Human-Centered Change and Innovation loves making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because we truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources there will be.
As a result, we are eternally grateful to all of you out there who take the time to create and share great innovation articles, presentations, white papers, and videos with Braden Kelley and the Human-Centered Change and Innovation team. As a small thank you to those of you who follow along, we like to make a list of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers available each year!
Nominations are now closed.
Our lists from the ten previous years have been tremendously popular, including:
Do you just have someone that you like to read that writes about innovation, or some of the important adjacencies – trends, consumer psychology, change, leadership, strategy, behavioral economics, collaboration, or design thinking?
Human-Centered Change and Innovation is now looking for the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022.
The deadline for submitting nominations is December 24, 2022 at midnight GMT.
Nominations are now closed, but people were able to submit a nomination in either of these two ways:
Sending us the name of the blogger and the url of their blog by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Sending the name of the blogger and the url of their blog and your e-mail address using our contact form
(Note: HUGE bonus points for being a contributing author)
So, think about who you like to read and let us know by midnight GMT on December 24, 2022.
We will then compile a voting list of all the nominations, and publish it on December 25, 2022.
Voting will then be open from December 25, 2022 – January 1, 2023 via comments and twitter @replies to @innovate.
The ranking will be done by me with influence from votes and nominations. The quality and quantity of contributions by an author to this web site will be a contributing factor.
Contact me with writing samples if you’d like to publish your articles on our platform!
The official Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022 will then be announced on here in early January 2023.
We’re curious to see who you think is worth reading!
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
Human-Centered Change and Innovation loves making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because we truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources there will be.
As a result, we are eternally grateful to all of you out there who take the time to create and share great innovation articles, presentations, white papers, and videos with Braden Kelley and the Human-Centered Change and Innovation team. As a small thank you to those of you who follow along, we like to make a list of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers available each year!
Our lists from the ten previous years have been tremendously popular, including:
Do you just have someone that you like to read that writes about innovation, or some of the important adjacencies – trends, consumer psychology, change, leadership, strategy, behavioral economics, collaboration, or design thinking?
Human-Centered Change and Innovation is now looking for the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022.
The deadline for submitting nominations is December 24, 2022 at midnight GMT.
You can submit a nomination either of these two ways:
Sending us the name of the blogger and the url of their blog by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Sending the name of the blogger and the url of their blog and your e-mail address using our contact form
(Note: HUGE bonus points for being a contributing author)
So, think about who you like to read and let us know by midnight GMT on December 24, 2022.
We will then compile a voting list of all the nominations, and publish it on December 25, 2022.
Voting will then be open from December 25, 2022 – January 1, 2023 via comments and twitter @replies to @innovate.
The ranking will be done by me with influence from votes and nominations. The quality and quantity of contributions by an author to this web site will be a contributing factor.
Contact me with writing samples if you’d like to publish your articles on our platform!
The official Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022 will then be announced on here in early January 2023.
We’re curious to see who you think is worth reading!
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
Recently I had the opportunity to interview Mauro Porcini, author of the new book The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People.
Mauro Porcini is PepsiCo’s first ever Chief Design Officer. He joined the food & beverage corporation in 2012 and in said role he is infusing design thinking into PepsiCo’s culture and is leading a new approach to innovation by design that impacts the company’s product platforms and brands, which include Pepsi, Lay’s, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Sodastream, Doritos, Lifewtr, Bubly, Aquafina, Cheetos, Quaker, 7Up, Mirinda, amongst many others. His focus extends from physical to virtual expressions of the brands, including product, packaging, events, advertising, fashion and art collaborations, retail activation, architecture, and digital media.
The interview dives into multiple aspects of innovation and design, including risk management, incremental versus disruptive innovation, the importance of language, meaning, and more.
Without further ado, here is the video recording:
Thanks to you Mauro for sharing your insights with our global human-centered change and innovation community!
To learn more about Mauro’s views on the importance of our humanity to design and innovation, grab yourself a copy of his new book The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People.
If you are more of a reader, then WITH FAIR WARNING, below you will find the questions I asked Mauro and a RAW TRANSCRIPT pulled directly out of YouTube without punctuation, etc. for the brave of heart.
I’m sorry, but it’s the best I can do right now. Here is the RAW, UNPUNCTUATED TRANSCRIPT of our interview:
1. Why is there no innovation without risk?
First of all thanks for having me it’s a pleasure to be here with you today why there is no innovation with our risk because the moment you change the status quo the moment you take anything it could be a product a brand
And experience a service anything and you modify uh its nature you modify that thing to take you to another status by definition you don’t know exactly uh what is going to happen you cannot control all the variables even just the fact that by modifying uh the solution people will react to it in a variety of different ways there is a wonderful um author and philosopher from Italy that inspired me since I was a child his name
Is pirandel and he wrote a book that in Italian was called Uno nesuno centonida I do remember exactly how they translated the title in English is available in many different languages but literally it means one nobody one hundred thousand and it talks about how we are one person but then eventually we are seen by the people surrounding Us in so many
Different ways and so we are 100 000 different people for all the people looking at us and interacting with us and seeing something different in us and then it goes on saying well because of this you know if you’re not yourself anymore and you are all those hundreds of thousands of interpretation uh you become nobody now we don’t need to think about this third iteration and this idea of nobody but that inspired me since I was very young because this is true for
Us as people but this is true also for anything we do as designers innovators entrepreneurs brand leaders we create something but we have no idea how that something is going to be interpreted by the people out there how they’re gonna use it they could spin it in One Direction in the other direction and so by definition when we create something we need to try to understand as much as possible the people in front of us their needs their wants their dreams and then
We need to really Buffet we need to do a proposal Ernesto juice Monday the founder of the lighting company are telling me that is Iconic you know premium luxury lighting firm used to say I don’t create solutions for people I create proposals and we’ll see how they will go obviously you know I try to manage the risk of The Proposal I try to control all the variables but we need to understand that we are Innovative and we’re really innovating we are need to
Be ready to take risk and we need to manage the risk with all the tools that we can with data we research with our knowledge but at the end of the day we need to be ready to take the risk and we also need to be ready therefore to manage the risk I used to work in 3M and the famous iconic CEO of 3M for many many years William McKnight used to say that once again there is not Innovation with our risk he was saying essentially the same thing and therefore we need to
Manage risk in the culture of the common we need to be okay with missteps with mistakes with failures or as I like to call them with experiments we need to be ready to embed the idea of failure slash experiment in our financial algorithms and we need to make sure that if somebody make an experiment that doesn’t go in the right direction by the way an experiment that by definition is all about testing and ideas so in any direction it goes is probably the right
Direction but you understand what I’m talking about when somebody makes an experiment proceed eventually by people as a failure or a mistake we don’t crucify the person we actually celebrate eventually the learning coming out of the misstep and we need to put in place also and ecosystem our processes and tools to extract as much learning out of that misstep and share the learn with the rest of the organization
Yeah I think I think it’s very important that that last Point especially that you just made around learning is the the key thing that you’re trying to achieve with any experiment and you can learn uh from success and failure and you know most of the time we we focus on trying to eliminate risk but I think you’re right that it’s key to not only manage it but manage the acceptance of the risk so so building upon that
2. You say innovation should start from our personal lives, but we also frequently say in design thinking that ‘you are not the customer’. How do you reconcile the two?
I love this question and nobody asked me this question yet I love it for a reason in the American culture of design that is the cultural design that essentially took to fame the idea of this I think you know and celebrated the idea of the same thinking I think there is somehow
And misunderstanding about what design thinking really is because we’ve been celebrating so much the processes the tools the ways of working uh that we think that is enough to bring in a consultant do a workshop on this and thinking all of a sudden now everybody knows the methodology we can do design think we can solve the problems of the world with that we think that we can bring in a design leader in these organizations and somehow
Introduce the idea of the same thinking and once again we’ll solve everything and the reality is that design thinking is not just a tool it’s not just about the tool eventually if you want to identify the same thinking as a methodology it’s not just about that there is the design thinker behind that and so there is all this conversations about the fact that you need to somehow detach yourself from uh the product the brand experience you
Need to focus everything on your end user or your customer or your consumer on the people you serve I like to call them people human beings and and so a lot of people think that you need to remove the sensitivity of the design The Poetry of the design the ability of the designer to understand those insights to observe people and translate that into poetry
Translate that into something that is unique that is different you know you can observe a reality in a neutral way as much as you want but at the end of the day if you put 20 people observing the same reality in the same way these 20 people we create solutions that are 20 times different on the base of their sensitivity and this is great we need to say that we need to preserve that is so important to understand that the touch of the design
Interpretation of the designer you know how the designer translates something that is objective that is neutral that is read about understanding the people you have in front of you but then add color nuances poetry as I called it earlier to make it magic to make it unique and this is the reason why you cannot replace designers with artificial intelligence at least until artificial intelligence
Will be able to replace human beings but then you know replacing designers or innovators will be the last of the problems or Humanity because artificial intelligence will think that you don’t need Humanity at all because we are totally in efficient in this plan I think we are destroying you know our society and our planet but before we get there hopefully we will never get there this sensitivity of the person the human being is something
We want to save and we need to stop talking about design thinking and Innovation processes as processes that need to be just objective and neutral without realizing the importance of having human beings with their emotions and their interpretations in these processes this is so clear when you are in a startup when you are a star designer to design a chair or a piece of light they make the difference as the
Entrepreneur make the difference in a subtop and then we work in corporations we work a scale and we forget the importance of the human being with a unique approach and sensitivity that can transform a cold data an observation that is available to anybody out there in Magic The Magic that make your company grow the magic that add shoulder value to your stock the magic the set you apart from competition yeah very very great points I think that
Too often people get lost in the idea of design thinking as a process when it’s more about a mindset and like you said the magic that that comes from identifying that key human insight and then doing something interesting with it
3. Why is incremental innovation no longer enough?
Incremental Innovation is safer and is a stable way to keep your company going to keep it up to speed and to progress towards something bigger and
Better so we need that is not enough because we live in a world that is continuously disrupted by new things in the world of business that means that we have so many new companies new brands new products coming in in their business reality competing with our products and brands in our life it means that there are so many things changing all the time and we live in total uncertainty and therefore
The ability to change and to flex and eventually to these wraps is part of this new ecosystem we live in is becoming many situations for you know many people uh in many companies even a condition for survival you know if you’re a person you lose your job or you’re attacked by a virus or something happen imagine you’re like you need to be able to disrupt and and and and this is creating so much anxiety in this Society is so much an
Exciting in companies as well but let’s go back to you know the context of business in companies we live in a world where today anybody can come up with an idea get easy access to funding through their proliferation of investment funds and all platforms like kickstarter.com where you can crowdfund your idea the Custom Manufacturing is going down driven by globalization and new technologies you can go straight to the people you serve what I like to call
People and other person called consumers through the e-commerce platforms to sell them stuff and through social media to promote your ideas and products in all these areas the companies of the past were building their huge barriers to entry middle scale of production distribution and communication it was so difficult to go compete with a big brand with a big company for the man and the woman on the street today they can and so the big and the small are left with
Just one solution they need to focus on the needs and wants of people and create something extraordinary for them the way we are trying to do that at PepsiCo is to think of a future uh where you know understand what is the future understand the societal diffusion understand the freedom marriage category of the future and understand what kind of Road PepsiCo could play in in the future and then understand what kind of product portfolio we need
To have to be ready to the Future so already that thinking is somehow disruptive or generates idea that are disruptive then you need to figure out how to use them this kind of ideas inform our Innovation strategy in turn developing things in-house it informs our partnership and you venture strategy it informs our acquisition strategy so you need to find ways to be disruptive in a strategic way
To be ready to a war that is Shifting and changing in the speed of light and the normal cycle of innovation based on incremental linear innovation don’t work as well as they used to work because of the speed of change it doesn’t mean you need to develop everything from within it means that you need to develop an innovation strategy that then can find different kind of outputs you can do everything by
Yourself you can do it with Partners out there or you can eventually make Acquisitions as well if you are a company I can afford it and this is by the way interesting because in the startup kind of world we live in the acquisition strategy is what many of these are Tabs are looking for so it’s a health ecosystem where you have entrepreneurs eventually build up new things new ideas and you have corporations at a certain point are
Alive and work with them so is is a very interesting new scenario but both the beginners model need to understand how to combine incremental Innovation with more disruptive innovation and thinking definitely definitely and that that’s uh that’s a very important point that without companies seeking to acquire startups then fewer startups would it would exist because they wouldn’t see that as an exit um very cool so uh let’s go back to
Something that you spoke about there just recently there which is …
4. What is the harm in calling people consumers?
Look I studied design in school we would never call the people we designed for consumers it would be so weird and we’re calling them eventually users most of the time people human being we were talking already back then 30 years ago about human centricity but not as a nobody thing it was just the way we were doing things and so if you
Call People’s consumers you’re gonna face that you’re gonna focus on the idea of selling them stuff obviously I mean you look at them as entity buying your product and you want to make money on by the way on top of it you’re gonna categorize people and reduce people to the area of consuming but you know what me you my wife my daughter my friends we do so much more in life than just consuming you know we do so many more things and I
Don’t want companies and Brands to look at me as a consuming being I want to have companies and Brands looking at me as a human being for who I am if you call them users at least you’re gonna focus on the use of the product you’re offering them and so you’re gonna try to satisfy the needs that they have and create products that are functionally relevant and desirable but if you look at them as people as
Human beings you’re gonna go above and beyond you’re going to think about them holistically you’re gonna think about them as people you care about people you love you know the subtitle of the book is people in love with people and when you love somebody could be your kids your wife your husband your significant other your parents and your friends what do you do well you try to do more you try to really make these people happy to do
Magic and expect that you want to make sure that you are serving them at 360 degrees and this is you know the mindset and the culture you build in your company if you stop calling them consumers or even users I used to have to call them for who they are people human beings it changed completely words are powerful and and a word can help you shaping the culture of an organization call them people and you will have armies of other people in love with
People trying to create something extraordinary for them is the product is the brand is the service you’re not going to be happy just with something that is good enough because it’s profitable and people are buying it you’re gonna try always to create something that is extraordinary because you want first of all to make people happy now this was a luxury in the past eventually for companies today is a need and is a must because of the
Competitive landscape we live in with barriers to entry crumbling down under the Winds of globalization new technologies and digital media and therefore the need of this company is already creating something extraordinary in all the different dimensions because if you have one of few areas or weakness that in the past you could protect your barriers to entry today are exactly the entry point for your competitors to come and erode your market share your mind
Share your love share with your with the people you serve well I think I think those are all uh very important points that you have to bring it away from the ACT to consumption and back to the the whole person if you really want to connect with the people that you’re looking to to serve and to bring value and meaning to uh speaking of meaning what does it take my dog that is crying usually stays on the desk with me one of the two and now it’s not but it cannot come out by itself
5. What does it take to make a design meaningful?
Every time we create a product um or any solution in general somehow we are touching the life of these people in a variety of different
Ways and we can add um convenience safety Beauty style and a variety of other values to the life of these people or on the opposite direction we can make the life of these people and I’m we can create complications to their lives we can make it challenging and difficult therefore when we create something we should always be driven by this idea of creating something that is relevant to them
And relevant to the company you know I I and and so I Define this relevance through a series of principles of meaningful design that I talk about in the book there are two foundational principles that are one the idea of creating something that is functional that is emotional and is semiotic so it fulfilled a specific functional need it creates uh engagement and emotional level between you and the product in the
Quran and then somehow it represents you as a semiotic value it tells a story about you to the rest of the world and then the other foundational principle is that the the solution should be essentially and I synthetizing in a way you know but new unique different uh from anything out there then there are a series of other principles that somehow take you the level down and give you a direction on how to design these products the product should be
Sustainable from aesthetic standpoint from a functional standpoint from an equal ecological standpoint from a social standpoint respectful of people um from a emotional stem points from a financial statement there are a series of um values and I call it sustainable meaning that you need to think about your portfolio of products and Solutions in time it needs to be it needs to add all these different layers of value over
Time uh it’s not just about fulfilling a solution I need in the short term but really thinking about how the solution is sustainable over time and now you need to be ready to change over time to create something extraordinary for them Then There are a series of other clarifying principles but I invite you to have a look at the book it will be a longer story but he told you know those principles are really about the sensitivity of the designer and some of
The things we discussed earlier in this conversation uh about the fact that design is not just about the cold solution to a problem to a product but it’s a story that is the sensitivity of of uh the the the designer or the entrepreneur or anybody coming up with a lady and creating the solution behind that very good that that story is definitely challenging to create I’m sure
6. Why do we work so hard as human beings to get the right answers to the wrong questions? How can we do better?
Well often we live our lives personal lives as well as our professional lives answering to expectations that come from order and so here you are and they tell you
Well you need to do this and to do that you need to you know have certain steps in your life and you’re like okay this is what they’re asking me to do I comply I go to high school I go to university I get married eventually I do certain things that Society expect me to do you go to a job and they tell you this is your job description I hire you because of this and then later on they tell you well this is your project this is the brief
And what most of the people do is answering the brief working within the boundaries of the job description living within the boundaries of those expectations of society there are some people though and usually this is the mindset of the innovator the challenge the convention the challenge the question the challenge the brief not for the sake of challenging but just because they want to understand better they want to understand if what
They ask to do is the right thing to do for them but also for the people asking the people being your boss the company or even Society do we live in the right Society should we challenge the conventions of this Society is my job description great for my company or I could do more than that to really help the company in ways that the company doesn’t even realize is the question in the brief the right one
Or actually they should ask me something else because if I just answer the question I’m gonna generate a series of answers that are great that are right but the question is wrong and therefore by definition also those right answers will be wrong won’t have value as an example is an example I make in the book as well imagine they ask you to design a bridge and many people would be like okay they asked me to design a bridge so I’m going
To design a bridge and I’m going to design a bridge to these beautiful that is functionally unbelievable and and I I’m gonna generate you know a series of bridges and they will be incredible designers and Engineers that we generate beautiful and super functional bridges that we all admire and they’re very iconic but the real innovator and by the way the philosopher the child will ask why
Here I am with another dog just a second she’s well uh the real innovator as well as the philosopher and a child they all ask why is typical of the philosopher to ask why and then again why again why is a technique to arrive to their root cause to the primary cause of everything the children do the same for other reasons and so once when you start to apply you will figure out in the case of the bridge that first of all
Yes you need to move from A to B why do I need a bridge of course you need to move from one side of the river to the other side of the river but then you ask again why why do I need to move on the other side of the river and they will tell you what because in the other side of the river there is the hospital and therefore the people of this town they need to take a bridge to arrive in a convenient way to the hospital if you stop there
Immediately you will think well maybe the bridge is the solution but maybe I can invent something else maybe I’m going to invent a sort of drone that you can write that can make each person real time super quick much faster than taking a car and going on a bridge arriving to the other side of the river so already that is an innovation instead of Designing a bridge you’re designing a machine that can fly it can take you to the hospital
But if you keep asking why maybe you arrive to realize that actually you don’t need the hospital on the other side you know the hospital is there but you can build an Hospital on this side of the river and so instead of Designing yet another Bridge you’re gonna design an hospital that is by far better Solutions because these people can have right much faster to the hospital when they did it than taking a bridge and going to the other side of the river
This is a very banal example very simplistic example to show how often we keep creating solutions for problems that are not the right ones to solve and if we will question the challenge the brief who arrive to something very different I did this all my life because of a man that with these behaviors and the way he was conducting business somehow taught me the kind of mindset it was my partner in the agency I created many years ago his name is Claudio a
Famous shoe business producer imagine like meeting Jay-Z here in the United States when you’re 24 and creating a company with this person so that’s what happened to me and I learned by observing him how he would challenge everything and every time thinking how can I do something different from uh what I did you know even himself before or from what everybody else did before and he was using this technique of always trying to understand the root
Causes and how you could really create something relevant for people in a different way and so with that kind of mindset I joined 3M I joined PepsiCo and I started with challenging my own job description creating something different in the way I was interpreting my job they were asking me to design products mostly the aesthetic side of a product a 3M I created the chief design officer position over time doing much more than what they were asking me and I thought
I’d be in so much more value for the company than if I was just designing the style of those two products they asked me to design when I was 27.
Image credits: Pixabay, Mauro Porcini
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How many times have you said or heard that? It’s how most innovation efforts start. It’s a statement that reflects leaders’ genuine desire to return to the “good ol’ days” when the company routinely created and launched new products and enjoyed the publicity and growth that followed.
But what does it mean to be more innovative?
Innovation’s ABCs
A is for Architecture
Architecture includes most of the elements people think of when they start the work to become more innovative – strategy, structure, processes, metrics, governance, and incentives.
Each of these elements answers fundamental questions:
Strategy: Why is innovation important? How does it contribute to our overall strategy?
Structure: Who does the work of innovation?
Process: How is the work done?
Metrics: How will we know when we’re successful? How will we measure progress?
Governance: Who makes decisions? How and when are decisions made?
Incentives: Why should people invest their time, money, and political capital? How will they be rewarded?
When it comes to your business, you can answer all these questions. The same is true if you’re serious about innovation. If you can’t answer the questions, you have work to do. If you don’t want to do the work, then you don’t want to be innovative. You want to look innovative*.
B is for Behavior
Innovation isn’t an idea problem. It’s a leadership problem.
Leaders that talk about innovation, delegate it to subordinates and routinely pull resources from innovation to “shore up” current operations don’t want to be innovative. They want to look innovative.
Leaders who roll up their sleeves and work alongside innovation teams, ask questions and listen with open minds, and invest and protect innovation resources want to be innovative.
To be fair, it’s incredibly challenging to be a great leader of both innovation and operations. It’s the equivalent of writing equally well with your right and left hands. But it is possible. More importantly, it’s essential.
C is for Culture
Culture is invisible, pervasive, and personal. It is also the make-or-break factor for innovation because it surrounds innovation architecture, teams, and leaders.
Culture can expand to encourage and support exploration, creativity, and risk-taking. Or it can constrict, unleashing antibodies that swarm, suffocate, and kill anything that threatens the status quo.
Trying to control or change culture is like trying to hold water in your fist. But if you let go just a bit, create the right conditions, and wait patiently, change is possible.
Easy as 123
The most common mistake executives make in the pursuit of being “more innovative” is that they focus on only A or only B or only C. But, as I always tell my clients, the answer is “and, not or.”
Start with Architecture because it’s logical, rational, and produces tangible outputs like org charts, process flows, and instruction manuals filled with templates and tools. Architecture is comforting because it helps us know what to do and how.
Use Architecture to encourage Behavior because the best way to learn something is to do it. With Architecture in place (but well before it’s finished), bring leaders into the work – talking to customers, sharing their ideas, and creating prototypes. When leaders do the work of innovation, they quickly realize what’s possible (and what’s not) and are open to learning how to engage (behave) in a way that supports innovation.
Leverage Architecture and Behavior to engage Culture by creating the artifacts, rituals, and evidence that innovation can happen in your company, is happening and will continue to happen. As people see “innovation” evolve from a buzzword to a small investment to “the way we do business,” their skepticism will fade, and their support will grow.
Just like the Jackson 5 said
ABC, It’s easy a 123
Architecture, behavior, culture – they’re all essential to enabling an innovation capability that repeatedly creates new revenue.
And while starting with architecture, building new leadership behaviors, and investing until the culture changes isn’t easy, it’s the 123 steps required to “be more innovative.”
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
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You have, no doubt, seen the design squiggle. The ubiquitous scribble is all loopy and knotty in the beginning until it finally sorts itself into a straight line by the end.
It illustrates the design process – “the journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution” – and its elegant simplicity has led it to be adopted by all sorts of other disciplines, including innovation.
But when I showed it to a client, her immediate response was, “It’s Jeremy Bearimy!”*
Wha????
And that is how I discovered The Good Place, a sitcom about four humans who die, go to The Good Place, and struggle to learn what it means to be good.
The show, created by Michael Schur of The Office and Parks and Recreation fame, is a brilliant treatise on ethics and moral philosophy. It also contains valuable wisdom about what innovators need to succeed.
Questions
With all due respect, “It’s the way it’s always been done” is an excuse that’s been used for hundreds of years to justify racism, misogyny…
Tahani Al-Jamil
This quote was a gut punch from the show’s fourth and final season. As innovators, we often hear people ask why change is needed. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” they proclaim.
But sometimes it is broke, and we don’t know it. At the very least, it can always be better.
So, while “it’s the way it’s always been done” at your company probably (hopefully) doesn’t include racism, misogyny, sexism, and other genuinely horrible things, framing the status quo as an enabler of those horrors is a harsh wake-up call to the dangers of an unquestioning commitment to continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done.
Decisions (not just Ideas)
If you’re always frozen in fear and taking too long to figure out what to do, you’ll miss your opportunity, and maybe get sucked into the propeller of a swamp boat.
Jason Mendoza
Even though Jason Mendoza is the resident idiot of The Good Place, he occasionally (and very accidentally) has moments of profound insight. This one to a situation that innovators are all too familiar with – analysis paralysis.
How often do requests for more data, more (or more relevant) benchmarks, or input from more people slow down decisions and progress? These requests are rarely rooted in doubt about the data, benchmarks, or information you presented. They are rooted in fear – the fear of making the wrong decision, being blamed or shamed, and losing a reputation or even a job.
But worse than being wrong, blamed, shamed, or unemployed is missing an opportunity to radically improve your business, team, or even the world. It’s the business equivalent of getting sucked into the propeller of a swamp boat.
Actions (not just decisions)
In football, trying to run out the clock and hoping for the best never works. It’s called “prevent defense.” You don’t take any chances and just try and hold on to your lead. But prevent defense just PREVENTS you from winning! It’s always better to try something.
Jason Mendoza
Jason does it again, this time invoking a lesson learned from his beloved Jacksonville Jaguars.
Few companies publicly admit to adopting a prevent defense, even though most companies engage in it. They play prevent defense when they don’t invest in innovation, focus exclusively on maintaining or incrementally improving what they currently do, or confine their innovation efforts to events like hackathons and shark tanks.
Incremental improvements and innovation theater keep you competitive. But they won’t get you ahead of the competition or make you a leader in your industry. In fact, they prevent it by making you feel good and safe when you’re really just running out the clock.
Perseverance
Come on, you know how this works. You fail and then you try something else. And you fail again and again, and you fail a thousand times, and you keep trying because maybe the 1,001st idea might work. Now, I’m gonna and try to find our 1,001st idea.
Michael
It’s hard to explain this quote without sharing massive spoilers, so let’s just say that The Good Place is an experiment that fails. A lot.
But it’s also an experiment that generates profound learning and universe-altering changes, things that would not have been possible without the failures.
Yes, smart innovators know when to kill a project. They also know when to try one more time. Wise innovators know the difference.
One final bit of wisdom
Innovation is hard. You will run into more resistance than expected, and things will rarely work out as planned. As long as you keep trying and learning, you won’t fail.
To paraphrase Jason Mendoza (again), you’re not a failed innovator, you’re pre-successful.
*For those of you who are, like I was, unfamiliar with Jeremy Bearimy, here’s a clip explaining it (WARNING: SPOILERS)
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It just landed on your desk. Or maybe you campaigned to get it. Or perhaps you just started doing it. How the title of “Innovation Leader” got to your desk doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that it’s there, along with a budget and loads of expectations.
Of course, now that you have the title and the budget, you need a team to do the work and deliver the results.
Who should you look for? The people that perform well in the current business, with its processes, structures, and (relative) predictability, often struggle to navigate the constant uncertainty and change of innovation. But just because someone struggles in the process and structure of the core business doesn’t mean they’ll thrive creating something new.
What are the qualities that make someone a successful innovator?
70 answers
A lot of people have a lot to say about the qualities and characteristics that make someone an innovator. When you combine the first four Google search results for “characteristics of an innovator” with the five most common innovation talent assessments, you end up with a list of 70 different (and sometimes conflicting) traits.
The complete list is at the end of this article, but here are the characteristics that appeared more than once:
Curious
Persistent
Continuously reflective
Creative
Driven
Experiments
Imaginative
Passionate
It’s a good list, but remember, there are 62 other characteristics to consider. And that assumes that the list is exhaustive.
+1 Answer
It’s not. Something is missing.
There is one characteristic shared by every successful innovator I’ve worked with and every successful leader of innovation. It’s rarely the first (or second or third) word used to describe them, but eventually, it emerges, always said quietly, after great reflection and with dawning realization.
Vulnerability.
Whether you rolled your eyes or pumped your fist at the word made famous by Brene Brown, you’ve no doubt heard it and formed an opinion about it.
Vulnerability is the “quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally.” Without it, innovation is impossible.
Innovation requires the creation of something new that creates value. If something is new, some or all of it is unknown. If there are unknowns, there are risks. Where there are risks, there is the possibility of being wrong, which opens you up to attack or harm.
When you talk to people to understand their needs, vulnerability allows you to hear what they say (versus what you want them to say).
In brainstorming sessions, vulnerability enables you to speak up and suggest an idea for people to respond to, build on, or discard.
When you run experiments, vulnerability ensures that you accurately record and report the data, even if the results aren’t what you hoped.
Most importantly, as a leader, vulnerability inspires trust, motivates your team, engages your stakeholders, and creates the environment and culture required to explore, learn, and innovate continuously.
n + 1 is the answer
Just as you do for every job in your company, recruit the people with the skills required to do the work and the mindset and personality to succeed in your business’ context and culture.
Once you find them, make sure they’re willing to be vulnerable and support and celebrate others’ vulnerability. Then, and only then, will you be the innovators your company needs.
Here’s the full list of characteristics:
Action-oriented, gets the job done
Adaptable
Ambitious
Analytical, high information capacity, digs through facts
Remember when companies competed fiercely on product features, then on service quality? Today, that battlefield has shifted. We live squarely in the Experience Economy, a landscape where customers don’t just buy what you sell; they invest in the emotions, the convenience, the sense of belonging, and the holistic journey your brand orchestrates. From that initial flicker of interest to long after a transaction, every single touchpoint shapes their perception, their loyalty, and their willingness to advocate for you.
As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I’ve witnessed organizations stumble when they cling to old paradigms. In this new reality, your competitive edge is no longer just about what you create, but about **how you make people feel**. And the most powerful methodology to master this nuanced art is **Design Thinking.**
Design Thinking is not a fleeting trend or a niche methodology for creative agencies. It’s a profound, empathetic shift in problem-solving that places human needs, desires, and behaviors at its absolute core. It’s an iterative, non-linear process that challenges ingrained assumptions, reframes complex problems, and propels teams to discover truly innovative solutions that resonate deeply with the people they serve.
To truly flourish in the Experience Economy, organizations must transcend a mere feature-list mentality and adopt a holistic, human-centric approach. Design Thinking equips them to build solutions that embody these critical outcomes:
Profound Empathy & Insight: It forces you to step into your users’ shoes, understanding their motivations, pain points, and unspoken desires through deep ethnographic research, immersive interviews, and genuine observation – moving far beyond mere surveys.
Problem Clarity & Reframing: Instead of rushing to solutions, Design Thinking demands a pause to truly define the *right* problem from the user’s perspective. This often involves reframing the challenge, uncovering root causes, and identifying hidden opportunities previously overlooked.
Expansive Ideation & Rapid Prototyping: It liberates teams to generate a vast array of potential solutions through divergent thinking. This is swiftly followed by building rapid, low-fidelity prototypes and testing them directly with users. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s learning quickly and cheaply to iterate towards the optimal solution.
Continuous Learning & Agility: Design Thinking inherently fosters a culture of iterative learning. Every “failure” or unexpected user feedback becomes a valuable data point, propelling continuous refinement and ensuring that solutions remain relevant in a dynamic environment.
Seamless Cross-Functional Collaboration: It naturally breaks down internal silos, bringing together diverse expertise – from engineers and marketers to customer service and finance – to co-create holistic experiences that span an entire organization, ensuring consistency and coherence.
Case Study 1: Kaiser Permanente – Humanizing Healthcare Journeys
Transforming Healthcare with Patient-Centered Design
Kaiser Permanente, a sprawling integrated healthcare provider in the U.S., delivered strong medical outcomes but often struggled with patient satisfaction due to complex processes and an impersonal environment. Recognizing that patient experience was becoming as crucial as clinical excellence, they embarked on a journey of human-centered redesign.
The Challenge: Improve the emotionally charged patient experience, particularly during stressful moments like emergency room visits, without compromising medical quality or drastically increasing costs.
Design Thinking in Action: Kaiser Permanente didn’t just survey patients. Multidisciplinary teams immersed themselves in the patient journey: they shadowed patients and staff, observed interactions in waiting rooms, and conducted deep empathy interviews. They uncovered anxieties stemming from long waits, confusing signage, and a lack of clear communication. They learned that small changes, like allowing patients to choose their own gown color, significantly boosted their sense of control and dignity. One of their most famous innovations involved redesigning the nurse shift change: instead of huddling in a back room, nurses now conducted handovers at the patient’s bedside, increasing transparency, reducing errors, and making patients feel more involved in their own care.
The Outcome: This empathetic approach led to innovations ranging from simplified wayfinding and redesigned waiting areas to standardized communication protocols. The result was a significantly more human-centered healthcare experience, leading to improved patient satisfaction scores, measurable reductions in medical errors, and enhanced staff morale, all stemming from a profound understanding of the patient’s emotional journey.
**The Lesson:** Design Thinking moves beyond efficiency, focusing on the emotional landscape of the user, leading to compassionate solutions that benefit both people and the bottom line.
Case Study 2: Commonwealth Bank of Australia – Reimagining Digital Banking with Empathy
Reimagining Banking for the Digital Age
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), one of the nation’s largest financial institutions, faced the challenge of an increasingly commoditized and impersonal banking landscape, particularly for digitally-native younger customers. They understood that their future competitive advantage lay in delivering intuitive, seamless, and emotionally reassuring digital experiences.
The Challenge: Simplify inherently complex banking processes, enhance digital engagement, and build deep trust in a rapidly evolving financial ecosystem where traditional loyalty was eroding.
Design Thinking in Action: CBA made Design Thinking a foundational element of its digital transformation. They established dedicated “customer rooms” where cross-functional teams (comprising designers, developers, product managers, and even frontline branch staff) directly observed customers interacting with prototypes of new digital features. They moved beyond traditional focus groups, actively bringing customers into the ideation, testing, and refinement phases. For instance, when overhauling their mobile banking app, they deeply explored common pain points like bill payments and money transfers, meticulously simplifying workflows based on actual user behavior and expressed needs. They iteratively built and tested dozens of versions of seemingly simple features, ensuring each step felt intuitive, secure, and empowering.
The Outcome: This human-centered rigor led to a highly acclaimed mobile banking app featuring intuitive tools like “Spend Tracker” for budget management and streamlined payment flows, alongside a significantly more user-friendly online platform. By empathizing with the emotional journey of banking—from anxiety about managing finances to the joy of reaching savings goals—they built digital products that felt profoundly empathetic and empowering.
**The Lesson:** By deeply understanding the human emotions tied to financial interactions, Design Thinking enabled CBA to create digital solutions that fostered trust and loyalty, not just transactional efficiency.
Embrace Design Thinking: Architecting Your Experiential Future
For organizations determined to lead in the Experience Economy, integrating Design Thinking is no longer an optional extra; it is the strategic imperative. Here’s your roadmap:
Cultivate Profound Empathy: Train and empower your teams to truly listen, observe, and feel what your customers experience. Go beyond data points; immerse yourselves in their lives. Conduct ethnographic research, build detailed customer journey maps, and lead with empathy interviews.
Champion Problem Reframing: Resist the urge to jump to solutions. Encourage your teams to step back, question assumptions, and redefine problems from the user’s perspective, unlocking unexpected avenues for innovation.
Promote Relentless Prototyping & Iteration: Shift your culture from “big-bang” launches to rapid, low-fidelity prototyping and continuous testing cycles. Embrace “fail fast, learn faster” as a mantra for accelerating insights.
Forge Cross-Functional Power Teams: Deliberately break down internal silos. Bring together diverse expertise from across your organization—from R&D to marketing to customer service—early and often, to ensure holistic, seamless solutions.
Foster a Culture of Psychological Safety: Create an environment where testing new ideas, challenging the status quo, and learning from “failures” is not just tolerated, but actively celebrated. Risk-taking is the engine of innovation.
In a world where products are rapidly commoditized and services easily replicated, the human experience stands as the ultimate, enduring differentiator. Design Thinking provides the robust, empathetic methodology to consistently deliver those exceptional, unforgettable experiences—transforming fleeting customers into fervent loyalists and securing your organization’s indelible position as a true leader in the Experience Economy.
“If you want to create breakthrough products, you need to think like a designer. You need to fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”
– Tim Brown, IDEO
Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.
Image credit: Gemini & Braden Kelley
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Welcome to a future where the rigid processes of traditional industries are infused with a profound sense of purpose and a touch of human ingenuity. For too long, “design thinking” has been mistakenly confined to the studios of creative agencies and the tech hubs of Silicon Valley. But as a staunch advocate for human-centered change and innovation, I’ve witnessed its transformative power unleashed in the most unexpected arenas: healthcare, finance, education, and even heavy manufacturing. It’s time to redefine its reach.
At its heart, design thinking is not about aesthetics; it’s about empathy-driven problem-solving. It’s a robust methodology, rooted in the designer’s approach, that masterfully integrates what is humanly desirable, technologically feasible, and economically viable. More than just a process, it’s a revolutionary mindset that challenges assumptions, encourages rapid experimentation, and champions continuous learning from real-world feedback. These are precisely the qualities that make it indispensable for sectors historically characterized by linearity, risk aversion, and an often impersonal approach.
Consider the typical landscape of non-design industries: they are often defined by their complex systems, deeply ingrained procedures, and an almost singular focus on efficiency, compliance, and scale. While these pillars are crucial for stability, they can inadvertently lead to solutions that are technically sound but critically disconnected from the very people they are meant to serve. This is the profound gap that design thinking expertly bridges, offering a dynamic pathway to innovation that is not only effective but also deeply resonates with human needs.
The renowned five phases of design thinking – Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test – are not a sequential dogma. Instead, they form a fluid, iterative ecosystem. You might find yourself looping back from testing to empathize further, or redefining the problem based on new insights gained during ideation. This inherent flexibility is the methodology’s superpower, allowing it to gracefully navigate the inherent ambiguities and evolving complexities of human challenges.
Why It Works: The Unseen Force of Empathy and Iteration
The transformative impact of design thinking in non-design industries stems from its unwavering commitment to placing the human at the absolute center of the challenge. Instead of presuming needs, it actively, almost obsessively, seeks to understand the experiences, frustrations, aspirations, and behaviors of stakeholders. This profound empathy, meticulously cultivated through immersive interviews, direct observation, and genuine immersion, consistently unearths insights that traditional market research or quantitative analysis often miss.
Hand-in-hand with empathy is the revolutionary power of rapid prototyping and iteration. In industries where the pace of change can be glacially slow and risk-aversion is paramount, design thinking champions quick, low-fidelity experiments. This “fail fast, learn faster” philosophy dramatically minimizes investment in potentially flawed solutions, accelerating the discovery of what truly works. It fundamentally shifts the organizational perspective from merely avoiding failure to actively embracing it as a vital source of learning and growth.
Let’s illuminate this with two compelling real-world examples:
Case Study 1: Revolutionizing the Patient Journey in Healthcare
Healthcare, a sector frequently grappling with labyrinthine bureaucracy and a purely clinical lens, is perhaps one of the most fertile grounds for human-centered innovation. Imagine the formidable challenge of enhancing the patient experience within a sprawling hospital system. A conventional approach might lean on operational efficiency improvements, new technology procurement, or standardized staff training. While these are certainly valuable, they often inadvertently overlook the profound emotional and psychological journey of the patient.
A forward-thinking hospital group in the Midwest embarked on this very quest, adopting design thinking to fundamentally reshape their approach. They began not by analyzing metrics, but by deeply Empathizing with patients, their families, and frontline healthcare providers. Through extensive, intimate interviews, shadowing patients throughout their appointments, and observing interactions in waiting areas and consultation rooms, they uncovered a vital truth.
What they precisely Defined as the core problem wasn’t merely extended wait times, but the pervasive anxiety, uncertainty, and feelings of being unheard that those waits engendered. Patients felt like cogs in a machine, overwhelmed by the clinical environment.
This critical insight fueled an intensive Ideation phase that transcended superficial fixes. Ideas blossomed: from interactive digital displays providing real-time updates and educational content in waiting areas, to dedicated “patient navigators” guiding individuals through complex procedures, and even radical redesigns of recovery rooms to feel less sterile and more comforting, more healing.
They swiftly Prototyped these concepts with remarkable agility: a simple paper mock-up of the digital display, role-playing scenarios for patient navigators, and even reconfiguring a disused room to test new furniture layouts and lighting. Crucially, they Tested these prototypes with actual patients and staff, gathering immediate, candid feedback.
The transformative outcome? A significant surge in patient satisfaction scores, a marked reduction in reported patient anxiety, and even a measurable decrease in missed appointments because patients felt genuinely engaged, informed, and cared for. The hospital didn’t just optimize a process; they profoundly reimagined and enhanced a human experience by centering their innovation around it.
Case Study 2: Empowering Underserved Communities with Human-Centered Financial Services
Financial services, often perceived as an impenetrable fortress of complexity and jargon, stand to gain immensely from a human-centered perspective, especially when serving marginalized or underserved populations. A microfinance institution in Southeast Asia confronted a persistent challenge: stubbornly low adoption rates for its savings products among rural villagers. Traditional solutions had often focused on competitive interest rates or aggressive marketing campaigns.
The institution courageously embraced design thinking, commencing with a period of profound Empathy for the villagers. Their teams lived within the communities, participated in daily chores, and engaged in informal, trust-building conversations, going far beyond the scope of formal surveys. They uncovered a critical insight: while people conceptually understood the value of saving, their daily lives were characterized by extreme unpredictability, with fluctuating, often meager, incomes and pressing, immediate needs. The rigid structures of conventional savings accounts simply did not align with their chaotic reality. Furthermore, a deep-seated distrust in formal financial institutions was a significant hurdle.
The newly Defined problem was not a lack of desire to save, but a critical absence of flexible, trustworthy, and genuinely accessible savings mechanisms that harmonized with their unique financial rhythms and vital social structures.
Collaborative Ideation sessions, involving both financial product specialists and community leaders, generated groundbreaking concepts. These included “group savings” models intrinsically linked to existing local social networks, mobile-based micro-savings allowing for tiny, frequent deposits and withdrawals, and even a system where highly respected local shopkeepers served as informal, trusted banking agents.
They rapidly Prototyped these innovative ideas using remarkably simple, accessible tools: mock mobile interfaces drawn on paper, small-scale community pilots, and even hand-drawn “passbooks” for the group savings initiatives. Critically, they rigorously Tested these prototypes with the very individuals they aimed to serve, gathering raw, honest feedback on usability, perceived trustworthiness, and practical relevance.
This iterative process culminated in a transformative mobile-first savings product that offered unparalleled flexibility in deposits and withdrawals, seamlessly integrated with a robust network of community-based agents who acted as trusted intermediaries. The remarkable outcome was a dramatic and sustainable increase in savings adoption, showcasing how design thinking could unlock true financial inclusion by profoundly understanding and respecting the user’s authentic context and needs.
The Path Forward: Embracing a Human-Centric Future
These powerful case studies unequivocally demonstrate that design thinking is far more than a fleeting corporate fad; it is a pragmatic, universally applicable, and profoundly effective methodology for tackling complex challenges across every imaginable industry. It demands a fundamental shift from a traditional product-centric or process-centric viewpoint to an unwavering human-centric one.
For non-design industries striving to innovate, remain relevant, and thrive in an increasingly volatile and human-driven world, embracing design thinking is no longer an optional endeavor – it is a strategic imperative. It requires organizational leaders to cultivate a culture steeped in boundless curiosity, to foster a climate of psychological safety where experimentation is encouraged, and to possess an unshakeable willingness to challenge deeply held assumptions.
It’s about transcending mere functionality to craft solutions that genuinely resonate, creating value that extends far beyond the quarterly earnings report to profoundly touch and enrich the lives of the people they serve. So, I urge you: go forth. Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test. And most importantly, always, always stay human. The future of innovation, in every industry, depends on it.
Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.
Image credit: Pexels
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In a world defined by rapid change and complexity, innovation is the engine of progress. But what powers innovation? The answer lies in diversity—the rich tapestry of perspectives, experiences, and ideas that diverse teams bring to the table. Diversity in innovation teams is not a luxury; it’s a necessity for creating solutions that resonate with a global audience. Diverse teams challenge assumptions, uncover blind spots, and spark breakthroughs that homogenous groups often overlook. In this article, we’ll explore why diversity is critical to innovation, examine two powerful case studies, and offer practical steps for building inclusive teams that drive human-centered change.
Why Diversity Fuels Innovation
Diversity in innovation teams encompasses more than demographics like race, gender, or age. It includes cognitive diversity—different ways of thinking and problem-solving—as well as socioeconomic, geographic, and professional diversity. This multifaceted approach ensures that teams approach challenges from multiple angles, leading to more creative and effective solutions. A 2015 McKinsey study found that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity were 15% more likely to achieve above-average financial returns, while those with gender diversity were 25% more likely to outperform their peers.
But the benefits go beyond numbers. Diverse teams foster psychological safety, where team members feel empowered to share bold ideas without fear of judgment. This environment is critical for human-centered innovation, which relies on empathy to address the needs of diverse audiences. However, diversity alone isn’t enough—organizations must cultivate inclusion to ensure every voice is heard and valued. Without inclusion, diversity can lead to conflict or disengagement, undermining innovation efforts.
Case Study 1: IBM’s Design Thinking Transformation
In the early 2010s, IBM faced a challenge: how to stay competitive in a fast-evolving tech landscape. The company turned to design thinking, a human-centered approach to innovation, and prioritized diversity in its teams. IBM assembled cross-functional groups that included engineers, designers, data scientists, and marketers from diverse cultural, racial, and professional backgrounds. These teams were trained to empathize with users, define problems collaboratively, and prototype solutions iteratively.
The impact was profound. Diverse teams helped shape IBM’s Watson AI platform, ensuring its applications—particularly in healthcare—addressed the needs of varied patient populations. For example, insights from team members with international healthcare experience led to features that supported multilingual patient interactions, improving accessibility. By 2018, IBM reported a 300% increase in ROI for design-driven projects, with diverse teams credited for identifying user needs that might have been missed by less varied groups.
“Our diverse teams brought perspectives that challenged our assumptions and made Watson a truly global solution,” said Phil Gilbert, former President of IBM Design. “Inclusion was the key to unlocking their potential.”
[Image: A diverse IBM team collaborates in a design thinking workshop, using sticky notes and whiteboards to map user journeys. Alt text: A group of professionals from varied backgrounds brainstorming around a whiteboard filled with colorful sticky notes.]
Case Study 2: Procter & Gamble’s Connect + Develop Program
Procter & Gamble (P&G) revolutionized its innovation strategy with its Connect + Develop program, launched in the early 2000s. The initiative sought external partnerships to co-create products, and diversity was at its core. P&G formed teams that blended internal employees with external experts from startups, academia, and global communities, representing diverse industries, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds. This approach disrupted P&G’s traditional thinking and led to groundbreaking innovations.
The Swiffer product line is a prime example. A diverse team of chemists, marketers, and external designers from varied cultural contexts collaborated to address unmet consumer needs for convenient cleaning. Insights from team members with experience in emerging markets ensured the Swiffer was affordable and practical for a wide range of households. The result? Swiffer became a $1 billion brand within a few years, contributing to P&G’s reported 50% innovation success rate through Connect + Develop.
“Diversity gave us a window into consumer needs we hadn’t seen before,” said Laura Becker, a former P&G innovation leader. “Our global team members brought ideas that transformed our approach.”
[Image: A Swiffer product prototype being tested by a diverse focus group in a real-world setting. Alt text: A group of people from different backgrounds testing a Swiffer mop in a home environment.]
Overcoming Challenges in Diverse Teams
While diversity drives innovation, it can also present challenges. Differing perspectives may lead to conflict, and unconscious bias can hinder inclusion. To address these issues, organizations must invest in training to mitigate bias, establish clear communication norms, and promote active listening. Leaders should also set shared goals to align diverse teams around a common purpose, ensuring that differences become a source of strength rather than division.
Building Diverse Innovation Teams: Practical Steps
Creating diverse, inclusive innovation teams requires intentional action. Here are five practical steps to get started:
Recruit with Purpose: Actively seek talent from underrepresented groups and diverse disciplines to build a robust talent pipeline.
Foster Psychological Safety: Create a culture where team members feel safe to share ideas and take risks, using tools like anonymous feedback systems.
Use Human-Centered Frameworks: Adopt design thinking or similar approaches to focus on empathy and user needs, leveraging diversity to understand varied audiences.
Train for Inclusion: Provide regular training on unconscious bias and inclusive leadership to ensure all voices are valued.
Measure and Celebrate Success: Track diversity metrics and celebrate innovations driven by diverse teams to reinforce their value.
By implementing these steps, organizations can harness the full potential of diversity to drive innovation that resonates with a global market.
Conclusion: A Call to Action
Diversity is the cornerstone of innovation in a connected world. The case studies of IBM and P&G demonstrate that diverse teams deliver measurable results—higher ROI, breakthrough products, and solutions that serve diverse audiences. But building such teams requires commitment. As leaders, we must challenge ourselves to recruit inclusively, foster psychological safety, and leverage human-centered tools to unlock creativity. The future of innovation depends on our ability to embrace the full spectrum of human potential. Start today—audit your teams, identify gaps in diversity, and take action to build a more inclusive innovation culture.
Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.
Image credit: Pexels
Guest AI: Grok
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As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I’ve witnessed firsthand how design thinking can revolutionize the way organizations approach complex problems. Design thinking is not just a process but a mindset that prioritizes empathy, experimentation, and iteration. In this article, I’ll explore some real-world applications of design thinking, showcasing its transformative potential through two compelling case studies.
The Essence of Design Thinking
Design thinking emphasizes an iterative process and involves stages like empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. Its power lies in its ability to break down silos, foster collaboration, and create solutions that are deeply aligned with user needs.
Case Study 1: Improving Public Transportation in Singapore
Singapore’s Land Transport Authority (LTA) faced challenges in optimizing the city’s public transportation system. With overcrowding and inefficiencies impeding commuter satisfaction, the LTA needed innovative solutions. They turned to design thinking for help.
The LTA began with the empathy phase, conducting in-depth interviews and surveys with commuters, bus drivers, and staff. This approach helped them to uncover pain points such as long waiting times, insufficient information about bus schedules, and crowded carriages.
In the ideation phase, multiple brainstorming sessions were held, bringing together diverse perspectives from designers, engineers, and everyday commuters. Ideas like real-time tracking apps, the redesign of bus stops, and enhanced user information systems were prototyped and tested with actual users.
Through iterative prototyping, the LTA successfully implemented real-time digital screens at bus stops, providing exact arrival times and occupancy levels. This innovation not only improved commuter satisfaction but also led to a 15% increase in public transport usage.
Case Study 2: Revolutionizing Healthcare through Human-Centered Design
Healthcare can often be a challenging field for both patients and providers. The Mayo Clinic, recognized globally for its patient-centered care, saw an opportunity to enhance patient experience further using design thinking.
The clinic embarked on an empathy-driven exploration by gathering insights from patients, families, and medical staff. They discovered that while the clinical care was excellent, the waiting experience and navigation through the facility were areas needing improvement.
With these insights, multidisciplinary teams engaged in ideation sessions, which led to the design of a patient-centric app. This app provided real-time updates on appointment timings, directional aid within the hospital, and educational content about their medical procedures.
Prototypes of the app were developed and tested with patients and staff, leading to refinements based on feedback. The final product was launched, significantly improving patient satisfaction scores and reducing perceived waiting times by 30%.
Conclusion
Design thinking is a powerful tool for organizations seeking to innovate and address complex challenges. By putting the user at the center of the process, organizations can create solutions that truly resonate with people’s needs. Whether it’s revolutionizing public transport in Singapore or enhancing patient care at the Mayo Clinic, the examples above illustrate the tangible impacts of this approach. As we move forward, the continued application of design thinking promises to unlock even greater potential in various sectors worldwide.
Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.
Image credit: Unsplash
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