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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of October 2023

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of October 2023 Drum roll please…

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

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

A New Innovation Sphere — by Pete Foley
Thinking Like a Futurist — by Ayelet Baron
Crossing the Possibility Space — by Dennis Stauffer
Twelve Digital Disruptions of Your Sales Cycle — by Geoffrey A. Moore
How to Fix Corporate Transformation Failure — by Greg Satell
The Biggest Customer Service Opportunity — by Shep Hyken
Do You Prize Novelty or Certainty? — by Mike Shipulski
What Pundits Always Get Wrong About the Future — by Greg Satell
The Biggest Challenge for Innovation is Organizational Inertia — by Stefan Lindegaard
What Company Do You See in the Mirror? — by Mike Shipulski

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

The Solution to Every Problem Lives Inside You — by Mike Shipulski
AI and the Productivity Paradox — by Greg Satell
Allow Your Customers to Die with Dignity — by Shep Hyken
Why Successful Innovators Are Curious Like Cats — by Janet Sernack
An Innovation Lesson From The Rolling Stones — by Robyn Bolton

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 three years:

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Twelve Digital Disruptions of Your Sales Cycle

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Twelve Digital Disruptions of Your Sales Cycle

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

The good news for a salesperson selling into a disrupted industry is that the forces of change are bringing net new budget dollars to the table. The bad news is, the budgets have not yet landed. In effect, then, there are two kinds of sales opportunities to target. You can go after the landed budgets, the incumbent ones, knowing that they are under assault and will be dwindling, but also knowing that at present they can be deployed quickly and readily. Or, one can go after the much larger budgets that have not yet landed, the ones that will power the future of the target industry and your company’s role within it, but with the knowledge that this is a time-consuming effort that requires a completely different approach from the normal sales motion. Basically then, you can make quota in the short term while marginalizing your company’s future, or you can build a platform for the future while putting quota at much higher risk.

Of course, what we need here is an and not an or. And that is possible, provided executive leadership and compensation programs acknowledge this challenge openly and segment the field of play accordingly. The key distinction is simple. Selling into undisrupted industries requires to you to compete to consume budget, whereas in a disrupted one, you must create to consume budget. The first activity is conducted with middle managers charged with deploying operational budgets as efficiently as possible. The second is conducted with executives seeking to reallocate investment assets to meet the new challenge as effectively as possible. As just noted, these are two very different sales motions, and the challenge facing many sales teams today is that, like it or not, they have to do both, and do both well, if their companies are going to succeed.

The Impact of Digital Disruption on the Sales Cycle:

Here are twelve ways in which selling into a digitally disrupted sector calls for a radically different approach from what marketing, sales, and service teams are used to:

Conventional lead generation does not work. It is based on hooking up with mid-level managers who have influence or authority over RFPs and budgets already in place. These people have no influence or authority over sales cycles involving redeployment of assets into new areas. All they will do is steer you to the old regime. Pursuing leads here will ensure you miss the next wave. And cold calling can’t succeed either. Executives employ people called administrative assistants for the express purpose of blocking your call. Instead you need to enable referrals, where a peer or trusted contact of the target executive enables the introduction.
Product narratives don’t work. They are based on having an established view of the problem and of the competitive set. This is very much the case in non-disrupted industries but never so in disrupted ones. So PowerPoint presentations and demos don’t serve. All they do is disappoint and cause executives to redirect the salesperson back to a mid-level manager and an ever-diminishing established budget. Instead you need problem narratives, stories that surface the critical changes under way and that resonate with the business leaders undergoing them. That’s what the early conversations in the sales cycle need to be about.
We need thought leadership here, people! Executives in disrupted industries are hungry for frameworks that can help them diagnose their new situation, envision a novel solution, and engage with peers to discuss their ideas. Slick slogans and asking “What’s keeping you up at night?” won’t cut it. But any vendor, be it a start-up or an established enterprise, who comes with a useful framework will get a good hearing, and the one whose framework gets adopted gets to orchestrate the others in building out a solution architecture. Narratives really, really matter.
Relationship marketing is fundamental. Executives in disrupted industries are open to forming new relationships and are looking for a trusted advisor. To compete for this role salespeople need to monitor industry developments, personal information, and workflow status in real time so they can bring key issues and ideas to the table in a timely manner.
Let’s get vertical, vertical! Digital disruption is unfolding on an industry by industry basis and manifests itself in ways unique to each one. That means that the early framing conversations need to be couched in the language and issues of the target industry, not the technologies and themes of the vendor’s industry. This requires marketing to develop a whole new set of muscles and sales to learn a new foreign language, which calls in turn for some judicious hiring of insider expertise and a sales training capability to get field teams up to speed fast.
Sales and marketing need to map out a new customer journey. All sales cycles are built on an underlying model of the customer journey. These become the backbone of workflows through any CRM system. The problem in a disrupted industry is that the conventional sales cycle maps are all wrong because the journey is taking a very different route. Sales teams need to work with their counterparts in marketing to map out the new journey and align their sales cycles and their CRM systems to it.
Proof-of-Concepts are necessary but not sufficient. To teams used to selling into non-disrupted markets POCs feel like going back in time, but they are key for disrupted industries where neither the problem diagnosis nor the solution prescription is well established. The challenge here is to manage them judiciously. Conservative forces inside the target customer will try to slow roll things here to buy time, whereas visionary sponsors may be too quick to want to leap to the full implementation. The trick is to make sure they are neither an obstacle to sales progress nor become a destination in and of themselves.
Professional services organizations need to lean in. They have to provide insightful pre-sales consulting on a low-latency, cost-efficient basis, while still maintaining billable utilization via their other work. In addition, they have to take the lead in the first few implementations, where their role is often as not to be the chief spear catcher, and then be prepared to package up their expertise and hand it over to partners just when the projects become predictable and profitable. Running professional services inside a technology company is an incredibly important and almost always thankless endeavor. But as the next point makes clear, it is core.
All offers are services-led—period. In a disrupted industry no one buys a product. The early adopters buy projects and the pragmatic majority buys solutions. Both of these offer types are services led. That means all proposals need to be services led as well. That is, they cannot be about products or even ROI; they have to be about changes under way and the responses needed to address them properly.
All sales motions are land-and-expand. No responsible executive underwrites a massive re-engineering undertaking with a single check, even when they already have established a deep relationship of trust with a particular vendor. Most follow a three-phase approach, where the first phase is to prove feasibility, the second, confirm desirability, and the third, achieve scalability. There is no place in disrupted industries for fly-by selling of any kind.
Customers have to step up too. This means that sales teams need to learn diplomatic ways for holding the customer’s feet to the fire, provoking them when they are not rising to the occasion, and holding them accountable when they do. Often this is best done through third parties, so creating communities of interest and sponsoring dialogs among peers become critical sales enablers.
Change management becomes an integral part of every implementation. Getting the new paradigm adopted is key not only to the customer’s success but to the vendor’s continued expansion within the account as well. Service organizations and partners need to be engaged, enlisted, monitored, and compensated accordingly, and this initially at least has to be orchestrated by the sales team who has the winning proposal.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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The End of the Digital Revolution

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Here’s What You Need to Know

The End of the Digital Revolution

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The history of digital technology has largely been one of denial followed by disruption. First came the concept of the productivity paradox, which noted the limited economic impact of digital technology. When e-commerce appeared, many doubted that it could ever compete with physical retail. Similar doubts were voiced about digital media.

Today, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t believe in the power of digital technology. Whole industries have been disrupted. New applications driven by cloud computing, artificial intelligence and blockchain promise even greater advancement to come. Every business needs to race to adopt them in order to compete for the future.

Ironically, amid all this transformation the digital revolution itself is ending. Over the next decade, new computing architectures will move to the fore and advancements in areas like synthetic biology and materials science will reshape entire fields, such as healthcare, energy and manufacturing. Simply waiting to adapt won’t be enough. The time to prepare is now.

1. Drive Digital Transformation

As I explained in Mapping Innovation, innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation. Clearly, with respect to digital technology, we are deep into the transformation phase. So the first part of any post-digital strategy is to accelerate digital transformation efforts in order to improve your competitive position.

One company that’s done this very well is Walmart. As an old-line incumbent in the physical retail industry, it appeared to be ripe for disruption as Amazon reshaped how customers purchased basic items. Why drive out to a Walmart store for a package of toothpaste when you can just click a few buttons on your phone?

Yet rather than ceding the market to Amazon, Walmart has invested heavily in digital technology and has achieved considerable success. It wasn’t any one particular tactic or strategy made the difference, but rather the acknowledgment that every single process needed to be reinvented for the digital age. For example, the company is using virtual reality to revolutionize how it does in-store training.

Perhaps most of all, leaders need to understand that digital transformation is human transformation. There is no shortage of capable vendors that can implement technology for you. What’s key, however, is to shift your culture, processes and business model to leverage digital capabilities.

2. Explore Post-Digital Technologies

While digital transformation is accelerating, advancement in the underlying technology is slowing down. Moore’s law, the consistent doubling of computer chip performance over the last 50 years, is nearing its theoretical limits. It has already slowed down considerably and will soon stop altogether. Yet there are non-digital technologies under development that will be far more powerful than anything we’ve ever seen before.

Consider Intel, which sees its future in what it calls heterogeneous computing combining traditional digital chips with non-digital architectures, such as quantum and neuromorphic. It announced a couple of years ago its Pohoiki Beach neuromorphic system that processes information up to 1,000 times faster and 10,000 more efficiently than traditional chips for certain tasks.

IBM has created a network to develop quantum computing technology, which includes research labs, startups and companies that seek to be early adopters of the technology. Like neuromorphic computing, quantum systems have the potential to be thousands, if not millions, of times more powerful than today’s technology.

The problem with these post-digital architectures is that no one really knows how they are going to work. They operate on a very different logic than traditional computers, will require new programming languages and algorithmic strategies. It’s important to start exploring these technologies now or you could find yourself years behind the curve.

3. Focus on Atoms, Not Bits

The digital revolution created a virtual world. My generation was the first to grow up with video games and our parents worried that we were becoming detached from reality. Then computers entered offices and Dan Bricklin created Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program. Eventually smartphones and social media appeared and we began spending almost as much time in the virtual world as we did in the physical one.

Essentially, what we created was a simulation economy. We could experiment with business models in our computers, find flaws and fix them before they became real. Computer-aided design (CAD) software allowed us to design products in bits before we got down to the hard work of shaping atoms. Because it’s much cheaper to fail in the virtual world than the physical one, this made our economy much more efficient.

Yet the next great transformation will be from bits to atoms. Digital technology is creating revolutions in things like genomics and materials science. Artificial intelligence and cloud computing are reshaping fields like manufacturing and agriculture. Quantum and neuromorphic computing will accelerate these trends.

Much like those new computing architectures, the shift from bits to atoms will create challenges. Applying the simulation economy to the world of atoms will require new skills and we will need people with those skills to move from offices in urban areas to factory floors and fields. They will also need to learn to collaborate effectively with people in those industries.

4. Transformation is Always a Journey, Never a Destination

The 20th century was punctuated by two waves of disruption. The first, driven by electricity and internal combustion, transformed almost every facet of daily life and kicked off a 50-year boom in productivity. The second, driven by the microbe, the atom and the bit, transformed fields such as agriculture, healthcare and management.

Each of these technologies followed the pattern of discovery, engineering and transformation. The discovery phase takes place mostly out of sight, with researchers working quietly in anonymous labs. The engineering phase is riddled with errors, as firms struggle to shape abstract concepts into real products. A nascent technology is easy to ignore, because its impact hasn’t been felt yet.

The truth is that disruption doesn’t begin with inventions, but when an ecosystem emerges to support them. That’s when the transformation phase begins and takes us by surprise, because transformation never plays out like we think it will. The future will always, to a certain extent, unpredictable for the simple reason that it hasn’t happened yet.

Today, we’re on the brink of a new era of innovation that will be driven by new computing architectures, genomics, materials science and artificial intelligence. That’s why we need to design our organizations for transformation by shifting from vertical hierarchies to horizontal networks.

Most of all, we need to shift our mindsets from seeing transformation as set of discreet objectives to a continuous journey of discovery. Digital technology has only been one phase of that journey. The most exciting things are still yet to come.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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What Disruptive Innovation Really Is

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What Disruptive Innovation Really Is

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

I recently read an article in ZDnet by Sherin Shibu discussing disruptive innovation, primarily through the lens of Clay Christensen’s work at the Harvard Business School. The article itself is very sound, and yet I found myself disagreeing with it on a number of points. In this blog, I want to interleave what Shibu says (presented in standard font) with my own commentary (inserted in italics) so that readers can develop their own point of view from the interaction.

What is disruptive innovation?

Disruptive innovation theory is a cautionary concept for large, established companies: There’s danger in becoming too good at what you do best. Delivering to the mainstream market is good and all, but a disruptor could target a market underserved by your current product with a new business model.

For me, disruptive innovation has a much bigger footprint because it also underlies virtually all venture capital investment. Its fundamental promise is to release an enormous amount of trapped value by reengineering an established system or process. The reason it is a cautionary concept for large established companies is that they are the custodians of the legacy systems and processes that are trapping the value. Yes, they can reduce the overhead by optimizing what they have, but no, they cannot compete with a categorically better way of doing things.

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen developed the concept of disruptive innovation in the 1990s with his groundbreaking book The Innovator’s Dilemma, and the theory became wildly popular in the decades to follow. But in some respects it has become a victim of its own success: “Despite broad dissemination, the theory’s core concepts have been widely misunderstood and its basic tenets frequently misapplied,” notes The Harvard Business Review.

Disruptive innovation is a process by which entrepreneurs break into a low-end or new market and create business models that are different from existing ones in those markets. Disruption has occurred when their business model becomes mainstream.

So, a new company targets an overlooked customer base — and manages to deliver a better product at a lower price point. At first, the incumbents don’t take the threat seriously, which allows the potential disruptors to gain a foothold. Then the disruptors target the incumbents’ mainstream customers. If the potential disruptors create something that the mainstream adopts in volume, they have successfully disrupted the market.

I think this reading of the model overemphasizes the need to attack the low end of the market. Yes, that is a proven path, but it is not the only one. The iPhone disrupted from the high end, for example, as has Tesla.

What is disruptive innovation not?

Defining disruptive innovation isn’t easy and not everyone is going to agree on every example. Classic disruptive innovation should not simply describe just any situation of upheaval. If a new company shakes things up a bit for incumbent competitors, that scene is not necessarily one of disruptive innovation — that could simply be a breakthrough. In order for this theory to have power and be used as an analytical and predictive model, it needs to be precisely defined.

My definition of disruptive innovation is one that overthrows and is incompatible with the existing business model or operating model of an industry. In the case of the iPhone, it was Apple’s ability to go over the top of the carrier to provide products and services directly to the consumer. In the case of Tesla, it is its ability to bypass the dealership model not only in sales but in services as well.

Christensen, for example, argued that Uber is not a disruptive innovator according to his definition. It fails to meet two requirements, in that it did not start in a low-end or new market. Instead, it built a name for itself in a mainstream market and then started drawing unserved customers with less expensive solutions. And being less expensive or creating an app to hail rides sustains the existing model rather than disrupts.

This is just wrong and shows the limitations of the “start at the low end” concept. Uber reengineered both the operating model and the business model of on-demand car transportation, allowing consumers to call a taxi to themselves, and allowing Uber to build a fleet of cars and drivers at no capital expense.

Not everyone thinks that’s the case and other perspectives can be found that argue Uber actually is a disruptive innovator. From this perspective, Uber started with a low-market foothold by offering on-demand black car services. It was only when the startup introduced UberX, a low-end market offering, that it was able to move into the mainstream.

What counts as disruption is up for debate, especially as Christensen’s theory is applied to shifting contexts.

In the case of Uber, focusing on the low end simply misses the point.

Why is it important to define disruptive innovation?

Disruption isn’t a fixed point; it’s the evolution of a product or service from the fringes of customers to the mainstream. It’s important to define it this way because then it becomes more about the experimental nature of the process than about the output. See, disruptive innovations don’t always succeed and not every successful company is a disruptor. The process is about building new business models previously unseen in the target industry and appealing to a more niche customer base at first.

In my view, disruptive innovation is a function of a breakthrough technology intersecting with a pool of trapped value, enabling the reengineering of a system or process that eliminates one or more whole categories of spend in its value chain. It is a categorical innovation as opposed to a product or marketing innovation.

Is disruptive innovation the primary way innovation operates?

No, it is not the primary factor of innovation. According to HBR, “disruption theory does not, and never will, explain everything about innovation specifically or business success generally.” It does, however, help predict which businesses will succeed and it provides a solid foundation for further research – it’s captured academic attention for 27 years.

I agree with the point that disruptive innovation is not the primary type. Most innovation is sustaining, meaning that it improves an existing system rather than overthrowing it—evolution, not revolution. What I disagree with wholeheartedly, on the other hand, is the notion that the theory helps predict which businesses will succeed. Historically, the advantage has gone to start-ups because they are unconflicted in their commitment to the new way. Established enterprises, however, have learned that they can neutralize start-ups if they are willing to be fast followers. Microsoft’s Azure is a superb example of a company that has done this. Disney’s response to Netflix is another good example, and it appears as if General Motors is on a comparable path toward neutralizing Tesla.

What is an example of disruptive innovation?

Netflix was around since 1997, and at first, it didn’t appeal to Blockbuster’s core clientele. Renting movies usually happened in person, and Netflix was all online. Plus, Netflix took a few days to deliver movies because selections came through the mail. Blockbuster could easily ignore Netflix because it didn’t have the brick-and-mortar infrastructure needed to dominate the market at that time.

This glosses over what was the initial disruptive innovation that Netflix provided with its home delivery model based on DVDs. The key differentiator at the beginning was designing out late fees.

Over time though, as streaming technology developed, Blockbuster’s target clients were drawn toward Netflix. The same impulsiveness that made renting a movie right away more desirable than getting a movie a few days later translated into wanting to watch movies with a click of a mouse instead of going to a physical location to rent a DVD. Disruptive innovation technology, in this case, streaming, goes hand in hand with implementing innovation.

There is another story playing out in Netflix’s transition from DVD shipping to streaming. It required the company to disrupt itself. This is an extraordinary ask, as most successful disruptive innovations attack someone else’s profit pool, not one’s own. Reed Hastings deserves enormous credit for leading the company through this change, and I would encourage the academy to focus its research lens on how in the world he was able to do so when so many CEOs have fallen short.

Are there any disruptive innovation technologies to keep an eye on?

Online learning is a technology to watch because it’s reaching a population that in-person learning can’t reach at a lower price point.

The main technologies to keep an eye on are the ones that tackle an underserved market and have the potential to expand their offerings to appeal to the mainstream.

Something like autonomous vehicles, for example, can seem innovative, but they aren’t disruptive according to the theory because they’ll be quickly absorbed into existing industries. The incumbent advantage is strong.

The important thing to remember is that innovation does not always lead to disruption.

I strongly support the idea that online education delivery has the power to disrupt the education market—again, a breakthrough technology intersecting with a boatload of trapped value. I think the point about autonomous vehicles is interesting as well because I agree they will be absorbed into the existing industries. But while they may not disrupt the automotive industry, I do think they can reengineer transportation and logistics.

Overall, I support Shibu’s main thesis which is that we have come to take disruptive innovation for granted and have become careless with how we apply the term. And while we part ways on how best to apply it, I still endorse Clay’s breakthrough insights in The Innovator’s Dilemma, which had a huge impact on a whole generation of companies in Silicon Valley.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels

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Kickstart Change with Reclaimed Focus and Attention

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Kickstart Change with Reclaimed Focus and Attention

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In 2019 we experienced the shock and the pain that resulted from the globally disruptive global Covid 19 pandemic. To both survive and thrive in the new decade of uncertainty, many people still need help and guidance to connect to, understand and manage their anxieties, fears, inertia, and confusion about the future to effectively ride the waves of disruptive change. Yet, according to Johann Hari, in his best-selling book – Stolen Focus, all over the world, our focus and attention have been stolen, and our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and we need to be intentional in reclaiming it.

He describes the wide range of consequences this has on our lives, which are further impacted by pervasive and addicting technology we are being forced to use in our virtual world, exasperated by the pandemic and the need to work virtually, from home. He reveals how our dwindling attention spans predate the internet, and how its decline is accelerating at an alarming rate.

He suggests that if we want to get back our ability to focus, stop multitasking and practice paying attention. Also, if we want to kickstart change and help people feel confident in their readiness, competence, and capacity to change and innovate in a world of unknowns, it all starts with improving our ability to pay deep attention to what is really going on.

Yet, in the thesaurus there are 286 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to paying attention, such as: listen, and giving heed, so what might be the key first steps to take in reclaiming your focus and attention?

Power of focus and attention

Energy flows where attention goes

Placing our focus and attention activates our energy, and our energy flows where our attention goes.

So, if you have been feeling tired and lethargic, or overwhelmed and burned out, then take a moment to consider how you might score yourself on an attentive-distractive continuum and consider how similar, or different you are to US college students who can now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and where office workers on average manage only three minutes?

Being intentional

Involves getting clear upfront about what you want to achieve, by setting an intention to achieve a specific outcome or result in the future that is important to you. In a world of unknowns, paying deep attention and being intentional are the key foundations for recovery, rebalance, and transformation.

Limiting ways of seeing, being, and acting in the world

Many people are still experiencing unconscious intrinsic, or reactive responses to their pandemic-induced work situations and are suffering from stress overload, overwhelm, and burnout.

This is because our autonomic nervous systems, which control our cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, urinary, and reproductive functions, and responses to stress, operate outside of our conscious control in two different and co-dependent and often competing systems.

Parasympathetic fight or flight system

Put very simply, our sympathetic nervous systems get overloaded by heightened stress levels, which ignite our protective fight or flight system, which normally allows our bodies to function under stress and danger, and, as a result, impacts significantly on our levels of tiredness, exhaustion, and burnt-out emotional, mental and physical states. This exasperates our inherent, unconscious needs to self-preserve (gut), feelings of isolation and loneliness (heat), and having the limited presence of mind (head) and reverts many of us into survival mode, and shift out of alignment, where we become physiologically incoherent (out of balance).

Which is not conducive to knowing and activating what we can truly, really, and actually influence and control in our lives, which requires us to effectively balance chaos with order.

Reduced capacity

When operating in survival mode, we are unable (like the US College students) to take the sacred pauses we need to make the space to attend and observe, through retreat, and reflection.

We are no longer able to access our inner knowing, play in the space of possibility, create a normalized state of equilibrium and calm, and be coherent and congruent in our daily lives.

Our overall capacity to set clear goals, make smart decisions, creatively solve problems, courageously take the right actions, harness our intuition, compassionately cultivate understanding and perception, develop good relationships, learn and develop, and finally, our health and well-being, are significantly reduced.

Initiate reclaiming focus and attention

Because we don’t know if companies will ever return to their pre-pandemic-like worlds, and become future-fit, people need to be reskilled in how to focus, how to observe, how to deeply focus and attend, and how to be intentional.

Developing daily habits to be focused and productive

Being intentional about breathing

To help balance and initiate harmonizing our autonomic nervous systems, develop physiological coherence, to respond optimally to the world, starts with developing focus and attention on your breath.

Doing this helps your neurology to relax, reduce stress and anxiety, increase calmness, and reconnect to the self.

Sounds simple, yet in my global coaching practice, clients would often turn up feeling overwhelmed and incoherent, so we would begin the session with a “box breathing” exercise. This involves breathing while you slowly count to four for a total of four times – four counts of breathing in, four counts of holding your breath, four counts of exhaling, and four more counts of holding after your exhale. We could both be grounded, and coherent, to partner and connect in high-impact and productive sessions.

Being intentional in stepping away from your screens

According to one 2019 survey of 1,057 U.S. office workers, 87 percent of professionals spend most of their workday staring at screens: an average of seven hours a day. Closing your laptop and taking a quick walk outside, in nature allows your brain to recharge for your next task, and enables your autonomic nervous system to take a well-deserved break and calm down.

Sounds simple, yet in my global coaching practice, clients found this very difficult to do, this might involve no TV screens in bedrooms, leaving phones outside bedrooms, turning phones off at 8.00 pm, buying an alarm clock, setting and sticking to a dedicated start and finish work times, taking regular lunch breaks outside in nature and coffee breaks with friends. Be playful and allow your mind to enjoy wandering into wondering.

Working in focused intervals

A recent article in Inc stated that – “In addition to the seven or eight hours of adequate sleep that so many entrepreneurs and CEOs neglect, taking smart breaks during your workday, and having longer periods of downtime are keys to being more productive”.

Sounds simple, again in my global coaching practice I had to negotiate with clients to be intentionally disciplined and methodical in planning their days, weeks, and months. This involved scheduling time to initiate or sustain a mindfulness or meditation practice, engage in a regular exercise program, go shopping to buy and eat healthy foods (eliminating desk-side snacks), being clear on key deliverables and breaking down key tasks into bite-size bits, and saying no to meetings that don’t contribute towards achieving these.

When we change the way we attend, a different world can come forth, for ourselves, others we are interacting with, and the environment we are operating within. When we know how to really, truly, and deeply attend, and observe, we can go to our place of deeper knowing, rethink and then act swiftly and inflow to effect the transformational breakthroughs that change the world as we know it.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our collective, learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, is a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, which can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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99.7% of Innovation Processes Miss These 3 Essential Steps

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99.7% of Innovation Processes Miss These 3 Essential Steps

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Congratulations! You developed and are using a best-in-class Innovation Process.

You start by talking to consumers, studying mega-trends, and scanning the globe for emerging technologies and disruptive offerings.

Once you find a problem and fall in love with it, you start dreaming and designing possible solutions. You imagine what could be, focused on creating as many ideas as possible. Then you shift to quality, prioritizing ideas that fit the company’s strategy and are potentially desirable, viable, and feasible.

With prioritized ideas in hand, you start iterating, an ongoing cycle of prototyping and testing until you confidently home in on a solution that consumers desire, is technically feasible, and financially viable.

But you don’t stop there! You know that ideas are easily copied by innovative business models are the source of lasting competitive advantage, so you think broadly and identify financial, operational, and strategic assumptions before testing each one like the innovation scientist you are.

If (and when) a solution survives all the phases and stage gates and emerges triumphant from the narrow end of the innovation process, there is a grand celebration. Because now, finally, it is ready to go to market and delight customers.

Right?

Wrong.

The solution’s journey has only just begun.

What lies ahead can be far more threatening and destructive than what lies behind.

Unless you planned for it by including these three steps in your innovation process.

1. Partnership with Sales

During testing, you ask consumers to give feedback on solutions. But do you ask Sales?

Salespeople spend most of their time outside the office and in stores, talking to customers (e.g., retailers, procurement), consumers, and users. They see and hear what competitors are doing, what is working, and what isn’t. And they will share all of this with you if you ask.

When I ask why innovation processes don’t include Sales, I hear two things (1) “it’s too early to talk to Sales” and (2) “they always tell us the same thing – it’s too expensive.”

First, if you have a concept (or two or three) with a 50/50 shot of going to market, call a few Salespeople and ask for their reactions. Nothing formal, no meeting required—just a gut reaction. And once you get that, ask when they’d like to talk again because their perspective is essential.

Second, “too expensive” should never be the end of the conversation. It’s one piece of feedback, ask follow-up questions to understand why it’s too expensive, then ask, “What else?” There’s always more, and some of it is useful. Plus, better to hear it now than months or years from now at the launch announcement.

2. Relay with Operations

Most companies have a process between the end of the innovation process and shipping the new offering. It’s where sourcing, manufacturing, shipping, inventory management, contracting, and many other crucial and practical decisions and plans are made.

Also, at most companies, the “transition” from the innovation process to the operational process is akin to chucking something over a wall. “Here you go,” Innovation seems to say, “we proved this will be a big business. Now go make it happen!”

Unfortunately, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, and everyone else affected usually stand on the other side of the wall, solution in hand, mouth agape, eyes wide, thinking, “Huh?”

Instead of an abrupt hand-off, the Innovation Process needs to identify when the relay-style hand-off starts, and Innovation and Operations run side-by-side, developing, adjusting, and honing the solution.

3. Hand-off to the Core Business

The hand-off to the Core Business is the most precarious of all moments for an innovation. The moment it leaves the Innovation team’s warm, nurturing, and forgiving nest and moves into the performance-driven reality of the Core Business.

The Core Business knows why it was added to the P&L, but they don’t understand how it came to be or why it is the way it is. And they definitely don’t love it as much as you do. All they see is a tiny, odd thing that requires lots of their already scarce resources to become something worthwhile.

Instead of depositing beloved solutions on the Core Business’ doorstep like an unwanted orphan, Innovation Process should ensure that the following three questions are answered and aligned to well before the hand-off occurs.

How material (revenue, profit) does a solution need to be to be welcomed into the Core Business?
Who runs the new business, and what else is on their plate?
What mechanisms are in place to ensure the Core Business supports the new solution during its tenuous first 1-3 years?

Create a process that creates innovation

Invention is something new.

Innovation is something new that creates value.

Innovation processes that focus solely on defining, designing, developing, and de-risking a solution run the risk of being Invention process because they result in something new but stop short of outlining how the innovation will be produced at scale, launched, scaled, and supported for years to come. You know, all those things required to create value.

BTW:

99.7% isn’t an exact number. In my experience, it’s 100%. But I wanted to leave some wiggle room.
I am 100% guilty of forgetting these three things.
If you’re trying to innovate for the first time in a loooooooong time, it’s ok to focus on the front end of innovation (define, design, develop, de-risk) and tackle these three things later. But trust me, you will need to tackle them later.

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Why is it important to innovate in 2023?

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Why is it important to innovate in 2023?

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

At ImagineNation™ we have just celebrated 10 years as a global innovation consultancy, learning, and coaching company. During this time, we’ve identified some of the common patterns that people demonstrate as a result of feeling uncomfortable, frozen, inert, stubborn, and confused and as a result, are resistant to innovation. Where many organizations, teams, and leaders appear to walk backward as if they are sleepwalking through this time in their lives.

At the same time, we know that innovation is transformational, and why, at this moment in time, it is more important than ever to create, invent and innovate. We also know that is crucial to be better balanced, resilient, and adaptive to grow and flow, survive and thrive, in today’s chaotic BANI environment. We also know exactly what transformative innovation involves, and how to enable and equip people to connect and collaborate in new ways to effect constructive and sustainable change in a world of unknowns.

Innovation is, in fact, the water of life!

Shaping the next normal

According to a recent article by McKinsey and Co “The future is not what it used to be: Thoughts on the shape of the next normal” the coronavirus crisis is a “world-changing event” which is forcing both the pace and scale of workplace innovation.

Stating that businesses are forced to do more with less and that many are finding better, simpler, less expensive, and faster ways to operate. Describing how innovative health systems, through necessity, constraints, and adversity have exploited this moment in time, to innovate:

“The urgency of addressing COVID-19 has also led to innovations in biotech, vaccine development, and the regulatory regimes that govern drug development so that treatments can be approved and tried faster. In many countries, health systems have been hard to reform; this crisis has made the difficulty much easier to achieve. The result should be a more resilient, responsive, and effective health system”.

We all know that it is impossible to know what will happen in the future and yet, that it is possible to consider and learn from the lessons of the past, both distant and recent. On that basis, it’s crucial to take time out, be hopeful, and positive, and think optimistically about the future. To be proactive and innovate to shape the kind of future we all wish to have, through making constructive and sustainable changes, that ultimately contribute to the common good.

Strategically deciding to innovate

Strategically deciding to innovate, is the first, mandatory, powerful, and impactful lever organizations, teams, leaders, and individuals can pull to effect constructive and sustainable change that enables people to execute and deliver real benefits:

Deal with, and find solutions to a world full of complex and competing social, civic, and political problems that are hard to solve and aren’t going away.
Better adapt, respond to, and be agile in fast-changing circumstances, uncertainty, instability, and to random and unexpected Black Swan events, like the global Covid-19 Pandemic and the Russian-Ukraine war.
Become human-centric to help people recover and manage their transition through the challenges of the global pandemic and enable them to exploit the range of accelerating technological advances in the digital age.
Develop corporate responsibility, sustainability, diversity, and inclusion strategies that are practical and can work and really deliver on their promises.
Compete by applying and experimenting with lean and agile start-up methodologies and take advantage of the opportunities and possibilities of the global entrepreneurship movement’s new models for leadership, collaboration, and experimentation.
Align to the range of changing workplace dynamics and trends, resulting from the pandemic, including WFH, the “soft resignation” and the demands of a hybrid workplace.
Shift individual, group, and collective consciousness towards collaboration and experimentation in ways that rebuild the trust that has been lost through incompetence, corruption, greed, and dishonesty.
Respond creatively to meet the increasingly diverse range of customer expectations and choices being made around value.

Important to innovate – three elements

To take advantage of living in a globalized world, where we are interconnected through technologies and values and where we have an interrelated structure of reality, we can:

Accept that innovation-led adaptation and growth are absolutely critical and develop targets and a willingness to invest in new scalable business models, achieve fast and effective developments, and launch processes to reflect these.
Invest in a coherent, time-risk balanced portfolio of initiatives and provide the resources to deliver them, at scale, strategically, to innovate to the right market, at the right price, at the right time, and through the most effective channels.
Adopt an ecosystem approach to adapt and grow by creating and capitalizing on both internal and external networks, and stakeholder management through developing workforce ecosystems – a structure that consists of interdependent actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to pursue both individual and collective goals.

Problem-solving, cultural change, and improving people’s lives

It is more important than ever to make innovation transformational, so that it delivers constructive, ethical, and sustainable change, by building on three critical successful abilities:

Seeing and sensing the real systemic problem or breakthrough opportunity:

What problem are we solving? And is there a customer who wants to pay to have that problem solved?
What problem are we solving for the customer? Who needs this?
What are the possibilities and opportunities available to us? And is there a customer who wants to pay to have this opportunity realized?
What are some of our strengths? What are some of the things we are doing well that we can build upon or exploit?

Shifting the culture:

Where are we today? Where do we want to be in the future?
What are our prevailing mindsets? How can we measure and contextualize their impact? What mindsets might we embrace to adapt and grow in an uncertain world?
How ready and receptive are we to really embrace change?
What do we need to unlearn and relearn to ensure our people are open-minded, hearted, and willed to embody and enact the desired change?
How engaged and passionate are our people in problem-solving?
How might we harness our people’s collective intelligence to solve problems and realize opportunities?

Aligning technologies, processes, artifacts, and behaviors as a holistic system:

What is our appetite for risk? How do we define risk in our context?
What type of innovation do we strategically want to plan for and engage in?
What old legacy technologies no longer serve your needs? What new technologies might you be willing to invest in for the future?
What disciplines are in place to ensure that people have a common understanding of the key processes and comply with managing them?
How are we ensuring that everyone is motivated and skilled to innovate?
How are we ensuring that people are acknowledged, rewarded, and organized to repeatedly innovate?
What are the key mindsets and behaviours that enable and equip people to embody and embrace repeatedly innovate and design solutions with the end customer in mind?

Become an adaptive and resilient difference maker

As many of us are aware, Toys R Us and Blockbuster were huge companies, that enjoyed massive success; however, this was all brought to an end due to their failure to innovate.

We can all avoid this fate by choosing to innovate and create constructive and sustainable change through:

Accepting and acknowledging that to survive and thrive in a BANI world, where necessity is still the mother of all invention, and the urgency to do this is more important than ever.
Identifying, understanding, and dealing with our own resistance to innovation, safely and proactively, and transforming resistance into resilience, to be adaptive and safely innovate.
Understanding where we are today and then assessing the gap to what we want to be in the future, and mitigating the risks of both closing the gap and leaving the gap wide open.
Enabling leaders, teams, and individuals to connect, explore, discover and navigate new ways of approaching and delivering commercially viable, value-adding, constructive and sustainable change, and outcomes.
Leveraging innovation to transform an organization, a business, the way people lead and team, to improve the quality of people’s lives in ways they appreciate and cherish.

“In order to transcend mere adequacy and make a mark of creative transcendence on the world, organizations need to stop walking backward, following a trail that has already been blazed. The motto of the British Special Air Service is, “Who dares, wins.” It is time for businesses to be bold, inspired, and look to the horizon. The next great innovation is out there. Will you have the guts to create it?”

Will you make a fundamental choice to innovate?

According to McKinsey and Co “The point is that where the world lands is a matter of choice – of countless decisions to be made by individuals, companies, governments, and institutions”.

Will you make a fundamental choice to use the current crisis to lead to a burst of innovation, productivity, resilience, and exploration in 2023, to take advantage of our connected world to create the constructive and sustainable changes we all want to have?

Or will you continue walking backward and sleepwalking through life, and fail to take advantage of this moment in time, to innovate, and continue life with the same thinking that is causing the current range of results, that many of us don’t want to have?

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

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

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The Anticipatory Leader

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Shifting from Reacting to Predicting Disruption

The Anticipatory Leader

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

The vast majority of organizational leadership today operates in a state of perpetual reaction. We manage by dashboard, optimize by quarterly report, and respond to crises only after they hit the headlines. This is the Victim Mindset of Leadership — believing that external disruption is an unavoidable, random event that must be absorbed. While this reactive approach might ensure short-term stability, it guarantees long-term decline.

In a world defined by exponential technology and complex global systems, the future belongs to the Anticipatory Leader. This is not about crystal balls or psychic predictions; it is a systematic, Human-Centered approach to sensing and preparing for future shifts before they become crises. It is the core capability that allows an organization to become the disruptor, rather than the disrupted. This shift requires trading the comfortable illusion of stability for the strategic discomfort of informed foresight.

The Three Domains of Anticipatory Leadership

Anticipation is built on a structured commitment to looking beyond the immediate horizon. It moves the leader from the transactional (managing today) to the transformational (designing tomorrow) across three key domains:

Sensing and Signal Detection (The ‘Where’):
This involves actively seeking weak signals — small, early indicators of massive change that are often dismissed as fringe ideas or anomalies. Reactive leaders only see trends; anticipatory leaders see inflection points. This means looking beyond industry trade journals into adjacent industries, geopolitical shifts, and emerging scientific research. It requires building diverse networks outside the company walls.
Scenario Mapping and Future Prototyping (The ‘What If’):
Anticipatory leaders refuse to plan for just one future. They create three to five plausible future scenarios based on their detected signals. These scenarios aren’t forecasts; they are mental models used to stress-test current strategies. Crucially, they use these scenarios to engage in Future Prototyping — building Minimum Viable Solutions (MVS) for future needs today, before the market demands them.
Building Organizational Adaptability (The ‘How’):
The best prediction is useless if the organization cannot pivot quickly. Anticipatory leadership requires embedding Agility and Resilience across the entire enterprise. This means flattening hierarchies, democratizing decision-making (empowering the edge), and constantly practicing unlearning — discarding outdated assumptions about the market, the customer, and the business model. This organizational fluidity is the ultimate defense against disruption.

Case Study 1: The Retail Giant and the E-Commerce Threat (The Cost of Reaction)

Challenge: The Slow Decline of Brick-and-Mortar Revenue

A massive, decades-old general merchandise retailer saw the emergence of e-commerce in the late 1990s not as a threat, but as a niche for booksellers. Their leadership was reactive, focused only on optimizing the square footage of their existing stores.

Anticipatory Leadership Intervention (Failure):

The retailer failed to detect the crucial weak signal: the shift in consumer expectations toward convenience and limitless choice. They ran a single, optimistic scenario: “Online sales will remain under 5% of total retail.” This reductionist view meant they did not prototype alternative logistics models (e.g., last-mile delivery, in-store pickup) until their market share began a terminal decline. Their leadership waited until the disruption was a crisis before reacting, resulting in an expensive, years-long struggle to catch up and a permanent loss of market leadership. The cost of reaction is always exponentially higher than the investment in anticipation.

The Human-Centered Imperative of Foresight

Anticipatory Leadership is inherently Human-Centered. It recognizes that the future is not found in spreadsheets alone; it’s found in the unmet, often un-articulated, needs of humans. By systematically looking for signals in human behavior — how younger generations are spending their time, how environmental awareness is shaping purchasing, or how trust is being fractured by digital life — the leader can predict the behavioral inflection points that drive market change.

Furthermore, leading through foresight mitigates the employee fear of change. When change is announced as a reaction to a competitor’s move, employees feel panicked and betrayed. When change is presented as the execution of a strategy anticipated two years ago, it breeds confidence and a sense of strategic purpose.

Case Study 2: The Software Company and the Open-Source Wave (The Power of Anticipation)

Challenge: The Commoditization of Proprietary Technology

A successful enterprise software company, whose entire business model was based on expensive, proprietary licensing, faced the rising tide of open-source software (OSS) in the early 2000s. The traditional leadership instinct was to view OSS as “low quality” or “non-commercial.”

Anticipatory Leadership Intervention (Success):

A small, empowered foresight team within the company detected a weak signal: the cultural shift among top developers who increasingly valued collaboration and transparency over vendor lock-in. Instead of dismissing OSS, the leadership team mapped two extreme scenarios — one where OSS failed, and one where it became the global standard. They quickly realized the latter was plausible and highly destructive to their core business.

Their action was anticipatory: they made a strategic pivot by quietly investing in and contributing heavily to several key OSS projects, and then repositioned their proprietary product not as a stand-alone license, but as a Premium Service Layer built on top of the open-source infrastructure. This shift transformed them from an expensive vendor into a trusted ecosystem partner, securing a new recurring revenue stream and attracting the very talent their competitors were losing. They predicted the disruption and changed their business model before their revenue plateaued.

Conclusion: Making Anticipation Your Operating System

The time lag between a disruption beginning and it hitting your P&L is shrinking every year. You cannot wait for the data to confirm what common sense and human insight already suggest. The Anticipatory Leader does not fear the future; they design for it.

“Reactive leaders spend their time climbing out of holes. Anticipatory Leaders focus on where to dig the next one. That gap is the difference between survival and sustained market dominance.” — Braden Kelley

Make sensing the future a daily habit, not an annual planning exercise. Your essential first step: Empower your best people to spend 10% of their time focused entirely on weak signals outside your current strategic boundary. This small investment in foresight is the greatest insurance policy you can buy against being disrupted.

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.

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Intrapreneurship 2.0

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Empowering Employees to Be Startup Founders

Intrapreneurship 2.0

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The single biggest threat to a successful, established company is rarely an external competitor; it is the Internal Antibody. This is the organizational immune system that attacks new ideas, citing rigid budget cycles, resource constraints, and ‘the way we’ve always done things.’ This institutionalized resistance is why so many large organizations fail to capitalize on the single greatest source of innovative ideas: their own employees.

Intrapreneurship 1.0 was about suggestion boxes, pitch competitions, and “20% time” — nice initiatives, but often disconnected from the strategic core, quickly defunded, and politically vulnerable. Today, in the age of rapid, complex disruption, we need Intrapreneurship 2.0: a systemic approach that treats internal innovators not as suggestion-givers, but as legitimate Startup Founders with the mandate, resources, and protection needed to scale. This is how you unlock a continuous capability for internal disruption.

The Three Pillars of the Intrapreneurial Operating System

To transition from a siloed corporate structure to a decentralized innovation engine, an organization must build three pillars, transforming its internal operating system to mimic a venture capital firm.

The Seed Funding and Protection Pillar:
The greatest barrier for an intrapreneur is not generating the idea, but navigating bureaucracy. Intrapreneurship 2.0 requires a dedicated, independently governed Internal Venture Fund separate from the traditional P&L and capital expenditure budget. Most importantly, it requires a “safe harbor” — a leadership commitment to shield these projects from the corporate antibodies, protecting the innovator’s career, even if the project fails after a disciplined experiment.
The Governance and Autonomy Pillar:
Intrapreneurs must have high autonomy over their team, budget, and execution methodology. Their reporting structure should be to an impartial “Innovation Review Board” (IRB), modeled after a VC board of directors, not to their traditional department head. This allows them to move with startup speed, pivoting based on market data rather than political consensus or departmental inertia.
The Talent and Rewarding Pillar:
Innovation is a retention strategy. The rewards for successful intrapreneurial ventures must be commensurate with the risk taken. This goes beyond a one-time bonus; it must include genuine equity-like incentives (e.g., profit-sharing on the new business line), career advancement into a new business unit established around the innovation, or formal recognition as a Chief Intrapreneur. This elevates internal innovation from a side project to a viable, exciting career path.

Case Study 1: Transforming Legacy Hardware into a Service Model

Challenge: Stagnant Revenue in a Global Industrial Manufacturer

A multi-billion-dollar industrial equipment company faced declining revenue as its traditional hardware sales became commoditized. The future was in “Equipment-as-a-Service” (EaaS), but the legacy sales force and technology platforms lacked the agility to transition.

Intrapreneurship 2.0 Intervention:

The leadership team sponsored a small, cross-functional team to form a fully-funded internal startup, deliberately naming it to sound external: Synergy Tech Solutions. The team was explicitly tasked with building the EaaS platform and customer experience outside of the main P&L. They were given a two-year budget and full autonomy to choose their cloud infrastructure and agile pricing model. Crucially, a formal Executive Steering Committee acted as their impartial VC board, providing guidance but never vetoing their market experiments. When the new service generated its first $10M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), the core intrapreneurial team was given the option to merge their unit back into the core with significant promotion and profit sharing, effectively transitioning from founders to general managers.

The Anti-Bureaucracy Toolkit

The single greatest tool for the intrapreneur is the ability to say no to corporate overhead. Intrapreneurship 2.0 recognizes that speed is the only currency that matters. Leaders must provide a practical “Anti-Bureaucracy Toolkit” that includes:

Pre-Approved Legal Templates: Quick contracts for small vendors or pilot customers, bypassing the standard six-week legal review.
Shadow IT Access: Permission to use modern, rapid prototyping software (often blocked by corporate IT and security policies) with agreed-upon guardrails.
Fast-Track Procurement: A simplified purchasing card with a higher limit for immediate needs, eliminating cumbersome Purchase Order (PO) processes.

Case Study 2: Solving Internal Talent Drain with an Innovation Marketplace

Challenge: Losing Top Talent to Startups and Internal Siloing

A large technology company suffered from talent drain as its best engineers left to join external startups. Simultaneously, internal talent was siloed and locked into non-strategic maintenance work.

Intrapreneurship 2.0 Intervention:

The company created an Internal Innovation Marketplace, essentially an internal job board for mission-driven, intrapreneurial projects. Any employee with an approved idea could post a “Team Request” for talent. The powerful shift was institutionalizing a formal Talent Mobility Policy that allowed employees to dedicate 100% of their time to an internal startup for a defined period (6-12 months) with a dedicated manager bypass for high-priority projects. This marketplace acted as a decentralized innovation incubator. It gave existing employees the startup experience they craved — ownership, speed, and mission — without having to leave the company. Within 18 months, the company successfully launched four new business lines, and top talent attrition was cut in half, proving that the best retention strategy is often internal disruption.

Conclusion: Scaling the Founder’s Mindset

Intrapreneurship 2.0 is the evolution of innovation culture. It’s not a program; it’s an organizational design decision. It is the recognition that the person closest to the customer pain or the technical opportunity is often a mid-level employee, not an executive.

“If you want to create a culture of continuous innovation, you must stop treating your best ideas as suggestions and start treating your best people as founders. Give them the key to the innovation vault and the mandate to drive change.” — Braden Kelley

The time for hesitant, half-measures is over. Embrace the principles of Intrapreneurship 2.0 to transform your workforce into a legion of nimble, motivated internal entrepreneurs, securing your future through your own capacity for disruption. Your first step: Audit your current innovation budget and separate 10% into a true, autonomous Internal Venture Fund.

For more on this topic I encourage to explore the writings of my friend Braden Kelley, a two-time best-selling author, including Charting Change and Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, and the creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. He helps organizations drive innovation, overcome resistance, and embed continuous change capabilities.

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.

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Navigating Disruption with Clarity

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Purpose as Your North Star

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In a world defined by constant disruption, where technologies, markets, and customer needs shift at an unprecedented pace, organizations are often left feeling adrift. The old playbooks of strategic planning and forecasting are proving insufficient to navigate the volatility. In this environment of chronic uncertainty, I believe the most powerful anchor for any organization is a clearly defined and deeply embedded sense of purpose. Purpose, when authentically articulated and lived, acts as a North Star, providing clarity, inspiring action, and uniting a workforce to not just survive disruption, but to thrive within it.

Purpose is more than just a mission statement or a marketing slogan. It is the fundamental reason an organization exists beyond making a profit. It is the why behind the what. When a company’s purpose is its guiding light, it helps leaders and employees make better decisions, prioritize more effectively, and remain resilient in the face of setbacks. Purpose creates a shared sense of meaning that transcends individual roles and responsibilities, fostering a culture of trust and collective commitment. It gives people a reason to come to work every day that is bigger than a paycheck.

Navigating disruption with purpose requires a human-centered approach to strategy. It’s about moving from a rigid, top-down model to one that is driven by a shared sense of why. This enables organizations to adapt more quickly, as everyone is aligned on the ultimate goal, even if the path to get there needs to change. An organization with a strong purpose will find that its people are more engaged, more innovative, and more willing to go the extra mile. The key elements for leveraging purpose as a navigational tool include:

Authenticity: The purpose must be genuine and deeply ingrained in the company’s DNA, not an afterthought.
Clarity: The purpose must be simple, clear, and easy for every employee to understand and articulate.
Alignment: All business decisions, from product development to hiring, should be evaluated against the organization’s purpose.
Empowerment: Employees must be empowered to act on the purpose, not just told what it is. This fosters ownership and bottom-up innovation.
Storytelling: The organization’s purpose should be constantly reinforced through stories that illustrate its impact on customers, communities, and employees.

Case Study 1: Patagonia’s Environmental Activism as a Business Strategy

The Challenge: Competing in a Fast-Fashion Market with a Commitment to Sustainability

Patagonia, the outdoor apparel company, operates in a highly competitive market often driven by low prices and rapid consumption. The company’s business model, which prioritizes durability and environmental responsibility, stands in stark contrast to the fast-fashion industry. Navigating this landscape while remaining true to its values presented a constant challenge.

The Purpose-Driven Strategy:

Patagonia’s purpose is “We’re in business to save our home planet.” This isn’t just a slogan; it is the core of their business strategy. Every decision, from material sourcing to marketing campaigns, is evaluated through this lens. When faced with disruption, such as a downturn in the economy, Patagonia doesn’t compromise on its purpose. Instead, it doubles down, knowing that its loyal customer base values this commitment. For example, during Black Friday, a time when most retailers encourage consumption, Patagonia famously ran a campaign telling customers, “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” This counterintuitive approach reinforced their purpose and created an even stronger connection with their customers. Their commitment to their purpose has allowed them to attract top talent, build a fiercely loyal community, and remain profitable while staying true to their core values.

The Results:

Patagonia has not only survived but thrived by leveraging its purpose as a navigational tool. It has demonstrated that a strong, authentic purpose is a powerful source of competitive advantage and resilience. The company’s clear “why” has enabled it to make bold decisions that might seem risky from a traditional business perspective, but which ultimately resonate deeply with its customers and employees. This case study shows that a purpose-driven approach provides a clear framework for navigating disruption, allowing a company to stand out and build a sustainable business in the long term.

Key Insight: An authentic and unwavering purpose can act as a powerful differentiator and a source of competitive advantage, enabling an organization to make bold, values-aligned decisions that build long-term loyalty and resilience.

Case Study 2: Microsoft’s Cultural Transformation under Satya Nadella

The Challenge: A Stagnant Culture and Missed Opportunities in a Rapidly Changing Tech Landscape

In the early 2010s, Microsoft was widely perceived as a company that had lost its way. Its culture was siloed and competitive, and it had missed key shifts in the tech industry, such as the rise of mobile computing. The company was in a state of internal turmoil, lacking a unified vision to guide it through the ongoing disruption. New leadership was needed to redefine the company’s direction and reignite innovation.

The Purpose-Driven Strategy:

When Satya Nadella became CEO, he didn’t start with a new product strategy; he started with purpose. He re-framed Microsoft’s mission to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” This purpose was intentionally broad and human-centered. It was a clear departure from the company’s past focus on “putting a computer on every desk.” This new North Star guided every subsequent strategic decision, from embracing open-source software and cloud computing to acquiring LinkedIn and GitHub. The purpose served as a unifying force, helping different business units collaborate and innovate together. It allowed the company to pivot into new markets with a clear sense of direction, moving beyond its traditional software dominance.

The Results:

Nadella’s purpose-driven leadership led to a remarkable cultural and business renaissance at Microsoft. The company’s stock price soared, and it regained its position as a global technology leader. By using a clear and human-centered purpose as its guide, Microsoft was able to navigate the complex and disruptive tech landscape with newfound clarity and agility. This case study demonstrates how a renewed sense of purpose, when effectively communicated and integrated into the culture, can act as a powerful engine for change, enabling a large organization to reinvent itself and thrive in a period of intense disruption.

Key Insight: Reclaiming and re-framing an organization’s purpose can serve as the most effective catalyst for a large-scale cultural transformation and business revitalization.

Making Purpose Your Guiding Light

In an era of relentless disruption, a clearly defined purpose is no longer a luxury—it is an essential strategic asset. It provides the clarity needed to make tough decisions, the inspiration required to foster innovation, and the resilience necessary to weather any storm. As leaders, our role is not just to set a course, but to articulate a compelling “why” that will serve as our collective North Star. By putting purpose at the center of our strategy, we can move from being passive observers of change to active agents of a future we are all proud to create.

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