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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of April 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of April 2025Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are April’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Innovation or Not? – Kawasaki Corleo — by Braden Kelley
  2. From Resistance to Reinvention — by Noel Sobelman
  3. How Innovation Tools Help You Stay Safe — by Robyn Bolton
  4. Should My Brand Take a Political Stand? — by Pete Foley
  5. Innovation Truths — by Mike Shipulski
  6. Good Management is Not Good Strategy — by Greg Satell
  7. ChatGPT Blew My Mind with its Strategy Development — by Robyn Bolton
  8. Five Questions Great Leaders Always Ask — by David Burkus
  9. Why So Many Smart People Are Foolish — by Greg Satell
  10. Beyond Continuous Improvement Culture — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in March that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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It All Starts with Wanting Things to be Different

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It All Starts With Wanting Things to be Different

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Wanting things to be different is a good start, but it’s not enough. To create conditions for things to move in a new direction, you’ve got to change your behavior. But with systems that involve people, this is not a straightforward process.

To create conditions for the system to change, you must understand the system”s disposition – the lines along which it prefers to change.. And to do that, you’ve got to push on the system and watch its response. With people systems, the response is not knowable before the experiment.

If you expect to be able to predict how the system will respond, working with people systems can be frustrating. I offer some guidance here. With this work, you are not responsible for the system’s response, you are only responsible for how you respond to the system’s response.

If the system responds in a way you like, turn that experiment into a project to amplify the change. If the system responds in a way you dislike, unwind the experiment. Here’s a simple mantra – do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. (Thanks to Dave Snowden for this.)

If you don’t like how things are going, you have only one lever to pull. You can only change.your response to what you see and experience. You can respond by pushing on the system and responding to what you see or you can respond by changing what you think and feel about the system.

But keep in mind that you are part of the system. And maybe the system is running an experiment on you. Either way, your only choice is to choose how to respond.

Image credits: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides available for download at http://misterinnovation.com

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What Innovation is Really About

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What Innovation is Really About

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Sometimes a short and simple word-play brings out some great reflection.

  1. Resistance kills Change
  2. Fear kills Experimentation
  3. Bureaucracy kills Speed
  4. Control kills Flexibility
  5. Tradition kills Disruption
  6. Pressure kills Creativity
  7. Hierarchy kills Agility
  8. Silos kills Collaboration
  9. Organizational inertia trumps Talent

Now, read that RIGHT to LEFT.

This is in many ways the essence of innovation in my view.

Image Credits: Stefan Lindegaard

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We Need to Stop Rooting for Change

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We Need To Stop Rooting For Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Today, everyone seems to want to associate themselves with change. Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s former CEO, loved to call his firm a 124 year-old startup. Its value fell by 30% under his tenure and would later collapse. Bill Gates pointed out that the culprit wasn’t innovation or disruption, but basic mismanagement.

It seems that, these days, Immelt’s leadership is closer to the rule than the exception. Everybody wants to be an innovator. Nobody wants to be associated with the status quo. Even political conservatives describe themselves as a “movement,” a seeming contradiction in terms. Change has become gospel, an end in itself rather than a mere means to an end.

The truth is that innovation is less about new ideas than it is about identifying meaningful problems. Too much happy talk about change can actually undermine meaningful transformation. If your focus on the fabulous yonder obscures your view into the day-to-day, you’re most likely headed for trouble. We need to start taking change more seriously.

Change Is Hard. People Are Struggling

Humans struggle to adapt. Our brains are not wired for change, but build synaptic pathways based on past experiences. These can change over time, but with some difficulty. We are also greatly influenced by those around us, whose brains have been shaped by similar experiences. Finally, there are often genuine switching costs that need to be overcome.

The notion that transformation can be challenging is nothing new. What managers often fail to account for, however, is that change never happens in a vacuum. It must be seen in context of everything else that’s going on in people’s lives, including pressures related to family, economic and health concerns.

Consider that research points to a dramatic increase of anxiety and depression since the start of the pandemic. Another study reported in Harvard Business Review found that 76% of employees in 2021 reported at least one mental health symptom, up from 59% in 2019 and 50% have reported leaving a job due to mental health concerns, compared to 34% two years earlier. Those are dramatic increases on already high levels.

Yet even before the pandemic there were signs of trouble. A 2014 report by PwC revealed that 65% of respondents in corporations cited change fatigue, 44% of employees complained they don’t understand the change they’re being asked to make, and 38% say they don’t agree with it. Should we be surprised that so many change initiatives fail?

Too Much Early Talk Ignites Resistance

Managers launching a new initiative often seek to start with a bang. They work to gain approval for a sizable budget as a sign of institutional commitment. They recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big “kick-off” meeting and look to move fast, gain scale and generate some quick wins. All of this is designed to create a sense of urgency and inevitability.

Yet this approach can often backfire. Any time you ask people to change what they think or how they act, there will be some who won’t like it and they will work to undermine you in ways that are often dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Starting a transformation initiative with a big kickoff just gives them an early warning that they’d better get started sabotaging you or change might actually take place.

Unfortunately, there are perverse incentives involved in many initiatives. When change involves new capability, there are inevitably vendors involved and consultants are brought in to manage the process. Often, in addition to helping to design and procure systems, these consultants are given the assignment for organizational change management as well.

At first, it may seem intuitive and sensible that the same vendor that designs the system helps implement the program. However, what is often missed is that these consultants are much more heavily financially incentivized to close the deal, which can often be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, than to drive genuine long-term transformation.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that what passes for “organizational change management” is often little more than an internal communication strategy and a training program implementation. That clearly doesn’t suffice.

Change Is Nonlinear. There Are Advantages To Starting Slow

People who are passionate about change naturally want it to happen as soon as possible. This is especially true of action-oriented managers, who pride themselves on executing a plan quickly and efficiently. There are often informal organizational incentives as well. Executives who are seen to be hard-charging and who “get things done” can be more likely to move up the corporate ladder.

Yet consider the case of Gandhi and the struggle for Indian independence. Soon after returning to India from South Africa, he called for nationwide strikes in response to the repressive Rowlatt Act. The people immediately rose up, but things quickly spun out of control and ended in tragedy. A decade later, he learned from his mistake and set out on his Salt March with just a small, disciplined cadre, which would inspire the world and help lead to Indian Independence.

Similar strategies have proven highly effective in organizational transformations. When Wyeth Pharmaceuticals began its shift to lean manufacturing, it started with a single team in a single plant, but success there led to a transformation involving 17,000 employees. When Experian sought to shift to a cloud-based enterprise, it started with internal API’s that had limited effect on its business, but helped lead to genuine and complete change.

What each of these had in common is that they started with a keystone change, which had a concrete and tangible goal, involved multiple stakeholders and paved the way for future change. While the initial wins were small, they showed what was possible and, because they were successful, they were able to build momentum and grow exponentially.

Change isn’t linear. Success grows exponentially on success. That’s why you often need to start slow to move fast.

Making Change Meaningful

My friend Srdja Popović once told me that the goal of a revolution should be to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. If you are successful it should be difficult to explain what was won because the previous order seems so unbelievable. Yet many leaders approach change initiatives as if they were swashbuckling heroes in their own action movie.

The simple truth is that every change initiative starts out weak and vulnerable, without a track record of success. People are bound to be suspicious. They already have everyday struggles and don’t want someone else’s idea to add to their burden. Most often, they’ll pay lip service, take a “wait and see” approach and then turn away at the first sign of trouble.

The problem with cheerleading change is that it puts the cart before the horse. People don’t embrace change because you came up with a fancy slogan, they adopt what they find meaningful, that creates genuine value to their lives and their work. Without that, all the happy talk just seems like a con.

We need to have more reverence for the mundane and ordinary. For better or worse, it works and it’s what people know. To create genuine transformation we need to get out of the business of selling ideas and into the business of selling success. If we can help allies to make change successful, even on a small scale, they can bring in others who bring in others still.

That can’t be done through persuasion, we have to start by identifying people who are already enthusiastic about change. Change isn’t about communication, but empowerment.

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

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Four Reasons Change Resistance Exists

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Four Reasons Change Resistance Exists

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Probably the greatest misconception about change is that it fails because people don’t understand it. The truth is that change usually fails because it is actively sabotaged. The status quo has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. Anytime you ask people to change what they think or how they act, you can expect resistance.

Yet not all resistance is the same. Some people are merely skeptical about change, they are looking for evidence based, rational arguments that the proposed action will achieve positive results. Often, however, resistance is irrational and no amount of evidence will be persuasive. People are actively working to subvert change efforts.

We can’t let our transformation efforts be defined by those who want it to fail. Not everyone will embrace change. Instead of wasting time and effort to convince the opposition, we should focus our efforts on empowering those who want it to succeed. However, we need to learn to recognize different kinds of resistance so that we can address genuine issues.

1. Change Fatigue

In recent years, business pundits have embraced the change gospel. We are told that we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Therefore, we must “innovate or die.” This creates an environment in which leaders have strong incentives to be seen as dynamic change agents who drive multiple initiatives.

Yet the truth is that, for most industries, we live in a decidedly un-VUCA world. In fact, a report from the OECD found that markets, especially in the United States, have become more concentrated and less competitive, with less churn among industry leaders. The number of young firms have decreased markedly as well, from roughly half of the total number of companies in 1982 to one third in 2013.

With so much talk about change, but so little of it actually happening, it shouldn’t be surprising that a study by PwC found that 65% of workers experienced “change fatigue” and that only half felt that their organization had the capabilities to deliver change. In other words, the change gospel is undermining our ability to produce real change!

That’s why in our transformation workshops the very first thing we ask participants to define is the need for change. We simply can’t expect people to get on board with a change initiative if they don’t see a genuine, meaningful problem being solved. Change, for change’s sake, is simply a waste of everybody’s time.

So before you embark on any transformation initiative ask yourself: “Why do we need this change? What problem are we solving? What value would we derive from solving it? Is that value worth disrupting people’s lives and work?

2. Perverse Incentives

Earlier in my career my work focused on turning around media companies in Eastern Europe and I noticed an interesting trend. Managers of sales departments in struggling companies often accounted for the majority of sales (and commissions) in their companies. Because these leaders were seen as major drivers of revenue, they had an enormous amount of power.

The secret to their success had less to do with any actual sales ability and vastly more to do with the fact that, for a variety of reasons, they had managed to get the prime accounts for themselves and, even if they were managing those accounts poorly, had no incentive to spread them around. They were, in effect, being incentivized to mismanage.

The truth is that we’ve known for decades that financial incentives usually backfire. Nevertheless, when we sit down with leaders to define a change strategy they invariably want to start by devising a complex system of “carrots and sticks” to engineer the behavior they want to see and are often disappointed when they are told that it’s a bad idea.

You never want to have to incentivize people to drive change. If an initiative has real value, you should be able to find people who are enthusiastic about it and want to make it work. Even a small initial cadre should be enough to deliver a successful keystone change and get the ball rolling. After that, the issue has more to do with scaling change than anything else.

3. Switching Costs

Every change encounters switching costs. In one particularly glaring example, the main library at Princeton University took 120 years to switch to the Library of Congress classification system because of the time and expense involved. Clearly, that’s an extreme case, but every change effort needs to take inevitable frictions into account.

There are a number of reasons why switching costs can become a significant roadblock. The first is our innate bias for loss aversion. First identified and documented by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, we all have a tendency to avoid losses rather than seek out new gains. The comfort of the status quo can be more powerful than the mysterious promise of transformation.

Another important force is the availability heuristic, which reflects our tendency to overweight information that is most easily accessible. What we experience in the here and now always seems more tangible and concrete than the more distant benefits of change, which many will suspect will never come.

You never want to get bogged down in selling an idea. The switching costs will always be more real to skeptics than any image you can conjure. Rather, you want to identify people who are already enthusiastic about the change and willing to bear any costs associated with switching. If you can empower them to succeed with a keystone change, you can sell that tangible success, which is always a stronger value proposition.

A key thing to remember here is that you shouldn’t have to convince early adopters. If you feel the need to persuade, you either have the wrong change or the wrong people. Find people who are as passionate as you are and show change can work. Then you can start thinking about bringing others in.

4. Identity And Dignity

Gary Starkweather had a big idea, but his boss at Xerox’s Research Center in Webster, NY hated it so much that he threatened to fire anyone who worked on it. To him, Xerox was a copier company and the idea didn’t have anything to do with copiers. Luckily, for Gary and for Xerox, the idea meshed perfectly with the new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)’s mission and the laser printed he developed there helped save the company.

Xerox PARC has since become almost synonymous with innovation, but even the researchers there could be hostile to ideas that were different. Dick Shoup and Alvy Ray Smith, were working on a new graphics technology called SuperPaint. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit in with PARC’s vision of personal computing and the two became outcasts. Smith would later team up with Ed Catmull and the technology would form the core of what became Pixar.

One of the biggest mistakes change leaders make is assuming that resistance to change has a rational basis. Very often people oppose change because it offends their identity and sense of self. We all take pride in the way we go about things, whether that involves our actions or our way of thinking about things.

This is the most visceral kind of resistance. We can motivate people to push through fatigue or bear the burden of inevitable switching costs, but we can’t ask people to stop being who they think they are. When people see themselves in a particular way, they rarely change and, in fact, will pay almost any price to stay true to their inner core.

What can be hardest about change, especially when we feel passionately about it, is that at some point, we need to accept that others will not embrace it and we will have to leave some behind. Not every change is for everybody. Some will have to pursue a different journey, one to which they can devote their passions and seek out their own truths.

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

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Five Key Digital Transformation Challenges

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Five Key Digital Transformation Challenges

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Each year, I sit through dozens of hours of research sessions with consumers.

If there is one theme, I hear consistently it’s that consumers expect the brands they engage with to provide a flawless digital experience in their interactions. And though that’s a notion that is consistent across all age groups, it’s a theme we hear unanimously from millennials. It only takes a quick look around various industries to see that the companies that are delivering a strong, digitally-centric value proposition make up a substantial portion of the growth.

Meanwhile, we’ve recently witnessed that many legacy brands are shrinking (i.e., The Limited) or going out of business entirely (i.e., Sports Authority). The bottom line is that companies born before the digital age must substantially transform in order to remain relevant. As Jack Welch said in the year 2000 “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” Many great brands today are in just this situation.

It takes five miles for an aircraft carrier to turn itself around 180 degrees. If you are on that aircraft carrier while it’s engaging in that ‘quick turn,’ you better hold on to something solid because you’ll soon be tilting at a 30-degree angle. Many large companies are not comfortable with making the difficult and rapid hard left required to align themselves with how the world has changed.

Being in the business of helping companies through their digital transformations, I have observed that many of the companies that struggle digitally do employ super-sharp and visionary executives who see what needs to be done. However, those executives face massive challenges when it comes to enacting the kinds of changes that are necessary in order to make that digital leap. Most of the work I do involves partnering with heroic innovators trying to change large enterprises from within. As a result, I have an insider’s perspective on the biggest challenges these companies face when taking on transformation projects and, in fact, spend most of my time working to try to overcome them.

Based on first-hand experience, here are the top five challenges to digital transformation. If you are facing any of these challenges, the list below may, if nothing else, give you comfort that you are not alone.

1. Organizational Resistance to Change

My rough guesstimate is that perhaps 10-15% of people in the world love change. They are excited by constantly having new challenges to tackle and new things to learn. But for the other 85-90%, change equals pain. It means uncertainty, a challenge to their role or identity, and, worst-case scenario, possibly the loss of a job and their family’s security. After all, once you’ve got a good thing going, its natural not to want to see your apple cart overturned. Digital transformation, by its very nature, upsets a lot of apple carts.

However the truth is that in times of change, not changing is far more risky than taking the leap. It just doesn’t always feel that way.

The consequences of resistance to change manifest itself in a myriad of ways. Digital projects vital to a company’s future success can have trouble getting funded, resourced, or marketed. These projects may be modified so as not to threaten retail or partner brands. They are held back by concerns about cannibalizing other revenue sources. They are asked to justify ROI to an unreasonable level of certainty. They are sent through endless legal reviews.

Kodak invented the digital camera, but it was the internal resistance to change that led the company to bury it because it threatened the company’s legacy film business. Imagine what Kodak could have been had it done what Bell Atlantic did when it realized how bleak the future of landlines looked — it became Verizon, which is now a dominant figure in the broadband, wireless and cable television industries. Did mobile phones decimate the landline business? Yep. But Bell Atlantic “protected” itself by accepting that change was on the horizon, and transformed by making the difficult decisions required to adapt to that change.

The great architect and innovator Matt Taylor once said, “The future is rationale only in hindsight.” When Bell Atlantic was making those critical decisions that fundamentally transformed what it was as a company, the outcome was far from clear or free of risk.

2. Lack of a Clear Vision for a Digital Customer Journey

Companies that succeed in creating a digital customer value proposition don’t get there by accident. They develop a clear vision of how they will meet their customers’ digital needs, set objectives against that vision, and execute — often over the course of multiple years. Often times, companies that are not succeeding simply haven’t painted a clear picture of what they want — or need — to be when they digitally “grow up.” While clarifying this vision doesn’t get you there by itself, in fact its only one of many steps, not having a vision is like going on a road trip without a destination. It’s always possible you could stumble into something great, but probably not.

Companies still in the dark need to do four things:

  1. Take stock of your assets – your brand, your customers, your intellectual property, and the strengths and talents of your organization.
  2. Study your market to understand your customers’ unmet needs and what your competitors are doing.
  3. Be on top of technology trends, which includes keeping apprised of relevant emerging technology and shifts in consumer behavior as it pertains to technology.
  4. Establish processes designed to generate portfolios of potential ideas for the future state of the customer journey. These processes should allow your company to create business hypotheses and vet and test them via customer research. In turn, new ideas can be aligned to the vision for how the customer of the future should interact with the brand, iterating along the way as more learnings come in.

3. Ineffective Gathering and Leveraging of Customer Data

The root of digital success is customer data. There’s more to the tree than the root, to be sure, but whether it’s Facebook, Amazon, Netflix or Uber, digital success stories have the effective gathering, storing and leveraging of customer data at the core. Many organizations today have a myriad of siloed systems containing various scraps of data about customer interactions, but no clear way to pull them together. Others have petabytes of data centralized in an information warehouse that they may use for reporting. However, they haven’t figured out what to do with all that data in a manner that provides value to the customer.

Fixing this in the most efficient way often requires starting fresh, to a degree. Determine what are the ten to fifteen key attributes of a customer that would allow us to serve and sell to them more effectively. Of course, these attributes are different depending on the sector that a company operates in, but once they have been identified, the key is to figure out how to most effectively gather and store that data in a centralized place that can be easily accessed via any touch point.

When you take a simplistic approach to creating value at the outset, you are then in a good position to start looking at more complex pockets of customer data and considering how some of that data might enable you to enhance the experience further and how to link it in.

4. Inflexible Technology Stack and Development Processes

Successful digital experiences are achieved through iteration. Successful digital properties almost always iterate to success via the “test and learn” approach — where new features are being regularly added, measured, adjusted and pruned, based on user feedback and usage data. However, it is impossible to take this approach if your development process involves quarterly release cycles. Leveraging agile processes and technologies that support frequent, if not continuous, integration and product releases are critical behaviors that lead to effective digital results.

Additionally, part of the iteration process involves the need to adjust workflows, business rules, content presentation, and (potentially) leverage data in different ways than were originally envisioned when systems were built. Companies trying to build flexible and elegant digital experiences on top of out-dated technology stacks are tilting at windmills. You don’t necessarily have to discard the mainframe, but modern enterprises must make their data read/write accessible via robust and secure APIs, and provide access to their business logic in a way that’s independent of presentation layers. If your core systems were designed more than five years ago, they probably need major refactoring in order to support effective digital execution.

5. Married to Legacy Business Model

Lastly, real success in digital is rarely about providing the exact same products and services, just through a digital pipe. Netflix shifted from DVDs to streaming. Uber created the world’s largest car service without buying any vehicles or hiring any drivers, and similarly, eBay and Alibaba created the world’s biggest retail channels without buying any inventory.

Companies that successfully “cross the chasm” to digital effectiveness often discover they need to provide for free what they used to charge for, sell as a subscription what used to be “a la carte,” monetize via advertising things that used to be paid for in other ways, and re-think how they derive revenue from the value that they create. Those that do so flexibly can often find that the adoption of a digital strategy offers more scale, revenue and profit than the legacy approach, but it takes experimentation, an assumption of risk, and — to be blunt — some failure along the way. Whereas this approach is widely accepted among startups, it is one that the management and investors in mature companies generally fear. Yet, this is the gauntlet they must run in order to achieve digital success.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: FreePik

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Innovation Mythbusters – Top 5

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Innovation Mythbusters - Top 5

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Amazingly Fabulous Tools is an award-winning, entrepreneurial market leader in the global machine engineering industry. The ambitious and proactive CEO Charlie Chaps invested in dispatching a Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley to research, investigate, and report on how to capture and emulate the critical ingredients of its “secret innovative sauce.” Upon their return, the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers created and shared a beautiful, illustrated PowerPoint presentation with the board despite secretly knowing and passively avoiding saying that Amazingly Fabulous Tools could not replicate what they had discovered, primarily due to how the top five innovation myths clandestinely operated in the organization.

The Corporate Antibodies

This is due to their overt experience with the organization’s “innovation antibodies,” which cause an organization to resist change and protect the status quo. These antibodies consist of rigid people and inconsistent processes that extinguish a new idea as soon as it begins to course through the organization. In the Amazingly Fabulous Tool company, most people, especially the founders and the board, unconsciously and powerfully neutralized any forces that threatened to destabilize the company’s current state and stunt its growth by shutting down the fresh ideas and unconventional thinking their company badly needed.

Charlie Chaps built a fantastic, largely incomprehensible strategic plan with a BHAG, strategic goals, and sets of individual KPIs. This plan provided concrete evidence that reassured the board that the company was taking action to sustain its leadership position in the market and would take the business to the next level by growing its ROI. It also aimed to leverage the collective genius of its owners, Bob the Brave Builder and Eric the Energetic Entrepreneur, to ensure a legacy was left no matter who was at the helm.

The Innovation Culture Diagnostic Findings

A quantitative and qualitative cultural diagnostic revealed that people lacked permission, safety, and trust to speak up, rock the boat and challenge the status quo. It also showed that the organization lacked rigor in its process disciplines and a focus on developing its people’s capabilities.

It also revealed that Amazingly Fabulous Tools was secretly driven by its founders’ and sales directors’ self-interest and greed due to the highly competitive profit-share sales model. Not by an obligation and commitment to creating, inventing, designing, and delivering disciplined, innovative process improvements, products, and services that their customers purchased and did not appreciate and cherish.

This was a stark contradiction and barrier to the company’s ability to sustain its enviable global reputation. Finally, people believed that Charlie Chaps’ fantastic strategic plan, BHAG, goals, and KPIs were confusing and disconnected from the organization’s current reality and would not produce a collaborative and innovative organization.

So, they did not accept or apply the plan and kept safe by conducting business as usual.

The Top Five Innovation Myths

Because the corporate antibodies revealed that people unanimously believed each of the key myths, including:

Myth # 1: Innovation is a solo activity; people believe that ” only the owners can innovate.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation is impossible without inclusion and collaboration, which are achieved through practical and disciplined teaming and networking.


Myth #2: Innovation is top-down; people believed they were not responsible or accountable for planning and were forced to be reactive. “The planning is difficult, that is for sure, because we are firefighting all the time, and that goes back to the frustration of not having enough time to do what needs to get done…and resources and …tools.”
The Brutal Truth: When people have the permission and safety to challenge the status quo, make mistakes, and are trusted to learn through experimentation, innovation can emerge anywhere in an organization, or team.


Myth #3: Innovation is about the newest thing; people believed that radical innovation was needed when agility was the problem; “The scary thing is our key competitor is getting more flexible (agile); we’re just getting more reliable (stable). It’s the stupid things that are so annoying. It’s the embarrassing things.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation is guided by its strategic intent. It can be incremental, continuous, radical, breakthrough, disruptive, or differentiated, as there is no one best way of innovating.


Myth # 4: Innovation can’t be taught; people believed that they did not have to learn to improve or innovate when they encountered quality issues continuously; “A lot of times, it’s not because the customer wants the machine tomorrow but because we want to ship it tomorrow because we want to get it off the floor, we want to meet numbers, we want the cash. We usually drive the time frame and rush it out the door, creating many internal problems. It also creates problems externally with the customer when they think they’re getting a machine fully intact, but half its parts are missing….”
The Brutal Truth: Innovators are not born and are made. Anyone can learn to innovate,


Myth #5: You can’t force innovation; people were dis-empowered and did not take responsibility for influencing their environment to provide order and discipline; “It’s a traffic jam. That’s what we’ve got. It’s a traffic jam. Cars sitting bumper to bumper look like they are gridlocked. It represents the log jam of our activities. Where people are trying to push so many activities through two lanes of traffic when we’ve got six lanes worth of traffic.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation can emerge when people have a sense of urgency, understand, and are motivated to engage in necessary, high-impact cultural and organizational change.

People must be prepared for it, change-ready and receptive, and intentionally pulled towards a compelling and desired future within an equalized environment that balances chaos and creativity with rigidity and discipline through rigorous planning.

The real costs to the organization

People believed that “This business makes money despite itself. There is potential to be truly great”. This was the most significant innovation antibody because there was no sense of urgency or even a financial or growth necessity to innovate. The company was quite comfortable with the status quo and had no reason to shift its habitual and unconscious comfort zone in ways that people and organizations must do to innovate because it involves being ready and receptive to mega-changes.

The significant investment in sending the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley sadly remained in the mythical realm of Innovation Dreamland.

So, lacking focus, discipline and rigor, the group of seriously qualified and intelligent engineers knowingly consistently dispatched faulty million-dollar machines to highly valued, global customers.

The cost of rework and brand erosion were considerable.

These machines required considerable analysis, problem-solving, and rework upon their return. Their costs were not recorded as repairs, causing the engineering division to be consistently over budget. Charlie Chaps reacted by restricting its budget and inhibiting its investment in critical research and development, which is needed to create, invent, and innovate to repair and sustain its global reputation as an innovator.

Innovation Dreamland remained a mythical and magical fantasy in Amazingly Fabulous Tools.

Sadly, the organization failed to shift its focus from challenge to opportunity because it could not resolve the corporate antibodies (implicit killers), remove the roadblocks, break down the internal cultural barriers to innovation and develop the agility necessary to become both a people-centric and customer-centric organization.

It lost an opportunity to make innovation a daily habit for everyone by failing to embed it in its organization as a way of life. It needed to empower, enable, and equip its talented, experienced and motivated people with the emotional energy, change, cognitive, and innovation agility to expose, challenge and resolve the underlying corporate antibodies.

It did not prioritize customer satisfaction and keep its promises by creating, inventing, and innovating high-value, quality products and services that improve the quality of their lives that are appreciated and cherished.

Many transformations and change-led innovation initiatives designed as strategic interventions fail due to a lack of alignment between strategy, structure, processes, and human skills, resulting in unproductive actions and poor human behaviors.

This is a short section from Chapter One of our new book, “Conscious Innovation – Empowering People to Be, Think and Act Differently in a Constantly Changing World”, which will be published in 2025.

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

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

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Change Leaders Must Anticipate and Overcome Resistance

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Change Leaders Must Anticipate and Overcome Resistance

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When Barry Libenson arrived at Experian as Global CIO in 2015, he devoted his first few months to speaking with customers. Everywhere he went he heard the same thing: they wanted access to real-time data. On the surface, it was a straightforward business transformation, but Libenson knew that it was far more complicated than that

To switch from batch processed credit reports to real-time access would require a technology transformation—from an on-premise to a cloud architecture—and in order to develop cloud applications effectively, he would have to initiate a skills-based transformation—from waterfall to agile development.”

So what at first appeared to be a straightforward initiative was actually three separate transformations stacked on top of one another. To make things even more difficult, people had good reason to be hostile to each aspect. Still, by being strategic about overcoming resistance from the start, he achieved a full transformation in less than three years.

Understanding Cognitive Biases

One of the key concerns about Libenson’s program at Experian was that the company would lose control over its business model. The firm had prospered selling processed credit reports. Giving customers real-time access to data seemed to undercut a value proposition that had proven itself over decades, almost as if McDonald’s decided to stop selling hamburgers.

These were not casual criticisms. In fact, they reflected instinctual cognitive biases that are deeply rooted in our consciousness. The first, loss aversion, reflects our tendency to avoid losses rather than seek out new gains. The second, called the availability heuristic, reflects our preference for information that is easy to access and internalize, such as the decades of profits generated by credit reports rather than the vague promise of a new cloud-driven business model.

A similar dynamic is plays out between the Black Lives Matter movement and police unions. One could argue, with significant evidence, that the smart play for police unions would be to come to some accommodation with protesters’ concerns to avoid more draconian policies later on. Yet after meticulously building their power base for decades, they have shown little willingness to make concessions.

Libensen and his team were able to navigate these challenges with two key strategies. First, he started with internal API’s, rather than fully open applications, as a keystone change,. That helped bridge the gap between the initial and desired future state. Second, the program was opt-in at first. Those program managers who were excited about creating cloud-based products got significant support. Those who weren’t were left alone.

Navigating Asymmetrical Impacts

Another obstacle to overcome was the fact that some people were more affected than others. In the case of Experian’s skills-based transformation from waterfall to agile development, which was essential to making the business and technology transformations possible, the change hit more senior personnel harder than junior ones.

Many of the project managers at the company had been doing their jobs for years—even decades—and took great pride in their work. Now they were being told they needed to do their jobs very differently. For a junior employee with limited experience, that can be exciting. For those more invested in traditional methods, the transition can more difficult.

Here again, the opt-in strategy helped navigate some thorny issues. Because no one was being forced to switch to agile development, it was hard for anyone to muster much resistance. At the same time, Libenson established an “API Center of Excellence” to empower those who were enthusiastic about creating cloud-based products.

As the movement to the cloud gained steam and began to generate real business results, the ability to build cloud-based projects became a performance issue. Managers that lagged began to feel subtle pressure to get with the program and to achieve what their colleagues had been able to deliver.

Overcoming Switching Costs

Experian facilitates billions of transactions a month. At that scale, you can’t just turn the ship on a dime. Another factor that increased the risk is the very nature of the credit business itself, which makes cybersecurity a major concern. In fact, one of Experian’s direct competitors, Equifax, had one of the biggest data breaches of the decade.

Every change encounters switching costs and that can slow the pace of change. In one particularly glaring example, the main library at Princeton University took 120 years to switch to the Library of Congress classification system because of the time and expense involved. Clearly, that’s an extreme case, but every change effort needs to take inevitable frictions into account.

That’s why Libenson didn’t push for speed initially, but started small, allowing the cloud strategy to slowly prove itself over time. As win piled upon win, the process accelerated and the transformation became more ingrained in the organization. Within just a few years, those who opposed the move to the cloud were in the distinct minority.

As General Stanley McChrystal explained in Team of Teams, he experienced a similar dynamic revamping Special Operations in Iraq. By shifting his force’s focus from individual team goals to effective collaboration between teams, he may have slowed down individual units. However, as a collective, his forces increased their efficiency by a factor of seventeen, measured by the amount of raids they were able to execute.

In every transformation, there is an inherent efficiency paradox. In order to produce change for the long-term, you almost always lose a little bit of efficiency in the short-term. That’s why it’s important to start small and build momentum as you go.

Leveraging Resistance To Forge A New Vision

Any change, if it is important and potentially impactful, is going to encounter fierce resistance. As Saul Alinsky noted, every revolution inspires its own counter-revolution. That’s why three quarters of organizational transformations fail, because managers too often see it as a communication exercise, rather than a strategic effort to empower those who are already enthusiastic about change to influence everyone else.

In the case of Experian’s move to the cloud, the objections were not unfounded. Offering customers real-time access to data did have the potential to upend the traditional credit report business model. Switching to a new technology architecture does raise cybersecurity concerns. Many senior project managers really had served the company well for decades with traditional development methods.

As Global CIO, Libenson could have ignored these concerns. He could have held a “townhall” and launched a major communication effort to convince the skeptics. Yet he did neither of these things. Instead, he treated the resistance not as an obstacle, but as a design constraint. He identified people who were already enthusiastic about the shift and empowered them to make it work. Their success built momentum and paved the way for what became a major transformation .

In fact, Experian’s cloud architecture unlocked enormous value for the firm and its customers. The company’s API hub made good on Libenson’s initial promise of supporting real-time access to data and today processes over 100 million transactions a month. It has also enabled a completely new business, called Ascend, now one of the company’s most successful products.

The truth is that bringing about fundamental, transformational change takes more than clever slogans and happy talk. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. You need to be clear-eyed and hard-nosed. You need to understand that for every significant change, there will be some who seek to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.

The difference between successful revolutionaries and mere dreamers is that those who succeed anticipate resistance and build a plan to overcome it.

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

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2024

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2024Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are August’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. SpaceX is a Masterclass in Innovation Simplification — by Pete Foley
  2. Secrets to Overcoming Resistance to Change — by David Burkus
  3. Five Things Most Managers Don’t Know About Innovation — by Greg Satell
  4. Are We Doing Social Innovation Wrong? — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  5. Only One Type of Innovation Will Win the Future — by Greg Satell
  6. What Your Website Reveals About Your Brand — by Howard Tiersky
  7. The Coming Leadership Confidence Crisis — by Robyn Bolton
  8. Adjacent Innovation is the Key to Growth and Risk — by Robyn Bolton
  9. Bringing Emotional Energy and Creative Thinking to AI — by Janet Sernack
  10. Delivering Customer Value is the Key to Success — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in July that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Secrets to Overcoming Resistance to Change

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Secrets to Overcoming Resistance To Change

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Employee resistance to change is one of the most perplexing and challenging issues that business executives encounter. Senior leaders have mapped out a change initiative and, in the process, gotten themselves excited about the future only to find the rest of the organization doesn’t share their enthusiasm.

This resistance manifests in various ways, such as decreased productivity, higher rates of employee turnover and transfer requests, attitudes, unauthorized strikes, or work slowdowns. And in trying to overcome resistance to change, leaders often make structured, logical arguments for why the change is needed.

Arguments that fail to persuade.

What’s often overlooked is that employee resistance to change is most likely due to the emotions behind the change, not the change itself. And in examining those emotions, the late Carl Frost offered four key questions that people ask themselves when they’re being asked to change. The answers to these questions determine their excitement, or resistance, to change.

In this article, we will explore how to overcome resistance to change by addressing the emotions behind it and we’ll offer advice on how leaders can answer those four questions.

Question 1: Do we know where we’re going?

A clear and compelling vision of the future is necessary to overcome resistance to change. It is important to paint a clear picture of what the future of the organization looks like and include the individual being asked to make the change in that vision. When employees can see themselves as a part of the future, they are more likely to embrace the change. Additionally, it is crucial to ensure that the vision is shared at every level of the organization. This helps create a sense of unity and purpose, making it easier for employees to align themselves with the change.

By providing a clear direction and involving employees in the vision, leaders can address the uncertainty and fear that often accompany change. When employees have a clear understanding of where the organization is heading, they are less likely to resist and more likely to actively participate in the change process.

Question 2: Do we know why we’re going there?

Communicating the reasons for the change effectively is essential in overcoming resistance. Employees need to understand the changes in regulation, competition, or the economy that necessitate the change. It is important to avoid nostalgia for the old times before the change, as this can hinder progress. Instead, leaders should focus on selling people on why the change is necessary and beneficial.

By clearly explaining the rationale behind the change, leaders can address any doubts or concerns employees may have. When employees understand the need for change and how it will positively impact the organization, they are more likely to embrace it and actively contribute to its success.

Question 3: Do we know we can get there?

Confidence in the organization’s ability to achieve the vision is crucial for overcoming resistance to change. Leaders must build belief in the organization’s capacity to reach the new future. This can be done by addressing concerns about skills, resources, and capabilities. It is important to create a plan to acquire necessary skills and resources, ensuring that employees have the support and tools they need to succeed.

By addressing concerns and providing the necessary resources, leaders can instill confidence in employees and alleviate their fears about the change. When employees believe that the organization has the capability to achieve the vision, they are more likely to embrace the change and actively work towards its realization.

Question 4: Do we know that there is better than here?

Individuals need to believe that the change will benefit them personally in order to lessen their resistance. Leaders should paint a compelling picture of the change in their role and how it will be better. It is important to show how the change will result in personal growth and improvement. Additionally, leaders should address concerns about sacrifices, extra time, and learning new skills.

By addressing the personal benefits of the change and addressing personal concerns, leaders can help employees see the value in embracing the change. When employees understand how the change will positively impact their own lives, they are more likely to overcome resistance and actively engage in the change process.

Overcoming resistance to change is crucial for successful change initiatives. By addressing the emotions behind the change and answering the four questions, leaders can increase excitement, self-efficacy, and confidence in the change. That helps the organizational change itself find success and (hopefully) that success empowers every employee to do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on August 7, 2023

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