Category Archives: Leadership

Compelling Narratives

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Compelling Narratives

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

As human beings we cling to two misconceptions of life. The first is that life is fragile. That is not quite right. Living things are certainly fragile — we are all subject to injury and will eventually die. Even whole species can go extinct. But life itself is anything but fragile. It originated some 3.5 billion years ago and has subsequently taken over the entire planet — land, water, sky, even deep within the earth — and shows no signs of loosening its grip. Life per se, in other words, may be the most powerful force we can experience.

Our second misconception is that, when it comes to our own lives, we are the ones in charge. There is some truth in this, but there is also truth in the notion that life is in charge of us. That is, life per se has an agenda that is independent of us, an agenda in which we are inexorably embedded, one that is grounded in the two universal functions that have enabled it to withstand the test of time — metabolism and reproduction.

We know a lot about these two functions from our study of the microbiology of the cell. Both entail a mindboggling number of chemical reactions chained together by a myriad of cascading pathways that are in turn governed by a byzantine array of positive and negative feedback loops. What is truly astounding is that, working in tandem, they have, from their very inception, been both dynamic — ever-changing—and persistent — continuity-maintaining. Life per se, in other words, is characterized by sustained dynamic equilibrium.

To be sure, life has evolved enormously since its cellular inception. After about 2 billion years of single-celled organisms only, cells began to collaborate with one another, leading to the emergence of additional layers of complexity. Over the 1.5 billion years since, they have generated all the variety of living things we see today, as well as a huge variety of species that have passed out of existence. But amidst all that change, over that entire immensity of time, at the level of the cell itself, this absurdly complex concatenation of cascading processes has never ever stopped. Based on this history, I think we must conclude that living things are compelled to live, and that includes us.

Yes, we can end our lives through suicidal interventions, but we cannot will our hearts to stop beating or our lungs to stop breathing. We can’t stop sleeping, and we can’t stop waking up. In short, we are embedded in something that is much larger and more powerful than our conscious selves, and we need to appreciate how this shapes our lived experience.

It turns out there is a whole tradition in philosophy called phenomenology that takes this premise as its starting point. It is organized around the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, but not in a way I am happy with. Like most philosophers, Husserl and Heidegger anchor their work in analytics and then search for narratives to illustrate their concepts. This runs counter to the fundamental premise of The Infinite Staircase, namely that the stairstep of Narrative precedes the stairstep of Analytics, both in evolutionary time and in order of priority when establishing meaning. That is, you need to get your narratives in focus first and then apply analytics to them, not the other way around.

The reason this is so important is that lived experience expresses itself in narratives, not analytics. Analytics abstract from narratives underlying principles which can be used to refine our strategy for living. This is an incredibly important function, one that underlies virtually all the amelioration of the human condition that we have accomplished over the past several centuries. But analytics cannot substitute for narratives. They cannot capture the immediacy of experience nor engage our sensibility with anything like the power of narratives. We are story-telling creatures, first and foremost. That’s how and where we develop our understanding of cause and effect.

Now, if we take the notion that we are compelled to live and we add it to the notion that narrative is our primary mode for processing lived experience, we can reasonably surmise that we are compelled to tell stories. What might that mean?

Well, for those of us in business, this is not a big surprise. We spend the bulk of our time engaged in storytelling and listening. What are you working on? How is it going? What’s the plan? How did the call go? Did you find that bug? What did Harry want? You get the idea. Stories are our lived experience, even more so if we are working remotely.

More formal occasions call for more formal storytelling, be that a proposal, a report, an analysis, an earnings call, or an annual plan. The point is, in all those situations, we are compelled to tell a story. Now, to be sure, our story may well be challenged–that is the function of analytics—but it is not OK not to tell one. The reason is that all our future actions will ultimately be grounded in a story that we agree to accept. Even the most routine bureaucratic approval cycles involve storytelling at some point in the process. We cannot act without a storyline to guide us. Thus, we are compelled to tell stories.

This is even more the case in the realm of politics. Today we are awash in political storytelling, much of which is being labeled misinformation. But the term is misleading. It implies that the teller has got their facts wrong. But that is not what is happening. Instead, they are telling a story that they believe will generate the political response they are seeking, be that to get themselves elected, or to prevent someone else from being elected, or to get legislation passed, or to block legislation from being passed. Our job as responsible citizens is to apply our analytics to their narratives to detect the ones we endorse and those we repudiate.

In both business and politics, pressure-testing the narratives we are presented with requires both judgment and experience. We normally do not have access to an irrefutable body of facts. Instead, we have to assess the character of the storyteller based on how they come across to us, how self-serving their story might be, how plausible it is, and the like, and we often draw on the opinions of professional commentators whom we have found to be trustworthy. There is no guarantee we are going to get things right, but the more due diligence we do, the more likely we will get close.

But what about all the lies? What about all the blatant liars that are just getting away with it? Why aren’t they being held to account? Why do their supporters believe them? The answer, in my view, is because they want to. People are not stupid. They know when other people are lying. The reason they accede to such lies and bully each other into accepting them is because the story being told validates their lived experience. You or I might repudiate the narrative, but we cannot repudiate their lived experience. That is theirs, not ours.

What we can do is share lived experiences with each other with the goal of finding common values. This requires a level of civility that we see openly mocked and that mockery is perhaps the most dangerous current in our present circumstances. It is not the narratives that are the problem. It is the sneering. We can work our way out of the toughest situations if we respect each other’s perspectives. We cannot do so when we demean or demonize our opponents. Stories and storytelling are the currency of our being. We cannot let it be debased.

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

— Image credit: 1 of 1,500+ FREE quotes available at http://misterinnovation.com

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How Human-Centered Leadership Can Reimagine the Aerospace Industry

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Move the Needle

How Human-Centered Leadership Can Reimagine the Aerospace Industry

GUEST POST from Kellee M. Franklin, PhD.

The aerospace industry is on a long flight, but subtle drifts in culture and practice have quietly moved it off its intended course. To get back on track, we don’t need a radical turn. We need to move the needle — one small, intentional correction at a time. This is the power of the 1-in-60 rule, a principle championed by former Thunderbird pilot Major Michelle Mace Curran: a onedegree error leads to being a mile off course after 60 miles. In the high-speed world of aerospace, those miles pass quickly, and the destination can be lost.

Reimagining this industry starts with recognizing that every decision, every interaction, is a chance to move the needle. A holistic educational campaign must be the first correction, teaching not just technical skills, but this very philosophy. It’s about empowering every team member to ask, “Is this choice moving us toward who we want to be?” When we let one “degree” slip — by skipping a quiet team member’s comment or bypassing a safety check because “it’s easier” — we compound a drift that, over time, takes us far from the vital human-centered power skills we need. In an era of increasing automation, skills like collaboration, critical thinking, empathy and ethical judgment are not soft — they are the critical systems that keep the mission on track. Yet, the industry remains focused on recruiting, hiring, and promoting for technical skills alone, placing it at risk of the pilot’s dreaded death spiral: a fatal, uncorrected descent caused by fixating on a single instrument while losing situational awareness.

This mindset shift is crucial for legacy employees — and necessary for an industry in need of refueling. Change can feel like a threat, but framing it as a series of small, needed adjustments to move the needle makes it manageable. It’s not about discarding experience, but about course-correcting outdated norms. Workshops and mentorship, inspired by experienced industry leaders like Curran and others, can offer profound insights. They can show how power skills — like maintaining broad situational awareness under pressure — enable teams to act decisively and create a culture that is far more dynamic, innovative, safe, and resilient. It requires leadership to invite challenge, conversation, and collaboration. In a traditionally hierarchical industry, these shifts can be difficult — but they are essential for real transformation.

How do I know human-centered leadership is not only needed but effective in the aerospace industry? Because I’ve had the good fortune of supporting leadership at the highest levels of the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, and within major corporate entities that design, develop, and secure aerospace technologies, where the stakes of every decision are immense. In those rooms, I’ve seen that while technical expertise is the foundation, the true innovation — and the true
innovators — are found among the airmen, guardians, and on the front lines. The real gift of leadership isn’t just knowing the technology; it’s knowing the people. It’s understanding their challenges, their potential, and having the wisdom to guide them through the full terrain of complexity. That human-centered insight is what transforms good missions into great ones. This is the essence of leadership that moves the needle — insight no instrument panel can ever provide.

My conviction is further reinforced by my years teaching global scholars at Hult International Business School, where I witnessed firsthand how creativity and collaborative problem-solving, critical thinking and sound judgment, and emotional intelligence and empathy are the true catalysts for success in a complex world. This is not just theory. It’s a strategic imperative. Consider EY, one of the Big Four professional services firms and an educational partner of Hult, which is putting $100 million behind human skills. They are actively recognizing and rewarding the value of uniquely human capabilities alongside technical adoption, proving that the most forward-thinking organizations understand that people-potential is the ultimate competitive advantage. This growing emphasis on human skills in the Age of AI is not a new trend for me; it’s the core of a conscious leadership integrative model I designed in 2018, built on the principle that sustainable innovation flows from empowered people, not just advanced systems.

This urgency is underscored by the 2026 Oliver Wyman “Lift Off Leadership” survey in partnership with the International Aerospace Women’s Association (IAWA), which found that 78% of aerospace leaders identify a critical gap in human-centered skills, and 65% believe that without a cultural shift, their organizations will struggle to innovate at the pace required for the next decade. The survey provides a clear roadmap: organizations must embed active sponsorship as a core leadership competency and address the everyday workplace cultures driving female attrition; leaders must move beyond passive mentoring to actively advocate for women in highlevel decision-making rooms; and the industry as a whole must adopt strict gender-neutral recruitment standards and properly fund proven leadership initiatives. Industry surveys are always insightful, but without proper and timely executive execution of strategic recommendations, these exercises continue to place emerging talent and the potential of aerospace in a perpetual holding pattern. For real “lift off”, employees require advocacy, intention, and support — because no mission ever launched on insight alone. These small, but critical, system-wide shifts demand human-centered leadership — not just technical expertise — to guide the way.

Inviting a new wave of dreamers is another powerful way to move the needle. We can start by promoting STEM/STEAM programs early, allowing current employees to work hand-in-hand with the future of the industry. By engaging with local colleges and universities in hack-a-thons and other idea-generating initiatives, we not only ignite the next generation’s passion but also tap into a wellspring of raw, unfiltered innovation. In our workspaces, actively dismantling exclusionary barriers and creating clear pathways — like targeted one-on-one and group coaching, upskill/reskill programs, and ongoing mentor/development initiatives — opens the cockpit to brighter skies and unseen horizons. We must also actively encourage employees to participate in professional development opportunities beyond our own organizations, empowering them to connect with and learn from peers across the industry, and return with fresh perspectives and renewed energy to elevate our teams. This is not just about fairness; it is about taking the field to elevated heights. Broader disciplines with a wider array of perspectives are the ultimate navigational tools, helping us spot drifts we might otherwise miss and chart a more enduring course.

The future of aerospace won’t be defined by a single, massive overhaul. It will be built on the collective commitment to make small, consistent adjustments. Leaders can begin today by:

  1. Hosting a “Drift Check” Workshop: Use the 1-in-60 rule to facilitate a team discussion on current cultural norms and co-creating a vision for the future.
  2. Launching a Reverse Mentorship Program: Pair senior leaders with junior employees, allowing diverse voices to be heard and fostering open, two-way learning.
  3. Implementing a “Power Skills” KPI: Include empathy, collaboration, innovation, and other power skills in performance reviews, publicly acknowledging team members who exemplify them.
  4. Celebrating “Course Corrections”: Transparently share small changes and their impact, making learning a core part of the culture.
  5. Building a Balanced Workforce: Sponsor a Dreamer’s Fellowship to fund underrepresented talent and actively recruit diverse disciplines. Intentionally blend technical expertise with human-centered innovators to create a more resilient and visionary team.

By embracing a 1-in-60 philosophy, we can recalibrate our heading, one degree at a time, and navigate toward a future that’s not just technologically advanced, but truly human-centered.

Image credits: Kellee M. Franklin

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What’s Your Learning Objective?

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What's Your Learning Objective?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Innovation is all about learning. And if the objective of innovation is learning, why not start with learning objectives?

Here’s a recipe for learning: define what you want to learn, figure how you want to learn, define what you’ll measure, work the learning plan, define what you learned and repeat.

With innovation, the learning is usually around what customers/users want, what new things (or processes) must be created to satisfy their needs and how to deliver the useful novelty to them. Seems pretty straightforward, until you realize the three elements interact vigorously. Customers’ wants change after you show them the new things you created. The constraints around how you can deliver the useful novelty (new product or service) limit the novelty you can create. And if the customers don’t like the novelty you can create, well, don’t bother delivering it because they won’t buy it.

And that’s why it’s almost impossible to develop a formal innovation process with a firm sequence of operations. Turns out, in reality the actual process looks more like a fur ball than a flow chart. With incomplete knowledge of the customer, you’ve got to define the target customer, knowing full-well you don’t have it right. And at the same time, and, again, with incomplete knowledge, you’ve got to assume you understand their problems and figure out how to solve them. And at the same time, you’ve got to understand the limitations of the commercialization engine and decide which parts can be reused and which parts must be blown up and replaced with something new. All three explore their domains like the proverbial drunken sailor, bumping into lampposts, tripping over curbs and stumbling over each other. And with each iteration, they become less drunk.

If you create an innovation process that defines all the if-then statements, it’s too complicated to be useful. And, because the IF-THENs are rearward-looking, they don’t apply the current project because every innovation project is different. (If it’s the same as last time, it’s not innovation.) And if you step up the ladder of abstraction and write the process at a high level, the process steps are vague, poorly-defined and less than useful. What’s a drunken sailor to do?

Define the learning objectives, define the learning plan, define what you’ll measure, execute the learning plan, define what you learned and repeat.

When the objective is learning, start with the learning objectives.

Image credits: Pexels

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

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

  1. Time to Rethink Pitch Fests and Business Plan Competitions — by Arlen Meyers
  2. What If You Could Prove the Government is Ripping Us Off? — by Braden Kelley
  3. The Surprising Innovation History of the Bicycle — by John Bessant
  4. Dead Actors Society — by Art Inteligencia
  5. Amazon Connect Combines Human Empathy with AI to Redefine Service — by Shep Hyken
  6. AI Will Create a More Human Future, Not a Less Human One — by Braden Kelley
  7. Managing Your Work Friends — by David Burkus
  8. Building the Business Case for a Customer Experience Audit — by Braden Kelley
  9. Customer Experience Audit vs. Customer Satisfaction Survey — by Braden Kelley
  10. Case Study – Innovating Around a Disruption — by Jason Hauer

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

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

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

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

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

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Never Trust a Guru

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Never Trust a Guru

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 2005 W. Chan Kim and Renée published Blue Ocean Strategy, which found that “blue ocean” launches, those in new categories without competition, far outperformed the shark-infested “red ocean” line extensions that are the norm in the corporate world. It was an immediate hit, selling over 3.5 million copies.

Bain consultants Chris Zook and James Allen’ published, Profit from the Core, around the same time. They found that firms that focused on their ”core” far outperformed those who strayed. For example, they warned that Amazon was putting itself from peril for expanding its business beyond books and predicted dire results.

Clearly, none of this makes sense. How can you both “focus on your core” and seek out “blue oceans?” It betrays logic that both strategies could outperform one another. Today, Amazon makes most of its money outside of books. Yes, new markets lack competitors, but they also lack customers. The truth is that most business research is surprisingly shoddy.

Cargo Cult Science

When Richard Feynman took the podium to give the commencement speech at CalTech in 1974, he told the strange story of cargo cults. In certain islands in the South Pacific, he explained, tribal societies had seen troops build airfields during World War and were impressed with the valuable cargo that arrived at the bases.

After the troops left, the island societies built their own airfields, complete with mock radios, aircraft and mimicked military drills in the hopes of attracting cargo themselves. It seems more than a little silly, and of course, no cargo ever came. Yet these tribal societies persisted in their strange behaviors.

Feynman’s point was that we can’t merely mimic behaviors and expect to get results. To illustrate what he meant, he told a story about going to a new-age resort where people were learning reflexology. A man was sitting in a hot tub rubbing a woman’s big toe and asking the instructor, “Is this the pituitary?” Unable to contain himself, the great physicist blurted out, “You’re a hell of a long way from the pituitary, man.”

What makes science real is not fancy sounding words or slick charts with numbers on them. Business gurus often boast of their “research” that consists of hundreds of case study interviews and large databases containing data on thousands of firms, but without the proper methods and controls, those things are meaningless.

The Problem With Case Studies

Organizations are often inscrutable and hard to research. That’s why the preferred mode of analysis is case studies in which insiders are interviewed and a particular situation is interpreted by investigators. These can be helpful, but they also have severe limitations.

First, with shareholders and customers to please, managers are rarely eager to talk about failures. So we usually only hear about successes. Those, of course, are important but also subject to survivorship bias. For example, if a risky strategy results in 1% of the firms being wildly successful and 99% going out of business, then we’ll tend to hear glowing accounts of that lucky 1% and we’ll miss the vast majority that flamed out.

Another issue with the case study method is that it is necessarily limited. When researchers did a case study on a company I used to run, to take just one example, they interviewed insiders (including me) and did their best to interpret what they heard and what they could glean from background information regarding the market.

While I don’t think anything was inaccurate, it wasn’t exactly the truth either. Only a handful of people were interviewed, almost all of them were concentrated in a single part of the business and none of them, besides me, were involved in making decisions. The issues presented in the case study simply weren’t the ones we were actually wrestling with.

The problem with case studies is that they offer little to no documentation. In more rigorous fields like, say, sociology or psychology, researchers are expected to share their data so that others can interpret it. Unfortunately, that’s rarely true in business research.

Working Around The Glitches In Our Brains’ Machinery

We tend to imagine that our minds are some sort of machines, recording what we see and hear, then storing those experiences away to be retrieved at a later time, but that’s not how our brains work at all. Humans have a need to build narratives. We like things to fit into neat patterns and fill in the gaps in our knowledge so that everything makes sense.

Psychologists often point to a halo effect, the tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another. For example, when someone is physically attractive, we tend to infer other good qualities and when a company is successful, we tend to think other good things about it.

The truth is that our thinking is riddled with subtle yet predictable biases. We are apt to be influenced not by the most rigorous information, but what we can most readily access. We make confounding errors that confuse correlation with causality and then look for information that confirms our judgments while discounting evidence to the contrary.

Unfortunately, so many of the popular management ideas today come from people who never actually operated a business, such as business school professors and consultants. These are often people who’ve never failed. They’ve been told that they’re smart all their lives and expect others to be impressed by their ideas, not to examine them thoroughly.

That’s why it’s so important to not to believe everything you think, there are simply too many ways to get things wrong and so few ways to get things right.

It’s More Important To Be Careful Than Smart

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

Over the years, however, I came to respect the Poles’ innate suspicion. The truth is that we are far too easily fooled and taken in by those prey on the glitches in our cognitive machinery. Often business gurus have fooled themselves. They believe they have special powers of insight and get taken in by the glitches we all have in our mental machinery.

We get taken in because we want their claims to be true. We’d like to think that there is a secret we’re missing, that there’s a black magic that we’re not privy to and, if we prove our worth and obtain access to a few simple truths, we’ll capture the success that eludes us. Things can seem simple in a PowerPoint deck, but the truth is that the world is a messy place.

That’s why we need to train ourselves to ask the tough questions. What are we not seeing? What data is missing? What are alternative interpretations for the evidence being presented? It’s more important to be careful than smart. We can only make decisions on higher or lower levels of confidence. In the real world, there are no “sure things.”

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

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How to Lead Cross-Functional Teams Without Cracking

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How to Lead Cross-Functional Teams Without Cracking

GUEST POST from David Burkus

You’ve just been asked to lead a new team. But here’s the catch: it’s not really your team. It’s a group pulled together from different departments – sales, marketing, product, maybe even someone from legal whose job seems to be vetoing everything. These aren’t people you hired. They don’t report to you. And they probably don’t report to each other either.

You’ve been handed what might be called a “project committee” or “task force,” but what you really have is a cross-functional team. And while cross-functional teams should be engines of innovation, agility, and organizational alignment, the truth is most of them don’t work very well.

But they can, if you lead them the right way.

The Promise and Problem of Cross-Functional Teams

In theory, cross-functional teams are supposed to break down silos, accelerate execution, and bring diverse perspectives to complex problems. And sometimes they do.

But more often than not, they stall out. One study found that 75% of cross-functional teams are actually dysfunctional—they miss deadlines, blow budgets, or fail to stay aligned with organizational priorities. And it’s not because the individuals aren’t talented. It’s because collaboration across departments requires a different kind of leadership. One that starts with structure, not just speed.

Too many team leaders, especially those new to cross-functional work, start with the work itself. They jump straight into assigning tasks, setting up meetings, and building timelines. That seems logical, it’s a project after all.

But if you don’t pause to clarify goals, define roles, and build new communication norms, your team will default back to the ways of working they know best—the ways of working from their own silos. And that means your team will function more like a loosely affiliated group than a truly collaborative unit.

Why Most Approaches Fail

Cross-functional dysfunction isn’t about poor communication, it’s about misaligned expectations. Everyone brings different priorities, pressures, and mental models into the room. The marketer thinks about brand. The engineer thinks about feasibility. The legal team thinks about risk. And no one is wrong.

But if you don’t create a shared understanding early, those different viewpoints don’t complement each other—they compete. Left unchecked, people stick to their departmental defaults, and the very diversity that was supposed to spark innovation becomes a source of friction.

How Cross-Functional Teams Win

To lead a cross-functional team effectively, you don’t just manage the project, you design the team.

Here’s how.

1. Clarify Goals and Roles

Before anyone touches a task list, you need to get the team aligned on two foundational questions: What are we trying to achieve? Who is doing what to get us there?

That may sound obvious. But in cross-functional teams, ambiguity reigns. Everyone assumes someone else is handling a task. Or worse, two people assume they’re both in charge.

Start by mapping out the scope of the project together. Identify major deliverables. Then ask the group: “Who here feels best equipped to own this?” Let people step forward. If there’s debate, facilitate it. If someone volunteers for a stretch assignment, support them, perhaps by pairing them with a more experienced teammate.

This approach does more than assign work. It sends a message: this is a team, not a collection of departments. And you’re here not just to execute—but to develop.

2. Set Communication Norms

Every department has its own way of working. Some teams live in Slack. Others still rely on email. Some expect immediate responses. Others have a “48-hour rule.” If you don’t align early, miscommunication is inevitable.

At your kickoff meeting, have the team co-create its communication norms. Ask questions like:

  • How will we keep each other updated on progress?
  • What tools should we use, and for what?
  • How do we request help?
  • How often should we meet?
  • How will we make decisions?
  • How will we give and receive feedback?

Document the answers. Make them visible and accessible. Then refer back to them, especially when things get bumpy.

These shared norms help your team navigate differences in communication style and prevent misunderstandings from becoming major roadblocks.

3. Build Empathy Through Common Understanding

Communication norms help people speak to each other. Empathy helps them listen with each other.

People on a cross-functional team aren’t just bringing different skills—they’re bringing different definitions of success. One team member might be evaluated on speed, another on accuracy, another on cost control. If you don’t understand the pressures your teammates are under, you’ll misunderstand their decisions—and maybe their intentions.

One powerful exercise: ask each team member to explain how their performance is measured back in their “home” department. What does success look like? What’s their boss expecting from them? What’s at stake?

You can even create simple “user manuals” for each team member that explain how they like to work, how they make decisions, and what stresses them out.

The more your team understands each other, the easier it becomes to collaborate, and to resolve conflicts when they arise.

4. Foster Psychological Safety

Here’s something most people miss: a lack of disagreement on a cross-functional team isn’t a sign of alignment. It’s a sign of silence.

In the early days of a new team, people tend to be polite. They nod along. They bite their tongues. They say things like, “That’s interesting,” when they really mean, “That will never work.”

But innovation doesn’t happen through politeness. It happens through candor. And candor requires psychological safety—the belief that you can speak up without fear of rejection or ridicule.

To build that safety, model vulnerability as a leader. Say things like, “What am I missing?” or “This is a rough idea—feel free to poke holes.” When people challenge you, thank them. When disagreements emerge, guide the group to evaluate ideas based on assumptions, not egos. Ask, “What assumptions are we each making?” rather than “Who’s right?”

Psychological safety isn’t about eliminating conflict. It’s about making conflict productive.

5. Celebrate Small Wins

Cross-functional projects often span months or even years. And when the deadline feels distant, motivation can wane, especially when team members are juggling other priorities.

That’s why milestones matter. Break the project into phases. Define what success looks like for each one. Then, when your team hits a milestone, celebrate it. A shout-out in a meeting. A thank-you email. A Slack emoji reaction.

Research shows that even small wins, when recognized, can boost morale and performance. Just make sure your recognition is authentic and specific. People know when you’re faking it.

Final Thought: It’s Never Too Late to Reset

Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, “Great… but I’m already halfway through leading a cross-functional team that’s barely functioning.”

Good news: it’s never too late to pause and reset. Call a meeting. Clarify goals. Align on roles. Set communication norms. Celebrate any progress you’ve made. Then start fresh from there.

Cross-functional teams can be challenging. But when they’re led well, they become more than the sum of their parts. They become engines of innovation and drivers of real change across your organization.

And you? You become the kind of leader who makes collaboration work, even when no one reports to you.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Do Your Innovation Words Match Your Actions?

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Do Your Innovation Words Match Your Actions?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Innovation isn’t a thing in itself. Companies need to meet their growth objectives and innovation is the word experts use to describe the practices and behaviors they think will maximize the likelihood of meeting those growth objectives. Innovation is a catchword phrase that has little to no meaning. Don’t ask about innovation, ask how to meet your business objectives. Don’t ask about best practices, ask how has your company been successful and how to build on that success. Don’t ask how the big companies have done it – you’re not them. And, the behaviors of the successful companies are the same behaviors of the unsuccessful companies. The business books suffer from selection bias. You can’t copy another company’s innovation approach. You’re not them. And your project is different and so is the context.

With innovation, the biggest waste of emotional energy is quest for (and arguments around) best practices. Because innovation is done in domains of high ambiguity, there can be no best practices. Your project has no similarity with your previous projects or the tightest case studies in the literature. There may be good practice or emergent practice, but there can be no best practice. When there is no uncertainty and no ambiguity, a project can use best practices. But, that’s not innovation. If best practices are a strong tenant of your innovation program, run away.

The front end of the innovation process is all about choosing projects. If you want to be more innovative, choose to work on different projects. It’s that simple. But, make no mistake, the principle may be simple the practice is not. Though there’s no acid test for innovation, here are three rules to get you started. (And if you pass these three tests, you’re on your way.)

  1. If you’ve done it before, it’s not innovation.
  2. If you know how it will turn out, it’s not innovation.
  3. If it doesn’t scare the hell out of you, it’s not innovation.

Once a project is selected, the next cataclysmic waste of time is the construction of a detailed project plan. With a well-defined project, a well-defined project plan is a reasonable request. But, for an innovation project with a high degree of ambiguity, a well-defined project plan is impossible. If your innovation leader demands a detailed project plan, it’s usually because they are used running to well-defined continuous improvement projects. If for your innovation projects you’re asked for a detailed project plan, run away.

With innovation projects, you can define step 1. And step 2? It depends. If step 1 works, modify step 2 based on the learning and try step 2. And if step 1 doesn’t work, reformulate step 1 and try again. Repeat this process until the project is complete. One step at a time until you’re done.

Innovation projects are unpredictable. If your innovation projects require hard completion dates, run away.

Innovation projects are all about learning and they are best defined and managed using Learning Objectives (LOs). Instead of step 1 and step 2, think LO1 and LO2. Though there’s little written about LOs, there’s not much to them. Here’s the taxonomy of a LO: We want to learn if [enter what you want to learn]. Innovation projects are nothing more than a series of interconnected LOs. LO2 may require the completion of LO1 or L1 and LO2 could be done in parallel, but that’s your call. Your project plan can be nothing more than a precedence diagram of the Learning Objectives. There’s no need for a detailed Gantt chart. If you’re asked for a detailed Gantt chart, you guessed it – run away.

The Learning Objective defines what you learn, how you want to learn, who will do the learning and when they want to do it. The best way to track LOs is with an Excel spreadsheet with one tab for each LO. For each LO tab, there’s a table that defines the actions, who will do them, what they’ll measure and when they plan to get the actions done. Since the tasks are tightly defined, it’s possible to define reasonable dates. But, since there can be a precedence to the LOs (LO2 depends on the successful completion of LO1), LO2 can be thought of a sequence of events that start when LO1 is completed. In that way, an innovation project can be defined with a single LO spreadsheet that defines the LOs, the tasks to achieve the LOs, who will do the tasks, how success will be determined and when the work will be done. If you want to learn how to do innovation, learn how to use Learning Objectives.

There are more element of innovation to discuss, for example how to define customer segments, how to identify the most important problems, how to create creative solutions, how to estimate financial value of a project and how to go to market. But, those are for another post.

Until then, why not choose a project that scares you, define a small set of Learning Objectives and get going?

Image credits: Pixabay

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Time to Finally Kill the Idea of Leaderless Organizations

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Time to Finally Kill the Idea of Leaderless Organizations

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

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 created a lot of buzz and helped bolster other flat models, such as Holacracy.

Yet 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 truth is that we need managers and trying to eliminate them is a waste of time.

Planning A Spontaneous Revolution

In the early 2000s, a series of color revolutions spread across Eastern Europe sweeping away the authoritarian remnants of post-communist governments in Serbia, the Georgian Republic and Ukraine. These would prove to other revolutionary waves such as the Arab Spring. Old-style hierarchies suddenly seemed out of date.

I experienced some of these events first-hand. I was living in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution and managing the leading news organization in the country. I also spent some time in the Georgian Republic and got to see many of the reforms take place. When Hamel’s article came out, I had already begun the research that would lead to my book Cascades and I found his ideas about flat organizations not only persuasive, but inspiring.

I shouldn’t have. Even at the time, it had become clear that the revolutions weren’t as successful and many of us had hoped. In Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych had already come to power and it would take another revolution to dislodge him. In other countries, such as Egypt, new authoritarians would soon take the place of those who had been overthrown.

Yet even more importantly, I would later get to know one of the chief architects of the color revolutions, my friend Srdja Popović, and would learn that the revolutions weren’t leaderless at all. In fact, much of what I had experienced as spontaneous and organic was actually very much planned, engineered and organized.

As I continued to research supposedly “leaderless” organizations this would be a recurring theme. Either their success was either not genuine or ephemeral, or that there was a less obvious, informal hierarchy at work.

The Truth About The Orpheus Orchestra

One of the most cited examples of successful leaderless organizations is the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in New York, which has been operating without a conductor since 1972. They not only regularly play at top venues like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, but have won multiple Grammy awards.

An orchestra concert is a highly coordinated event, with many different musicians needing to coordinate their efforts to play music according to a specific vision. If everyone applies their own interpretation, what should be a symphony would end up as a cacophony. So how does Orpheus manage to not only survive, but thrive?

The truth is that Orpheus is not really a purely leaderless organization. It would be more accurate to say that the members trade off leadership, with one member leading one particular collection and then a different member leading another. So while it is true that the Orchestra as a whole is leaderless, each concert is leaderful.

That’s quite a big difference. If you would believe that an entire orchestra could conduct itself, you might go and try to run your organization with no direction at all, which would be a disaster. However, if you would follow the direction of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, you would appoint a particular team member to run each project, which would be so utterly conventional that it wouldn’t even seem worth mentioning.

The Open Source Pecking Order

Another favorite that advocates of “leaderless” organizations like to point to are open-source software communities. Yet once again, when you take a closer look, these communities are not some free-for-all, with everybody chiming in and making changes at will. In fact, in successful communities take governance very seriously.

Some projects, like Android and WordPress, are tightly controlled by the companies that originated them, Google and Automattic, respectively. They manage the community fairly tightly, accepting patches, revisions and improvements as they see fit and providing a vision for where they think the technology should go.

Open source foundations, like Linux and Apache provide more intricate governance structures. They don’t have much in the way of formal leadership, but in practice each project has informal leaders who drive the direction of the technology. In fact, competition for clout within those communities can be very stiff.

There’s a reason why some of the world’s most valuable companies pay people well to contribute to open-source software communities and it’s not altruism. They want to shape how crucial technologies will develop to benefit their business. To do that, talented people need to spend time building the trust and reputation that will enable them to lead.

Let’s Not Fire All The Managers

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

There are several reasons that this is true. The first is that, while having a flatter structure leads to more innovation and creativity, you need good leadership and governance to execute well. As an industry matures and becomes more complex, more levels of hierarchy are needed to manage it effectively.

Another important factor to consider is that even without a formal hierarchy, leaders will tend to emerge. Which is why when you take a closer look at often cited examples of “leaderless organizations,” there is much more hierarchy that it would at first seem. Just because there isn’t an organization chart doesn’t mean there isn’t a pecking order.

We need to stop thinking in terms of how many levels of bureaucracy there are and start working to network our organizations. We don’t need to eliminate managers — or anyone else for that matter — but to widen and deepen connections within and without our enterprise. We need to lead and to do it more effectively.

The role of leadership in organizations has changed. It is no longer merely to plan and direct work, but to inspire meaning and empower belief. As I wrote in Cascades, the key to transformational change is small groups, loosely connected by united by a shared purpose. The job of leaders today is to help those groups connect and forge a common purpose.

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

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Unleashing Your Innovation Potential

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Unleashing Your Innovation Potential

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

It is not unusual, especially in the corporate world, to label someone who disrupts and challenges the status quo, or what others say, as argumentative and “oppositional”. According to Human Synergistics, the Oppositional Style, in their circumplex, when measured as a dominant leadership style, is summarized in their 360-degree Leadership Styles Inventory (LSI) by two items: “usually against things” and “opposes new ideas.” It labels the person, or leader as being aggressively defensive and causes them to disengage by avoiding engaging in any kind of conflict, dissent and disagreement. This inhibits and prevents them from unleashing their creative thinking and their innovation potential.

In my many years as a corporate trainer presenting high-performance cultures and transformational leadership programs, I learned to apply my imagination, curiosity and inquiry skills to be attentively present, listen deeply and ask generative questions. This helped me develop strategies to unleash a person’s innovation potential by encouraging and enabling thoughtful dissent and disagreement.  I learned to uncover and recognize a leader’s energy and positive intent behind many of the scary, argumentative, hostile, contrary, critical, and aggressive behaviors directed at me, especially in my years upfront as a female corporate trainer in many toxic organizational cultures.

I often found that they were compromised in some way by their personal and family needs and values, their assumptions and beliefs about themselves and their performance at work, poor physical and mental health, and/or a lack of emotional well-being. Any one of these factors made them self-protective, leading to either overt aggression toward others, passive avoidance of conflict, or an unconscious refusal to engage in thoughtful dissent and disagreement because they did not want to be perceived as hostile and argumentative.

All of these unconscious reactive responses inhibited them from unleashing their creative thinking and innovative potential. 

This blog explores the power of unleashing creative thinking and innovation potential through supporting people to thoughtfully dissent and disagree – by using conflict as a catalyst for better decision-making, problem-solving, and strengthened collaboration and innovation – not as a barrier.

Unconscious reactive responses

This manifests as a neurologically challenging reactive response, as people’s brains are wired to defend and protect them to ensure their survival. These defensive responses are composed of fight/flight/freeze/fawn reactions and arise when people face what their neurology (the limbic system) perceives as a threat to their security, safety, or survival.

These reactions stem from past experiences and traumas that are often stored in people’s somatic memories. They become neurologically wired and embedded in people’s habitual ways of being unless they are noticed, labelled, accepted, acknowledged and owned. Until there is a safe holding space for this to happen, it will be impossible to unleash their creative thinking and innovation potential.

Safe holding spaces

Once a safe holding space is established, an oppositional person can be carefully and empathetically challenged, disputed, deviated from, and redirected towards more self-regulated, resourceful, and emotionally healthy states and new approaches. This involves bravely engaging them in thoughtful dissent and disagreement, despite being encased in a toxic organizational culture. Its about building permission, safety and trust to encourage creative thinking that unleashes a persons innovation potential.

Fight-flight-freeze and fawn responses

The amygdala is designed to detect threats and trigger the fight-flight-freeze response to help people survive

  •  A fight response involves standing our ground when we feel threatened, driven by anger, fear, and anxiety.
  •  A flight response entails moving away from or avoiding a situation to reduce painful feelings.
  •  A freeze response involves shutting down, feeling numb, or experiencing paralysis to reduce painful feelings, resulting in immobility.
  • A fawn response involves appeasing and placating others or seeking approval while neglecting the need to feel safe.  

Role of smart conflict, thoughtful dissent and disagreement

This is particularly evident in political and organizational contexts, where people are suffering from change fatigue and overwork. As a result, they unconsciously disengage from their work, families, and daily lives through a flight-or-freeze response, driven by burnout, the pursuit of external validation (a fawn response), or frustration and anger (usually a fight response). A combination of any or all of these largely unconscious but fully present reactive responses creates toxic organizational cultures, in which leaders’ behaviors are either passively or aggressively defensive in their attempts to meet people’s core security, safety, and survival needs. Leaders avoid encouraging or engaging in thoughtful dissent and disagreement that mobilizes people’s creative and critical thinking and unleashes their innovation potential.

The constraints and challenges of the pandemic, coupled with threats to people’s stability and the desire for certainty, also led many people in organizations to fear that their needs for security, safety, and survival would not, and could not, be met. These fears unconsciously intensified people’s defensiveness and reactivity, leading to immobilization through passivity, helplessness, hopelessness, powerlessness, disengagement, and detachment. This indicates a lack of emotional intelligence, largely due to the absence of initial self-regulation and self-leadership strategies.  It is easier and sometimes safer to be a victim and blame others for any negative, pessimistic, or painful feelings of shame, guilt, and embarrassment, resulting from competing commitments, value violations, thought distortions, and emotional dissociation.

These emotionally overwhelming and cognitively overloading factors are also accepted inhibitors to unleashing a person’s innovative potential, especially when they are unable to engage in thoughtful dissent and disagreement under the influence of a toxic organizational culture.

Making the shift

To support people to effectively shift this way of being and safely unleash their creative thinking and innovation potential:

It is crucial to develop and apply the generative discovery skillset to welcome dissent and thoughtful disagreement:

  • Notice: by being aware and attentively present to what is happening to, and within the person, neurologically and physiologically, emotionally, cognitively and physically.
  • Disrupt: by being curious and safely asking open, explorative discovery questions, and by listening carefully to hear and notice what is really going on for them.
  • Dispute: by safely summarizing and challenging their assumptions, perceptions and perspectives, asking evocative and provocative questions that encourage contrary thinking, diversity of thought, differences and constructive disagreement.
  • Deviate: by safely summarizing and eliciting a mindset flip or an agility shift in the oppositional person, directing their creative energy towards constructive behaviors that deliver a positive outcome.

This enables people to redirect their emotional energy and move away from unresourceful internal thought patterns and distortions. It also encourages them to open their minds to thoughtful dissent and disagreement, allowing them to think differently and enter creative and innovative realms. 

This is impossible when toxic organizational cultures force people to hide behind conventional, rigid, and closed minds that won’t allow them to rock the boat and be, think and act differently by intentionally using conflict constructively by embracing dissent and thoughtful disagreement 

At the same time, it’s crucial to safely, empathically and compassionately evoke and provoke an opening of people’s hearts by purposefully and meaningfully aligning their needs and values, so that the change motivates them to change meaningfully and purposefully. This creates the safe holding space that allows them to let go of the need to be in control and be open-willed, unleashing their creative thinking and innovation potential to make the shift to the creative and innovative realms.

Empowering people and teams to redirect their emotional energy towards opening their minds to thoughtful dissent and disagreement allows them to handle hard conversations with constructive and creative intent.

Welcoming dissent and thoughtful disagreement involves daring yourself and others to be and think differently. Being able to think creatively maximize a person or a teams innovation potential, unleashes their human ingenuity in the age of AI, and mobilizes their collective intelligence to lead, manage, or implement constructive and sustainable change.

Leveraging constructive conflict, dissent and thoughtful disagreement unleashes people’s creative thinking and innovation potential and is a necessary part of enabling AI, digital transformation and innovation initiatives to succeed in uncertain and disruptive times.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™ and The Start-Up Game.™ Discover our collective learning products and tools that can be customized as playful bespoke corporate learning programs. Our blended and transformational change and learning programs provide a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation and entrepreneurship. It will also upskill people and teams, developing their future fitness within your unique digital transformation and innovation initiatives. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Gemini

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

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

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

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

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

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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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