Tag Archives: human behavior

Humanizing Agility

Humanizing Agility

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Like many others, I invested time in isolation during the pandemic to engage in various online learning programs. As a highly credentialed coach to many global Agile and SCRUM leaders in major international and local organizations, I enrolled in an Agile coach certification program and enthusiastically attended all daily sessions. It was a disastrous learning experience, verifying my perception of the Agile community’s focus on a prescriptive rules-driven process to agility. The Agile Manifesto’s  highest priority is satisfying customers through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software; only two of the 12 principles mention people – “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project” and “the best architectures, requirements, and design emerge from self-organizing teams.” So, with this in mind, what might be some of the benefits of integrating a technological and process-driven disciplined approach towards humanizing agility?

I am a conceptual and analytical thinker, an entrepreneur, and an innovator who is acknowledged as a global thought leader on the people side of innovation. I also teach, mentor, and coach people to be imaginative, inquisitive, and curious, always asking many open questions. I empower, enable, and equip them to become change-agile, cognitively, and emotionally agile and develop their innovation agility. The presenters responded to my method of inquiry by assuming that I knew nothing about Agile despite knowing nothing about my background.

As a result, they failed to certify me without communicating or consulting with me directly, despite my meeting all of the course evaluation criteria and having more than 10,000 hours of facilitation and more than 1,000 hours of coaching experience on the people side of change. I also have a comprehensive background in humanizing total quality management, continuous improvement, and start-up methodologies in major organizations.

I contacted the training company and challenged their decision, only not to be “heard” and be paid lip service when confronted by a rigid, linear, conventional, disconnected approach to agility and its true role and capability in catalysing change, innovation and teaming.

This is especially true considering the senior SCRUM and Agile leaders I was coaching at the time experienced very few problems with Agile’s disciplined process and technological side. They specifically requested coaching support to develop strategies to resolve their monumental challenges and complex issues involving “getting people to work together daily” and operating as “self-organizing teams.” How do they go about humanizing agility?

Making sense of agility

Despite my disappointment, I bravely continued researching how to make sense of agility and link and integrate it with the people side of change, innovation, and teams. I intended to enable leaders to execute agile transformation initiatives successfully by combining a human-centered approach to agile software development through humanizing agility.  

Agility refers to a leader, team, or organization’s ability to make timely, effective, and sustained changes that maintain superior performance. According to Pamela Myer’s book “The Agility Shift”, – an agility shift is the intentional development of the competence, capacity and confidence to learn, adapt and innovate in changing contexts for sustainable success. We have incorporated this approach into our innovation learning and coaching curriculum at ImagineNation™ and iterated and pivoted it over the past 12 years in empowering, enabling and equipping people to become “agility shifters” by humanizing agility.

Humanizing agility differently

Agility can be humanized and expanded to include change, cognitive, innovation, and organizational agility, all powerfully fueled by people’s emotional energy. This is fundamental to achieving success through non-growth or growth strategies and delivering equitable and sustainable outcomes that will make the world a better place for all humanity.  

It involves identifying pivots, unlearning, learning, and relearning, embracing new approaches, frameworks, and tools, and developing new 21st-century mindsets, behaviors, and skills.

Humanizing agility involves empowering, enabling, and equipping people to be, think and act differently autonomously and competently, especially in the conflicted, chaotic, unstable post-COVID world of emerging unknowns.

Like innovation, agility is contextual.

Humanizing agility supports people to adapt, grow and thrive, become nimble by enabling:

  • Teams to deliver product releases as shorter sprints to collect customer feedback to iterate and pivot product development.
  • Leaders, teams, and organizations respond quickly and adapt to market changes, internally and externally.
  • People must think and feel and be able to quickly make intentional shifts to be effective, creative, inventive, and innovative in changing contexts.

That empowers, enables and equips people with the mindsets, behaviors, and skills to adapt, grow, and thrive by developing their confidence, capacity, and competence to catalyze and mobilize their power to move quickly and easily, think creatively and critically to make faster decisions and solve complex problems with less effort.  

Humanizing Agility – The Five Elements

1. Emotional energy

Emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels creativity, invention, and innovation.

Understanding and harnessing this energy inspires and motivates individuals to explore and embrace creative thinking strategies in partnership with AI.

Emotional energy catalyses people’s intrinsic motivation, conviction, hope, positivity, and optimism to approach their world purposefully, meaningfully, and differently.

When people are true to their calling, they make extra efforts and are healthier, which positively impacts their well-being and improves their resilience.

2. Change agility

Change agility is the ability to anticipate, respond, be receptive, and adapt to constant and accelerating change in an uncertain, unstable, conflicted world.

It involves developing a new perspective of change as a continuous, iterative, and learning process that has to be embedded in every action and interaction, not a separate standalone process.

Requiring the development of new mental models, states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills to drive business and workforce outcomes that are critical for an organization to survive and thrive through any change.

Change becomes an ongoing opportunity, not a threat or liability, and humanizing agility in the context of change agility is a core 21st-century competency for leaders, teams and coaches.

3.Cognitive agility

Cognitive agility is the extent to which people can adapt and shift their perspectives and thought processes when doing so leads to more positive outcomes. 

Cognitive agility refers to how flexible and adaptive people can be with their thoughts in the face of change, uncertain circumstances, and random and unexpected events and situations. Being cognitively agile helps people break down their neuro-rigidity and eliminate any core fixed mindsets; it supports their neuro-plasticity and develops a growth mindset and ability to perceive the world through multiple lenses and differing perspectives.

Humanizing agility in the context of cognitive agility enables people to make sense of and understand the range of challenges, problems, and paradoxes at the deeper systemic and surface levels, preparing them for smart risk-taking, effective decision-making, and intelligent problem-solving. 

4.Innovation agility

Innovation agility is the extent to which people develop the courage, compassion and creativity to safely deep-dive into and dance with cognitive dissonance—to passionately, purposefully, and apply creative tension and develop neuro-elasticity, to play in the space where possibility lives—between the present state and the desired creative, inventive, and innovative outcome.

To empower, engage, and enable people to use their human ingenuity and harness their collective intelligence to be innovative in the age of AI by adapting and growing in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, which is appreciated and cherished.

5.Organizational and leadership agility

Organizational agility involves developing an ability to renew itself, adapt, innovate, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, uncertain and unstable operating environment. It requires a paradoxical balance of two things: a dynamic capability, the ability to move fast—speed, nimbleness, responsiveness and stability, and a stable foundation—a platform of things that don’t change to provide a rigorous and disciplined pillar.

Organizations and leaders prioritizing humanizing agility also prioritize differing and creative ways of being, thinking and acting. They maintain their strength by focusing on their core competencies while regularly stretching themselves for maximum flexibility, adaptiveness and resilience.

Finally…. Imagine humanizing agility

Imagine what you could do and the difference we could make to people, customers, organizations, communities and the world by humanizing agility in ways that embrace and embody the five elements of agility to harness the human ingenuity and people’s collective intelligence guide vertical, horizontal and transformational changes the world and humanity need right now.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

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

Image Credit: Pexels

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

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

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

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

  1. Ignite Innovation with These 3 Key Ingredients — by Howard Tiersky
  2. What Have We Learned About Digital Transformation? — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  3. The Collective Growth Mindset — by Stefan Lindegaard
  4. Companies Are Not Families — by David Burkus
  5. 24 Customer Experience Mistakes to Stop in 2024 — by Shep Hyken
  6. Transformation is Human Not Digital — by Greg Satell
  7. Embrace the Art of Getting Started — by Mike Shipulski
  8. Trust as a Competitive Advantage — by Greg Satell
  9. 3 Innovation Lessons from The Departed — by Robyn Bolton
  10. Humans Are Not as Different from AI as We Think — by Geoffrey A. Moore

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

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

Have something to contribute?

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

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

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

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of March 2023Drum 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 March’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Taking Care of Yourself is Not Impossible — by Mike Shipulski
  2. Rise of the Prompt Engineer — by Art Inteligencia
  3. A Guide to Effective Brainstorming — by Diana Porumboiu
  4. What Disruptive Innovation Really Is — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  5. The 6 Building Blocks of Great Teams — by David Burkus
  6. Take Charge of Your Mind to Reclaim Your Potential — by Janet Sernack
  7. Ten Reasons You Must Deliver Amazing Customer Experiences — by Shep Hyken
  8. Deciding You Have Enough Opens Up New Frontiers — by Mike Shipulski
  9. The AI Apocalypse is Here – 3 Reasons You Should Celebrate! — by Robyn Bolton
  10. Artificial Intelligence is Forcing Us to Answer Some Very Human Questions — by Greg Satell

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

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

Have something to contribute?

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

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

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.






What’s Next – The Only Way Forward is Through

What's Next - The Only Way Forward is Throughby Braden Kelley

The world needs you. The United States needs you. Your family needs you.

Both your heart and your mind are needed to work on potentially the greatest innovation challenge ever put forward.

What is it?

We must find a solution to the division and lack of meaning that has become the American experience.

I’m not sure about the country you live in, but here at home in the United States we are more divided than we have been in a long time – if ever. People are feeling such an absence of meaning and purpose in their lives that they are finding it in opposing ‘the other’.

In the most extreme cases, we are so divided that brothers and sisters, and parents and children are no longer speaking with each other or getting together for holiday meals.

We speak often about the importance of diversity of thought, diversity of group composition for innovation, but when a society reaches a point where people cannot productively disagree and debate their way forward together, innovation will inevitably begin to suffer.

When there is no dialogue, no give and take and a culture begins to emerge where opposition is mandatory, progress slows.

As long as the current situation intensifies, there will be no progress on other areas in desperate need of innovation:

  • Climate change
  • Gender equity
  • (Insert your favorite here)

We all need your help creating the idea fragments that we can connect as a global innovation community into meaningful ideas that hopefully lead to the inventions that will develop into the innovations we desperately need.

The innovations that will move social media from its current parallel play universe to one which actually encourages productive dialogue.

The innovations that will help people find the renewed sense of meaning and purpose that can’t be found making Sik Sok videos, watching other people play video games on Kwitch or investing in cryptocurrency pyramid schemes.

Meaning of Life Quote from Braden Kelley

Our entrepreneurs have made a lot of cotton candy the past couple of decades and people are starving, people are hangry.

There are certain constants in the human condition, and when we as a species stray too far away, it creates huge opportunities for innovators to create new things that will bring us back into balance.

But we can’t ignore where we are now.

We must acknowledge our current situation and fight our way past it. The only way forward is through.

As a thought starter, here is an ad campaign from Heineken from 2017:

We need everyone’s help to address the meaning crisis.

We need everyone’s help to bring America (and the rest of the world) back into productive conversation and connection – to end the division.

Are you up to the task?

Are you ready to help?

Let’s start the dialogue below and get that pebble rolling downhill in the winter, gathering snow as it goes.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments on:

  • other great thought starters
  • good idea fragments to build on
  • the way through

Image credit: Pixabay

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50 Cognitive Biases Reference – Free Download

by Braden Kelley

I came across this cognitive biases infographic from TitleMax and it has a lot of great information in it, but…

The problem with long, information-rich infographics like this is that they’re hard to consume on the screen in their entirety, you can’t print them in a legible way, and they’re hard to leverage in your work. The creators of this infographic did a nice job of capturing a wide range of cognitive biases, which makes this a quite useful tool for design thinking, but not in this format.

To help everyone out, I’ve taken the original infographic and reformatted it into a five page PDF for easy reading and printing on 8.5″ x 11″ letter size paper.

Click here to download the 50 Cognitive Biases PDF (8.5″x11″)

See the original infographic below (click to access the source image):

Cognitive Biases Infographic

Click here to download the 50 Cognitive Biases PDF (8.5″x11″)

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Training Your Quantum Human Computer

Quantum Human Computing

What is quantum computing?

According to Wikipedia, “Quantum computing is the use of quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to perform computation. Computers that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers.”

Rather than try and explain all of the ins and outs of how quantum computing differs from traditional computing and why it matters, I encourage you to check out this YouTube video:

In case you were curious, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the current record holder for quantum computing is a Google machine capable of processing 72 Quantum Bits. There is supposedly a machine in China capable of 76 Qubits, but it has yet to be fully recognized as the new record holder.

So, what does quantum computing have to do with humanity and the human brain and our collective future?

Is the human brain a quantum computer?

The easy answer is – we’re not sure – but scientists are conducting experiments to try and determine whether the human brain is capable of computing in a quantum way.

As the pace of change in our world accelerates and data proliferates, we will need to train our brains to use less traditional brute force computing of going through every possibility one after another to do more parallel processing, better pattern recognition, and generating an increase in our ability to see insights straight away.

Connect the Dots

But how can we train our brains?

There are many different ways to better prepare your brain as we move from the Information Age to the Age of Insight. Let me start you off with two good ones and invite you to add more in the comments:

1. Connect the Dots

Many of us grew up doing connect-the-dot puzzles, and they seemed pretty easy. But, that is with visual queues. The image above shows a number of different visual queues. Connect the dots, especially without numbers or visual queues are great proving grounds for improving your visual pattern recognition skills.

2. DLAIY JMBULE

One of my favorites is the word game DAILY JUMBLE in my local newspaper. You can also play it online. The key here is to work not on using brute force to reorder the letters into a word, but trying to train your brain to just SEE THE WORD – instantly.

Succeeding at this and other ways of training your brain to be more like a quantum computer involves getting better at removing your conscious analytical brain from the picture and letting other parts of your brain take over. It’s not easy. It takes practice – continual practice – because it is really hard to keep the analytical brain out of the way.

So, are you willing to give it a try?

Stay tuned for the next article in this series “The Age of Insight” …

Image credits: Utrecht University, Pixabay


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Making People Dance Instead of Jaywalk

Making People Dance Instead of JaywalkI love anything that is fun and investigates human psychology, especially crowd psychology, and the investigation of how you can use fun to potentially influence human behavior for social good (i.e. the piano stairs example I’ve shared before).

Nobody likes to wait at pedestrian crossings. Traffic lights can be dangerous for impatient pedestrians trying to save a few seconds to cross the street (and willing to risk their lives in the process).

The folks at Smart created The Dancing Traffic Light, an experiential marketing concept providing a fun and safe way to keep people from venturing too early into the street. They started by placing a dance room on a square in Lisbon, Portugal and invited random pedestrians to go into the box and dance. Their movements were then displayed on a few traffic lights in real time. This resulted in 81% more people stopping and waiting at those red lights.

It’s a genius marketing gimmick because it reinforces the brand value of fun by making people dance in a box that looks, imagine that, a bit like a smart car.

The question brought up by this example of a marketing campaign that claims that fun can be used to achieve social good, is that it claims a benefit, that without an extended test could be attributed to novelty…

Does the benefit hold up over time?

Or does it stop being fun and impactful after people have seen it once or twice or the live video component goes away and it becomes a recording? Do people then start jaywalking again at the normal rate?

What do you think?


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