Category Archives: Leadership

Engaging Consciousness in the Emotional Work of Organizational Transformation

GUEST POST from Douglas Ferguson

Organizational transformation is a uniquely human endeavor. Navigating the journey to change starts with understanding the employee experience and creating space for emotional safety in the workplace.

According to organizational behavior expert Sigal Barsade, emotions are the key to encouraging higher performance and achievement. Her research shows that emotions influence employees’ wellness in addition to driving productivity. Thus, to influence organizational transformation, leaders need to take a closer look at how emotions factor into the employee experience.

In this article, we’ll discuss emotions and their role to change management in the following topics:

The Employee Experience
The Transformation Timeline
Emotions at Work
An Engagement of Consciousness

The Employee Experience

Without a keen understanding of the employee experience and your team’s emotional state, sustainable change is more fantasy than reality. In your efforts to initiate organizational transformation, consider first transforming employees’ work experience to promote a sense of emotional well-being.

In shaping the employee experience, it’s critical to understand employees’ expectations for emotional safety in the workplace. As most employees value their mental health above all else, they expect their working environment to promote trust, purpose, and social cohesion. Moreover, they want to know that leadership recognizes their contributions and that there is room and opportunity for sustainable growth and development. Similarly, team members want their personal sense of purpose to be in alignment with the organization.

With increased emotional wellness comes higher employee engagement and a more motivated workforce. With a stronger sense of emotional safety in the employee experience, leaders will find that their team is prepared to engage in organizational transformation.

The Transformation Timeline

“You have to attract people… you can’t bribe or coerce transformation.”
Greg Satell

Once you prioritize the employee experience in your change strategy, you can begin the organizational transformation timeline. Organizational transformation is a process that happens through gradual change, resulting in sustainable behavioral transformation. This type of comprehensive change can only occur through a series of repeatable actions and innovative systems, not one-time initiatives.

Take steps towards sustainable change with the following phases of organizational transformation:

Phase One: Fight Resistance

To sustain organizational transformation, leaders and team members need a solid strategy for managing resistance. Resistance often stems from the discomfort that change brings.

To move beyond this fear, leaders should explain that while transformation involves many unknown factors, the forthcoming change will bring overall positive results. By showing team members how they will benefit from a change, leaders can overcome resistance and encourage their employees to support the initiative.

Freezing of Behaviors
In Lewis’ Change management model, change is broken into three steps: freezing, changing, and refreezing.

In the first phase of organizational transformation, the “unfreezing” process will occur. This involves recognizing one’s need for change and defining new behaviors that replace the former methods and practices. During this very fluid phase, team members and leaders identify and share data that supports a need for change.

Phase Two: Facilitate Adjustment

After strategically managing resistance to change, the next phase in achieving organizational transformation is facilitating the adjustment period. During this phase, team members are no longer actively resisting transformation but still need time to adjust to the changes the new initiative brings.

In the adjustment period, changes are discussed in detail, and team members are invited to provide criticism and feedback. This phase allows team members to personalize the change as they recognize their individual roles in achieving organizational transformation. In a successful adjustment phase, every team member is aligned with the necessary actions for the next phase: acceptance.

Changing

Within the adjustment phase of organizational transformation, team leaders will actively change their old habits. At this time, all stakeholders work to replace undesired behaviors with desired ones.

Phase Three: Foster Acceptance

In phase three of the organizational transformation timeline, you’ll lead your team into the acceptance phase with a solid vision and strategy for sustaining the changes over time.

Refreezing

In the foster acceptance phase, refreezing occurs when changes are stabilized and become the new normal. As the organizational transformation nears completion, team members are in the best position to cement these changes by ensuring a legacy of growth.

Phase Four: Ensure Consistency

The fourth phase of organizational transformation establishes consistent and sustainable growth. Consistency is a direct result of repeatable actions from strategic processes, intentional routines, and innovative practices that allow each team member to enact changes that carry into the future continuously.

Emotions at Work

A clear strategy for long-term change is only a roadmap to organizational transformation. After setting the stage for change to take place, leaders must engage in the emotional work of transformation.

Change takes emotional labor, requiring an environment that is uniquely attuned to address employees’ emotional needs. In the workplace, emotions can be an accelerator for transformation. To engage emotions in the most effective way, leaders can create conditions that ensure psychological safety.

Research shows that to solidify organizational transformation, we must mitigate emotional harm and, in doing so, foster emotional commitment from team members. While emotional harm isn’t tangible, it presents itself in certain ways that can create anxiety, fear, and similar negative responses in employees. Essentially, working to facilitate positive experiences alongside potentially negative emotions is the key to harnessing a safe space for transformation. Leaders that are able to manage the effects of stress successfully can transform a high-pressure environment into a space for high performance.

Sonja Kresojevic, the founder of Spinnaker Co. and a proponent of using agile principles for organizational change, firmly believes that true transformation is a product of an empowered organization. According to Kresojevic, the more we humanize change through emotional labor and healing initiatives, the more we are able to influence others and start shifting organizations in the direction of transformation.

Leaders can promote healing and psychological safety by allowing employees to share their thoughts and criticisms freely and without retribution. With an increase in support and emotional safety, your team will be ripe for organizational transformation.

An Engagement of Consciousness

An organization’s penchant for the unknown is essential in driving organizational transformation. In your efforts to humanize change management, it’s crucial to understand and accept human nature’s role in experiencing change. In understanding our natural inclinations toward risk aversion in the face of change, we can work to replace this avoidance of uncertainty with curiosity, vulnerability, and authenticity in the workplace. This approach to change management will transform the way we work, the risks we take, and our willingness to accept change.

Much of organizational transformation is dependent on accepting uncertainty: that the future is unclear and we don’t have all the answers. The real secret to driving organizational transformation is empowering people to develop and accept new ideas on their own. Managing the uncertainty of organizational transformation takes time, allowing for the unfreezing, changing, and refreezing process to take place as stakeholders consider their options.

Rob Evans, Master Coach of Collaboration and Transformation Designer, shares that giving people a chance to court the unknown, is essential for change acceptance as it allows new ideas to seep in and take hold.

Practicing patience during the change management process allows for “engagement in the full consciousness,” in which leaders can kickstart the organizational transformation timeline and encourage employees to buy into the change. By pairing deliberate strategy with time for authentic employee engagement, radical transformation is an inevitability.

Ready to start the journey to organizational transformation? Consider a new approach to the employee experience. Voltage Control can help you and your team define the best path for your organization’s transformation.

This article originally appeared at VoltageControl.com

Image credit: Pixabay

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Back to Basics: The Innovation Alphabet

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Back to Basics: The Innovation Alphabet

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You know ALL the innovation tools and frameworks:

Design Thinking
Lean Startup
Disruptive Innovation

But knowing and doing are two different things. When I first learned Jobs to be Done, it felt painfully obvious, exactly like the customer research I did for five years at P&G. Then I had to do it (conduct a Jobs to be Done interview), and it was difficult (ok, it was a disaster).

And teaching others to do it is a third entirely different thing. Because by the time you have the skills and expertise to teach others, you’ve forgotten what it was like to start from the beginning.

It’s easy to forget that before you can read a sentence, you must know how to read a word. Before you can read a word, you must recognize a letter.

So let’s go back to basics. Back before the methodologies. Before the frameworks. Before the theories. Let’s go back to the letters and words that are Innovation’s essence.

Let’s go back to the Innovation Alphabet.

Assumptions, every innovation has them, and every innovator tests them to reduce risk

Brainstorming, a great way to get lots of ideas and maybe even some new ones

Customers, the people we innovate for

Disruptive Innovation, cheaper, lower quality products that appeal to non-consumers

Experiments, how you test assumptions and reduce risk

Fun, what innovation should be

Hope, it springs eternal in the heart of every innovator

Ideas, where most innovations start

Jobs to be Done, the problems people have/the progress they want to make (and the hill I will die on)

Leadership, the most crucial element in innovation (and often the biggest barrier)

Mistakes, how we learn, grow, and make progress

No, the start of a conversation, not the end

Opportunities, a nice term for “problem”

Problems, where all innovations should start

Quiet, what we sometimes need to think big and create something new

Team, how innovation gets done

Uncomfortable, what innovation should make you (especially if you’re a senior executive)

whY, the one question you can never ask enough

Zzzz, what you finally get to do when you’ve changed the world

As you can see, some letters still need words. What should they be?

Are there better words for some letters?

Let me know in the comments!

Image credit: Unsplash

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Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

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After a week of torrid voting and much passionate support, along with a lot of gut-wrenching consideration and jostling during the judging round, I am proud to announce your Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022:

Robyn Bolton
Robyn M. Bolton works with leaders of mid and large sized companies to use innovation to repeatably and sustainably grow their businesses.

Janet Sernack
Janet Sernack is the Founder and CEO of ImagineNation™ which provides innovation consulting services to help organizations adapt, innovate and grow through disruption by challenging businesses to be, think and act differently to co-create a world where people matter & innovation is the norm.

Greg Satell
Greg Satell is a popular speaker and consultant. His first book, Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age, was selected as one of the best business books in 2017. Follow his blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @Digital Tonto.

Mike Shipulski
Mike Shipulski brings together people, culture, and tools to change engineering behavior. He writes daily on Twitter as @MikeShipulski and weekly on his blog Shipulski On Design.

Braden Kelley
Braden Kelley is a Human-Centered Experience, Innovation and Transformation consultant at HCL Technologies, a popular innovation speaker, workshop leader, and creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons and Charting Change from Palgrave Macmillan. Follow him on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

Teresa Spangler
Teresa Spangler is the CEO of PlazaBridge Group has been a driving force behind innovation and growth for more than 30 years. Today, she wears multiple hats as a social entrepreneur, innovation expert, growth strategist, author and speaker (not to mention mother, wife, band-leader and so much more). She is especially passionate about helping CEOs understand and value the role human capital plays in innovation, and the impact that innovation has on humanity; in our ever-increasing artificial/cyber world.

Douglas Ferguson
Douglas Ferguson is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist. He is the founder and president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based change agency that helps enterprises spark, accelerate, and sustain innovation. He specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision making and design inspired facilitation techniques.

John Bessant
John Bessant has been active in research, teaching, and consulting in technology and innovation management for over 25 years. Today, he is Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Research Director, at Exeter University. In 2003, he was awarded a Fellowship with the Advanced Institute for Management Research and was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy of Management. He has acted as advisor to various national governments and international bodies including the United Nations, The World Bank, and the OECD. John has authored many books including Managing innovation and High Involvement Innovation (Wiley). Follow @johnbessant

Shep Hyken
Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker, and New York Times, bestselling business author. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs, go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

Pete Foley
A twenty-five year Procter & Gamble veteran, Pete has spent the last 8+ years applying insights from psychology and behavioral science to innovation, product design, and brand communication. He spent 17 years as a serial innovator, creating novel products, perfume delivery systems, cleaning technologies, devices and many other consumer-centric innovations, resulting in well over 100 granted or published patents. Find him at pete.mindmatters@gmail.com

Geoffrey A. Moore
Geoffrey A. Moore is an author, speaker and business advisor to many of the leading companies in the high-tech sector, including Cisco, Cognizant, Compuware, HP, Microsoft, SAP, and Yahoo! Best known for Crossing the Chasm and Zone to Win with the latest book being The Infinite Staircase. Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute

Soren Kaplan
Soren Kaplan is the bestselling and award-winning author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an affiliated professor at USC’s Center for Effective Organizations, a former corporate executive, and a co-founder of UpBOARD. He has been recognized by the Thinkers50 as one of the world’s top keynote speakers and thought leaders in business strategy and innovation.

Steve Blank
Steve Blank is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford and Senior Fellow for Innovation at Columbia University. He has been described as the Father of Modern Entrepreneurship, credited with launching the Lean Startup movement that changed how startups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught; how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate.

Arlen Meyers
Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, an instructor at the University of Colorado-Denver Business School and cofounding President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs at www.sopenet.org. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ameyers/

Jesse Nieminen
Jesse Nieminen is the Co-founder and Chairman at Viima, the best way to collect and develop ideas. Viima’s innovation management software is already loved by thousands of organizations all the way to the Global Fortune 500. He’s passionate about helping leaders drive innovation in their organizations and frequently writes on the topic, usually in Viima’s blog.

Alain Thys
As an experience architect, Alain helps leaders craft customer, employee and shareholder experiences for profit, reinvention and transformation. He does this through his personal consultancy Alain Thys & Co as well as the transformative venture studio Agents of A.W.E. Together with his teams, Alain has influenced the experience of over 500 million customers and 350,000 employees. Follow his blog or connect on Linkedin.

David Burkus
Dr. David Burkus is an organizational psychologist and best-selling author. Recognized as one of the world’s leading business thinkers, his forward-thinking ideas and books are helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. David is the author of five books about business and leadership and he’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and more. A former business school professor turned sought-after international speaker, he’s worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries.

Diana Porumboiu
Diana heads marketing at Viima, the most widely used and highest rated innovation management software in the world, and has a passion for innovation, and for genuine, valuable content that creates long-lasting impact. Her combination of creativity, strategic thinking and curiosity has helped organisations grow their online presence through strategic campaigns, community management and engaging content.

Art Inteligencia
Art Inteligencia is the lead futurist at Inteligencia Ltd. He is passionate about content creation and thinks about it as more science than art. Art travels the world at the speed of light, over mountains and under oceans. His favorite numbers are one and zero.

Howard Tiersky
Howard Tiersky is an inspiring and passionate speaker, the Founder and CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, innovation consultant, serial entrepreneur, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance. IDG named him one of the “10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today”, and Enterprise Management 360 named Howard “One of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers That Will Change Your World.”

Paul Sloane
Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader and editor of A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing, both published by Kogan-Page.

Bruce Fairley
Bruce Fairley is the CEO and Founder of The Narrative Group, a firm dedicated to helping C-Suite executives build enterprise value. Through smart, human-powered digital transformation, Bruce optimizes the business-technology relationship. His innovative profit over pitfalls approach and customized programs are part of Bruce’s mission to build sustainable ‘best-future’ outcomes for visionary leaders. Having spearheaded large scale change initiatives across four continents, he and his skilled, diverse team elevate process, culture, and the bottom line for medium to large firms worldwide.

Patricia Salamone
Patricia Salamone is a career strategist having worked across the financial services, CPG, media and telecom sectors – seeking resonance with every problem she is hired to solve. Patricia sees innovation through the lens of human need, framing what is to be solved not through the problem at hand, but rather the mystery to be unraveled. Patricia is currently an Account Strategist at Gongos, Inc.

Dainora Jociute
Dainora (a.k.a. Dee) creates customer-centric content at Viima. Viima is the most widely used and highest rated innovation management software in the world. Passionate about environmental issues, Dee writes about sustainable innovation hoping to save the world – one article at the time.

Dean and Linda Anderson
Dr. Dean Anderson and Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson lead BeingFirst, a consultancy focused on educating the marketplace about what’s possible in personal, organizational and community transformation and how to achieve them. Each has been advising clients and training professionals for more than 40 years.

Brian Miller
Brian Miller is the senior VP, strategic development, at BMNT Inc., an internationally recognized innovation consultancy and early-stage enterprise accelerator that is changing the future of public service innovation.

Phil McKinney
Phil McKinney is the Author of “Beyond The Obvious”, Host of the Killer Innovations Podcast and Syndicated Radio Show, a Keynote Speaker, President & CEO CableLabs and an Innovation Mentor and Coach.

Tom Stafford
Tom Stafford studies learning and decision making. His main focus is the movement system – the idea being that if we can understand the intelligence of simple actions we will have an excellent handle on intelligence more generally. His research looks at simple decision making, and simple skill learning, using measures of behaviour informed by the computational, robotics and neuroscience work done in the wider group.

Ralph Christian Ohr
Dr. Ralph-Christian Ohr has extensive experience in product/innovation management for international technology-based companies. His particular interest is targeted at the intersection of organizational and human innovation capabilities. You can follow him on Twitter @Ralph_Ohr.

Jeffrey Phillips
Jeffrey Phillips has over 15 years of experience leading innovation in Fortune 500 companies, federal government agencies and non-profits. He is experienced in innovation strategy, defining and implementing front end processes, tools and teams and leading innovation projects. He is the author of Relentless Innovation and OutManeuver. Jeffrey writes the popular Innovate on Purpose blog. Follow him @ovoinnovation

Shilpi Kumar
Shilpi Kumar an inquisitive researcher, designer, strategist and an educator with over 15 years of experience, who truly believes that we can design a better world by understanding human behavior. I work with organizations to identify strategic opportunities and offer user-centric solutions.

Robert B Tucker
Robert B. Tucker is the President of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group. He is a speaker, seminar leader and an expert in the management of innovation and assisting companies in accelerating ideas to market.

Norbert Majerus and George Taninecz
Norbert Majerus is a popular keynote speaker and consultant. His latest book, Winning Innovation – How Innovation Excellence Propels an Industry Icon Toward Sustained Prosperity, is available now. Follow him on LinkedIn or visit leandriveninnovation.com. For more than 20 years, George, as president of George Taninecz Inc., has helped executives publish award-winning books that illustrate applications of lean thinking. He also supports companies and associations with white papers, articles, and case studies on the deployment of lean in manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries.

Farnham Street
Farnham Street focuses on helping you master the best of what other people have already figured out.

Scott Anthony
Scott Anthony is a strategic advisor, writer and speaker on topics of growth and innovation. He has been based in Singapore since 2010, and currently serves at the Managing Director of Innosight’s Asia-Pacific operations.

Anthony Mills
Anthony Mills is the Founder & CEO of Legacy Innovation Group (www.legacyinnova.com), a world-leading strategic innovation consulting firm working with organizations all over the world. Anthony is also the Executive Director of GInI – Global Innovation Institute (www.gini.org), the world’s foremost certification, accreditation, and membership organization in the field of innovation. Anthony has advised leaders from around the world on how to successfully drive long-term growth and resilience through new innovation. Learn more at www.anthonymills.com. Anthony can be reached directly at anthony@anthonymills.com.

Paul Hobcraft
Paul Hobcraft runs Agility Innovation, an advisory business that stimulates sound innovation practice, researches topics that relate to innovation for the future, as well as aligning innovation to organizations core capabilities. Follow @paul4innovating

Jorge Barba
Jorge Barba is a strategist and entrepreneur, who helps companies build new puzzles using human skills. He is a global Innovation Insurgent and author of the innovation blog www.Game-Changer.net

Nicholas Longrich
Nicholas Longrich is a senior lecturer in evolutionary biology and paleontology at the University of Bath. He is interested in how and why the world is the way it is and studies dinosaurs, among other things—pterosaurs, fossil birds, lizards and snakes.

Rachel Audige
Rachel Audige is an Innovation Architect who helps organisations embed inventive thinking as well as a certified Systematic Inventive Thinking Facilitator, based in Melbourne.

If your favorite didn’t make the list, then next year try to rally more votes for them or convince them to increase the quality and quantity of their contributions.

Our lists from the ten previous years have been tremendously popular, including:

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2015
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2016
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2017
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2018
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2019
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021

Download PDF versions of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020, 2021 and 2022 lists here:

. . .

Happy New Year everyone!

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Why are so many people quitting?

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Why are so many people quitting?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

People don’t leave a company because they feel appreciated.

People don’t leave a company because they feel part of something bigger than themselves.

People don’t leave a company because they see a huge financial upside if they stay.

People don’t leave a company because they are treated with kindness and respect.

People don’t leave a company because they can make less money elsewhere.

People don’t leave a company because they see good career growth in their future.

People don’t leave a company because they know all the key players and know how to get things done.

People don’t leave the company so they can abandon their primary care physician.

People don’t leave a company because their career path is paved with gold.

People don’t leave a company because they are highly engaged in their work.

People don’t leave a company because they want to uproot their kids and start them in a new school.

People don’t leave a company because their boss treats them too well.

People don’t leave a company because their work is meaningful.

People don’t leave a company because their coworkers treat them with respect.

People don’t leave a company because they want to pay the commission on a real estate transaction.

People don’t leave a company because they’ve spent a decade building a Trust Network.

People don’t leave a company because they want their kids to learn to trust a new dentist.

People don’t leave a company because they have a flexible work arrangement.

People don’t leave a company because they feel safe on the job.

People don’t leave a company because they are trusted to use their judgment.

People don’t leave the company because they want the joy that comes from rolling over their 401k.

People don’t leave a company when they have the tools and resources to get the work done.

People don’t leave a company when their workload is in line with their capacity to get it done.

People don’t leave a company when they feel valued.

People don’t leave a company so they can learn a whole new medical benefits plan.

People don’t leave a job because they get to do the work the way they think it should be done.

So, I ask you, why are people leaving your company?

Image credit: Pexels

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Measuring and Improving Your Capacity for Change

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The Adaptability Quotient (AQ)

Measuring and Improving Your Capacity for Change

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the 20th century, Intelligence Quotient (IQ) reigned supreme. In the early 21st century, Emotional Quotient (EQ) became the recognized differentiator for effective leadership. Today, in a world defined by exponential technology, global volatility, and non-stop disruption, a new measure has emerged as the most critical predictor of both individual and organizational success: the Adaptability Quotient (AQ).

AQ is the measure of an individual’s or organization’s capacity to recognize, navigate, and thrive in an environment of constant change. It is not simply about coping with change; it is about the willingness and ability to unlearn, pivot, and proactively seek new ways of operating when old competencies lose relevance. The leaders and organizations that master AQ will be the ones who survive and become the disruptors.

Why AQ Trumps IQ and EQ in Volatility

IQ and EQ are necessary, but they are insufficient for sustained success in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world. A brilliant strategist (High IQ) may cling to an outdated business model because their knowledge base is too rigid. An emotionally intelligent leader (High EQ) may soothe their team’s anxiety, but fail to push them to take the necessary risk of abandoning a comfortable process.

AQ is the bridge between knowing and doing. It is the ability to integrate intellectual understanding (IQ) with social awareness (EQ) to execute a radical pivot. It moves the human system from a state of resistance to a state of readiness. We must start treating AQ not as a soft skill, but as a core strategic asset that can be measured, trained, and cultivated.

The Three Pillars of Organizational AQ

For an organization, AQ is an expression of its collective culture and structural design. We can break it down into three core components:

Cognitive Agility (The Mental Pivot):
This is the organizational ability to unlearn rapidly. It involves questioning deeply held assumptions and embracing ambiguity. Does your organization view variance as a problem to be fixed, or as a signal of market change to be investigated? A high AQ organization actively solicits perspectives that contradict the prevailing narrative.
Emotional Resilience (The Cultural Buffer):
This is the organizational capacity to process the anxiety and fear that accompanies change without collapsing into inertia. Leaders with high individual AQ create psychological safety that allows teams to fail, learn, and try again quickly. This resilience transforms resistance into energy for experimentation.
Execution Velocity (The Structural Fluidity):
This is the speed at which the organization can implement a new strategy or product. High AQ requires structural changes: flattened hierarchies, modular organizational units, and decentralized decision-making (empowering teams at the edge). A great idea is useless if it takes eighteen months and five committees to approve.

Case Study 1: The Media Company’s Structural Pivot for Survival

Challenge: The Digital Ad Revenue Cliff

A major publishing house was built on print and traditional digital advertising. When programmatic advertising began to commoditize their core revenue stream, leadership faced massive cognitive dissonance and internal resistance to changing their successful model.

AQ Intervention (Success):

The leadership team implemented a high-AQ pivot. They mandated that 50% of the entire newsroom and sales staff must be cross-trained in data-driven subscription modeling (Cognitive Agility). Crucially, they separated the new ‘Subscription Revenue Unit’ into a fully autonomous internal startup, giving the lead intrapreneurs full control over budget and rapid hiring (Execution Velocity). The public acknowledgment of the financial threat (addressing Emotional Resilience) gave employees permission to abandon the past. This structural separation allowed the new unit to develop a profitable subscription business in 18 months, effectively securing the company’s future by pivoting before the crisis became terminal.

Measuring Your Organization’s AQ

While a precise, standardized number is still emerging, you can measure your organization’s AQ through three critical proxies:

Time-to-Pivot: How long does it take your company to kill a failing project or fully launch a new, major strategic direction after the initial market signal is received? Lower is better.
Unlearning Index: What percentage of the annual training budget is dedicated to acquiring new skills versus reinforcing old skills? How many legacy processes were officially retired last year?
Experimentation Rate: What is the ratio of high-risk, low-budget market experiments to high-budget, safe-bet initiatives? High AQ companies embrace frequent, small bets.

Case Study 2: The Healthcare Provider’s Resilience Test

Challenge: Rapid, Unforeseen Regulatory and Technological Change

A regional healthcare network struggled to integrate mandatory new EHR (Electronic Health Record) systems while simultaneously pivoting to telemedicine during a crisis. Staff resistance was crippling both initiatives due to anxiety and workflow overload.

AQ Intervention (Success):

The leadership recognized the exhaustion and fear. Instead of simply pushing mandates, they invested heavily in Emotional Resilience. They established a system of “Change Huddles” — short, daily, mandatory forums where frontline staff could voice their specific process frustrations with a promise that the administration would address the top three friction points within 48 hours. This structural feedback loop demonstrated genuine care (Emotional Resilience) and immediately tackled bureaucratic bottlenecks (Execution Velocity). By giving staff a sense of agency and responsiveness, the organization maintained high morale and successfully implemented both the EHR and telemedicine system faster than comparable networks, proving that human capacity for change is the limiting factor, not the technology.

Conclusion: The Architect of Adaptability

In the era of continuous transformation, the Adaptability Quotient is not optional; it is the fundamental measure of competitive relevance. Leaders must evolve from managers of stability to Architects of Adaptability. This shift demands that we prioritize fluid structure over rigid hierarchy, psychological safety over command-and-control, and continuous unlearning over the comfort of expertise.

“IQ gets you hired, EQ helps you manage, but AQ determines your survival. The future belongs not to the smartest, but to the most adaptive.” — Braden Kelley

The time to raise your AQ is now. Your first step: Identify the single biggest bureaucratic obstacle that prevents your teams from executing a pivot in less than 90 days, and commit to eliminating it entirely.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: 1 of 950+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

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3 Steps to a Truly Terrific Innovation Team

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3 Steps to a Truly Terrific Innovation Team

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“What had a bigger impact on the project? The process you introduced or the people on the team?”

As much as I wanted to give all the credit to my brilliant process, I had to tell the truth.

“People. It’s always people.”

The right people doing the right work in the right way at the right time can do incredible, even impossible, things. But replace any “right” in the previous sentence, and even the smallest things can feel impossible. A process can increase the odds of doing the right work in the right way, but it’s no guarantee. It’s powerless in the hands of the wrong people.

But how do you assemble the right group of people? Start with the 3 Ts.

Type of Innovation

We’re all guilty of using ‘innovation’ to describe anything that is even a little bit new and different. And we’ve probably all been punished for it.

Finding the right people for innovation start with defining what type of innovation they will work on:

Incremental: updating/modifying existing offerings that serve existing customers

Adjacent: creating new offerings for existing customers OR re-positioning existing offerings to serve new customers

Radical: new offerings or business models for new customers

Different innovation types require teams to grapple with different levels of ambiguity and uncertainty. Teams working on incremental innovations face low levels of ambiguity because they are modifying something that already exists, and they have relative certainty around cause and effect. However, teams working on radical innovations spend months grappling with ambiguity, certain only that they don’t know what they don’t know.

Time to launch

Regardless of the type of innovation, each innovation goes through roughly the same four steps:

Discover a problem to be solved
Design solutions
Develop and test prototypes
Launch and measure

The time allotted to work through all four steps determines the pace of the team’s work and, more importantly, how stakeholders make decisions. For example, the more time you have between the project start and the expected launch, the more time you have to explore, play, create, experiment, and gather robust data to inform decisions. But if you’re expected to go from project start to project launch in a year or less, you need to work quickly and make decisions based on available (rather than ideal) data.

Tasks to accomplish

Within each step of the innovation process are different tasks, and different people have different abilities and comfort levels with each. This is why there is growing evidence that experience in the phase of work is more important than industry or functional expertise for startups.

There are similar data for corporate innovators. In a study of over 100,000 people, researchers identified the type and prevalence of four types of innovators every organization needs:

Generators (17% of the sample): Find new problems and ideate based on their own experience.

Conceptualizers (19%): Define the problem and understand it through abstract analysis, most comfortable in early phases of innovation (e.g., Discover and Design)

Implementers (41%): Put solutions to work through experiments and adjustments, most comfortable in later stages of innovation (Develop and Launch)

Optimizers (23%): Systematically examine all alternatives to implement the best possible solution

Generators and Conceptualizers are most comfortable in the early stages of innovation (i.e., Discover and Design). Implementers and Optimizers are most comfortable in the later stages (e.g., Develop and Launch). The challenge for companies is that only 36% of employees fall into one of those two categories, and most tend to be senior managers and executives.

Taking Action

Putting high performers on innovation teams is tempting, and top talent often perceives such assignments as essential to promotion. But no one enjoys or benefits when the work they’re doing isn’t the work they’re good at. Instead, take time to work through the 3Ts, and you’ll assemble a truly terrific innovation team.

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Why is it important to innovate in 2023?

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Why is it important to innovate in 2023?

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

At ImagineNation™ we have just celebrated 10 years as a global innovation consultancy, learning, and coaching company. During this time, we’ve identified some of the common patterns that people demonstrate as a result of feeling uncomfortable, frozen, inert, stubborn, and confused and as a result, are resistant to innovation. Where many organizations, teams, and leaders appear to walk backward as if they are sleepwalking through this time in their lives.

At the same time, we know that innovation is transformational, and why, at this moment in time, it is more important than ever to create, invent and innovate. We also know that is crucial to be better balanced, resilient, and adaptive to grow and flow, survive and thrive, in today’s chaotic BANI environment. We also know exactly what transformative innovation involves, and how to enable and equip people to connect and collaborate in new ways to effect constructive and sustainable change in a world of unknowns.

Innovation is, in fact, the water of life!

Shaping the next normal

According to a recent article by McKinsey and Co “The future is not what it used to be: Thoughts on the shape of the next normal” the coronavirus crisis is a “world-changing event” which is forcing both the pace and scale of workplace innovation.

Stating that businesses are forced to do more with less and that many are finding better, simpler, less expensive, and faster ways to operate. Describing how innovative health systems, through necessity, constraints, and adversity have exploited this moment in time, to innovate:

“The urgency of addressing COVID-19 has also led to innovations in biotech, vaccine development, and the regulatory regimes that govern drug development so that treatments can be approved and tried faster. In many countries, health systems have been hard to reform; this crisis has made the difficulty much easier to achieve. The result should be a more resilient, responsive, and effective health system”.

We all know that it is impossible to know what will happen in the future and yet, that it is possible to consider and learn from the lessons of the past, both distant and recent. On that basis, it’s crucial to take time out, be hopeful, and positive, and think optimistically about the future. To be proactive and innovate to shape the kind of future we all wish to have, through making constructive and sustainable changes, that ultimately contribute to the common good.

Strategically deciding to innovate

Strategically deciding to innovate, is the first, mandatory, powerful, and impactful lever organizations, teams, leaders, and individuals can pull to effect constructive and sustainable change that enables people to execute and deliver real benefits:

Deal with, and find solutions to a world full of complex and competing social, civic, and political problems that are hard to solve and aren’t going away.
Better adapt, respond to, and be agile in fast-changing circumstances, uncertainty, instability, and to random and unexpected Black Swan events, like the global Covid-19 Pandemic and the Russian-Ukraine war.
Become human-centric to help people recover and manage their transition through the challenges of the global pandemic and enable them to exploit the range of accelerating technological advances in the digital age.
Develop corporate responsibility, sustainability, diversity, and inclusion strategies that are practical and can work and really deliver on their promises.
Compete by applying and experimenting with lean and agile start-up methodologies and take advantage of the opportunities and possibilities of the global entrepreneurship movement’s new models for leadership, collaboration, and experimentation.
Align to the range of changing workplace dynamics and trends, resulting from the pandemic, including WFH, the “soft resignation” and the demands of a hybrid workplace.
Shift individual, group, and collective consciousness towards collaboration and experimentation in ways that rebuild the trust that has been lost through incompetence, corruption, greed, and dishonesty.
Respond creatively to meet the increasingly diverse range of customer expectations and choices being made around value.

Important to innovate – three elements

To take advantage of living in a globalized world, where we are interconnected through technologies and values and where we have an interrelated structure of reality, we can:

Accept that innovation-led adaptation and growth are absolutely critical and develop targets and a willingness to invest in new scalable business models, achieve fast and effective developments, and launch processes to reflect these.
Invest in a coherent, time-risk balanced portfolio of initiatives and provide the resources to deliver them, at scale, strategically, to innovate to the right market, at the right price, at the right time, and through the most effective channels.
Adopt an ecosystem approach to adapt and grow by creating and capitalizing on both internal and external networks, and stakeholder management through developing workforce ecosystems – a structure that consists of interdependent actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to pursue both individual and collective goals.

Problem-solving, cultural change, and improving people’s lives

It is more important than ever to make innovation transformational, so that it delivers constructive, ethical, and sustainable change, by building on three critical successful abilities:

Seeing and sensing the real systemic problem or breakthrough opportunity:

What problem are we solving? And is there a customer who wants to pay to have that problem solved?
What problem are we solving for the customer? Who needs this?
What are the possibilities and opportunities available to us? And is there a customer who wants to pay to have this opportunity realized?
What are some of our strengths? What are some of the things we are doing well that we can build upon or exploit?

Shifting the culture:

Where are we today? Where do we want to be in the future?
What are our prevailing mindsets? How can we measure and contextualize their impact? What mindsets might we embrace to adapt and grow in an uncertain world?
How ready and receptive are we to really embrace change?
What do we need to unlearn and relearn to ensure our people are open-minded, hearted, and willed to embody and enact the desired change?
How engaged and passionate are our people in problem-solving?
How might we harness our people’s collective intelligence to solve problems and realize opportunities?

Aligning technologies, processes, artifacts, and behaviors as a holistic system:

What is our appetite for risk? How do we define risk in our context?
What type of innovation do we strategically want to plan for and engage in?
What old legacy technologies no longer serve your needs? What new technologies might you be willing to invest in for the future?
What disciplines are in place to ensure that people have a common understanding of the key processes and comply with managing them?
How are we ensuring that everyone is motivated and skilled to innovate?
How are we ensuring that people are acknowledged, rewarded, and organized to repeatedly innovate?
What are the key mindsets and behaviours that enable and equip people to embody and embrace repeatedly innovate and design solutions with the end customer in mind?

Become an adaptive and resilient difference maker

As many of us are aware, Toys R Us and Blockbuster were huge companies, that enjoyed massive success; however, this was all brought to an end due to their failure to innovate.

We can all avoid this fate by choosing to innovate and create constructive and sustainable change through:

Accepting and acknowledging that to survive and thrive in a BANI world, where necessity is still the mother of all invention, and the urgency to do this is more important than ever.
Identifying, understanding, and dealing with our own resistance to innovation, safely and proactively, and transforming resistance into resilience, to be adaptive and safely innovate.
Understanding where we are today and then assessing the gap to what we want to be in the future, and mitigating the risks of both closing the gap and leaving the gap wide open.
Enabling leaders, teams, and individuals to connect, explore, discover and navigate new ways of approaching and delivering commercially viable, value-adding, constructive and sustainable change, and outcomes.
Leveraging innovation to transform an organization, a business, the way people lead and team, to improve the quality of people’s lives in ways they appreciate and cherish.

“In order to transcend mere adequacy and make a mark of creative transcendence on the world, organizations need to stop walking backward, following a trail that has already been blazed. The motto of the British Special Air Service is, “Who dares, wins.” It is time for businesses to be bold, inspired, and look to the horizon. The next great innovation is out there. Will you have the guts to create it?”

Will you make a fundamental choice to innovate?

According to McKinsey and Co “The point is that where the world lands is a matter of choice – of countless decisions to be made by individuals, companies, governments, and institutions”.

Will you make a fundamental choice to use the current crisis to lead to a burst of innovation, productivity, resilience, and exploration in 2023, to take advantage of our connected world to create the constructive and sustainable changes we all want to have?

Or will you continue walking backward and sleepwalking through life, and fail to take advantage of this moment in time, to innovate, and continue life with the same thinking that is causing the current range of results, that many of us don’t want to have?

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our collective, learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, is a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, starting Tuesday, February 7, 2023.

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

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Five Steps to Digital Transformation Success

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Five Steps to Digital Transformation Success

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Digital transformation is increasingly becoming an integral part of businesses in the modern age, as companies seek to leverage technology to gain a competitive edge. But, while the potential benefits of digital transformation are tantalizing, it’s not always easy to make the transition. To ensure a successful digital transformation, here are five key steps you should consider.

1. Understand Your Goals

Before you begin your digital transformation, it’s important to understand your goals. What do you want to achieve with your digital transformation? Do you want to improve customer service, create a more efficient process for managing data, or something else entirely? Being clear on your goals will help you to focus your efforts and ensure you’re making the most of your digital transformation.

2. Develop a Strategy

Once you’ve established your goals, you’ll need to develop a strategy for achieving them. What technologies and processes will you need to implement? What resources and personnel will you need to make it happen? Having a clear strategy will help to ensure success, as you’ll have a roadmap for getting from A to B.

3. Focus on the Customer Experience

Digital transformation should always be focused on the customer experience. How will the changes you’re making improve the customer experience? Will they make it easier to purchase products or services? Will they make it faster to access customer service? By focusing on the customer experience, you can ensure your digital transformation is successful.

4. Invest in Technology and Resources

Digital transformation is an investment, and you’ll need to invest in the right technologies and resources to make it successful. This could include investing in new software, hardware, personnel, and training. While these investments may be costly, they’re necessary in order to ensure the success of your digital transformation.

5. Plan for Change

Finally, it’s important to plan for change. Digital transformation can be disruptive to your business, so it’s important to plan for the changes and prepare your team for the transition. This could involve training staff on new technologies, creating a communication plan to keep everyone in the loop, and establishing processes for dealing with any issues that may arise.

Digital transformation can be a daunting process, but it can also be incredibly rewarding. By following these five key steps, you can ensure your digital transformation is successful and that your business can reap the rewards.

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The Anticipatory Leader

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Shifting from Reacting to Predicting Disruption

The Anticipatory Leader

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

The vast majority of organizational leadership today operates in a state of perpetual reaction. We manage by dashboard, optimize by quarterly report, and respond to crises only after they hit the headlines. This is the Victim Mindset of Leadership — believing that external disruption is an unavoidable, random event that must be absorbed. While this reactive approach might ensure short-term stability, it guarantees long-term decline.

In a world defined by exponential technology and complex global systems, the future belongs to the Anticipatory Leader. This is not about crystal balls or psychic predictions; it is a systematic, Human-Centered approach to sensing and preparing for future shifts before they become crises. It is the core capability that allows an organization to become the disruptor, rather than the disrupted. This shift requires trading the comfortable illusion of stability for the strategic discomfort of informed foresight.

The Three Domains of Anticipatory Leadership

Anticipation is built on a structured commitment to looking beyond the immediate horizon. It moves the leader from the transactional (managing today) to the transformational (designing tomorrow) across three key domains:

Sensing and Signal Detection (The ‘Where’):
This involves actively seeking weak signals — small, early indicators of massive change that are often dismissed as fringe ideas or anomalies. Reactive leaders only see trends; anticipatory leaders see inflection points. This means looking beyond industry trade journals into adjacent industries, geopolitical shifts, and emerging scientific research. It requires building diverse networks outside the company walls.
Scenario Mapping and Future Prototyping (The ‘What If’):
Anticipatory leaders refuse to plan for just one future. They create three to five plausible future scenarios based on their detected signals. These scenarios aren’t forecasts; they are mental models used to stress-test current strategies. Crucially, they use these scenarios to engage in Future Prototyping — building Minimum Viable Solutions (MVS) for future needs today, before the market demands them.
Building Organizational Adaptability (The ‘How’):
The best prediction is useless if the organization cannot pivot quickly. Anticipatory leadership requires embedding Agility and Resilience across the entire enterprise. This means flattening hierarchies, democratizing decision-making (empowering the edge), and constantly practicing unlearning — discarding outdated assumptions about the market, the customer, and the business model. This organizational fluidity is the ultimate defense against disruption.

Case Study 1: The Retail Giant and the E-Commerce Threat (The Cost of Reaction)

Challenge: The Slow Decline of Brick-and-Mortar Revenue

A massive, decades-old general merchandise retailer saw the emergence of e-commerce in the late 1990s not as a threat, but as a niche for booksellers. Their leadership was reactive, focused only on optimizing the square footage of their existing stores.

Anticipatory Leadership Intervention (Failure):

The retailer failed to detect the crucial weak signal: the shift in consumer expectations toward convenience and limitless choice. They ran a single, optimistic scenario: “Online sales will remain under 5% of total retail.” This reductionist view meant they did not prototype alternative logistics models (e.g., last-mile delivery, in-store pickup) until their market share began a terminal decline. Their leadership waited until the disruption was a crisis before reacting, resulting in an expensive, years-long struggle to catch up and a permanent loss of market leadership. The cost of reaction is always exponentially higher than the investment in anticipation.

The Human-Centered Imperative of Foresight

Anticipatory Leadership is inherently Human-Centered. It recognizes that the future is not found in spreadsheets alone; it’s found in the unmet, often un-articulated, needs of humans. By systematically looking for signals in human behavior — how younger generations are spending their time, how environmental awareness is shaping purchasing, or how trust is being fractured by digital life — the leader can predict the behavioral inflection points that drive market change.

Furthermore, leading through foresight mitigates the employee fear of change. When change is announced as a reaction to a competitor’s move, employees feel panicked and betrayed. When change is presented as the execution of a strategy anticipated two years ago, it breeds confidence and a sense of strategic purpose.

Case Study 2: The Software Company and the Open-Source Wave (The Power of Anticipation)

Challenge: The Commoditization of Proprietary Technology

A successful enterprise software company, whose entire business model was based on expensive, proprietary licensing, faced the rising tide of open-source software (OSS) in the early 2000s. The traditional leadership instinct was to view OSS as “low quality” or “non-commercial.”

Anticipatory Leadership Intervention (Success):

A small, empowered foresight team within the company detected a weak signal: the cultural shift among top developers who increasingly valued collaboration and transparency over vendor lock-in. Instead of dismissing OSS, the leadership team mapped two extreme scenarios — one where OSS failed, and one where it became the global standard. They quickly realized the latter was plausible and highly destructive to their core business.

Their action was anticipatory: they made a strategic pivot by quietly investing in and contributing heavily to several key OSS projects, and then repositioned their proprietary product not as a stand-alone license, but as a Premium Service Layer built on top of the open-source infrastructure. This shift transformed them from an expensive vendor into a trusted ecosystem partner, securing a new recurring revenue stream and attracting the very talent their competitors were losing. They predicted the disruption and changed their business model before their revenue plateaued.

Conclusion: Making Anticipation Your Operating System

The time lag between a disruption beginning and it hitting your P&L is shrinking every year. You cannot wait for the data to confirm what common sense and human insight already suggest. The Anticipatory Leader does not fear the future; they design for it.

“Reactive leaders spend their time climbing out of holes. Anticipatory Leaders focus on where to dig the next one. That gap is the difference between survival and sustained market dominance.” — Braden Kelley

Make sensing the future a daily habit, not an annual planning exercise. Your essential first step: Empower your best people to spend 10% of their time focused entirely on weak signals outside your current strategic boundary. This small investment in foresight is the greatest insurance policy you can buy against being disrupted.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

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