Category Archives: Leadership

Problems vs. Solutions vs. Complaints

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Problems vs. Solutions vs. Complaints

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you see a problem, tell someone. But, also, tell them how you’d like to improve things.

Once you see a problem, you have an obligation to seek a solution.

Complaining is telling someone they have a problem but stopping short of offering solutions.

To stop someone from complaining, ask them how they might make the situation better.

Problems are good when people use them as a forcing function to create new offerings.

Problems are bad when people articulate them and then go home early.

Thing is, problems aren’t good or bad. It’s our response that determines their flavor.

If it’s your problem, it can never be our solution.

Sometimes the best solution to a problem is to solve a different one.

Problem-solving is 90% problem definition and 10% getting ready to define the problem.

When people don’t look critically at the situation, there are no problems. And that’s a big problem.

Big problems require big solutions. And that’s why it’s skillful to convert big ones into smaller ones.

Solving the right problem is much more important than solving the biggest problem.

If the team thinks it’s impossible to solve the problem, redefine the problem and solve that one.

You can relabel problems as “opportunities” as long as you remember they’re still problems

When it comes to problem-solving, there is no partial credit. A problem is either solved or it isn’t.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Intrapreneurship 2.0

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Empowering Employees to Be Startup Founders

Intrapreneurship 2.0

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The single biggest threat to a successful, established company is rarely an external competitor; it is the Internal Antibody. This is the organizational immune system that attacks new ideas, citing rigid budget cycles, resource constraints, and ‘the way we’ve always done things.’ This institutionalized resistance is why so many large organizations fail to capitalize on the single greatest source of innovative ideas: their own employees.

Intrapreneurship 1.0 was about suggestion boxes, pitch competitions, and “20% time” — nice initiatives, but often disconnected from the strategic core, quickly defunded, and politically vulnerable. Today, in the age of rapid, complex disruption, we need Intrapreneurship 2.0: a systemic approach that treats internal innovators not as suggestion-givers, but as legitimate Startup Founders with the mandate, resources, and protection needed to scale. This is how you unlock a continuous capability for internal disruption.

The Three Pillars of the Intrapreneurial Operating System

To transition from a siloed corporate structure to a decentralized innovation engine, an organization must build three pillars, transforming its internal operating system to mimic a venture capital firm.

The Seed Funding and Protection Pillar:
The greatest barrier for an intrapreneur is not generating the idea, but navigating bureaucracy. Intrapreneurship 2.0 requires a dedicated, independently governed Internal Venture Fund separate from the traditional P&L and capital expenditure budget. Most importantly, it requires a “safe harbor” — a leadership commitment to shield these projects from the corporate antibodies, protecting the innovator’s career, even if the project fails after a disciplined experiment.
The Governance and Autonomy Pillar:
Intrapreneurs must have high autonomy over their team, budget, and execution methodology. Their reporting structure should be to an impartial “Innovation Review Board” (IRB), modeled after a VC board of directors, not to their traditional department head. This allows them to move with startup speed, pivoting based on market data rather than political consensus or departmental inertia.
The Talent and Rewarding Pillar:
Innovation is a retention strategy. The rewards for successful intrapreneurial ventures must be commensurate with the risk taken. This goes beyond a one-time bonus; it must include genuine equity-like incentives (e.g., profit-sharing on the new business line), career advancement into a new business unit established around the innovation, or formal recognition as a Chief Intrapreneur. This elevates internal innovation from a side project to a viable, exciting career path.

Case Study 1: Transforming Legacy Hardware into a Service Model

Challenge: Stagnant Revenue in a Global Industrial Manufacturer

A multi-billion-dollar industrial equipment company faced declining revenue as its traditional hardware sales became commoditized. The future was in “Equipment-as-a-Service” (EaaS), but the legacy sales force and technology platforms lacked the agility to transition.

Intrapreneurship 2.0 Intervention:

The leadership team sponsored a small, cross-functional team to form a fully-funded internal startup, deliberately naming it to sound external: Synergy Tech Solutions. The team was explicitly tasked with building the EaaS platform and customer experience outside of the main P&L. They were given a two-year budget and full autonomy to choose their cloud infrastructure and agile pricing model. Crucially, a formal Executive Steering Committee acted as their impartial VC board, providing guidance but never vetoing their market experiments. When the new service generated its first $10M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), the core intrapreneurial team was given the option to merge their unit back into the core with significant promotion and profit sharing, effectively transitioning from founders to general managers.

The Anti-Bureaucracy Toolkit

The single greatest tool for the intrapreneur is the ability to say no to corporate overhead. Intrapreneurship 2.0 recognizes that speed is the only currency that matters. Leaders must provide a practical “Anti-Bureaucracy Toolkit” that includes:

Pre-Approved Legal Templates: Quick contracts for small vendors or pilot customers, bypassing the standard six-week legal review.
Shadow IT Access: Permission to use modern, rapid prototyping software (often blocked by corporate IT and security policies) with agreed-upon guardrails.
Fast-Track Procurement: A simplified purchasing card with a higher limit for immediate needs, eliminating cumbersome Purchase Order (PO) processes.

Case Study 2: Solving Internal Talent Drain with an Innovation Marketplace

Challenge: Losing Top Talent to Startups and Internal Siloing

A large technology company suffered from talent drain as its best engineers left to join external startups. Simultaneously, internal talent was siloed and locked into non-strategic maintenance work.

Intrapreneurship 2.0 Intervention:

The company created an Internal Innovation Marketplace, essentially an internal job board for mission-driven, intrapreneurial projects. Any employee with an approved idea could post a “Team Request” for talent. The powerful shift was institutionalizing a formal Talent Mobility Policy that allowed employees to dedicate 100% of their time to an internal startup for a defined period (6-12 months) with a dedicated manager bypass for high-priority projects. This marketplace acted as a decentralized innovation incubator. It gave existing employees the startup experience they craved — ownership, speed, and mission — without having to leave the company. Within 18 months, the company successfully launched four new business lines, and top talent attrition was cut in half, proving that the best retention strategy is often internal disruption.

Conclusion: Scaling the Founder’s Mindset

Intrapreneurship 2.0 is the evolution of innovation culture. It’s not a program; it’s an organizational design decision. It is the recognition that the person closest to the customer pain or the technical opportunity is often a mid-level employee, not an executive.

“If you want to create a culture of continuous innovation, you must stop treating your best ideas as suggestions and start treating your best people as founders. Give them the key to the innovation vault and the mandate to drive change.” — Braden Kelley

The time for hesitant, half-measures is over. Embrace the principles of Intrapreneurship 2.0 to transform your workforce into a legion of nimble, motivated internal entrepreneurs, securing your future through your own capacity for disruption. Your first step: Audit your current innovation budget and separate 10% into a true, autonomous Internal Venture Fund.

For more on this topic I encourage to explore the writings of my friend Braden Kelley, a two-time best-selling author, including Charting Change and Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, and the creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. He helps organizations drive innovation, overcome resistance, and embed continuous change capabilities.

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.

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What the Current Round of Layoffs Tells Us

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What the Current Round of Layoffs Tells Us

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

When layoffs hit one or two companies, you might blame it on management, but when they hit market leader after market leader, you know something structural is afoot. The important thing then is to extract the signal from all the noise. Here is my cut at it.

First of all, it is the digital consumer sector that is under fire—not all of tech. But note that when you click on the Tech Section of any major publication, all you get is consumer tech news. B2C has eclipsed B2B in the public perception of what tech is all about. The downturn may not change this for consumers, but it sure will for investors. B2B tech actually has the opportunity to thrive in a downturn if it focuses on solving urgent problems that have short time to payback.

Second, the digital consumer model has such attractive economics when it is operating at scale that it led to a massive overvaluation of the sector per se. As with prior bubbles in tech, overvaluing is primarily due to extrapolating present growth as perpetual and ignoring global economic and geopolitical downside risks. Downturns simply call this out and demand a recalibration of valuation based on a more balanced mix of positive and negative factors.

Third, when enterprises have hyper-valued market caps, management does everything it can to sustain them, eventually to the point of counterproductive actions driven more by inertia than any sensible investment strategy. Given the peer pressures of investor relations, this is almost impossible to stop, so ultimately we end up where we are, in need of a correction that everyone saw coming, but no one acted upon. And to be fair, guessing when the correction will come is not a winning play. Better to accept the dynamics you have in front of you and then adapt as fast as you can once they change.

Net net, it is time to own the correction, put our houses in order, accept the deflation in stock price, refocus on our core mission, reset our performance metrics, and get back out on the field.

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

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How to Turn Fear into Fuel for Innovation

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The Change Mindset

How to Turn Fear into Fuel for Innovation

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The relentless pace of modern business ensures one constant: Change is mandatory. Yet, the average project failure rate stubbornly hovers around 70%. This failure isn’t technical; it’s human. It’s the result of change-makers ignoring the most fundamental driver of resistance: Fear.

Fear — of the unknown, of losing control, of being exposed as inadequate — is a natural, physiological response to disruption. In the workplace, this fear becomes a powerful, paralyzing force. Our primary goal as innovation and change leaders must therefore be to cultivate a widespread, innate Change Mindset — the ability to not just tolerate organizational anxiety, but to consciously process and convert it into the potent energy required for creative action. This is the bedrock of Braden Kelley’s Human-Centered Change methodology.

Recognizing Resistance as a Vital Signal

When resistance appears, our default managerial response is often to push harder, double-down on communication, or blame culture. This is a mistake. Resistance is not an adversary to be defeated; it is a vital signal — a rich source of insight. The human brain’s threat-detection center, the amygdala, doesn’t distinguish between a saber-toothed tiger and a new organizational chart. It simply signals danger, initiating a “fight or flight” response.

To unlock the Change Mindset, we must move beyond the Adoption Mindset — which focuses on forcing the “what” of the change—to an Engagement Mindset — which focuses on co-creating the “how” and “why.” The goal is to interrupt the fear-to-resistance loop by making the process itself safe.

Three Levers for Cultivating the Change Mindset

A resilient Change Mindset is built on systemic practices that address the three deep human needs for motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose (AMP).

De-Risk Failure and Celebrate Unlearning: The primary fear is often the consequence of failure (public critique, professional setback). Leaders must create a “Failure Budget” where lessons learned are not hidden, but treated as necessary R&D costs. More critically, we must celebrate unlearning — the difficult work of letting go of old, comfortable competencies. The mantra must shift from “Do this perfectly” to “Experiment, learn quickly, and share the failure data.”
Engage the Co-Creation Imperative: No one resists what they help create. The fastest path to mitigating the fear of losing control is to distribute control. Change should not be designed in an ivory tower and then ‘cascaded.’ Involve the end-users — those whose lives will be most impacted — in the design of the new process from the beginning. This shared ownership is the most powerful antidote to resistance.
Translate Fear into a Shared North Star: Fear is paralyzing when it’s personal. It becomes motivating when it’s acknowledged, externalized, and channeled toward a compelling, shared future. The leader’s job is to define the North Star — the purpose that clearly links the pain of change today to a truly meaningful, beneficial outcome tomorrow. This purpose is the sustainable fuel, far more potent than any mandate or bonus.

Case Study 1: The Global Financial Services Firm – Co-Designing Compliance

Challenge: Shifting to Agile in a Risk-Averse Environment

A major financial services firm had to adopt an iterative digital product model, but faced massive cultural resistance. The entrenched fear, particularly from Legal and Compliance teams, was that faster development would inevitably lead to regulatory breaches and career-ending risk.

Intervention:

The firm avoided a traditional mandate. Instead, they created cross-functional “Innovation Pods” that explicitly included key members from Legal and Compliance. Leaders openly validated the regulatory fears. They then empowered these Pods to co-design a new, accelerated compliance process that built real-time, automated regulatory checks directly into the development tools. The mindset shifted from “Compliance is an obstacle” to “Compliance is a co-creator of speed and safety.” By letting the most fearful groups design the control mechanisms, resistance evaporated, and product development speed increased by over 40%.

Case Study 2: The Healthcare Provider Network – Peer-Led Mastery

Challenge: EHR Integration and Physician Burnout

A large hospital network faced a change management catastrophe: merging three disparate Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. This change amplified existing physician burnout and deep-seated fears about workflow disruption and patient safety issues.

Intervention:

The project used a Human-Centered Change approach focused on peer-to-peer enablement. They identified respected Physician Change Champions who were trained in both the new system and Change Leadership principles. These champions led short, peer-focused “unlearning” sessions designed to remove the five most frustrating administrative steps from the old system first. The narrative was intentionally shifted from “We’re losing the old system” to “We are adopting better tools to reclaim time for patient care and achieve better outcomes.” This focus on shared purpose and empowering clinical autonomy resulted in a 95% adoption rate within the first quarter and a measurable reduction in administrative friction.

Conclusion: Change is a Human System

The Change Mindset is not about eliminating fear; it’s about acknowledging it and leveraging its energy. We must stop treating resistance as an adversary and start seeing it as the raw, powerful energy of human emotion that comes with any significant disruption. To lead change is to be the ultimate Human-Centered Designer. It means designing the environment and the process to make it psychologically safe for people to take the necessary risk of letting go of the past.

“The Change Mindset is the belief that the energy generated by fear, when properly acknowledged and channeled through co-creation, is the most sustainable and potent fuel available for continuous innovation. Embrace the human system.”

Your first step toward a Change Mindset is simple: Before launching your next initiative, pause and map the three greatest fears of your end-users. Then, invite them to design the solutions to those fears. The future belongs not to the fastest technology, but to the most adaptable human system.

For more detail on different elements of people’s change mindsets to harness going into any change or transformation initiative, I encourage you to check out Braden Kelley’s Eight Change Mindsets

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Forbidden Truth About Innovation

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Forbidden Truth About Innovation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

If you heard it once, you heard it a thousand times:

Big companies can’t innovate
We need to innovate before we get too big and slow
Startups are innovative. Big companies are dinosaurs. They can’t innovate.

And yet you persevere because you know the truth:

Big companies CAN innovate.

They CHOOSE not to.

Using Innovation to drive growth is a choice.

Just like choosing to grow through acquisition or expansion into new markets is a choice.

All those choices are complex, uncertain, and risky. In fact:

70 – 95% of innovations fail
70 – 90% of acquisitions fail
~80% of market entry efforts fail

Hold on. The odds of failure are the same!

All three growth drivers have similar failure rates, but no one says, “Big companies can’t acquire things” or “Big companies can’t expand into new markets.”

We expect big companies to engage in acquisitions and market expansion.

Failed acquisitions and market expansions prove us (or at least our expectations) wrong. Because we don’t like being wrong, we study our failures so that we can change, improve, and increase our odds of success next time.

We expect big companies to fail at innovation.

In this case, failure proves us right. We love being right, so we shrug and say, “Big companies can’t innovate.”

We let big companies off the hook.

Why are our expectations so different?

Since the dawn of commerce, businesses engaged in innovation, acquisitions, and market expansion. But innovation is different from M&A and market expansion in three fundamental ways:

Innovation is “new” – Even though businesses have engaged in innovation, acquisitions, and market expansion since the very earliest days of commerce, innovation only recently became a topic worthy of discussion, study, and investment. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1960s that Innovation was recognized as worthy of research and deliberate investment.

Innovation starts small – Unlike acquisitions and new markets that can be easily sized and forecasted, in the early days of an innovation, it’s hard to know how big it could be.

Innovation takes time – Innovation doesn’t come with a predictable launch date. Even its possible launch date is usually 3 to 5 years away, unlike acquisition closing dates that are often within a year.

What can we do about this?

We can’t change what innovation is (new, small, and slow at the start), but we can change our expectations.

Finish the sentence – “Big companies can’t innovate” absolves companies of the responsibility to make a good-faith effort to try to innovate by making their struggles an unavoidable consequence of their size. But it’s not inevitable, and continuing the sentence proves it. Saying “Big companies can’t innovate because…” forces people to acknowledge the root causes of companies’ innovation struggles. In many ways, this was the great A-HA! of The Innovator’s Dilemma: Big companies can’t innovate because their focus on providing better (and more expensive) solutions to their best customers results in them ceding the low-end of the market and non-consumers to other companies.

Be honest – Once you’ve identified the root cause, you can choose to do something different (and get different results) or do everything the same (and get the same results). If you choose to keep doing the same things in the same ways, that’s fine. Own the decision.

Change your choice. Change your expectations – If you do choose to do things differently, address the root causes, and resolve the barriers, then walk the talk. Stop expecting innovation to fail and start expecting it to be as successful as your acquisition and market expansion efforts. Stop investing two people and $10 in innovation and start investing the same quantity and quality of resources as you invest and other growth efforts.

The first step in change is admitting that change is needed. When we accept that “big companies can’t innovate” simply because they’re big, we absolve them of their responsibility to follow through on proclamations and strategies about the importance of innovation as a strategic driver of growth.

It’s time to acknowledge that innovation (or lack thereof) is a choice and expect companies to own that choice and act and invest accordingly.

After all, would it be great to stop persevering and start innovating?

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Leading in the Age of Uncertainty

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How to Anticipate and Adapt with Confidence

Leading in the Age of Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

The defining characteristic of the modern business environment is not speed, but volatility. We live in a perpetual state of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity). For many leaders, this constant flux generates paralysis, a desperate clinging to old, rigid plans. As a champion of Human-Centered Change, I argue that this uncertainty is not a threat to be managed, but a resource to be leveraged. The true differentiator of effective leadership today is the ability to move beyond mere reactivity and cultivate a proactive culture of Anticipatory Adaptation.

Anticipatory Adaptation is the fusion of foresight and flexibility. It recognizes that in a world where AI, geopolitics, and customer demands shift monthly, the most dangerous strategy is having no strategy for change itself. It’s about building an organizational immune system that can detect weak signals, prototype rapid responses, and maintain psychological safety throughout the process. This approach is the engine that keeps Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire to burn brightly, even through the fog of the unknown.

The Three Pillars of Anticipatory Leadership

To lead confidently amidst the chaos, we must operationalize foresight and agility across three interconnected domains:

1. Institutionalizing Weak Signal Detection

Most organizations are blind to the future because they only listen to strong, incumbent signals — the loudest customers, the direct competitors, the latest earnings reports. Proactive leaders institutionalize the detection of weak signals — the faint, emerging trends on the periphery of their industry. This means empowering diversity of thought and challenging the organizational echo chamber. Who is talking to the fringe users? Who is monitoring the startup ecosystem that could completely disrupt your business model? This exercise, often facilitated through tools like FutureHacking sessions, turns passive watching into active, strategic reconnaissance.

2. Prioritizing Minimum Viable Actions (MVAs)

Uncertainty creates risk aversion, leading to large, slow, ‘bet-the-farm’ projects. The adaptive leader breaks down major strategy into small, rapid, reversible experiments—Minimum Viable Actions (MVAs). The goal of an MVA isn’t scale; it’s learning. MVAs are designed to test the underlying assumptions of a trend or a threat with minimal resource commitment. By running five small, fast experiments instead of one huge pilot, you dramatically accelerate your learning curve and reduce the cost of failure. Speed of learning is the only sustainable competitive advantage in an uncertain age.

3. Anchoring Decision-Making in Purpose

When the environment is stable, processes guide decisions. When the environment is volatile, processes break down. The only constant anchor is a clear, shared purpose. The human-centered leader ensures every team member understands the organizational Why—the mission that transcends quarterly earnings. When faced with an unforeseen threat or a pivot opportunity, team members can independently and rapidly make aligned decisions because they share a common moral and strategic filter. This decentralized, purpose-driven decision-making is the ultimate expression of empowered agency in an uncertain world.

Case Study 1: The Retailer’s Digital Pivot

A major brick-and-mortar retailer with a strong regional presence was initially slow to adopt e-commerce. As the pandemic hit, they faced imminent closure. Traditional leadership might have panicked and attempted a massive, desperate digital overhaul, likely failing due to speed and cost.

Instead, the new leadership team adopted an Anticipatory Adaptation approach. They didn’t try to build Amazon overnight. Their weak signal detection—which they had instituted pre-crisis—had already flagged the rapid shift toward local delivery apps. Their MVA focused solely on testing one assumption: Could their existing store associates execute high-quality, local, last-mile delivery? They launched a pilot within 72 hours, integrating with a single local courier service, manually tracking results. When the MVA proved successful, they rapidly scaled the model, granting each store manager the agency to customize the local delivery integration based on their specific community needs.

By focusing on speed of learning with MVAs and leveraging their existing human assets (store associates), they successfully transformed their physical stores into micro-distribution centers, not only surviving the crisis but gaining market share by offering hyperlocal service that larger competitors couldn’t match. Their success was a product of small, rapid adaptations, not a sweeping, rigid plan.

Case Study 2: Hacking the Climate Risk

I worked with a global utility provider whose core infrastructure faced rising climate-related risks (severe storms, heat waves). The traditional response was a twenty-year capital expenditure plan. While necessary, it was too slow for the pace of change.

We instituted a futurology program centered on uncertainty. We didn’t ask, “What will the weather be?” but “What if the worst-case scenario happened five years early?” This forced cross-functional teams (engineering, finance, public relations, and frontline operations) to anticipate cascading failures. The MVA derived from this exercise was a decentralized Rapid Response Kit—a set of pre-approved procedures, pre-allocated minor budgets, and pre-trained local teams empowered to deploy immediate, tactical infrastructure solutions (like temporary microgrids) without waiting for C-suite sign-off during a crisis.

The result was a cultural shift from passive risk management to proactive resilience. The utility didn’t eliminate the climate risk, but they drastically reduced the time between recognizing a threat and taking decisive, purpose-aligned action. Their improved response times during subsequent extreme weather events saved millions in recovery costs and significantly boosted public trust, illustrating how empowering people to act within a purpose framework is the most effective defense against uncertainty.

“Confidence in an uncertain world isn’t about knowing the answer; it’s about trusting your organization’s ability to learn faster than the pace of change. Trust comes from human empowerment, not rigid control.”

The Adaptive Leader’s Next Steps

Leading with confidence in this environment means shifting your leadership focus:

Audit Your Blind Spots: Dedicate resources to actively seek and discuss weak signals that challenge your current success model. What customer are you losing that you aren’t talking about?
Institutionalize Rapid Testing: Require every major strategic initiative to be broken down into three to five low-cost, reversible MVAs. Celebrate the learning derived from failed experiments, not just the success of the winners.
Embrace Humility: Recognize that the smartest person is the network, not the individual leader. Your job is to facilitate learning, remove organizational friction, and anchor everyone in the shared purpose so they can adapt locally and autonomously.

Uncertainty tests the structural integrity of every organization. The leaders who succeed will be those who trust their people, prioritize learning over planning, and wield Anticipatory Adaptation as their core strategic competence.

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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Cultivating a Culture of Ethical Awareness

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Beyond Regulation

Cultivating a Culture of Ethical Awareness

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s fast-paced digital economy, compliance is often treated as a checklist — a hurdle to clear before launching the next product or technology. We invest heavily in systems to meet GDPR, HIPAA, or emerging AI guidelines. But here is the critical distinction: compliance is a floor, not a ceiling. True, enduring innovation is not just about legality; it’s about legitimacy. As a champion of Human-Centered Change, I contend that the future belongs to organizations that proactively foster a deep-seated Culture of Ethical Awareness, moving beyond regulation to anchor their decisions in shared, proactive moral purpose.

Why does this matter now? Because the speed of technological change — particularly with Generative AI — has outpaced the speed of legislative change. We are in a strategic gap where organizations must choose their own ethical high ground. Ethical failure is no longer just a legal risk; it is an existential threat that can destroy brand trust, talent retention, and market valuation almost overnight. Ethical leadership must become an active design discipline, not a passive compliance exercise.

The Three Pillars of Proactive Ethical Culture

Building an ethically aware culture requires dismantling the belief that “ethics” is solely the job of the legal or risk department. It must be integrated into the innovation mindset through three key pillars:

1. Embedding Ethical Friction in Design

Innovation methodologies often celebrate speed and frictionless iteration. The human-centric leader, however, purposefully injects ethical friction at the design stage. This means making sure the team includes an explicit “Ethical Guardian” or “Customer Advocate” whose job is to pause, challenge assumptions, and ensure that the “can we do this?” question is always followed by, “should we do this?” We must mandate diverse perspectives in the room during prototyping to proactively detect bias and potential societal harm before launch.

2. Making Values a Verb, Not a Noun

Many companies have beautifully phrased values posters. A Culture of Ethical Awareness translates these values into concrete behaviors and decision-making filters. Ethical values must be explicitly tied to performance reviews, promotion criteria, and reward structures. If a team is penalized for delaying a launch due to ethical concerns discovered during testing, the culture fails. Conversely, if a team is celebrated for pausing an initiative to address fairness, the culture strengthens. Ethics must be a verb — something you actively do — not just a noun hanging on a wall.

3. Fostering a Culture of “Courageous Transparency”

Ethical breaches often start small and are exacerbated by internal fear and secrecy. Leaders must cultivate psychological safety that allows employees to raise ethical red flags without fear of retribution. This requires Courageous Transparency — the willingness of senior leaders to publicly acknowledge their own ethical blind spots and the difficulty of complex decisions. When leaders model vulnerability and prioritize the ethical investigation over speed, they reinforce the cultural mandate.

Case Study 1: The Algorithmic Fairness Gap

A major financial services client I worked with was developing an AI-driven lending platform to dramatically speed up small business loan approvals. The system performed brilliantly on efficiency metrics. However, our human-centered audit—focusing on equity as a core ethical value — revealed a systemic issue. The historical training data, collected over two decades, inadvertently penalized newer business models and businesses located in historically underserved zip codes, disproportionately affecting minority and female-led startups.

The system was compliant with current lending laws, but it was profoundly unethical in its outcome, perpetuating historical economic bias. The leadership made the courageous decision to pause the rollout, despite pressure. They didn’t scrap the AI; they redesigned the data intake and verification process to include forward-looking metrics (like projected revenue and business model viability) alongside historical data. By prioritizing the ethical value of fairness over speed, they not only built a better model but cemented their reputation as a community partner, turning a risk into a substantial market advantage.

Case Study 2: The Data Retention Dilemma

Consider a well-known global social platform that faced an internal debate regarding user data retention. The legal team advised that, under prevailing laws, they could legally retain certain anonymized user interaction data indefinitely for the purposes of “future product improvement.” This was compliant and highly valuable for training the next generation of recommendation algorithms.

However, a strong ethical awareness group, comprised of product designers, engineers, and privacy advocates, pushed back. Their argument was human-centered: retaining data indefinitely, even if legal, violates the users’ implicit and explicit expectation of privacy and control over their digital footprint. It created a “data hoard” that represented future vulnerability. The group successfully advocated for the principle of Data Minimalism — the ethical mandate to only retain data for as long as it is absolutely necessary to serve the user’s immediate need. This cultural win led to a high-profile privacy feature being released, reinforcing user trust and creating a significant competitive differentiator based on ethical choice, not just regulatory necessity.

“When technology moves faster than trust, trust always loses. Ethical leadership is the intentional act of slowing down the technological acceleration just enough to let human values catch up.”

Designing the Ethical Future

To transition from a culture of compliance to one of ethical awareness, leaders must make these actions habitual:

The Ethics Review Board is Mandatory: Integrate diverse, multi-disciplinary teams (engineers, ethicists, legal, frontline users) into a standing, empowered board that reviews new technologies and policies with an ethical lens.
Use Ethical Priming: Before major design sessions, start with a simple exercise: define the worst possible ethical outcome of this project. Priming teams to consider the negative consequences sharpens their focus on the proactive moral design.
Hire for Moral Courage: When hiring or promoting, evaluate candidates not just on competence, but on their demonstrated moral courage — their past willingness to speak up, challenge the status quo, and prioritize ethics over expediency.

The challenge of our time is to ensure that the innovations we celebrate don’t inadvertently erode the human values we cherish. The organization that champions Ethical Awareness as a core innovation discipline will not only avoid the inevitable regulatory headaches but will attract the best talent, earn the deepest trust, and build the most resilient business for the future.

Image credit: Google Gemini

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The Human-Centric Leader

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Guiding Your Team Towards a More Fulfilling Future

The Human-Centric Leader

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

The world of work is fundamentally changing. The relentless pursuit of purely transactional efficiency, often symbolized by the old, sterile model of command-and-control, has reached a point of diminishing returns. We’ve spent decades trying to optimize the machine; now, the real competitive advantage lies in optimizing the human experience. As a leader focused on Human-Centered Change and Innovation, I can tell you that the path to a sustainable, high-performing future requires a profound mindset shift.

We must transition from merely managing processes to orchestrating human potential. This isn’t about being “soft;” it’s about being strategically smart. A human-centric approach is the only way to light the Innovation Bonfire and successfully navigate the complexities of digital and cultural transformation. It means recognizing that your greatest asset isn’t capital or technology — it’s the ingenuity, creativity, and emotional well-being of your people.

Three Core Principles of Human-Centric Leadership

A human-centric leader builds a culture where change is embraced, not feared. This requires a steadfast commitment to three interconnected pillars:

1. Cultivating Empathetic Curiosity

True empathy goes beyond feeling sorry for someone; it’s about curiosity — actively seeking to understand their context, challenges, and aspirations. It’s what powers the best design thinking and experience design methodologies. Leaders must model this behavior, turning every interaction into a moment of genuine connection and learning. The questions you ask are more important than the answers you give.

2. Empowering Agency and Ownership

People resist change imposed upon them, but they champion change they help create. The human-centric leader delegates decision-making authority, pushing power closer to the customer and to the source of the problem. This fosters psychological safety, which is the bedrock for all innovation. When people feel safe to fail, they are free to experiment, iterate, and ultimately, succeed. Ownership drives engagement, and engagement drives performance.

3. Anchoring on a Shared, Higher Purpose

In an age of complexity, purpose is the only stable anchor. Your employees are not transactional automatons; they are seeking meaning and impact. A human-centric leader articulates a Why that transcends quarterly earnings. This shared purpose is what aligns distributed teams, guides ethical decisions in the age of AI, and fuels the sustained motivation needed for ambitious transformation. Purpose acts as the ultimate filter for decision-making.

Case Study 1: Microsoft’s Cultural Turnaround

Few modern corporate narratives better illustrate the strategic value of human-centric change than the transformation at Microsoft under Satya Nadella. Before his tenure, the culture was often described as toxic and hyper-competitive, suffering from an internal “know-it-all” syndrome that stiffed collaboration and innovation across siloed departments.

Nadella didn’t start with a new product strategy; he started with a cultural overhaul rooted in empathy and a “learn-it-all” mindset. He introduced the concept of the growth mindset, encouraging leaders to see failure not as a verdict, but as a crucial data point in a continuous learning loop. This single shift fundamentally changed how people interacted, communicated risk, and pursued new projects. By prioritizing employee experience and psychological safety, Microsoft shifted its focus from internal competition to external customer value, a principle that underpinned their entire cloud strategy.

The result? A revitalization of their core products, the successful creation of entirely new, collaborative offerings (like Teams), and a historic rebound in market capitalization. This wasn’t a tech story; it was a people story. It proved that fixing the human operating system is the precursor to fixing the business operating system, validating the human-centric mandate for the modern C-suite.

Case Study 2: A Healthcare Transformation

I recently worked with a major global healthcare provider facing crippling burnout among its frontline nurses and administrative staff. The traditional leadership response had been to mandate efficiency training — treating symptoms, not the root cause. Our approach mandated empathy.

We didn’t ask “How can we make them work faster?” We asked, “What is the greatest source of human friction in their day?” Through in-depth ethnographic research, we discovered the core problem wasn’t patient interaction (the joyful part of the job); it was the burdensome, repetitive administrative tasks and the fragmentation of legacy IT systems that stole up to two hours per shift away from patient care. This was a crisis of fulfillment.

The human-centered innovation solution was twofold. First, we rapidly deployed contextual AI tools to absorb nearly 70% of routine documentation — the stuff that felt like digital drudgery. Second, and crucially, we empowered the nurses themselves — the true process experts — to design the new administrative workflow. We gave them the design authority to determine how the technology should integrate with their daily routines, creating profound psychological ownership over the solution.

The outcome: a 30% reduction in documented burnout, a measurable increase in patient satisfaction (CSAT), and a 15% reduction in administrative overhead within two quarters. By treating the nurses as innovators rather than cogs, the organization successfully unlocked both efficiency and fulfillment.

“The most innovative companies don’t just solve customer problems; they solve their employees’ problems first. When you remove friction for your team, they naturally remove friction for your customers.”

The Path Forward: Auditing Your Human-Centricity

The journey toward human-centric leadership requires a deliberate, iterative process. It requires courage, transparency, and a willingness to be vulnerable. Here are a few immediate actions you can take:

Conduct a Change Audit: Stop measuring only task completion. Start measuring friction points and purpose alignment. Ask deep, uncomfortable questions about where energy is drained and where organizational purpose is lost.
Embrace Transparency: Share the “Why” behind your decisions as your default setting. In the absence of information, people will create their own, often negative, narrative. Transparency builds trust, which is the currency of human connection.
Lead as a Service Provider: Recognize that leadership is fundamentally a service profession. Your job is not to provide all the answers, but to remove the obstacles that prevent your team — the true experts — from finding them.

By focusing on the fulfillment and flourishing of your people, you don’t just achieve better business results; you build a resilient, adaptive, and enduring organization. This is the only future worth building, and the human-centric leader is the only one who can guide us there. Now, go light that fire!

Image credit: Pixabay

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Designing Innovation – Accelerating Creativity via Innovation Strategy

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Designing Innovation - Accelerating Creativity via Innovation Strategy

GUEST POST from Douglas Ferguson

To innovate is to survive.

As an overwhelming 80% of founders believe innovation to be the heart of organizational growth, employing an innovation strategy that promotes, facilitates, and feeds innovation is essential.

Developing a solid plan for facilitating innovation in your organization is a necessary step in your company’s growth. In this article, we’ll discuss the best ways to harness innovation as we explore the following topics:

The Source of Innovation
What is an Innovation Strategy?
Strategizing for Innovation
Innovating from Within
A System of Innovation

The Source of Innovation

Innovation often feels like a form of magic: it’s a powerful yet elusive force that drives the best ideas and creates the greatest breakthroughs. While some prefer to wait for inspiration to strike, happenstance is hardly the driving force behind innovation.

The true source of innovation is the organization itself. Leaders must intentionally create systems, processes, and strategies that allow for innovation at every turn.

Innovation is similar to any other corporate function as it requires careful strategizing to make the best ideas come to life. In doing this, leaders can set the stage and make the most innovative ideas and processes a regular practice in their organization. Ultimately, innovation may appear in the initial spark of a great idea, but it takes purposeful, thoughtful, and conscious planning for a great idea to exist beyond that moment of genius.

What is an Innovation Strategy?

Driving organizational innovation starts with creating an innovation strategy. An innovation strategy identifies processes that allow for the most creative and effective solutions.

The ideal innovation strategy allows an organization to zero in on its audience’s expectations by:

Identifying customers’ unmet needs
Targeting these needs for growth

A healthy innovation strategy allows an organization to create the most efficient pathways to resolving these needs and growing its company. Effective strategies for innovation follow a prioritization method to help teams understand which ideas hold the highest return. In creating a solid innovation strategy, leaders must develop a system that can be repeated time and again.

Strategizing for Innovation

From defining your goals to using tech to transform your organization into a hybrid model, the possibilities are endless when it comes to innovation. As you design your innovation strategy, it’s essential to understand the nuances of innovation. Working with an innovation consultant can help you iron out a strategy that’s best for your team. With an expert in innovation, you’ll be able to better determine effective next steps toward the business’s goals.

Consultants are equipped to explain the subtleties in innovative strategizing, such as the various types of innovation:

Routine Innovation.

Routine innovation is a building block that adds to the company’s pre-existing structure, such as its customer base or earlier versions of a product.

Disruptive Innovation.

Disruptive innovation results in a new business model that disrupts or challenges the competition’s business models.

Radical Innovation.

Radical innovation introduces new inventions, software, or technology to completely transform an existing business model. This type of innovation is best used to help organizations achieve a competitive advantage in the market.

Architectural Innovation.

Architectural innovation uses new technology to create new markets. Essentially, architectural innovation changes the entire overall design of a product by redesigning existing components.

In creating the best innovation strategy for your current needs, take into account the following guidelines:

Clarifying your goals and priorities.

The right innovation strategy outlines your organizational goals and efforts to identify the best actionable steps to achieve these goals.

Fostering alignment within your organization.

Alignment should be at the center of any innovation strategy. Everyone must be aligned in pursuing a common goal for an organization to achieve new ideas and an innovative way of working.

Encouraging your team to keep improving.

Complacency kills innovation. Make sure your company is always ready to move on to the next great idea by making continuous growth and development a key part of your innovation strategy.

Reaching long-term success.

Focusing on reaching long-term success is an essential part of any innovation strategy.

Innovating From Within

An innovation strategy becomes the most effective when leaders can ingrain the processes and practices into their culture. Once innovation becomes an integral part of how a team works, they’ll be able to keep innovation top-of-mind.

By innovating from within, you’ll create a sustainable innovation strategy that becomes part of your company culture. Consider these pillars of innovation as you center innovation strategy at the heart of your company:

Models: Innovation strategies fall into two models:

Business model innovation
In this process, an organization completely adapts its business model to add value to its customers.
Leveraging an existing business model
This process allows an organization to use its existing business model while bringing innovation to the business itself.

Intrapreneurship
Intrapreneurship empowers employees to act as entrepreneurs while working within the company. This encourages each person to create and act on their ideas, thus fostering a culture of ongoing company-wide innovation.

Corporate Accelerator
Corporate accelerators are programs started by larger enterprises, offering aspiring entrepreneurs the opportunity to find mentors, access seed capital, and make important connections.

Innovation Labs
Innovation labs are a starting point for R&D teams and startups to facilitate new ideas.

Open Innovation Program
This model of R&D encourages existing employees to collaborate on new business ideas that add value to the company.

External Accelerators
Though external accelerators don’t meet in-house, they can add incredible value to an organization. Businesses can use external accelerators to advance startups and drive concepts that align with their goals and needs without covering the costs of running an in-house program.

Collaboration
Collaboration is an integral component in shaping a cohesive innovation strategy. Through constant discussion, interaction, and creative collaboration, all members of an organization work together to bring their ideas to life.

Ideation
Managing innovation requires organizations to manage ideation. In doing so, leaders work to identify the best plans for analyzing, gathering, and implementing the right ideas. Ultimately, companies need an effective system that will transform an idea into a process that gets results.

Measurement
Innovation strategies should include a plan to measure success by considering relevant metrics for each goal. For example, KPIs such as email subscribers, website traffic, and social shares are excellent metrics for tracking brand awareness.

A System of Innovation

Developing a comprehensive innovation strategy must go beyond general objectives such as achieving growth, creating value, and beating competitors. To truly create company-wide change through innovation, organizations should clearly articulate specific objectives that will allow for the most sustainable competitive advantage.

A thorough innovation strategy successfully embeds innovation in the very system of an organization. To implement such systemic innovation, design your innovation strategy with the following objectives:

Creating Long-Term Value for Potential Customers

An innovation strategy should always consider the most effective ways to create long-term value for customers. In developing a cohesive strategy, consider the type of value you’re aiming to create through innovation. Value can be created in many ways, including improving customer experience, making a product more affordable, or benefiting society at large.

In your efforts to identify what values to zero in on, consider those that will have the greatest impact in the long term. This way, your innovation strategy will include continuously iterating towards better designs in the future.

Capturing Value Generated From Innovations

Innovations easily attract competitors that can pose a risk to the original product or idea. In your efforts to create a thorough innovation strategy, consider how your company plans to capture the value its innovations create.

For example, a company that creates an exciting new product should be prepared for its competition to create more affordable prototypes. In the worst-case scenario, the competition may capture the value of the innovation.

Consider these risks in your innovation strategy by identifying what complementary services, products, assets, and capabilities may improve customer loyalty. This way, you’ll already have a plan in place to ensure your organization continues to profit from every innovation.

Strategizing for Business Model Innovation

Technology plays an important role in innovation but isn’t the only path to new ideas. In developing a robust innovation strategy, consider the level of technology and your preferred method of innovation to pursue.

Harnessing the magic of innovation takes careful planning. Need help driving innovation in your organization? At Voltage Control, we help leaders develop innovative strategies through change! Contact us today to discuss the best path to innovation.

Image credit: Pexels

Article first published here: voltagecontrol.com

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Five Key Skills for Chief Transformation Officers

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Five Key Skills for Chief Transformation Officers

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

As digital transformation continues to become more commonplace in the modern business landscape, the role of the Chief Transformation Officer (CTO) has become increasingly important. A CTO is responsible for leading and managing large-scale, enterprise-wide transformation initiatives that typically involve multiple stakeholders, departments, and processes.

Given the complexity of their role, CTOs must possess a blend of technical and leadership skills in order to be successful. Here are five key skills that every CTO should have:

1. Strategic Thinking

The CTO needs to be able to identify and prioritize potential areas of transformation in order to develop a comprehensive and effective transformation plan. This requires a deep understanding of the organization and its goals, as well as the ability to think strategically and plan ahead.

2. Change Planning, Leadership and Management

The CTO must be able to effectively lead and manage the transformation process, which includes developing and implementing a plan, managing stakeholders, and ensuring that the transformation is successful. This requires a deep understanding of change planning, leadership, and management principles and processes. Ideally, they should be a certified Human-Centered Change professional, skilled at leveraging the Change Planning Toolkit™.

3. Cross-Functional Communication

The CTO must have excellent communication skills in order to effectively communicate the transformation plan and objectives to stakeholders across functional siloes, as well as to ensure that everyone is on the same page throughout the process. The Change Planning Canvas™ is a great tool for getting everyone literally all on the same page for change, and is introduced in Braden Kelley’s best-selling book Charting Change.

4. Technical Expertise

The CTO must possess a strong understanding of the technical and operational aspects of the organization in order to develop effective transformation plans and strategies. This may involve a deep understanding of data, analytics, and enterprise systems.

5. Relationship Building

The CTO needs to be able to build relationships with stakeholders across the organization in order to ensure that everyone is on board with the transformation plan and objectives. This requires the ability to understand different perspectives and build consensus among stakeholders.

These five skills are essential for any CTO to be successful in their role. With the right skillset and a strategic approach, a CTO can lead their organization to success and ensure a successful transformation.

To read more about Chief Transformation Officers, see my other article here:

What is a Chief Transformation Officer? — by Art Inteligencia

Image credit: Pexels

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