Category Archives: Psychology

Kickstart Change with Reclaimed Focus and Attention

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In 2019 we experienced the shock and the pain that resulted from the globally disruptive global Covid 19 pandemic. To both survive and thrive in the new decade of uncertainty, many people still need help and guidance to connect to, understand and manage their anxieties, fears, inertia, and confusion about the future to effectively ride the waves of disruptive change. Yet, according to Johann Hari, in his best-selling book – Stolen Focus, all over the world, our focus and attention have been stolen, and our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and we need to be intentional in reclaiming it.

He describes the wide range of consequences this has on our lives, which are further impacted by pervasive and addicting technology we are being forced to use in our virtual world, exasperated by the pandemic and the need to work virtually, from home. He reveals how our dwindling attention spans predate the internet, and how its decline is accelerating at an alarming rate.

He suggests that if we want to get back our ability to focus, stop multitasking and practice paying attention. Also, if we want to kickstart change and help people feel confident in their readiness, competence, and capacity to change and innovate in a world of unknowns, it all starts with improving our ability to pay deep attention to what is really going on.

Yet, in the thesaurus there are 286 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to paying attention, such as: listen, and giving heed, so what might be the key first steps to take in reclaiming your focus and attention?

Power of focus and attention

Energy flows where attention goes

Placing our focus and attention activates our energy, and our energy flows where our attention goes.

So, if you have been feeling tired and lethargic, or overwhelmed and burned out, then take a moment to consider how you might score yourself on an attentive-distractive continuum and consider how similar, or different you are to US college students who can now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and where office workers on average manage only three minutes?

Being intentional

Involves getting clear upfront about what you want to achieve, by setting an intention to achieve a specific outcome or result in the future that is important to you. In a world of unknowns, paying deep attention and being intentional are the key foundations for recovery, rebalance, and transformation.

Limiting ways of seeing, being, and acting in the world

Many people are still experiencing unconscious intrinsic, or reactive responses to their pandemic-induced work situations and are suffering from stress overload, overwhelm, and burnout.

This is because our autonomic nervous systems, which control our cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, urinary, and reproductive functions, and responses to stress, operate outside of our conscious control in two different and co-dependent and often competing systems.

Parasympathetic fight or flight system

Put very simply, our sympathetic nervous systems get overloaded by heightened stress levels, which ignite our protective fight or flight system, which normally allows our bodies to function under stress and danger, and, as a result, impacts significantly on our levels of tiredness, exhaustion, and burnt-out emotional, mental and physical states. This exasperates our inherent, unconscious needs to self-preserve (gut), feelings of isolation and loneliness (heat), and having the limited presence of mind (head) and reverts many of us into survival mode, and shift out of alignment, where we become physiologically incoherent (out of balance).

Which is not conducive to knowing and activating what we can truly, really, and actually influence and control in our lives, which requires us to effectively balance chaos with order.

Reduced capacity

When operating in survival mode, we are unable (like the US College students) to take the sacred pauses we need to make the space to attend and observe, through retreat, and reflection.

We are no longer able to access our inner knowing, play in the space of possibility, create a normalized state of equilibrium and calm, and be coherent and congruent in our daily lives.

Our overall capacity to set clear goals, make smart decisions, creatively solve problems, courageously take the right actions, harness our intuition, compassionately cultivate understanding and perception, develop good relationships, learn and develop, and finally, our health and well-being, are significantly reduced.

Initiate reclaiming focus and attention

Because we don’t know if companies will ever return to their pre-pandemic-like worlds, and become future-fit, people need to be reskilled in how to focus, how to observe, how to deeply focus and attend, and how to be intentional.

Developing daily habits to be focused and productive

Being intentional about breathing

To help balance and initiate harmonizing our autonomic nervous systems, develop physiological coherence, to respond optimally to the world, starts with developing focus and attention on your breath.

Doing this helps your neurology to relax, reduce stress and anxiety, increase calmness, and reconnect to the self.

Sounds simple, yet in my global coaching practice, clients would often turn up feeling overwhelmed and incoherent, so we would begin the session with a “box breathing” exercise. This involves breathing while you slowly count to four for a total of four times – four counts of breathing in, four counts of holding your breath, four counts of exhaling, and four more counts of holding after your exhale. We could both be grounded, and coherent, to partner and connect in high-impact and productive sessions.

Being intentional in stepping away from your screens

According to one 2019 survey of 1,057 U.S. office workers, 87 percent of professionals spend most of their workday staring at screens: an average of seven hours a day. Closing your laptop and taking a quick walk outside, in nature allows your brain to recharge for your next task, and enables your autonomic nervous system to take a well-deserved break and calm down.

Sounds simple, yet in my global coaching practice, clients found this very difficult to do, this might involve no TV screens in bedrooms, leaving phones outside bedrooms, turning phones off at 8.00 pm, buying an alarm clock, setting and sticking to a dedicated start and finish work times, taking regular lunch breaks outside in nature and coffee breaks with friends. Be playful and allow your mind to enjoy wandering into wondering.

Working in focused intervals

A recent article in Inc stated that – “In addition to the seven or eight hours of adequate sleep that so many entrepreneurs and CEOs neglect, taking smart breaks during your workday, and having longer periods of downtime are keys to being more productive”.

Sounds simple, again in my global coaching practice I had to negotiate with clients to be intentionally disciplined and methodical in planning their days, weeks, and months. This involved scheduling time to initiate or sustain a mindfulness or meditation practice, engage in a regular exercise program, go shopping to buy and eat healthy foods (eliminating desk-side snacks), being clear on key deliverables and breaking down key tasks into bite-size bits, and saying no to meetings that don’t contribute towards achieving these.

When we change the way we attend, a different world can come forth, for ourselves, others we are interacting with, and the environment we are operating within. When we know how to really, truly, and deeply attend, and observe, we can go to our place of deeper knowing, rethink and then act swiftly and inflow to effect the transformational breakthroughs that change the world as we know it.

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, which can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

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Both Sides of the Story

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Both Sides of the Story

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you tell the truth and someone reacts negatively, their negativity is a surrogate for significance.

When you withhold the truth because someone will react negatively, you do everyone a disservice.

When you know what to do, let someone else do it.

When you’re absolutely sure what to do, maybe you’ve been doing it too long.

When you’re in a situation of complete uncertainty, try something. There’s no other way.

When you’re told it’s a bad idea, it’s probably a good one, but for a whole different reason.

When you’re told it’s a good idea, it’s time to come up with a less conventional idea.

When you’re afraid to speak up, your fear is a surrogate for importance.

When you’re afraid to speak up and you don’t, you do your company a disservice.

When you speak up and are met with laughter, congratulations, your idea is novel.

When you get angry, that says nothing about the thing you’re angry about and everything about you.

When someone makes you angry, that someone is always you.

When you’re afraid, be afraid and do it anyway.

When you’re not afraid, try harder.

When you’re understood the first time you bring up a new idea, it’s not new enough.

When you’re misunderstood, you could be onto something. Double down.

When you’re comfortable, stop what you’re doing and do something that makes you uncomfortable.

It’s time to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

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Creating Productive Interactions During Difficult Times

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Creating Productive Interactions During Difficult Times

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When times are stressful, it’s more difficult to be effective and skillful in our interactions with others. Here are some thoughts that could help.

Decide how you want to respond, and then respond accordingly.

Before you respond, take a breath. Your response will be better.

If you find yourself responding before giving yourself permission, stop your response and come clean.

Better responses from you make for even better responses from others.

If you interrupt someone in the middle of their sentence so you can make your point, you made a different point.

If you find yourself preparing your response while listening to someone, that’s not listening.

If you recognize you’re not listening, now there are at least two people who know the truth.

When there are no words coming from your mouth, that doesn’t constitute listening.

The strongest deterrent to listening is talking.

If you disagree with one element of a person’s position, you can, at the same time, agree with other elements of their position. That’s how agreement works.

If you start with agreement, even the smallest bit, disagreement softens.

Before you can disagree, it’s important to listen and understand. And it’s the same with agreement.

It’s easy to agree if that’s what you want to accomplish. And it’s the same for disagreement.

If you want to move toward agreement, start with understanding.

If you want to demonstrate understanding, start with listening.

If you want to demonstrate good listening, start with kindness.

Here are three mantras I find helpful:

Talk less to listen more.

Before you respond, take a breath.

Kindness before agreement.

Image credit: Wikimedia

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Will CHATgpt make us more or less innovative?

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Will CHATgpt make us more or less innovative?

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

The rapid emergence of increasingly sophisticated ‘AI ‘ programs such as CHATgpt will profoundly impact our world in many ways. That will inevitably include Innovation, especially the front end. But will it ultimately help or hurt us? Better access to information should be a huge benefit, and my intuition was to dive in and take full advantage. I still think it has enormous upside, but I also think it needs to be treated with care. At this point at least, it’s still a tool, not an oracle. It’s an excellent source for tapping existing information, but it’s (not yet) a source of new ideas. As with any tool, those who understand deeply how it works, its benefits and its limitations, will get the most from it. And those who use it wrongly could end up doing more harm than good. So below I’ve mapped out a few pros and cons that I see. It’s new, and like everybody else, I’m on a learning curve, so would welcome any and all thoughts on these pros and cons:

What is Innovation?

First a bit of a sidebar. To understand how to use a tool, I at least need to have a reasonably clear of what goals I want it to help me achieve. Obviously ‘what is innovation’ is a somewhat debatable topic, but my working model is that the front end of innovation typically involves taking existing knowledge or technology, and combining it in new, useful ways, or in new contexts, to create something that is new, useful and ideally understandable and accessible. This requires deep knowledge, curiosity and the ability to reframe problems to find new uses of existing assets. A recent illustrative example is Oculus Rift, an innovation that helped to make virtual reality accessible by combining fairly mundane components including a mobile phone screen and a tracking sensor and ski glasses into something new. But innovation comes in many forms, and can also involve serendipity and keen observation, as in Alexander Fleming’s original discovery of penicillin. But even this requires deep domain knowledge to spot the opportunity and reframing undesirable mold into a (very) useful pharmaceutical. So, my start-point is which parts of this can CHATgpt help with?

Another sidebar is that innovation is of course far more than simply discovery or a Eureka moment. Turning an idea into a viable product or service usually requires considerable work, with the development of penicillin being a case in point. I’ve no doubt that CHATgpt and its inevitable ‘progeny’ will be of considerable help in that part of the process too. But for starters I’ve focused on what it brings to the discovery phase, and the generation of big, game changing ideas.

First the Pros:

1. Staying Current: We all have to strike a balance between keeping up with developments in our own fields, and trying to come up with new ideas. The sheer volume of new information, especially in developing fields, means that keeping pace with even our own area of expertise has become challenging. But spend too much time just keeping up, and we become followers, not innovators, so we have to carve out time to also stretch existing knowledge. But if we don’t get the balance right, and fail to stay current, we risk get leapfrogged by those who more diligently track the latest discoveries. Simultaneous invention has been pervasive at least since the development of calculus, as one discovery often signposts and lays the path for the next. So fail to stay on top of our field, and we potentially miss a relatively easy step to the next big idea. CHATgpt can become an extremely efficient tool for tracking advances without getting buried in them.

2. Pushing Outside of our Comfort Zone: Breakthrough innovation almost by definition requires us to step beyond the boundaries of our existing knowledge. Whether we are Dyson stealing filtration technology from a sawmill for his unique ‘filterless’ vacuum cleaner, physicians combining stem cell innovation with tech to create rejection resistant artificial organs, or the Oculus tech mentioned above, innovation almost always requires tapping resources from outside of the established field. If we don’t do this, then we not only tend towards incremental ideas, but also tend to stay in lock step with other experts in our field. This becomes increasingly the case as an area matures, low hanging fruit is exhausted, and domain knowledge becomes somewhat commoditized. CHATgpt simply allows us to explore beyond our field far more efficiently than we’ve ever been able to before. And as it or related tech evolves, it will inevitably enable ever more sophisticated search. From my experience it already enables some degree of analogous search if you are thoughtful about how to frame questions, thus allowing us to more effectively expand searches for existing solutions to problems that lie beyond the obvious. That is potentially really exciting.

Some Possible Cons:

1. Going Down the Rabbit Hole: CHATgpt is crack cocaine for the curious. Mea culpa, this has probably been the most time consuming blog I’ve ever written. Answers inevitably lead to more questions, and it’s almost impossible to resist playing well beyond the specific goals I initially have. It’s fascinating, it’s fun, you learn a lot of stuff you didn’t know, but I at least struggle with discipline and focus when using it. Hopefully that will wear off, and I will find a balance that uses it efficiently.

2. The Illusion of Understanding: This is a bit more subtle, but a topic inevitably enhances our understanding of it. The act of asking questions is as much a part of learning as reading answers, and often requires deep mechanistic understanding. CHATgpa helps us probe faster, and its explanations may help us to understand concepts more quickly. But it also risks the illusion of understanding. When the heavy loading of searching is shifted away from us, we get quick answers, but may also miss out on the deeper mechanistic understanding we’d have gleaned if we’d been forced to work a bit harder. And that deeper understanding can be critical when we are trying to integrate superficially different domains as part of the innovation process. For example, knowing that we can use a patient’s stem cells to minimize rejection of an artificial organ is quite different from understanding how the immune system differentiates between its own and other stem cells. The risk is that sophisticated search engines will do more heavy lifting, allow us to move faster, but also result in a more superficial understanding, which reduces our ability to spot roadblocks early, or solve problems as we move to the back end of innovation, and reduce an idea to practice.

3. Eureka Moment: That’s the ‘conscious’ watch out, but there is also an unconscious one. It’s no secret that quite often our biggest ideas come when we are not actually trying. Archimedes had his Eureka moment in the bath, and many of my better ideas come when I least expect them, perhaps in the shower, when I first wake up, or am out having dinner. The neuroscience of creativity helps explain this, in that the restructuring of problems that leads to new insight and the integration of ideas works mostly unconsciously, and when we are not consciously focused on a problem. It’s analogous to the ‘tip of the tongue’ effect, where the harder we try to remember something, the harder it gets, but then comes to us later when we are not trying. But the key for the Eureka moment is that we need sufficiently deep knowledge for those integrations to occur. If CHATgpt increases the illusion of understanding, we could see less of those Eureka moments, and the ‘obvious in hindsight ideas’ they create.

Conclusion

I think that ultimately innovation will be accelerated by CHATgpt and what follows, perhaps quite dramatically. But I also think that we as innovators need to try and peel back the layers and understand as much as we can about these tools, as there is potential for us to trip up. We need to constantly reinvent the way we interact with them, leverage them as sophisticated innovation tools, but avoid them becoming oracles. We also need to ensure that we, and future generations use them to extend our thinking skill set, but not become a proxy for it. The calculator has in some ways made us all mathematical geniuses, but in other ways has reduced large swathes of the population’s ability to do basic math. We need to be careful that CHATgpt doesn’t do the same for our need for cognition, and deep mechanistic and/or critical thinking.

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Why are so many people quitting?

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Why are so many people quitting?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Measuring and Improving Your Capacity for Change

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The Adaptability Quotient (AQ)

Measuring and Improving Your Capacity for Change

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

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

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

Why AQ Trumps IQ and EQ in Volatility

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

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

The Three Pillars of Organizational AQ

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

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

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

Challenge: The Digital Ad Revenue Cliff

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

AQ Intervention (Success):

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

Measuring Your Organization’s AQ

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

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

Case Study 2: The Healthcare Provider’s Resilience Test

Challenge: Rapid, Unforeseen Regulatory and Technological Change

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

AQ Intervention (Success):

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

Conclusion: The Architect of Adaptability

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

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

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

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

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Systems Thinking Meets Empathy

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Designing Solutions for Interconnected Problems

Systems Thinking Meets Empathy

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

For decades, organizational innovation has been dominated by a mindset of reductionism: breaking a complex problem into smaller, manageable parts. We optimize the part, declare victory, and are often shocked when the whole system breaks down. We’ve managed to perfect the gear, but forgotten how the clock works.

Today’s challenges — digital transformation, climate resilience, supply chain volatility, and toxic organizational culture — are not isolated problems. They are interconnected systems. Solving them requires a fusion of two powerful disciplines that, when combined, create a force multiplier for change: Systems Thinking (the structural view) and Empathy (the human view).

This fusion is the essence of designing truly holistic and sustainable solutions. It moves us beyond mere product fixes to genuine systemic transformation.

The Failure of Incremental Optimizations

The core trap of reductionist thinking is the Unintended Consequence. Consider the classic example of optimizing a call center. By focusing purely on reducing the “Average Handling Time” (AHT), you successfully lower labor costs (an optimized part). But the system responds by increasing customer frustration, spiking repeat calls, and driving employee burnout (a systemic failure). The local win leads to a global loss.

Systems Thinking forces us to zoom out, seeing the organization not as a hierarchy of departments, but as a network of feedback loops. It requires identifying leverage points — small changes that yield large, lasting results — rather than just hammering on symptoms.

Empathy: The Only Way to Map the Human System

Where Systems Thinking provides the map of structure, Empathy provides the coordinates of human behavior. A map of the system is useless if it doesn’t accurately represent the people within it. You can’t identify a leverage point in a human system without understanding the motivations, fears, and cognitive biases that govern behavior.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) uses empathy to uncover latent needs, but when scaled to address large systems, that empathy must be elevated. It becomes about mapping the human-to-human and human-to-process connections. This qualitative understanding reveals the true cultural and emotional feedback loops — the places where fear reinforces inertia, or where purpose creates a virtuous cycle.

The Integrated Approach: Five Steps to Systemic Empathy

1. Define the Boundary with Humility:
Use Systems Thinking to define the true scope of the problem. Which external stakeholders, historical decisions, and seemingly unrelated departments are truly influencing the issue? We must resist the urge to draw the boundary too tightly around our own silo.
2. Map the Feedback Loops (Human and Structural):
Don’t just map process flows. Use Empathy to map the emotional and political flows. Where does the fear of a leader reinforce risk aversion? Where does a metric (like AHT) incentivize the wrong human behavior?
3. Locate the Leverage Points at the Intersection:
Look for places where human behavior and structure violently intersect. A simple policy change may be a leverage point, but only if it addresses a deep-seated human pain point revealed through empathy. This is where you stop fixing symptoms and start changing the system’s DNA.
4. Co-Design the Intervention with the System:
Never design the solution for the system; always design it with the system. Involve people from multiple, traditionally siloed points in the loop — Legal, Finance, Operations, and the end-user — to ensure the solution is structurally viable and emotionally adoptable.
5. Measure Systemic Impact, Not Local Gain:
Did the change truly improve the entire network? Your success metrics must be holistic. Measure outcomes like employee engagement and customer lifetime value, not just localized metrics like output per hour.

Case Study 1: Reforming the R&D Investment System

Challenge: Stagnant Innovation in a Fortune 500 Manufacturing Firm

A massive manufacturer struggled with risk-averse innovation despite generous R&D funding. Reductionist analysis focused on optimizing the stage-gate process (the part).

Systemic Empathy Intervention:

The team interviewed engineers, lab managers, and the CFO (Empathy). They discovered a powerful Systemic Loop: The rigid financial forecasting requirement (Structural Loop) fueled engineers’ fear of committing to risky projects, which meant they only proposed incremental ideas (Human Behavior). The solution was to create a small, separate “Discovery Fund” for high-risk, low-budget projects. This fund was shielded from traditional forecasting requirements, immediately lowering the fear-of-failure feedback loop. The small structural change, informed by human empathy, successfully unlocked the entire R&D system and generated a rapid spike in ambitious proposals.

Case Study 2: Improving a Public Service Delivery System

Challenge: High Employee Turnover in a Local Social Service Office

A metropolitan social service office had high case worker turnover, leading to poor service continuity. Traditional fixes focused on increasing salaries or hiring more HR staff (addressing symptoms).

Systemic Empathy Intervention:

The team shadowed case workers and interviewed citizens (Empathy). They uncovered a debilitating Vicious Cycle: Case workers were forced to use outdated, disconnected administrative software (Structural Loop), leading to hours of manual data entry instead of counseling clients (Human Pain). This caused burnout and emotional drain (Human Behavior), which led to high turnover, further burdening remaining staff (Reinforcing Loop). The structural leverage point wasn’t salary; it was the software. By co-designing a simplified mobile application with the case workers, the organization successfully automated 60% of data entry, immediately improving job satisfaction and halting the vicious cycle of turnover. This structural change, driven by empathy, stabilized the entire service delivery system.

Conclusion: Designing Holistically

We are no longer optimizing products; we are optimizing human systems. To lead change today is to stop being a reductionist tinkerer and start being a Systemic Empathy Architect. The future belongs to those who can zoom in with deep, qualitative empathy to understand the human experience, and then zoom out with Systems Thinking to find the elegant structural leverage point that solves the whole problem, not just the part.

“If you want to create change that sticks, don’t fix the symptom. Map the human system, find the fear, and insert empathy as the structural leverage point. That’s how you design transformation.”

The time for siloed innovation is over. Embrace the integrated power of Systems Thinking and Empathy. Your first action: Take your last failed innovation project and re-map it, this time focusing only on the human feedback loops, not the process steps. Lead the charge toward truly holistic, human-centered transformation.

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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How to Turn Fear into Fuel for Innovation

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The Change Mindset

How to Turn Fear into Fuel for Innovation

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

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

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

Recognizing Resistance as a Vital Signal

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

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

Three Levers for Cultivating the Change Mindset

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

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

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

Challenge: Shifting to Agile in a Risk-Averse Environment

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

Intervention:

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

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

Challenge: EHR Integration and Physician Burnout

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

Intervention:

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

Conclusion: Change is a Human System

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

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

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

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

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Your Personal Change Playbook

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A Step-by-Step Guide to Adapting

Your Personal Change Playbook - A Step-by-Step Guide to Adapting

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

As a thought leader focused on human-centered change, I often guide organizations through massive transformations—shifting cultures, adopting new technologies, or entering new markets. But every large-scale change, at its root, is a collection of thousands of individual, personal transformations. The biggest bottleneck in corporate innovation isn’t a lack of money or technology; it’s the human inability to adapt effectively.

The pace of modern life — the constant evolution of work, technology, and social structures—demands that we become master adapters. If we don’t actively manage our own journey through change, we default to resistance, anxiety, and stagnation. This article is your personal Change Playbook—a structured, step-by-step guide to help you navigate, process, and ultimately thrive amidst continuous disruption. It’s about applying the same principles of strategic change management we use for billion-dollar companies to the most complex system of all: you. Our goal is to replace change fatigue with adaptive resilience.

Phase 1: Awareness and Acknowledgment (The “Why”)

The first and most crucial step is to move past denial and build situational awareness around the change. This is the diagnostic phase, focused on emotional and cognitive clarity.

Step 1: Define the Disruption: Clearly articulate what is changing. Is it a skill (e.g., GenAI replacing a task), a role (a reorganization), or an environment (moving cities)? Be specific; vague anxiety is a resource drain.
Step 2: Identify the Loss: Every change, even a positive one, involves a loss: loss of routine, loss of status, loss of a comfortable skill set. Acknowledge this loss and the resulting grief cycle (denial, frustration, sadness). Skipping this step traps you in resistance and depletes psychological capital.
Step 3: Articulate Your Personal “WIIFM”: WIIFM stands for “What’s In It For Me?” Executives need a business case; you need a personal one. What specific, beneficial future state does this change unlock for you? A new career path, better work-life balance, or a challenging new skill? This creates the personal motivation for action.

“Change resistance is often un-managed fear. To overcome it we must acknowledge and quantify what we stand to lose AND gain.” — Braden Kelley

Phase 2: Experimentation and Iteration (The “How”)

Once you’ve accepted the reality of the change, you must shift from processing emotions to taking small, deliberate actions. Think of this phase as running short Agile Sprints on your life.

Step 4: Micro-Commitments: Break the change down into the smallest possible tasks. If you need to learn Python, your first task isn’t “Become a Coder.” It’s “Complete the first 3 lessons of the online course” or “Write one 5-line function.” This builds early wins and momentum, reducing the activation energy required for the next step.
Step 5: Embrace the “Ugly Prototype”: Accept that you will be inefficient and awkward in the new state. A novice guitarist doesn’t sound like a master; a new skill will feel slow and frustrating. The goal is rapid, imperfect prototyping of the new behavior, not perfection. This reduces the paralyzing fear of failure and accelerates the learning curve.
Step 6: Build Your Support Coalition: No change happens in isolation. Identify three types of people: a Mentor (who has done the change), a Buddy (who is doing the change with you), and a Champion (your accountability partner). This creates your personal change ecosystem and strengthens your social support net.

Case Study 1: The Mid-Career Pivot of “Sarah”

The Challenge:

Sarah, a 48-year-old marketing director, learned her company was shifting their entire strategy from traditional advertising to data-driven digital platforms. Her core expertise (creative storytelling and media buying) was suddenly becoming obsolete. She felt immense fear and a threat to her professional identity.

The Personal Change Playbook in Action:

Sarah applied Phase 1 by first defining the loss: “I am losing my status as the ‘go-to’ expert.” Her WIIFM was to lead the new digital transformation team and remain relevant for the next decade. In Phase 2, she started with a micro-commitment: spending 30 minutes every morning before work to complete an online certification in Google Analytics and a data visualization tool. She didn’t announce her grand plan; she focused on the next small task. By focusing on doing the change, she gradually built confidence and tangible skills.

The Result:

Within six months, Sarah became the most vocal and skilled advocate for the new strategy. She didn’t become a programmer, but she became fluent in the language of data, allowing her to lead and manage the younger data science teams effectively. Her willingness to be a beginner accelerated her into a new, expanded leadership role, proving that intentional adaptation is a powerful career shield.

Phase 3: Integration and Mastery (The “What’s Next”)

The final phase is about locking in the new behaviors and preparing for the inevitable next change by establishing a Personal Feedback Loop.

Step 7: Codify the New Normal: Make the new habit non-negotiable. If the change was switching to a new workflow software, delete the old one. If it was a new exercise routine, book it in your calendar as a meeting you can’t miss. Ritualize the behavior until it requires minimal conscious effort and becomes part of your identity.
Step 8: Reflect and Document (The Personal Retrospective): The most underutilized tool for change is a journal. Write down what you learned about yourself during the process. What triggered resistance? What enabled quick progress? This creates an adaptability blueprint for your future changes, turning every transformation into a learning opportunity.
Step 9: Anticipate the Next Shift: Use your newly developed foresight muscle to look ahead. Based on what you see in your industry, what is the next skill, tool, or mindset you will need to start prototyping? The goal is to make pre-emptive change your default state, ensuring you are always one step ahead of obsolescence.

Case Study 2: Overcoming Remote Work Burnout “Mark”

The Challenge:

Mark, a software engineer, shifted to permanent remote work. While initially happy, he quickly succumbed to work-life boundary collapse. He was always “on,” leading to severe burnout, reduced creativity, and a strained relationship with his family. The change was his environment.

The Personal Change Playbook in Action:

Mark’s loss was “structured time and separation.” His WIIFM was “sustainable productivity and restored family life.” His Micro-Commitment (Step 4) wasn’t complicated; it was physical. He implemented a non-negotiable 30-minute commute ritual (Step 7): a brisk walk around the neighborhood before 9 AM and again at 5 PM. During this time, he mentally “commuted,” listening to podcasts on the way in and calling his wife on the way out. He also physically moved his work laptop into a specific home office and never used it anywhere else (Codifying the New Normal).

The Result:

The ritualized transition created the mental and physical boundary the office had provided. His productivity recovered, and his burnout receded. He documented (Step 8) that his greatest enabler was the physical separation of work and rest, proving that sometimes, the most sophisticated solution to a digital problem is a simple human ritual.

Ultimately, change is not an event you endure; it is a skill you cultivate. By approaching your personal transformations with the same rigor, empathy, and strategic thinking that we apply to organizational change, you stop being a victim of disruption and start becoming a master of your own adaptation. Start today. Your playbook is waiting.

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Six Ways to Stop Gen-Z from Quiet Quitting

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Six Ways to Stop Gen-Z from Quiet Quitting

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

There has been a shift in the workplace culture. Some employees are going from “The Great Resignation,” in which they outright quit, to “quiet quitting,” which means they do the bare minimum and nothing more. While all ages have potential quiet quitters, Gen-Z seems to have earned the reputation (right or wrong) for this practice. The problem with employees participating in this movement of doing the bare minimum is that it can turn into a lack of engagement, and the impact could be felt by customers in the form of a bad customer experience.

I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Santor Nishizaki, author of the upcoming book Working with Gen Z: A Handbook to Recruit, Retain, and Reimagine the Future Workforce After Covid-19, and he has some great tips for leaders to help Gen-Z employees be more engaged at work and create a better customer experience. Here are six of his tips, followed by my commentary.

1. Have Clear Expectations

Dr. Nishizaki’s research found that 98% of Gen-Zs want clear expectations from their employer from day one. It’s frustrating for workers not to understand what is clearly expected of them. The expectations must be set on day one, if not during the hiring process. Proper onboarding is crucial. According to Gallup, clear expectations are essential for all generations. How can we best serve our customers if our employees don’t know what we expect?

2. Be Transparent and Show the “receipts”

Dr. Nishizaki refers to “receipts” as evidence. Just as a customer might get a receipt as proof of purchase, the same concept is relevant for Gen-Z employees, and is one of the significant challenges to getting them to come to work and do more than the bare minimum. Rather than proof-of-purchase, consider proof-of-value for employees. This is especially important as employees are being asked to return to the office after two years of remote work. Feeling valued must be more than words. True appreciation is needed to get workers to feel good about the company that employs them.

3. Help Them “glow up” by Investing in Their Strengths

Dr. Nishizaki believes in playing to Gen-Z’s strengths. Specifically, he uses the Gallup CliftonStrengths to help them grow to their potential. Focusing on your employees’ strengths and partnering them with coworkers whose strengths complement their weaknesses significantly impacts their enjoyment of work and serving customers. Spending extra time to let people do what they do best will make them happier, which translates to more engagement with fellow employees and customers.

4. Support Their Mental Health

Dr. Nishizaki heard from his clients and saw the rise of mental health challenges on college campuses and realized the need for leaders to respond. Recent data from McKinsey found that Gen-Zs are more likely than Millennials to feel stressed or anxious regularly (53% for women, 39% for men), and 82% want mental health days. Leaders must ensure that all employees are aware of resources available to them (mental health apps, therapy, etc.), and lead by example by taking mental health days and being open about burnout. Creating a positive and engaging customer experience is difficult when an employee’s basic needs aren’t met.

5. Build a Culture of Impact

What impact does your company or brand have on its customers—and even the world? Gen-Z is attracted to creating impact, and it doesn’t have to be a major impact. Taking a few extra minutes to explain why someone’s work is important to a customer or their colleagues can satisfy this need.

6. Be a Coach, Not a Micromanager

Dr. Nishizaki found that Gen-Zs ranked the skills necessary to be a good manager as a “coach and mentor” over “technical expertise” and a “task assigner.” If you’re managing Gen-Z (or employees from any generation), asking good questions will help them learn better and is less confrontational. Dr. Nishizaki quotes Timothy Gallwey, an author and performance coach, who said, “Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It’s helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” Customer service role-playing is a great training tool, but rather than offering a list of what they did wrong, ask them why they took their approach. Usually, they’ll figure out what they did wrong without any drama, and you’ll see your retention and customer satisfaction surveys improve.

Gen-Z wants its leaders to be engaged. Managers who can turn up the volume on their leadership skills will retain the best employees, win the war on talent and create a better experience for internal and external customers.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

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