Category Archives: Leadership

What Will Happen if You Disappear?

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What Will Happen if You Disappear?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you were out of the office for a month and did not check email or check in, how would things go?

Your Team – Would your team curl up into a ball under the pressure, or would they use their judgement when things don’t go as planned? I think the answer depends on how you interacted with them over the last year. If you created an environment where it’s a genius and a thousand helpers, they won’t make any decisions because you made it clear that it’s your responsibility to make decisions and it’s their responsibility to listen. But if over the last year you demanded that they use their judgement, they’ll use it when you’re gone. Which would they do? How sure are you? And, how do you feel about that?

Other Teams – Would other teams reach out to your team for help, or would they wait until you get back to ask for help? If they wait it’s because they know you make all the decisions and your team is voice actuated – you talk and they act. But if other teams reach out directly to your team, it’s because over the last years you demonstrated to your team that you expect them to use their good judgement and make good decisions. Would other teams reach out for help or would they wait for you to get back? How do you feel about that?

Your Boss – Would your boss dive into the details of the team’s work or leave the work to the team? I think it depends on whether you were transparent with your boss over the last years about the team’s capability. If in your interactions you took credit for all the good work and blamed your team for the work that went poorly, your boss will dig into the details with your team. Your boss trusts you to do good work and not your team, and since you’re not there, your boss will think the work is in jeopardy and will set up meetings with your team to make sure the work goes well. But if over the last years you gave credit to the team and communicated the strengths and weaknesses of the team, your boss will let the team do the work. Would your boss set up the meetings or leave your team to their work? How sure are you?

To celebrate my son’s graduation from engineering school, I am taking a month off from work to ride motorcycles with him. I’m not sure how it will go with my team, the other teams and my boss, but over the last several years I’ve been getting everyone ready for just this type of thing.

Image credit: 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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Revolutions Never Begin with a Slogan

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Revolutions Never Begin with a Slogan

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenski has been compared to great orators like Winston Churchill. He vowed to the English House of Commons to fight “in the forests, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets.” In a speech to the US Congress he told President Biden, “​​Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.”

While new to politics, Zelensky is no neophyte when it comes to delivering a line. A longtime actor and comic who was the voice of “Paddington” in the Ukrainian adaptations of the hit movie, his production company Kvartal 95 produced a series of hits. It would be easy to boil his effectiveness down to his communication skills.

That would be a mistake. Zelenski’s eloquence derives its power from the plight of his people, their passion for freedom and their unwillingness to return to an often troubled past. One reason why change so often fails is that we spend so much time focusing on wordsmithing that we neglect why the need for change arose in the first place. That is where we must start.

Gandhi’s Satyagraha

As a young man, Mohandis Gandhi wasn’t the type of person you would notice. Impulsive and undisciplined, he was also so shy as a young lawyer that he could hardly bring himself to speak in open court. With his law career failing, he accepted an offer to represent the cousin of a wealthy muslim merchant in South Africa.

Upon his arrival, Gandhi was subjected to humiliation on a train and it changed him. His sense of dignity offended, he decided to fight back. Yet he would do so not by attacking his enemies, but by targeting his own weaknesses. The aim, as he put it, was “the vindication of truth not by affliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self.”

His method of Satyagraha was not passive resistance as commonly understood, which he considered a “weapon of the weak.” In fact, it was extremely strategic. Its aim was to undermine his opponents legitimacy and, in doing so, their freedom of action. He sought to back them into a corner in which both action and inaction would yield essentially the same result —an upending of the existing order.

At its core, Satyagraha is intended to be a quest for truth. The aim is to get your opponents to confront themselves. As the South African leader Jan Smuts would put it. “It was my fate to be the antagonist of a man for whom even then I had the highest respect… For me — the defender of law and order — there was the usual trying situation, the odium of carrying out the law, which had not strong popular support.”

Stalin’s Gift That Just Kept Giving

One of the first things a visitor to Warsaw will notice is the Palace of Culture. When arrived in the country in 1997, it dominated the skyline. A replica of the Seven Sisters buildings in Moscow, it was forced upon the Polish people by Stalin in 1955 and for decades it served as a reminder of Soviet domination.

I remember attending a business meeting there where my host pointed out that it had the best view in Warsaw, because it was the only place where you couldn’t see the Palace of Culture. Its tower had the feel of Sauron, the evil force in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. It was more than just a foreign presence at the heart of the capital city. It was an all-watching eye, a reminder that Poles’ lives were not fully their own.

We remember the Solidarity movement in Poland as a struggle for labor against communism and economics were certainly part of it. But the larger grievance was encapsulated in the Palace of Culture, the feeling of being completely subjugated by another nation. Poles felt it deeply and never truly accepted Soviet rule.

Much like Gandhi on the train, it was that emotional sense of injury that pushed the Polish people to be passionate about change and it is similar forces that propel the Ukrainians now. Vladimir Putin, much like Stalin before him, has unwittingly empowered his own opposition by failing to recognize their identity and attempting to subjugate their identity,

Today, the Palace of Culture still stands, albeit enfeebled by the modern skyscrapers bustling with commercial activity, that surround and obscure it.

Steve Jobs and the Products That Sucked

Steve Jobs didn’t believe in market research. He once explained, “Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d ask customers what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.’ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” That’s why he didn’t start out with a product idea, but something that “sucked”

Computers sucked. They were ugly and hard to use. That’s what drove him to create the Macintosh. Music players sucked. He wanted something that would put 1000 songs in his pocket. That’s what drove him to create the iPod. Phones sucked. That’s what drove him to create the iPhone. Much like Gandhi’s humiliation and the Palace of culture, these things offended his sensibilities.

If you want to create change in this world, you need to identify a grievance that people care about. Because if people don’t see a problem, they’re not going to care about your solution. It doesn’t matter if it’s in your team, your organization, your industry or throughout society as a whole. Change isn’t about ideas, it’s about solving meaningful problems.

When we begin to work with a leadership team on a transformational initiative, we always start out asking about what problem they are trying to solve. Often, they don’t know. There are so many wonderful things to adopt that it’s easy to fall into the trap of identifying a solution before you’ve actually defined a problem.

Don’t Let Talking About Change Undermine Your Ability to Achieve It

Every leader wants to be seen at the vanguard of change. The truth is, it’s relatively easy to announce a change initiative, hire vendors to implement new technologies and then bring in change consultants to hone messaging and arrange training, but these things are unlikely to bring about successful transformation.

In fact, evidence suggests that all of the talk about change may be undermining our ability to achieve it. One survey found that 44% of employees say they don’t understand the change they’re being asked to make, and 38% say they don’t agree with it. A clear majority, 65% of respondents complained of “change fatigue.”

Change doesn’t begin with an idea. It starts with identifying a meaningful problem. That’s why it’s so important that before you start an initiative you ask questions like, ask questions like, “What problem are we trying to solve? Is there a general consensus that it’s a problem we need to solve? How would solving it impact our business?

When we look at transformational leaders who achieved great things, the first thing we tend to notice is their words, not the cause that compelled them to act. The words are easy to replicate. Anyone can speak them. But If you want to create change in this world, you need to identify a grievance that people care about. Because if people don’t see a problem, they’re not going to care about your solution.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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The Real Reason Your Team Isn’t Speaking to You

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The Real Reason Your Team Isn't Speaking to You

GUEST POST from David Burkus

It’s a common issue in many organizations – teams not voicing obstacles or issues in their work. If you’ve been a leader for a while, you’ve probably experienced it firsthand. Maybe you and your team had a check-in meeting with everyone, and everything was positive. Everyone gives a status update. And no one is asking for help. So, the meeting ended, and everyone went about their business.

But you were suspicious. Your team was saying it was all good. But then they started missing deadlines, or the project came in over budget, or it didn’t come in at all.

You’re not alone. In fact, in many organizations’ failures happen and get covered up at many levels of the organization. It’s not uncommon for senior leaders to be the least informed about what’s really happening in the organization because everyone at every level is trying to minimize failure…or trying to minimize their role in it.

No one trusts each other enough to share their setbacks, so no one knows what’s holding the team back.

But trust doesn’t automatically resolve teamwide issues. Building trust is great, but research suggests that trust alone is insufficient. Instead, teams need to feel psychological safety—a climate of mutual trust and respect that helps team members feel safe to take interpersonal risks. Risks like voicing failures or disagreements, but also risks like sharing their “crazy” ideas that just might be brilliant.

Teams with psychological safety have members who can be vulnerable and authentic with each other. They ask questions or offer ideas that may seem odd but can lead the team’s thinking in new directions. Psychological safety encourages team members to speak up when they disagree, and as a result more diverse viewpoints are shared. Psychological safety reduces failures, because when people feel that they can speak freely they’re more likely to intervene before a team makes a mistake. In fact, research from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who first discovered the power of psychology safety on teams, suggests that on diverse teams, psychological safety determines whether their varied strengths are harnessed or if they perform below their potential.

In her work, Edmondson describes psychological safety as “a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”

Trust and Respect.

These may seem similar. But they have their differences. The interplay between them is what builds psychological safety. Trust is how much we feel we can share our authentic selves with others. Respect is how much we feel they accept that self. If I trust you, then I will share honestly with you. If you respect me, then you will value what I’ve shared. High-performing teams don’t need to just trust each other, they also need to learn how to respect each other’s contribution.

So how can leaders build a sense of trust and respect on a team? Here’s a few ideas:

1. Celebrate Failures

Celebrating failures on a team doesn’t mean teams throw a party every time they lose, but it doesn’t mean that every loss immediately triggers a round of “shift the blame” or that they forbid each other from talking about “the project which shall not be named.” Failures are inevitable, and often for reasons outside of a team’s control. Clients change their mind. Budgets get cut. Global pandemics disrupt the supply chain and force everyone to look at each other on video calls. To build trust on a team, the team must be comfortable with the idea that they will fail—and that they will learn from failure.

So, taking the time to celebrate what the painful experience taught the team can be a worthwhile exercise. This happens in several ways. You could draft a “failure resume” for yourself and encourage teammates to do the same, listing every job or project that didn’t turn out as hoped. As a team, you could create a “failure wall” with pictures or quotes from projects that blew up or clients you didn’t win. Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, throws regular Oops Meetings, where she admits her own mistakes and encourages the team to do the same. One pharmaceutical company went so far as to create “Failure Wakes” to gather researchers together around a promised but failed compound. The team said their good-byes, and expressed gratitude for the lessons working on that aborted drug taught them. These types of celebrations not only focus the team on lessons learned, but they encourage future risk-taking and keep teams motivated even when those chances of failure are high.

2. Hold After-Action Reviews

One way to at least celebrate learning if not failure is the after-action review. Although unlike clapping or waving, this is a more serious ritual done after the action (hence the name). Originally a military ritual, after-action reviews work well because they force the team to discuss strengths and weaknesses and to dissect past failures (and even successes) for lessons. Just after the team finishes a project, or during an important milestone, gather them together and ask them a few questions:

  • What was our intended result?
  • What was the actual result?
  • Why were they different?
  • What will we do the same next time?
  • What will we do differently next time?

The purpose of the meeting is not to find someone to blame, or someone to give all the credit. The goal is to extract lessons from the project about where the team is strong and where they need improvement. When people are open and honest about their weaknesses and contributions to failure, celebrate the vulnerability they just signaled.

3. Model Active Listening

The easiest way to signal disrespect to someone is make them feel ignored. The reverse is true as well. Making people feel listened to and truly heard is one of the simplest ways to signal that you respect what they have to say. Great team cultures are marked by how well they listen to each other and take turns speaking so everyone feels heard. But our natural tendency as humans can make it difficult to show others we’re listening. We want to help people. So, when people come to us with problems, we want to jump in and help right away. For team leaders, this tendency is even stronger. People are supposed to come to us for help, right? So, we start helping…which means we start talking…which means we stop listening.

One simple trick for ensuring you listen longer and help others feel more heard is to get used to saying, “Tell me more.” When someone says something that triggers a thought in your head, and you feel your mouth starting to open so your brilliant advice can greet the world—stop. Instead of whatever you were going to say, just say “Tell me more.” If you want to take active listening even further, consider a useful acronym from communication expert Julian Treasure: RASA. When someone else is speaking, Receive their ideas by paying attention to them as they speak. Appreciate what they are saying by nodding or giving confirming feedback. Summarize what the other person said when they’re finished. Then Ask them questions to explore their idea further. Since respect is a learned behavior, as you model active listening your team will follow your example—and more members of your team will feel heard and respected.

4. Recognize, And Share Credit

Leadership thinker Warren Bennis once noted that good leaders shine under the spotlight, but great leaders help others shine. Teams that share credit and take the time to recognize each other are teams where members feel more respected and more trusted. But teams that fight for credit when a project is finished (or fight over blame when it fails) diminish what little respect they had before. Great team leaders look for as many ways to share credit with their team as they can, even if they desire most of the credit. This can be as simple as taking the time to appreciate each team member’s strengths, or as big as shouting those praises throughout the company. When team members know what you appreciate about them, they know you respect their abilities and their ideas.

In addition, find small wins that can be celebrated more often—hence creating more opportunities to recognize others. Small wins have a big impact on individual and team motivation—and that impact only gets bigger when credit for the win is shared team wide.

Conclusion – The Psychological Safety Cycle

When individuals feel respected, and respectful behavior becomes the norm on a team, trust will naturally increase as well. That ensures that great ideas, and great lessons, get heard and considered. Without respect, that trust you’re building by accepting failures and embracing held-back brilliance from your team, will have a very short half-life. You can’t sleep on respect.

It’s a cycle.

You build trust on the team, which encourages people to take risks (or to risk admitting failures) and if that risk is met with respect…trust grows even more. If it doesn’t, you’re failing even faster.

It’s worth including in the conclusion, that we’re not talking about repeat failures. Psychological safety doesn’t mean there’s no accountability for consistently under-performing. It doesn’t mean that people can get away slacking off or that teams will just keep failing. But it does mean they don’t have to be afraid to ask for help or admit those occasional times when they do fail. It means that they take learning and growth so seriously that don’t hold back talking about their own struggles and their own mistakes.

And that’s why high-performing teams are psychologically safe teams.

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on January 6, 2024

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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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Paying Your Employees More Can Save You Money

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Paying Your Employees More Can Save You Money

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

What’s the secret to keeping employees, getting them to work hard and provide a more engaging experience with your customers? There are two answers. The first is one word: Money.

Many years ago, I worked with a well-known fast casual restaurant chain. I was impressed by its low turnover and high customer engagement and satisfaction ratings. Its secret was higher starting pay, generous raises and a reasonable benefits package. All of that compensation led to attracting the best candidates, and more importantly, keeping them.

A recent RetailWire article covered the higher wages Costco pays its employees. Typical hourly employees (Costco refers to them as “assistants”) include cashiers, stockers, warehouse personnel and people running the Costco food courts. With a tighter labor market, it is tougher to find people to fill these roles (and others). It is reported that Costco’s wages are at the high end of the industry. A memo from Costco’s CEO Ron Vachris stated, “We believe our hourly wages and benefits will continue to far outpace others in the retail industry.”

While wages are higher, employee retention in retail has gone down. According to an article in The Economist, the average employee turnover rate in the retail industry is 60%. Costco’s turnover is 8%, which is an incredible 86.67% lower than the industry.

Does this mean the higher wages are being paid by consumers? The simple answer is no. The longer answer is why. Just because a company pays employees more, a resulting benefit, such as lower turnover, actually reduces the cost of the higher wage. Lower turnover results in lower hiring costs, which also includes the cost of on-boarding and training. The full cost of the higher wage is dramatically reduced to a point that might pay for itself.

But higher wages aren’t the only reason employees stick around, work harder and better engage with customers. As mentioned at the top of the article, there is also a second reason, and that is culture.

While some employees will stick around for the paycheck, if you want the most out of any employee, they must like their job, and that goes beyond the job description. It also includes who they work with and work for. The culture of a company helps retain the best talent.

Regardless of what you pay your employees, if they don’t like the company, the way they are treated, their boss or leadership, paying them more may not be enough. I won’t go into creating company culture, but you can check out a Forbes article from last year that covered the Employee Hierarchy of Needs with a focus on building a fulfilling workplace culture.

Happy employees mean happier customers. All the benefits mentioned translate to higher NPS and customer satisfaction scores. If you compare the highest-rated companies and brands for customer service and experience posted by the American Customer Satisfaction Institute (ACSI) and the highest-rated companies and brands by employees at www.Glassdoor.com, you’ll find many of the same names. This is further backed up by an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review titled “The Key to Happy Customers? Happy Employees” by Andrew Chamberlain and Daniel Zhao. Even though it was written just over five years ago, the insights are more relevant than ever.

Companies like Costco prove that investing in employees through both compensation and culture isn’t just good for employees. It’s good for business. Employee happiness is contagious. Customers pick up on it. And when customers are happy, they come back, spend more and tell others. And, that makes the leadership and investors happy too!

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

This article was originally published on Forbes.com

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Diverge and Disrupt Your Way to Success

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Diverge and Disrupt Your Way to Success

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I have earned my stripes as a rebellious maverick and serial misfit, who, until today, seldom feels content with complying with the status quo, especially when confronted by illogical, rules-bound, conventional, and conforming behaviors. My constant and disruptive search for new horizons has enabled me to make many professional changes and reinventions – from graphic to fashion designer, retail executive, design management consultant, culture and change management consultant, corporate trainer, group facilitator, executive, leadership and team coach, start-up entrepreneur, innovation coach, and award-winning blogger and author who has thrived by being different and disruptive. We need to reframe disruption to increase the possibilities for game-changing inventions and innovations to succeed in an uncertain and unstable future.

Through real-life experiences and by teaching, training, mentoring, and coaching others to learn, adapt, and grow by conquering high peaks and engaging in stimulating adventures, I have come to understand that being open to continuous disruption and constant reinvention is essential for survival and success in our chaotic and uncertain world.

This sense of restlessness continues to spark disruptive and creative changes in my life; as a result, it has taught me several key distinctions —being braver, daring, courageous, responsible, and accountable — throughout my forty-year professional career, which has spanned a period of being different and disruptive.

Being different and disruptive has allowed me to reach new inflection points, absorb new information, build new relationships, establish new systems and modalities, and elevate my confidence, capacity, and competence as an innovator through consulting, training, and coaching in innovation.

How does this link to being innovative?

This relates to innovation because when people impose barriers and roadblocks to innovation, they unconsciously inhibit and resist efforts to learn new ways of enacting constructive and creative change while being different and disruptive.

  • The crucial first step in managing this is to accept responsibility for recognizing and disrupting your internal structures, mental models, mindsets, and habitual behaviors.
  • The next step involves leveraging your cognitive dissonance to create cracks, positive openings, doorways, and thresholds, thus making space for profound changes that enable you to challenge accepted norms.
  • Finally, safely exit your comfort zone, unlearn, learn, and relearn variations in how you feel, think, and act to remain agile, adaptive, and innovative during uncertain and unstable times.

These three elements help you stand out and be disruptive, maximizing differences and diversity by fostering inquisitiveness and curiosity, and developing self-regulation strategies to manage your unconscious automatic reactions or reactive behaviors when faced with change imperatives, including digital transformation, cultural change programs, and innovation initiatives.

Being brave and different

Some of you come from learning environments that label students who challenge teachers or their learning processes as different, disruptive, and rebellious. These students are often punished, threatened, or ignored until they comply with the accepted norms and conform. This diminishes the possibilities and opportunities of maximizing diversity, difference, and disruption as catalysts for change and creativity in the classroom.

As a result, some individuals develop “negative anchors” due to being labelled as different or disruptive and learn how to act or speak to avoid their teacher’s displeasure and disapproval. This leads many to either rebel or adopt more compliant behaviors that keep them out of trouble. Those who choose to rebel miss the chance to benefit from the diversity and inclusion offered in the classroom and traditional education processes.

Only exceptional teachers and educators are curious and question why some individuals think or behave differently. Often labelled as “troublemakers,” these individuals tend to be alienated from the more compliant students, leading many “disruptive” students to fall by the wayside, unable to progress and achieve their full potential. Many of these “deviants” seek alternative ways of becoming socialized and educated. In contrast, others experience exclusion and social and intellectual alienation rather than maximizing the possibilities of being different and disruptive to the world.

  • Finding the courage to rebel.

Alternatively, many found the courage and resilience to persist in our rebellion and challenge the status quo. By being different, disruptive, and diverging from the norm, many of us changed our game and, ultimately, the world! People achieved this by thinking thoughts no one else considered and taking actions no one else pursued, flipping conventions on their heads and making the ordinary unexpected through difference and disruption.

The outdated labels and negative associations tied to being different and disruptive have become ingrained in the organizational mindset through schools and educational institutions. These continue to create paralyzing, fear-driven responses to embracing change and adopting innovation. This often hinders organizations from fully embracing people’s collective intelligence, developing the skills and maximizing the possibilities and creativity that disruption, diversity, inclusion, and difference present:

  • Diversity, inclusion, difference, and disruption are essential tools for thinking differently in ways that change the business landscape!
  • Disruptive, deviant and diverse teams that differ significantly and challenge the status quo can think the unthinkable, surprising the world with new inventions and unexpected solutions through their disruptive, collaborative, and creative thinking strategies, which are crucial for innovation success.

Being the disruptive change

Choosing the self-disruption path forces you to climb steep foothills of new information, relationships, and systems to take the first steps toward becoming the change you wish to see in the world.

  • Reframing Disruption

For many, even the word ” disruption ” is perceived as unfavorable and intimidating. When we were confronted at school by disruptive students, we would duck for cover to avoid the teacher’s wrath.  Similarly, in group and team projects where one person opposes, argues, dominates the conversation, and doesn’t pay attention to or listen to anyone else’s opinions, we tend to stay silent and disengage from the discussion.

Many situations and problems require changes, upgrades, or removal of systems or processes, which disrupt the norm. The global pandemic significantly disrupted the traditional 9:00 am to 5:00 pm office workday, leading to the advantages of more flexible work environments where people have adapted to numerous challenges and forged a new working world.

This prompts us to reconsider how we might reframe disruption from its typical definition.

Original Definition of Disruption (Oxford Dictionary): “Disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process.”“Radical change to an existing industry or market due to technological innovation” Reframing Disruption“An opening, doorway and threshold for intentionally disturbing or interrupting an event, activity, or process positively, constructively to effect radical changes that contribute towards the common good (people, profit and planet) differently.

Yet complacent, inwardly focused, conventional business methods result only in continuous or incremental disturbances or changes. In contrast, being different and safely disruptive to activate profound interruptions to business as usual is required to transform the business game.

Disruption without a positive, constructive, value-adding intent and relevant context makes people fearful and anxious. Many individuals have blind spots regarding how their fear-driven learning or survival anxieties negatively affect their effectiveness and productivity. They may even attempt to mask their fears and learning shortcomings by pretending to know things they don’t.

It starts with disrupting yourself.

Personal or self-disruption opens pathways for self-discovery, self-transformation, and innovation in a volatile and chaotic world where disruptive change is constant and inevitable. 

This involves becoming emotionally energized and mentally stimulated by engaging in a journey of continuous discovery that maximizes the value and benefits of being different and disruptive. It includes a commitment to ongoing learning and a willingness to identify and take smart risks, reframe, and embrace constraints as catalysts for creative thinking. This approach involves failing fast to learn by doing, generating ground-breaking ideas, and taking unexpected and surprising right turns that lead to new ways forward. Particularly as we explore what AI can do and what it should do, we need to ensure that our courageous and rebellious traits support its development and applications to help build a brighter future for all.

Being different and disruptive shifts the needle, increasing the possibilities for game-changing reinventions and innovations. Co-creative relationships with AI can support us in restructuring and reimagining how we approach customers, markets, communities, and the world in unprecedented ways. 

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, Anyone Can Learn to Innovate, which is due for publication in late 2025.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also up-skill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pexels

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Building Innovation Momentum Without the Struggle

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Five Questions for Tendayi Viki

Building Innovation Momentum Without the Struggle

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Innovation efforts get stuck long before they scale because innovation isn’t an idea problem. It’s a leadership problem.  And one of those problems is that leaders are expected to spark transformation, without rocking the boat.

I’ve spent my career in corporate innovation (and wrote a book about it), so I was thrilled to sit down with Tendayi Viki, author of Pirates in the Navy and one of the most thoughtful voices on corporate innovation.

Our conversation didn’t follow the usual playbook about frameworks and metrics. Instead, it surfaced something deeper: how small wins, earned trust, and emotional intelligence quietly power real change.

If you’re tasked with driving innovation inside a large organization—or supporting the people who are—this conversation will challenge what you think it takes to succeed.

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Robyn Bolton (RB): You work with a lot of corporate leaders. What’s one piece of conventional wisdom they need to unlearn about innovation?

Tendayi Viki (TV): That you need to start with a big bang. That transformation only works if it launches with maximum support and visibility from day one.

But we don’t think that way about launching new products. We talk about starting with early adopters. Steve Blank even outlines five traits of early evangelists: they know they have the problem, they care about solving it, they’re actively searching for a solution, they’ve tried to fix it themselves, and they have budget. That’s where momentum comes from.

But in corporate settings, I see leaders trying to roll out transformation as if it is a company-wide software update. I once worked with someone in South Africa who was introduced as the new head of innovation at a big all-hands event. He told me later, “I wish I hadn’t started with such a big bang. It created resentment—I hadn’t even built a track record yet.”

Instead of struggling and pushing change on people, I try to help leaders build momentum. Think of it like a flywheel. You start slow, with the right people, at the right points of leverage. You work with early adopter leaders, tell stories about their wins, invite others to join. Soon, you’re not persuading anyone—you’ve got movement.

RB: Have you seen that kind of momentum work in practice?

TV: A few great examples stand out.

Tendayi VikiClaudia Kotchka at P&G didn’t go around talking about design thinking when she started. She picked a struggling brand and applied the tools there. Once that project succeeded, people paid attention. More leaders asked for help. That success did the selling.

And there’s a story from Samsung that stuck with me. A transformation team was tasked with leading “big innovation,” but they didn’t start by preaching theory. They said, “Let’s help senior leaders solve the problems they’re dealing with right now.” Not future-state stuff—just practical challenges. They built credibility by delivering value, not running roadshows.

If you can’t find early adopters, then take one step back. Solve someone’s actual problem. People are always fans of solving their own problems.

RB: When you think about leaders who are good at building momentum, what qualities or mindsets do they tend to have?

TV: Patience is huge. This stuff takes time. And you have to set expectations with the people who gave you the mandate: “It’s not going to look like much at first—but it’s working.”

And I think you can measure momentum. Not just adoption metrics, but something simpler: how many people are coming to you without you pushing them? That’s real traction. You don’t have to chase them. They’re curious. They’ve seen the early wins.

Another big one is humility. You’ve got to respect the people who resist you. That doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but it means understanding. Maybe they need to see social proof. Maybe they’re waiting for cover from another leader. Maybe they’re not comfortable standing out.

None of that means they’re wrong. It just means they’re human. So work with the confident few first and bring in the rest when they’re ready.

RB: Have you always approached resistance that way?

TV: Oh no—I learned that one the hard way.

Early in my career, I was running a workshop at Pearson. I was beating up on this publishing group about how they’re going to get killed by digital, and they were arguing.  It was a really difficult conversation, and I was convinced I was right and they were wrong.

Afterward, one of the leaders pulled me aside and said, “I don’t disagree with what you said. I think you’re right. But I didn’t like how you made us feel.”

And that was the moment. They weren’t resisting because of the content. They were reacting to how I delivered it. I made them feel stupid, even if I didn’t mean to. And their only move was to push back.

It took me years to absorb that lesson. But now I never forget: if people are resisting, check the emotional tone before you check the content.

RB: Last question. What is one thing you’d like to say to corporate leaders trying to drive innovation?

TV: Just chill!

Seriously. There’s so much *efforting* in corporate transformation. All the chasing, tracking, nudging, following up. “Have they responded to the email? Did you call them?” All that pressure to push, to prove.

But it reminds me of this Malcolm Gladwell podcast, Relax and Win, about San Jose State sprinters. Their coach taught them that to run their fastest, they had to stay relaxed. When you tense up, you actually slow down.

Innovation works the same way. Don’t force it. Build momentum. Let it grow. And trust it once it’s moving.

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The real challenge in corporate innovation isn’t convincing people that change is needed—it’s helping them feel safe enough to join you.

This conversation with Tendayi reminded me that the most effective innovation leaders don’t lead with pressure or pitch decks. They lead with patience, empathy, and small wins that build momentum.

Image credit: Pexels, Tendayi Viki (via LinkedIn)

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Don’t Get Fooled by Hucksters, Gurus and Consultants

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Don't Get Fooled by Hucksters, Gurus And Consultants

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When I lived in Poland, it was common to say that “life is cruel, and full of traps.” From an American perspective, the aphorism can be a bit of a culture shock. We’re raised to believe in the power of positivity, the American dream and the can-do spirit. Negativity can be seen as something worse than a weakness, both an indulgence and a privation at the same time.

Over the years, however, I came to respect the Poles’ innate suspicion. The truth is that we are far too easily fooled and taken in by those prey on the glitches in our cognitive machinery. Sometimes the ones peddling bunk have fooled also themselves. Their claims seem to be supported by logic and evidence, but their promises never quite pan out.

We’re taken in because we want their claims to be true. We’d like to think that there is a secret we’re missing, that there’s a black magic that we’re not privy to and, if we prove our worth and obtain access to a few simple truths, we’ll capture the success that eludes us. Yet these frauds follow common patterns and there are telltale signs we can learn to spot.

1. The Survivorship Bias Trick

In 2005 W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, both distinguished professors at INSEAD, published Blue Ocean Strategy. In their study of 108 companies the authors found that “blue ocean” launches, those in new categories without competition, far outperformed the shark-infested “red ocean” line extensions that are the norm in the corporate world. It was an immediate hit, selling over 3.5 million copies.

Bain consultants Chris Zook and James Allen’ book, Profit from the Core, boasted even more extensive research encompassing 200 case studies, a database of 1,854 companies, 100 interviews of senior executives and an “extensive review” of existing literature. They found that firms that focused on their ”core” far outperformed those who strayed.

It doesn’t take too much thinking to start seeing problems. How can you both “focus on your core” and seek out “blue oceans”? It betrays logic that both strategies could outperform one another. Also, how do you define “core?” Core markets? Core capabilities? Core customers? While it’s true that “blue ocean” markets lack competitors, they don’t have any customers either. Who do you sell to?

Yet there is an even bigger, more insidious problem and it is a trick that hucksters, gurus and consultants regularly employ to falsely establish dubious claims. It’s called survivorship bias. Notice how “research” doesn’t include firms that went out of business because there were no customers in those “blue oceans” or because they failed to diversify outside of their “core.” The data only pertains to the ones that survived.

Can you imagine a medical researcher failing to include the results of patients that died? Or an airplane designer forgetting to mention the prototypes that crashed? Yet hucksters, gurus and consultants get away with it all the time.

2. Dressing Up Social Proof As “Research”

Another trick hucksters, gurus and consultants use is to dress up social proof as research in order to increase their credibility as experts and establish a need for their services. They say, for example, that they find company profitability is strongly correlated with a customer focus or that culture has a statistically powerful effect on performance.

At first glance, these claims seem reasonable, but as Phil Rosenzweig explained in The Halo Effect, it’s all part of a subtle bait and switch. What is being “researched” is not really “customer focus” or “culture,” but perceptions about those things in responses to a survey. So it is highly likely that successful companies are merely being perceived as having these traits.

For example, in 2000, before the dotcom crash, Cisco was flying high. A profile in Fortune reported it to have an unparalleled culture with highly motivated employees. But just one year later, when the market tanked, the very same publication described it as “cocksure” and “naive.” Did the “culture” really change that much in a year, with the same leadership?

Some might say that it’s “obvious” that a strong culture and customer focus contribute to performance, but then why go through the whole kabuki dance of “research?” Why not just say, “if you believe these things are important, we can help you with them?” It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that their is either an intent to deceive or just pure incompetence.

You don’t have to look far to see that this is an ongoing con. A few quick Google searches led me to major consulting firms currently selling halo effects as causal relationships to trusting customers here and here.

3. The VUCA World

Today it’s become an article of faith that we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Business pundits tell us that we must “innovate or die.” These are taken as basic truths that are beyond questioning or reproach. Those who doubt the need for change risk being dismissed as out of touch.

The data, however, tell a very different story. A report from the OECD found that markets, especially in the United States, have become more concentrated and less competitive, with less churn among industry leaders. The number of young firms have decreased markedly as well, falling from roughly half of the total number of companies in 1982 to one third in 2013.

A comprehensive 2019 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found two correlated, but countervailing trends: the rise of “superstar” firms and the fall of labor’s share of GDP. Essentially, the typical industry has fewer, but larger players. Their increased bargaining power leads to more profits, but lower wages.

The truth is that we don’t really disrupt industries anymore. We disrupt people. Economic data shows that for most Americans, real wages have hardly budged since 1964. Income and wealth inequality remain at historic highs. Anxiety and depression, already at epidemic levels, worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

So why do hucksters, gurus and consultants insist that industries are under constant threat of disruption?

4. The Allure Of Pseudoscience

In Richard Feynman’s 1974 commencement speech at Cal-Tech, he recounted going to a new-age resort where people were learning reflexology. A man was sitting in a hot tub rubbing a woman’s big toe and asking the instructor, “Is this the pituitary?” Unable to contain himself, the great physicist blurted out, “You’re a hell of a long way from the pituitary, man!”

His point was that it’s relatively easy to make something appear “scientific” by, for example, having people wear white coats or present charts and tables, but that doesn’t really make it science. True science is testable and falsifiable. We can’t merely state what you believe to be true, but must give others a means to test it and prove us wrong.

This is important because it’s very easy for things to look like the truth, but actually be false. That’s why we need to be careful, especially when it’s something we already believe in. The burden is even greater when it’s an idea that we want to be true. That’s when we need to redouble our efforts, dig in and make sure we verify our facts.

Hucksters, gurus and consultants love to prey on our weakness for authority by saying that “the science says…” The truth is that science doesn’t “say”anything, it merely produces hypotheses that haven’t been disproven yet. Some, like Darwin’s theory of natural selection, have been around a long time, so we’re pretty sure that they’re true, but even in that case a large part of it was debunked within months. The ‘theory” as we know it now is what survived.

There are no absolute answers. There is, as Sam Arbesman has put it, a half life of facts. We can only make decisions on higher or lower levels of confidence. In the real world, there are no “sure things,” and don’t let hucksters, gurus and consultants tell you any different.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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It All Starts with Wanting Things to be Different

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It All Starts With Wanting Things to be Different

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Wanting things to be different is a good start, but it’s not enough. To create conditions for things to move in a new direction, you’ve got to change your behavior. But with systems that involve people, this is not a straightforward process.

To create conditions for the system to change, you must understand the system”s disposition – the lines along which it prefers to change.. And to do that, you’ve got to push on the system and watch its response. With people systems, the response is not knowable before the experiment.

If you expect to be able to predict how the system will respond, working with people systems can be frustrating. I offer some guidance here. With this work, you are not responsible for the system’s response, you are only responsible for how you respond to the system’s response.

If the system responds in a way you like, turn that experiment into a project to amplify the change. If the system responds in a way you dislike, unwind the experiment. Here’s a simple mantra – do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. (Thanks to Dave Snowden for this.)

If you don’t like how things are going, you have only one lever to pull. You can only change.your response to what you see and experience. You can respond by pushing on the system and responding to what you see or you can respond by changing what you think and feel about the system.

But keep in mind that you are part of the system. And maybe the system is running an experiment on you. Either way, your only choice is to choose how to respond.

Image credits: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides available for download at http://misterinnovation.com

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