Category Archives: Leadership

5 Business Myths You Cannot Afford to Believe

5 Business Myths You Cannot Afford To Believe

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Sometimes a business idea or strategy seems to make total sense. Yet once it is implemented, it turns out to be a mistake. We rely upon research, stories and data to help us formulate what might work best. It’s okay to fail. But if you already know something is wrong, don’t make it worse by relying on a flawed business strategy.

I’ve taken some of my favorite topics I’ve researched and written about over the years and uncovered five myths that, while seeming to make sense, could cost you money, customers and maybe even your business. So, with that in mind, here are my five favorite business myths and the explanations behind why believing them cost your organization dearly.

A Repeat Customer Is a Loyal Customer – The customer keeps coming back, so they must be loyal … wrong! Just because a customer comes back doesn’t always mean they love you. You must find out why they keep coming back. Maybe you have a physical location that is two miles closer than your competitor’s location. What if a competitor builds a store between you and your customer? You may find out they were loyal to your location and not to you. Or maybe your price is the lowest. If that’s what the customer loves, guess what happens when your competition offers a lower price? It turns out they were loyal to their wallet, not your store. There are a number of reasons customers come back that have nothing to do with how much they love the experience of doing business with you. But when you find someone who is truly loyal, keep doing what they love about you, and you may have them forever.
We Want Satisfied Customers – This is a perfect follow-up to A Repeat Customer Is a Loyal Customer. No, you don’t want satisfied customers. You want loyal customers. In my customer service and CX research (sponsored by RingCentral), we asked more than 1,000 U.S. consumers if they were to rate an experience as “average” or “satisfactory,” how likely would they be to come back. Almost one in four (23%) said if they had a satisfactory experience, they would not be likely to or would never come back. Satisfactory is average, and the first opportunity the customer has to do business with a place that’s even slightly better than average, it’s a good possibility that they will move on.
Only the Front Line Needs Customer Service Training – Customer service is not a department. It’s a philosophy that everyone in an organization must embrace. Everyone either deals directly with a customer, supports someone who does or is part of the process that drives or supports the customer experience. Someone in the warehouse may never see a customer, but if they fail to pack merchandise properly, they will negatively impact the experience, causing the customer to call and complain and make the company double its effort to send a product that isn’t damaged. Once the employees in the warehouse realize their impact on the experience, they will view their job in a new way and be focused on creating a better customer experience.
Customer Loyalty Programs Create Loyal Customers – Customer loyalty programs are often about points, perks and discounts. An important question to consider is, “If you take those perks away, would the customer still be loyal to you?” That doesn’t mean you should do away with the program. While these types of programs may not drive true loyalty, what they will do is drive repeat business. So, recognize a loyalty program for what it is: a repeat business and marketing program. And if the customer keeps coming back, each and every time is an opportunity (beyond the points and perks) to validate their decision to do so with an experience that will keep them from even considering switching to your competition.
The Customer Is Always Right – No, the customer is NOT always right, but they are always the customer. This is one of my favorite myths. Ten years ago, I wrote an entire article (Your Customers Are Not Always Right) devoted to this concept. For today, I’ll summarize it in one sentence: If the customer is wrong, let them be wrong with dignity and respect.

Don’t make the mistake of believing any of these myths. Rather than clinging to conventional wisdom that sounds good but potentially fails in practice, focus on understanding what’s behind these myths and what will work. Brainstorm with your team how you can “bust” these myths and create the experience that customers love and come back for.

Image Credit: Unsplash

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

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Automation Success More About Trust Than Technology

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Automation Success More About Trust Than Technology

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

We’ve all seen the apocalyptic headlines about robots coming for our jobs. The AI revolution has companies throwing money at shiny new tech while workers polish their résumés, bracing for the inevitable pink slip. But what if we have it completely, totally, and utterly backward? What if the real drivers of automation success have nothing to do with the technology itself?

That’s precisely what an MIT study of 9,000+ workers across nine countries asserts. While the doomsayers have predicted the end of human workers since the introduction of the assembly line, those very workers are challenging everything we think we know about automation in the workplace.

The Secret Ingredient for Technology ROI

MIT surveyed workers across the manufacturing industry—50% of whom reported frequently performing routine tasks—and found that the majority ultimately welcome automation. But only when one critical condition is present. And it’s one that most executives completely miss while they’re busy signing purchase orders for the latest AI and automation systems.

Trust.

Read that again because while you’re focused on selecting the perfect technology, your actual return depends more on whether your team feels valued and believes you are invested in their safety and professional growth.

Workers Who Trust, Automate

This trust dynamic explains why identical technologies succeed in some organizations and fail in others. According to MIT’s research:

Job satisfaction is the second strongest indicator of technology acceptance, with a 10% improvement that researchers identified as consistently significant across all analytical models
Feeling valued by their employer shows a highly significant 9% increase in positive attitudes toward automation
Trust also consistently predicts automation acceptance, as workers scoring higher on trust measures are significantly more likely to view new technologies positively.

For example, Sam Sayer, an employee at a New Hampshire cutting tool manufacturer, has become an automation champion because his employer helped him experience how factory-floor robots could free him from routine tasks and allow him to focus on more complex problem-solving. “I worked in factories for years before I ever saw a robot. Now I’m teaching my colleagues on the factory floor how to use them.”

This contrasts with an aerospace manufacturer in Ohio that hired a third party to integrate a robot into its warehouse processes. Despite the company’s efforts to position the robot as a teammate, even giving it a name, workers resisted the technology because they didn’t trust the implementation process or see clear personal benefits.

These patterns hold across industries and countries: When workers perceive their employer as invested in their development and well-being, automation initiatives succeed. When that foundation is missing, even the most sophisticated technologies falter.

Four Steps to Convert Resistors to Champions

Whether it’s for the factory floor or the office laptop, if you want ROI and revenue growth from your automation investments, start with your people:

Design roles that connect workers to outcomes: When people see how their input shapes results, they become natural technology allies.
Create visible growth pathways. Workers motivated by career advancement are significantly more likely to embrace new technologies.
Align financial incentives with implementation goals. When workers see the personal benefits of adoption, resistance evaporates faster than free donuts in the break room.
Make safety improvements the leading edge of your technology story. It’s the most universally appreciated benefit of automation.

A Provocative Challenge

Ask yourself this (potentially) uncomfortable question: Are you investing as much in trust as you are in technology?

Because if not, you might as well set fire to a portion of your automation budget right now. At least you’d get some heat from it.

The choice isn’t between technology and workers—it’s between implementations that honor human relationships and those that don’t. The former generates returns; the latter generates résumé updates.

What are you choosing?

Image credit: misterinnovation.com (1 of 850+ free quote slides for download)

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Better Decision Making at Speed

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Better Decision Making at Speed

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want to go faster there are three things to focus on: decisions, decisions, and decisions.

First things first – define the decision criteria before the work starts. That’s right – before. This is unnatural and difficult because decision criteria are typically poorly defined, if not undefined, even when the work is almost complete. Don’t believe me? Try to find the agreed-upon decision criteria for an active project. If you can find them, they’ll be ambiguous and incomplete. If you can’t find them, well, there you go.

Decision criteria aren’t just categories -like sales revenue, speed, weight – they all must have a go-no-go threshold. Sales must be greater than X, speed must be greater than Y and weight must be less than Z. A decision criterion is a category with a threshold value.

Second, before the work starts, define the actions you’ll take if the threshold values are achieved and if they are not. If sales are greater than X, speed is greater than Y and weight is less than Z, we’ll invest A dollars a year for B years to scale the business. If one of X, Y or Z are less than their threshold value, we’ll scrap the project and distribute the team throughout the organization.

Lastly, before the work starts, define the decision-maker and how their decision will be documented and communicated. In practice, there is usually just one decision-maker. So, strive to write down just one person’s name as the decision-maker. But that person will be reluctant to sign up as the decision-maker because they don’t want to be mapped the decision if things flop. Instead, the real decision-maker will put together a committee to make the decision.

To tighten things down for the committee, define how the decision will be made. Will it be a simple majority vote, a super-majority, unanimous decision or the purposefully ambiguous consensus vote. My bet is on consensus, which allows the individual committee members to distance themselves from the decision if it goes badly. And, it allows the real decision-maker to influence the consensus and effectively make the decision without making it.

Formalizing the decision process creates speed. The decision categories help the team avoid the wrong work and the threshold values eliminate the time-wasting is-it-good-enough arguments. When the follow-on actions are predefined, there’s no waiting there’s just action. And defining upfront the decision-maker and the mechanism eliminates the time-sucking ambiguity that delays decisions.

Image credits: misterinnovation.com (1 of 850+ free quote slides for download)

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The Role Platforms Play in Business Networks

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The Role Platforms Play in Business Networks

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

A decade and a half ago, my colleague at TCG Advisors, Philip Lay, led a body of work with SAP around the topic of business network transformation. It was spurred by the unfolding transition from client-server architecture to a cloud-first, mobile-first world, and it explored the implications for managing both high-volume transactions as well as high-complexity relationships. Our hypothesis was that high-volume networks would be dominated by a small number of very powerful concentrators whereas the high-complexity networks would be orchestrated by a small number of very influential orchestrators.

The concentrator model has played out pretty much as expected, although the astounding success of Amazon in dominating retail is in itself a story for the ages. The key has been how IT platforms anchored in cloud and mobile, now supplemented with AI, have enabled transactional enterprises in multiple sectors of the economy to scale to levels previously unimaginable. And these same platforms, when opened to third parties, have proved equally valuable to the long tail of small entrepreneurial businesses, garnering them access to a mass-market distribution channel for their offerings, something well beyond their reach in the prior era.

The impact on the orchestrator model, by contrast, is harder to see, in part because so much of it plays out behind closed doors “in the room where it happens.” Enterprises like JP Morgan Chase, Accenture, Salesforce, Cisco, and SAP clearly extend their influence well beyond their borders. Their ability to orchestrate their value chains, however, has historically been grounded primarily in a network of personal relationships maintained through trustworthiness, experience, and intelligence, not technology. So, where does an IT platform fit into that kind of ecosystem?

Here it helps to bring in a distinction between core and context. Core is what differentiates your business; context is everything else you do. Unless you are yourself a major platform provider, the platform per se is always context, never core. So, all the talk about what is your platform strategy is frankly a bit overblown. Nonetheless, in both the business models under discussion, platforms can impinge upon the core, and that is where your attention does need to be focused.

In the case of the high-volume transaction model, where commoditization is an everyday fact of life, many vendors have sought to differentiate the customer experience, both during the buying process and over the useful life of the offer. This calls for deep engagement with the digital resources available, including accessing and managing multiple sources of data, applying sophisticated analytics, and programming real-time interactions. That said, such data-driven personalization is a tactic that has been pursued for well over a decade now, and the opportunities to differentiate have diminished considerably. The best of those remaining are in industries dominated by an oligopoly of Old Guard enterprises that are so encumbered with legacy systems that they cannot field a credible digital game. If you are playing elsewhere, you will likely fare better if you get back to innovating on the offering itself.

In the case of managing context in a high-complexity relationship model, it is friction that is the everyday fact of life worth worrying about. Most of it lies in the domain of transaction processing, the “paperwork” that tags along with every complex sale. Anything vendors can do to simplify transactional processes will pay off not only in higher customer satisfaction but also in faster order processing, better retention, and improved cross-sell and up-sell. It is not core, it does not differentiate, but it does make everyone breathe easier, including your own workforce. Here, given the remarkable recent advances in data management, machine learning, and generative AI, there is enormous opportunity to change the game, and very little downside risk for so doing. The challenge is to prioritize this effort, especially in established enterprises where the inertia of budget entitlement keeps resources trapped in the coffers of the prior era’s winning teams.

The key takeaway from all this is that for most of us platforms are not strategic so much as they are operational. That is, the risk is less that you might choose an unsuitable platform and more that you may insufficiently invest in exploiting whatever one you do choose. So, the sooner you get this issue off the board’s agenda and into your OKRs, the better.

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

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Getting Buy-In for Change Now That Innovation is Dead

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Getting Buy-In for Change Now That Innovation is Dead

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Innovation is undergoing a metamorphosis, and while it may seem like the current goo-stage is the hard part (it’s certainly not easy!), our greatest challenge is still ahead. Because while we may emerge as beautiful butterflies, we still need to get buy-in for change from a colony of skeptical caterpillars who’ve grown weary of transformation talk.

The Old Playbook Is Dead, Too

Picture this: A butterfly lands, armed with PowerPoint slides about “The Future of Leaf-Eating” and projections showing “10x Nectar Collection Potential.” The caterpillars stare blankly, having seen this show before.

The old approach – big presentations, executive sponsorship, and promises of massive returns within 24 months – isn’t just ineffective. It’s harmful. Each failed transformation makes the next one harder, turning your caterpillars more cynical and more determined to cling to their leaves.

The Secret Most Change Experts Miss

Butterflies don’t convince caterpillars to transform by showing off their wings. They create conditions where transformation feels possible, necessary, and safe. Your job isn’t to sell the end state – it’s to help others see their own potential for change.

Here’s how:

Start With the Hungriest Caterpillars

Find those who feel the limitations of their current state most acutely. They’re not satisfied with their current leaf, and they’re curious about what lies beyond. These early adopters become your first chrysalis cohort.

Make it About Their Problems, Not Your Vision

Instead of talking about transformation, focus on specific pain points. “Wouldn’t it be easier to reach that juicy leaf if you could fly?” is more compelling than “Flying represents a paradigm shift in leaf acquisition strategy.”

Build a Network of Proof

Every successful mini-transformation creates evidence that change is possible. When one caterpillar successfully navigates their chrysalis phase, others pay attention. Let your transformed allies tell their stories.

Set Realistic Expectations

Metamorphosis takes time and isn’t always pretty. Be honest about the goo phase – that messy middle where things fall apart before they come together. This builds trust and prepares people for the real journey, not the sanitized version.

Where to Start

Identify your first chrysalis cohort – the people already feeling the limits of their current state
Focus on solving immediate problems that showcase the benefits of change
Document and share small victories, letting others tell their transformation stories
Create realistic timelines that acknowledge both quick wins and longer-term metamorphosis

What’s your experience? Have you successfully guided a transformation without relying on buzzwords and fancy presentations? Drop your stories in the comments.

After all, we’re all just caterpillars and butterflies helping each other find our wings.

Image credit: misterinnovation.com

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Six Keys to Effective Teamwork

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Six Keys to Effective Teamwork

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Teamwork is the secret that makes common people achieve uncommon results. However, effective teamwork doesn’t just happen; it requires careful planning and implementation. This article provides six keys to effective teamwork that will help you build a high-performing team. These keys are not just theoretical concepts, but practical strategies that have been proven to work in real-world settings. They are designed to address the common challenges that teams face, such as lack of clarity, poor communication, personality clashes, fear of taking risks, lack of diversity, and lack of motivation. By addressing these issues, you can create a team that is not only effective but also enjoyable to be a part of.

1. Set Clear Goals

Setting clear goals is the first step towards effective teamwork. Goals provide direction and purpose, and they help team members understand what they are working towards. It’s important to set goals at both the team and individual levels. Team goals help to align everyone’s efforts, while individual goals help each team member understand their role and contribution to the team.

Setting clear milestones is also crucial. Milestones are like signposts on the road to success. They help you track progress, identify issues, and celebrate achievements. So, don’t just set goals, but also define clear milestones to guide your team’s journey.

2. Communicate Activity

Communication is the lifeblood of any team. Effective teamwork requires regular communication that keeps everyone on the same page and fosters a sense of camaraderie. One way to facilitate communication is through daily huddles or standups. These meetings provide a platform for team members to share their completed tasks, upcoming focus, and potential obstacles.

Regular check-ins also enhance collaboration and teamwork. They allow team members to share their progress, ask for help, and offer support to others. So, make communication a priority in your team, and watch as it transforms your team’s dynamics and performance.

3. Understand Differences

Every team is a melting pot of different personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and behaviors. Understanding these differences is key to effective teamwork. By recognizing and utilizing individual strengths and weaknesses, you can create a team that is greater than the sum of its parts.

A “manual of me” can be a useful tool in this regard. This is a document where each team member shares their preferences, strengths, weaknesses, and support needs. It helps team members understand each other better and work together more effectively.

4. Create Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is a state where team members feel comfortable taking risks, speaking up, and sharing failures. It’s a culture where people feel safe to be themselves and express their thoughts and ideas. Creating such a culture requires encouraging a safe environment for interpersonal risks and disagreements, embracing failures as learning opportunities, and modeling vulnerability and trust as a leader.

Remember, a team that fears making mistakes will never innovate. So, foster a culture of psychological safety, and watch as your team becomes a hotbed of creativity and innovation.

5. Disagree Respectfully

Disagreements are inevitable in any team. However, it’s how you handle these disagreements that determines the success of your team. Encourage your team members to disagree respectfully and value diverse ideas and opinions. This not only prevents conflicts but also leads to better decisions and solutions.

Active listening and asking questions instead of making statements can be a powerful tool in this regard. It helps to explore the assumptions behind differing ideas and promotes understanding and respect. So, don’t fear disagreements, but use them as an opportunity to learn and grow.

6. Celebrate Small Wins

Finally, don’t forget to celebrate small wins and milestones. Celebrations not only boost morale but also foster a sense of achievement and appreciation. Regularly share and celebrate individual and team wins, recognize contributions, and create a culture of appreciation and motivation.

Remember, a team that feels appreciated will always do more than what is expected. So, make it a habit to celebrate small wins, and watch as your team’s motivation and performance soar.

Effective teamwork is not a destination, but a journey. It requires continuous effort, commitment, and learning. However, with these six tips, you can make this journey smoother and more enjoyable. So, start implementing these tips today, and watch as your team transforms into a high-performing, cohesive unit that is capable of doing their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on December 4, 2023

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Turning Bold Ideas into Tangible Results

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Exclusive Interview with Robyn Bolton

Innovation doesn’t happen without the right kind of leadership, it’s not all about the lightbulb moment or the idea that results. Innovation begins with an insight and it is effective leadership that helps pay off my definition of innovation:

“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.” — Braden Kelley

It is no easy task to identify an insight worth investing in or to organize and lead a team to successfully pick the right idea out of a sea of possibilities, to develop it, to understand its potential advantages versus the alternatives it must displace, and to align the organization in the ways necessary to overcome any idea’s fatal flaw and shepherd it to successful launch and possibly even market development if the market for the solution does not already exist.

Innovation of course requires leadership, but do the same leadership principles apply to successfully leading innovation?

Today we will explore this question, along with many others surrounding culture, obstacles, process, strategy, and other aspects of innovation success with our special guest.

Unlocking Innovation for Leaders

I had the opportunity recently to interview Robyn Bolton, who works with senior executives at medium and large companies who are committed to using innovation to confidently and consistently drive revenue growth. She works with companies in various industries, including industrial goods, healthcare, consumer goods, and education under her consulting firm MileZero. She is also a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in the Master of Design Innovation program. Prior to founding MileZero, Robyn served as a Partner at Innosight, the innovation and growth strategy consulting firm co-founded by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, worked as a consultant and project leader for The Boston Consulting Group in both Boston and Copenhagen Denmark, and earned her MBA at Harvard Business School.

Below is the text of my interview with Robyn and a preview of the kinds of insights you’ll find in Unlocking Innovation: A Leader’s Guide for Turning Bold Ideas Into Tangible Results presented in a Q&A format:

1. Why do so many companies struggle to innovate?

Companies struggle because they think innovation is an idea problem. It’s not. It’s a leadership problem. What I mean by that is executives who excel at running the core business are often asked to innovate (create new things) while they operate (run the existing business). Naturally, these executives rely on the very instincts and behaviors that made them successful – making quick decisions based on data and experience, striving to rapidly eliminate risk, and repeatedly and consistently delivering results. The problem is that these behaviors doom innovation efforts. They demand detailed financial forecasts when no data exists, expect quick returns on long-term investments, and try to eliminate risk from an inherently uncertain process. Success requires leaders who recognize that innovation is the opposite of operations and are willing to do the opposite of what made them successful operators.

2. Why is it so hard for innovation labs to last more than a couple of years?

Innovation labs struggle because organizations treat them like startups but expect them to operate and produce results like the core business. Executives launch labs with promises of freedom and flexibility but quickly start demanding predictable results and quick returns. By the start of the second year, executives are anxious for tangible financial results, especially as economic pressures mount, core business results slip, or a new executive arrives questioning innovation investments. Without a plan to demonstrate measurable progress in Year 2, deliver tangible results in Year 3, and a leader willing to advocate for innovation and the organizational clout to stave off skeptics, labs are easy targets for cost-cutting.

3. What does it take to build a solid foundation for innovation?

A solid innovation foundation requires a holistic approach, what I call the ABCs: Architecture, Behavior, and Culture. Architecture includes the strategies, structures, and processes that guide how work gets done. Behavior – specifically leadership behavior – turns words into actions and demonstrates what the organization truly values and believes about innovation. Culture establishes, expands, and sustains an environment where creativity and experimentation can thrive. But behavior is the most critical element because without leaders modeling the right behaviors, the best architectures fail and cultures crumble.

4. What is it that makes innovation almost the opposite of operations?

Operations exist in what Rita McGrath describes as a high-knowledge, low-assumption environment where leaders can predict outcomes based on past experience. Innovation occurs in low-knowledge, high-assumption environments where no one knows what will work, and past experiences are more likely to be misleading than helpful. Operational excellence comes from eliminating variation and risk. Innovation requires embracing uncertainty and learning from failure. The mindsets and behaviors that make someone a great operator – decisiveness, risk elimination, decisions based on quantitative historical data – hinder innovation success.

5. What would your advice be to an innovation professional on how to prevent innovation zombie projects from emerging?

Zombies exist because managers are reluctant to kill projects because that may mean that they were wrong. Instead, they put the projects on pause or delay work until the next round of funding. The key to preventing zombie projects is recognizing and communicating that the decision to start wasn’t wrong. It was based on the information available at the time. New information is now available, resulting in a different understanding of the situation and, therefore, a different decision. This learning process becomes infinitely easier when you have a (relatively) objective and (completely) transparent decision-making tool outlining clear criteria for what makes an innovation attractive and worth pursuing – what I call an “innovation playground.” This framework defines what’s “in play” (attractive), “in bounds” (worth discussing), and “out of bounds” (not worth pursuing) across multiple dimensions like strategic fit, customer benefit, and required capabilities. Of course, this tool is only as useful as the people who use it, so leaders need the courage to make and stick to hard decisions about stopping projects that don’t meet the criteria.

6. Which is more important for innovation success? Leadership, strategy or culture?

Leadership behavior is the foundation for everything else. I’ve worked with companies that have brilliant strategies or are famous for their innovation cultures but are unable to get results from their innovation investments because their leaders don’t demonstrate the right behaviors – embracing uncertainty, making decisions with incomplete information, treating failure as learning. That’s why the “B” in the ABCs of Innovation (Behavior) comes first. Executives must recognize that their instincts and behaviors need to change before they can become successful innovation leaders.

7. Is there any such thing as a perfect innovation process? If not, what are the key components for any innovation process?

There is no perfect process. Innovation isn’t baking, where following a precise recipe guarantees success. However, there are essential components that every innovation process needs: diagnosing the real problem to solve, designing multiple potential solutions, developing and testing assumptions, de-risking through experimentation, and delivering value. The order of these steps matters, but everything else – the specific activities, tools, metrics, and timelines – can and should be adapted to your organization’s needs and culture.

8. What makes one innovation culture more successful than another?

Successful innovation cultures share three characteristics: First, they’re authentic to the organization rather than copied from another company. Second, they recognize that operators and innovators are equally important and valuable to the organization and work hard to strike the right balance between protecting innovation teams and connecting them to the core business. Third, and most importantly, they’re actively demonstrated through leadership behaviors, not just written on posters or mentioned in town halls.

9. Innovation labs/teams/groups often have a different culture from the rest of the organization. Is it possible to spread the culture out of the lab and infect the rest of the organization? How?

Yes, but it requires patience and intentionality. Start by sharing stories that make innovation relatable and relevant to everyone. If you can’t answer “What’s In It for Me” for each person in the organization, you can’t expect them to change their focus or behavior. When people express interest, invite them into your team’s traditions and events. Don’t force participation – remember that not everyone wants to or needs to be an innovator. Most importantly, teach and support those who are interested in innovation while celebrating the operators who keep the core business running. Culture spreads through pull, not push.

10. One of the most dangerous moments for any promising innovation project is the transfer of out of the lab and into an operational unit of the main organization to scale it. How can organizations do better at scaling up innovation experiments into equal members of the organization’s solution catalog?

The valley of death is real! The key to crossing it is to view it as a relay rather than just chucking something across the chasm. Historically, executives have been afraid of distracting core business teams with uncertain projects so they wait until launch to involve the people who will ultimately own the innovation. While this still occurs, I’m starting to see companies over-correct and bring operators into the process at the very start, including them in activities and decisions when the team is still operating in a highly ambiguous and uncertain space. Success requires meeting in the middle. When innovation teams know more than they don’t know, that’s when collaboration between innovation and operational teams starts. From that point through launch, innovators and operators should work hand-in-hand to understand and navigate uncertainty while adapting their plans, processes and metrics to ensure market success without losing the critical insights that sparked the innovation. Most importantly, Senior leaders must stay engaged, understanding and supporting the additional time and resources needed during the transition period.

11. Anything you wish I’d asked?

I wish you’d asked, “What does innovation leadership success really look like?” Because while revenue and survival rates are measures of success, I believe that the real measure is the lives you change. Given that only 0.002% of incubated ideas generate meaningful revenue, and 90% of innovation labs shut down within three years, there’s no guarantee that your work will become a wild, world-changing success. That doesn’t mean that you failed. For me and so many of the successful leaders with whom I’ve worked, success is also giving someone the courage to challenge the status quo because they see you doing it. It’s inspiring someone to take risks when you break the rules thoughtfully and responsibly. If you’ve helped even one person discover their potential as an innovator or creative problem-solver, you’ve succeeded.

Conclusion

Thank you for the great conversation Robyn!

I hope everyone has enjoyed this peek into the mind of the woman behind the insightful new title Unlocking Innovation: A Leader’s Guide for Turning Bold Ideas Into Tangible Results!

Image credits: MileZero (Robyn Bolton)

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Leading Through Complexity and Uncertainty

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Leading Through Complexity and Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Leaders need to make decisions and we rarely get to choose the context. Most often, we need to take action without all the facts, in a rapidly changing environment and a compressed time frame. We need to do so with the knowledge that if we get it wrong, we will bear the blame and no one else. It will be our mess to clean up.

That’s a hard bridge to cross and many, if not most, are never quite able to get there. I think that’s why we admire great leaders so much, because they have the courage to take responsibility on their backs and be accountable, to inspire confidence even in an atmosphere of confusion and to point the way forward, even if they aren’t sure it’s the right direction.

The truth is that you can never really be certain until you take that step forward. The simple and inescapable truth is that to accomplish anything significant you need to travel on an uncertain journey. It is tautologically true that the well-trod path will take us nowhere new. We can never fully control uncertainty, but we can learn to lead through it.

How Things Get So Complicated And Uncertain

Generally, we prefer to operate with some degree of predictability, which is why we build structure into daily life. On a personal level, we create habits and routines to give us a sense of grounding. On a societal level, we create laws and norms, so that we know what to expect from our interactions with each other.

Yet in Overcomplicated, mathematician Sam Arbesman gives two reasons why uncertainty is, to a great extent, unavoidable. The first is accretion. We build systems, like the Internet or the laws set down in the US Constitution, to perform a limited number of tasks. Yet to scale those systems, we need to build on top of them to expand their initial capabilities. As systems become larger, they get more complex and uncertain.

The second force is interaction. We may love the simplicity of an iPhone, but don’t want to be restricted to its capabilities alone. So we increase its functionality by connecting it to millions of apps. Those apps, in turn, connect to each other as well as to other systems. Every connection increases complexity and makes things harder to predict.

These two forces lead to what Benoit Mandelbrot called Noah effects and Joseph effects. Joseph effects, as in the biblical story, support long periods of continuity. Noah effects, on the other hand, are like a big storm creating a massive flood of discontinuity, washing away the previous order. Uncertainty, for better or worse, will always be somewhat unavoidable.

The Problem With Simplicity

The most straightforward solution to complexity and uncertainty is to boil things down and make them more simple. Politicians are fond of highlighting the thousands of pages pieces of legislation contain, because complexity is widely seen as a fatal flaw. “If it was thought through clearly, why couldn’t it have been devised more simply?” is the implication.

Yet while we yearn for simple rules, those rules often lead us astray. As Ludwig Wittgenstein explained in his rule following paradox, “no course of action could be determined by a rule because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” Simple rules tend to be necessarily vague, which limits their usefulness.

Something similar happens when we try to tame complexity by summarizing it through identifying patterns. Random points of data, if there are enough of them, will always generate patterns as well, so we can never be quite sure if we are revealing an underlying truth or just creating a convincing illusion. To discern between the two is, unfortunately, complex.

In Why Information Grows, MIT’s Cesar Hidalgo explains that it is through emergent complexity that we create value. To understand what he means, let’s take another look at an iPhone. Its simple design belies incredible complexity, not only in the technology it contains, but in what it connects to, a complex ecosystem of apps, servers and data.

Steve Jobs didn’t intend to create an App Store, because he wanted to keep the iPhone simple. However, eventually he was convinced that by limiting complexity he was curtailing the potential value of his creation and, ultimately, he relented. It is through managing complexity, not avoiding it, that we can most effectively impact the world.

Narrowing Scope And Limiting Variables

The Franciscan friar William of Occam is best remembered for Occam’s razor, which he didn’t exactly invent, but did much to popularize. The technique, which is often mischaracterized as “the simplest solution is often the best,” actually had a lot more to do with variables and assumptions, which he advises to keep to a minimum.

It’s an interesting distinction that makes a big difference. William wasn’t advising us to ignore complexity, but to avoid increasing it by injecting things that don’t need to be there. We can acknowledge the messiness of the world and still tidy up our little corner of it, by narrowing our scope and limiting the variables we deal with.

Steve Blank advises startups to develop minimum viable products to test assumptions, rather than investing resources into a full-featured prototype. The idea is by narrowing scope you can get a better idea of the marketplace and then increase complexity from there. In our work helping organizations drive transformation, we advise our clients to start out with a keystone change, rather than rolling out everything all at once.

Whatever strategy you use, the key, as William of Occam pointed out long ago, is to limit variables where you can, while still recognizing that the universe is far more complex than our scaled down model of it. Or, as the statistician George Box put it, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Innovation Is Exploration

The truth is that uncertainty is only a problem if you try to control it. The framers of the US Constitution designed it to be a guide, not a blueprint. That’s been the key to its success. They recognized it would have to evolve and grow over time and designed a system of checks and balances to curb the human potential for malice.

We need to start thinking less like engineers, designing just the right combination of levers and pulleys to account for every eventuality, and more like gardeners, seeding and nurturing ecosystems, pruning as we go. Gardeners don’t need to know the exact outcome of everything they plant, but can seek to improve the harvest each season.

In a world driven by networks and ecosystems, we can no longer treat strategy as if it were a game of chess, planning out each move with near perfect precision and foresight. The world moves far too fast for that. By the time we’ve put the final touches on the master plan, the assumptions upon which it was made are often no longer true.

Rather, we must constantly explore, widening and deepening connections to ecosystems of talent, technology and information. That’s how we uncover new paths that are often unseen from our usual perch and leverage complexity to our advantage. Breakthrough innovations arise out of unexpected encounters.

The next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. Today, competitive advantage is no longer the sum of all efficiencies, but the sum of all connections.

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

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Empathy is a Vital Tool for Stronger Teams

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Empathy is a Vital Tool for Stronger Teams

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

In the fast pace of today’s organizations, it’s easy for teams to focus solely on tasks, deadlines, and results. However, truly high-performance teams – and their leaders – understand that their strength lies not just in productivity but in the relationships they build.

Empathy plays a crucial role in this process, enabling teams to build trust, foster open communication, and maintain resilience, even in challenging times.

This is why empathy is not just a “soft skill” – it’s a powerful leadership tool that can elevate team dynamics to new levels. Whether you’re navigating tough decisions, managing conflicts, or trying to boost morale, applying empathy can enhance collaboration and performance.

This card is designed to guide you in bringing more empathy into your team’s dynamics.

As part of our Team Dynamics Cards, it belongs to a comprehensive suite of leadership growth and team dynamics tools aiming to boost team collaboration, performance, and communication. We develop such tools and approaches to ignite team discussions, inspire self-reflection and guide actionable steps.

Check it out below and get in touch if you would like some guidance on how to work with this for your team(s).

Today’s Card: Empathy in Team Dynamics

Stefan Lindegaard Empathy Quote Category: Culture & Mindset

We delve into the significant role of empathy in fostering positive team dynamics. Empathy, the ability to understand and share others’ feelings, can foster a team environment characterized by collaboration, understanding, and productivity. It’s a crucial ingredient for managing individual roles, decision-making, performance under pressure, and the creation of shared values and goals.

Principles:

Promoting Understanding and Respect: Foster an environment where team members understand and respect each other’s perspectives and recognize each member’s unique contributions.
Empathy in Conflict Resolution: Use empathy to address and resolve conflicts, helping teams navigate disagreements in a respectful, satisfactory manner.
Fostering Psychological Safety through Empathy: Build a psychologically safe space where individuals comfortably express thoughts and emotions, assured of empathetic understanding.

Reflection Questions (10 mins):

Reflect on a situation where empathy within your team led to a significant positive outcome. What was the situation, and how did empathy play a role?
How would you rate the level of empathy within your current team? What impact does it have on your team’s dynamics?

Action Questions (30 mins):

Identify specific ways your team can foster understanding, respect, and empathy in day-to-day interactions. How can these actions lead to improved team dynamics?
Consider a recent or upcoming challenge your team is facing. How can empathy play a role in the decision-making process, conflict resolution, and maintaining morale under pressure?

Get in touch if you and your team would like to know more about our Team Dynamics Cards and how we can tailor this to your needs and interests. You can read more about our learning hub and community on https://www.stefanlindegaard.com

Image Credits: Pexels

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It is Okay to Feel Stuck

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It is Okay to Feel Stuck

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you’re stuck, it’s not because you don’t have good ideas. And it’s not because you’re not smart. You’re stuck because you’re trying to do something difficult. You’re stuck because you’re trying to triangulate on something that’s not quite fully formed. Simply put, you’re stuck because it’s not yet time to be unstuck.

Anyone can avoid being stuck by doing what was done last time. But that’s not unsticking yourself, that’s copping out. That’s giving in to something lesser. That’s dumbing yourself down. That’s letting yourself off the hook. That’s not believing in yourself. That’s not doing what you were born to do. That’s not unsticking, that’s avoiding the discomfort of being stuck.

Being stuck – not knowing what to do or what to write – is not a bad thing. Sure, it feels bad, but it’s a sign you’re trekking in uncharted territory. It may be a new design space or it may be new behavioral space, but make no mistake – you’re swimming in a new soup. If you’ve already mastered tomato soup, you won’t feel stuck until you jump into a pool filled with chicken noodle. And when you do, don’t beat yourself up because your lungs are half-filled with noodles. Instead, simply recognize that chicken soup is different than tomato. Pat yourself on the back for jumping in without a life preserver. And even as you tread water, congratulate yourself for not drowning.

Unsticking takes time and you can’t rush it. But that’s where most fail – they climb out of the soup too soon. The soup doesn’t feel good because it’s too hot, too salty, or too noodly, so they get out. They can’t stand the discomfort so they get out before the bodies can acclimate and figure out how to swim in a new way. The best way to avoid getting stuck is to stay out of the soup and the next best way is to get out too early. But it’s not best to avoid being stuck.

Life’s too short to avoid being stuck. Sure, you may prevent some discomfort, but you also prevent growth and learning. Do you want to get to your deathbed and realize you limited your personal growth because you were afraid to feel the discomfort of being stuck? Imagine getting to the end of your life and all you can think of is the see of things you didn’t experience because you were unwilling to feel stuck.

Stuck is not bad, it just feels bad. Instead of seeing the discomfort as discomfort, can you learn to see it as the precursor to growth? Can you learn to see the discomfort as an indicator of immanent learning? Can you learn to see it as the tell-tale sign of your quest for knowledge and understanding?

If you’re not yet ready to feel stuck, I get that. But to get yourself ready, keep your eye out for people around you who have dared to get stuck. Learn to recognize what it looks like. And when you do find someone who is stuck, tell them they are doing a brave thing. Tell them that it’s supposed to feel uncomfortable. Tell them that no one has ever died from the discomfort of being stuck. And tell them that staying with the discomfort is the best way to get unstuck. And thank them for demonstrating the right behavior.

Image credits: Unsplash

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