Category Archives: Leadership

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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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.

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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

Image credit: Pixabay

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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?

Image credit: Pixabay

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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.

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