Category Archives: marketing

9 Multi-Sensory CX Levers Retail and Service Brands Still Ignore

by Braden Kelley and Chateau G Pato

Which Multi-Sensory CX Levers Do Retail and Service Brands Still Ignore? (Short Answer)

Nine multi-sensory CX levers retail and service brands still ignore: (1) acoustic privacy and soundscape ownership, (2) congruent scent — and anti-scent, (3) light for dignity and wayfinding, (4) haptic quality of the transaction, (5) thermal comfort as experience, (6) spatial density and movement choreography, (7) the wait as a sensory journey, (8) cross-channel sensory congruence, and (9) sensory recovery after failure. Soft landings design what people feel. Hard landings optimize what people click.

People don’t experience your brand as a channel map. They experience it as a body in a place — and most brands still leave that body undesigned.

Why Do Brands Own Screens — and Leave the Senses to Chance?

I keep watching retail and service brands fund visual merchandising, apps, and queue math while the body still decides loyalty. Vision and screens get owners. Facilities “handles” the rest. Marketing owns scent for a campaign week. Nobody owns acoustic privacy, thermal dignity, haptic quality, wait atmosphere, or sensory recovery when the promise breaks.

Ambience is a loyalty system, not décor — I unpack that frame in The Science of Ambience. This piece is the ignored lever kit: what to own in stores, branches, clinics, hotels, and hybrid service spaces.

Lever	Usually owned by…	Should force…
1. Acoustic privacy	Nobody / facilities noise	Trust in speech and calm
2. Scent	Campaign / landlord	Congruence or deliberate absence
3. Light	Merchandising only	Wayfinding + dignity
4. Haptics	Procurement	Hand-feel of the brand
5. Thermal	Facilities KPI	Stay/leave comfort
6. Density/flow	Throughput / planograms	Body safety and ease
7. Wait atmosphere	Queue math	Felt time and status
8. Cross-channel congruence	Siloed teams	Promise the body recognizes
9. Sensory recovery	“Apology script”	Make-right the nervous system can trust

If only eyes and screens have owners, your CX is half-blind.

1. Why Is Acoustic Privacy a Multi-Sensory CX Lever?

Lever: Design what people hear — and what others can overhear — as CX, not background.

Why ignored: Playlists feel like branding; acoustic privacy feels like construction cost.

Humans feel: Stress, shame in overheard conversations, inability to think or decide.

Soft-landing move: Name a soundscape owner; create quiet zones; mask or separate sensitive speech; measure “could I be overheard?” — not only average decibels. Stores, banks, clinics, and service counters all live or die on this lever.

2. How Do Congruent Scent — and Anti-Scent — Shape Loyalty?

Lever: Intentional scent aligned to the job — or deliberate clean, neutral air when scent would harm trust.

Why ignored: Scent marketing as a campaign stunt; everyday odor left to chance.

Humans feel: Welcome and memory — or nausea, allergy, “cheap,” distrust.

Soft-landing move: Congruence-test scent against the brand promise; provide opt-out paths; ban conflicting vendor scents; never use scent to cover neglect. Manipulation is not design.

3. Why Should Light Serve Dignity and Wayfinding — Not Only Merchandising?

Lever: Light that helps people find, read, feel safe, and look (and feel) respected.

Why ignored: Spotlight the product; leave pathways, faces, and forms in glare or gloom.

Humans feel: Confusion, aging-eyes struggle, a surveillance vibe — or flattering calm.

Soft-landing move: Build a light map for tasks (find, choose, pay, wait, exit); reduce glare on screens and faces; respect circadian needs where dwell is long.

4. What Is Haptic Quality of the Transaction?

Lever: Touch quality of counters, devices, bags, cards, pens, samples, seating, and doors.

Why ignored: Procurement buys “durable and cheap”; the brand book stops at the logo.

Humans feel: Care or contempt in the fingers — sticky screens, cold metal, flimsy bags.

Soft-landing move: Run a haptic audit of the last three meters to “done”; choose materials that match the promise; treat cleanability as dignity.

5. Why Is Thermal Comfort a Customer Experience Lever?

Lever: Air temperature, drafts, humidity, and microclimates designed for the human job — not only energy targets.

Why ignored: Facilities owns HVAC KPIs; CX owns NPS.

Humans feel: Urgency to leave, irritability, inability to browse or decide.

Soft-landing move: Dual scorecard — energy and dwell comfort; zone by activity (try-on vs checkout vs wait); treat employee comfort as CX, because they set the emotional weather.

6. How Does Spatial Density and Movement Choreography Affect CX?

Lever: How close, how fast, how blocked — proxemics, aisle width, queue shape, wheelchair and stroller truth.

Why ignored: Throughput and planograms win; body stress is dismissed as a “busy day.”

Humans feel: Threat, fatigue, abandoned carts, skipped service.

Soft-landing move: Choreograph peak density; make escape routes visible; design accessibility as the default, not an exception; measure leave-without-buying and leave-without-asking-for-help. Efficient layouts that exhaust humans are a cousin of efficient misery.

7. Why Design the Wait as a Sensory Journey?

Lever: Multi-sensory design of waiting — status, seating, sound, light, micro-care — not only queue length.

Why ignored: SLA and average wait; atmosphere is “someone else’s budget.”

Humans feel: Helplessness and rage — or surprisingly calm progress.

Soft-landing move: Pair status-as-experience with sensory comfort; give honest ETAs; give the body something useful or kind to do while waiting. The status-less wait is often a moment that matters more than the score — see 8 Moments That Matter More Than Your NPS Dashboard.

8. What Is Cross-Channel Sensory Congruence?

Lever: Align what digital promises with what the place smells, sounds, and feels like — and vice versa.

Why ignored: App, store, and service teams optimize locally.

Humans feel: Whiplash — calm app, chaotic floor; premium site, sticky counter.

Soft-landing move: One sensory signature card across channels; journey owners accountable for congruence breaks; prototype the handoff from phone to place. Congruence is also a trust design problem — see 11 Principles for Designing Trust (Not Just Usability).

9. How Do You Design Sensory Recovery After Failure?

Lever: When something breaks, redesign the sensory context of recovery — calm space, private voice, unhurried light, empowered human — not only a script.

Why ignored: Recovery is policy and CRM; the body stays in the same stressful soundscape.

Humans feel: A second injury — apology under fluorescent panic — or restored dignity.

Soft-landing move: Recovery zones or rituals; acoustic privacy for complaints; time and power for make-right; train for sensory de-escalation so the nervous system can trust the repair.

What Should You Ask Before the Next Retail or Service Redesign?

Five questions for a multi-sensory audit:

Who owns sound and privacy?
Where does scent help or harm the job?
Does light serve faces and tasks — or only products?
What do hands and temperature teach about our promise?
When we fail, does the body get a softer place to recover?

Mantra: Stop decorating the vibe. Start owning the senses that decide whether humans stay, trust, and return.

FAQ: Multi-Sensory CX Levers

What is multi-sensory CX?

Multi-sensory CX is customer experience designed for the whole body — sound, scent, light, touch, temperature, space, waiting atmosphere, and recovery feel — not only screens, visuals, and queue metrics.

What sensory levers improve retail experience?

Sensory levers that improve retail experience include acoustic privacy, congruent (or deliberately absent) scent, dignifying light and wayfinding, haptic quality at the transaction, thermal comfort, density choreography, sensory waits, cross-channel congruence, and sensory recovery after failure.

How does ambience affect customer loyalty?

Ambience affects customer loyalty because sensory cues shape emotion and memory before people rationalize a score — coherent, dignifying environments invite return; mismatched or stressful senses teach the body to leave.

What is sensory congruence in CX?

Sensory congruence in CX means the body’s experience of sound, scent, light, touch, and space matches the brand promise across digital and physical channels — so the handoff from phone to place feels like one relationship, not whiplash.

How do you design waiting rooms for better CX?

Design waiting rooms for better CX by treating the wait as a sensory journey: honest status, comfortable seating and temperature, acoustic calm, dignifying light, and something useful or kind for the body to do — not only shorter average wait on a dashboard.

Image credits: Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini and Cursor to clean up the article, add images and create infographics.

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Unlocking Trapped Value from the Technology Adoption Lifecycle

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Unlocking Trapped Value from the Technology Adoption Lifecycle

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

For some time now I have been making the case that investment decisions, be they made by customers engaging with a new product and vendor or private equity firms backing a new technology and entrepreneur, should begin with finding the intersection between the innovation at hand and a pool of trapped value it can release, thereby creating the return on investment. That said, one of the core principles of investing is called risk-adjusted returns, meaning that the greater the risk you take, the higher the return needs to be. My expertise is in the risks related to technology adoption, where the risk factors change over the course of a new technology’s deployment. With that thought in mind, here is how the trapped value thesis needs to risk-adjust to adapt:

Early Market: very high technology adoption risk. The prize here has to be quite large indeed. Typically it will come in one of two forms. For B2B investments, it will be like an oil reservoir that, if tapped correctly, will produce a gusher. Regulated industries have pockets of trapped value all over the place that fit the bill. Also, industries like automotive and real estate, which are restructuring their relationships with dealers and agents, would qualify. By contrast, B2C investments tap into trapped value that looks more like shale oil—no deep pockets, but incredibly broad presence. Media, transportation, and hospitality have funded extraordinary returns for Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb, not because the trapped value was severe but because it was so pervasive. The point is, early-stage venture investing needs to target home-run bets to warrant the risks it takes. Same goes for visionary customers in B2B markets who are the early adopters of these technologies. They are taking on significant risk so they need to be targeting outstanding rewards.
Crossing the Chasm: high technology adoption risk, but readily mitigated. The challenge here is that the technology has great potential for any number of use cases but needs some additional support in every case to achieve the desired end result. The chasm-crossing playbook focuses on a single use case in a single industry and geography in order to create a killer “whole product” that nails the use case and to build a coalition of customer references and partner successes that will keep the market growing even as the technology vendor expands into other segments. Here the trapped value should be intense but narrowly confined, designed to meet three critical success factors:
1. Big enough to matter (it should be able to generate 10X your current year’s billings target)
2. Small enough to lead (if you crush your plans, you should get 50% segment share)
3. Good fit with your crown jewels (if you win, nobody is going to displace you).
As you can see, there is risk here, but it is manageable through market focus and disciplined execution, the key risk reduction factor being how compelling is the customer’s reason to buy.
Bowling Alley: modest adoption risk. The challenge here is to expand beyond your first “beachhead” vertical into adjacent use cases with the same segment as well as adjacent segments with the same use case. Part of the source of reduced risk is that you have a working playbook from the first vertical. Much of the source, however, comes from the emergence of local ecosystems of partners who complete the whole product solutions for each use case. These partners make their living supplementing the technology vendor’s product or platform, and their extra talent, domain expertise, and segment focus represent a major risk reduction. As a result, the trapped value rewards have a lower hurdle to clear to garner investor interest and customer buy-in.
Tornado: low adoption risk. The risk here is the opposite—getting left behind as the world embraces the shift to a new normal. The trapped value that drives a tornado is released by “killer apps.” These apps may not release the most trapped value, but they represent a sure winner to start with, making the buying decision a no-brainer. The point is, if you want to get any traction in the tornado, you have to lead with a killer app, a no-regrets offering that delivers simple-to-consume rewards and gets everyone onto the new platform. That means the trapped value must be easy to target and the value of releasing it must be obvious to all, especially to the end users who will be the prime beneficiaries.
Main Street: very low adoption risk. The primary adoption challenge here is converting conservative end users who simply do not want to switch to yet another new technology. The trapped value now exists in nuisances, little bits of inefficiency that have workarounds but are annoying. From the point of view of productivity, the cost savings from eliminating them are minimal. But in terms of the user experience, as well as customer satisfaction, the impact can be substantial. B2C enterprises spend most of their R&D here focused either on eliminating “hygiene” issues or innovating with new “delighters,” both of which can increase demand, the cornerstone for volume operations success. B2B enterprises use six-sigma analytics to scout their value chains for bottlenecks that increase latency, something that adds risk without adding value, and frustrates even their most loyal customers.

The key takeaway is that there are different kinds of trapped value, each occupying a different sweet spot in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. As a vendor and potential leader of a go-to-market ecosystem, you must be crystal clear about the kind of trapped value you are targeting, the kind of risk-taking it warrants, and the kinds of solutions that will get the most traction.

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

Image Credit: Unsplash

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12 Conversational VoC Questions That Beat Dead Survey Forms

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12 Conversational VoC Questions That Beat Dead Survey Forms

by Braden Kelley and Chateau G Pato

Which Conversational VoC Questions Beat Dead Survey Forms? (Short Answer)

Twelve conversational VoC questions that beat dead survey forms: (1) What were you trying to get done? (2) Where did it first go sideways? (3) What did that cost you? (4) What workaround did you invent? (5) Who else had to hear this story? (6) What would “made right” look like today? (7) What almost made you leave? (8) What should we stop doing? (9) Which handoff or policy broke trust? (10) What did you need to know that nobody told you? (11) Who helped — and were they allowed to finish? (12) What should we tell you next time something breaks?

A dead survey form harvests a number. A conversational VoC question invites a story you can act on — and a human who feels less alone for telling it.

Why Do Dead Survey Forms Lose to Real Questions?

Conversational VoC is listening as dialogue — adaptive prompts, messaging, voice, or short interviews in or near the moment of experience — aimed at understanding and closed-loop action, not only score capture. Dead survey forms are static questionnaires that arrive late, feel extractive, and rarely change anything the customer can see.

I have watched response rates fall while dashboards stayed confident. People did not stop having opinions. They stopped volunteering unpaid labor to a form that never proved it was listening. Soft landings for loyalty intelligence require questions that surface jobs, seams, dignity costs, and make-right — not another 1–10 scale after the heat has cooled. For the wider method shift, see Surveys Are Collapsing — Conversational and Agentic VoC.

Question	Form fails	Dialogue surfaces
1. Trying to get done?	Score before the job	Real progress they hired you for
2. First went sideways?	Surveys after “resolved”	First fail point
3. What did it cost?	Effort scores flatten dignity	Time, money, shame, trust
4. What workaround?	“How easy?” hides shadow paths	Design debt customers invent
5. Who else heard it?	Channel scores miss seams	Retelling tax
6. Made right today?	Callbacks close cases	Concrete recovery
7. Almost leave?	Silent churn never responds	Quiet-exit cliffs
8. What should we stop?	Forms hunt promoters	Subtraction customers need
9. What broke trust?	One score collapses betrayal	Unfair vs merely hard
10. What weren’t you told?	Late satisfaction asks	Status and expectation gaps
11. Allowed to finish?	Agent scores punish care	Powerless frontline moments
12. Tell you next time?	“Any other comments?” junk drawer	Preferred honesty for bad news

1. “What Were You Trying to Get Done When This Started?”

The question: Open on the job, not the brand or the ticket number.

Why the form fails: NPS/CSAT assume the episode is already framed. Comment boxes come after the score.

Dialogue surfaces: The real progress the human hired you for.

Ask without theater: In-channel, right after the moment — one sentence, then listen.

Closed-loop move: Tag the journey/job owner, not only a sentiment bucket.

2. “Where Did It First Go Sideways?”

The question: Find the first fail point — not the last contact.

Why the form fails: Post-close surveys fire after “resolved,” missing the spike.

Dialogue surfaces: Wrong door, unclear next step, status-less wait.

Ask without theater: “Walk me to the first moment it stopped making sense.”

Closed-loop move: Instrument that fail point. Don’t only coach the last agent.

3. “What Did That Cost You — Time, Money, Dignity, or Trust?”

The question: Name the human cost in their language.

Why the form fails: Effort scores flatten shame, fear, and unpaid homework.

Dialogue surfaces: Dignity costs and emotional residue forms never code well.

Ask without theater: Offer the dimensions; let them choose and expand.

Closed-loop move: Recovery proportional to cost — not a coupon reflex.

4. “What Workaround Did You Invent to Get Unstuck?”

The question: Archaeology of the shadow path.

Why the form fails: “How easy was it?” hides the spreadsheet, the second account, the friend who knows someone.

Dialogue surfaces: Competing hires and design debt.

Ask without theater: “What did you do that we didn’t design for?”

Closed-loop move: Kill or adopt the workaround on purpose.

5. “Who Else Did You Have to Tell This Story To?”

The question: Map the retelling tax and orphan seams.

Why the form fails: Channel scores miss bot → agent → specialist handoffs.

Dialogue surfaces: Seams with no owner.

Ask without theater: Count the tells. Thank them for the labor.

Closed-loop move: Context that travels. Seam owner named. For the beats forms miss entirely, see 8 Moments That Matter More Than Your NPS Dashboard.

6. “What Would ‘Made Right’ Look Like for You — Today?”

The question: Co-design recovery with specificity.

Why the form fails: Detractor callbacks close cases; they rarely ask for a concrete make-right.

Dialogue surfaces: The fix they will actually trust.

Ask without theater: “If we could only do one thing before end of day…”

Closed-loop move: Power to deliver that make-right — or an honest constraint.

7. “What Almost Made You Leave, Switch, or Stop Trying?”

The question: Surface the quiet-exit cliff while they’re still talking.

Why the form fails: Non-respondents and silent churn never enter the harvest.

Dialogue surfaces: Leading indicators of abandonment.

Ask without theater: Normalize the near-exit. Don’t punish honesty.

Closed-loop move: Watch unfinished jobs and repeat contact — not only scores.

8. “What Should We Stop Doing Because of What Happened?”

The question: Invite a stop, not only a fix.

Why the form fails: Forms hunt promoters; they rarely fund subtraction.

Dialogue surfaces: Policy cliffs, dark patterns, busywork the org still loves.

Ask without theater: “If you ran this place for a day, what would you kill?”

Closed-loop move: A visible stop with a date — reciprocity they can see. If your program still manages the number instead of the journey, use 11 Signs Your CX Program Is Scorekeeping, Not Sense-Making.

9. “Which Handoff or Policy Moment Broke Trust?”

The question: Separate usability friction from trust violation.

Why the form fails: One score collapses betrayal and a slow page load.

Dialogue surfaces: Fine-print cliffs, denied recovery, opaque decisions.

Ask without theater: “Was it hard — or did it feel unfair?”

Closed-loop move: Trust redesign (control, care, accountability), not only UX polish.

10. “What Did You Need to Know That Nobody Told You?”

The question: Status, next step, and expectation gaps.

Why the form fails: Timing mismatches; surveys ask satisfaction after silence already hurt.

Dialogue surfaces: Opacity as the product.

Ask without theater: “What update would have lowered your stress?”

Closed-loop move: Status-as-experience design. Proactive messaging with truth.

11. “Who Helped — and Were They Allowed to Finish the Job?”

The question: Honor frontline power — or its absence.

Why the form fails: Agent scores punish care; customers rarely get asked about mandate.

Dialogue surfaces: Powerless moments of truth.

Ask without theater: Name the human if they want; protect them from blame theater.

Closed-loop move: Recovery bands and dual scorecards — not handle-time theater. For the rulebook, see 10 Agent Empowerment Rules Your Customer Deserves Before They Quit.

12. “What Should We Tell You Next Time Something Breaks?”

The question: Co-design the future promise and alerting.

Why the form fails: “Any other comments?” is a junk drawer.

Dialogue surfaces: Preferred channel, timing, and honesty level for bad news.

Ask without theater: Close by giving them authorship of the next loop.

Closed-loop move: Preference captured. Next incident proves you heard them.

How Do You Run a Conversational Listening Check Before the Next VoC Redesign?

Before the next VoC redesign, run five go/no-go questions:

Are we asking in the heat or after the harvest?
Do our questions invite jobs and costs — or only scores?
Who can act on what we hear this week?
What will customers see that we stopped or fixed?
How do we measure “felt heard,” not only response rate?

Dead forms extract. Living questions listen — and then change something.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is conversational VoC?

Conversational VoC is listening as dialogue — adaptive prompts, messaging, voice, or short interviews in or near the moment of experience — aimed at understanding and closed-loop action, not only capturing a score on a static form.

What questions should I ask instead of surveys?

Ask what they were trying to get done, where it first went sideways, what it cost them, what workaround they invented, who else had to hear the story, what “made right” looks like today, what almost made them leave, what you should stop, which handoff broke trust, what nobody told them, whether helpers were allowed to finish, and what to tell them next time something breaks.

Why are survey response rates falling?

Survey response rates are falling because forms feel extractive, arrive after the heat has cooled, mismatch how people already converse, and rarely show customers that anything changed. People still have stories — they stop volunteering unpaid labor to dead forms.

How do you run conversational VoC?

Run conversational VoC in-channel and near the moment: ask job- and cost-centered questions, follow curiosity without theater, route themes to journey owners who can act, close the loop with visible fixes or stops, and measure whether people felt heard — not only response rate.

What is the difference between VoC surveys and conversational feedback?

VoC surveys optimize for structured scores and dashboard hygiene. Conversational feedback optimizes for dialogue, context, and action — surfacing jobs, seams, dignity costs, and make-right while the experience is still hot. Scores can remain a pulse; they should not be the whole conversation.

Image credits: Pexels

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VC-Backed Firms in Regulated Industries

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The Times They Are A-Changin’

VC-Backed Firms in Regulated Industries

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

This week I have had conversations with executive teams of VC-backed firms working in three different regulated industries: Healthcare, Telco, and Financial Services. All of them reported that their sales pipelines were around 3X what they were a year ago. We didn’t dig into why, although I expect that it means the incumbent providers are under increasing pressure to modernize their operating models and streamline their infrastructure models to meet customer demand and pricing pressure.

The reason we did not get to discuss why this is happening is that each of the teams was more focused on how — how do we adapt our playbook to this new development? You might not think an upsurge in demand would be a problem, but all three of these firms are at least an order of magnitude sub-scale to properly address the demands of their target customers. How do you ride such a wave demand without wiping out? How do you scale and not break your company?

Understanding the Dynamics of the Situation

The easiest way to see what is going on here is to examine it through the lens of the Hierarchy of Powers. Here’s how it plays out:

Category Power. The category is shifting from resisting the next wave to embracing it, albeit reluctantly, because the status quo is deteriorating, and it is clear something has to change. This leads to the upsurge in RFPs and RFIs that each company is now seeing. Budget is being created whereas before it had to be scrounged. This is great news for each enterprise, but it has its challenges.
Company Power. Compared to the Tier 1 prospects each of these companies is targeting, their own is tiny indeed. All of them lack the global reach and depth of personnel their customers require. Nonetheless, these are their most valuable prospects, so they must find a way to engage. That’s the core of the challenge.
Market Power. Each company has already focused on a single vertical—that is how they got as far as they have. Now they are going to have to focus even more rigorously in order to control their exposure to too much demand coming at them too fast and too soon. To secure market power, to become the go-to vendor for their category of offer for this vertical, they must prioritize the right subset of prospects and do whatever it takes to get them over the line.
Offer Power. This is where each company shines. It is why they are each attracting the attention of companies that a year ago were not returning their calls. Their products, however, are highly complex, and the implementations even more so, so they cannot support runaway growth. Moreover, the regulated industries they serve impose rigorous, one might even say onerous, demands, creating a whole series of hoops to jump through before they can get to the other side. How do you “catch the wave” when the sign on the beach says “proceed with caution”?
Execution Power. At the end of the day, this is the crux of the challenge. How can a subscale company with a world-class offer meet the demands of a regulated industry dominated by behemoth enterprises? How should it adapt its playbook?

Adapting the Playbook

Given this change in dynamics, here are the kinds of adaptions that are called for:

Control your destiny by narrowing your focus. The key for all three enterprises is to win a handful of Tier 1 accounts that the rest of the industry looks to for best practices. Winning these accounts will establish them as the go-to choice for the industry as a whole. This objective trumps all others, and every organization inside the company needs to reprioritize its workload accordingly.
Hold fast to your priorities. This is an internal transformation that requires strict discipline to execute. In the past, it was OK to step off the path to address an impromptu request because the demand for everyone’s time was less insistent. Now it is not. Use weekly commits as a way to make workloads visible, and intervene whenever they are drifting off course.
Stay very focused on your top-tier target accounts. Every one of them is a priority, even when they may not be giving you all the reception you want. Conversely, all other prospects are a distraction even when they are inviting you in.
Continue to serve your existing customer base. These are not the Tier 1 players we are targeting, but they are references that can help win those accounts. In addition, they are the early adopters who put their faith in you. You must do right by them.
Align with a big friend. Your target customers need you to bring many more resources to the table than you have inside your company. The good news is that these same customers work with global service providers who specialize in helping them on-board next-generation offers. You need to secure strong support from at least one of these, and you probably cannot easily support more than one, so pick one you think you can trust, and go all in with them on your go-to-market planning.
Let the big friend help you clear your regulatory hurdles. Time is your scarcest resource, and unfortunately, regulated industries are not good at moving swiftly. It’s a mismatch in operating models. VC-backed companies take risks to save time; regulated industries take time to reduce risk. This is not something you are well positioned to deal with. Global services firms, on the other hand, already have relationships with the regulatory authorities you must interface with, not to mention the bandwidth to work through the mandated processes. Do whatever you can to get their help in expediting whatever needs to be done.
Create the solution playbook that you and your GSI friend will co-deliver. Do not let the GSI take over the implementation. You know a lot more about what it takes to make your solution work than they do. But you can make sure that the work is profitable for them by giving them the playbook and letting them bill for their time. You don’t need the services revenue anywhere near as much as you need the Tier 1 account win.
Defer inbound requests that take you off strategy. You don’t have to say no. You just have to say, not yet. Given the amount of stress that any Tier 1 engagement will put on your firm, taking even one account that is off-script risks breaking your camel’s back.
Defer inbound interest around an acquisition. You are at an inflection point in value creation that is potentially extraordinary, the very outcome you and your investors have been preparing for. This is not the time to let go of the reins, particularly if they are going to get handed to an established enterprise whose culture is likely to clash with yours. Moreover, you cannot afford the distraction of all the due diligence that M&A discussions necessarily entail. M&A cannot solve your Tier 1 problem. You have to do that yourself.

Now, to be clear, there are exceptions that could overrule any one of the prescriptions above, so each team needs to review them in light of its own history and circumstances. The key point is that when the market is shifting from a state of scarcity to one of abundance, there is a short time window to catch that wave. The large competitors cannot move fast enough to do this themselves — that is why they are interested in making an acquisition. You are agile enough to do so, but you are painfully subscale — hence the need for the somewhat drastic prescriptions above. Navigating this part of the journey is tricky, but if you stay focused on winning (and keeping!) a handful of Tier 1 accounts, you are making the best bet.

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

Image Credit: Google Gemini

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Why We Love to Hate Chatbots

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Why We Love to Hate Chatbots

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

More and more, brands are starting to get the chatbot “thing” right. AI is improving, and customers are realizing that a chatbot can be a great first stop for getting quick answers or resolving questions. After all, if you have a question, don’t you want it answered now?

In a recent interview, I was asked, “What do you love about chatbots?” That was easy. Then came the follow-up question, “What do you hate about chatbots?” Also easy. The truth is, chatbots can deliver amazing experiences. They can also cause just as much frustration as a very long phone hold. With that in mind, here are five reasons to love (and hate) chatbots:

Why We Love Chatbots

24/7 Availability: Chatbots are always on. They don’t sleep. Customers can get help at any time, even during holidays.
Fast Response: Instant answers to simple questions, such as hours of operation, order status and basic troubleshooting, can be provided with efficiency and minimal friction.
Customer Service at Scale: Once you set up a chatbot, it can handle many customers at once. Customers won’t have to wait, and human agents can focus on more complicated issues and problems.
Multiple Language Capabilities: The latest chatbots are capable of speaking and typing in many different languages. Whether you need global support or just want to cater to different cultures in a local area, a chatbot has you covered.
Consistent Answers: When programmed properly, a chatbot delivers the same answers every time.

Chatbots Shep Hyken Cartoon

Why We Hate Chatbots

AI Can’t Do Everything, but Some Companies Think It Can: This is what frustrates customers the most. Some companies believe AI and chatbots can do it all. They can’t, and the result is frustrated customers who will eventually move on to the competition.
A Lack of Empathy: AI can do a lot, but it can’t express true emotions. For some customers, care, empathy and understanding are more important than efficiency.
Scripted Retorts Feel Robotic: Chatbots often follow strict guidelines. That’s actually a good thing, unless the answers provided feel overly scripted and generic.
Hard to Get to a Human: One of the biggest complaints about chatbots is, “I just want to talk to a person.” Smart companies make it easy for customers to leave AI and connect to a human.
There’s No Emotional Connection to a Chatbot: You’ll most likely never hear a customer say, “I love my chatbot.” A chatbot won’t win your heart. In customer service, sometimes how you make someone feel is more important than what you say.

Chatbots are powerful tools, but they are not a replacement for human connection. The best companies use AI to enhance support, not replace it. When chatbots handle the routine issues and agents handle the more complex and human moments, that’s when customer experience goes from efficient to … amazing.

Image credits: Unsplash

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Win Your Way to an AI Job

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Anduril’s AI Grand Prix: Racing for the Future of Work

LAST UPDATED: January 28, 2026 at 2:27 PM

Anduril's AI Grand Prix: Racing for the Future of Work

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The traditional job interview is an antiquated artifact, a relic of a bygone industrial era. It often measures conformity, articulateness, and cultural fit more than actual capability or innovative potential. As we navigate the complexities of AI, automation, and rapid technological shifts, organizations are beginning to realize that to find truly exceptional talent, they need to look beyond resumes and carefully crafted answers. This is where companies like Anduril are not just iterating but innovating the very hiring process itself.

Anduril, a defense technology company known for its focus on AI-driven systems, recently announced its AI Grand Prix — a drone racing contest where the ultimate prize isn’t just glory, but a job offer. This isn’t merely a marketing gimmick; it’s a profound statement about their belief in demonstrated skill over credentialism, and a powerful strategy for identifying talent that can truly push the boundaries of autonomous systems. It epitomizes the shift from abstract evaluation to purposeful, real-world application, emphasizing hands-on capability over theoretical knowledge.

“The future of hiring isn’t about asking people what they can do; it’s about giving them a challenge and watching them show you.”

— Braden Kelley

Why Challenge-Based Hiring is the New Frontier

This approach addresses several critical pain points in traditional hiring:

Uncovering Latent Talent: Many brilliant minds don’t fit the mold of elite university degrees or polished corporate careers. Challenge-based hiring can surface individuals with raw, untapped potential who might otherwise be overlooked.
Assessing Practical Skills: In fields like AI, robotics, and advanced engineering, theoretical knowledge is insufficient. The ability to problem-solve under pressure, adapt to dynamic environments, and debug complex systems is paramount.
Cultural Alignment Through Action: Observing how candidates collaborate, manage stress, and iterate on solutions in a competitive yet supportive environment reveals more about their true cultural fit than any behavioral interview.
Building a Diverse Pipeline: By opening up contests to a wider audience, companies can bypass traditional biases inherent in resume screening, leading to a more diverse and innovative workforce.

Beyond Anduril: Other Pioneers of Performance-Based Hiring

Anduril isn’t alone in recognizing the power of real-world challenges to identify top talent. Several other forward-thinking organizations have adopted similar, albeit varied, approaches:

Google’s Code Jam and Hash Code

For years, Google has leveraged competitive programming contests like Code Jam and Hash Code to scout for software engineering talent globally. These contests present participants with complex algorithmic problems that test their coding speed, efficiency, and problem-solving abilities. While not always directly leading to a job offer for every participant, top performers are often fast-tracked through the interview process. This allows Google to identify engineers who can perform under pressure and think creatively, rather than just those who can ace a whiteboard interview. It’s a prime example of turning abstract coding prowess into a tangible demonstration of value.

Kaggle Competitions for Data Scientists

Kaggle, now a Google subsidiary, revolutionized how data scientists prove their worth. Through its platform, companies post real-world data science problems—from predicting housing prices to identifying medical conditions from images—and offer prize money, and often, connections to jobs, to the teams that develop the best models. This creates a meritocracy where the quality of one’s predictive model speaks louder than any resume. Many leading data scientists have launched their careers or been recruited directly from their performance in Kaggle competitions. It transforms theoretical data knowledge into demonstrable insights that directly impact business outcomes.

The Human Element in the Machine Age

What makes these initiatives truly human-centered? It’s the recognition that while AI and automation are transforming tasks, the human capacity for ingenuity, adaptation, and critical thinking remains irreplaceable. These contests aren’t about finding people who can simply operate machines; they’re about finding individuals who can teach the machines, design the next generation of algorithms, and solve problems that don’t yet exist. They foster an environment of continuous learning and application, perfectly aligning with the “purposeful learning” philosophy.

The Anduril AI Grand Prix, much like Google’s and Kaggle’s initiatives, de-risks the hiring process by creating a performance crucible. It’s a pragmatic, meritocratic, and ultimately more effective way to build the teams that will define the next era of technological advancement. As leaders, our challenge is to move beyond conventional wisdom and embrace these innovative models, ensuring we’re not just ready for the future of work, but actively shaping it.

Anduril Fury

Frequently Asked Questions

What is challenge-based hiring?

Challenge-based hiring is a recruitment strategy where candidates demonstrate their skills and problem-solving abilities by completing a real-world task, project, or competition, rather than relying solely on resumes and interviews.

What are the benefits of this approach for companies?

Companies can uncover hidden talent, assess practical skills, observe cultural fit in action, and build a more diverse talent pipeline by focusing on demonstrable performance.

How does this approach benefit candidates?

Candidates get a fair chance to showcase their true abilities regardless of traditional credentials, gain valuable experience, and often get direct access to influential companies and potential job offers based purely on merit.

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons, Google Gemini

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Reimagining Personalization

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Reimagining Personalization

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Personalization was one of the leading rationales for companies investing in digitalization. The idea was that you were going to delight your customers by proactively offering them goods and services they were predisposed to want. This would create customer loyalty, increase their lifetime value, spur word-of-mouth endorsement, drive up Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and solve world hunger.

OK, not so much. A decade or more in, it’s time we ask ourselves, what is the real value of personalization, and how should we allocate our future investments in it? This begins with getting ourselves onto the right playing field in the first place. Personalization has different dynamics depending on whether your enterprise is Business to Consumer (B2C), Business to Business (B2B), B2B2C or B2G2C. Here’s how it plays out.

B2C

Let’s face it — as consumers, we are tired of personalization in its current form. It isn’t really personal, it is just an unending barrage of re-targeted advertising that works statistically but not psychologically. Despite all its promises to the contrary, it is not in fact delightful. So, best to take all that language about delighting our customers and throw it in the trashcan.

Instead of looking for delighters, we should be examining our hygiene factors. These are the things that annoy customers most when they go awry — late shipping, lost luggage, long hold times, rejected passwords, tedious surveys — you name it. Getting hygiene right is hard, but doing so consistently drives brand loyalty through the roof — just ask Amazon. We love what they do so much we subscribe to them! The point is, the things we love are not personal, they are institutional. Amazon has invested enormously in systems that set expectations through timely communication, early anomaly detection, instant alerts, and the like. This is not marketing, it’s logistics, but it is personally delivered, and we feel empowered in a highly differentiated way. (BTW, note to Amazon — you are increasingly over-monetizing your landing pages with sponsored ads, thereby eroding your most valuable asset. You need to set limits and stick to them.)

B2B2C

Rethinking personalization creates a whole new wave of innovation for B2B2C companies to pursue. Instead of optimizing for clicks, help your customers better detect signals. To be fair, some of these could be buying signals, and they should be used to drive consumer traffic along existing lines. But machine learning is also extremely effective at monitoring hygiene factors wherever there is log data to exploit. Omniture was an early pioneer in using this technology for website optimization, and now with generative AI you can let your customers’ websites ask visitors what they are interested in seeing instead of playing whack-a-mole with their best guesses.

The point is, no company is happy with their website, ever — and frankly, for good reason. They are just too hard to navigate, too much about themselves, not enough about the customers and prospects they are there to serve. By focusing on hygiene factors rather than delighters, this can be changed.

B2G2C

OK, when it comes to dealing with government services, no one is really thinking about delighters. Nightmares, on the other hand, do come to mind. Once again, it’s all about hygiene factors. The services that are being offered meet real needs. It’s the obstacles that systems and bureaucracies put in the way of citizens seeking those services that drive everyone crazy.

The fastest way to cut through this mess is to embrace the adage Time is money. The goal is to relentlessly optimize for reducing latency while at the same time reducing fraud as well. This requires the very best in ML and AI, but those resources are available today, and there are plenty of socially minded entrepreneurs who are ready to put in the hard work to make them scale. The core metric of success is time to closure, the tracking of which will be no mean feat. One consequence of its success, to be frank, would be a reduction in bureaucratic employment — not just to free up more money for social services but rather to expedite transaction processing throughout the system. My hope would be that impacted agencies could redeploy their workforces into the field where face-to-face personal interaction actually can make a powerful difference in the moment.

B2B

One question that bugs the you-know-what out of CEOs of successful global enterprises is, Why do our customers keep telling us we are hard to do business with? Of course, the answer is because they are. The real question is what can they do about it? Here are some low-hanging-fruit places to start:

Disintermediate your salespeople from replenishment transactions. Instead, empower customers to transact on their own behalf through digital self-service portals. And extend the same courtesy to partners who are acting as agents on behalf of their customers.
Attack the long tail of your SKUs. Not only do they entangle your salespeople in majoring in minors, they confuse the heck out of your customers.
Stop imposing buying risks on your customers and take them upon yourself instead by tokenizing bundles to allow for swapping out unconsumed portions and truing up on overused ones.
Invest in customer success initiatives that build relationships higher up in the customer organization, leveraging thought leadership marketing, customer health scoring, and executive sponsors focused on deep listening. Customers can tell you what they really need from you if you’ll let them.

Here as elsewhere, the goal is not to delight the customer. Customers don’t want to be delighted. They want to be served – thoughtfully, reliably, and economically. Remember, it’s not about you. It’s about them.

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

Image Credit: Pexels

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Top 40 Innovation Authors of 2025

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After a week of torrid voting and much passionate support, along with a lot of gut-wrenching consideration and jostling during the judging round, I am proud to announce your Top 40 Innovation Authors of 2025:

Robyn Bolton
Robyn M. Bolton works with leaders of mid and large sized companies to use innovation to repeatably and sustainably grow their businesses.
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Greg Satell
Greg Satell is a popular speaker and consultant. His first book, Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age, was selected as one of the best business books in 2017. Follow his blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @Digital Tonto.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stefan Lindegaard
Stefan Lindegaard is an author, speaker and strategic advisor. His work focuses on corporate transformation based on disruption, digitalization and innovation in large corporations, government organizations and smaller companies. Stefan believes that business today requires an open and global perspective, and his work takes him to Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dennis Stauffer
Dennis Stauffer is an author, independent researcher, and expert on personal innovativeness. He is the founder of Innovator Mindset LLC which helps individuals, teams, and organizations enhance and accelerate innovation success. by shifting mindset. Follow @DennisStauffer

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

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

Ayelet Baron
Ayelet Baron is a pioneering futurist reminding us we are powerful creators through award winning books, daily blog and thinking of what is possible. Former global tech executive who sees trust, relationships and community as our building blocks to a healthy world.

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

Leo Chan
Leo is the founder of Abound Innovation Inc. He’s a people and heart-first entrepreneur who believes everyone can be an innovator. An innovator himself, with 55 US patents and over 20 years of experience, Leo has come alongside organizations like Chick-fil-A and guided them to unleash the innovative potential of their employees by transforming them into confident innovators.

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

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

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

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

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

Chateau G Pato
Chateau G Pato is a senior futurist at Inteligencia Ltd. She is passionate about content creation and thinks about it as more science than art. Chateau travels the world at the speed of light, over mountains and under oceans. Her favorite numbers are one and zero.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2015
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2016
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2017
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2018
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2019
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024

Download PDF versions of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 lists here:

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. . .

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Happy New Year everyone!

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Making Empathy Your Secret Weapon

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GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When I first moved to Kyiv about 20 years ago, I met my friend Pavlo, who is from Belarus. Eventually our talk turned to that country’s leader, Alexander Lukashenko, and an incident in which he turned off the utilities at the US Ambassador’s residence, as well as those of other diplomats. It seemed totally outlandish and crazy to me.

“But he won,” Pavlo countered. I was incredulous, until he explained. “Lukashenko knows he’s a bastard and that the world will never accept him. In that situation all you can win is your freedom and that’s what he won.” It was a mode of thinking so outrageous and foreign to me that I could scarcely believe it.

Yet it opened my eyes and made me a more effective operator. We tend to think of empathy as an act of generosity, but it’s far more than that. Learning how to internalize diverse viewpoints is a skill we should learn not only because it helps make others more comfortable, but because it empowers us to successfully navigate an often complex and difficult world.

Identifying Shared Values

We all have ideas we feel passionately about and, naturally, we want others to adopt them. The ideas we believe in make up an important facet of our identity, dignity and sense of self. For me, as an American living in post-communist countries, the ideas embedded in democratic institutions were important and it was difficult for me to see things another way.

My conversation with Pavlo opened my eyes. Where I saw America and “the west” as a more just society, people in other parts of the world saw it as a dominant force that restricted their freedom. My big insight was that I didn’t need to agree with a perspective to understand, internalize, and leverage it as a shared value.

For example, once I was able to understand that some people saw Americans as powerful—something akin to an invading force—I was able to shed the feelings of vulnerability that arose from being in a strange and foreign land and focus on the shared value of safety in my dealings with others.

A great strategy for identifying shared values is to listen closely to what your opposition is saying. People say and do things because they believe they will be effective. Once I was able to stop dismissing Lukashenko as a corrupt thug, I was able to identify the issues surrounding safety and dominance that could be useful to me.

Building Shared Purpose

Using empathy to identify shared values is a crucial first step, but doesn’t achieve anything by itself. To move things forward, we need to build a shared purpose. Consider a famous study called the Robbers Cave Experiment, which involved 22 boys of similar religious, racial and economic backgrounds invited to spend a few weeks at a summer camp.

In the first phase, they were separated into two groups of “Rattlers” and “Eagles” that had little contact with each other. As each group formed its own identity, they began to display hostility on the rare occasions when they were together. During the second phase, the two groups were given competitive tasks and tensions boiled over, with each group name calling, sabotaging each other’s efforts and violently attacking one another.

In the third phase, the researchers attempted to reduce tensions. At first, they merely brought them into friendly contact, with little effect. The boys just sneered at each other. However, when they were tricked into challenging tasks where they were forced to work together in order to be successful, the tenor changed quickly. By the end of the camp the two groups had fallen into a friendly camaraderie.

As Francis Fukuyama writes in his recent book, “Identity can be used to divide, but it can also be used to integrate,” which is exactly what I found in my years working is foreign cultures. Once I was able to leverage shared values to create a shared purpose and began engaging in shared actions, that purpose and those actions became part of a shared identity. Yes, I was still an American, with American values and perspectives, but I became their American.

Overcoming Conflict By Designing A Dilemma

Unfortunately, building a shared purpose isn’t always possible. A simple truth is that humans build attachments to people, ideas and things. When those attachments are threatened, they will lash out. That’s why whenever we set out to make a significant impact, there will always be those who will work to undermine what we are trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.

When that happens—and it always does eventually—we can get sucked into a conflict, which will likely take us off course and discredit what we’re trying to achieve. Yet, here too, developing empathy skills to identify shared values can be extremely helpful once we learn how to design a dilemma action, which puts the opponents into an impossible position.

Dilemma actions have been used for at least a century—famous examples include Gandhi’s Salt March, King’s Birmingham Campaign and Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels—but more recently codified by the global activist, Srdja Popović. They are just as effective in an organizational context, using an opponent’s resistance against them.

One of the great things about dilemma actions is that you approach them exactly the same way you approach building allies—by identifying a shared purpose. Once you do that, you can design a constructive act rooted in that shared purpose that advances your agenda. Your opponent then has a choice: they can disrupt the act and violate the shared value or they can let it go forward and let change progress.

For example, I was once running a transformation project that was being impeded by a Sales Director hogging accounts. Although it was agreed that she would distribute her clients, she never got around to it, so I set up a meeting with a key account and one of our salespeople. When she tried to disrupt the meeting, she violated the shared value we had established, was dismissed from her position and everything fell into place after that.

Empathy Is Not Absolution

Empathy, as powerful as it can potentially be, is widely misunderstood. It is often paired with compassion in the context of creating a more beneficial workplace. That is, of course, a reasonable and worthy objective, but the one-dimensional use of the term is misleading and limits its value.

When seen only through the lens of making others more comfortable, empathy can seem like a “nice to have,” trait rather than a valuable competency and an important source of competitive advantage. It’s much easier to see the advantage of imposing your will, rather than internalizing the perspectives of others.

One thing I learned over many years living in foreign cultures is that it’s important to understand how people around you think, especially if you don’t agree with them and, as is sometimes the case, find their point of view morally reprehensible. In fact, learning more about how others think can make you a more effective leader, negotiator and manager.

Empathy is not absolution. You can internalize the ideas of others and still vehemently disagree. There is a reason that Special Forces are trained to understand the cultures in which they will operate and it isn’t because it makes them nicer people. It’s because it makes them more lethal operators.

It is only through empathy that we can understand motivations—for good or ill—and design effective strategies to build shared purpose or, if need be, design a dilemma for an opponent. To operate in an often difficult world, you need to understand your environment. That’s why building empathy skills can be like a secret weapon.

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

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Important Questions for Innovation

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Important Questions for Innovation

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Here are some important questions for innovation.

What’s the Distinctive Value Proposition? The new offering must help the customer make progress. How does the customer benefit? How is their life made easier? How does this compare to the existing offerings? Summarize the difference on one page. If the innovation doesn’t help the customer make progress, it’s not an innovation.

Is it too big or too small? If the project could deliver sales growth that would dwarf the existing sales numbers for the company, the endeavor is likely too big. The company mindset and philosophy would have to be destroyed. Are you sure you’re up to the challenge? If the project could deliver only a small increase in sales, it’s likely not worth the time and expense. Think return on investment. There’s no right answer, but it’s important to ask the question and set the limits for too big and too small. If it could grow to 10% of today’s sales numbers, that’s probably about right.

Why us? There’s got to be a reason why you’re the right company to do this new work. List the company’s strengths that make the work possible. If you have several strengths that give you an advantage, that’s great. And if one of your weaknesses gives you an advantage, that works too. Step on the accelerator. If none of your strengths give you an advantage, choose another project.

How do we increase our learning rate? First thing, define Learning Objectives (LOs). And once defined, create a plan to achieve them quickly. Here’s a hint. Define what it takes to satisfy the LOs. Here’s another hind. Don’t build a physical prototype. Instead, create a website that describes the potential offering and its value proposition and ask people if they want to buy it. Collect the data and refine the offering based on your learning. Or, create a one-page sales tool and show it to ten potential customers. Define your learning and use the learning to decide what to do next.

Then what? If the first phase of the work is successful, there must be a then what. There must be an approved plan (funding, resources) for the second phase before the first phase starts. And the same thing goes for the follow-on phases. The easiest way to improve innovation effectiveness is avoid starting phase one of projects when their phase two is unfunded. The fastest innovation project is the wrong one that never starts.

How do we start? Define how much money you want to spend. Formalize your business objectives. Choose projects that could meet your business objectives. Free up your best people. Learn as quickly as you can.

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