Category Archives: Leadership

Why Networks Can Outperform Hierarchies

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(And Vice Versa)

Why Networks Can Outperform Hierarchies

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I still remember the bright autumn day in 2014 when I turned off of the main road in Exton, Pennsylvania onto a remote path. I was going to meet Brian J. Robertson, the creator of a hot new “flat” management approach called Holacracy. I was skeptical, because it seemed to be a cumbersome way to go about governance, but I was open to learning about it.

Many companies, most famously Zappos, were enthusiastically adopting it and there was no shortage of hype among the punditry about abolishing hierarchies. Brian, for his part, was gracious and patient with me, explaining how and why everything worked. Still, I had my doubts and remained unconvinced.

Recently, Stanford’s Bob Sutton pointed to Ronnie Lee’s research that confirmed my (and his) suspicions. While flatter structures can promote creativity, we need hierarchies to execute well. The truth is that hierarchies form naturally and, rather than trying to ignore that basic fact, we need to design enterprises with hierarchical networks in mind.

Evolution, Religion and Leadership

It’s become common today for many, especially in the academic world, to dismiss religion as the product of ancient superstition. Yet in The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes a powerful case that it plays an important evolutionary role. “There is now a great deal of evidence that religions do in fact help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems and win the competition for group-level survival,” he wrote.

So while many pundits often portray bureaucratic hierarchies as an anachronistic byproduct of the industrial revolution, it seems significant that religions tend to have hierarchical structures. Even religious activities that can be done individually, such as Buddhist meditation, are often led by someone who has an elevated group status.

So it stands to reason that hierarchy plays a similar governance role in organizations, helping to coordinate group activity by setting priorities, establishing basic rules and norms and, when needed, providing impetus to change direction and adapt to external events. Clearly, these are essential governance functions in any enterprise.

Many would say that, in an increasingly digital environment that helps us communicate and coordinate across boundaries of time and space, we simply don’t need the same levels of bureaucratic governance that we used to. However, what Professor Lee found in the startups he researched was that the levels of hierarchy increased significantly over the last 50 years, most probably due to the greater levels of complexity involved in work.

It’s important to note that, even after years of hype, it’s hard to find examples of successful non-hierarchical organizations. Even the rare exceptions, such as the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, aren’t quite as flat in how they organize work as it would first seem. Zappos would eventually back away from Holacracy as would other early adopters, such as Medium.

Hierarchies Are Networks

The term “network” is often misconstrued. In management circles, it is often used to mean an organic, unfathomable, amorphous structure, but really a network is just any system of nodes connected by links. So, in that sense, any conceivable organizational structure is a network, even a typically hierarchical organizational chart.

The important question is what kind of networks do we want our organizations to be? If we look at the evidence from thousands of years of human civilization, we’d have to conclude that some sort of command and control mechanism is needed. At the same time, as our competitive environment becomes more complex, we want information to be able to go to where it is needed without getting stuck in leadership bottlenecks.

A bit of network science can be helpful here. For functional purposes, networks have two salient characteristics: clustering and path length. Clustering refers to the degree to which a network is made up of tightly knit groups while path length is a measure of social distance—the average number of links separating any two nodes in the network.

Ideally our organizational networks would have a high degree of clustering—to promote close collaboration and teamwork—as well as short path lengths so that information can get from one part of the enterprise to any other part with speed and efficiency. Intuitively, it seems like those two priorities are in conflict. However, thanks to some breakthroughs in network science in the late 90s, we know that such “small world” networks are not only achievable, but common.

What’s really important isn’t how your organizational chart is constructed, but how you design for connection and there are some common sense ways to do that.

Understanding Formal And Informal Structures

Every organization has both formal and informal structures. For example, while ostensibly open source communities have little formal organization, in practice they are very hierarchical, with high-status individuals driving the direction of the project. At the same time, even in a formal organization, there are informal relationships as when, say, you work in sales and your brother-in-law works in logistics in a very different part of the company.

Network scientists call people who link disparate networks in an organization boundary spanners and they are crucial for maintaining culture as an organization grows. Once you understand the importance of boundary spanners, you can start redesigning programs and platforms to optimize for connection.

There are a number of ways to network your organization by optimizing organizational platforms for connection. Facebook’s Engineering Bootcamp found that “bootcampers tend to form bonds with their classmates who joined near the same time and those bonds persist even after each has joined different teams.” At Experian, leadership found that a biking club led to boundary spanning collaborations at work, so they helped more clubs to get organized.

One striking example of how even small tweaks can improve connectivity is a project done at a bank’s call center. When it was found that a third of variation in productivity could be attributed to informal communication outside of meetings, the bank arranged for groups to go on coffee break together, increasing productivity by as much as 20% while improving employee satisfaction at the same time.

Perhaps most famously, Steve Jobs designed the headquarters both at Apple and Pixar to encourage random collisions among employees. It seems we’ve been asking the wrong question. The problem isn’t how we dismantle hierarchies, but how we connect them.

Leading Hierarchical Networks

For decades we’ve been hearing that we need to eliminate bureaucracy and break down silos. Yet there is little evidence of any success. In fact, when management guru Gary Hamel, who has been leading the call to “bust bureaucracy,” surveyed readers at Harvard Business Review he found that levels of organization had increased, not decreased.

The inescapable conclusion is that we’ve failed to do away with hierarchies because they serve a useful purpose. We need them. In much the same way, the much maligned “silos” form around centers of capability as a result of close collaboration. These are good things. We don’t want to eliminate them, we want to support and empower them.

So instead of trying to break down silos, we need to connect them. Network science tells us that it takes just a small amount of boundary spanning “random connections,” in order to bring social distance crashing down. We can’t just look at organizational charts, but need to focus on how meaningful relationships form in the real world.

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.

If we are to lead effectively in an increasingly ecosystem-driven world, we need to empower networked hierarchies.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Google Gemini

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Leading Through Uncertain Times

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Leading Through Uncertain Times

GUEST POST from David Burkus

One of the biggest myths in leadership—especially when leading through uncertainty—is that strong leaders always appear rock-solid and unwavering. That they must exude confidence, provide a flawless roadmap, and convince everyone that the future is secure and under control. According to this myth, certainty equals strength, and any expression of doubt is a liability.

But here’s the truth: rigid confidence in a fragile plan is a recipe for disaster.

The act of planning is more important than any one plan. Why? Because when leading through uncertainty, no plan survives its first contact with reality. The philosopher Mike Tyson put it more bluntly: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Whether it’s a global crisis, an unexpected shift in the market, or internal organizational upheaval, uncertainty guarantees that what looked good on paper will eventually fall short.

The real job of leading through uncertainty isn’t about having the right answer in advance—it’s about building the capacity to learn, adapt, and course-correct as events unfold.

The False Confidence Temptation

It’s easy to see why the myth of the all-knowing, confident leader has endured. In high-stress situations, people crave clarity. They want someone to reassure them that everything will be okay. And leaders, sensing that pressure, often feel the need to perform certainty—even if they don’t feel it.

So, they commit early. They communicate loudly. And then when facts change—as they always do in uncertain times—they feel trapped. Trapped by the story they’ve already told. Trapped by the perception of strength they feel compelled to maintain. As a result, they stick to plans that no longer work, hoping their authority will carry the day.

Meanwhile, their teams are watching—and not just watching decisions. They’re watching adaptability. And when leaders don’t adapt, trust begins to erode.

Why False Confidence Fails

Uncertainty exposes the flaws in static leadership. When leaders cling to their original plans, they send an implicit message: “I’m more committed to being right than I am to doing what’s right.”

That mindset doesn’t just limit a leader’s effectiveness—it damages the team’s morale. Employees begin to withhold concerns or ideas because they believe the direction is locked in. They stop offering feedback, stop speaking up, and start disengaging.

Even worse, when a leader projects confidence without substance, it creates false security. Teams may charge forward based on outdated assumptions, only to find themselves caught unprepared when the landscape shifts. In these moments, the cost of inflexibility isn’t just lost opportunities—it’s lost credibility.

But the inverse is also true. When leaders are transparent about what they don’t know, and quick to adjust when new information arrives, they model something far more powerful: humility, agility, and resilience.

Embrace the Discomfort of Not Knowing

Leading through uncertainty begins with a mindset shift: from knowing to learning.

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, put it best when he said leaders must move from being “know-it-alls” to “learn-it-alls.” That shift is more than clever. It’s essential. Because when uncertainty hits, your old playbook won’t cut it. The market changes. Customer needs evolve. What worked last quarter may not apply today.

If you’re stuck thinking “I’ve got this figured out,” you’re missing what the moment is trying to teach you.

Great leaders ask great questions: “What are we missing?” “What could go wrong?” “What does the team see that I don’t?” By doing so, they unlock insights that top-down planning alone can’t deliver.

Paradoxically, vulnerability builds trust. When leaders admit they don’t have all the answers, but they’re committed to finding better ones, teams respond with greater openness and creativity. They don’t need their leader to be infallible. They need their leader to be present, curious, and real.

Rehearse for Change, Don’t Just React to It

Uncertainty isn’t a rare event anymore. It’s the default setting.

And in this environment, the most successful leaders don’t just prepare for the known—they rehearse for the unknown.

Think of a quarterback. They don’t memorize a playbook and call it a day. They run drills for dozens of scenarios. They rehearse breakdowns, coverage changes, weather shifts—anything that might happen on game day. Why? Because in high-pressure moments, instinct takes over. Preparation becomes performance.

Leadership is no different. When faced with unexpected change, your ability to pivot comes from prior practice.

That’s why modern leaders rehearse for change. Not just Plan A, but Plans B, C, and D. And they do it with their teams. What if our biggest customer leaves? What if a key supplier goes dark? What if our product suddenly faces a new competitor?

These aren’t pessimistic questions. They’re practical ones. And talking through them isn’t fear-mongering—it’s building resilience.

When teams rehearse together, they’re better equipped to respond together. They know where to go, who needs support, and what priorities must shift. That shared preparedness builds confidence—not in the plan, but in the team’s ability to adapt.

Communicate Early, Often, and Honestly

In uncertain times, silence is dangerous. When leaders don’t communicate, teams don’t relax—they spiral.

The absence of information is rarely interpreted generously. If leaders don’t speak up, people start filling the void with their own assumptions. And human nature being what it is, those assumptions usually lean toward worst-case scenarios.

That’s why leaders must communicate promptly and transparently—even if they don’t have all the answers.

Transparency doesn’t mean having everything figured out. It means being clear about what you know, what you’re doing, and what you’re still working on. The message can be as simple as:

  • “Here’s what’s happening.”
  • “Here’s what we’re doing about it.”
  • “Here’s what we need from you.”

This clarity transforms uncertainty from a threat into a shared challenge. It gives people agency. It builds trust. And it reinforces the most important message a team can hear: “We’re in this together.”

Model Adaptability, Not Perfection

When the world is unpredictable, your leading through uncertainty playbook should be built around adaptability—not perfection.

That means acknowledging when circumstances change. Updating your direction when new facts emerge. And giving your team permission to do the same. It’s not enough to say “we’re agile” in principle. You have to live it in practice.

And perhaps most importantly, you need to create space for your team to learn with you. Ask for input. Share lessons learned. Celebrate smart adjustments, even if they came after a mistake. The goal isn’t to be flawless—it’s to be flexible.

The Real Strength in Leading Through Uncertainty

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from recent years, it’s that the ground will keep shifting. There will always be new disruptions, new challenges, and new unknowns. But the best leaders don’t fear that reality. They prepare for it. They build cultures of learning, resilience, and trust. They lead not by pretending to have all the answers, but by modeling the pursuit of better ones.

Leading through uncertainty isn’t about being the one who always knows. It’s about being the one who always learns. It’s about modeling curiosity, building flexibility, and fostering trust.

Because the truth is, your team doesn’t need a hero with all the answers. They need a human who’s willing to listen, adapt, and learn alongside them.

That’s the kind of leadership that endures—even when the future doesn’t go according to plan.

Image credit: Pexels

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How Good is Your Situational Awareness?

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How Good is Your Situational Awareness?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Business and life are all about choosing how you want to allocate your time and money. In life, it’s your personal time and money and in business it’s the company’s.

If you’ve ever done any winter hiking, you know that it’s important to know the terrain. If there’s a mountain in the way, you either go over it or around it. But there is one thing you can’t do is pretend it’s not there. If you go around it, you’ve got to make sure you have enough energy, food, water and daylight to make the long trek to shelter. If you go over it, you’ve got to make sure you have the ice picks, crampons, down jackets and climbing skills to make it up and down to shelter. With winter hiking, the territory, gear and team capability matter. And the right decision is defined by situational awareness.

And what of the shelter? Does it sleep five, six or seven? And because you have seven on your team, it’s not really shelter if it sleeps five. And if you don’t know how many it sleeps, you’re not situationally aware. And if you’re not situationally aware, on five may fit in the shelter and two will freeze to death. Maybe before your trip you should look at the map and learn all the shelters their locations and how many the can hold. The right action and the safety of your crew depends on your situational awareness.

And the decision depends on how much daylight do you have left. Before you left basecamp it was possible to know when the sun will set. Did you take the time to look at the charts? Did you take advantage of the knowledge? If you don’t have enough sunlight, you’ve got to go over the top. If you do, you can take the leisurely great circle route around the mountain. And if you don’t know, you’ve got to roll the dice. I’d prefer to be aware of the situation and keep the dice in my pocket. And for that, you need to be aware of the situation.

Winter hiking is difficult enough even when you have maps of the terrain, weather forecasts, locations of the shelters and knowledge of when the sun will set. But it’s an unsafe activity when there are no maps of the territory, the weather is unknown and there’s no knowledge of the shelters. But that’s just how it is with innovation – the territory has never been hiked, no maps, no weather forecast, and shelters are unknown. With innovation, there’s no situational awareness unless you create it. And that’s why with innovation, the first step is to create the maps. No maps, no possibility of situational awareness.

The best people at situational awareness are the military. They know maps and they know how to use them. The know to do recon to position the enemy on the map and they know to use the situational awareness (the map, the enemy’s location, and their direction of travel) to decide how what to do. If the enemy’s force is small and in poorly defensible position, there are a certain set of actions that are viable. If the enemy force is large and has the high ground, it’s time to sit tight or retreat with dignity. (To be clear, I’m a pacifist and this military example does mean I condone violence of any kind. It’s just that the military is super good at situational awareness.)

If you’re not making maps of the competitive landscape, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re not moving resources around and speculating how the competition will respond based on the topography and your position within it, you’re not sharpening your situational awareness and you’re not taking full advantage of the information around you. If you don’t know where the mountains are you can’t avoid them or use them to slow your competition. And if you don’t know know where the shelters are an how many miles you can hike in a day, you don’t know if you’re overextending your position and putting your crew at risk.

Winter is coming. If you’re not creating maps to build situational awareness, what are you doing?

Image credit: Mrs. Gemstone

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Accelerating Change in Consumer Packaged Goods

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Accelerating Change in Consumer Packaged Goods

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

I had the pleasure of engaging with a team of executives from a Global 2000 Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company, and as always from such encounters, I learned something new.

The team is focused on accelerating change, and I was sharing with them the zone management model, and how each zone is intended to keep a characteristic pace. The Productivity Zone, by design, goes the slowest because its job is to take extra time in order to reduce risk and cost. The Incubation Zone, again by design, goes the fastest because its job is to take extra risk and pretty much ignore cost in order to reduce time.

What the team made me realize is that, given all the change coming at them (and, yes, we had been talking a lot about Generative AI and related technologies), they needed their Productivity Zone to speed up, come what may. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is not just a single CPG enterprise talking. Every Volume Operations enterprise at its core runs on processes. There is no other way to operate at scale, which means the Performance Zone is completely dependent on them. But here’s the thing—all those mission-critical processes are invented, maintained, and improved by the Productivity Zone.

So, here’s the challenge in a nutshell: How can you possibly speed up something that is inherently designed to go slow? Or, to make the goal more specific, how do you incubate a truly disruptive process and then, at the right moment, use it to transform your most conservative organizations?

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear me advocate for aligning the zone management framework with the Technology Adoption Life Cycle as a roadmap for how best to navigate these waters. Here’s how it plays out in four acts:

  1. Act One: Incubate, focusing on early adopters who are looking to explore the opportunities, leveraging a project model. You intend to prove the feasibility of the new process, and you will do whatever it takes to do so. Your goal is to show what good could look like while at the same time taking technical risk off the table, leaving adoption risk as the primary remaining challenge.
  2. Act Two: Transform, focusing exclusively on a single underperforming function led by pragmatists in pain, leveraging a solution model. You intend to use the breakthrough technology to completely revamp the process in question, taking it from underperforming to stellar. Your goal is to create a credible set of references to support your transition to Act Three.
  3. Act Three: Perform, focusing first on processes adjacent to those addressed by Act Two, ones that are performing adequately but could definitely be improved, led by pragmatists who are reluctant to change until they see others go first. You intend to create a groundswell of adoption that will convert their reluctance to change into a fear of missing out. Your goal is to lead with a “killer app,” highlighting whatever portion of your technology that can deliver a quick win, and then follow that up with a complete roll-out.
  4. Act Four: Secure, focusing on the revamped process end to end, monitoring quality from final deliverable back through each step, working with process managers who will be maintaining their portion of the new system. You intend to continuously improve following a data-driven approach supplemented with whatever analytics and AI can provide. Your goal is to operate at scale with unprecedented productivity and agility.

The key point of this framework is that it is linear. You take it one act at a time, and you do not skip over any acts. Your key metric is time to complete, both at the level of each act and of the whole play. With respect to anything transformational, know that most people appreciate it may take more than one year, and no one will give you three years. So you have a maximum of eight quarters to get to Act Four (which will be ongoing thereafter).

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

Image Credit: Pexels

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Your Response is Your Responsibility

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Your Response is Your Responsibility

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you don’t want to go to work in the morning, there’s a reason. If’ you/re angry with how things go, there’s a reason. And if you you’re sad because of the way that people treat you, there’s a reason. But the reason has nothing to do with your work, how things are going or how people treat you. The reason has everything to do with your ego.

And your ego has everything to do with what you think of yourself and the identity you attach to yourself. If you don’t want to go to work, it’s because you don’t like what your work says about you or your image of your self. If you are angry with how things go, it’s because how things go says something about you that you don’t like. And if you’re sad about how people treat you, it’s because you think they may be right and you don’t like what that says about you.

The work is not responsible for your dislike of it. How things go is not responsible for your anger. And people that treat you badly are not responsible for your sadness. Your dislike is your responsibility, your anger is your responsibility and your sadness is your responsibility. And that’s because your response is your responsibility.

Don’t blame the work. Instead, look inside to understand how the work cuts against the grain of who you think you are. Don’t blame the things for going as they go. Instead, look inside to understand why those things don’t fit with your self-image. Don’t blame the people for how they treat you. Instead, look inside to understand why you think they may be right.

It’s easy to look outside and assign blame for your response. It’s the work’s fault, it’s the things’ fault, and it’s the people’s fault. But when you take responsibility for your response, when you own it, work gets better, things go better and people treat you better. Put simply, you take away their power to control how you feel and things get better.

And if work doesn’t get better, things don’t go better and people don’t treat you better, not to worry. Their responses are their responsibility.

Image credit: Mrs. Gemstone

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Stereotypes – Are They Useful and Should We Use Them? 

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Stereotypes - Are They Useful and Should We Use Them? 

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

I recently got a call from an ex colleague looking to staff up a technology innovation organization.  She was looking for suggestions for potential candidates, and when I asked her for a bit more more information, her first criteria was that she was looking for a ‘Gen Z’. This triggered an interesting conversation around how useful generational and other stereotypes are.

At one level, they are almost invaluable.  We use stereotypes, categorization and other grouping strategies all of the time, both consciously and unconsciously.   Grouping things together is a pragmatic part of how we as humans deal with large numbers of anything, whether it’s people, tasks, objects or pretty much anything, and are often a key tool in prediction. They are not always accurate or precise, but they are often a first step in how we distill large amounts of data or choices down to more manageable numbers, and/or how we begin to understand something unfamiliar. If a stranger were to point an unfamiliar gun at us at a stop sign, we can quickly determine that they are probably dangerous, likely a criminal, and that the gun is likely deadly. That kind of categorization and stereotyping might be the difference between life and death.

But these grouping strategies can also mislead us, especially if we don’t use them effectively.   For example, in the case of generational stereotypes, when dealing with large numbers of people, it can be useful to break them down into generational groups. A targeted marketing campaign may benefit from knowing that people over a certain age are more likely to use different social media platforms than people under 20.  Or a physician and patient may benefit from knowing certain age groups are more likely to face certain health issues and need screening for certain diseases.  Stereotypes can also address fundamental differences in life experiences between generations.  For example, Gen Z grew up immersed in a digital world, whereas earlier generations grew up acquiring digital skills, perhaps changing how we design interfaces for Medicare versus home schooling?. 

But the key lies in the phrase ‘large groups of people’.  There are times when its really useful and beneficial to make approximations on when dealing with large groups. But as tempting as it can be when having to make a quick judgement, or to quickly filter a large number of people, as in my friends original question, applying them to individuals is often misleading, and risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 

No matter what grouping strategy we apply, we need to be really careful about applying them at an individual level. And there are of course many different ways to group things, whether it’s categorization, archetypes, stereotypes, sensory cues or many others, depending upon context and goals.  I’ve deliberately blurred the lines between these, because in reality, people tap into different ones depending upon goals, contexts, personal experience or personal knowledge.  And to a large degree, similar principles apply to all of them.  That leads to a couple of concepts, which while pretty obvious, I think are worth sharing or reiterating:  

1. Stereotypes can be useful when applied to large groups of people, but judging an individual through that lens is disingenuous in both directions. Take gender as an example. There are distinct, scientifically measured differences between men and women if we look at them at the large group level. These differences can be physical, behavioral or both.  Perhaps the least controversial is that ON AVERAGE, men are taller and stronger than women. But importantly there is also massive overlap between genders, and there are many, many individual women who are taller and stronger than individual men. We intuitively get that, and nobody would recruit for a job that requires hard physical labor by ruling out women. But conversely, if we are designing a clothing line, we’d be foolish to ignore those average differences when developing sizing options and inventory. Gender differences are potentially useful when dealing with large numbers, but potentially highly misleading on an individual basis

Similarly, using generational stereotypes to target ‘digital natives’ for a tech job may superficially sound reasonable, as it did to my friend.  But it risks ignoring strong candidates who may reside outside of that category.  Even if Gen Z as a whole may arguably have a more intuitive understanding of tech, there are many individual Millennials, X’ers and Boomers who are more technically savvy than individual Z’ers.  Designing software targeted at large groups of specific age groups may benefit from group categorization, but choosing who to write it on that basis is a lot less effective, if at all.  

2. Grouping is how we often manage complex decisions. Faced with more than a few individual choices, pragmatically, we often have to find some way to narrow choice to manageable numbers. For example, in Las Vegas we have 2,500 restaurants. When deciding where to eat, we cannot consider each one individually. We instead use grouping filters like location, cost, cuisine, familiarity or ratings. It’s not perfect, it’s often not a conscious strategy, and we may miss a great restaurant, but it beats the alternative of starving while we cross reference 2500 individual options. Recruitment these days is similar. Most job openings get multiple candidates that we must narrow to manageable numbers. But we need to be careful that we carefully select criteria that benefit us and candidates. Those may vary by context. But especially as we defer screening and decision making to AI and automation, it’s so important that we really understand what those criteria are, and how they benefit our search. I’d argue that generational stereotypes are a particularly ineffective filter in narrowing our choices for many things, especially for recruiting or career management.

3.  Not all stereotypes or categories are accurate.  Even if they feel intuitively right, they may be neither accurate or predictive.  In part this is because they are often based on (superficial) correlation, instead of causation. For example, historically a common stereotype was that women were considered less able at math and science than men.  It was true that for a long time men were better represented in these fields.  But the stereotype that men were were more skilled was fundamentally inaccurate.  We now know there is no gender difference in that innate ability.  But a mixture of social factors, and a feedback loop created by a self fulfilling stereotype created an illusion of meaningful difference.  Conversely, men were considered less empathic than women.  The actual science is far less clear on this, and there may be some small innate gender differences.  But if they exist, they are sufficiently small that it’s hard to separate whether this is due to self reporting biases, socialization, or meaningful differences in biology. But certainly the difference is too small to preclude men from careers that require a high level of empathy, a stereotype that existed for quite some time in, for example, fields such as nursing, which were long dominated by women. 

Even today, only 13% of registered nurses in the US are male, and only 31% of engineers are women  Self fulfilling stereotypes can be particularly hard to see through, let alone break, because they reinforce their own illusion. 

But all of this said, some stereotypes can still be useful.  Take the stereotype that the Swiss are punctual, organized and ‘on time’.  If you are planning on catching a train for an important flight, nearly 95% of trains in Switzerland arrived on time in 2025. In Italy, the number was less than 75%.  That of course doesn’t guarantee than the Swiss train will be on time, or the Italian one won’t. But it does make it prudent to add a bit more padding into an Italian travel itinerary, or at least research back up options!

And then there are examples like the tomato.  No matter how you pronounce it, the tomato is technically a fruit.  But it is commonly used as a vegetable.  So is it more practically useful to categorize it as a fruit or vegetable? I’d argue vegetable.  

In conclusion, stereotype, categories, grouping and similar mechanisms are a fundamental part of the way we as humans deal with large amounts of data.  And at least at one level, as the amount of data we are exposed to explodes, we are going to need those filters more than ever.  But they can also be highly misleading, especially when applied to individuals, so we need to understand when and how to use them, and treat them with a lot of caution.  

Image credits: Google Gemini

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Four Things I Have Learned About Ideas

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Four Things I Have Learned About Ideas

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I’ve always been inspired by ideas. Some, like Aristotle’s logic, shape the world for millennia. Others, like Einstein’s relativity, completely change our conceptions of what is possible. Still others, like mRNA vaccines, seem to emerge at just the right time. Ideas are what have marked humanity’s progress from living in caves to civilizations.

Yet bad ideas can destroy just as completely as good ideas can create. Fascism led Europe to effectively wipe itself out in little more than a decade. Communism relegated hundreds of millions of people to poverty and struggle. Corporate debacles like like Enron, WeWork and Theranos, have shown us that the wrong idea can cost billions.

We need to handle ideas with care, being open enough to new ones so that we don’t miss out on opportunities, but skeptical enough that we don’t get taken in by ones that do harm. What I’ve learned researching innovation and change is that creating, parsing and evaluating ideas is a skill that must be practiced and honed over time. Here are 4 things to keep in mind.

1. Ideas Can Come From Anywhere

Albert Einstein was an outcast in the world of physics when he unleashed four papers on the world that would change the field forever. When Jim Allison discovered cancer immunotherapy, it took him three years to find anyone who would invest in it. Katalin Karikó was told to abandon her research into mRNA vaccines or be demoted.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science historian Thomas Kuhn explained why breakthroughs so often happen this way. As the world changes and evolves, flaws in existing models become more evident, eventually becoming untenable. That’s what sets the stage for a paradigm shift. “Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones,” he wrote.

Yet new paradigms almost always need to be championed by outsiders or newcomers rather than acknowledged experts. As the physicist Max Planck put it “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

In Mapping Innovation, I showed how data and real-world experience bear this out. On the innovation platform Innocentive (now Wazoku Crowd), problems tend not to be solved within the domain in which they arose, but by a practitioner in an adjacent field. In fact, a study analyzing 17.9 million papers found the most highly cited work tended to come from highly specialized experts partnering with an outsider.

2. Ideas Need To Develop Over Time

In 1891, Dr. William Coley had an unusual idea. Inspired by an obscure case, in which a man who had contracted a severe infection was cured of cancer, the young doctor purposely infected a tumor on his patient’s neck with a heavy dose of bacteria. Miraculously, the tumor vanished and the patient remained cancer free even five years later.

It was a breakthrough, of sorts, but for more than a 100 years Coley’s work was viewed with skepticism and, in truth, there were serious problems with it. Coley couldn’t explain the underlying mechanism by which an infection could cure cancer and he couldn’t replicate his results with any consistency. When radiation therapy began showing success, most people forgot about Coley’s and his work.

Yet a small cadre of supporters kept the faith alive. His daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, would establish the Cancer Research Institute in 1953 to support immune-based approaches to cancer treatment. Over the next four decades, glimmers of hope would appear from time to time, but no one could make Dr. Coley’s idea work.

Then, in 1995 there was a breakthrough. Following a hunch, Jim Allison figured that maybe the problem wasn’t that our bodies couldn’t identify and fight cancer cells, but that something was switching the immune response off. If we could switch it back on, we would have a completely new tool to fight cancer. Allison would win the Nobel Prize for his work on the development of the first cancer immunotherapy drug in 2018.

Dr. Coley had the right idea from the start, but it wasn’t enough. It would take over a century to develop better understanding of cancer, genomics, as well as tools like recombinant DNA to make it work. Literally thousands of researchers worked around the globe for decades to make good on an initial insight.

3. Ideas Need Ecosystems

When Jim Allison was finishing up graduate school in the early 1970s, they had just discovered T cells and he was fascinated. He would later tell me how he was amazed about how all these things could be flying around our bodies killing things and somehow not hurt us. He decided to focus his career on figuring out how it all worked.

Over the next decade, Jim and his colleagues started piecing together a larger picture of how the immune system worked through a vast array of signals and receptors that regulate our immune response, triggering it to increase activity and to shut down once the threat has dissolved. A colleague had noticed that one of these molecules inhibited tumor growth.

Dr. Coley and Jim Allison occupied world’s. To Coley, the immune system was like an on/off switch and, triggering the immune system should lead directly to an immune response to fight cancer. Yet Allison was part of a much larger ecosystem that led to a different understanding that allowed him to target a specific receptor in the regulation system. That opened the floodgates and now cancer immunotherapy is a major field of its own.

The simple fact is that ideas need ecosystems. Look at any major technology and it’s not the initial invention that creates the impact, but the secondary and tertiary technologies. Electricity needed appliances to change the world. The internal combustion engine needed vehicles. Computers needed software and the Internet.

We can’t just look at nodes, but must consider networks. It’s through those connections that we create the combinations that can help us solve important problems.

4. You Need To Let The Muse Know You’re Serious

One of the toughest things about ideas is that they can only be validated forward, never backward. You never know if you have the right idea until it’s been tested in the real world and, even then, there could be some confounding factor you may be missing. As Kevin Ashton put it, “Creation is a long journey, where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead.”

That’s tough work. You can’t just expect lightning to strike. Truly creative people know you have to work at it every day. Sometimes it goes easier and sometimes it’s a bit tougher. There are constant disappointments and true epiphanies are rare. But if you keep with it you’ll find that most days you can come up with something, even if it’s something small.

Somebody told me once that you have to let the muse know that you’re serious. Producing ideas leads to more ideas, which allows you to start creating connections between them. The more you produce, the better the chances are that some of those connections will be novel and lead to something important. That’s how you produce an idea that matters.

But even then the work isn’t over, because the world your idea enters into keeps evolving and changing. That’s why you need to share it and encourage others to build on it so that it can grow and reach its true potential. Ideas must combine and recombine so that they can memetically evolve. For our ideas to succeed, we need to serve them well.

As Daniel Dennett put it, “A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.”

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Google Gemini

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Feedback Giving Secrets

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Feedback Giving Secrets

GUEST POST from David Burkus

A large part of doing your best work ever involves getting feedback on your performance. Feedback is how you know where to improve and where to build upon your strengths. Giving feedback is a requirement for unlocking greater performance, both individually and in teams.

But many leaders struggle to give feedback.

Sometimes this is because giving feedback, particularly constructive feedback is uncomfortable. It’s not fun to tell someone they’re under-performing. And sometimes it’s because the tactics leaders are taught to reduce that discomfort are—to put it bluntly—terrible. We’re told to combine positive and constructive criticism and sometimes even to “sandwich” in the constructive feedback around two pieces of praise.

But if you’ve ever tried this tactic, you know it doesn’t reduce the discomfort and it often makes the conversation less clear. So, don’t.

That’s the big secret to giving great feedback. Don’t mix messages. Give positive feedback and constructive feedback at different times and in different ways.

And in this article, we’ll review a few simple steps to make both positive and constructive feedback conversations less awkward and more productive.

Giving Positive Feedback

There are three keys to giving great positive feedback: 1) Do it right away, 2) Be specific, and 3) Explain why it matters.

Do It Right Away

The first key to giving great positive feedback is to do it right away. As soon as you notice someone’s exceptional actions, praise them for it. Don’t document and wait until the next check-in or performance review, comment on the behavior by the end of that day. The more quickly you offer someone praise, the more they understand that their performance matters and that they matter. Sometimes leaders want to praise publicly, so leaders will wait for the next team-wide meeting and praise a few different people. But that diminishes the importance of the individual actions by delaying the praise. And besides, there is no rule that says you can only praise someone’s actions once.

Be Specific

The second key to giving great positive feedback is to be specific. Comment on the specific behavior you observed as well the specific situation they were in. And get specific about why their action or idea was so good. While you should give your people praise like “I’m proud of you” and “You’re awesome,” too much vague praise starts to feel stale and insignificant. So, when you’re giving feedback on a specific action, be as specific as possible. As a bonus, most of the time, when a specific action is praised, people want to do more of it. You may get more of what you measure, but you always get more of what you praise.

Explain Why It Matters

The third key to giving great positive feedback is to explain why it matters. This isn’t about just saying “I really appreciated that.” Instead, it’s about connecting the specific action you’re praising to the larger whole of team or organizational success. People want to know the work they do matters, but it’s often hard to see how their day-to-day tasks fit into the bigger picture and lead to organizational success. So, the best time to help them see the whole team and the significance of their role in it is when you’re praising the actions that lead to team-wide wins.

Giving Constructive Feedback

Likewise, there are three keys to giving great constructive feedback:

  1. Comment on behavior, not intent,
  2. Co-create solutions, and
  3. Close with potential

Comment On Behavior

The first key to giving great constructive feedback is to comment on the behavior—that’s it. Comment solely on the action you observed or words you heard. Many times, when giving constructive criticism we guess at the rationale behind the behavior. This is a distraction. We’re not mind readers; we’re going to guess wrong from time to time. And when we do (or even if we guess right and the other person is in denial) we can end up moving the conversation away from the behavior that needs to change and into an unproductive argument about someone’s mindset. If the goal is to change behavior, focus on behavior.

Co-Create Solutions

The second key to giving great constructive feedback to is co-create solutions. Once you’ve commented on the behavior, and maybe even explained its effect on the rest of the team, it’s time to find a better way to behave moving forward. However, often leaders tend to just dictate what the person should do. But if you want the behavior change to stick, you have to involve the person responsible for the action. You have to co-create a solution. Instead of telling them what to do, take the time to ask questions that guide and direct them toward finding a better way to behave. You’ll get more buy-in and you’ll increase their autonomy and hence motivation to change.

Close With Potential

The third key to giving great constructive feedback is to close with potential. End on a high note. But more importantly, end on a note that emphasizes your belief in their ability to improve. In perhaps one of the best studies on teacher feedback among students, researchers found that 19 simple words at the top of the paper had a dramatic effect on whether students took the time to revise and improve. Those words: “I’m giving you this feedback because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” If leaders did the same at the closing moments of a constructive feedback conversation, that would dramatically improve the chances of people improving.

Part of the reason giving feedback is so uncomfortable for leaders is that it feels like judging people and not coaching them. And that’s why the closing moments of feedback are so important, whether it’s closing positive feedback with an explanation of why those actions are appreciated or closing constructive feedback with a comment on that person’s potential. Those final moments of the conversation make the difference between feedback that can be readily applied and feedback that’s quickly discarded. Giving feedback is about the behavior, but it’s also about why it’s so important to improve. Great feedback empowers everyone to do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on January 17, 2022.

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Does Work Need to be Meaningful?

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Does Work Need to be Meaningful?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Life’s too short to work on things that don’t make a difference. Sure, you’ve got to earn a living, but what kind of living is it if all you’re doing is paying for food and a mortgage? How do others benefit from your work? How does the planet benefit from your work? How is the world a better place because of your work? How are you a better person because of your work?

When you’re done with your career, what will you say about it? Did you work at a job because you were afraid to leave? Did you stay because of loss aversion? Did you block yourself from another opportunity because of a lack of confidence? Or, did you stay in the right place for the right reasons?

If there’s no discomfort, there’s no growth, even if you’re super good at what you do. Discomfort is the tell-tale sign the work is new. And without newness, you’re simply turning the crank. It may be a profitable crank, but it’s the same old crank, none the less. If you’ve turned the crank for the last five years, what excitement can come from turning it a sixth? Even if you’re earning a great living, is it really all that great?

Maybe work isn’t supposed to be a source of meaning. I accept that. But, a life without meaning – that’s not for me. If not from work, do you have a source of meaning? Do you have something that makes you feel whole? Do you have something that causes you to pole vault out of bed? Sure, you provide for your family, but it’s also important to provide meaning for yourself. It’s not sustainable to provide for others at your own expense.

Your work may have meaning, but you may be moving too quickly to notice. Stop, take a breath and close your eyes. Visualize the people you work with. Do they make you smile? Do you remember doing something with them that brought you joy? How about doing something for them – any happiness there? How about when you visualize your customers? Do you they appreciate what you do for them? Do you appreciate their appreciation? Even if there’s no meaning in the work, there can be great meaning from doing it with people that matter.

Running away from a job won’t solve anything; but wandering toward something meaningful can make a big difference. Before you make a change, look for meaning in what you have. Challenge yourself every day to say something positive to someone you care about and do something nice for someone you don’t know all that well. Try it for a month, or even a week.

Who knows, you may find meaning that was hiding just under the surface. Or, you may even create something special for yourself and the special people around you.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Making Ring-fenced Funding Work

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Toughest Challenge Series: Episode 2

Making Ring-fenced Funding Work

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Inspired by the HP Incubations Team

Here’s the challenge. Everyone gets that you need to ring-fence funding for incubating Horizon 3 initiatives. At the corporate level, with the CEO’s direct sponsorship, this can be managed as a separate operating unit with its own budget. The challenge is when the incubation is nested. That means it is being funded out of the operating budget of a Performance Zone business unit, not from some special set-aside allocation.

Nested incubation represents the majority of internally funded Horizon 3 investments. (M&A is a different vehicle, funded out of capex not opex, and is not subject to the challenges we will discuss here). The reason there is a strong preference for nested incubations is that, if successful, they are of immediate interest to the business unit’s current customer base as well as its partner ecosystem. That is, while there can be high technical risk, there is little to no market risk. That said, it is still early days, the technology is not proven, product-market fit still needs to be determined, so it is in no position to generate ROI in the current fiscal year.

The challenge comes to the fore in a tough year where the corporation has to cut back on its operating expenses. Everybody is expected to take a haircut, tighten their belts, suck it up, and carry on. The problem is, when it comes to managing incubations, this simply does not work. Incubation is all about getting and maintaining momentum. If at any point you take your foot off the accelerator, you will lose momentum, and you will never get it back. Instead, you will salvage what you can from the R&D and write the whole thing off to bad timing. But let’s be clear: this is not management, this is mismanagement.

So, what’s the fix? It starts with the business unit surfacing its incubation opportunity during the annual budgeting process. It proposes to set aside a portion of its next year’s budget dedicated to funding the incubation, with funding released on a VC-model based on milestone attainment. This is documented and agreed to at the Executive Leadership Team level. If bad times hit, the choice is never to take a haircut; it is either to carry on or cancel things altogether, and it is made in dialog with the ELT since either way it could have a material impact on the enterprise’s market valuation.

Once the nested incubation has been agreed to, then the business unit leader is responsible for ensuring its funding stays ring-fenced. In particular, this means that resources assigned to the incubation effort cannot be “borrowed” by the current product lines to temporarily address an urgent need. Again, this is all about maintaining momentum.

To ensure this works as planned, here is a tip from a long-time friend and colleague who is the CFO at a major enterprise:

All ring-fenced items are documented and agreed upon at the ELT level. The way it works is the finance team who work with the budget holder is the guardian of all ring-fenced spend. When changes need to be made, they can’t touch ring-fenced spend. Of course, you have to limit the number of ring-fenced items to give freedom of execution to the leaders, but it’s an effective mechanism.

That’s what he thinks. And that’s what I think too. What do you think?

Image Credit: Google Gemini

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