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 July’s ten most popular innovation posts:
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:
In today’s rapidly evolving world, the consulting landscape is undergoing a profound transformation. I was recently asked a series of questions to capture my thoughts on how the consulting industry and its employees will need to evolve to thrive in the coming years – including my thoughts on the creation of “superhero” consultants. The emergence of the “superhero” consultant is not merely a result of advanced tools and technologies, but rather the cultivation of essential skills and capabilities. As we navigate through this era of unprecedented change, it is imperative for consulting firms to foster a culture of flexibility, growth, and continuous learning. The future of consulting lies in the hands of those who can seamlessly integrate human expertise with artificial intelligence (AI), build meaningful connections in a hybrid work environment, and facilitate diverse perspectives to drive innovation. This article delves into the key attributes that will define the next generation of consultants and explores the obstacles that must be overcome to unlock their full potential.
Here are the questions:
1) What are the tools and technologies that a consultant should use to become a “superhero” consultant? Why are these specific tools/technologies important? How should these tools be used most effectively?
This is the wrong question. It is not tools and technologies that will enable “superhero” consultants, but instead the development of the right skills and capabilities. The future of consulting will require consulting firms to hire and develop employees that are:
Flexible and growth minded – the world is changing at an accelerating rate and consultants more than ever before will need to be lifelong learners, comfortable with knowledge gaps and eager to become an expert in something on behalf of the client with each new project
AI Taskmasters – the future of work is man and machine working together and consultants skilled at breaking down work to the right size (atomizing work) and assigning it to both human and AI workers
Socially Savvy – remote and hybrid work is here to stay and even clients have soured on having consultants travel in every week, so “superhero” consultants must excel at building connections and relationships via internal, external and client social tools to both distribute/execute work and to source new work
Skilled facilitators – as data and AI-generated work products become plentiful, sense-making rises in importance along with a diversity of perspectives – often in workshops facilitated by consultants
Open Sourced – gone are the days of rinse and repeat projects powered by proprietary frameworks and IP, instead “superhero” consultants will excel at identifying the right tools and frameworks to bring to bear – from FutureHacking™ to Design Thinking to the Change Planning Toolkit™
The capabilities of tools and technologies will grow over time and new ones will emerge. The best consultants will constantly be scanning the horizon for new tools, technologies, and capabilities and leverage the above skills and capabilities to unlearn and then re-learn the best ways to create value for their clients.
2) What are the biggest obstacles that prevent consultants from being able to access or learn the steps needed to become a “superhero” consultant? What should be done to remove these obstacles to help make this transformation easier for more consultants?
The biggest obstacles that prevent consultants from becoming “superheroes” are internal – to both the consultants themselves and the firms they work for. Companies will need to examine their own policies, procedures, and training programs to right-size them for this emerging new reality. Firms will need to allow consultants to pick the right frameworks, tools and technologies for addressing client challenges – instead of limiting them to those owned by the firm. Consultants will need to shift their mindset from being experts in a particular tool or technology and towards being masters of the above skills and capabilities and experts in achieving key client outcomes. Firms will need to invest in the training and the technology necessary to provide AI’s built for purpose to accelerate the ability of consultants to more efficiently and effectively solve client challenges. Firms will also need to update their tools and methods for capturing and sharing knowledge to leverage AI capabilities at the same time.
3) What specific areas of consulting (eg. IT, finance, marketing, etc.) have the greatest potential to produce this new brand of “superhero” consultants? Why?
This new brand of “superhero” consultants will excel in a number of different disciplines because they will be able to not only find more efficient and effective ways to execute work traditionally performed by consultants (technology implementations, analytical work, etc.), but as they are helping clients transform the ways they perform different types of work, they will also be able to help clients identify new activities that will be made possible by the transformation and the new technologies and ways of working they bring with it. The reason is their focus on building skills and capabilities into which tools and technologies plug in – somewhat interchangeably.
Conclusion
The journey to becoming a “superhero” consultant is not without its challenges, but the rewards are immense. By embracing a mindset of lifelong learning and adaptability, consultants can harness the power of emerging technologies to deliver unparalleled value to their clients. The future of consulting is not about rigid frameworks or proprietary tools, but about the ability to unlearn and relearn, to innovate and collaborate, and to drive meaningful change. As we look ahead, it is clear that the most successful consultants will be those who can navigate the complexities of a dynamic world with agility and foresight. Let us continue to push the boundaries of what is possible and strive to create a brighter future for the consulting industry. Keep innovating!
I have exciting news to share and I can finally reveal all the details.
I am teaming up with the HCL Digital Consulting practice to help clients design compelling experiences, organizational agility, and innovation capabilities at the front end of their digital transformations.
HCL’s Digital Consulting practice brings together decades of deep technology expertise with best in class consulting services that are global, outcome based, and people-focused. Our mission is to drive both transformation and continuous improvement, and to do it all at scale. We work as a partner alongside our clients to align technology needs with business goals — from strategy to execution — to deliver solutions that are:
Visionary — find what’s possible with strategic future focus
Pragmatic — actionable solutions right-sized
Empathetic — human-centered and business-minded approach
In our digital age, all companies must change how they think, how they interact with customers, partners, and suppliers, and how their business works on the inside. Customer, partner, and supplier expectations have changed, and a gap is opening between what they expect from their interaction with companies and what those companies are currently able to deliver. Companies must immediately work to close this expectation gap, or their entire business is at risk.
This success guide provides questions and frameworks for companies to use to plan and execute successful a Digital Transformation.
Live from the Innovation Studio comes EPISODE FOUR of a new ‘Ask the Consultant’ series of short form videos. EPISODE FOUR tackles a question I’m asked so frequently that I wrote a book to answer it:
“What is the best way to create successful change?”
Hint: It starts with getting a copy of Charting Change because I introduce in the book several key frameworks that lay the groundwork for successful change that are built upon in the Change Planning Toolkit™.
The pace of change is accelerating and organizations need to become more agile and more capable of continuous change. This presents a huge challenge for most organizations.
Together in this episode we’ll explore some of the core building blocks to creating successful change in your organization, and a discuss what else is in Charting Change and the Change Planning Toolkit™, and how this particular book can make a great course book for change management courses at universities, executive education, and corporate training programs.
Many of the tools in the optional Change Planning Toolkit™ will look familiar to change management professionals because they have been informed by the ACMP’s Standard for Change Management and the PMI’s PMBOK.
“Does the change you’re proposing inspire fear or curiosity? Fear steals energy from change; curiosity fuels it.”— Braden Kelley
Grab your copy of Charting Change on Amazon while they last!
What question should I tackle in the next video episode of “Ask the Consultant” live from my innovation studio?
Live from the Innovation Studio comes EPISODE THREE of a new ‘Ask the Consultant’ series of short form videos. EPISODE THREE aims to answer a question that many people struggle to answer or accurately discuss:
“What is digital transformation?”
Digital transformation is a complicated topic for people to speak intelligently about and to explore in depth because there is so much misinformation and confusion about what a digital transformation actually is – a lot of it espoused by technology vendors.
Together in this episode we’ll explore what digital transformation is by looking at two definitions that show what digital transformation is not.
1. Wikipedia’s bad definition of Digital Transformation
“Digital Transformation (DT or DX) is the adoption of digital technology to transform services or businesses, through replacing non-digital or manual processes with digital processes or replacing older digital technology with newer digital technology. Digital solutions may enable – in addition to efficiency via automation – new types of innovation and creativity, rather than simply enhancing and supporting traditional methods.”
— Wikipedia
2. This Definition of Digital Transformation Gets Closer But Still Isn’t Right
“Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It’s also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.”
— EnterprisersProject
So, let’s dig into what Digital Transformation really is …
A digital transformation is the journey between a company’s current business operations to a reimagined version of itself from the perspective of how a digital native would build the same business operations leveraging the latest technology and scientific understandings of management science, leadership, decision science, business and process architecture, design, customer experience, etc.
A digital transformation can only be successfully achieved if you put customers and employees at the center to create a human-centered data model and explore the intersection between what’s needed and what’s possible to simplify processes, reduce complexity, and to design elegant experiences.
The key thing to remember is that technology comes at the end, not the beginning, starts by making strategic choices, and focuses on identifying and building the needed capabilities to execute the new strategy.
Here is a quick review list of ten things to keep in mind for a successful digital transformation:
Reimagine your business from a digital native perspective
A Human-Centered Data Model (customers & employees)
Put your customers and employees at the center
Identify intersection of what’s needed & what’s possible
Simplify processes
Reduce complexity
Design elegant experiences
Technology comes at the END – not the beginning
Start by making strategic choices
Build capabilities needed to achieve your transformation
Live from the Innovation Studio comes EPISODE TWO of a new ‘Ask the Consultant’ series of short form videos. EPISODE TWO tackles the second most commonly asked question of me:
“How can I create continuous innovation in my organization?”
Hint: It starts with getting a copy of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire because I detail in the book how to overcome the key barriers to innovation.
Together in this episode we’ll explore how to create continuous innovation in your organization, why I wrote Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, and how it can make a great course book for innovation courses at universities, executive education, and corporate training programs.
“Innovation is never easy — and not always welcome. This book is dedicated to the men and women who dedicate their lives to pushing our organizations to make more efficient use of our human capital and natural resources and to make the world a better place.”
Live from the Innovation Studio comes EPISODE ONE of a new ‘Ask the Consultant’ series of short form videos. EPISODE ONE tackles the question people ask me more than any other:
“What is innovation?”
If you’d like to see additional potential definitions of innovation you can find 60+ additional innovation definitions here (sorry, link expired).
My definition of innovation, refined over the years, is the following:
“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing solution.” – Braden Kelley
The video above covers why I have defined innovation in this way, and why it is so important for every organization to have a clear definition of innovation that they disseminate WIDELY across the organization.
What question should I tackle in the next video episode of “Ask the Consultant” live from my innovation studio?
In a popular previous article we looked at the Top 10 Reasons Not to Innovate. In this article we will look at Ten Reasons You Might Suck at Innovation as we explore the following question:
Do you need an innovation intervention?
Unless you feel that your innovation program is a runaway success and exceeding your expectations, the answer might very well be…
yes.
Ten Reasons You Might Suck at Innovation
Nobody can articulate your definition of innovation (or you don’t have one)
Nobody can articulate your innovation vision/strategy/goals (or you don’t have them)
People struggle to tell the story of one or more innovations launched to wide adoption by the organization
Most of what passes as innovation inside the organization would actually be classified as improvements (not innovation) by people outside the organization
The organization no longer makes external innovation perspectives available to a wide audience
Nobody takes the time to participate in our innovation efforts anymore
Your organization is unable to accept insights and ideas from outside the organization and develop them into concepts that can be scaled to wide adoption
Innovation program leadership has difficulty getting time on the CEO’s calendar any more
Your innovation team is trying to do all of the innovating instead of helping to accelerate the innovation efforts of others
Your pace of innovation is slower than the organizations you compete with for market share, donations, votes, etc.
What is an innovation intervention?
An innovation intervention is a professionally directed, education process resulting in a face to face meeting of consultants, leaders and/or managers with the organization in trouble with innovation. People who struggle with innovation are often in denial about their situation and unwilling to seek treatment. They may not recognize the negative effects their behavior has on themselves and others. Intervention helps the person make the connection between their use of innovation and the problems in their organization. The goal of intervention is to present the innovation user with a structured opportunity to accept help and to make changes before things get even worse.
This may be a somewhat tongue in cheek adaptation of a definition from the substance abuse context*, but it’s almost scary how much I didn’t have to change in the switching of contexts. To make it easier for people to accept help, I came up with the Ten Reasons You Might Suck at Innovation above, and a service offering to hopefully fit within your purchasing authority and your budget (especially if you split it up into two installments of $4,999.99).
Purchasing an Innovation Intervention for $9,999.98 + expenses (or two payments of $4,999.99 + expenses) will get you a three day engagement including:
A cross-functional and/or cross-site innovation maturity study using my 50 question innovation audit, including analysis of the results, and presentation of the findings
One or two days on-site:
Seeing where and how your innovation happens
Conducting interviews to understand the structure of your innovation programs, processes, and other key elements of your innovation infrastructure
Walking through past innovation successes and failures
The balance of the three days will then be spent analyzing the on-site observations and creating a set of actionable recommendations
A 10% discount on any Disruptive Innovation Toolkit™ site license purchases for your organization
Together we’ll get your innovation efforts back on track towards success and build a foundation capable of sustaining continuous innovation. Forward-thinking organizations that haven’t begun an innovation program or a focus on innovation and want to get off to a strong start will be able to leverage the Innovation Intervention service too.
Image credit: calbaptist.edu
*Thanks to the NCADD (National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, Inc.) for the inspiration
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I came across this video recently thanks to my friends at BLT who recruit consultants for firms in London and beyond.
It pokes fun at the experience many internal and external consultants face with clients, whether we are working on an innovation project, technology project, or some other kind of project.
So, I encourage you to check out the video for a chuckle and to leave a comment below:
How does this reflect your experience of being called upon as an “expert” by a project team?
Or your experience working in the consulting industry and meeting with potential clients in a pre-sales situation as the subject matter expert there with the partner and/or sales guy?
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Meanwhile, the tireless invention and innovation efforts of research teams in companies around the world have helped to keep the pace of technological advancement in computer processing power at or above Moore’s Law for several decades. This has given technology companies the ability to put more computing power than the entire Apollo space program into the pockets of more than a billion people around the world.
It seems like everything has become digital, including music, books, and even movies. Increasingly intelligent digital technologies and mercurial customer expectations threaten both people and enterprise at every turn. With all of this technological change, the last few decades have been an amazing time for consultancies, full of revenue and opportunities. Clients desperate for solutions to help them cope with these challenging times helped management consulting firms grow in size and scale, expanding to cover multiple technology, and even marketing, specialties.
But the same technologies that have led to the growth of consulting companies over the last couple of decades, will begin to lead to a shrinking of those same consulting firms. The increasing diversification of the large global consultancies into other specialties is the first step to what is an inevitable shrinkage forced upon the industry by the three factors I detailed in my last article titled Consulting Industry Caught in the Crossfire.
The same forces that are causing a feeling of disequilibrium for the firms that consultancies serve are also causing the same unease, trepidation and challenge for the consulting firms themselves as they find themselves attacked on three sides from:
In my previous article on the Consulting Industry Attacked on Three Sides I looked at each attack in turn, but in this article I would like to dig a bit deeper into the final threat.
Artificial Intelligence
Roboadvisors, chatbots, and other implementations of artificial intelligence have captured people’s imaginations and led to both an increase in the number of articles written about artificial intelligence, but also in the practical implementations of artificial intelligence. People are becoming increasing comfortable with artificial intelligence thanks to the recommendation engines on Amazon and Netflix and IBM Watson’s appearance on the game show Jeopardy and battles against chess grandmasters.
But what does consulting have to fear from artificial intelligence?
Perhaps viewing this short video might give you a glimpse:
In the short run, maybe consultants don’t have as much to fear from artificial intelligence as workers in transportation, retail, or manufacturing. But, in the grander scheme of things, over time enterprising technology vendors will inevitably build upon publicly available artificial intelligence frameworks made publicly available by companies like Microsoft and Google (who are seeking to increase the sale of cloud services) to automate some of the tasks that recently minted undergraduate analysts or Indians perform now for the large consulting firms.
What we are starting to see is exactly what Roger Martin described in his landmark book The Design of Business, from which I would like to highlight one of the key concepts called The Knowledge Funnel highlighted in the image from the book below.
Source: The Design of Business by Roger Martin
The key point here is that as we understand our business and our interactions with our customers well enough, what was once a mystery we start to identify patterns inside of (heuristics), which then eventually allows us to create algorithms that can be captured in Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) and then eventually in code. The power of artificial intelligence is the ability to move the role of the machine to the left in The Knowledge Funnel, away from pure manual coding by a human, to computer programs that write themselves and eventually to heuristic identification and algorithm creation at some point in the near future. This is what crowd computing, machine learning and deep learning ultimately make possible, and which I explored in a previous article titled Welcome to the Crowd Computing Revolution in more detail. The fact remains that as computer programmers and the artificial minds they create become more adept at watching the work that consultants do and recognizing the patterns in their recommendations, the pressure on consultancies will build.
Conclusion
These are challenging times for large consultancies and small independent consultants as consultancies are forced respond to these attacks from three sides. Part of that three-pronged attack will come from a growing legion of automation engineers taking to cubicles around the world to design people out of jobs. In the same way that mechanical engineers build robots to replace our human muscles with machine muscles, automation engineers are computer programmers tasked with creating inexpensive machine minds with sufficient artificial intelligence to replace our more expensive human minds. Professions like that of the automation engineer will attract increasing numbers from workforces around the world, but not nearly enough to offset the losses in job opportunities that these individuals are tasked with eliminating. Only time will tell how quickly and how broadly artificial intelligence (AI) threatens the core business of consultancies.
If you are in the consulting industry, what is your strategy for responding to this threat?
Because, make no mistake, the threat is real. The only question is how quickly it will materially impact your bottom line.
BONUS:
You might enjoy this interview with David Cope, the creator of Emi (Emily Howell) the algorithmic composer, whom he later killed:
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Drum roll please…
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In a popular previous article we looked at the 
Source: The Design of Business by Roger Martin