Tag Archives: change

Innovation Teams Do Not Innovate

Guest Post from Janet Sernack

In our first blog in this series of three blogs, we reinforced and validated the importance and role of collaboration. We then described the range of emerging new, inspirational, and adaptive models that lean into complexity and catalyze and embed sustainable innovative workplace culture change. Where some organizations, like Alibaba, Disney, Google, Salesforce, and GE, developed their future fitness by courageously investing in catalyzing, igniting, and leading change through innovation teams.

Innovation teams are teams that don’t innovate!

Conventional team collaboration performance and development approaches are still relevant and foundational to long-term organizational success. And, a new range of organizational needs are emerging in our fast-changing and disruptive world, that complement conventional team development processes including the importance of:

Providing a unified and holistic and systemic “collective mind” focussed on adding value to customers,
Being agile, focused, and in charge to make faster decisions,
Sharing resources and insights to reduce costs,
Working interdependencies to improve efficiencies and productivity,
Shifting focus from being competitive towards co-creating ecosystems to solve bigger, more complex problems, to lead, embed, and sustain value-adding change in a disruptive world.

According to the authors of Eat, Sleep Innovate, an innovation team is formed to develop “something different that creates value” and do this best in a culture where such behaviors come naturally.

These behaviors include:

Curiosity
Customer obsession
Adeptness to ambiguity
Collaboration
Empowerment
Accountability

Purpose of innovation teams

The purpose of an innovation team is to create an environment that unlocks an organization’s collective intelligence (capacity, competence, and confidence) and builds the capability to change as fast as change itself.

Usually, through providing mentorship, coaching, and learning process in ways that align, engage, enable, equip and leverage peoples’ collective intelligence to:

Adapt to higher levels of ambiguity and uncertainty,
Challenge the status quo and help break a conventional business as usual habits, leadership styles, and comfortable ways of working,
Provoke future “fast forward” (horizon three) thinking,
Support the implementation of digital and organizational transformational efforts,
Collectively and collaboratively drive innovation across organizations pragmatically and make it a reality,
Leverage synergies across ecosystems to solve complex problems and deliver increased value to customers.

Ultimately, to provoke and evoke future “fast forward” creative discoveries and experiment with new platforms and possible future business models to help guide future renewal and reinventions.

Delivering these, as smart and multi-disciplinary teams in ways that are timely, agile, and disciplined that potentially support and bring significant value to customers, the market, and to the organization.

Unconventional stretch collaboration requires connection, cognitive dissonance, and conflict

Experimenting with, iterating, and adapting new collaborative models, enables organizations and their leaders, to shift their focus – from being defensively competitive towards being creatively constructive.

Where the goal is to create a high performing, connected, and networked workplace culture where people:

Have the time and space to deeply connect, collaborate, and co-create value,
Maximize differences and diversity of thought,
Generate the urgency and creative energy to innovate,
Feel safe and have permission to freely share ideas, wisdom, knowledge, information, resources, and perspectives.

Innovation teams create discord and generate conflict

At ImagineNation™ we have found that the best way for innovation teams to perform is through building safety and trust, whilst simultaneously being safely provocative and evocative in creating discord and conflict to disrupt peoples conventional thought processes, behaviors, and habits.

To engage people in maximizing differences and diversity to generate creative ideas, and experiment with inventive prototypes, that ultimately solve big and complex problems and deliver commercially astute, innovative solutions.

By connecting, networking, and focussing on co-creation and emphasizing collaboration, inclusion, and mutual accountability, and not on being competitive.

Dealing with the organizational blockers – Innovation teams

At ImagineNation™ our experience has enabled us to understand and reduce the range of key common blockers to transformational and innovation-led change initiatives.

Where we support clients identify, and resolve and remove them by enabling and equipping innovation teams to:

Develop agile and innovation mindsets: building capability in safely exposing and disrupting rigid mindsets through customized mindset shifting, behavioral-based, skills development programs.
Understand the impact of the organization’s collective mindset: supporting teams to develop an empathic understanding of one another, then shifting how they feel and think to act differently, and cultivate the discomfort resilience when facing the challenges and failures in the innovation rollercoaster ride.
Enable leadership development: through educating, mentoring, and coaching leaders to grow their adaptive, collaborative, engaging, and innovative team leadership and membership capabilities.
Foster the development of an adaptive and innovative culture: by applying the cultural assessment and diagnostic processes that result in pragmatic culture change initiatives.
Ensure strategic alignment: sensing, perceiving, and developing a mutual focus, common language and understanding, and a collaborative networked way of working, that bridges the gap between the current and desired states.

Setting up an innovation team – the critical success factors

At ImagineNation™ we have also helped our clients identify, and embed the critical success factors, that enable innovation teams to drive and embed innovation-led change and transformational initiatives by ensuring:

Alignment to the mission, vision, purpose, values.
Strategic allocation of resources.
Leadership team sponsorship and mentorship.
Investment in team members and leader’s capability development.
Thinking big and focussing on clarifying and delivering future “fast forward” far-reaching solutions to highly impactful challenges.
Organization engagement and enrolment in implementing changes and creating, inventing, and delivering innovative solutions.
Lines of sight to stakeholders, eco-system players, and customers, taking an empathic value-adding perspective at all times.

Innovation teams – an unfreezing opportunity to co-create future-fit organizations

Embracing this type of collaborative approach creates an unprecedented opportunity for organizations, who have been upended as a result of the Covid-19 crisis, to develop a sense of urgency toward unfreezing and eliminating their corporate antibodies.

Empathizing with the range of challenges leaders are facing right now, where many are slowly waking up to a post-covid world, where there is an unprecedented and urgent opportunity to co-create a “new normal” that is well-designed to lift any of the emotional barriers to teamwork, locked-down relationships and online fatigue.

Opening the door to a new kind of co-creative, collaborative and cohesive team spirit that allows and encourages people to re-imagine, re-learn, reinvent and co-create new, fresh future fit, adaptive and innovative, people and customer-centric systems, structures, business models, and ecosystems.

All of which are mandatory for delivering future “fast forward” strategies for applying the collaborative and collective intelligence required for increasing value in innovative ways that people and customers appreciate and cherish, in ways we have not previously imagined, that connect with and contribute to, the good of the whole.

Find out about our learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators Certified Program, a collaborative, intimate, and deep personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 8-weeks, starting Tuesday, October 19, 2021.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of a human-centred approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, within your unique context. Find out more

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The Rebirth of Blogging Innovation

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The Rebirth of Blogging Innovation

Join Us Here at Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Fifteen years ago I started writing Blogging Innovation on a cumbersome platform called Blogger.

It started as a place to share my observations and insights about business and innovation. Leveraging what I learned operating and optimizing the marketing engine powering what is now VRBO.com from Expedia, Blogging Innovation grew.

Blogging Innovation drew an increasingly large audience and its mission grew into:

“Making innovation insights accessible for the greater good.”

This led me to invite other leading innovation voices onto this growing platform to broaden the chorus of voices across a range of innovation-related specialties and topics.

I had the opportunity to go out and do video interviews with luminaries like Dean Kamen, Seth Godin, Dan Pink, John Hagel, and many others, sharing them with you on the blog and via my YouTube channel.

A global innovation community was born with Blogging Innovation transforming into Innovation Excellence and then into Disruptor League before I stepped away.

Recently I posted a slideshow on LinkedIn of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020 and in communicating with the authors recognized for their contributions on the list it surfaced that people would be interested in contributing guest posts here.

Please follow the link, give it a like or leave a comment on LinkedIn supporting your favorite author on the list or add a name of someone I should watch for this year’s list.

Because people expressed interest in contributing articles to Human-Centered Change and Innovation, I’ve decided to allow some guest posts from select authors.

Here are the first three:

1. How to Conduct Virtual Office Hours
by Arlen Meyers

2. Innovation organization only thrives along with innovation culture
by Nicolas Bry

3. Catalysing Change Through Innovation Teams
by Janet Sernack

If you’ve contributed articles to Blogging Innovation in the past and are interested in contributing to Human-Centered Change and Innovation, please contact me and I’ll set you up with a user account.

Topics of particular interest include:

Innovation Culture
Innovation Methods
Change and Transformation
Human-Centered Design
Behavioral Science and Economics
Customer Experience and Insights
Employee Experience and Engagement
Organizational Psychology

Keep innovating!

Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Catalysing Change Through Innovation Teams

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Catalysing Change Through Innovation Teams

Guest Post from Janet Sernack

What makes Israel so innovative? And what has this got to do with teaming? One of the key discoveries, we made, almost ten years ago, when we relocated to Israel, was the power of its innovation eco-system – the result of a collaboration between the state, venture capital firms, successful entrepreneurs, educational system, business system, incubators, and accelerators. Reinforcing and validating the importance and role of collaboration, where a range of new, inspirational, and adaptive models that lean into complexity and catalyze and embed innovative workplace culture changes, have emerged. Where some organizations have strategically and systemically, courageously invested in applying these new models internally, in catalyzing change through innovation teams.

Transform creative discoveries

Innovation teams transform creative discoveries and ideas into new platforms and business models in timely, agile, and disciplined ways that bring significant value to the market and organization. Who, according to Nick Udall, CEO and co-founder of nowhere, effectively deliver the desired step-changes, breakthrough innovations, and organizational transformation, in ways that “move beyond what we know and step into the unknown, where the relationship between cause and effect is more ambiguous, hidden, subtle and multi-dimensional.”

New collaborative models

The range of new collaborative models, include teams and teaming, tribes, collectives, and eco-systems, are all designed to help organizations innovate in turbulent times.

Where they empower and enable everyone to be involved in innovating, and in responding to the diverse assortment of complex challenges emerging from the Covid-19 crises. They also empower and enable people to co-sense and co-create inventive solutions to the range of “complex” challenges, in ways that potentially engineer 21st-century adaptability, growth, success, and sustainability, in countries, communities, and organizations.

Capacity to change

Groups, teams, and teaming are now the “DNA of cultures of innovation”, who fuel organizations, with an “evolutionary advantage – the capacity to change as fast as change itself.” As we transition from our pre-Covid-19 conventional business-as-usual “normals”, organizations have the opportunity to adapt to the high levels of ambiguity by leveraging their peoples’ collective genius.

Utilizing innovation teams to multiply their value and co-create innovation cultures that catalyze growth, in the post-Covid-19 world through:

Emerging and exploring possibilities
Discovering creative opportunities
Making strategic decisions
Incubating and accelerating new ideas.

Realm of the creative team

According to Dr. Nick Udall in “Riding the Creativity Roller-Coaster” – creative teams embrace and work with the unknown, intangible, invisible, the unconscious and the implicate, that their key challenges are “to wander with wonder into the unknown.”

Through cultivating a 21^st-century skill set, including – attending and observing, questioning, listening and differing, risk-taking and experimenting, and teaming and networking that enables them to be, think and act differently.

Catalyzing change through innovation teams involves creating a culture of innovation, which according to the authors of “Eat, Sleep, Innovate” – is one in which (mindsets) and behaviors that drive innovation come naturally.

Where creative teams are formed around a Passionate Purpose, that propels them into the unknown, in an unpredictable world, where they connect and stretch with cognitive dissonance and creative tension, through developing discomfort resilience. To co-create collective breakthroughs that shift them beyond managing the probable, toward leading what’s possible.

Role of collective mindsets and behaviors

One of the key elements that we can intentionally cultivate is our ability to develop habits that build our mental toughness and emotional agility to cope with stress and adversity, at the same time, paradoxically, create, invent and innovate.

The one thing that we can all control, and is controllable, are our individual and collective mindsets – how we think, feel and choose to act, in solving complex problems, performing and innovating, to dance on the edges of our comfort zones, in the face of the kinds of uncertainties we confront today.

Challenges in creating a culture of innovation

Our research at ImagineNation™ has found that many organizations are disappointed and disillusioned with many of the conventional approaches to effecting culture change, largely because of variables including:

Confusion between the role of climate, culture, and engagement assessments and processes, knowing which one aligns to their purpose, strategy, and goals and delivers the greatest and most relevant value.
The typically large financial investment that is required to fund them.
The time it takes to design or customize, and implement them.
The complexity of tools and processes available that are involved in contextualizing and measuring desired changes.
Designating responsibility and accountability for role modeling, leading, and implementing the desired changes.
Building peoples’ readiness and receptivity to the desired change.
Efforts are required in removing the systemic blockers to change.
Designing and delivering the most appropriate change and learning interventions.
The false promises of “innovation theatre”.
The time it takes to reap desired results, often years.

In response to our client’s need for speedy, cost-effective, and simple, internal and collaborative culture change initiatives, we developed an integrated, simple, yet profoundly effective approach that integrates three powerful streams for catalyzing change through innovation teams:

Team development and teaming skills
Education and learning interventions
Coaching and mentoring initiatives

By taking these variables into account, focussing on building the internal capability, and offering a different and fresh perspective towards catalyzing change through innovation teams.

Creating a culture of innovation – the innovation team

We took inspiration from our 32 years of collective knowledge, wisdom, and experience across the domains of change management, culture, leadership, and team development as well as from our 8 years of iterating and pivoting our approach to the People Side of Innovation.

Coupling this with our extensive research sources, we developed and customized a team-based action and blended learning and coaching methodology for innovation teams, described as:

Change catalysts who operate with senior leadership sponsorship, empowered and equipped to trigger internal change management, engagement, and learning initiatives.
Teachers, coaches, and mentors who provide coaching and mentoring support to educate people in innovation principles and processes that cultivate sustainable innovation through co-creating learning programs and events.
A small effective and cohesive team, of evangelists, agitators, coaches, and guides and enables the whole organization to participate through partnering and collaborating on potentially ground-breaking (Moonshot) projects, aligned to the organization’s vision, purpose, and strategy.
Amazing networkers and influencers who work both within and outside of silos to inspire and motivate people to co-operate and collaborate by taking a systemic perspective, leveraging organizational independencies, to co-sense and co-create groundbreaking (Moonshot) prototypes that they pitch to senior leaders.
Being customer-obsessed and equipped with the innovation agility – capacity, competence, and confidence to adapt, transform, and constantly innovate to maximize the impact of innovation across the organization to affect growth, and deliver improved value by making innovation everyone’s job, every day, to make innovation a habit and way of life.

Developing the future fit future-facing company

Involves a commitment toward catalyzing change through innovation teams, leveraging teams, tribes, collectives as internal growth engines, who collaborate quickly to respond to ambiguity, turbulence, and rapid developments. By being nimble and agile, leading with open minds, hearts, and will to be present and compassionate to emerging human needs, courageously experiment with different business models, and creatively contribute to an improved future, for everyone.

This is the first in a series of three blogs about catalyzing change through innovation teams, why innovation teams are important in catalyzing culture change, and what an innovation team does.

Check out our second blog which describes how an innovation team operates and our final blog which includes an evidence-based case study of an effective and successful innovation team in a client organization.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of a human-centered approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, within your unique context. Find out more

Image credit: Unsplash.com

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Accelerating Complexity vs. Accelerating Change

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Accelerating Complexity vs. Accelerating Change

Does the quickening pace of change or the accelerating pace of complexity pose a greater threat for humans and organizations?

Change can be incredibly disruptive to both humans and organizations.

So much so that I decided to create a more modern, visual, collaborative and effective set of methods and tools to help organizations beat the 70% change failure rate and better keep pace with the accelerating pace of change – the Change Planning Toolkit™ – introduced in my latest book Charting Change.

In the book I highlight that the pace of change is accelerating, and use the increasing rate of change in the S&P 500’s membership as a proof point:

Innosight Average Company Lifespan

Another proof point is the fact that all of our high technology has been developed in roughly the last 100 years.

There can be no doubt that the pace of change and disruption is quickening.

But how much of the accelerating disruption that we see can be attributed to what I see as an increasing pace of complexity?

If anyone doubts that we live in a time of accelerating complexity, I encourage you to check out the book The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites, or this TED talk given by Thomas:

I find this video quite frightening because it highlights how fragile our high-technology society is, and how much we need each other.

If a single person can’t make the simplest of electrical appliances by themselves, even over the course of a year, then imagine the complexity that organizations must manage to make even more complicated products.

Imagine the challenge of making changes to our organizations after we’ve optimized things to successfully manage this complexity.

If both complexity and change are accelerating, how can we cope?

Here are four key ways to better manage complexity and change:

Choose carefully which complexity to inflict upon the organization

Learn how to architect the organization for continuous change

Continuously evaluate your organization’s trade-offs between flexibility and fixedness

Leverage the modern, visual, and collaborative tools from the Change Planning Toolkit™ that are easily adapted to our new virtual work environment

Grab the ten free tools from the Change Planning Toolkit™ before purchasing a license so you can keep these three key frameworks front and center as you plan a more modular and conscious approach to managing the growing complexity in your organization:

PCC Change Readiness Framework
Organizational Agility Framework
Architecting the Organization for Continuous Change

Download the 10 Free Tools

Keep innovating!

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Charting Change – Kindle Price Reduction

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I’m super excited how well my new book Charting Change is doing on various Amazon sites around the world (USA, UK, CA, AU, DE, FR, JP)!

Charting Change has been the number one new release on Amazon for at least “Business Management” and “Production & Operations” so far. It also was the #2 new release for “Organizational Change” and probably #1 too (but I think I missed getting a screenshot).

The book is currently available on Kindle and as a hardcover, and I’m excited to announce that the publisher has reduced the price on the Kindle version to make it more accessible to people worldwide. More news on other ebook versions coming soon!

For those of you who already have the book, I hope you are enjoying it and leave an Amazon review when you finish! 🙂

Please feel free to ask questions about the book below.

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Charting Change – Now Available on Kindle

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I’m super excited to announce that my new book Charting Change is now available in English at various Amazon sites around the world (USA, UK, CA, AU, DE, FR, JP) with a traditional eBook coming soon!

The book is currently available on Kindle and as a hardcover. Unfortunately the eBook is still delayed. I’m trying to stay on top of the publisher to get it out as quickly as possible, so stay tuned!

I will announce on my blog here when the eBook and Nook versions are available for those who don’t have a Kindle.

For those of you who already have the book, I hope you are enjoying it and leave an Amazon review when you finish! 🙂

Please feel free to ask questions about the book below.

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What innovation hasn’t changed something?

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What innovation hasn't changed something? Can you think of a single innovation that didn’t change something?

I didn’t think so.

Innovation is change, or at least, innovation requires change.

In my role as an innovation keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, I recently led a German-based industrial company’s North American IT leadership team through an innovation workshop, during which we spent part of the time working to define their common language of innovation (as described in my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire). For companies looking to build a sustainable innovation capability this is an important first step.

One of the biggest reasons it is important to define innovation and to spend time creating a common language of innovation is that the word innovation means something different to every individual. It is very easy for companies to spin their wheels when people don’t have the same understanding of what constitutes innovation and what doesn’t.

Because of this danger, when working with companies to help build an innovation system I always make sure that we define what they want innovation to mean in their organization and what their vision, strategy and goals are going to be for innovation. This helps get everyone on the same page and causes people to start seeing some of the changes required in order to build a strong innovation capability in the organization.

Defining Innovation

As part of this most recent workshop discussion around what constitutes innovation I shared my definition of innovation and we worked together to create a definition that is going to fit their culture and their business.

My own personal definition of innovation is:

“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.”

I’ve worked pretty hard over the years to refine this definition, and I like my definition because it highlights a couple of inherent tensions and relationships that people must consider. These include:

Invention vs. innovation
Useful vs. valuable
The requirement for an innovation to be widely adopted
The requirement for an innovation to replace the existing solution

Because innovation requires change, a potential innovation must:

Create so much value that people are willing to go through the discomfort of abandoning or migrating away from their existing solution (even if it is the oft-ignored ‘do nothing’ solution);
At the same time, you must also do an outstanding job of helping people access that value through design, packaging, education, etc. so that the product or service is a delight to use and so that you potentially simultaneously increase the overall value of the solution;
And, finally you must provide a very clear value translation for your potential customers of how this new solution will fit into their lives and is worth the disruption that comes with adopting it.

For those of you familiar with my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, or with my other writings, you may recognize my Value Innovation Framework and my views on what it takes to achieve successful innovation captured in the above three points.

Organization Size and History Matters

Inside a large organization (or one with a longer history), a potential innovation often inflicts a lot of change on the organization. Inside a large organization or an organization with a longer history, the organization will have grown up around one or two initial solutions and built an infrastructure to maximize the success of those initial solutions. As a result, any potential innovation will often require knowledge, skills, and other resources in order to build and scale it that are new to the organization. This may involve building new distribution channels, hiring people with the necessary skills and expertise, and many more changes required to build the capabilities needed to make the potential innovation a success.

Inside a startup organization this is not the case, and this is the reason why it is often easier and faster for a startup to create and implement a potential innovation than an established company. Because everything is new, there is nothing to change, other than the minds of the customers in order to get them to replace their existing solution and the minds of potential partners to convince them to work with you. This is the advantage that startups have over existing companies.

But the disadvantage startups have is that startups usually have to spend more of their time chasing the funding they need to transform their idea into a realized innovation. Whether the advantages or the disadvantages are larger depends on the startup. And, whether the startup can beat the established organization depends on how good the established organization is at managing change, and how fast it can change.

Final Thoughts

Most of us work in established organizations that have either grown large because of successful leadership, strategic vision, efficient operations, and continuous improvement and innovation, or we work for an organization that has at least established some level of longevity as a going concern. This means that for most of us we MUST get better at change. We must accept change as a constant and as a key (along with innovation) to our organization continuing to thrive in a sea of rising global competition. We must also get FASTER at change.

One way to do this is to change HOW we change by embracing a new more visual, more collaborative approach to planning our change efforts using tools like my Change Planning Toolkit™. I will be introducing this toolkit in my new book Charting Change, releasing March 9, 2016. People who buy a copy of my book Charting Change will get access to the Change Planning Canvas™ and 25 other tools from the toolkit. As a special gift for everyone else, I will be making a series of 10 free downloads available on my web site from the 50+ frameworks, worksheets and other tools contained in the toolkit (including the popular Visual Project Charter™).

I hope it is now clear that to be successful at innovation that you must become better at change, and I encourage you all to do so!

This article originally appeared on the Planview blog

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Digital Transformation Matters

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Digital Transformation Matters

The pace of change is accelerating.

Much has changed since we all started to dial in with our modems and connect to online services like America Online or Compuserve and eventually directly onto the Internet and the World Wide Web. Elements of our digital world continue to invade our language and our consciousness.

“Text me later.”
“Skype me tomorrow.”
“Google it.”
“#hashtag”
“rtofl”

Whether we like it or not the physical world and the digital world, and people are more likely to freak out about leaving their mobile phone at home than their wallet. Soon you won’t even need to carry a wallet (unless you want to). Canada stopped making pennies. In Sweden many businesses no longer take cash. Have you tried buying a drink on an airplane lately? (no cash accepted there either)

We now live in a digital age.

Not because technology is new, but because the way we react to technology and interact with it is different.

We’ve had technology for a while, but we used it primarily for performing calculations, and then for information storage and retrieval. But now, because the computer has moved from being a machine in a lab programmed with punch cards, to something nearly every one of us carries in our pocket or wears on our wrist, we’re beginning to form relationships with machines and more importantly, to use our machines to form, maintain, and even deepen, our human relationships.

So what does this mean for you as a business person?

It means that people like me have to drag you kicking and screaming away from the way you’ve always done business, away from the way you’ve always structured your enterprise, away from the ways you’ve facilitated communication among employees and between you and your customers, partners, and suppliers and towards a fundamentally different way of organizing and operating your business.

Are you ready to do business in a digital way for the digital age?

No?

Well, your market is large and attractive to me and my digital native friends. While you struggle under the weight of your legacy systems and the denial that you must change how you think, change how you interact with customers, change how your business works inside, maybe we will re-imagine your business and your entire industry from the ground up with a collection of digital strategies that utilize the power of the digital mindset to more efficiently and effectively utilize people, process and technology with some venture capital backing to challenge the incumbents and put them out of business. People are fascinated with startups like Uber and with good reason, but they should also be looking at what established technology companies like Amazon are doing because you’re either have to think like a technology company or go out of business.

In my next article on digital transformation we will circle back to discuss Uber in a bit more detail as we explore the difference between a digital strategy and a digital transformation. Because they are not the same and are vastly different in what they require to be successful. The one thing they both have in common is that they will inflict change (in varying amounts) upon the organization, and with a more visual, collaborative approach to planning that change – like that enabled by the Change Planning Toolkit™ that I introduce in my new book Charting Change – you will increase your odds of beating the 70% change failure rate and successfully achieving your digital change goals.

Stay tuned!

This article originally appeared on Linkedin

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Most Companies Fail at Innovation Because…

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Most companies fail at innovation because they fail at change.

There you go, there is the entire article in a single sentence. Please click the like button or leave a comment on your way out, and I’ll turn out the lights.

I’m actually serious, but I didn’t come to this single sentence overnight, but through decades of research and experience. It coalesced however this morning in an interview with Chad McAllister that will air next month.

This sentence also highlights the reason why after writing the popular Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire (a book about innovation) and traveling the world delivering innovation keynotes and workshops, that my next book for Palgrave Macmillan (@PalgraveBiz) will be about change, not innovation.

Because after all, my life’s work is to help others change the world for the better by creating and sharing valuable tools and insights that hopefully serve to accelerate innovation and change in communities around the world.

I will continue on to say though that if you want to be successful at innovation you need to get better at planning, leading, managing, and maintaining change.

If you doubt the linkage, please check out my other article Managing Innovation is About Managing Change. This will give you a great example of how innovation inflicts change on the organization.

And if you’d like to learn more about making your organization more change capable, then I encourage you to check out my article Change the World – Step One, which is the first in a series of articles I will be publishing here in the run up to the launch of my book in January 2016 to help organizations build a stronger, more sustainable approach to change. This first article outlines the Four Keys to Successful Change, with much more content and a whole Change Planning Toolkit™ being released over the next few months.

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December Innovation Special

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As 2014 comes to a close and the holiday season continues, I thought I would make a special offer to event organizers in search of a last minute innovation speaker for a December or early January 2015 event AND to innovation managers looking to build strong momentum for their innovation efforts as we head into 2015.

Here is the offer:

Book me for an event occurring between December 5, 2014 and January 15, 2015 for either a:

60-90 minute Innovation Keynote
2-4 hour Innovation Workshop
1 Day Innovation Masterclass

… and I will include a box of fifty (50) signed copies of my popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for your attendees, at no additional charge.

P.S. In 2015 I will be launching a powerful new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit and a book, app, Quickstart Guide and eLearning to go with it. Please contact me if you are interested in getting advance access to this toolkit in exchange for being a case study for the book.

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