Category Archives: Leadership

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2026

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2026 Drum 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 July’s ten most popular innovation posts:

What Happens When AI Becomes Your Customer? — by Shep Hyken
The Experience Economy 2.0 — by Braden Kelley
How to Calculate the ROI of Customer Experience — by Braden Kelley
Strategic Foresight: A Practitioner’s Guide to Thinking About the Future — by Braden Kelley
Innovation or Not — InTruth — by Braden Kelley
Innovation Framework Examples: 7 Real-World Cases That Show How They Work — by Braden Kelley
The Personal AI Renaissance — by Braden Kelley
Your 3 Phase AI Journey — by Geoffrey Moore
Why So Much Bullshit? — by Greg Satell
Creating an Innovation Edge — by John Bessant

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

The Neuroscience of Creativity — by Braden Kelley
The Synthetic Organization — by Braden Kelley
Use Failure as Rocket Fuel for Success Like SpaceX — by Robert B. Tucker
Crossing the Chasm of Fear — by Braden Kelley
4 Simple Rules That Make You Exponentially More Effective and Productive — by Greg Satell

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!

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 five years:

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Three Facts That Business Leaders Refuse to Accept

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Three Facts That Business Leaders Refuse to Accept

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the late 90s Fortune magazine named Enron the most innovative company for six consecutive years, right up until the company collapsed in scandal. GE’s strategy of stack ranking was seen as a model to be emulated by other firms, even though there was no evidence it worked. McKinsey advised companies to fight a war for talent.

Today, we know better. It’s obvious that Enron was incredibly dysfunctional, that stack ranking undermines a high-performance culture and that talent is something that you build through upskilling, not something you “win” in a metaphorical war. It’s mind boggling to think of all the damage that was done before those ideas were exposed.

Yet if we accept all that we need to ask ourselves which ideas are widely accepted today that don’t hold water. Every era has its own fictions, things that are accepted because they are repeated, but lack any serious foundation. They become memes replicating themselves throughout the zeitgeist, rarely being questioned. Here are three truths that will surprise you.

1. Bigger Organizations Are More Innovative

We tend to think of innovation as something startups do. Big organizations, with their bloated bureaucracies and cumbersome decision making, are less nimble. Yet a recent book, Corporate Explorer, by Stanford professor Charles O’Reilly, Harvard Professor Paul Lawrence and consultant Andrew Binns finds that larger firms have more resources, talent and ideas.

This may seem surprising, but there is ample evidence supporting the principle that larger enterprises innovate more effectively. A 1969 study of local health departments found that the larger ones serving larger communities were more innovative. A 1986 analysis of footwear manufacturers found that the bigger ones had more technical specialists and adopted more radical innovation. Same thing when researchers looked at German banks’ adoption of telecommunication services.

Clearly startups have advantages. They tend to be less bureaucratic and can make decisions faster. They are also less invested in incumbent systems and technologies, which makes change easier. Yet innovation isn’t just about speed, it’s also about commitment to solving important problems and larger enterprises have more resources and scope to do that.

That’s why when you look at the most cutting edge technologies, like quantum computing, artificial intelligence, materials science, synthetic biology and others, you tend to find large organizations at the core. Don’t get me wrong, not every big company can innovate, but the ones that can come up with new ideas and execute them consistently, year after year and decade after decade, are enterprises with scale.

2. Levels Of Bureaucracy And Hierarchy Are Increasing, Not Decreasing

About a decade ago, the management guru Gary Hamel wrote a highly cited article in Harvard Business Review entitled First, Let’s Fire All the Managers. He analyzed the success of Morningstar, a leading manufacturer of tomato products that operates with a flat management structure and called for other corporations to follow its lead.

“A hierarchy of managers exacts a hefty tax on any organization,” he wrote. “This levy comes in several forms. First, managers add overhead, and as an organization grows, the costs of management rise in both absolute and relative terms.” The article was very influential and helped bolster other flat models, such as Holacracy.

For a while now, management gurus have been advocating for flatter organizations, yet there is little evidence that eliminating managers is a viable model. In fact, when Wharton Professor Ronnie Lee took a close look at game software developers, he found that the number of levels of bureaucracy increased significantly, not decreased, over the last 50 years.

Certainly, the “flat organization” idea hasn’t caught on. “Since 1983, the size of the bureaucratic class—the number of managers and administrators in the US workforce—has more than doubled, while employment in other categories has grown by only 40%,” Hamil recently wrote.

The inescapable conclusion is that we’ve failed to do away with bureaucracies and hierarchies because they serve a useful purpose. While flatter structures can inspire creativity, we need hierarchies to execute complex operations well. That might not play well when your trying to sell consulting projects or on the keynote stage, but it’s the truth.

3. Markets Are Becoming Less Competitive, not More (At least in the US)

Today it’s become an article of faith that everything moves faster. Business pundits tell us that we’re living in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). These are taken as basic truths that are beyond questioning or reproach. Yet are things actually moving any faster than in earlier eras? The evidence is surprisingly scarce.

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.

What You See Is How You’ll Act

When ideas are repeated often enough, we begin to take them as self-evident and don’t even question them. People take it for granted that small organizations are more innovative than larger ones, that flatter organizations outperform those with high levels of bureaucracy and that business is more competitive today than in earlier eras.

If you believe all that, then you would avoid getting involved with a large organization if you want to innovate, you would try to eliminate levels of hierarchy and create a high sense of urgency about everything you do. Yet when you examine the evidence it becomes clear that none of these things are factual.

The truth is that size has little to do with innovation. As we saw during Covid, the most pathbreaking advances came from collaborations between organizations, public and private, large and small. The levels of hierarchy in an organization aren’t nearly as important as its networks. Pushing too many initiatives is more likely to result in a high level of change fatigue and diminished mental health than lead to genuine results.

When we look back at earlier eras, it’s easy to see the errors in the zeitgeist. It seems obvious that the robber barons undermined society, that excessive tariffs during the depression would impoverished society and that Enron was a fraud. Yet we need to look with the same skeptical eye at prevalent beliefs today.

As Richard Dawkins has explained, memes are selfish. They propagate themselves for their own benefit, not necessarily for ours. We need to learn to be fiercer advocates for our fates.

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

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Managing Your Work Friends

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Managing Your Work Friends

GUEST POST from David Burkus

You just got promoted. Congratulations! But now you’re managing your friends. The people you used to grab lunch with, the ones you vented to about the boss, and the folks who knew every inside joke from your team Slack channel — they’re your team. And you’re their boss.

Work friendships are powerful. They boost morale, improve collaboration, and make the workday more enjoyable. I don’t have to convince you that having friends at work is valuable. But when the power dynamic shifts, when you go from being “work friend” to “work boss,” things inevitably change. Suddenly your decisions carry weight — promotions, raises, performance reviews, and tough calls that impact livelihoods. At the same time, your team knows a lot about you. Maybe they’ve seen your Instagram stories or been with you at happy hours. That blurred line between friendship and authority can get messy fast.

And this is the dilemma of managing your friends: how do you maintain meaningful relationships without undermining your credibility as a leader? How do you stay approachable and authentic while also being consistent and fair?

The answer isn’t easy, but it is possible. It starts with understanding what doesn’t work, and then rebuilding those friendships into a new kind of relationship.

Why Most New Managers Struggle

Most new managers stumble into one of two extremes when they start managing their friends. They either pretend nothing has changed, or they change everything.

Some ignore the shift. They keep gossiping, keep oversharing, keep hanging out exactly the same way — hoping the friendship will buffer any awkwardness. But it doesn’t. That kind of behavior undermines authority when it’s time to make a hard call. A joke about a teammate suddenly looks like favoritism. A venting session about a senior leader sounds like open dissent. And the manager’s credibility takes the hit.

Others overcorrect. They pull back completely. They stop socializing. They stop texting. They stop grabbing coffee or lunch. They put up walls and operate only in “professional mode.” That comes across as cold — because it is. And the sudden distance damages trust and morale.

Both extremes backfire. Pretending nothing has changed creates resentment and perceptions of favoritism. Overcorrecting destroys connection and trust. Neither approach works long term. What new managers really need is a third path: redefining the friendship for the new reality.

Why The Old Dynamic Doesn’t Work Anymore

It helps to remember why friendships at work felt easy before. They were built on equality. You were in the trenches together — venting about the same boss, rolling your eyes in the same meetings, maybe even sneaking out early together on a Friday. But the key word there is were. You were equals. Now you’re not.

Power dynamics are like gravity. You don’t always see them, but they’re always pulling. Once you’re in charge, every interaction gets filtered through that shift. You may think you’re just being candid with an old friend, but now it sounds like the boss has picked a side. You may think you’re just cutting them some slack, but others see favoritism. And once your team suspects favoritism, everything else you do gets questioned — your motives, your decisions, even your integrity.

That’s why the old friendship dynamic doesn’t work anymore. It’s not because the friendship isn’t real — it’s because the context has changed. So if you want to keep both your friendships and your credibility, you’ll need to redefine the relationship.

Five Tips For Managing Your Friends

1. Address the Shift Directly

Pretending nothing has changed is like pretending you didn’t just get promoted. Everyone knows. They feel it already. And if you don’t address it, the tension just lingers like an awkward silence no one names.

The fix is surprisingly simple: talk about it. You don’t need to make a big speech or hold a formal meeting. Just have an honest one-on-one conversation with each friend. Something as short as:

“Hey, I know this feels a little different now that I’m in this role. I really value our friendship, and I want to make sure I’m being fair and consistent with the whole team. What boundaries make sense for us?”

That’s it. Short, honest, specific. And it shows you care enough to be proactive. Trust me, your friend is already wondering how things are going to change. By being the first to bring it up, you take away the uncertainty and replace it with clarity.

2. Embrace Your New Role

You can still be friendly, but you can’t be “one of the gang” anymore. Accepting that reality is part of stepping into leadership.

This is where many new managers trip up. They cling to the old dynamic. They keep venting frustrations, gossiping, and oversharing with their closest colleagues. But once you’re the boss, those conversations hit differently. A joke about a coworker is no longer harmless — it’s favoritism. Complaining about company policy isn’t just blowing off steam — it’s sowing dissent.

And those side conversations? They never stay side conversations. They spread. They change perceptions. They chip away at your authority.

That doesn’t mean you need to become robotic. You can still laugh with your team. You can still celebrate wins. You can still be approachable. But you’re “leader first, friend second” now. And when you need to vent, find a new outlet—a mentor, another manager, or someone outside the company. Your team isn’t your sounding board anymore.

3. Stay Consistent to Avoid Favoritism

Fairness isn’t just a leadership principle—it’s a credibility shield. The quickest way to lose trust is to treat your friends differently than the rest of the team.

That doesn’t mean you’ll intend to play favorites. It’s usually subtle. Giving your old buddy more slack on a deadline. Asking them for input first in meetings. Grabbing lunch with them a little more often than with others. None of those things seem like a big deal, but your team notices. They always notice. And once they suspect favoritism, the dynamic of the whole team changes.

So be deliberate about how you lead. Rotate lunch invites. Keep feedback tied to measurable goals so everyone sees the standard is the same. Spread recognition evenly and shine the spotlight on the whole team, not just the familiar faces. Consistency protects your credibility and reinforces trust across the group.

4. Reevaluate Social Media Boundaries

Before you were the boss, your social media interactions were harmless — liking memes, posting weekend selfies, swapping DMs. But now? Those same interactions can be seen as bias or favoritism, and worse, they come with receipts.

A casual photo at a backyard barbecue? Favoritism. Liking a slightly edgy meme your friend shared? Bias. Responding privately to a rant about another teammate? Favoritism again — this time with screenshots. You don’t have to ghost your entire digital life, but you do need to tighten boundaries. Adjust privacy settings. Consider unfollowing or at least limiting interactions. Keep work and social media in separate lanes. And follow this rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t put it in a company email, don’t put it in a DM.

5. Focus on Connection Through the Work

One of the best parts about working with friends is the sense of connection. The risk, when you become their boss, is thinking you need to pull away completely to preserve fairness. But you don’t. You just need to redirect that connection into the work itself.

Research on prosocial motivation—our drive to protect and promote the well-being of others—shows that teams thrive when they’re bonded around shared purpose. That’s your new role: to cultivate connection not through gossip or side chats, but through collaboration, recognition, and shared wins.

Keep the relationships, but root them in the team’s mission. That way you’re not just holding on to friendships—you’re strengthening the team.

The Bottom Line

Managing your friends after a promotion is one of the trickiest leadership challenges you’ll face. If you pretend nothing’s changed, you’ll lose credibility. If you overcorrect, you’ll lose connection. The path forward is acknowledging the shift, embracing your new role, staying consistent, setting boundaries, and channeling friendship into shared purpose.

You don’t have to lose your friends when you become their boss. But you do have to lead them differently. And if you do it well, you won’t just keep your friendships — you’ll earn their respect.

Image credit: Gemini

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The Leadership Journey

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The Leadership Journey

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you know what to do, do it. Don’t ask, just do.

If you’re pretty sure what to do, do it. Don’t ask, just do.

If you think you may know what to do, do it. Don’t ask, just do.

If you don’t know what to do, try something small. Then, do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

If your team doesn’t know what to do unless they ask you, tell them to do what they think is right. And tell them to stop asking you what to do.

If your team won’t act without your consent, tell them to do what they think is right. Then, next time they seek your consent, be unavailable.

If the team knows what to do and they go around you because they know you don’t, praise them for going around you. Then, set up a session where they educate you on what you should know.

If the team knows what to do and they know you don’t, but they don’t go around you because they are too afraid, apologize to them for creating a fear-based culture and ask them to do what they think is right. Then, look inside to figure out how to let go of your insecurities and control issues.

If your team needs your support, support them.

If your team need you to get out of the way, go home early.

If your team needs you to break trail, break it.

If they need to see how it should go, show them.

If they need the rules broken, break them.

If they need the rules followed, follow them.

If they need to use their judgement, create the causes and conditions for them to use their judgement.

If they try something new and it doesn’t go as anticipated, praise them for trying something new.

If they try the same thing a second time and they get the same results and those results are still unanticipated, set up a meeting to figure out why they thought the same experiment would lead to different results.

Try to create the team that excels when you go on vacation.

Better yet, try to create the team that performs extremely well when you’re involved in the work and performs even better when you’re on vacation. Then, because you know you’ve prepared them for the future, happily move on to your next personal development opportunity.

Image credits: Pixabay

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Building the Business Case for a Customer Experience Audit

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What the C-Suite Actually Asks

Building the Business Case for a Customer Experience Audit

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

Every Customer Experience (CX) leader I’ve worked with believes, correctly, that their organization needs a customer experience audit. Very few of them get the budget approved on the first try. The gap almost never comes down to whether the need is real — it comes down to whether the person championing it walked into the room prepared for the four questions a C-suite reliably asks, in roughly this order.

“What does this cost us if we do nothing?”

This is the opening question, and it’s the one the CX ROI Calculator exists to answer. Walk in with your own churn rate, revenue per customer, and a modeled range — conservative to optimistic — rather than an industry statistic borrowed from a research report. A number that’s obviously yours survives scrutiny. A number that’s obviously generic invites the room to argue with the source instead of the substance.

“Why an audit, and not just another survey?”

This is where most business cases quietly fall apart, because the honest answer requires admitting a limitation of what you’re already doing. Your NPS and CSAT programs measure what customers are willing to tell you. An audit measures what’s actually happening in the journey, including the parts customers work around instead of reporting. If your organization has been running satisfaction surveys for years and CX metrics still haven’t moved the way they should, that’s not evidence the audit is unnecessary — it’s usually the single best evidence that it is. Surveys have had their chance to find the problem. They haven’t. A different method is the correct next step, not a redundant one.

“What will we actually be able to do differently afterward?”

An executive approving a budget is not funding a diagnosis for its own sake — they’re funding the decisions the diagnosis will enable. The strongest version of this answer is specific: an audit produces a prioritized list of friction points ranked by business impact, not a general health score. Walk in already able to name the kind of decision it unlocks — “we’ll know whether to fix onboarding or billing first” is a far stronger sentence than “we’ll understand our customers better.”

“How disruptive is this, and how long until we see something?”

This is the question that kills otherwise-approved initiatives at the last step, usually because nobody addressed it until it was asked live in the room. Have the realistic timeline ready before you’re asked for it, not after: when the audit starts, what it requires from internal teams, and when the first findings arrive. Vagueness here reads as risk, even when the actual answer would have been reassuring.

Sequencing the case correctly

The order matters as much as the content. Lead with the cost of inaction (the number), and the room is primed to hear the diagnosis as the obvious next step rather than an added expense. Lead with the audit itself, and you’re immediately negotiating from a weaker position — explaining a cost before anyone in the room has agreed there’s a problem worth solving.

If you haven’t run your own numbers yet, start with the calculator — it’s the fastest way to walk into that first conversation with your own defensible figure instead of someone else’s. When you’re ready to talk about what an audit specifically finds and how it runs, the audit page has the detail, and I’m glad to answer the disruption and timeline questions directly if you’d rather hear them from me before you’re asked them by your own leadership.

Building the Business Case for a Customer Experience Audit

Image Credit: Gemini, ChatGPT

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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A Tale of Two Narratives on Polarization

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A Tale of Two Narratives on Polarization

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

In a time of increasing polarization, amplified by social media and exacerbated by malicious actors, we all need to deepen our understanding of just what we are into. Polarization, as I described in a previous blog on this subject, is best understood as an artifact of people binding their identities to explanatory narratives that validate their experience of the world, especially those experiences that activate their deepest fears. Binding to narrative per se is fundamental to both psychological and social stability, and in that context, it is natural and healthy. But when the narrative is being deliberately corrupted in order to manipulate public opinion, it fosters increasingly antagonistic relationships, dehumanizing the antagonists and inflaming the protagonists, both of which encourage us to treat fellow human beings as targets for marginalization, incarceration, or elimination.

In contemporary culture, there are two framing narratives that are driving this kind of polarization (and let me give shout out to Tangle for calling them to my attention):

Civilization vs the Barbarians. In this narrative, “we” are the defenders of what is good, noble, and sacred in human culture, and “they” are agents of evil, degradation, and blasphemy. Thus, “we” can consider ourselves exempt from ethical accountability in our actions against them because “they” are threatening the very foundation of ethics itself.
Oppressed vs the Oppressors. In this narrative, “we” are the victims of political, social, and economic exploitation by “them,” an overclass that has acquired a disproportionate share of power, wealth, and entitlements illegitimately at our expense. Thus, “we” can consider ourselves exempt from ethical accountability in our actions against them because “they” have unethically disenfranchised us.

Both narratives can be legitimate under extreme conditions, but each also lends itself to inflammatory purposes as well. Historically, the role of news reporting has been to help us distinguish between these two states. What is disgraceful about today’s media is that major broadcast networks, as well as previously highly respected publications, have not just abandoned this role but are actively engaged in subverting it. Let’s look a little more closely at what they are up to.

Civilization vs the Barbarians

This is the narrative framework that underlies Israel’s stance about its war with Hamas. It is also the one the US used to justify its post-9/11 actions against both Iraq and Isis. In both instances, provoked by starkly violent surprise attacks against purely civilian targets, outrage and righteous indignation fueled a demand for massive retaliation. There was simply no room for acknowledging any mitigating circumstances, any possible responsibility for creating the conditions that might have led to the terrorist attacks, or any accountability for subsequent acts of retributive retaliation regardless of how appalling they, in turn, might have been.

Now, given the extremity of the provocations, it is hard to see how any of this could have been avoided. But the civilization-vs-barbarians narrative is being used much more broadly in contemporary political discourse to address concerns that are much less extreme, including the following:

Right-wing outrage over illegal immigration
Left-wing outrage over anti-abortion legislation
Right-wing outrage over students demonstrating over the war in Gaza
Left-wing outrage over climate change deriders
Right-wing outrage over DEI initiatives
Left-wing outrage over 2020 election deniers.
Right-wing outrage over atheism
Left-wing outrage over book-banning

The key term here, in case you missed it, is outrage. Outrage uses righteousness to legitimize an explosion of anger against a community-sanctioned target. But the roots of that anger are not in the object of its attention. They are in the subject that has been carrying that burden around internally and who has now found a socially acceptable way to release it. And don’t think this applies just to “other people.” No one (except maybe a saint) is exempt here. You and I are as subject to the power of narratives as anyone else—it is only the trigger narratives themselves that separate us.

Look back over the bullet points above. Each of them is encased in a narrative, be it based on fact or urban legend. We should not be naïve about the power of these narratives to shape public opinion and influence elections. Psychologically, they play upon some of our deepest fears and then offer us a protective shield that is both internally coherent and externally impenetrable. That’s what makes the civilization-vs-barbarians narrative such a powerful political tool.

Oppressed vs the Oppressors

This is the narrative framework that underlies US college student protests in support of the Palestinians and against Israel’s sustained offensive in the Gaza Strip, as well as NATO support for the Ukraine and US support for Taiwan. Inside the US, it underpins support for the homeless, defunding of the police, and decriminalization of drug use. In each case, in order to relieve the debilitating conditions these communities are living under, the narrative calls for a radical change in the status quo, including a willingness to deprioritize legal justice in order to achieve social justice.

There are two separate audiences this narrative seeks to engage. Ostensibly, it is the oppressed themselves, but this can be misleading. Under exceptional circumstances, it is true that such narratives can trigger a revolution of the oppressed, but more commonly, these folks are in no position to take action on their own behalf. The far more frequent audience is people of means who have the power to take action and who empathize with the cause. This results in two kinds of calls to action—a revolutionary path, led by the oppressed, which seeks to overthrow the oppressors through violent means, and a liberal path, led by the empathizers, which seeks reform by working within the system.

Although we associate the oppressed-vs-the-oppressors narrative primarily with the left, we should note that the far right is leveraging it as well, as witnessed by the following widely held claims:

The woke liberal establishment is imposing socialist agendas around climate change and DEI on the oppressed white middle class.
Parental rights are under attack, threatened by liberal ideologies that have taken over public schools.
The 2020 election was rigged by Democrats, and Republicans, therefore, need not accept the results of the 2024 election because it also could be rigged.
Donald Trump did not get a fair trial because it, too, was rigged.
(And at the far right) the tyranny of the Deep State is so oppressive it warrants patriotic citizens taking up arms and shedding blood.

The Implications

To sum up, both political parties are using both narratives, but in very different contexts.

US Right: “Oppressors are the woke liberal establishment imposing socialist agendas around climate change and DEI on the oppressed white middle class.”
US Right: “Barbarians are the illegal immigrants seeking to invade our country and take over our democracy by outnumbering the civilized native white citizenry.”
US Left: “Oppressors are the conservative capitalist establishment imposing unjust requirements on disadvantaged populations, including illegal immigrants, the homeless, and the addicted.”
US Left: “Barbarians are the far-right politicians and pundits undermining the rule of law with fake news and demagogic rhetoric to block reproductive rights, equal opportunity programs, and climate change initiatives.”

Any attempt to argue people off of any of these positions is almost certain to fail, not because the arguments that support them are especially persuasive, but because people have bound their identities to them so tightly that they cannot break with them. As part of this binding, society self-segregates into “Us” and “Them,” each with its own amplifying media sources, its own signals of solidarity, its own righteous indignation, its own contempt for the other side.

Given all that, what could anyone seeking a better way possibly do? That is a question for a future blog post, one that is still very much in the works. For now, we should just note when these narratives are being used in corrupt ways to legitimize illegitimate claims and do our best to detach ourselves from them.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: Pixabay

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Why Collective Intelligence is the New Scarce Resource in an Age of Abundant AI

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The Coordination Dividend – An AI Soft Landing Scenario

Why Collective Intelligence is the New Scarce Resource in an Age of Abundant AI

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

Throughout history, every major technological revolution has fundamentally altered the landscape of scarcity. The Industrial Revolution transitioned physical labor from a precious commodity into an abundant input; the Information Age did the same for data; and the Internet democratized communication, rendering the friction of distance nearly obsolete. Today, we are witnessing the latest iteration of this pattern: Artificial Intelligence is rapidly making individual intelligence, once our most guarded and limited asset, an abundant utility.

But if intelligence is becoming commoditized, what becomes scarce next? Many leaders are still trapped in a race to build “smarter” systems, yet the evidence suggests that smarter algorithms alone will not generate the competitive advantage we seek. The real bottleneck for progress in the coming decade is no longer how smart we are, but how effectively we coordinate our human and AI systems toward shared goals.

I call this the Coordination Dividend. It is the measurable surplus value created when diverse groups of humans and autonomous agents align seamlessly, communicate with minimal friction, and operate within shared mental models. As we navigate the AI transition, the winners will not be those with the most powerful models, but those who design the best operating systems for collective intelligence. Innovation, leadership, and organizational design are no longer just about optimizing technology, they are about perfecting the human-centered architecture of our future collaboration.

Section 1: Why Intelligence Is No Longer the Bottleneck

For years, we have been conditioned to believe that the primary lever for organizational success is the acquisition and application of specialized intelligence. We hired for it, we optimized our internal processes around it, and we built our competitive moats upon it. However, we are now entering an era where expert-level reasoning, sophisticated code generation, and nuanced creative synthesis are becoming commoditized utilities, accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a subscription.

The danger in the current market environment is the pursuit of the “Solo Genius” myth — the belief that an individual, super-powered by an AI agent, will be the primary driver of value. While AI augmentation significantly boosts individual output, it does not inherently solve the challenges of friction, misalignment, or slow execution that plague most organizations. In a world where intelligence is abundant, the strategic advantage shifts from the individual to the system.

This creates a critical pivot point for leaders:

Moving Beyond Capability: We must stop asking “How can AI make our people smarter?” and start asking “How can we orchestrate our people and AI together to move faster?”
The End of the Intelligence Moat: If your organizational strategy relies solely on being the smartest player in the room, your edge will evaporate as those capabilities are integrated into foundation models.
The Shift to Agility: The true test of an organization is now its ability to reconfigure itself in real-time. We must transition our focus from maximizing raw intelligence to maximizing organizational agility — the capacity to pivot, integrate new tools, and align collective energy without the usual administrative drag.

When intelligence is everywhere, the most successful entities will be those that master the flow of information and intent between human operators and synthetic agents. The future belongs to those who recognize that the intelligence itself is merely the raw material; the finished product is the coordinated outcome.

The Scarcity Shift Matrix

Section 2: Anatomy of the Coordination Dividend

To capture the Coordination Dividend, we must move past the idea that AI is a tool we “use” and begin to see it as a partner we “integrate” into our operational fabric. Coordination is no longer just about human-to-human interaction; it is about establishing a high-fidelity interface between human intent and synthetic execution.

The architecture of this dividend rests on three foundational pillars:

Shared Mental Models: In a hybrid workforce, humans and AIs must operate from the same baseline of context. This requires a shift in how we document strategy, culture, and operational constraints. If the AI doesn’t understand the “why” behind the “what,” it will optimize for the wrong outcome. Building a shared mental model is about encoding human values and strategic intent into the persistent memory of our systems.
Adaptive Governance: Traditional, top-down hierarchies act as friction points that prevent the rapid exchange of information necessary for coordination. We need to transition toward fluid, purpose-driven collaboration where decision rights are clear but execution is decentralized. Governance in this new era means setting the boundaries and the goals, then empowering human-AI teams to navigate the space in between autonomously.
Low-Latency Feedback Loops: The speed of business is accelerating. The organizations that win will be those that have engineered out the “wait states” in their decision-making processes. By creating real-time feedback loops — where performance data is instantly processed by AI to inform the next human action — we turn planning into a continuous, iterative flow rather than a static, periodic event.

Ultimately, these pillars define the difference between an organization that is merely “using AI” and one that is “AI-coordinated.” The former will continue to struggle with siloes and misalignment, while the latter will discover the efficiency gains that come from true systemic harmony.

The Anatomy of Human-AI Orchestration

Section 3: Impact Across the Ecosystem

The Coordination Dividend is not merely an internal efficiency metric for corporate operations; it is a fundamental restructuring of how value is created across every layer of modern society. When we solve the coordination problem between human intent and synthetic intelligence, the ripple effects transform everything from enterprise strategy to civic infrastructure.

Consider how this dividend manifests across key dimensions of our economic and societal ecosystem:

Innovation & Product Design: The traditional innovation pipeline is notoriously clogged by friction — the delay between ideation, prototyping, testing, and scaling. In an AI-coordinated environment, teams can run hundreds of parallel experiments simultaneously. The bottleneck is no longer generating or executing ideas, but curating the highest-impact concepts and aligning multidisciplinary teams around rapid deployment.
Organizational Design & Culture: Traditional departmental silos are the ultimate tax on coordination. The Coordination Dividend dismantles rigid organizational charts in favor of dynamic, cross-functional “pod” structures where human domain experts, experience designers, and specialized AI agents form transient units around specific outcomes, dissolving once the goal is reached.
Leadership & Change Management: The role of the leader fundamentally pivots from “commander of resources” to “architect of coordination.” Tomorrow’s leaders will win not by issuing directives, but by designing the collaborative systems, guardrails, and psychological safety needed for humans and AI agents to co-create without friction or paralysis.
Civic Infrastructure & Public Systems: At a societal scale, the inability to coordinate remains our greatest challenge — evident in healthcare delivery, urban planning, and educational equity. When local governments and institutions leverage low-latency, AI-augmented coordination, we can optimize complex public networks (from smart traffic management to personalized learning pathways) in real time while maintaining a deeply human-centered ethos.

Across every sector, the lesson remains constant: technology supplies the velocity, but coordination supplies the vector. Without systemic alignment, speed simply leads to faster friction.

The Coordination Dividend: Ecosystem Impact

Section 4: Measuring the Dividend

If coordination is the core source of competitive advantage in an AI-abundant era, we must develop new frameworks to measure it. Traditional productivity metrics — focused on output volume, lines of code, or hours logged — are entirely obsolete when generative systems can flood an organization with synthetic artifacts in seconds. Measuring volume only incentivizes noise; we must instead measure alignment and velocity.

To quantify the Coordination Dividend, forward-looking organizations will monitor key operational indicators:

Coordination Friction Index: Calculating the latent delay between intent and execution. How many handoffs, approval bottlenecks, or misaligned rework cycles occur between a strategic decision and its initial market feedback?
Context Parity: Assessing how accurately human teams and AI agents share operational context. High context parity eliminates hallucinated priorities and ensures autonomous workflows remain tightly bound to strategic goals.
Adaptive Velocity: Measuring an organization’s ability to reconfigure workflows, redeploy human talent, and integrate new AI models without triggering operational paralysis or cultural burnout.

Crucially, this dividend must be rooted in human-centricity. High-tech coordination without human-centered design risks creating hyper-efficient panopticons — systems that optimize for throughput at the expense of psychological safety, creativity, and trust. The ultimate metric of a successful coordination model is whether it frees humans to focus on judgment, empathy, and strategic intuition, or simply traps them in a high-speed hamster wheel of machine management.

Measuring the Coordination Dividend

Conclusion: The New Operating System for Civilization

As we navigate the ongoing shifts of the AI transition, it is easy to become captivated by the exponential performance curves of new models and raw processing capabilities. Yet, history reminds us that technology alone is never the destination — it is merely the catalyst. Just as steam power required the invention of the factory, and the Internet required the creation of networked platforms, artificial intelligence demands a radical overhaul of our collaborative architecture.

The Coordination Dividend represents the next frontier of organizational and societal evolution. In a world of abundant intelligence, value migrates to those who can master the art and science of synthesis — uniting human empathy, judgment, and creativity with machine scale, precision, and speed. The defining challenge of the next five years will not be building smarter algorithms, but designing better systems of human-AI orchestration.

For leaders, innovators, and experience designers, the directive is clear: stop obsessing solely over AI tools, and start designing for systemic alignment. By prioritizing low-latency feedback loops, shared mental models, and human-centered governance, we can ensure that artificial intelligence does not fragment our efforts, but elevates our collective capability. Intelligence provides the raw energy for our future, but coordination is the steering system that ensures we achieve a soft landing — and build a resilient, high-performing society on the other side.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the “Coordination Dividend”?

The Coordination Dividend is the measurable surplus value created when groups of humans and AI systems align seamlessly, communicate with minimal friction, and operate toward shared goals. As AI makes raw intelligence abundant, competitive advantage shifts from individual smarts to collective coordination speed and efficiency.

Why does intelligence cease to be the primary bottleneck in the AI era?

Generative AI democratizes access to expert reasoning, code generation, and strategic synthesis. When expert-level capability becomes a low-cost utility available to everyone, having intelligent individuals or models is no longer a distinct moat; the true bottleneck becomes how effectively an organization can connect, align, and execute across human-machine teams.

How do organizations measure and capture the Coordination Dividend?

Rather than tracking traditional volume metrics (e.g., hours logged or lines written), organizations quantify coordination by measuring the Coordination Friction Index (delay between intent and execution), Context Parity (shared context between humans and AI), and Adaptive Velocity (speed of reconfiguring workflows without burnout).

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a visualization of but one possible future. I will be publishing other possible futures as they crystallize in my mind (or as you suggest them for me to explore).

Image credits: Google Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini to clean up the article, add images and create infographics.

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Why Are What We Know and What We Do Often So Different?

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Why Are What We Know and What We Do Often So Different?

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1988, a young management student named John Krafcik published an article in MIT’s Sloan Management Review entitled, Triumph of the Lean Production System. Based on his study of 90 manufacturing plants in 20 countries, it argued that manufacturing could be made vastly more productive, while improving quality at the same time.

These methods would grow into the lean manufacturing movement and their effectiveness has been well documented. Krafcik himself went on to have a successful career in the auto industry, taking over Google’s self-driving division, Waymo, in 2016. There is an amazingly strong case for manufacturers to adopt lean methods.

Yet surprisingly few do. In fact, a recent survey found that less than 15% of manufacturers have adopted lean methods. This dilemma is much more common than you’d think. We’ve been conditioned to believe that a good idea, once proven out, will prevail in the marketplace, but that’s not really true. There is often a large gap between what we know and what we do.

A New World Of Work

Clearly the world of work has changed. When I began professional life in the mid-90s, laptops were still new and few people had access to the Internet. Work was something you did in your office. We largely communicated by phone and memos typed up by secretaries. Data analysis was something you did with a pencil, paper and a desk calculator.

Today, on the other hand, work is largely something we do with each other. We are increasingly collaborating in teams and our work has become more social and less cognitive. For example, the journal Nature noted that the average scientific paper today has four times as many authors as one did in 1950 and the work they are doing is far more interdisciplinary.

The truth is that we spend most of our time in meetings, collaborating with colleagues to solve problems, rather than working alone in our offices to execute tasks. Perhaps not surprisingly, there has been no shortage of concepts developed, such as psychological safety, agile development and diversity & inclusion policies, designed to help us succeed and prosper in this new world of work.

Yet much like with lean manufacturing, the reality of most workplaces rarely reflects the pundits’ rhetoric. The reason for this is simple. The status quo has inertia on its side and that is an incredibly powerful force. Change takes effort and is often disruptive. The costs are clear and present while the benefits can seem distant and remote.

The New, New Economy

In 1982, when Steve Jobs was trying to lure John Sculley from Pepsi to Apple, he asked him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” The ploy worked and Sculley became the first CEO of a major conventional company to join a Silicon Valley startup.

Yet since then, besides for a relatively short period between 1996 and 2004, labor productivity has remained depressed, except during recessions when businesses cut workers. At the same time, income inequality has increased and business has become less dynamic, with fewer startups and less churn among market leaders. I don’t think those are the changes Jobs was talking about.

It seems amazing that given all of the technological progress, including mobile and cloud computing, artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0 manufacturing technologies, that so little has been accomplished, but in their recent book, Power and Progress, economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue that market and technological forces, if left to their own devices, tend to favor elites rather than society as a whole.

We can’t simply leave our fates to the impersonal whims of market and technological forces. The historical record shows that innovations that displace workers do not necessarily make us better off. In fact, we have strong reasons to suspect that many of these technologies impoverish our society and corrode our culture.

Technology and markets were created by humans to serve people. That is their purpose and should be, by any reasonable analysis, the measure of their value. We need to take a hard look at the last 30 years and ask how we’re better off, how we’re worse off, what we need to do differently and how we can forge a better path.

The End Of History?

In 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published an essay in the journal The National Interest titled The End of History, which led to a bestselling book. Many took his argument to mean that, with the defeat of communism, US-style liberal democracy had emerged as the only viable way of organizing a society.

He was misunderstood. His actual argument was far more nuanced and insightful. After explaining the arguments of philosophers like Hegel and Kojeve, Fukuyama pointed out that even if we had reached an endpoint in the debate about ideologies, there would still be conflict because of people’s need to express their identity.

Humans tend to build stories that support our notions of who we think we are. If you work hard at your job, new ideas about lean manufacturing or agile development can seem like an affront. In much the same way, entrepreneurs like to think that their businesses have social value and the denizens of the tech universe like to think that their code changes the world.

If you believe that the forces of history are on your side, pursuing your path seems like a calling and an obligation. The benefits you receive are just more proof that you are headed in the right direction and whatever costs that are incurred by others may seem like mere table stakes to be paid for the price of progress.

That’s why tech billionaires write silly manifestos and politicians are able to fleece them for outrageous amounts of money. It is not enough to earn a good living and live in comfort. People have a need to be recognized and they will cling to the the identity they have built for themselves. Asking them to change can often seem more than a simple shift in behavior, but an affront to who they are.

Dismantling the Cult of Inevitability

We’d like to think that if something is a good idea, can be proven to work, improve performance and make people’s lives better, that market and technological forces will somehow make it inevitable. Unfortunately, the history of the last half century makes it clear that’s not true. Most people in developed countries are worse off than a generation ago.

Yes it’s true that our TV’s have gotten better and we have infinitely more channels. We carry supercomputers around in our pockets that give us unprecedented access to information and emerging services like ChatGPT give us almost superhuman powers to process it. Yet the cost of basics, such as housing, healthcare and education have impoverished us.

This wasn’t inevitable. Consider that in the US per capita GDP has nearly doubled since 1985 but median household income has risen only 27% and you begin to see the problem. In my work with organizational transformation it is clear that similar forces are at work in the corporate world. For all the talk about disruption and change, the status quo usually prevails.

We need to be more cognizant of the stories we tell ourselves. We have a primal need to be the heroes in our own narratives, to tell ourselves that we are on the right path while others are just fooling themselves, to look for information that confirms our choices and neglect evidence to the contrary. It is not a character flaw, but a reality of human nature.

Ironically, it is through awareness of our failings that can help us overcome them. Decades of research show that shifts in knowledge and attitudes don’t necessarily result in changes in behavior. Once we know that we can be more vigilant and hold ourselves to a higher standard. What we know and what we do are two different things, but with effort we can narrow the gap.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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How to Keep Learning as a Leader

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How to Keep Learning as a Leader

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Leaders are learners.

That’s not really disputed. You have to be a pretty strong learner to even get into a leadership role. And most people agree that you have to be continuously learning as a leader as well.

The problem is that what is common knowledge is not always common practice. As the demands of the leadership role pile up, and the freely available time on the calendar shrink, it can become easy to cut learning from the schedule.

But what leaders who consistently excel know is that continuously learning has to be a priority. They know that resting on their past knowledge and foolishly believing they’ve learned enough is inviting disaster. Because as the world changes, leaders who rest on how much they know will find they know an awful lot about a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

Learning doesn’t have to dominate a leader’s calendar, but it cannot be removed from it. And a few simple habits, practiced regularly, can dramatically increase how much learning leaders can find time for.

So, in this article, we’ll outline four ways you can keep learning as a leader.

Linger On Failure

The first way to keep learning as a leader is to linger on failure. Failure is feedback. It’s uncomfortable feedback, but it’s the most potent form of feedback when it comes to learning. In addition, failure is inevitable. Projects will fall apart or go over budget. Clients will move to competitors. People will quit. But how you respond matters. You can shift blame and try to convince others it wasn’t your failure. Or you can linger on the failure long enough to analyze what happened and improve as a result.

Perhaps one of the best examples of modern-day learning from failure is Navy Seal turned leadership consultant, Jocko Willink. The worst day of Willink’s Navy service was also the one he learned the most from. He was leading a mission that turned into a friendly fire incident—with teams shooting at each other in the mistaken belief they were the enemy. Afterwards, Willink was told to prepare for a debrief and, instead of compiling reasons he was blameless, Willink reflected on the failure and decided to take ownership of it. And his choosing to take on the blame helped the rest of his battalion be honest and transparent about the incident—so they could learn how to keep it from happening again.

Stay Curious

The second way to keep learning as a leader is to stay curious. Be willing to ask others about their expertise. This sounds easy, but often we’re tempted to do the opposite and pretend we have the answers. In fact, research shows that faking certainty and displaying confidence may be what brought most people into a leadership role in the first place. But it’s not an effective way to keep learning. Something amazing happens when leaders admit they don’t know and start asking questions: people start teaching them.

One leader whose life is a testament to the power of curiosity is Brain Grazer. Grazer is the founder of Imagine Entertainment and a Hollywood executive responsible for dozens of hit television shows and movies. But inside Hollywood, he’s also known for his “curiosity conversations.” Starting early in his career, Grazer made it a goal to have at least one conversation per week with someone about a topic or industry he knew nothing about. This wasn’t a networking exercise where he was just trying to expand his contact list, although that happened. It was a regular habit of trying to expand his mind and a realization that the best way to do that was to stay curious and be genuinely interested in other people.

Experiment

The third way to keep learning as a leader is to experiment. When everything is working, it’s easy to forget the importance of trying new things to keep learning. But smart leaders know they must challenge the status quo when times are good in order to keep bad times from happening. In addition, being willing to let your team experiment can scale up everyone’s learning. You won’t always have successful experiments. There will be failures, but as we’ve already covered, those are learning opportunities as well

One overlooked form of experiments leaders make often is decisions. Admit it. Decisions don’t look like experiments. It was Peter Drucker who is often credited with pointing this out. Drucker knew that, at their core, every decision is a miniature experiment in what you think will happen as a result of your actions. In fact, he went so far as encouraging leaders to keep a “decision journal”—a record of what decision you made and what the intended result was—so that you can check back in a few months or years and learn the results of your decision experiment and actually learn from your decisions instead of just continuing to blindly act.

Cultivate Conflict

The final way to keep learning as a leader is to cultivate conflict. One unfortunate result of being in a leadership position is that people often self-censor ideas that conflict with the leader’s. They fear being see as a troublemaker or worse, and so they keep their ideas to themselves. But leaders need the benefit of those ideas and, as such, they need to embrace existing conflict and cultivate more. Obviously, this refers to task-focused conflict and not interpersonal conflict. But that task-focused conflict still needs to be respectful in tone and with a sense of team-wide trust. And it’s the leader’s job to model the way on how to have the respectful conflict to learn from diverse ideas.

Often that can mean openly calling for conflict over an idea or proposal. There’s a possibly apocryphal story about General Motors’ legendary CEO Alfred P Sloan that captures the idea behind cultivating conflict. During a meeting in which GM’s top management team was considering a weighty decision, Sloan closed the meeting by asking.” “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here?” Sloan then waited as each member of the assembled committee nodded in agreement. Sloan continued, “Then, I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what this decision is about.”

While these habits are simple to practice, they are not exactly comfortable—especially at first. It’s comfortable to be curious because curiosity comes with an admission that you don’t know something. It’s uncomfortable lingering on failure. It’s uncomfortable to hold yourself accountable for decisions or to cultivate conflict. But learning happens in discomfort. Discomfort is a sign that you’re growing. So, if you want to stay committed to keep learning as a leader, you’re unfortunately going to have to stay committed to being uncomfortable as a leader as well. And if you do, you’ll keep growing into new and better ways to lead your team and you’ll keep creating an environment where everyone can do their best work ever.

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on January 31, 2022.

Image credit: Pexels

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Here is Your Healthy Dose of Heresy

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Here is Your Healthy Dose of Heresy

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Anything worth its salt will meet with resistance. More strongly, if you get no resistance, don’t bother.

There’s huge momentum around doing what worked last time. Same as last time but better; build on success; leverage last year’s investment; we know how to do it. Why are these arguments so appealing? Two words: comfort and perceived risk. Why these arguments shouldn’t be so appealing: complacency and opportunity cost.

We think statically and selectively. We look in the rear view mirror, write down what happened and say “let’s do that again.” Hey, why not? We made the initial investment and did the leg work. We created the script. Let’s get some mileage out of it. And we selectively remember the positive elements and actively forget the uncertainty of the moment. We had no idea it was going to work, and we forget that part. It worked better than we imagined and we remember the “working better” part. And we forget we imagined it would go differently. And we forget that was a long time ago and we don’t take the time to realize things are different now. The rules are dynamic, yet our thinking is static.

We compete with the past tense. We did this and they did that, and, therefore, that’s what will happen again. So wrong. We’ve got smarter; they’ve got smarter; battery capacity has tripled; power electronics are twice as efficient; efficiency of solar panels has doubled; CRISPR can edit our genes. The rules are different but the sheet music hasn’t changed. The established players sing the same songs and the upstarts cut them off at the knees.

If you were successful last time and everyone thinks your proposed project is a good idea, ball it up and throw it in the trash. It reeks of stale thinking. If your project plan is dismissed by the experts because it contradicts the tired recipe of success, congratulations! You may be onto something! Stomp on the accelerator and don’t look back.

If your proposal meets with consensus, hang your head and try again. You missed the mark. If they scream “heretic” and want to burn you at the stake, double down. If the CEO isn’t adamantly against it, you’re not trying hard enough. If she throws you out of the room half way through your presentation, you may have a winner!

Yesterday’s recipes for success are today’s worn paths of mediocrity.

If you’re confident it will work, you shouldn’t be. If you’re filled with electric excitement it might actually work and scared to death it might end in a wild fireball of burn metal toxic fumes, what are you waiting for?!

Heretics were burned at the stake because the establishment knew they were right. Goddard was right and the New York Times wasn’t. Decades later they apologized – rockets work is space. And though the Qualifiers and Pope Paul V were unanimous in their dismissal of Galileo and Copernicus, the heretics had it right – the sun is at the center of everything.

Don’t seek out dissent, but if all you get is consensus, be wary. Don’t be adversarial, but if all you get is open arms, question your thesis. Don’t be confrontational, but if all you get is acceptance, something’s wrong.

If there’s no resistance, work on something else.

Image credits: Pexels

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