Tag Archives: Business Transformation

Unleashing Your Innovation Potential

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

It is not unusual, especially in the corporate world, to label someone who disrupts and challenges the status quo, or what others say, as argumentative and “oppositional”. According to Human Synergistics, the Oppositional Style, in their circumplex, when measured as a dominant leadership style, is summarized in their 360-degree Leadership Styles Inventory (LSI) by two items: “usually against things” and “opposes new ideas.” It labels the person, or leader as being aggressively defensive and causes them to disengage by avoiding engaging in any kind of conflict, dissent and disagreement. This inhibits and prevents them from unleashing their creative thinking and their innovation potential.

In my many years as a corporate trainer presenting high-performance cultures and transformational leadership programs, I learned to apply my imagination, curiosity and inquiry skills to be attentively present, listen deeply and ask generative questions. This helped me develop strategies to unleash a person’s innovation potential by encouraging and enabling thoughtful dissent and disagreement. I learned to uncover and recognize a leader’s energy and positive intent behind many of the scary, argumentative, hostile, contrary, critical, and aggressive behaviors directed at me, especially in my years upfront as a female corporate trainer in many toxic organizational cultures.

I often found that they were compromised in some way by their personal and family needs and values, their assumptions and beliefs about themselves and their performance at work, poor physical and mental health, and/or a lack of emotional well-being. Any one of these factors made them self-protective, leading to either overt aggression toward others, passive avoidance of conflict, or an unconscious refusal to engage in thoughtful dissent and disagreement because they did not want to be perceived as hostile and argumentative.

All of these unconscious reactive responses inhibited them from unleashing their creative thinking and innovative potential.

This blog explores the power of unleashing creative thinking and innovation potential through supporting people to thoughtfully dissent and disagree – by using conflict as a catalyst for better decision-making, problem-solving, and strengthened collaboration and innovation – not as a barrier.

Unconscious reactive responses

This manifests as a neurologically challenging reactive response, as people’s brains are wired to defend and protect them to ensure their survival. These defensive responses are composed of fight/flight/freeze/fawn reactions and arise when people face what their neurology (the limbic system) perceives as a threat to their security, safety, or survival.

These reactions stem from past experiences and traumas that are often stored in people’s somatic memories. They become neurologically wired and embedded in people’s habitual ways of being unless they are noticed, labelled, accepted, acknowledged and owned. Until there is a safe holding space for this to happen, it will be impossible to unleash their creative thinking and innovation potential.

Safe holding spaces

Once a safe holding space is established, an oppositional person can be carefully and empathetically challenged, disputed, deviated from, and redirected towards more self-regulated, resourceful, and emotionally healthy states and new approaches. This involves bravely engaging them in thoughtful dissent and disagreement, despite being encased in a toxic organizational culture. Its about building permission, safety and trust to encourage creative thinking that unleashes a persons innovation potential.

Fight-flight-freeze and fawn responses

The amygdala is designed to detect threats and trigger the fight-flight-freeze response to help people survive

A fight response involves standing our ground when we feel threatened, driven by anger, fear, and anxiety.
A flight response entails moving away from or avoiding a situation to reduce painful feelings.
A freeze response involves shutting down, feeling numb, or experiencing paralysis to reduce painful feelings, resulting in immobility.
A fawn response involves appeasing and placating others or seeking approval while neglecting the need to feel safe.

Role of smart conflict, thoughtful dissent and disagreement

This is particularly evident in political and organizational contexts, where people are suffering from change fatigue and overwork. As a result, they unconsciously disengage from their work, families, and daily lives through a flight-or-freeze response, driven by burnout, the pursuit of external validation (a fawn response), or frustration and anger (usually a fight response). A combination of any or all of these largely unconscious but fully present reactive responses creates toxic organizational cultures, in which leaders’ behaviors are either passively or aggressively defensive in their attempts to meet people’s core security, safety, and survival needs. Leaders avoid encouraging or engaging in thoughtful dissent and disagreement that mobilizes people’s creative and critical thinking and unleashes their innovation potential.

The constraints and challenges of the pandemic, coupled with threats to people’s stability and the desire for certainty, also led many people in organizations to fear that their needs for security, safety, and survival would not, and could not, be met. These fears unconsciously intensified people’s defensiveness and reactivity, leading to immobilization through passivity, helplessness, hopelessness, powerlessness, disengagement, and detachment. This indicates a lack of emotional intelligence, largely due to the absence of initial self-regulation and self-leadership strategies. It is easier and sometimes safer to be a victim and blame others for any negative, pessimistic, or painful feelings of shame, guilt, and embarrassment, resulting from competing commitments, value violations, thought distortions, and emotional dissociation.

These emotionally overwhelming and cognitively overloading factors are also accepted inhibitors to unleashing a person’s innovative potential, especially when they are unable to engage in thoughtful dissent and disagreement under the influence of a toxic organizational culture.

Making the shift

To support people to effectively shift this way of being and safely unleash their creative thinking and innovation potential:

It is crucial to develop and apply the generative discovery skillset to welcome dissent and thoughtful disagreement:

Notice: by being aware and attentively present to what is happening to, and within the person, neurologically and physiologically, emotionally, cognitively and physically.
Disrupt: by being curious and safely asking open, explorative discovery questions, and by listening carefully to hear and notice what is really going on for them.
Dispute: by safely summarizing and challenging their assumptions, perceptions and perspectives, asking evocative and provocative questions that encourage contrary thinking, diversity of thought, differences and constructive disagreement.
Deviate: by safely summarizing and eliciting a mindset flip or an agility shift in the oppositional person, directing their creative energy towards constructive behaviors that deliver a positive outcome.

This enables people to redirect their emotional energy and move away from unresourceful internal thought patterns and distortions. It also encourages them to open their minds to thoughtful dissent and disagreement, allowing them to think differently and enter creative and innovative realms.

This is impossible when toxic organizational cultures force people to hide behind conventional, rigid, and closed minds that won’t allow them to rock the boat and be, think and act differently by intentionally using conflict constructively by embracing dissent and thoughtful disagreement

At the same time, it’s crucial to safely, empathically and compassionately evoke and provoke an opening of people’s hearts by purposefully and meaningfully aligning their needs and values, so that the change motivates them to change meaningfully and purposefully. This creates the safe holding space that allows them to let go of the need to be in control and be open-willed, unleashing their creative thinking and innovation potential to make the shift to the creative and innovative realms.

Empowering people and teams to redirect their emotional energy towards opening their minds to thoughtful dissent and disagreement allows them to handle hard conversations with constructive and creative intent.

Welcoming dissent and thoughtful disagreement involves daring yourself and others to be and think differently. Being able to think creatively maximize a person or a teams innovation potential, unleashes their human ingenuity in the age of AI, and mobilizes their collective intelligence to lead, manage, or implement constructive and sustainable change.

Leveraging constructive conflict, dissent and thoughtful disagreement unleashes people’s creative thinking and innovation potential and is a necessary part of enabling AI, digital transformation and innovation initiatives to succeed in uncertain and disruptive times.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™ and The Start-Up Game.™ Discover our collective learning products and tools that can be customized as playful bespoke corporate learning programs. Our blended and transformational change and learning programs provide a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation and entrepreneurship. It will also upskill people and teams, developing their future fitness within your unique digital transformation and innovation initiatives. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Gemini

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Self-Acceptance Will Supercharge Your Life

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Self-Acceptance Will Supercharge Your Life

GUEST POST from Tullio Siragusa

For a long time, society has demanded that we show up as good people. Do the right things and practice Godliness. The facts are that this has turned out to be an impossible expectation to fulfill. Not because we can’t be good people, and do the right things, it’s because the edict doesn’t give license to vulnerably reveal the darkness in the way of achieving the goal of being a good person.

“When we accept ourselves as a gift in the world, we begin to recognize the same in others. Whatever is external of ourselves becomes a mirror of who we are within.”

That means that if you don’t like what is external of you, simply shift what is within you.

“ALL PROBLEMS SOLVED”. Simple right? Not exactly.

There is a step that most people avoid, and that is to reveal the darkness within first. At the heart of becoming the best version of ourselves, is acceptance. While historically we’ve had the pressure to always show up as if we have it all together, for fear of retribution of judgement from others, we can’ keep avoiding or masking our darkness.

It’s important to go deeper in the darkness we are in as individuals to discover the source of it, but we have to stop judging and shaming each other for being human. We are imperfect. We discover ourselves through failures., just as science discovers things through failure.

“Failure is built into the success formula of scientific discovery, it’s no different in how we discover ourselves as human beings.”

If you have darkness within you, instead of feeling shame, or guild you could shift your context and realize that our collective consciousness has chosen you to play out the darkness so you could overcome it and create the frequency for others to do the same. This is because you are the best person among all of us, to overcome it and become a beacon of Light for the rest of us.

Let me repeat that in case it hasn’t sunken in yet. YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO OVERCOME THE DARKNESS YOU ARE IN.

“The way out of hell in life… is on the other side of it. The door is just past the point of no return… only those trusting that the door is within reach, can walk through fire and gain control over everything.”

There are two ways to overcome challenges in life.

1) You work really hard to transform yourself, and to overcome the “not so good” traits; most of us end up simply suppressing who we are, but few do actually transform “some” aspects of themselves.

2) You accept yourself as you are, and you focus on becoming a being who bestows goodness in the world. When you are feeling bad about yourself, you are not good to you or anyone.

The first route will have you chasing your tail for years, and when you do fall (which happens in this imperfect reality) you’ll feel so bad, that you can’t focus on anything else. This has been the cause of depression, anger, resentment and all the chaos in the world for thousands of years. It all stems from lack of self-respect, self-love, self-dignity, self-honor, and lack of self-acceptance.

It’s impossible to accept others as they are when we still have traits, we don’t accept about ourselves. How can you accept other people’s traits, if you don’t accept yourself completely?

The second route shifts you into a parallel universe instantly, where you begin to accept others by allowing them to not be perfect, just like you.

“When you accept yourself for all of who you are, you can do the same for others, and you begin to experience life’s beauty and perfection in the imperfections.”

Acceptance shifts you into a parallel Universe where bliss is the normal mode of existence… Acceptance is being present without judgment. Having trouble with self-acceptance?

Try this simple exercise and mantra. Give yourself a hung and say:

“I am great just as I am, and I love me just as I am; I extend the same to everyone around me, and allow them to accept me as I am. I can now focus my energy on emanating the love I have for myself to the entire world and allow the world to do the same in return”.

For millenniums we’ve been going in circles feeling bad about our “character flaws”, which in some ways has kept us from achieving our greatest potential as humanity.

It’s important to get in touch with our own inner ugliness, yes… this is very important, but for no other reason than to recognize it, accept it, and find love for ourselves anyway.

“How we choose to perceive ourselves, is how we experience the entire Universe.”

Our thoughts and actions generate energy; this energy multiplies and creates a frequency for others. The more we generate the energy of compassion, love, and we shed a tear for those who suffer, the more a sense of urgency will take place worldwide to do the same.

Self-acceptance isn’t just the first step to practicing emotional intelligence, it is the way to living free of shame, and free to be our imperfect selves. My recent Rant & Grow guest, Rocky Rosen is the world’s #1 smoking cessation coach (aka the cigarette whisperer) as he turns 67 he is finally embracing self-acceptance.

Check out the coaching session with Rocky and see what commitments he makes to practice self-acceptance and supercharge his life. Maybe you’ll discover some wisdom for your own life. You can listen to the podcast right here.

Originally published at tulliosiragusa.com on September 9, 2019.

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How to Consciously Develop More Courage

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GUEST POST from Tullio Siragusa

In order to achieve your goals and to make your dreams come true, the most vital thing needed is courage. The biggest hurdle preventing you from achieving goals and reaching your desired destination is a fear.

Fear can cost you a lot. Fear can impact your self-confidence. It may distract your attention from achieving something worthy. It may even badly affect your health and most probably your wealth too.

Courage is a tool that can help bear greater risks and in return provide significant gains. Courage will help you initiate activities despite of fear, and put you on a path of growth and learning.

Courage = the ability to take more risks = more growth and learning = personal success.

It’s a powerful formula if you know how to leverage fear to your advantage.

Fear Can Be Your Friend

Fear is a feeling, developed because of a chemical reaction. It is often not real but rather fabricated by our imaginations, limited thinking and insecurities.

It depends on us on how we use this chemical reaction, either to our advantage or detriment.

To boost your courage, you can learn to use your fears in a positive way so that it can give you maximum benefits and advantages.

The first belief to break from is that fear is tied to disastrous outcomes. There are some good fears too. Let’s look at an example.

Imagine you have to fulfill a task for a very well trusted client. If the deadline isn’t met, the fear of losing that client will automatically trigger you to remain active and do what it takes to finish the task on time.

Similarly, if you have a presentation the next day, your fear of doing a poor job might help you to invest in more practice. When it comes to fear always try to figure out the intensity and appropriate logical way to solve it efficiently.

Stretch Your Comfort Zone

Going above and beyond your comfort zone, in order to stretch what you are currently capable of doing, is not easy. Fear and anxiety are key symptoms of going outside your comfort zone.

“Nothing truly exciting happens in life, until you go beyond your comfort zone. Want to grow? Learn to love being uncomfortable.”

Once you step out of your comfort zone you develop more courage gradually. Stepping out of your comfort zone will present you with various unexpected situations and scenarios. This is the point where fear kicks in because handling unexpected situations is usually a next level task where a lot of courage is needed to cope with the anxiety of stretching beyond your current capabilities.

Start by taking small steps. Courage cannot be developed overnight. Asking for help is a great way to practice expanding your courage. The short conversations you start having with those willing to help you, can turn over time into longer deep dives with peers, University fellows, friends of friends, and so on.

“The simple act of asking for help expands your courage and helps you stretch beyond your comfort zone in a healthy and safe way.”

Knowing your limits and behaving accordingly will also help in developing your courage. It’s not always unexpected and strange things that require us to face them courageously, but rather courage is also demanded to let things be that are not within your control. Letting things unfold naturally and patiently will also boost your courage.

Accept Your Imperfections

No human is perfect in this world. Making mistakes is a part of life. Be bold enough to accept your mistakes and never ever hesitate to apologize for your actions or words which may have hurt someone’s feelings and emotions.

Relationships also play a key role in boosting your courage, and the best relationships are based on mutual authenticity and vulnerability. The more real you are with someone, the more courage you develop to speak your truth.

Be Mindful

Some people are naturally mindful as if they have inherited the trait genetically, while other people learn through practice and hard work.

Mindfulness means having a full mind actively present. If you are not a mindful type person, don’t worry.

Meditation will help you in learning how to be mindful. Find a quiet and peaceful place free of distractions. Sit there for almost 20 minutes and focus on your ‘in’ and ‘out’ of breathing. Try not to think of anything else in those 20 minutes of meditation. Meditation can be done anywhere but it will be more helpful if done in a quiet place.

Mindfulness and the practice of meditation will help you overcome your fear very courageously. For example, during medication the emotion of fear can be attributed to just a chemical reaction triggered by a thought, and with more self-awareness you can begin to remove the value given to it.

Meditation is a great way to hack a recurring thought that is triggering fears, that isn’t based on reality, and neutralize it.

Own Your Self-Worth

The most effective way to practice being courageous is learning to say “no” and always give importance to your needs first. Not having a habit of saying “no” will lead you towards a miserable life where making others happy will leave your own happiness behind.

Never underestimate yourself and never ever tolerate negative and toxic people around you. There should be no room in your heart for such people who don’t even think before bashing someone’s confidence and ultimately their courage.

I want to make it clear that there is no magic pill to boost your courage within a day. Hard work, passion and a lot of patience is needed. A lot of practice, meditation and regularly going beyond your comfort zone can get you the desired results.

Once you understand the real meaning of fear and the process of this chemical reaction, you’ll start taking advantage of it knowing that it is not real, but instead, it is self-made and fabricated.

Never let your fears hold the steering wheel that will deviate you from your path towards courage. Stay confident and motivated, believe in yourself and don’t forget to ask for help.

Originally published at tulliosiragusa.com on October 28, 2019.

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What to Do When Your Plans Are Already Obsolete

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HINT: It has something to do with strategy execution

What to Do When Your Plans Are Already Obsolete

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

We are three full weeks into the new year and I am curious, how is the strategy and operating plan you spent all Q3 and Q4 working on progressing? You nailed it, right? Everything is just as you expected and things are moving forward just as you planned.

I didn’t think so.

So, like many others, you feel tempted to double down on what worked before or chase every opportunity with the hope that it will “future-proof” your business.

Stop.

Remember the Cheshire Cat, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

You DO know where you’re going because your goals didn’t change. You still need to grow revenue and cut costs with fewer resources than last year.

The map changed. So you need to find a new road.

You’re not going to find it by looking at old playbooks or by following every path available.

You will find it by following these three steps (and don’t require months or millions to complete).

Return to First Principles

When old maps fail and new roads are uncertain, the most successful leaders return to first principles, the fundamental, irreducible truths of a subject:

Organizations are systems
Systems seek equilibrium and resist change when elements are misaligned
People in the system do what the system allows, models, and rewards

Returning to these principles is the root of success because it forces you to pause and ask the right questions before (re)acting.

Ask Questions to Find the Root Cause

Based on the first principles, think of your organization as a lock. All the tumblers need to align to unlock the organization’s potential to get to where you need to go. When the tumblers don’t align, you stay stuck in the dying status quo.

Every organization has three tumblers – Architecture (how you’re organized), Behavior (what leaders actually do), and Culture (what gets rewarded) – that must align to develop and execute a strategy in an environment of uncertainty and constant change.

But ensuring that you’ve aligned all three tumblers, and not just one or two, requires asking questions to get to the root cause of the challenges.

Is your leadership team struggling to align on a decision because they don’t have enough data or can’t agree on what it means? The Behavior and Culture tumblers are misaligned with the structure and incentives of Architecture

Are people resisting the new AI tools you rolled out? Architectural incentives and metrics, and leadership communications and behaviors are preventing buy-in.

Struggling to squeeze growth out of a stagnant business? Structures and systems combined with organization culture are reinforcing safety and a fixed mindset rather than encouraging curiosity and learning.

Align the Tumblers

When you diagnose the root causes you find the misaligned tumbler. And, in the process of bringing it into alignment, it will likely pull the others in, too.

By role modeling leadership behaviors that encourage transparent communication (no hiding behind buzzwords), quantifying confidence, and smart risk taking, you’ll also influence culture and may reveal a needed change in Architecture.

Modifying the metrics and rewards in Architecture and making sure that your communications and behavior encourage buy-in to new AI tools, will start to establish an AI-friendly culture.

Overhauling Architecture to encourage and reward actions that expand that stagnant business into new markets or brings new solutions to your existing customers, will build new leadership Behaviors will drive culture change.

Get to your Goals

It’s a VUCA/BANI world AND It’s only going to accelerate. That means that the strategy you developed last quarter and the operational plans you set last month will be obsolete by the end of the week.

But the strategy and the plan were never the goal. They were the road you planned based on the map you had. When the map changes, the road does, too. But you can still get to the goal if you’re willing to fiddle with a lock.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Top 40 Innovation Authors of 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

. . .

. . .

Happy New Year everyone!

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Voting Open – Top 40 Innovation Authors of 2025

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Vote for Top 40 Innovation Authors 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 deliveriseng 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 Authors available each year!

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

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 Authors of 2025.

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

The deadline for submitting votes is December 31, 2025 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 author by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Adding the name of the author as a comment to this article’s posting on Facebook
Adding the name of the author as a comment to this article’s posting on our Linkedin Page (Be sure and follow us)

The official Top 40 Innovation Authors of 2025 will then be announced here in early January 2026.

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!

Nominations Open – Top 40 Innovation Authors of 2025

Leave a reply

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:

Do you 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 for the Top 40 Innovation Authors of 2025.

The deadline for submitting nominations is December 24, 2025 at midnight GMT.

You can submit a nomination either of these two ways:

Sending us the name of the author and the url of their blog by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Sending the name of the author 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, 2025.

We will then compile a voting list of all the nominations, and publish it on December 25, 2025.

Voting will then be open from December 25, 2025 – January 1, 2026 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 Authors of 2025 will then be announced on here in early January 2026.

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

SPECIAL BONUS: From now until December 31, 2025 you can get either the hardcover or softcover of my latest best-selling book Charting Change (free shipping worldwide) for only £/$/€ 23.99 (~36% OFF).

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Do What 91% of Executives Will Not

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Winning in Times of Uncertainty

Do What 91% of Executives Will Not

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In times of great uncertainty, we seek safety. But what does “safety” look like?

What We Say: Safety = Data

We tend to believe that we are rational beings and, as a result, we rely on data to make decisions.

Great! We’ve got lots of data from lots of uncertain periods. HBR examined 4,700 public companies during three global recessions (1980, 1990, and 2000). They found that the companies that emerged “outperforming rivals in their industry by at least 10% in terms of sales and profits growth” had one thing in common: They aggressively made cuts to improve operational efficiency and ruthlessly invested in marketing, R&D, and building new assets to better serve customers have the highest probability of emerging as markets leaders post-recession.

This research was backed up in 2020 in a McKinsey study that found that “Organizations that maintained their innovation focus through the 2009 financial crisis, for example, emerged stronger, outperforming the market average by more than 30 percent and continuing to deliver accelerated growth over the subsequent three to five years.”

What We Do: Safety = Hoarding

The reality is that we are human beings and, as a result, make decisions based on how we feel and the use data to justify those decisions.

How else do you explain that despite the data, only 9% of companies took the balanced approach recommended in the HBR study and, ten years later, only 25% of the companies studied by McKinsey stated that “capturing new growth” was a top priority coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Uncertainty is scary so, as individuals and as organizations, we scramble to secure scarce resources, cut anything that feels extraneous, and shift or focus to survival.

What now? AND, not OR

What was true in 2010 is still true today and new research from Bain offers practical advice for how leaders can follow both their hearts and their heads.

Implement systems to protect you from yourself. Bain studied Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies and found that 79% use two different operating models for innovation to combat executives’ natural risk aversion. The first, for sustaining innovation uses traditional stage-gate models, seeks input from experts and existing customers, and is evaluated on ROI-driven metrics.

The second, for breakthrough innovations, is designed to embrace and manage uncertainty by learning from new customers and emerging trends, working with speed and agility, engaging non-traditional collaborators, and evaluating projects based on their long-term potential and strategic option value.

Don’t outspend. Out-allocate. Supporting the two-system approach, nearly half of the companies studied send less on R&D than their peers overall and spend it differently: 39% of their R&D budgets to sustaining innovations and 61% to expanding into new categories or business models.

Use AI to accelerate, not create. Companies integrating AI into innovation processes have seen design-to-launch timelines shrink by 20% or more. The key word there is “integrate,” not outsource. They use AI for data and trend analysis, rapid prototyping, and automating repetitive tasks. But they still rely on humans for original thinking, intuition-based decisions, and genuine customer empathy.

Prioritize humans above all else. Even though all the information in the world is at our fingerprints, humans remain unknowable, unpredictable, and wonderfully weird. That’s why successful companies use AI to enhance, not replace, direct engagement with customers. They use synthetic personas as a rehearsal space for brainstorming, designing research, and concept testing. But they also know there is no replacement (yet) for human-to-human interaction, especially when creating new offerings and business models.

In times of create uncertainty, we seek safety. But safety doesn’t guarantee certainty. Nothing does. So, the safest thing we can do is learn from the past, prepare (not plan) for the future, make the best decisions possible based on what we know and feel today, and stay open to changing them tomorrow.

Image credit: Pexels

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Was Your AI Strategy Developed by the Underpants Gnomes?

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Was Your AI Strategy Developed by the Underpants Gnomes?

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“It just popped up one day. Who knows how long they worked on it or how many of millions were spent. They told us to think of it as ChatGPT but trained on everything our company has ever done so we can ask it anything and get an answer immediately.”

The words my client was using to describe her company’s new AI Chatbot made it sound like a miracle. Her tone said something else completely.

“It sounds helpful,” I offered. “Have you tried it?”

“I’m not training my replacement! And I’m not going to train my R&D, Supply Chain, Customer Insights, or Finance colleagues’ replacements either. And I’m not alone. I don’t think anyone’s using it because the company just announced they’re tracking usage and, if we don’t use it daily, that will be reflected in our performance reviews.”

All I could do was sigh. The Underpants Gnomes have struck again.

Who are the Underpants Gnomes?

The Underpants Gnomes are the stars of a 1998 South Park episode described by media critic Paul Cantor as, “the most fully developed defense of capitalism ever produced.”

Claiming to be business experts, the Underpants Gnomes sneak into South Park residents’ homes every night and steal their underpants. When confronted by the boy in their underground lair, the Gnomes explain their business plan:

Collect underpants
?
Profit

It was meant as satire.

Some took it as a an abbreviated MBA.

How to Spot the ~~Underpants~~ AI Gnomes

As the AI hype grows, fueling executive FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), the Underpants Gnomes, cleverly disguised as experts, entrepreneurs and consultants, saw their opportunity.

Sell AI
?
Profit

While they’ve pivoted their business focus, they haven’t improved their operations so the ~~Underpants~~ AI Gnomes as still easy to spot:

Investment without Intention: Is your company investing in AI because it’s “essential to future-proofing the business?” That sounds good but if your company can’t explain the future it’s proofing itself against and how AI builds a moat or a life preserver in that future, it’s a sign that the Gnomes are in the building.
Switches, not Solutions: If your company thinks that AI adoption is as “easy as turning on Copilot” or “installing a custom GPT chatbot, the Gnomes are gaining traction. AI is a tool and you need to teach people how to use tools, build processes to support the change, and demonstrate the benefit.
Activity without Achievement: When MIT published research indicating that 95% of corporate Gen AI pilots were failing, it was a sign of just how deeply the Gnomes have infiltrated companies. Experiments are essential at the start of any new venture but only useful if they generate replicable and scalable learning.

How to defend against the AI Gnomes

Odds are the gnomes are already in your company. But fear not, you can still turn “Phase 2:?” into something that actually leads to “Phase 3: Profit.”

Start with the end in mind: Be specific about the outcome you are trying to achieve. The answer should be agnostic of AI and tied to business goals.
Design with people at the center: Achieving your desired outcomes requires rethinking and redesigning existing processes. Strategic creativity like that requires combining people, processes, and technology to achieve and embed.
Develop with discipline: Just because you can (run a pilot, sign up for a free trial), doesn’t mean you should. Small-scale experiments require the same degree of discipline as multi-million-dollar digital transformations. So, if you can’t articulate what you need to learn and how it contributes to the bigger goal, move on.

AI, in all its forms, is here to stay. But the same doesn’t have to be true for the AI Gnomes.

Have you spotted the Gnomes in your company?

Image credit: AI Underpants Gnomes (just kidding, Google Gemini made the image)

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Innovation Theater – A Defense

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Innovation Theater - A Defense

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

I can’t believe that I’m writing this. Honestly, I can’t believe I’m even thinking this. I’m an open-minded person, but I truly never thought that anything would ever change my mind on this topic. And yet, I must confess that I’ve come to the conclusion that…

(deep breath)

Innovation Theater is important.

(Sorry, needed a minute to recover. It’s one thing to think something. It’s another to see it in writing.)

Why We All Hate(d) Innovation Theater.

The term “Innovation Theater” was coined by Steve Blank in a 2019 HBR article to describe innovation activities like hackathons, shark tanks, and workshops that “shape and build culture, but they don’t win wars, and they rarely deliver shippable/deployable product.”

The name stuck because it gave the Innovation Industrial Complex a perfect scapegoat. Innovation efforts weren’t producing results because companies were turning real strategy into theater—events that could be delegated and scheduled instead of the courage, commitment, and willingness to change that actual innovation requires.

And in many cases, this criticism was warranted.

But in our rush to dismiss Innovation Theater, we missed something important.

What I (Almost) Missed.

Recently, I visited a company’s Innovation Center, curious to see what ten years of innovation investments and two floors in a downtown high-rise had produced.

The answer was a framework to think more deeply about equity and inclusion. My immediate reaction was rage. A decade of investments for this? Millions of dollars spent on the very definition of Innovation Theater? And they’re bragging about it?!?

Once the rage subsided, something remained. Something that I couldn’t shake. An inkling that I had missed something. That inkling became the realization that I was wrong.

Over the past five years, the framework had been used in carefully curated workshops to help teams across the organization see things they had previously overlooked, understand topics that were sensitive or taboo, and envision solutions that no one their heavily regulated industry had even considered.

Not every workshop resulted in action. But over time, something shifted.

Seasons. Not Shows.

Repetition created a shared language. Multiple touchpoints built permission. Small success stories accumulated to make risk feel manageable. The workshops didn’t send off isolated sparks of innovation. They built the conditions where acting on new ideas became progressively safer and more normal.

And after several seasons, enduring value was created. The company now enjoys the highest retention rate of customers in its industry and has attracted more new customers than all its competitors combined. A decade of “Innovation Theater” delivered exactly what innovation is supposed to deliver: measurable competitive advantage and revenue growth.

Don’t Cancel Your Next Innovation Event.

The problem isn’t Innovation Theater itself. It’s how we practice it.

A one-off hackathon? Theater. An annual workshop? Theater. But sustained investment over years, touching dozens of teams, building shared language and accumulated proof points? That’s a strategic bet on transformation that creates lasting competitive advantage.

The question isn’t whether Innovation Theater works. It’s whether you’re willing to commit to the season, not just the show. Are you prepared to invest consistently, measure differently, and wait for compounding effects that won’t show up in next quarter’s results?

Because when you commit to the season, not just the show, it’s the most strategic bet you can make.

Image credit: Pexels

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