Category Archives: Strategy

Voting Closed – Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024

Happy Holidays!

For more than a decade I’ve devoted myself to making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because I truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources there will be.

As a result, we are eternally grateful to all of you out there who take the time to create and share great innovation articles, presentations, white papers, and videos with Braden Kelley and the Human-Centered Change and Innovation team. As a small thank you to those of you who follow along, we like to make a list of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers available each year!

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

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

Do you just have someone that you like to read that writes about innovation, or some of the important adjacencies – trends, consumer psychology, change, leadership, strategy, behavioral economics, collaboration, or design thinking?

Human-Centered Change and Innovation is now looking to recognize the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024.

It is time to vote and help us narrow things down.

The deadline for submitting votes is December 31, 2024 at midnight GMT.

The ranking will be done by me with influence from votes and nominations. The quality and quantity of contributions to this web site by an author will be a BIG contributing factor (through the end of the voting period).

You can vote in any of these three ways (and each earns points for them, so please feel free to vote all three ways):

Sending us the name of the blogger by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Adding the name of the blogger as a comment to this article’s posting on Facebook
Adding the name of the blogger as a comment to this article’s posting on our Linkedin Page (Be sure and follow us)

The official Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024 will then be announced here in early January 2025.

Here are the people who received nominations this year along with some carryover recommendations (in alphabetical order):

Adi Gaskell – @adigaskell
Alain Thys
Alex Goryachev
Andy Heikkila – @AndyO_TheHammer
Annette Franz
Arlen Meyers – @sopeofficial
Art Inteligencia
Ayelet Baron
Braden Kelley – @innovate
Brian Miller
Bruce Fairley
Chad McAllister – @ChadMcAllister
Chateau G Pato
Chris Beswick
Chris Rollins
Dr. Detlef Reis
Dainora Jociute
Dan Blacharski – @Dan_Blacharski
Daniel Burrus – @DanielBurrus
Daniel Lock
David Burkus
Dean and Linda Anderson
Dennis Stauffer
Diana Porumboiu
Douglas Ferguson
Drew Boyd – @DrewBoyd
Frank Mattes – @FrankMattes
Geoffrey A Moore
Gregg Fraley – @greggfraley
Greg Satell – @Digitaltonto
Helen Yu
Howard Tiersky
Janet Sernack – @JanetSernack
Jeffrey Baumgartner – @creativejeffrey
Jeff Freedman – @SmallArmyAgency
Jeffrey Phillips – @ovoinnovation
Jesse Nieminen – @nieminenjesse
John Bessant
Jorge Barba – @JorgeBarba
Julian Birkinshaw – @JBirkinshaw
Julie Anixter – @julieanixter
Kate Hammer – @Kate_Hammer
Kevin McFarthing – @InnovationFixer
Leo Chan
Lou Killeffer – @LKilleffer
Manuel Berdoy

Mari Anixter- @MariAnixter
Maria Paula Oliveira – @mpaulaoliveira
Matthew E May – @MatthewEMay
Michael Graber – @SouthernGrowth
Mike Brown – @Brainzooming
Mike Shipulski – @MikeShipulski
Mukesh Gupta
Nick Jain
Nick Partridge – @KnewNewNeu
Nicolas Bry – @NicoBry
Nicholas Longrich
Norbert Majerus and George Taninecz
Pamela Soin
Patricia Salamone
Paul Hobcraft – @Paul4innovating
Paul Sloane – @paulsloane
Pete Foley – @foley_pete
Rachel Audige
Ralph Christian Ohr – @ralph_ohr
Randy Pennington
Richard Haasnoot – @Innovate2Grow
Robert B Tucker – @RobertBTucker
Robyn Bolton – @rm_bolton
Saul Kaplan – @skap5
Shep Hyken – @hyken
Shilpi Kumar
Scott Anthony – @ScottDAnthony
Scott Bowden – @scottbowden51
Shelly Greenway – @ChiefDistiller
Soren Kaplan – @SorenKaplan
Stefan Lindegaard – @Lindegaard
Stephen Shapiro – @stephenshapiro
Steve Blank
Steven Forth – @StevenForth
Tamara Kleinberg – @LaunchStreet
Teresa Spangler – @composerspang
Tom Koulopoulos – @TKspeaks
Tullio Siragusa
Yoram Solomon – @yoram

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We’re curious to see who you think is worth reading!

Back to the Basics of the Performance Zone

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Back to the Basics of the Performance Zone

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

As the global economy gropes its way to a new normal, with buyers still looking to regain their confidence to invest, most companies are dealing with sluggish performance—not terrible, but not great. In such circumstances, management attention gravitates to the Productivity Zone, where the focus is internal on ourselves, and the goal is to optimize our processes to prop up our operating margins. All good, but only half the solution.

The other half is to reengage with the Performance Zone. The goal of this zone is to not to improve–it is to win the game. There is no process for doing this (if there were, then Germany would win the World Cup every year), so internal focusing will not help. Instead, we need to reexamine our relationship with others, specifically with our customers and our competitors. Strategy begins, in other words, when we divert our attention from us and put it on them.

Investigating our Customers

In a doldrums economy, we know that existing budgets are tight, so if we are to find growth opportunities, we need to detect where new budgets are emerging. In other words, we are looking for forces at work in our target markets that are changing the investment priorities of our target customers. The key unit of examination here is the use case.

Use cases live at the intersection of our portfolio of offerings and customer value realization. We already have libraries of established use cases, but those are the ones that are under budget constraint. We are looking for emerging use cases, typically gnarly problems that are possible to solve with our stuff, but only with net new innovation and additional attention from us. Such use cases are at odds with our Productivity Zone focus on efficiency, but they are key to finding growth opportunities in trying times.

Each use case is a shorthand representation for a mini-TAM (Total Addressable Market). We are not looking for big here, we are looking for urgent. We want use cases that will activate customers to invest now, even when budgets are tight, keeping in mind that even the most highly focused use case with the smallest immediate TAM is normally a harbinger of bigger things to come. First-mover advantage in an emerging use case is like winning an early primary election—it is modestly valuable in itself, but even more so in terms of its impact on later competitions in bigger venues.

To detect these opportunities we need to interrogate our customer-facing teams in sales, solution engineering, and customer success to extract from them anecdotal evidence of novel use cases, regardless of who the vendor is. We also want to hear stories about customers struggling with problems that no one is solving. The question we are trying to answer is, what does the world really want from our company now? What would cause prospective customers to line up to spend money with us today?

To be sure, pursuing net new use cases requires investment at our end, and we too are under budget pressure, so there can be no “spray and pray” here. We need to stack rank whatever opportunities we detect on a risk/reward gradient and focus on the top one or two only, the limiting factor being that whatever we do fund must get “all the way to bright.” Adding even just one more opportunity than there is budget to fund results in all opportunities getting underfunded and nothing getting over the finish line. It is the most common cause of companies losing their way and drifting into irrelevance.

Learning from our Competitors

Here again we should divide up the landscape into legacy versus future competitors, as we will treat each differently. The legacy group are competing for the same constrained budgets as we are, using tactics we are now quite likely to be familiar with. This is the realm of execution, not strategy. It rewards campaigns led by the Productivity Zone focused on extracting the best returns we can from what is a low-yield, but also a low-risk, situation. Our customers are not going away, but they are going to sweat their assets and consolidate vendors wherever they can. Inertia here is our friend, and we need to leverage it as best we can by eliminating any sources of friction that would diminish our returns.

On the other hand, our future competitors do warrant strategic attention, for any number of reasons. For example, any recent wins they may have had could signal an emerging new use case, one that we too should be checking out. Alternatively, we may learn they are attacking our own target use case, in which case we need to differentiate quickly and dramatically in order to block them out early (a mini-TAM is too small for more than one winner). A third possibility is that we may be getting blindsided altogether, our installed base under some whole new form of attack, potentially jeopardizing the future of our entire franchise. It’s a wake-up call nobody likes to get, essentially forecasting an existential threat, but that is often what it takes to prod an established enterprise to adjust to a changing market landscape.

The standard unit of work for investigating future-oriented competition is the win/loss analysis. Again, we need to bring in the customer-facing teams to get their anecdotal evidence. Analyst reports don’t help much—they tend either to track us and our legacy competitors in established markets, or to glom onto the next potential disruptive technology and make extravagant extrapolations of its future returns. Instead, we want to look closely at the new use cases, regardless of whether we have won or lost, to see what the customer ended up prioritizing and why that drove their buying decision. As always, we prefer to win, but it is imperative regardless that we learn.

Changing the Narrative

Once we have focused on others, once we have revised our understanding of what the world wants from us, and who we are going to be competing with, we can now legitimately focus our attention on ourselves and our stakeholders. These include our installed base, our ecosystem partners, our investors, and our employee workforce. Our new strategy calls for a change in our course and speed, and we need everyone in our boat to row in the same direction. This can only happen if we change the narrative.

It is hard to overemphasize this point, so let me put it another way. If we do not change the narrative, nothing new will happen. No one will change course and speed. Even if we make clear the course corrections we are making, things still won’t change. That’s because everyone always assumes that things will be more or less the same, and that goes especially for established franchises. Getting stakeholders to turn a big boat requires a big signal.

The structure of the successful new narrative is always the same. It is never about you. Nobody cares about you (well, except your mom, of course, God bless her). Stakeholders have plenty on their own plates to worry about without taking on stuff on yours. What they do care about, on the other hand, is what is happening in their world, how it impinges on their hopes and plans, where it is creating risk for them, and what, if anything, you might be able to do to help them mitigate that risk. That’s what your new narrative must be all about. It’s a new you because it is a new world, and you are rising to meet the occasion. Not only does this change people’s focus, it energizes those whom it attracts, giving a real boost to the team at a time when everyone can use one.

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

Image Credit: Unsplash

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Nominations Closed – Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation loves making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because we truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources there will be.

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

Human-Centered Change and Innovation is now looking for the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024.

The deadline for submitting nominations is December 24, 2024 at midnight GMT.

You can submit a nomination either of these two ways:

Sending us the name of the blogger and the url of their blog by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Sending the name of the blogger and the url of their blog and your e-mail address using our contact form

(Note: HUGE bonus points for being a contributing author)

So, think about who you like to read and let us know by midnight GMT on December 24, 2024.

We will then compile a voting list of all the nominations, and publish it on December 25, 2024.

Voting will then be open from December 25, 2024 – January 1, 2025 via comments and twitter @replies to @innovate.

The ranking will be done by me with influence from votes and nominations. The quality and quantity of contributions by an author to this web site will be a contributing factor.

Contact me with writing samples if you’d like to publish your articles on our platform!

The official Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024 will then be announced on here in early January 2025.

We’re curious to see who you think is worth reading!

SPECIAL BONUS: From now until December 31, 2024 you can save 30% OFF on my latest best-selling book Charting Change on either the eBook (immediate download) or the hardcover (free shipping worldwide) when using code HOL30.

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Make the Planet and Your Bottom Line Smile

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Make the Planet and Your Bottom Line Smile

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

What if the most profitable thing you could do was work that reduced the rise in the earth’s temperature? What if it was most profitable to reduce CO2 emissions, improve water quality or generate renewable energy? Or what if it was most profitable to do work that indirectly made the planet smile?

What if while your competitors greenwashed their products and you radically reduced the environmental impacts of yours? And what if the market would pay more for your greener product? And what if your competitors saw this and disregarded the early warning signs of their demise? This is what I call a compete-with-no-one condition. This is where your competitors eat each other’s ankles in a race to the bottom while you raise prices and sell more on a different line of goodness – environmental goodness. This is where you compete against no one because you’re the only one with products that make the planet smile.

The problem with an environmentally-centric, compete-with-no-one approach is you have to put yourself out there and design and commercialize new products based on this “unproven” goodness. In a world of profits through cost, quality and speed, you’ve got to choose profits through reduced CO2, improved water quality and renewable energy. Why would anyone pay more for a more environmentally responsible product when its price is higher than the ones that work well and pollute just as much as they did last year?

When the Toyota Prius hybrid first arrived on the market, it cost more than traditional cars and its performance was nothing special. Yet it sold. Yes, it had radically improved fuel economy, but the fuel savings didn’t justify the higher price, yet it sold. Competitors advertised that the Prius hybrid didn’t make financial sense, yet it sold. With the Prius hybrid, Toyota took an environmentally-centric, compete-with-no-one approach. They made little on each vehicle or even lost money, but they did it anyway. They did the most important thing. They started.

The Toyota Prius hybrid wasn’t a logical purchase, it was an emotional one. People bought them to make a statement about themselves – I drive a funny-shaped car that gets great gas mileage, I’m environmentally responsible, and I want you to know that. And as other companies scoffed, Toyota created a new category and owned the whole thing.

And, slowly, as Toyota improved the technology and reduced their costs, the price of the Prius dropped and they sold more. And then all the other manufacturers jumped into the race and tried to catch up. And while everyone else cut their teeth on high volume manufacturing a hybrid vehicle, Toyota accelerated.

Below is a chart of hybrid electric vehicles (hev) sold in the US from 2000 to 2017. Each color represents a different model and the Toyota Prius hybrid is represented by the tall blue segment of each year’s stacked bar. In 2000, Toyota sold 5,562 Prius hybrids (60% of all hevs). In 2005, they sold 107,897 Prius hybrids, 17,989 Highlander hybrids and 20,674 Lexus hybrids for a total of 209,711 hybrids (69% of all hevs). In 2007, they sold 181,221 Prius and five other hybrid models for a total of 228,593 (65% of all hevs). In 2017, sold 15 hybrid models and the nearest competitor sold four models. The reduction from 2008 to 2011 is due to reduced gas prices. (Here’s a link to the chart.)

United States Hybrid Electric Vehicle Sales

The success of the Prius vehicle set off the battery wars which set the stage for the plug-in hybrids (larger batteries) and all-electric vehicles (still larger batteries). At the start, the Prius didn’t make sense in a race-to-the-bottom way, but it made sense to people that wanted to make the planet smile. It cost more, and it sold. And that was enough for Toyota to make profits with a more environmentally friendly product. No, Prius didn’t save the planet, but it showed companies that it’s possible to make profits while making the planet smile (a bit). And it made it safe for companies to pursue the next generation of environmentally-friendly vehicles.

The only way to guarantee you won’t make more profits with environmentally responsible products is to believe you won’t. And that may be okay unless one of your companies believes it is possible.

Here’s a thought experiment. Put yourself ten years into the future. There is more CO2 in the atmosphere, the earth is warmer, sea levels are higher, water is more polluted and renewable energy is far cheaper. Are your sales higher if your product creates more CO2, or less? Are your sales higher if your product heats the earth, or cools it? Are your sales higher if your product pollutes water, or makes it cleaner? Are your sales higher because you bet against renewable energy, or because you embraced it? Are your sales higher because you made the planet frown, or smile?

Now, with your new perspective, bring yourself back to the present and do what it takes to increase sales ten years from now. Your future self, your children, their children, and the planet will thank you.

Image credits: Google Gemini

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Components of a Good Digital Strategy

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Components of a Good Digital Strategy

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

If I told you I had a document in my hand that was the new digital strategy for your company, what would you expect it to contain?

A list of projects? A “mission” statement? A technology vision? A competitive market analysis? A financial forecast?

One of the problems with the label “digital strategy” is that there’s not a common understanding of what it actually means or should contain. Naturally, the needs vary by company, but what if I said I had one menu for a Chinese restaurant and one for an Italian restaurant? Of course, there would be some differences, but there would also be some similarities: both would contain a list of foods you can order and their prices.

While we know what to expect to see in a menu, what should we expect to find in a digital strategy?

We develop digital strategies for companies from media to retail to financial services, and we use a ten-chapter outline for our digital strategy documents. Starting from this point, we often customize, and I’d encourage you to do that as well. Consider this a cheat-sheet that, if it works for your organization, can form the basis for your digital strategy.

Chapter One: Our Current Situation

Describe your company’s current situation vis a vis digital. Outline the digital touchpoints that currently exist, how recently they have been “remodeled,” how you measure their performance and what feedback you receive from both customers and stakeholders. Neither exaggerate the problems nor sweep them under the rug. The idea is to present a clear, objective, and fact-based description of the current state. Ideally, cite specific stats such as conversion, ad revenue, usability testing results or other data-driven “evidence” for your position. Also, describe any obvious gaps in your digital landscape. If you have clarity on the reasons for some of the problems or gaps (technical issues, business process issues, etc.), then state these as well.

Chapter Two: The Customer and Competitive Landscape

Describe your customer segments succinctly. What is understood about their current needs? How have they changed? Ideally, cite evidence from market research. In particular, how have their channel/touchpoint preference and expectations been evolving? What does that suggest about what your brand needs to do to stay relevant? If you have data to support it, describe how the current digital ecosystem for your company impacts your customer’s perception, behavior and purchase decisions (either positively or negatively — you may have examples of both). Now take a look at competitors. Your customers are evaluating you against your competitive set; what are they offering regarding a digital experience? How does it differ from what your brand is doing? What success metrics do you have available to indicate how successful competitive efforts are? (remember not everything your competitor is doing differently is necessarily successful). Remember to look not just at your traditional large competitors, but also at smaller competitors who may not be taking a significant market share (yet) but who might be more nimble or creative. Look also at “comparative” brands. If you are a hotel, what are airlines doing? What is Uber or Amazon doing? And how are their latest innovations both creating new expectations your customers have for you and also highlighting opportunities for your industry to do something similar?

Chapter Three: Trends

Chapters One and Two describe the current state. Chapter Three is your space to forecast the future. What trends are likely to impact your customer and your industry over the next few years? I suggest focusing on a 2-3 year time horizon. In today’s fast-moving world trying to forecast farther than that is too inaccurate. What kind of trends should you focus on? Certainly focus on digital trends, such as the shift to mobile or other digital technologies that may be relevant to your industry (wearables, VR, AR, chatbots, etc.). But also focus on trends that may not be inherently digital but which may have a significant impact in your industry over the next few years. These could be growth in China, the different priorities of the millennial generation, etc.

Chapter Four: Our Assets

Nothing in the outline of the first three chapters is inherently good news or bad news — it’s just a journalistic perspective on your brand, your customers, and competitors- where they are today and where they are going. It’s not uncommon for it to be an inventory of all the ways you are behind and that can be a bit of a downer. This chapter is your opportunity to remind the reader of any untapped assets you may have that might be able to help you leap ahead. What kind of asset should you describe? Here are some ideas. Consider which apply in your situation:

Your brand — How is your brand viewed by customers? Even if you are behind the curve in digital, it takes a long time to build a trusted brand. That’s worth a lot, and if you catch up, that brand may be a huge competitive weapon even against companies who seem to be ahead of you today.
Your content — Perhaps you have a backlog of content that is not being fully leveraged. A new digital strategy may enable you to tap value that is currently latent.
Technology — You might have some proprietary technology that, if connected to a stronger digital touchpoint, could enable you to bring capabilities to the market that would be difficult for others to match.
Your people and their skills — Your organization may be uniquely good at something. Perhaps there is a way to leverage that strength. Or you may have specific individuals whose talents aren’t fully leveraged but who could make a major difference if given the opportunity to drive new digital strategies.

Your scale, financial resources, partnership relationships, network of stores, licensed IP, etc. Companies have many other assets, far too many to list here. Try to inventory everything you have to work with and consider which other assets might have a place in developing a strategy that provides sustainable competitive differentiation.

Chapter Five: The Future Customer Journey

Chapter Five is where you describe your vision of the future. You have been setting up the rationale for change in the previous four chapters; this is where you propose your solution. Describe how the customer will interact with your brand differently in the future — what changes will be made to the different touchpoints? How does their journey play out from initial introduction to your brand, through the phases of initial interest and research, through their purchase decisions, experience of your product or service, problem resolution, and future re-purchase? Describe your customer, their situation, and their priorities and tell a compelling story that rings the intuitive bell of the user that this future journey will be both far better for the customer and also lead to better business outcomes for the brand. Support the alignment with customer needs via research data where available. One format for describing the customer journey is a roadmap.

However you describe it, your strategy should align with the three key priorities of a successful digital business.

Chapter Six: Money and Business Model

If you have done a good job in Chapter Five, you now have your reader or listener (if it’s a presentation) thinking, “Sounds great, but how much is this going to cost??” Chapter Six is where you lay out three things — roughly what implementing this strategy will cost, what your projections are for financial return, and how the business model under the new strategy changes, if at all. Clarity around investment and returns is what separates digital strategies that sound good from ones that actually get done. After all, an ambitious digital strategy for a major brand is likely to be a substantial investment. Most of the time those at the CFO and CEO level making investment decisions of hat scale are not doing it because of the inherent “good” of digital, but because they expect a return that justifies the decision. You must help them see your story in the kind of financial language that they use to make all of their other decisions. Be sure to describe not only the total budget but how much you anticipate will be capital vs operating budget and what the cash flow timing looks like. You’ll want someone from your finance department to be involved in modeling this in spreadsheet form.

Chapter Seven: Technology

It’s quite likely that your new strategy will be closely tied to technology. In Chapter Seven describe the technologies that are needed. It’s not essential to describe hardcore “tech” details or reference specific software tools. Rather, the idea here is to describe the key requirements you will have of technology to achieve the strategy.

Chapter Eight: Business Process and Organization

Often a substantial digital transformation will change the way you do business. If so, then no doubt you will need to reconsider various business processes or parts of your organizational structure. Chapter Eight should describe the types of changes that may be needed.

Chapter Nine: Timeline and Challenges

In Chapter Nine, you lay out a detailed quarter by quarter plan of how you intend to proceed. In addition, be upfront about the assumptions, risks and anticipated challenges your strategy will face. It may seem like it would be better to keep quiet about possible risks, but actually, the opposite is true for two reasons. First, it adds credibility to your plan and process to show you’re realistic about the possible roadblocks and are already thinking about how to avoid them. And second, when you get funded, and your project actually does encounter challenges it won’t be a shock to your stakeholders. Most major transformations encounter a lot of twists and turns, and you need not only the initial support but the sustained support of your key stakeholders. Having a frank conversation about the things that could go wrong in advance is planting the seeds for their support when you need it in the future.

Chapter Ten: The Cost of Failure

The last chapter addresses the question of what if we don’t do it? Or what if we do it half-heartedly? Digital transformation projects inevitably involve risks. And really wouldn’t we all rather avoid risk? This last chapter is the time to describe the risks of not proceeding or not fully proceeding. How will this impact sales? How will it impact your brand? If you just delay a year or two and then proceed, how will that impact your ability to catch up to the market?

So there you are: ten chapters of your digital strategy (or at least a starting point). One final suggestion is to make the development of your strategy an inclusive process. These days an effective digital strategy touches every part of an organization, and people can be quite resistant to an outside “digital team” deciding their fate for them. Furthermore, I suggest you create an inclusive process around the finalization of your digital strategy outline before you begin the process of developing the strategy. To the point I began with, there is a risk that when you come back to your CMO or your CEO with “The Digital Strategy” they may be surprised by what is and what isn’t covered. You can use this outline as a starting discussion point to gauge their expectations and jointly agree on what the strategy actually needs to address so that the scope and structure of the strategy meets their expectations and you can focus on the substance. Good luck strategizing and as always let us know if we can be of any help!

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: FreePik

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Humanizing Agility

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Humanizing Agility

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Like many others, I invested time in isolation during the pandemic to engage in various online learning programs. As a highly credentialed coach to many global Agile and SCRUM leaders in major international and local organizations, I enrolled in an Agile coach certification program and enthusiastically attended all daily sessions. It was a disastrous learning experience, verifying my perception of the Agile community’s focus on a prescriptive rules-driven process to agility. The Agile Manifesto’s highest priority is satisfying customers through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software; only two of the 12 principles mention people – “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project” and “the best architectures, requirements, and design emerge from self-organizing teams.” So, with this in mind, what might be some of the benefits of integrating a technological and process-driven disciplined approach towards humanizing agility?

I am a conceptual and analytical thinker, an entrepreneur, and an innovator who is acknowledged as a global thought leader on the people side of innovation. I also teach, mentor, and coach people to be imaginative, inquisitive, and curious, always asking many open questions. I empower, enable, and equip them to become change-agile, cognitively, and emotionally agile and develop their innovation agility. The presenters responded to my method of inquiry by assuming that I knew nothing about Agile despite knowing nothing about my background.

As a result, they failed to certify me without communicating or consulting with me directly, despite my meeting all of the course evaluation criteria and having more than 10,000 hours of facilitation and more than 1,000 hours of coaching experience on the people side of change. I also have a comprehensive background in humanizing total quality management, continuous improvement, and start-up methodologies in major organizations.

I contacted the training company and challenged their decision, only not to be “heard” and be paid lip service when confronted by a rigid, linear, conventional, disconnected approach to agility and its true role and capability in catalysing change, innovation and teaming.

This is especially true considering the senior SCRUM and Agile leaders I was coaching at the time experienced very few problems with Agile’s disciplined process and technological side. They specifically requested coaching support to develop strategies to resolve their monumental challenges and complex issues involving “getting people to work together daily” and operating as “self-organizing teams.” How do they go about humanizing agility?

Making sense of agility

Despite my disappointment, I bravely continued researching how to make sense of agility and link and integrate it with the people side of change, innovation, and teams. I intended to enable leaders to execute agile transformation initiatives successfully by combining a human-centered approach to agile software development through humanizing agility.

Agility refers to a leader, team, or organization’s ability to make timely, effective, and sustained changes that maintain superior performance. According to Pamela Myer’s book “The Agility Shift”, – an agility shift is the intentional development of the competence, capacity and confidence to learn, adapt and innovate in changing contexts for sustainable success. We have incorporated this approach into our innovation learning and coaching curriculum at ImagineNation™ and iterated and pivoted it over the past 12 years in empowering, enabling and equipping people to become “agility shifters” by humanizing agility.

Humanizing agility differently

Agility can be humanized and expanded to include change, cognitive, innovation, and organizational agility, all powerfully fueled by people’s emotional energy. This is fundamental to achieving success through non-growth or growth strategies and delivering equitable and sustainable outcomes that will make the world a better place for all humanity.

It involves identifying pivots, unlearning, learning, and relearning, embracing new approaches, frameworks, and tools, and developing new 21st-century mindsets, behaviors, and skills.

Humanizing agility involves empowering, enabling, and equipping people to be, think and act differently autonomously and competently, especially in the conflicted, chaotic, unstable post-COVID world of emerging unknowns.

Like innovation, agility is contextual.

Humanizing agility supports people to adapt, grow and thrive, become nimble by enabling:

Teams to deliver product releases as shorter sprints to collect customer feedback to iterate and pivot product development.
Leaders, teams, and organizations respond quickly and adapt to market changes, internally and externally.
People must think and feel and be able to quickly make intentional shifts to be effective, creative, inventive, and innovative in changing contexts.

That empowers, enables and equips people with the mindsets, behaviors, and skills to adapt, grow, and thrive by developing their confidence, capacity, and competence to catalyze and mobilize their power to move quickly and easily, think creatively and critically to make faster decisions and solve complex problems with less effort.

Humanizing Agility – The Five Elements

1. Emotional energy

Emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels creativity, invention, and innovation.

Understanding and harnessing this energy inspires and motivates individuals to explore and embrace creative thinking strategies in partnership with AI.

Emotional energy catalyses people’s intrinsic motivation, conviction, hope, positivity, and optimism to approach their world purposefully, meaningfully, and differently.

When people are true to their calling, they make extra efforts and are healthier, which positively impacts their well-being and improves their resilience.

2. Change agility

Change agility is the ability to anticipate, respond, be receptive, and adapt to constant and accelerating change in an uncertain, unstable, conflicted world.

It involves developing a new perspective of change as a continuous, iterative, and learning process that has to be embedded in every action and interaction, not a separate standalone process.

Requiring the development of new mental models, states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills to drive business and workforce outcomes that are critical for an organization to survive and thrive through any change.

Change becomes an ongoing opportunity, not a threat or liability, and humanizing agility in the context of change agility is a core 21st-century competency for leaders, teams and coaches.

3.Cognitive agility

Cognitive agility is the extent to which people can adapt and shift their perspectives and thought processes when doing so leads to more positive outcomes.

Cognitive agility refers to how flexible and adaptive people can be with their thoughts in the face of change, uncertain circumstances, and random and unexpected events and situations. Being cognitively agile helps people break down their neuro-rigidity and eliminate any core fixed mindsets; it supports their neuro-plasticity and develops a growth mindset and ability to perceive the world through multiple lenses and differing perspectives.

Humanizing agility in the context of cognitive agility enables people to make sense of and understand the range of challenges, problems, and paradoxes at the deeper systemic and surface levels, preparing them for smart risk-taking, effective decision-making, and intelligent problem-solving.

4.Innovation agility

Innovation agility is the extent to which people develop the courage, compassion and creativity to safely deep-dive into and dance with cognitive dissonance—to passionately, purposefully, and apply creative tension and develop neuro-elasticity, to play in the space where possibility lives—between the present state and the desired creative, inventive, and innovative outcome.

To empower, engage, and enable people to use their human ingenuity and harness their collective intelligence to be innovative in the age of AI by adapting and growing in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, which is appreciated and cherished.

5.Organizational and leadership agility

Organizational agility involves developing an ability to renew itself, adapt, innovate, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, uncertain and unstable operating environment. It requires a paradoxical balance of two things: a dynamic capability, the ability to move fast—speed, nimbleness, responsiveness and stability, and a stable foundation—a platform of things that don’t change to provide a rigorous and disciplined pillar.

Organizations and leaders prioritizing humanizing agility also prioritize differing and creative ways of being, thinking and acting. They maintain their strength by focusing on their core competencies while regularly stretching themselves for maximum flexibility, adaptiveness and resilience.

Finally…. Imagine humanizing agility

Imagine what you could do and the difference we could make to people, customers, organizations, communities and the world by humanizing agility in ways that embrace and embody the five elements of agility to harness the human ingenuity and people’s collective intelligence guide vertical, horizontal and transformational changes the world and humanity need right now.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

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 9-weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

Image Credit: Pexels

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Acting on Strategy and Tactics

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Acting on Strategy and Tactics

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When it comes to strategy and tactics, there are a lot of definitions, a lot of disagreement, and a whole lot of confusion. When is it strategy? When is it tactics? Which is more important? How do they inform each other?

Instead of definitions and disagreement, I want to start with agreement. Everyone agrees that both strategy AND tactics are required. If you have one without the other, it’s just not the same. It’s like with shoes and socks: Without shoes, your feet get wet; without socks, you get blisters; and when you have both, things go a lot better. Strategy and tactics work best when they’re done together.

The objective of strategy and tactics is to help everyone take the right action. Done well, everyone from the board room to the trenches knows how to take action. In that way, here are some questions to ask to help decide if your strategy and tactics are actionable.

What will we do? This gets to the heart of it. You’ve got to be able to make a list of things that will get done. Real things. Real actions. Don’t be fooled by babble like “We will provide customer value” and “Will grow the company by X%.” Providing customer value may be a good idea, but it’s not actionable. And growing the company by an arbitrary percentage is aspirational, but not actionable.

Why will we do it? This one helps people know what’s powering the work and helps them judge whether their actions are in line with that forcing function. Here’s a powerful answer: Competitors now have products and services that are better than ours, and we can’t have that. This answer conveys the importance of the work and helps everyone put the right amount of energy into their actions. [Note: this question can be asked before the first one.]

Who will do it? Here’s a rule: if no one is freed up to do the new work, the new work won’t get done. Make a list of the teams that will stop their existing projects before they can take action on the new work. Make a list of the new positions that are in the budget to support the strategy and tactics. Make a list of the new companies you’ll partner with. Make a list of all the incremental funding that has been put in the budget to help all the new people complete all these new actions. If your lists are short or you can make any, you don’t have what it takes to get the work done. You don’t have a strategy and you don’t have tactics. You have an unfunded mandate. Run away.

When will it be done? All actions must have completion dates. The dates will be set without consideration of the work content, so they’ll be wrong. Even still, you should have them. And once you have the dates, double all the task durations and push out the dates in your mind. No need to change the schedule now (you can’t change it anyway) because it will get updated when the work doesn’t get done on time. Now, using your lists of incremental headcount and budget, assign the incremental resources to all the actions with completion dates. Look for actions and budgets as those are objective evidence of the unfunded mandate character of your strategy and tactics. And for actions without completion dates, disregard them because they can never be late.

How will we know it’s done? All actions must call out a definition of success (DOS) that defines when the action has been accomplished. Without a measurable DOS, no one is sure when they’re done so they’ll keep working until you stop them. And you don’t want that. You want them to know when they’re done so they can quickly move on to the next action without oversight. If there’s no time to create a DOS, the action isn’t all that important and neither is the completion date.

When the wheels fall off, and they will, how will we update the strategy and tactics? Strategy and tactics are forward-looking and looking forward is rife with uncertainty. You’ll be wrong. What actions will you take to see if everything is going as planned? What actions will you take when progress doesn’t meet the plan? What actions will you take when you learn your tactics aren’t working and your strategy needs a band-aid?

What will you do?
Who will do it?
When will it be done?
And how will you know it’s done?

Image credit: Eric Minbiole

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Are We Doing Social Innovation Wrong?

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GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

The Volume Operations business model kicks in when you have hundreds of thousands of users and goes up from there. 100,000, for those of us who are not math majors, is 10 to the power of 5. Uber-successful volume ops businesses operate at 10 to the power of 9 and up—millions of users or customers. But if you are a start-up, you are looking at 10 or maybe 100. How do you get from here to there?

The key thought to keep in mind is the old chestnut “what got you here won’t get you there.” That is, whatever operating model you have, keep in mind it can scale to two exponents but never to three. That means for every two exponents you have to change operating models, which likely means you have to change executive leadership in order to go forward.

To illustrate this idea, I’d like to focus on the non-profit sector and ask the question, what would it take to really solve for any widespread social problem? Homelessness was the first one that came to mind, but hunger is another obvious one, drug addiction a second, street crime a third. They are all seemingly intractable issues that, despite the best intentions of a whole raft of people, and regardless of how much funding is supplied, stubbornly resist any sustainable improvement.

The question I want to address is not what programs would work—because I actually think a whole lot of programs would work—but rather, how could we organize to deploy these programs successfully at scale.

Following our principle of what got you here won’t get you there, we need a ladder of operating models that can take us, exponent by exponent, from 10 to the power of 1 to, say, 10 to the power of 7. What might that look like?

Consider this a straw man, a place to start, something to edit. It conveys a key lesson from the high-tech sector, namely that the fastest way to kill a disruptive innovation is to race to scale by skipping over one or more of these “exponential steps.” It just doesn’t work. There are too many emergent factors at each new level you must learn to cope with in order to succeed. The only reliable way to scale is to ratchet your way up this staircase, adapting your systems and operations as you go.

Unfortunately, that’s not what politicians do. They want to make a big impact right away. That means they start everything on one of the upper stairs. Driven by impatience, they ignore the dynamics of adoption and demand mass deployment from the get-go. They think the problem is simply one of getting enough funding. It’s not. It’s one of operational innovation. Scaling prematurely simply wastes the funding. And then when programs do flounder, as they inevitably will, they blame it on execution when in reality they simply did not do the hard, time-consuming work of building up their foundation step by step from below.

One of the implications of this framework is that social services should be incubated in the private sector where freedom from regulatory constraints supports agile innovation. But as they scale, the importance of regulatory oversight increases and more communal engagement is required. The goal should be to keep this oversight as local as possible as long as possible, doing as much as we can to empower the people delivering the service itself. Once that operating model solidifies, then, and only then, is there a proper foundation for scaling to state and federal programs.

Today, we do not lack the empathy to support social services. Nor do we lack the funding. But we are failing nonetheless. We can do better. We need to do better.

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

Image Credit: Pexels

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Your Strategy Must Reach Beyond Markets to Ecosystems

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Your Strategy Must Reach Beyond Markets to Ecosystems

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

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 Regional Advantage, the key difference was that while Route 128 was a collection of value chains, Silicon Valley built an ecosystem.

Clearly, ecosystems are even more important today than they were back then. In fact, a study by Accenture Strategy a few years ago found that ecosystems are a “cornerstone” of future growth and that 60% of executives surveyed viewed ecosystems as a way to disrupt their industry. A similar number saw them as key to increasing revenue.

The problem is that competing in an ecosystem environment is vastly different than a traditional value chain strategy. While a value chain is driven by efficiencies, an ecosystem is driven by connections in a network. So we need to do more than adapt our strategy and tactics, we need to learn how to play a whole new game. The first step is to learn the rules.

First, Start Early

One of the key aspects of ecosystems is that they don’t seem all that important at first. By the time it becomes clear that a change is underway, it is often too late to adapt. The demise of Boston’s technology companies is a great example of how that can happen. Dominant firms such as DEC, Data General and Wang Laboratories found themselves irrelevant so quickly that they never recovered.

Network scientists call this an ‘instantaneous phase transition’ and it happens because connections tend to form slowly. They start as isolated clusters that, even taken in sum, don’t seem to amount to much. However, when those clusters connect, a cascade ensues and what once seemed inconsequential suddenly becomes predominant.

That’s why it’s so important to become active in an ecosystem before those clusters connect, when things are moving relatively slowly, everybody wants to talk to you and the price of admission is still fairly cheap. Once an ecosystem begins to thrive, things move much faster and costs for entry raise exponentially.

Consider the automobile industry, which is now spending billions to set up research centers in Silicon Valley. Just think of how much cheaper — and more effective — it would have been for those companies to have started 20 or 30 years ago.

Not Just Spinning Out, But Spinning In

A typical strategy for an enterprise looking to leverage an ecosystem is to spin out a division to focus on activities that are relevant to it. These spinoffs tend to have a lot more in common with the ecosystem firms than the parent company and therefore are much more able to connect. However, because links to the parent company become more tenuous over time, benefits are limited.

A potentially more successful strategy is to spin ecosystem firms in. For example, the National Labs have set up programs like Cyclotron Road, Chain Reaction and Innovation Crossroads that invite entrepreneurial firms to come work at the labs, make use of the scientific facilities and be mentored by top scientists.

In the private sector, corporate venture capital operations, as well as incubators and accelerators, can be a great way to connect with small entrepreneurial companies early in the ecosystem lifecycle. Beyond the actual investments made, these programs give you the opportunity to connect with hundreds of small firms, some of which can become important partners, suppliers and customers later on.

What’s crucial is that you are not seen as an interloper, but a true source of value, whether that value is in actual monetary investment, access to facilities and expertise or connection to points of market access. What may be insignificant to your company may be incredibly valuable to a small, entrepreneurial firm.

Maintaining Open Nodes

One of Saxenian’s most interesting findings in Regional Advantage was how differently the Boston technology firms treated outsiders compared to the Silicon Valley companies. The Boston firms were vertically integrated and sought to keep everything in-house. The Silicon Valley companies, on the other hand, thrived on connection.

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.

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.

So while it is necessary to reach out to evolving ecosystems, it is just as important to ensure that there are also paths for small entrepreneurial firms to engage within your enterprise. Ecosystems thrive on personal connections. Those may not show up on a strategic plan or a balance sheet, but they are just as important as any other asset.

The New Competitive Advantage

Ever since Harvard professor Michael Porter published his seminal book, Competitive Strategy in 1980, strategists have sought advantage through driving efficiencies in order to maximize bargaining power against customers, suppliers, substitute goods and new market entrants. By doing so, they could achieve higher margins and invest in greater efficiencies, creating a virtuous cycle.

Yet today things move much too fast for that kind of chess game. To compete in a networked world, you must constantly widen and deepen connections. Instead of always looking to maximize bargaining power, you need to look for opportunities to co-create with customers and suppliers, to integrate your products and services with potential substitutes and form partnerships with new market entrants.

Power no longer resides at the top of value chains, but rather at the center of networks and collaboration has become the new competitive advantage. Value is no longer merely a target for extraction, but an asset for connection. You need to be seen to be adding value to the ecosystem in order to get value out.

The truth is that we can no longer manage for stability, we must manage for disruption. We can’t predict the future, but we can connect to it, nurture it and profit from it. Yet to do so requires far more than a simple shift in strategy and tactics. It requires a fundamental change in mindset.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pixabay

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Smarter Risk Taking

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Smarter Risk Taking

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

After founding ImagineNation™ in Israel, I invested a year of my time and considerable money in taking what I thought were smart risks to invent an experiential business game. This involved collaborating with one of the top game design companies to co-create a live business simulation incorporating innovative gamification elements intending to teach corporations how to be innovative.

To my shock and surprise at the time, my invention initially failed!

Despite being an adult and experiential learning specialist and having designed and facilitated hundreds of corporate learning games for some of Australia’s top 100 companies over twenty-five years. It felt really horrible, and it was a visceral, heartbreaking, shameful and ego-destroying experience that I would not want anyone, anywhere, ever to experience.

Deep Learning Experience

Yet, it became a profound learning experience, enabling me to understand how:

My imposter syndrome played a significant self-sabotaging role. It did not set me up for success, nor did it set me up for maximising the importance of self-efficacy and self-mastery when on an innovation roller-coaster ride.
I had not undertaken sufficient research studies to determine if users wanted and were ready to accept such a radical innovation. Nor had I noticed how much the corporate learning market was being disrupted by technology, causing significant time and budget constraints, that I had neglected to address.
I had not paused long enough to consider, anticipate, plan and mitigate the risks involved in prototyping a viable minimal product in a new market.
I had not considered the risks involved with collaborating with a new consulting partner and co-facilitator, as well as with a new client. Nor anticipated how to resolve the values conflict that erupted when the project failed.
I had not fully understood the process involved in iterating and pivoting a new invention and the time it would take to produce a commercially viable product that the market would understand, be ready for, and respond to.

Finally, it seems that I had unconsciously fallen victim to the innovative start-up entrepreneur’s curse – falling in love with my product!

This was generated by my excitement, enthusiasm and energy of the possibilities rather than balancing these courageously and compassionately with the:

Harsh realities to be innovative.
Vital role of smart risk-taking and experimentation.
What ‘fails fast, to learn quickly’ really means at the heart (emotional), head (cognitive) and gut (visceral) levels.

Value of Failing Fast

They say that people need to teach what they need to learn themselves.

This valuable failure enabled me to invest the next ten years in learning to make sense of innovation and what it means to be innovative, including:

Helped me develop self-efficacy, trust my inner knowing and judgement, and make a stand for myself in the face of opposition and criticism I often received when presenting at a global conference on the people side of innovation, especially by process engineers.
Investing more attention, time in iterating and pivoting, testing and validating the two-day business simulation MVP to make it more tangible, simpler and teachable.
Acknowledging that technology had accelerated sufficiently to accept that the original creative idea of a simple hybrid board game was the most valuable commercial option that could make the difference I wanted to make in the world.
Becoming more patient, self-compassionate, and courageous in smart risk-taking and leading, coaching, and engaging in team innovation and continuous learning through various innovation, entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial learning initiatives.

Iterating and Pivoting

I iterated, pivoted, and refined my intellectual property by presenting and bespoking the Coach for Innovators, Leaders and Teams Certified Program™ for over twelve years to global change-makers.

Most importantly, I reined in my competitive, risky and restless saboteur and focused on doing just one thing, which has finally morphed into a book, supported by a board game to teach people how to be innovative and develop an innovation mindset.

Taking Risks

In the fog of a globalised, disrupted, unpredictable and increasingly uncertain world, no innovation can progress, and no one can be innovative without smart risk-taking.

No innovation can improve without rigorous experimentation, where learning mainly happens by doing things to explore, discover, and know what not to do.

Research has shown that most successful new business ventures abandoned their original business strategies when implementing their initial plans, learned what would and would not work in the market, and conserved sufficient resources to have a second or third stab at getting it right.

Trial and Error and Cause and Effect

Innovation is a never-ending, risky, adaptive process involving trial and error and understanding cause and effect.

Because people are fearful of making mistakes and the negative consequences of failure, innovation requires leadership to develop both foresight and prospection skills to:

Empower and enable them to paradoxically take both a strategic and systemic perspective and a human-centred approach.
Equip them to be innovative when designing business ventures and transformation initiatives that deliver commercially viable outcomes to successfully improve the quality of people’s lives that are appreciated and cherished.

Risk-taking is a Choice

In most businesses and organizations, innovation involves taking considerable risks, especially if seeking to enter a new market with a new product. It is compounded and resisted by many people in organizations because they are too focused on personal survival, personal gain, short-term gain and shareholder return.

Unfortunately, many organizations end up, paradoxically, undermining their organization’s capacity to be innovative, adapt, innovate and grow. Mainly due to their people being disengaged, resistant to change, lacking agency and being held back by bureaucracy and hierarchy that is averse to smart risk-taking and experimentation.

The Future is Permissionless

Because most people generally do not have permission, and are not allowed to make mistakes. They are not encouraged to try new things, so they become risk-averse, avoidant, oppositional and conventional, and don’t feel safe in deviating from the accepted way of doing things.

This is commonly known as the ‘status quo’ and drives people to comply with ‘what is’ (even when it no longer matters) and not apply their human ingenuity, be innovative and create new inventions from ‘what could be’ possible and through smart risk-taking to partner with AI in delivering innovative solutions in a disruptive world of complexity and unknowns.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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