Category Archives: Psychology

The Nordic Way of Leadership in Business

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The Nordic Way of Leadership in Business

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

What if there was a leadership approach that naturally fostered trust, embraced adaptability, and encouraged continuous innovation? Could this approach serve as a model for navigating today’s complex business landscape? Many organizations are finding inspiration in exactly such a model – the Nordic way. Known for its progressive approach to leadership, organizational agility, and transformative innovation, the Nordic style is gaining recognition worldwide for its unique, people-first methods.

Here’s a closer look at why the Nordic approach is a valuable inspiration for leaders globally and how its principles might apply across cultures and industries.

Leadership: Trust as the Foundation

Nordic leadership is deeply rooted in trust. Rather than micromanaging, Nordic leaders empower their employees by granting autonomy and responsibility, creating a high-trust environment that enhances motivation, engagement, and creativity. This approach not only flattens traditional hierarchies but fosters open communication and shared purpose. Employees in Nordic organizations are encouraged to think independently, take ownership of their roles, and bring their best ideas to the table – qualities essential for navigating constant change.

This trust-based model also creates an environment of psychological safety, where people feel valued and supported. It’s a model that resonates well beyond the Nordic region, offering a compelling answer to the global call for leaders who can cultivate an engaged and resilient workforce. By promoting a culture where everyone is part of the mission, Nordic leaders are creating teams prepared to face challenges collaboratively and creatively.

Agility: A Mindset of Flexibility and Collective Ownership

Nordic organizations approach agility not simply as a set of processes but as a fundamental mindset. It’s a philosophy of flexibility and shared ownership that spans the entire organization, enabling teams to pivot quickly and proactively address new challenges. By encouraging collaboration and empowering cross-functional teams, Nordic organizations instill a strong sense of collective responsibility, where employees at all levels contribute to swift decision-making and adaptive strategies.

This approach to agility is about building a resilient organization, one that can respond effectively to changes in the market, technology, or societal expectations. For organizations worldwide, adopting a similar mindset could mean going beyond structured agile practices to develop a true culture of adaptability and resilience, grounded in empowered teams and proactive collaboration.

Innovation and Transformation: Constant Evolution

Nordic companies are known for their strong commitment to innovation, but it’s not innovation for its own sake – it’s innovation with a purpose. In the Nordic approach, innovation is a continuous process integrated into everyday work, driving improvements across products, services, and even organizational practices. Rather than isolating innovation within specific departments, Nordic organizations encourage a culture of experimentation, learning, and reinvention throughout the entire organization.

This proactive approach to transformation and change is essential for maintaining relevance in a competitive world. Nordic leaders understand that sustainable innovation relies on a supportive culture, one where challenging the status quo is encouraged and continuous improvement is celebrated. For global businesses, this focus on purposeful innovation offers a framework that can help organizations evolve while staying aligned with their core values and mission.

Values as Drivers of Sustainable Success

At the heart of Nordic leadership and organizational development are values like sustainability, collaboration, and inclusivity. Nordic leaders prioritize these values not just as corporate responsibilities but as strategic drivers of success. By embedding principles of social responsibility, environmental stewardship, and inclusivity into their business practices, Nordic organizations create a competitive edge that appeals to modern consumers and stakeholders alike.

For organizations in other parts of the world, these values are increasingly relevant as they face rising expectations for transparency, ethical conduct, and positive societal impact. Nordic leaders illustrate how a values-driven approach not only enhances business reputation but also contributes to innovation and employee engagement, establishing a model that aligns organizational success with social progress.

Can the Nordic Way be a Learning Source for Global Leaders?

While the Nordic model provides valuable inspiration, it may not be universally applicable without adaptation. Here’s a closer look at its potential as a learning source for leaders globally:

Pros

  1. Adaptable Principles: Nordic leadership’s focus on trust, collaboration, and sustainability is relevant across industries and regions. These core principles offer a framework that any organization can incorporate to enhance engagement and adaptability.
  2. Scalability of Agility: The Nordic approach to agility as a mindset rather than a rigid framework allows for flexible application. Organizations of different sizes can tailor this mindset to suit their unique structures and goals.
  3. Empowered Innovation: By democratizing innovation across the organization, Nordic companies empower employees to contribute ideas and take initiative, a practice that can drive change and spark innovation regardless of regional context.

Cons

  1. Cultural Context: The success of the Nordic model is partly rooted in Nordic cultural values of equality and inclusiveness, which may not translate seamlessly into hierarchical or individualistic cultures. Adapting these principles may require significant shifts in mindset and organizational structure.
  2. Resource-Intensive: The commitment to employee well-being, work-life balance, and continuous learning is resource-intensive. Organizations in high-pressure or resource-limited environments may find it challenging to implement these practices at scale.
  3. Long-Term Focus: The Nordic model’s emphasis on sustainable, long-term growth over immediate profit may not align with the priorities of companies in highly competitive markets where short-term results are essential.

Why I Believe in the Nordic Way

I believe the Nordic approach to leadership can inspire global leaders, especially those who are rethinking how to create meaningful impact within their organizations. The Nordic way is not just a set of strategies or processes; it’s a philosophy that values people, purpose, and sustainable progress.

In a time when many leaders are facing complex challenges – ranging from rapid technological change to employee well-being and social responsibility – this approach offers a balanced framework that aligns with what a lot of people, inside and outside organizations, are seeking.

One of the biggest reasons it resonates globally is because of its simplicity: build trust, foster collaboration, and drive innovation with a purpose. These are universal needs, no matter where a business operates. In any organization, these principles tap into a common need to feel valued, empowered, and part of a meaningful mission. And while the Nordic model is uniquely suited to its cultural context, its core principles are adaptable and can be translated in ways that suit other environments.

Leaders in competitive, high-stakes markets might not adopt every aspect, like the high emphasis on work-life balance, but they can still take away a focus on trust, inclusivity, and adaptive agility to improve engagement and innovation.

But What are the Challenges?

What could be missing is perhaps a realistic look at the challenges Nordic leaders face within this model. While it’s admired for its human-centered approach, maintaining high trust and autonomy can be demanding. It requires leaders to be consistent, transparent, and continuously engaged with their teams, which can be difficult as organizations scale or enter competitive markets. Consider a fast-growing company where balancing autonomy with consistency becomes a daily challenge as new layers of leadership emerge.

For leaders, this means actively working to sustain the level of trust and openness that drove early success, even as the organization scales and diversifies. Another potential challenge is balancing the flexibility that empowers employees with the structure needed for consistent output.

For global leaders, the Nordic model might be most powerful if presented not just as a set of ideals but as a journey of ongoing effort and adjustment. As leaders across the globe adapt to new realities, the Nordic way offers not just a model but a mindset – one that reminds us that lasting success begins with people and purpose.

Image Credit: Pexels

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Science Says You Shouldn’t Waste Too Much Time Trying to Convince People

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Science Says You Shouldn't Waste Too Much Time Trying to Convince People

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Experts have a lot of ideas about persuasion. Some suggest leveraging social proof, to show that people have adopted the idea and had a positive experience. Others emphasize the importance of building trust and using emotional rather than analytical arguments. Still others insist on creating a unified value proposition.

These are, for the most part, constructive ideas. Yet they are more a taxonomy than a toolbox. Human nature can be baffling and our behavior is rarely consistent. Sometimes we’ll dig in our heels on a relatively minor point and others we’ll give in on a major issue relatively easily, often without any constable rhyme or reason.

Yet consider this one simple science-based principle that explains a lot: The best indicator of what we think and what we do is what the people around us think and do. Once you internalize that, you can begin to understand a lot of otherwise bizarre behavior and work to spread the ideas you care about. Often it’s not opinions we need to shape, but networks.

Majorities Don’t Just Rule, They Also Influence

Consider a famous set of conformity studies performed by the psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s. The design was simple, but ingenuous. He merely showed people pairs of cards, asking them to match the length of a single line on one card with one of three on an adjacent card. The correct answer was meant to be obvious.

However, as the experimenter went around the room, one person after another gave the same wrong answer. When it reached the final person in the group (in truth, the only real subject, the rest were confederates), the vast majority of the time that person conformed to the majority opinion, even if it was obviously wrong!

The idea that people have a tendency toward conformity is nothing new, but that they would give obviously wrong answers to simple and unambiguous questions was indeed shocking. Now think about how hard it is for a more complex idea to take hold across a broad spectrum of people, each with their own biases and opinions.

The truth is that majorities don’t just rule, they also influence, even local majorities. So if you want people to adopt an idea or partake in an action, you need to take into account the communities they are already a part of—at home, at work, in their neighborhood and in other aspects of their social circles. That’s where their greatest influences lie.

The 3 Degrees of Influence Rule

In 1948, Congress authorized funding for the Framingham Heart Study, which would track the lifestyle and health habits, such as diet, exercise, tobacco use and alcohol intake, of 5209 healthy men and women. It was originally intended to last 20 years, but the results were so incredibly useful, it lasted for decades and even included the children of early cohorts.

More than a half century after the study began two researchers, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, began to suspect that the Framingham Heart Study could be used for a very different, but important purpose. What they noticed was that the data included not only information about people’s habits, but their social networks as well.

So they set out to see if they could identify causal links between people’s health and their social connections. Using 32 years of data, they were able to establish a strong effect in areas as diverse as happiness, smoking and even obesity. As it turns out, the people around us not only help to shape our opinions, but our health as well.

The really astounding discovery, however, was that the effect extended to three degrees of influence. So not only our friends’ friends, influence us deeply, but their friends too—people that we don’t even know. Wherever we go, we bring that long, complex web of influence with us and we, in turn, help to shape others’ webs of influence too.

So when set out to shape someone else’s opinion, we need to account for social networks. We may, for example, be able to play on a target’s emotions, give them all the facts and evidence and demonstrate strong social proof, but their communities — extending out to three degrees of influence — will always factor in. While we’re working to persuade, those invisible webs of influence may be working against us.

Thanksgiving Dinners And Earnings Guidance

There is no greater American tradition than the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. No matter what your political persuasion, you are bound to have some relative who holds very different opinions than the rest of the family and who feels no compunction about making clear to everyone at the table exactly where they stand.

As should be clear by now, the reason our crazy uncles are so impervious to persuasion is that we aren’t actually arguing with them at all, but the totality of their social networks. Their friends at work, buddies at the bar, people in their neighborhood and everybody else who they interact with on a regular basis, all get a say at our holiday table.

In much the same way, there isn’t any real reason for CEOs to provide earnings guidance for investors. Steve Jobs refused do it and Apple’s stock during his tenure. Same thing with Unilever under Paul Polman. In 2018, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and uber-investor Warren Buffett wrote a strong Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal urging CEOs to end the practice.

During the pandemic many companies stopped giving earnings guidance to investors but, as soon as things began to stabilize, they started up again. It seems incredible, because all of the experts, even McKinsey, have advised against it. Still the vast majority of CEOs are unconvinced, despite all the contrary evidence. Could their networks be playing a role?

Don’t Try To Shape Opinions, Shape Networks

We like to think we can shape the ideas of others. It can sometimes seem like a puzzle. How can we conjure up the right combination of value proposition, analysis, emotive argument and social proof, to persuade our target?. There is, in fact, an enormous communication industry dedicated to exactly that proposition.

Decades of scientific research suggests that it’s not so easy. Our thoughts aren’t just the product of neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters reacting to different stimuli, but also our social networks. The best indicator of what people think and do is what the people around them think and do. While we’re trying to score debate points, those complex webs of influence are pushing back in often subtle, but extremely powerful ways.

We need to be far more humble about our persuasive powers. Anybody who has ever been married or had kids knows how difficult it is to convince even a single person of something. If you expect to shift the opinions of dozens or hundreds—much less thousands or millions—with pure sophistry, you’re bound to be disappointed.

Instead of trying to shape opinions, we’re often better off shaping networks. That’s why we advise our clients pursuing transformational change efforts to start with a majority, even if that majority is only three people in a room of five. You can always expand a majority out, but once you’re in the minority you’re going to get immediate pushback.

Rather than wordsmithing slogans, our time and efforts will be much better spent working to craft cultures, weaving the complex webs of influence that lead to genuinely shared values and shared purpose.

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

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Fearless Fashionistas Are Staying Ahead of Change

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Why Aren’t You?

Fearless Fashionistas Are Staying Ahead of Change

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

As a fashion and lifestyle conceptualist and analyst for a major Australian department store group during the pre-Internet era, I co-created, with the GM of Marketing and GM of Women’s, Men’s, Children’s Apparel and Accessories, a completely new role. I took on the responsibility of forecasting and predicting customer, lifestyle, and fashion trends two to three years ahead of the present. While forecasting involves estimating future events or trends based on historical and statistical data, making predictions involves forming educated guesses or projections that do not necessarily rely on such data. Both forecasting and predictive skills are vital for developing strategic foresight—an organized and systematic approach to exploring plausible futures and anticipating, better preparing for, and staying ahead of change.

In this exciting new role, I had to ensure that my forecasts and predictions did not cause people to become anxious and tense, leading to poor or conflicting decisions involving millions of dollars. Instead, I needed to make sure that my forecasts convinced people that the well-researched information had been collected, captured, analyzed, and synthesized effectively. To ensure that the discovery of new marketing concepts is prompted by the development of strategic foresight, which enables people to make informed, million-dollar investment decisions by staying ahead of change.

This was before the revolutions in Design Thinking and Strategic Foresight. It taught me the fundamentals of agile and adaptive thinking processes, as well as the importance of creating and capturing value by viewing it from the customer’s perspective. It was initiated through rigorous research that involved framing the domain and scanning for trends by mentally moving back and forth among many scenarios, making links, connections, and unlikely associations. The information could then be actualized, analyzed, and synthesized to focus on evaluating a range of plausible futures as forecast scenarios. To envision the future by identifying the most promising or commercially viable trends in Australian marketing and merchandising, thereby supporting better policy-making across the organization, which consisted of forty-two department stores.

At the time, Australian fashion and lifestyle trends were considered six months behind those in Europe and the USA. This allowed me to utilize current and historical sales data, along with statistical methods, to create a solid foundation for the sales and marketing situation across various merchandise segments. Having completed a marketing degree as an adult learner, I applied and integrated marketing concepts and principles from product and fashion lifecycle management. Through being inventive, I built a fashion and lifestyle information system that had not previously existed, enabling the whole organization to stay ahead of change.  

I conducted backcasting research and built relationships with top Australian manufacturers that supplied our customers, gathering evidence and feedback that supported or challenged my approach to developing trend-tracking processes over a three-year period. I traveled widely four times a year to Europe and the USA to research the fashion and lifestyle value chain, visiting yarn, textile, couture, and ready-to-wear shows to explore, discover, identify, and validate emerging and diverging trends, providing context and evidence of their evolution and convergence. This was further tested and validated by analyzing and synthesizing the most critical and commercially successful fashion and lifestyle ranges marketed and merchandised at that time in major global department stores and leading retail outlets.

Formal research was also carried out through various channels, including desktop research, fashion and lifestyle forecasting services, as well as USA and European media, to gather customer insights that could then be identified, analyzed, synthesized, and developed and implemented into key fashion marketing and merchandising trends across the entire group of forty-two department stores. This enabled them to present a coordinated marketing and merchandising approach across all apparel to customers and stay ahead of change.

This was my journey into what is now known as strategic foresight, laying the vital foundations for developing my brain’s neuroplasticity and neuroelasticity, and becoming an agility shifter, with a prospective mind and adaptive thinking strategy that enables me to stay ahead of change.

Staying ahead of change

It took me many years to realize that I was chosen for this enviable role, not because of my deep knowledge and extensive experience, but for my intuitive and unconventional way of thinking. In Tomorrowmind, Dr Martin Seligman calls this ‘prospection’, an ability to metabolize the past with the present to envisage the future. He states that a prospective mind extracts the nutrients from the past and the present, then excretes the toxins and ballast to prepare for tomorrow. He defines prospection as “the mental process of projecting and evaluating future possibilities and then using these projections to guide thought and action.”

This develops the ability to stay ahead of change by anticipating and adapting to it, and includes many elements, such as:

  • Being able to adopt both a systemic and tactical approach, as well as a structured and detailed perspective alongside an agile and flexible view of the current reality or present state, simultaneously.
  • Sensing, connecting, perceiving, and linking operational patterns, and analyzing and synthesizing them within their context.
  • Generating, exploring, and unifying possibilities and options for selecting the most valuable commercial applications that match customers’ lifestyle needs and wants.
  • Unlearning and viewing the world with fresh eyes through sensing and perceiving it through a paradoxical lens, and cultivating a ‘both/and’ bird’s-eye perspective.
  • Opening your heart, mind, and will to relearning and learning, letting go of what may have worked in the past, focusing your emotional energy, towards learning new mindsets and mental models and relearning how to perceive the world differently.
  • Wondering and wandering into fresh and multiple perspectives underlie the development of a strategic foresight capability.

This approach helps shift your focus across the polarities of thought, from a fixed, binary, or linear and competitive approach to one that is neuro-scientifically grounded. It aims to foster your neuroplasticity and neuroelasticity within your brain, enabling the development of new and diverse perspectives that support prospective, strategic, critical, conceptual, complementary, and creative thinking processes necessary for staying ahead of change.

  • Improves strategic thinking

Strategic foresight aims to anticipate, analyze, synthesize, adapt to, and shape the factors relevant to a person, team, or company’s business, enabling it to perform and grow better than its competitors and stay ahead of change. It requires confidence, capacity, and competence to partner effectively and to think and act differently, using cutting-edge analytics, proven creative tools, and artificial intelligence (AI). This approach empowers, enables, and equips individuals with better, more risk-informed strategic thinking. It also provides a foundation for creative thinking by helping people better understand the options and alternatives available to them. Additionally, it identifies potential developments that could lead to building a competitive advantage at the individual, team, or organizational level, enabling them to stay ahead of change, innovate, and succeed in an uncertain business environment.  

  • Increases adaptability

In a recent article, ‘Navigating the Future with Strategic Foresight, the Boston Consulting Group stated:

“It’s not about gathering more data than everyone else but about being able to detect forward-looking signals, stretch perspectives, and interpret the data with fresh eyes. Uncertainty does not dissipate; rather, strategic foresight offers the clarity of direction that comes from greater confidence in data, assumptions, and analysis”.

The information gathered through strategic foresight enhances people’s ability and willingness to adapt their responses to uncertainty and unexpected situations and embrace change. It provides concrete evidence, in the form of data, assumptions, and analysis, to support people in being adaptive. This requires being open to unlearning, relearning, and learning, protecting you against anxiety, stress, and burnout, and helping you stay ahead of change and become resilient to create, invent, and innovate through chaos, uncertainty and disruption.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in early 2026.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

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

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Leaders’ Responsibility is Their Response

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Leaders' Responsibility is Their Response

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you’re asked to do more work that you and your team can handle, don’t pass it onto your team. Instead, take the heat from above but limit the team’s work to a reasonable level.

When the number of projects is larger than the budget needed to get them done, limit the projects based on the budget.

When the team knows you’re wrong, tell them they’re right. And apologize.

When everyone knows there’s a big problem and you’re the only one that can fix it, fix the big problem.

When the team’s opinion is different than yours, respect the team’s opinion.

When you make a mistake, own it.

When you’re told to do turn-the-crank work and only turn-the-crank work, sneak in a little sizzle to keep your team excited and engaged.

When it’s suggested that your team must do another project while they are fully engaged in an active project, create a big problem with the active project to delay the other project.

When the project is going poorly, be forthcoming with the team.

When you fail to do what you say, apologize. Then, do what you said you’d do.

When you make a mistake in judgement which creates a big problem, explain your mistake to the team and ask them for help.

If you’ve got to clean up a mess, tell your team you need their help to clean up the mess.

When there’s a difficult message to deliver, deliver it face-to-face and in private.

When your team challenges your thinking, thank them.

When your team tells you the project will take longer than you want, believe them.

When the team asks for guidance, give them what you can and when you don’t know, tell them.

As leaders, we don’t always get things right. And that’s okay because mistakes are a normal part of our work. And projects don’t always go as planned, but that’s okay because that’s what projects do. And we don’t always have the answers, but that’s okay because we’re not supposed to. But we are responsible for our response to these situations.

When mistakes happen, good leaders own them. When there’s too much work and too little time, good leaders tell it like it is and put together a realistic plan. And when the answers aren’t known, a good leader admits they don’t know and leads the effort to figure it out.

None of us get it right 100% of the time. But what we must get right is our response to difficult situations. As leaders, our responses should be based on honesty, integrity, respect for the reality of the situation and respect for people doing the work.

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Escaping the Fear Trap

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What We Can Learn from Wildfire Fighters About Leading Through Uncertainty

Escaping the Fear Trap

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

What does a lightning strike in a Spanish forest have to do with your next leadership meeting? More than you think.

On June 14, 2014, lightning struck a forest on Spain’s northeast coast, only 60 miles from Barcelona.  Within hours, flames 16 to 33 feet high raced out of control toward populated areas, threatening 27,000 acres of forest, an area larger than the city of Boston.

Everything – data, instincts, decades of firefighting doctrine – prioritized saving the entire forest and protecting the coastal towns.

Instead, the fire commanders chose to deliberately let 2,057 acres, roughly the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, burn.

The result? They saved the other 25,000 acres (an area the size of San Francisco), protected the coastal communities, and created a natural firebreak that would protect the region for decades. By accepting some losses, they prevented catastrophic ones.

The Fear Trap That’s Strangling Your Business

The Tivissa fire’s triumph happened because firefighters found the courage to escape what researchers call the “fear trap” – the tendency to focus exclusively on defending against known, measurable risks.

Despite research proving that defending against predictable, measurable risks through defensive strategies consistently fails in uncertain and dynamic scenarios, firefighter “best practices” continue to advocate this approach.

Sound familiar? It should. Most executives today are trapped in exactly this pattern.

We’re in the fire right now. Financial markets are yo-yoing, AI threatens to disrupt everything, and consumer behaviors are shifting.

Most executives are falling into the Fear Trap by doubling down on protecting their existing business and pouring resources into defending against predictable risks.  Yet the real threats, the ones you can’t measure or model, continue to pound the business.

While you’re protecting last quarter’s wins, tomorrow’s disruption is spreading unchecked.

Four Principles for Creative Decision-Making Under Fire

The decision to cede certain areas wasn’t hasty but based on four principles enabling leaders in any situation to successfully navigate uncertainty.

1. A Predictable Situation is a Safe Situation.

Stop trying to control the uncontrollable. Standard procedures work in predictable situations but fail in unprecedented challenges.

Put it in Practice: Instead of creating endless contingency plans, build flexibility and agility into operations and decision-making.

2. Build Credibility Through Realistic Expectations.

Reducing uncertainty requires realism about what can be achieved. Fire commanders mapped out precisely which areas around Tivissa would burn and which would be saved, then communicated these hard truths and the considered trade-offs to officials and communities before implementing their strategy, building trust and preventing panic as the selected areas burned.

Put it in practice: Stop promising to protect everything and set realistic expectations about what you can control. Then communicate priorities, expectations, and trade-offs frequently, transparently, and clearly with all key stakeholders.

3. Include the future in your definition of success

Traditional firefighting protects immediate assets at risk. The Tivissa firefighters expanded this to include future resilience, recognizing that saving everything today could jeopardize the region tomorrow.

Put it in practice: Be transparent about how you define the Common Good in your organization, then reinforce it by making hard choices about where to compete and where to retreat. The goal isn’t to avoid all losses – it’s to maximize overall organizational health.

4. Use uncertainty to build for tomorrow.

Firefighters didn’t just accept that 2,057 acres would burn – they strategically chose which acres to let burn to create maximum future advantage, protecting the region for generations.

Put it in practice: Evaluate every response to uncertainty on whether it better positions you for future challenges. Leverage the disruption to build capabilities, market positions, and organizational structures that strengthen you for future uncertainty.

Your Next Move

When the wind shifted and the fire exploded, firefighters had to choose between defending everything (and likely losing it all) or accepting strategic losses to ensure overall wins.

You’re facing the same choice right now.

Like the firefighters, your breakthrough might come not from fighting harder against uncertainty, but from learning to work with it strategically.

What are you willing to let burn to save what matters most?

Image credit: Pexels

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Building a Business with Feelings and Emotions

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Building a Business with Feelings and Emotions

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you use your sane-and-rational lenses and the situation doesn’t make sense, that’s because the situation is not governed by sanity and rationality. Yet, even though there’s a mismatch between the system’s behavior and sane-and-rational, we still try to understand the system through the cloudy lenses of sanity and rationality.

Computer programs are sane and rational; Algorithms are sane and rational; Machines are sane and rational. Fixed inputs yield predicted outputs; If this, then that; Repeat the experiment and the results are repeated. In the cold domain of machines, computer programs and algorithms you may not like the output, but you’re not surprised by it.

But businesses are not run by computer programs, algorithms and machines. Businesses are run by people. And that’s why things aren’t always sane and rational in business.

Where computer programs blindly follow logic that’s coded into them, people follow their emotions. Where algorithms don’t decide what to do based on their emotional state, people do. And where machines aren’t afraid to try something new, people are.

When something doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because your assumptions about the underlying principles are wrong. If you see things that violate logic, it’s because logic isn’t the guiding principle. And if logic isn’t the guiding principle, the only other things that could be driving the irrationality are feelings and emotions. But if you think the solution is to make the irrational system behave rationally, be prepared to be perplexed and frustrated.

The underpinnings of management and leadership are thoughts, feelings and emotions. And, thoughts are governed by feelings and emotions. In that way, the currency of management and leadership is feelings and emotions.

If your first inclination is to figure out a situation using logic, don’t. Logic is for computers, and even that’s changing with deep learning. Business is about people. When in doubt, assess the feelings and emotions of the people involved. And once you understand their thoughts and feelings, you’ll know what to do.

Business isn’t about algorithms. Business is about people. And people respond based on their emotional state. If you want to be a good manager, focus on people’s feelings and emotions. And if you want to be a good leader, do the same.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Neuroplastic Entrepreneurs

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The surprising power of reframing as an innovation tool

Neuroplastic Entrepreneurs

GUEST POST from John Bessant

Neuroplasticity. Not some weird creation of a mad 3D sculptor intent on creating a strange new species with which to threaten the world in another zombie apocalypse story but instead a wonderful feature of our brains. Research increasingly confirms our ability, in the face of unexpected shock or challenge, to rewire ourselves, make new neural connections. Defined as ‘the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization’ it’s visible in the ways in which people can recover speech or movement after traumatic brain injury and it’s now understood to be critical in the process of early cognitive development in babies. It’s even offered as one explanation for the impossible and unpredictable lifestyls of teenagers; their penchant for lying in bed all day and mooching aorund may be down to their working hard at the synaptic level to reconstruct their brains!

It’s also a good description of a key capability which entrepreneurs have. Being able to reframe, seeing the world in a new way opens up significant new possibilities. Provided, of course, that you are then able to follow through, solving problems and enabling the new connections necessary to bring about that state.

Think about Malcolm Maclean, sitting on the dock of the bay one afternoon and imagining an alternative approach to shipping. Instead of the laborious loading and unloading with all its costs, its wasted time, the security challenges and so on – why not use containers? The vision involved a stretch of the imagination; the actual realisation of it considerably more but in the end you have a game changer. Reframing and then realising the possibilities.

It’s an old story; the challenge of transportation and logistics was one which engaged James Brindley 200 years earlier as the Industrial Revolution began to reshape the British economy and the landscape in which it took place. You can’t get a manufacturing-led transformation off the ground unless you can move tings around – raw materials in and finsihed products out of your factories. Which, given the worn-out and primitive state of many of the roads and tracks criss-crossing the country at the time was a big problem. Brindley was one of the pioneers of the idea of creating waterways – canals – as an alternative, providing fast and straight connections between factories, cities and ports.

Internal Waterways
Image: Watercolour of Barton aqueduct by G.F. Yates 1793, public domain

Just like Malcolm Maclean, this was an inspirational idea which required a deal of systems thinking. Not just one which could imagine an alternative world built on waterways but also one which would need a lot of practical problem solving to bring it into being. Dealing with multiple questions around how to enable the different elements of the system to come together and deliver ‘emergent properties’ where the whole has an impact much greater than the sum of its parts.

His efforts extended well beyond the map making and route planning through to the detailed construction, involving tunnels, cuttings and viaducts. He also had to think through the big challenge of hydraulics, how to fill the canals with water and keep them full – which meant, amongst other things, solving the problem of lining the canal with a water- saving clay. He also reduced the water demand by cutting narrower canals and then designing narrow-boats to navigate them. And since the country is not level means that in places vessels using the canal have to climb up or down slopes which necessitated development of intricately engineered locks and sluices.

Brindley’s work on connecting up the dots of his system into something which changed the transportation world of its time even extended to thinking in the same direction as Malcolm Mclean came to do much later. Faced with the problem of loading and unloading coal as a key bulk item Brindley devised a system involving specially built wooden containers which could be prefilled and transhipped quickly from specially-designed boats!

Above all Brindley was a systems thinker, seeing connections and working on how to best join up the dots to deliver major change. Which his legacy over 350 miles of canals criss-crossing the country and powering the Industrial Revolution seems to have done.

There’s still plenty of scope for such system rethinking today – giving opportunities even in the face of crisis. Take the example of Gridless, founded in 2022 and already a successful and growing business in the energy sector of Africa.

First the vision. Africa is the coming continent, with a huge population of around a billion largely young people and rapidly accelerating development. This creates an engine for growth through both domestic demand and – with sufficient investment – the possibility of increasing exports, not just of raw materials but of finished goods and services.

It has enormous potential – and it has a track record as a place where radical innovations can emerge and scale. Take the example of M-PESA. Where the idea of mobile money still seems fresh and exciting for citizens of the industrialised world learning to use cashless payments by phone it’s actually rather old hat to many people in East Africa. M-PESA (the word means mobile money in Swahili) is coming up towards celebrating its 20th birthday and has moved a long way from being an experiment to try and improve access to basic financial services for the largely unbanked population of Kenya. Now the M-PESA network carries 60% of GDP and delivers a growing range of services across the economy.

But Africa is also unevenly developed; not least in the case of energy. Whilst much of the population is now connected this is not the case everywhere. Over two thirds of the population – 600 million people – have no access to electricity. Mini-grids (relatively small local power stations and networks) can help solve this energy access problem, not least by tapping into the huge potential which renewable energy – solar, wind, hydro and biomass – has for the region.

There’s no shortage of technology to help construct mini and even micro-grids, and there are plenty of power sources which could potentially be tapped. The problem is economic; in order to finance the construction of such a micro-grid a lot of capital is needed up front. That needs a reasonable return to cover operating costs and recoup the investment costs – but in the short term the market to pay for this isn’t there.

When the power starts to flow there is relatively little demand to hook it up to; people who’ve survived without electricity don’t suddenly become active consumers. As Eric Hersman, one of the founders of Gridless points out, ‘ … if you’re a smallholder farmer in a rural village in Africa you’ll likely buy an LED light bulb and charge your phone at first. These don’t draw a lot of electricity, but they do change your life considerably. It might be a few years before you invest in that refrigerator, TV, irrigation pump, or electric oven’.

The consequence of this slow demand growth is that the provider ends up throwing away 80% of its energy and having to charge too high a price for the rest. What could be an important way of helping local communities develop runs aground because that high price effectively throttles the emerging demand at birth. Catch-22.

Gridless represents an entrepreneurial way of reframing this problem. Given such a stalemate their business model asks a simple question. What if there were a consumer who would guarantee to buy electricity at the necessary market rate to support the project and then gradually retreat as the prices fell and the connections rose? A stepping stone approach, essentially a temporary scaffolding to enable an infrastructure to emerge and grow. Using a horticultural metaphor it’s like putting in place a trellis to support an early sapling until the plant is able to survive and thrive on its own.

That’s the vision part of the Gridless approach – to help Africa with micro-grid development. Their website describes it simply: ‘By combining small-scale bitcoin data centres and renewables-based mini-grids they aim to develop the foundation of a new model to expand profitable electrification to communities in emerging markets without the need for charity, aid, gifts, or government subsidy…’

Bitcoin mining – the energy intensive operation of multiple computers beavering away at solving complex mathematical puzzles to earn rewards in the form of bitcoins – does not have the best of reputations in terms of sustainability. By its nature it involves consuming huge amounts of energy whose generation often contributes to pollution and global warming. But Gridless have reworked the story so that it makes a positive contribution to both sustainability of operations and community development.

It does so in a simple a practical way. It hooks up a bitcoin mine with a source of sustainable energy provided by local renewables like hydro or solar. And it deals with the ‘stranded energy’ problem by joining in the system as a ‘buyer of last resort’. Their bitcoin mining operations provide plenty of demand for energy and those operations are profitable enough to buy it at prices which are too high for local communities to pay in the short term. But as the market develops so the local demand increases – and this means the provider can reduce prices, recouping their costs over a larger market. They can also invest to extend the grid and bring yet more demand into the system.

Eventually things reach a point where there isn’t enough power left for the bitcoin mining, so Gridless pack up their operations, move on to another site where there is ‘stranded energy;’ and start the whole cycle once again. It’s a business model for development with some important social values underpinning it. The main purpose is to help connect people through micro-grids and to gradually exit as the role of the buyer of first resort becomes unnecessary. It’s a business fuelled by bitcoin profits but these are effectively being reinvested in social development – a powerful alternative vision. By providing a consistent and reliable demand for electricity, Bitcoin mining helps to utilize excess renewable energy that might otherwise go to waste, thereby unlocking the potential of stranded renewable energy projects and contributing to a more sustainable energy future.

An impressive vision – but as Messrs Maclean and Brindley will tell you, the challenge is not in creating the vision, it’s in realising it. Visions like these need a lot of different dots to be joined up, a lot of problem solving to make it all work. The Gridless solution starts with the idea of being ‘geographically agnostic’ – meaning it is mobile and can be moved anywhere, finding and helping develop micro-grids wherever there is ‘stranded energy’ opportunity.

They do this by putting the bitcoin mine in a box – literally, using a shipping container in a way which would make Malcolm Maclean proud. They move it close to sources of renewable power – like a micro-hydro system in Zambia, harvesting the abundant energy from the fast flowing Zambesi river.

They’ve worked hard on adapting their technology – computers, power supplies, software – to operate in what can still be challenging conditions. Rural Africa is a long way from the clinical clean environments of Silicon Valley and they’ve had to learn to deal with the suite of problems this throws up in order to make their system reliable. For example air quality- the dust which the wind blows up as it sweeps across the wide plains means you have to be very careful to fit suitable filters to avoid all the expensive electronics grinding to a halt. Ditto the heat; average temperatures in Kenya hover around 30 degrees Celsius so there’s a big problem in keeping things cool. And then there are the bugs.

In 2022 when they set up their first facility the lights attracted plenty of curious insects and, especially in the rainy season, they flew towards them en masse, only to crash into the ventilation fans and eventually jam them!

Problems weren’t just physical; the economics of buying containers ready made from China or the USA to use as mobile bitcoin mines posed a big challenge. Quite apart from the logistics and transportation costs of getting them to Africa there were bureaucratic costs involved in getting the various permissions needed to import such equipment. And then there were the capital costs – at over $100,000 per container it was too expensive. So the team went back to the drawing board and designed their own container which cost 75% less. It’s also had the side benefit of bypassing many of the import regulations (since it is now a domestically manufactured product)

Their problem-solving also extends to another big issue with their business model – that of micro-grid management. How to balance supply and demand and make sure that the needs of the community are served first? Gridless wanted to make sure that they weren’t using electricity which somebody else needed. They did this by writing their own software – Gridless OS – which allows for real-time response to demand, making sure people get what they need when they need it whilst also stabilising the grid.

Africa Innovation

After three years of such problem-solving the team have a robust model which they have demonstrated can work in a variety of contexts, using whatever renewable power supply is available – solar, hydro or biomass. Theirs is primarily a social mission and so they’ve codified their experience and can offer a blueprint for the same kind of model to be used by others to help African development.

And it works. Not only by connecting people to electric power but by extending the range of possibilities which that then opens up. Once you have power you can have light – which offers more than just illumination, it allows children to study at night and boosts education. Local services become possible because power enables small-scale facilities to operate and deliver healthcare. Business can connect better to markets and small-scale farms and factories can improve their operations and profitability, generating employment.

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine one of the Gridless founders, Janet Maingi, elaborated on this novel approach which now operates in several countries including Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, ‘…for example, there’s a tea factory in Muranga, Kenya, which is in the highlands. We partnered with the energy generator in the area and they were able to give the factory power. Now, their facilities are able to support the tea factory, which has two benefits: tea farmers can bring their tea to the factory, which means it doesn’t spoil on the farms because they can’t get it to point B in time and more employment has also been created just by that tea factory becoming an electrified space….’

The potential is huge. As Eric Hersman, points out ‘….just 10% – 40GW of the 400GW of hydroelectric energy in Africa – has been developed (and that’s just hydro!). There is a near unlimited supply of energy to be developed in the one place on earth that needs it most… Africa. But how to get the plants built? Despite being home to 17% of the world’s population, Africa currently accounts for just 4% of global power supply investment’.

As he points out mini-grid business models have traditionally focused on having an ‘anchor client’, a single large electricity consumer such as a telecom tower, which consumes the majority of electricity supplied by the mini-grid. The anchor client is the first step in what’s called an ABC strategy (Anchor—Business—Consumers) for mini-grid financial sustainability. The model builds on finding an anchor client with a predictable load profile and then helping develop around that a group of local businesses that can provide stable demand and promote economic growth in the communities. The last step is residential customers, bringing them in gradually by improving access and generating income from them.

Over the last 3 years Gridless has shown that mini-grids can be made profitable using their model of becoming a ‘geographically agnostic anchor tenant’. They’ve done this on 6 sites in 3 African countries, using the stranded (wasted) energy from hydro, biomass, geothermal, some of that augmented by solar. Their numbers prove that it can be done; they are confident that a 5-7 year return on investment is possible on almost any hydro mini grid.

There’s a lot to be done – figures from the World Bank estimate that Africa needs 140,000 mini-grids to help electrify the continent. But as of 2025 only 5000 have been built – around 5% of what’s required. Which opens up a huge opportunity – if we can reframe the problem.

The key thing about neuroplasticity is that it isn’t an instant process of constructing new neural pathways. Instead the connections have to be made and reinforced; only gradually does the new network become fully operational. Patients who manage to recover movement or speech after a catastrophic neural event like a stroke do so by a mixture of hard work and determination. Gradually creating those new pathways.

Fixing problems like Africa’s energy challenge won’t happen overnight. It’s not going to be simple, and it will need a lot of system-level problem-solving, joining the dots. But just like James Brindley imagining a network of canals or Malcolm Maclean picturing container routes spanning the world, it starts with an entrepreneurial vision.

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Unblocking Change

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Unblocking Change

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want things to change, you have two options. You can incentivize change or you can move things out of the way that block change. The first way doesn’t work and the second one does. For more details, click this link at it will take you to a post that describes the late Danny Kahneman’s thoughts on the subject.

And, also from Kahneman, to move things out of the way and unblock change, change the environment.

Change Blocker 1 – Metrics

When you measure someone on efficiency, you get efficiency. And if people think a potential change could reduce efficiency, that change is blocked. And the same goes for all metrics associated with cost, quality and speed. When a change threatens the metric, the change will be blocked. To change the environment to eliminate the blocking, help people understand who the change will actually IMPROVE the metric. Do the analysis and educate those who would be negatively impacted if the change reduced the metric. Change their environment to one that believes the change will improve the metric.

Change Blocker 2 – Incentives

When someone’s bonus could be negatively impacted by a potential change, that change will be blocked. Figure out whose incentive compensation are jeopardized by the potential change and help them understand how the potential change will actually increase their incentives. You may have to explain that their incentives will increase in the long term, but that’s an argument that holds water. Until they believe their incentives will not suffer, they’ll block the change.

Change Blocker 3 – Fear

This is the big one – fear of negative consequences. Here’s a short list: fear of being judged, fear of being blamed, fear of losing status, fear of losing control, fear of losing a job, fear of losing a promotion, fear of looking stupid and fear of failing. One of the best ways to help people get over their fear is to run a small experiment that demonstrates that they have nothing to fear. Show them that the change will actually work. Show them how they’ll benefit.

Eliminating the things that block change is fundamentally different than pushing people in the direction of change. It’s different in effectiveness and approach. Start with the questions: “What’s in the way of change?” or “Who is in the way of change?” and then “Why are they in the way of change?” From there, you’ll have an idea what must be moved out of the way. And then ask: “How can their environment be changed so the change-blocker can be moved out of the way?”

What’s in the way of giving it a try?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Making it Safe to Innovate

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Building Emotional Safety

Making it Safe to Innovate - Building Emotional Safety

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When my husband and I became accredited as foster parents for children in need, I thought my skills as a trainer and facilitator would help me navigate the challenges we faced. I quickly discovered that when children arrived at our home late at night, often physically injured and emotionally distraught due to a tragic accident or being separated from their families, their primary need was for emotional safety. This began my long and enlightening quest into what it truly means for someone to develop both emotional and psychological safety. To discover and explore why both emotional and psychological safety are crucial for people to survive, innovate and thrive in the post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

The whole issue of “safety” is a crucial one. Causing many people, especially those in the change, learning and coaching space, to stop, pause, retreat, and reflect upon how to personalize and contextualize it for ourselves and others we care about and interact with. Yet so few people understand the importance of creating safe environments, especially today when there is so much hatred and violence happening on many of our streets.

We all deserve to, and are entitled to, feel emotionally safe and secure in all aspects of our lives.

What does it mean to be safe?

Because safety: the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury, impacts everyone and everything in our entire world system. It is an essential element required for our survival, growth, and ability to navigate and innovate in the post-pandemic era. Safety is critical in enhancing people’s capacity to connect, belong, and engage in purposeful relationships, build happy families and secure communities, as well as produce creative, inventive, and innovative work that helps make the world a better place.

What is emotional safety?

Emotional safety exists in an environment where individuals feel valued, respected, and heard, regardless of their values, beliefs, or religious or cultural origins. It involves allowing people to feel safe and secure, nurturing vulnerability, and sharing personal thoughts and feelings without fear of having their words judged as “bad” or “wrong.” Without facing punishment, discrimination, persecution, diminishment, blame, shame, hatred, or violence by others.

It’s a space where it’s safe to say “I don’t know” or “I made a mistake” without being labelled as incompetent or “lacking” in some vital way.

  • Improving well-being, engagement and productivity

Emotional safety is a vital element of an emotionally and mentally healthy environment that fosters well-being, boosts engagement, and enhances productivity. In such an environment, individuals feel secure enough to express, explore, and share their thoughts and feelings about themselves, their colleagues, managers, leaders, and even their organization as a whole. People feel respected and trusted to share ideas, establish boundaries, and be accepted for who they are, what they believe in, flaws and all. 

  • Building mutuality

The intention is to build mutuality, defined by the American Psychological Association as:

“The tendency of relationship partners to think of themselves as members of a dyadic relationship rather than as distinct individuals. As close relationships, particularly romantic ones, develop over time, partners display increasing levels of mutuality, which may influence their affect, cognition, and behavior. In interdependence theory, the tendency of partners to depend equally on each other’s behavior for the attainment of desirable outcomes”.

We live in an interdependent, globalized world where developing emotionally safe, positive, and interactive mutual relationships across geographies, technologies, demographics, and functions is more important than ever. Mutuality lays the groundwork for creating a shared understanding that fosters a safe and open space for learning and effective interactions, based on cooperative, co-petitive, and collaborative relationships in the workplace.

  • Becoming attuned

Emotional intelligence, empathy, trust, and effective communication are vital for fostering emotional safety and form the basis for developing effective emotional regulation and management strategies. This enables us to attune to and connect with others with whom we wish to build relationships.

According to Dr. Dan Seigal:

“When we attune with others, we allow our internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.”

As a foster carer, my ability and willingness to attune with them represented the most important gift I could offer the children. It allowed them to feel close and connected to someone who genuinely cared for them by simply providing the most basic essentials. With no judgement or strings attached, and with both detachment and empathy, it also provided them with crucial evidence that this could indeed continue to be possible for them in their future lives.

As a trainer, facilitator, and coach, these are the key ingredients for establishing an emotionally safe and effective learning intervention, particularly about the people side of innovation and in building an organization that fosters a culture of failure. 

Developing a psychologically safe culture

Emotional safety is closely linked to psychological safety, which is the belief that individuals can be themselves at work and share their opinions and ideas without fear of negative repercussions.  According to Dr Timothy Clarke at the Leaderfactor, psychological safety empowers individuals and teams to reach new levels of creativity, collaboration, and innovation by nurturing a culture of inclusion and vulnerability. It is a social condition where people feel accepted and secure enough to learn, contribute, and question the status quo, free from fear of embarrassment, marginalization, or punishment, by creating an environment founded on permission, safety, and trust.

  • Embodying a way of being

Creating this emotional state or culture is much harder than most people think. Most organizations believe it’s something they must achieve through process and system changes, rather than by embodying it as a way of being a manager, leader, trainer, or coach who creates:

  • Sanctuaries of inclusion—a space where individuals feel safe and are encouraged to express their feelings, thoughts, opinions, and ideas, fostering a profound sense of inclusion, connection, and belonging.
  • Safe containers – a space where individuals confidently disrupt conventional or habitual ways of doing things, step outside their comfort zones, and challenge the status quo, allowing dissonance, contradiction, paradox, and conflict as sources of creative tension to disrupt, differ, and deviate from the norm. 
  • Collective holding spaces—where individuals accept responsibility, take ownership, and are trusted to contribute to the entire system. By fostering co-creative, interdependent relationships both internally and externally, we work towards achieving the team’s and organization’s vision, mission, purpose, and collective goals.
  • Incubators and accelerators of innovation—where team members are free to emerge, diverge, and converge possibilities. They are empowered, enabled, and equipped to transform these into creative ideas and opportunities. Individuals and teams feel safe in unlearning, learning, and relearning new ways of being, thinking, and acting. This environment challenges the status quo by encouraging disruptive questions, taking calculated risks, and experimenting with new ideas within an authentic, fail-fast culture that promotes quick learning.

Benefits of emotional and psychological safety

  • Enhances individual, team, and collective engagement, connection, and belonging. It establishes a foundation for harnessing and mobilizing people’s collective intelligence in line with the organization’s vision, mission, and purpose. 
  • Promotes effective team collaboration, where individuals feel at ease sharing their ideas, opinions, and concerns. It cultivates an environment where diverse perspectives can be openly discussed alongside differing views: 
  • Inspires people to be emotionally energetic, agile, and adaptable in the face of uncertainty and chaos, as well as in a rapidly changing business landscape.

AI will continue to disrupt job stability and security.

Developing emotional and psychological safety is a key success factor that underpins a culture of innovation, as it creates the essential space for individuals to think and act differently. This is achieved through experimentation, learning from failures, and exploring new methods that lead to breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions, enabling individuals to survive and thrive in the age of AI.

  • Both job losses and opportunities

Fast Company shares that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a stark warning for the developed world about job losses resulting from AI. The CEO told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. This could result in a 10% to 20% rise in the unemployment rate over the next one to five years, Amodei says. The losses could come from tech, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, with entry-level jobs being hit the hardest.

Just as the children we fostered needed emotional safety, we all require emotional safety when walking our city streets. Similarly, while at work, we all need a psychologically safe working environment rooted in mutuality and trust. This is what allows individuals to attune to each other, feel secure, bonded, and connected, fostering a sense of belonging and unity. This requires investing in the co-creation of emotionally and psychologically safe spaces that attract and retain top talent, enabling individuals to feel valued, as they truly matter, and helping them adapt, innovate, grow, perform and thrive in a post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

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

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Values Determine Your Competitiveness

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Values Determine Your Competitiveness

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When Lou Gerstner was chosen to lead IBM in 1993, he was an unlikely revolutionary. A McKinsey consultant and then the successful CEO of RJR Nabisco, he was considered to be a pillar of the establishment. He would, however, turn out to be as subversive as any activist, transforming the company and saving it from near-death.

Yet there was more to what he achieved than simply turning red ink to black. “The Gerstner revolution wasn’t about technology or strategy, it was about transforming our values and our culture to be in greater harmony with the market,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of his chief lieutenants, told me.

Values are essential to how an enterprise honors its mission. They represent choices of what an organization will and will not do, what it rewards and what it punishes and how it defines success and failure. Perhaps most importantly, values will determine an enterprise’s relationships with other stakeholders, how it collaborates and what it can achieve.

Values Incur Costs And Constraints

At his very first press conference, Gerstner famously declared: “the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” It was an odd, even shocking statement for a new CEO charged with turning around a historic company. But what he understood, and few others did, was that unless he changed the culture to honor the values its success was built on, no strategy could succeed.

“At IBM we had lost sight of our values,” Wladawsky-Berger would later tell me. “For example, there was a long tradition of IBM executives dressing formally in a suit and tie. Yet that wasn’t a value, it was an early manifestation of a value. In the early days, many of IBM’s customers were banks, so IBM’s salespeople dressed to reflect their customers. So the value was to be close to customers.”

Gerstner had been a customer and knew that IBM did not always treat him well. At one point the company threatened to pull service from an entire data center because a single piece of competitive equipment was installed. So as CEO, he vowed to shift the focus from IBM’s “own “proprietary stack of technologies” to its customers’ “stack of business processes.”

Yet he did something else as well. He made it clear that he was willing to forego revenue on every sale to do what was right for the customer and he showed that he meant it. Over the years I’ve spoken to dozens of IBM executives from that period and virtually all of them have pointed this out. Not one seems to think IBM would still be in business today without it.

The truth is that if you’re not willing to incur costs and constraints, it’s not a value. It’s a platitude. “Lou refocused us all on customers and listening to what they wanted and he did it by example,” Wladawsky-Berger, remembers. “We started listening to customers more because he listened to customers.

Values Signal Trust And Credibility

In South Africa, the Congress of The People was held in June, 1955. The gathering, which included blacks, mixed race, Indians and liberal whites, convened to draft and adopt the Freedom Charter, much like the Continental Congress gathered to produce the Declaration of Independence in America. The idea was to come up with a common and inclusive vision.

However, the Freedom Charter was anything but moderate. It was a “revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisioned could not be achieved without radically altering the economic and political structure of South Africa… In South Africa, to merely achieve fairness, one had to destroy apartheid itself, for it was the very embodiment of injustice,” Nelson Mandela would later write.

Yet despite its seemingly radical aims, the Freedom Charter spoke to common values, such as equal rights and equal protection under the law—not just among the signatories, but for anyone living in a free society. It was powerful because of how it signaled to outside stakeholders, such as international institutions, governments and corporations that they shared more with the anti-apartheid movement than they did with the regime.

It was because of those values that activists were able to successfully boycott firms, such as Barclays Bank and Shell Oil, that did business in South Africa. When those companies pulled their investments out, the dominoes began to fall. International sanctions and political pressure increased markedly and Apartheid became politically untenable.

Here again, values would play a crucial role. Much like Gerstner’s willingness to lose revenue on every sale to keep his commitment to IBM customers, Mandela’s commitment to the Freedom Charter, even during 27 years in prison, signaled to stakeholders—inside and outside of South Africa—that supporting his cause was the right thing to do.

Shared Values Drive Collaboration

In the 1960s and 70s, Route 128 outside of Boston was the center of technology, but by the 1990s Silicon Valley had taken over and never looked back. As AnnaLee Saxenian explained in her classic, Regional Advantage, the key difference had less to do with strategy, technology and tactics than it did with values and how the firms saw themselves.

Dominant Boston firms such as DEC, Data General and Wang Laboratories saw themselves as warring fiefdoms. The west coast startups, however, saw themselves as part of the same ecosystem and tended to band together and socialize. “Everybody worked for the same company — Silicon Valley,” Saxenian would later tell me.

This difference in values translated directly into differences in operational practice. For example, in Silicon Valley if you left your employer to start a company of your own, you were still considered part of the family. Many new entrepreneurs became suppliers or customers to their former employers and still socialized actively with their former colleagues. In Boston, if you left your firm you were treated as a pariah and an outcast.

When technology began to shift in the 80s and 90s, the Boston firms had little, if any, connection to the new ecosystems that were evolving. In Silicon Valley, however, connections to former employees acted as an antenna network, providing early market intelligence that helped those companies adapt.

When you value competition above all else, everyone is a potential enemy. However, when you are willing to forsake absolute fealty in the service of collaboration, you can leverage the assets of an entire ecosystem. Those may not show up on a strategic plan or a balance sheet, but they are just as important as any other asset.

Moving From Hierarchies to Networks

The truth is that IBM was not devoid of values when Gerstner arrived. It’s just that they’d gone awry. “IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition,” Wladawsky-Berger remembers. Certainly it valued technology and profits, just not customers.

What Gerstner did was, as noted above, bring the company’s culture and values back into “harmony with the market.” The company no longer wielded monopoly-like power. It had to collaborate with a wide array of stakeholders. It was this realization that led it to become the first major technology company to embrace open source software and support Linux.

Traditionally we’ve seen the world as driven by hierarchies. Kings and queens ruled the world through aristocracies that carried out their orders. Corporate CEO’s outlined strategies that underlings would have to execute. Discipline was enforced through a system of punishments and rewards. Power was valued above all else.

Yet as Moisés Naím pointed out in The End of Power, “Power is easier to get, but harder to use or keep.” Therefore, the ability to attract has become more important than the power to compel or coerce. That’s why today, strategy has less to do with increasing efficiencies and acquiring resources and more to do with widening and deepening networks of connections.

Power no longer lies at the top of hierarchies, but emanates from the center of networks. What determines whether we will get there or not is our values.

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

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