Category Archives: Innovation

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of May 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of May 2025Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are May’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. What Innovation is Really About — by Stefan Lindegaard
  2. ‘Stealing’ from Artists to Make Innovations Both Novel and Familiar — by Pete Foley
  3. Benchmarking Innovation Performance — by Noel Sobelman
  4. Transform Your Innovation Approach with One Word — by Robyn Bolton
  5. Building Innovation Momentum Without the Struggle — Five Questions for Tendayi Viki
  6. Change Behavior to Change Culture — by Mike Shipulski
  7. The Real Reason Your Team Isn’t Speaking to You — by David Burkus
  8. The Enemy of Customer Service is … — by Shep Hyken
  9. Three Real Business Threats (and How to Solve Them) — by Robyn Bolton
  10. Better Customer Experiences Without Customer Feedback — by Shep Hyken

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in April that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Your Response is What Matters

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Your Response is What Matters

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When was the last time you taught someone a new method or technique? What was their reaction? How did it make you feel? Will you do it again?

When was the last time you learned something new from a colleague? What was your reaction? What did you do so it would happen again?

When was the last time you woke up early because you were excited to go to work? How did you feel about that? What can change so it happens once a week?

When was the last time you had a crazy idea and your colleagues helped you make it real? How did you feel about that? How can you do it for them? What can you do to make it happen more frequently?

When was the last time you had a crazy idea and it was squelched because it violated a successful recipe? How did you feel about that? What can you do so it happens differently next time?

When was the last time you used your good judgement without asking for permission? How did you feel about that? What can you do to give others the confidence to use their best judgement?

When was the last time someone gave you credit for doing good work? And when was the last time you did the same for someone else? What can you do so the behavior blossoms into common practice?

When was the last time you openly contradicted a majority opinion with a dissenting minority opinion? Though it was received poorly, you must do it again. The majority needs to hear your dissenting opinion so they can sharpen their thinking.

When was the last time you gave good advice to a younger colleague? How can you systematize that type of behavior?

When was the last time you did work so undeniably good that others twisted it a bit and adopted it as their own? Don’t feel badly. When doing innovative work this is what success looks like. All that really matters is your customers realize the value from the work and not who gets credit. What can you do so this type of thing happens as a matter of course?

Good things happen and bad things happen. That’s how life goes. But the important part is you pay attention to what worked and what didn’t. And the second important part is actively making the good stuff happen more frequently and the bad stuff happen less frequently.

Image credit: Pexels

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Three Ways Strategic Idleness Accelerates Innovation and Growth

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Three Ways Strategic Idleness Accelerates Innovation and Growth

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“What will you do on vacation?” a colleague asked.

“Nothing,” I replied.

The uncomfortable silence that followed spoke volumes. In boardrooms and during quarterly reviews, we celebrate constant motion and back-to-back calendars.  Yet, study after study shows that the most successful leaders embrace a counterintuitive edge: strategic idleness.

While your competitors exhaust themselves in perpetual busyness, research shows that deliberate mental downtime activates the brain networks responsible for strategic foresight, innovative solutions, and clear decision-making.

The Status Trap of Busy-ness

At one company I worked with, there was only one acceptable answer to “How are you doing?”  “Busy.”  The answer wasn’t a way to avoid an awkward hallway conversation. It was social currency. If you’re busy, you’re valuable.  If you’re fine, you’re expendable.

A 2017 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research confirmed what Columbia, Georgetown, and Harvard researchers discovered: being busy is now a status symbol, signaling “competence, ambition, and scarcity in the market.”

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: your packed schedule is undermining the very outcomes you’re accountable for delivering.

Your Brain’s Innovation Engine

Neuroscience has confirmed what innovators have long practiced: Strategic Idleness. While you consciously “do nothing,” your default mode network (DMN) engages, making unexpected connections across stored information and experiences.

Recent research published in the journal Brain demonstrates that the DMN is activated during creative thinking, with a specific pattern of neural activity occurring during the search for novel ideas. This network is essential for both spontaneous thought and divergent thinking, core elements of innovation.

So if you’ve always wondered why you get your best ideas in the shower, it’s because your DMN is powered all the way up.

Three Ways to Power-Up Your Engine

Here are three executive-grade approaches to strategic idleness without more showers or productivity sacrifices:

  1. Pause for 10 Minutes Before Making a Decision
    Before making high-stakes decisions, implement a mandatory 10-minute idleness period. No email, no conversation—just sitting. Research on cognitive recovery suggests that this brief reset activates your DMN, allowing for a more comprehensive consideration of variables and strategic implications.
  2. Take a Walking Meeting with Yourself
    Block 20 minutes in your calendar each week for a solo walking meeting (and then take the walk!). No other attendees, no agenda, just walking. Researchers at Stanford University found that walking increases creative output by an average of 60% compared to sitting. The combination of physical movement and mental space creates ideal conditions for your brain to generate solutions to problems you didn’t know you had.
  3. Schedule 3-5 minutes of Strategic Silence before key discussions
    Research on group dynamics shows that silent reflection before discussion can reduce groupthink and increase the quality of ideas by helping team members process information more deeply. Before you dive into a critical topic at your next leadership meeting, schedule 3-5 minutes of silence. Explain that this silence is for individual reflection and planning for the upcoming discussion, not for checking email or taking bathroom breaks. Acknowledge that it will feel awkward, but that it’s critical for the upcoming discussion and decision.

Remember, You’re Not Doing Nothing If You’re being Strategically Idle

The most valuable asset in your organization isn’t technology, capital, or even the products you sell.  It’s the quality of thinking that goes into critical decisions. Strategic idleness isn’t inaction; it’s the deliberate cultivation of conditions that foster innovation, clear judgment, and strategic foresight.

While your competitors remain trapped in perpetual busyness, by using executive advantage of strategic idleness, your next breakthrough will present itself.

This is an updated version of the June 9, 2019, post, “Do More Nothing.”

Image credit: Unsplash, Laura Weiss

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You Already Have Too Many Ideas

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You Already Have Too Many Ideas

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Innovation isn’t achieved by creating more ideas. Innovation is realized when ideas are transformed into commercialized products and services. Innovation is realized when ideas are transformed into new business models that deliver novel usefulness to customers and deliver increased revenues to the company.

In a way, creating ideas that languish in their own shadow is worse than not creating any ideas at all. If you don’t have any ideas, at least you didn’t spend the resources to create them and you don’t create the illusion that you’re actually making progress. In that way, it’s better to avoid creating new ideas if you’re not going to do anything with them. At least your leadership team will not be able to rationalize that everything will be okay because you have an active idea generation engine.

Before you schedule your next innovation session, don’t. Reason 1 – it’s not an innovation session, it’s an ideation session. Reason 2 – you don’t have resources to do anything with the best ideas so you’ll spend the resources and nothing will come of it. To improve the return on investment, don’t make the investment because there will be no return.

Truth is, you already have amazing ideas to grow your company. Problem is, no one is listening to the people with the ideas. And the bigger problem – because no one listened over the last ten years, the people with the ideas have left the company or stopped trying to convince you they have good ideas. Either way, you’re in trouble and creating more ideas won’t help you. Your culture is such that new ideas fall on deaf ears and funding to advance new concepts loses to continuous improvement.

If you do want to hold an ideation event to create new ideas that will reinvent your company, there are ways to do it effectively. First, define the customer of the ideation event. This is the person who is on the hook to commercialize things that will grow the business. This is the person who will have a career problem if ideas aren’t implemented. This is the person who can allocate the resources to turn the ideas into commercialized products, services. If this person isn’t an active advocate for the ideation event, don’t hold it. If this person will not show up to the report out of the ideation event, don’t hold it. If this person does not commit to advancing the best ideas, don’t hold the event.

Though innovation and ideas start with “i”, they’re not the same. Ideas are inexpensive to create but deliver no value. Innovation is expensive and delivers extreme value to customers and the company. If you’re not willing to convert the ideas into something that delivers values to customers, save the money and do continuous improvement. Your best people will leave, but at least you won’t waste money on creating ideas that will die on the vine.

If the resources aren’t lined up to run with the ideas, don’t generate the them. If you haven’t allocated the funding for the follow-on work, don’t create new ideas. If the person who is charged with growing the business isn’t asking for new ideas, don’t hold the ideation event.

You already have too many ideas. But what you lack is too few active projects to convert the best ideas into products and services that generate value for your customers and growth for your company.

Stop creating new ideas and start delivering novel usefulness to your customers.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Innovation, Leadership and Productive Conflict

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Five Questions to Laura Weiss

Innovation, Leadership and Productive Conflict

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You need friction to create fire. It’s true whether you’re camping or leading change inside an organization. Yet most of us avoid conflict—we ignore it, smooth it over, or sideline the people who spark it.

I’ve been guilty of that too, which is why I was eager to sit down with Laura Weiss, founder of Design Diplomacy, former architect and IDEO partner, university educator, and professional mediator, to explore why conflict isn’t the enemy of innovation, but one of its essential ingredients.

Our conversation wasn’t about frameworks or facilitation tricks. It was about something deeper: how leaders can unlearn their fear of conflict, lean into discomfort, and use it to build trust, fuel learning, and drive meaningful change.

So if conflict feels like a threat to alignment and progress, this conversation will show you why embracing it is the real leadership move.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Robyn Bolton: What’s the one piece of conventional wisdom about change that organizations need to unlearn?

Laura Weiss: The belief that change is event-driven.  It’s not, except for seismic shifts like the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, 9/11, and October 7. It’s happening all the time!  As a result, leading change should be seen as a continuous endeavor that prepares the organization to be agile when unforeseen events occur.

RB: Wow, that is capital-T True! What is driving this misperception?

LW: It’s been said that ‘managers deal with complexity, but leaders deal with change’. So, it all comes down to leadership. However, the prevailing belief is that a “leader” is the person who has risen to the top of the organization and has all the answers.

In many design professions, those who are promoted to leadership roles are exceptional at their craft. But evolving from an ‘individual contributor’ to leading others involves skills that can seem contrary to our beliefs about leadership. One is humility – the capability to say “I don’t know” without feeling exposed as a fraud, especially in professions where being a “subject matter expert” is expected. Being humble presents the leader as human, which leads to another skill: connecting with others as humans before attempting to ‘lead’ them. I particularly like Edgar Schein’s relationship-driven leadership philosophy as opposed to ‘transactional’ leadership, where your role relative to others dictates how you interact.

RB: From your experience, how can we unlearn this and lead differently?

LW: Leaders need to do three things:

  1. Be self-aware. After becoming a certified coach, it became clear to me that all leadership begins with understanding oneself. If you’re unaware of how you operate in the world, you certainly can’t lead others effectively.
  2. Be agile. Machiavelli famously asked: “Is it better to be loved or feared…?” Being a leader requires the ability to do both, operating along the ‘warmth-strength’ continuum, starting with warmth. There are six leadership styles a leader should be familiar with, in the same way that golfers know which golf club to use for a particular situation.
  3. Evolve. This means feedback – being willing to ask for it and receive it. Many senior leaders stop receiving feedback as they progress in their careers. But times change, and ‘what got you here won’t get you there.’ Holding up a mirror to very senior leaders who have rarely, if ever, received feedback, or have received it but didn’t really “get it,” is critical if they are to change with the times and the needs of their organization.

RB: Amen!  I’m starting to sense a connection between leadership, innovation, and change, but before I make assumptions, what do you see?

LW: First, I want to acknowledge the thesis of your book that “innovation isn’t an idea problem, it’s a leadership problem” – 1000% agree with that!

Laura Weiss

One of the reasons I shifted from being an architect to focusing on the broader world of innovation was that I was curious about why some innovation initiatives were successful and some were not.  Specifically, I was curious about the role of conflict in the creative problem-solving process because conflict is critical to bringing innovation and change to life. Yet, it’s not something most of us are naturally good at – in fact, our brain is designed to avoid it!

The biggest myth about conflict is that it erodes trust and undermines relationships. The opposite is true – when handled well, productive conflict strengthens relationships and leads to better outcomes for organizations navigating change.

Just as with innovation, the organizations that are most successful with change are the ones that consistently use productive conflict as an enabler of change.

To achieve this, organizations must shift from a reactive stance to a proactive one and become more “discovery-driven”. This means practicing iterative prototyping and learning their way forward. In my mind, innovation is a form of structured learning that yields something new with value.

RB: What role does communication play in leadership and conflict?

LW: Conflict is an inevitable part of the human experience because it reflects the tension between the status quo and something else that’s trying to emerge.  It can appear even in the process of solving daily problems, so the ability to deal productively with conflict, from simple misunderstandings to seemingly intractable differences, is crucial.

The source code for effective conflict engagement is effective conversations.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

The real challenge in leadership isn’t preventing conflict—it’s recognizing that conflict is already happening and choosing to engage with it productively through conversation

This conversation with Laura reminded me that innovation and change don’t just thrive on new ideas. They require leaders who are self-aware enough to listen, humble enough to ask for feedback, and courageous enough to stay in the tension long enough for something better to emerge.

Image credit: Unsplash, Laura Weiss

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Should We Stop Asking Employees to Innovate?

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Should We Stop Asking Employees to Innovate?

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

I recently revisited a comment from one of my older posts on how to train and educate executives on innovation. It went something like this:

“Innovation requires time and drive to explore new vistas, so it’s understandable that busy employees can’t be bothered with it. The best approach is for senior managers to assign a team, giving them the time and resources to innovate.”

While I agree that dedicated innovation teams with the right resources are crucial, the notion that “busy employees can’t be bothered” with innovation is not just dangerous, it’s short-sighted.

If leaders believe innovation is only for a select few, it signals that innovation isn’t truly a priority. And in today’s fast-evolving landscape, companies that don’t prioritize innovation throughout their ranks are setting themselves up for stagnation.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the matter:

1. Innovation isn’t just for the few, it’s for everyone – strategically.

Not every employee needs to work on breakthrough innovation, but every employee should have the opportunity to contribute. Whether through idea portals, hackathons, or innovation challenges, businesses should create accessible ways for employees to share their ideas and build on others’.

2. Innovation should happen in the day-to-day.

Often, the best innovations come from employees focused on improving their immediate environment. This type of incremental innovation – refining processes, enhancing services, or finding small but impactful efficiencies – should happen at the business unit level. Meanwhile, dedicated teams can tackle more disruptive and higher-risk projects with a long-term payoff.

3. It’s time to re-frame innovation.

The term “innovation” has become vague and overused. Consider a term like “impact” as a way to shift the focus from concepts to tangible results. Impact is measurable and reflects the outcome, not just the process. After all, what matters isn’t innovation for its own sake, but the meaningful change it brings.

Finally, corporate innovation teams should shift their roles from doers to facilitators and integrators – empowering business units to innovate while connecting internal and external resources. Collaboration, both within and outside the organization, accelerates innovation, increasing diversity of thought and speeding up results.

Scaling innovation across the company is a collective effort, not a siloed one.

What’s your take on this?

Image Credits: Pexels

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Benchmarking Innovation Performance

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Closing the Gap Between Aspiration and Execution

Benchmarking Innovation Performance

GUEST POST from Noel Sobelman

In today’s volatile, technology-driven world, where the pace of change continues to accelerate, most executive teams agree on one thing: innovation, whether incremental, adjacent, or transformative, is critical. What’s far less clear is how to measure whether their innovation efforts are working or how to systematically improve them. That’s where benchmarking comes in.

Benchmarking isn’t just a diagnostic tool, it’s a strategic accelerator. It provides clarity where there’s ambiguity, reveals blind spots that internal reviews often miss, and equips leadership teams with hard data to make smarter, faster, and more confident decisions about innovation investments and process improvements.

This article explores benchmarking as a strategic capability for quantifying the gap between current innovation performance and best-in-class execution. It also outlines how companies can use benchmarking to unlock more reliable, scalable, and profitable innovation outcomes.

From Insight to Action: Why Benchmark Innovation?

Innovation is inherently risky with outcomes that are hard to predict, but the processes that support it don’t have to be. Effective innovation systems are structured, repeatable, measurable, and continuously improving. Benchmarking enables companies to see those systems clearly and objectively. It replaces assumptions with insight and turns performance anecdotes into verifiable data.

Used strategically, benchmarking helps executive teams build a compelling case for change grounded in facts rather than opinions. It offers a concrete way to quantify gaps between current and desired performance, helping to expose where process inefficiencies or capability gaps are holding the organization back. Benchmarking also supports leadership in identifying maturity levels across critical innovation capabilities, from governance and investment decision-making to resource management and project execution.

Importantly, it links development capabilities directly to measurable business outcomes. That means innovation isn’t just about creativity or culture, it’s about performance that can be tracked, improved, and scaled. By grounding decisions in comparative data, benchmarking makes it easier to align managers around realistic year-over-year improvement targets that are both ambitious and realistic.

Defining Performance: What Benchmarking Measures

For benchmarking to drive real improvement, it must look at the right dimensions of performance. At Accel, we use a multi-dimensional benchmarking model that examines four distinct categories of innovation performance: innovation effectiveness, project performance, process application, and portfolio management.

Innovation effectiveness reflects senior leadership’s ability to guide success across the full innovation spectrum, from product line extensions to transformative new ventures. This includes new product vitality, the percentage of revenue generated by recent launches, as well as return on R&D investment and the proportion of spend lost due to delayed or ineffective decision-making (aka, wasted development spending). When measuring leadership effectiveness in creating new sources of growth beyond the core business, we include leading indicators like evidence-based portfolio metrics, progress metrics, and scaling metrics such as user engagement, retention rate, and referral rate.

Innovation project performance reflects how well teams execute against their objectives. It includes metrics such as time-to-market, time-to-profitability, and schedule predictability, alongside actual-to-planned measures of product cost, profitability, and quality. These indicators help determine whether teams are executing effectively while meeting the business and customer needs they set out to address. New venture project performance measures include validated assumptions and cumulative evidence strength across solution desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility dimensions.

Innovation process application focuses on how consistently and effectively innovation methodologies are applied. Here, we assess actual versus estimated project cycle times across development phases as well as the accuracy of development cost forecasts. We also examine the frequency of project re-scoping, exception reviews, team turnover, and the reuse of design or code elements, all of which serve as indicators of process health. For transformative innovation processes, we also assess learning velocity, experimentation rigor, evidence-based decision-making, metered funding practices, core business leverage, and engagement with external ecosystems.

Finally, innovation portfolio management metrics reveal how well an organization aligns its innovation resources with its strategy. We evaluate factors such as strategic alignment, investment allocation, resource utilization, and portfolio value realization. When these are off-target, companies often see a mismatch between growth ambition and investment mix, poor development throughput, or low return on their innovation spend.

Accel Management Group innovation performance benchmark metrics

Figure 1. Innovation Performance Benchmark Metrics

Together, these four categories offer a comprehensive view of performance and their connection to business outcomes, and more importantly, a roadmap for targeted, results-driven improvement.

How It Works: Accel’s Benchmarking Approach

The benchmarking process begins by establishing a clear, accurate picture of the company’s current state. This involves gathering available performance data, then evaluating it for consistency and comparability across sources. We reconcile discrepancies and normalize contextual factors like company size, product line complexity, regulatory classification, innovation type, and development methodology.

AI accelerates this process by enabling faster data harmonization, natural language processing to analyze qualitative inputs (such as project postmortems or customer feedback), and machine learning algorithms that detect hidden drivers of performance variance across projects, teams, or business units.

Once we’ve built this baseline, we assess capability maturity across several critical dimensions. These include innovation process structure, governance and decision-making frameworks, execution models (such as gated, Agile, or transformative approaches), and portfolio management practices. We also analyze resource management, discovery and ideation, new venture incubation efforts, alignment with business strategy, culture, and organizational mechanisms such as incentives and reward systems.

From there, we compare the organization’s practices and outcomes against peer companies, industry leaders, and Accel’s leading practice reference model. The output isn’t just a list of issues; it’s a prioritized set of capability gaps linked directly to performance impact. We then work with executive teams to develop action plans and change roadmaps, aligning leadership around where to invest, where to restructure, and where to accelerate change.

Noel Sobelman benchmarking approach

Figure 2. Benchmarking Approach

What Benchmarking Reveals: A Snapshot from the Field

We’ve seen across multiple clients and industries how benchmarking can uncover hidden obstacles to innovation performance. Consider the example of one of our clients, a MedTech manufacturer that decided to benchmark their capabilities after struggling with missed launch dates and underwhelming innovation returns. Their leadership team believed that product complexity and regulatory challenges were the root cause. But when we dug into the data, a different picture emerged.

The company was not consistently tracking core new product development performance metrics, making it difficult to identify root issues or assess improvement opportunities. Sample project data revealed that early-phase development cycles, specifically Concept and Planning Phases, were taking two to three times longer than industry benchmarks. Moreover, the company was investing heavily in detailed design before evaluating technical feasibility or validating customer requirements, which led to protracted development timelines, late-stage surprises, compliance-driven rework, and chronic cost overruns.

Our assessment also uncovered a lack of system-level architecture discipline and siloed project planning without proper integration to balance customer needs against technical, market window, schedule, and resource considerations. In short, while the organization believed it had a process problem, benchmarking revealed a deeper issue: a maturity gap in early-phase project planning, risk management, and system design.

By framing these insights within industry benchmarks and leading practices, the company was able to galvanize leadership support for a targeted transformation. The result was a realigned innovation and portfolio management process focused on early project de-risking, customer need validation, and robust front-end planning, leading to faster cycle times, fewer late-stage surprises, and improved innovation throughput.

Why It Matters: The Strategic Case for Benchmarking

Benchmarking delivers more than operational insights, it unlocks real business value. Companies that benchmark and act on the findings tend to outperform peers in key areas. For instance, best-in-class organizations generate over 45 percent of their revenue from new products. Their time-to-market is over 40 percent faster, and their R&D resources are more efficiently allocated toward high-impact initiatives like platform innovation and next-generation solutions.

In contrast, companies that don’t benchmark often lack visibility into why projects fail, where delays originate, or how resources are being utilized. This results in lower returns on innovation investment, lower project success rates, and internal misalignment on where and how to improve. We’ve seen cases where products missed their mark not because the core idea was flawed, but because teams moved too quickly into development without validating customer needs or failed to adapt to shifting customer expectations. The result: products that launched late, didn’t resonate with customers, or had to be reworked at a significant cost.

When benchmarking is integrated into an ongoing performance management system, it serves as a feedback loop, continuously guiding decision-making and capability development. That’s why it’s not just a one-time diagnostic, but a strategic discipline that supports innovation as a competitive advantage. AI technologies enhance this feedback loop by transforming benchmarking into a dynamic, continuous process, automatically updating benchmarks as internal and external data sources evolve, and alerting teams to emerging gaps or opportunities in real time.

Conclusion: A Tool for Strategic Transformation

In a world where innovation separates leaders from followers, benchmarking is more than a diagnostic, it’s a tool for strategic transformation. By providing hard data on where you stand and where to focus, it turns vague aspirations into actionable priorities and ensures that innovation efforts are aligned with measurable business outcomes.

But benchmarking only delivers value when it’s integrated into the broader innovation system, driving continuous improvement and sharper execution over time. That’s where its real power lies, as an ongoing discipline that builds organizational maturity and long-term advantage.

For executive teams looking to sharpen their innovation capability, a few critical questions should guide the next steps:

  • Do we have an objective understanding of how our innovation performance stacks up against peers?
  • Are our development processes delivering the speed, quality, predictability, and customer impact we need?
  • Can we clearly measure how innovation contributes to growth and profitability?
  • Most importantly, are we investing in the right capabilities to win in the future?

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and you can’t lead if you don’t know where you stand.

Image credits: Accel Management Group, Noel Sobelman, Pexels

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Transform Your Innovation Approach with One Word

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Transform Your Innovation Approach with One Word

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Have you heard any of these sentences recently?

“We don’t have time”

“Our people don’t have the skills”

“We don’t have the budget”

“That’s not what we do”

I hear them all the time.  

Sometimes they’re said when a company is starting to invest in building their innovation capabilities, sometimes during one-on-one stakeholder interviews when people feel freer to share their honest opinions, and sometimes well after investments are made.

Every single time, they are the beginning of the end for innovation.

But one word that can change that.

“We don’t have time – yet.”

“Our people don’t have the skills – yet.”

“We don’t have the budget – yet.”

“That’s not what we do – yet.”

Yet.

Yet creates space for change.  It acknowledges that you’re in the middle of a journey, not the end.  It encourages conversation.

“We don’t have time – yet.”

“OK, I know the team is busy and that what they’re working on is important.  Let’s look at what people are working on and see if there are things we can delay or stop to create room for this.”

“Our people don’t have the skills – yet.”

“Understand, we’re all building new skills when it comes to innovation.  Good news, skills can be learned.  Let’s discuss what we need to teach people and the best way to do that.”

“We don’t have the budget – yet.”

“I get it.  Things are tight. We know this is a priority so let’s look at the budget and see if there’s a way to free up some cash.  If there’s not, then we’ll go back to leadership and ask for guidance.”

“That’s not what we do – yet.”

“I know.  Remember, we’re not doing this on a whim, we’re doing this because (fill in reason), and we have a right to do it because of (fill in past success, current strength, or competitive advantage.”

You need to introduce the Yet.

It is very rare for people to add “yet” to their statements.  But you can.

When someone utters an innovation-killing statement, respond with “Yet.” Maybe smile mischievously and then repeat their statement with “yet” added to the end.

After all, you’re not disagreeing with them. You’re simply qualifying what they’re saying.  Their statement is true now, but that doesn’t mean it will be true forever.  By restating their assertion and adding “yet,” you’re inviting them to be part of the change, to take an active role in creating the new future state.

There’s a tremendous amount of research about the massive impact of this little word.  It helps underperforming students overachieve and is closely associated with Dr. Carol Dweck’s research into fixed and learning mindsets.

The bottom line is that “yet” works.

Put Yet to work for you, your organization, and your efforts to innovate and grow.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of April 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of April 2025Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are April’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Innovation or Not? – Kawasaki Corleo — by Braden Kelley
  2. From Resistance to Reinvention — by Noel Sobelman
  3. How Innovation Tools Help You Stay Safe — by Robyn Bolton
  4. Should My Brand Take a Political Stand? — by Pete Foley
  5. Innovation Truths — by Mike Shipulski
  6. Good Management is Not Good Strategy — by Greg Satell
  7. ChatGPT Blew My Mind with its Strategy Development — by Robyn Bolton
  8. Five Questions Great Leaders Always Ask — by David Burkus
  9. Why So Many Smart People Are Foolish — by Greg Satell
  10. Beyond Continuous Improvement Culture — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in March that continue to resonate with people:

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Procrastinating with Purpose

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Procrastinating with Purpose

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

There’s a useful trick when you want to do new work. It has some of the characteristics of procrastination, but it’s different. With procrastination, the problem solver waits to start the solving until it’s almost impossible to meet the deadline. The the solver uses the unreasonable deadline to create internal pressure so they can let go of all the traditional solving approaches. With no time for traditional approaches, the solver must let go of what worked and try a new approach.

Now, the mainstream procrastinator doesn’t wait with forethought as I described, but forethought isn’t the required element. The internal pressure doesn’t care if it was forethought, it constrains out the tried-and-true, either way. Forethought or not, the results speak for themselves – unimaginable work done in far less time than reasonable.

But what if you could take the best parts of procrastination and supercharge it with purpose and process? What if you could help people achieve the results of procrastination – unimagined solutions done in an unreasonable time window – but without all the stress that comes with procrastination? What about a process for purposeful procrastination?
The IBE (Innovation Burst Event) was created to do just that – to systematize the goodness of procrastination without all the baggage that comes with it.

The heart of the IBE is the Design Challenge, where a team with diverse perspective is brought together by a facilitator to solve a problem in five minutes. The unreasonable time constraint generates all the goodness that comes with procrastination, but, because it’s a problem solving exercise, there’s no drama. And like with procrastination, the teams deliver unimaginable results within an unrealistic time constraint.

The purposefulness of the IBE comes with up-front work to create Design Challenges that investigate design space that has high potential. This can be driven by the Voice of the Customer (VOC) or Voice of the Technology (VOT). Either way, the choice of the design space is purposeful.

If you want to jump-start your innovation work, try the IBE. And who knows, if you call it purposeful procrastination you may get a lot of people to participate.

Image credit: Unsplash

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