Tag Archives: influencers

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2025Drum 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 August’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. The Nordic Way of Leadership in Business — by Stefan Lindegaard
  2. Science Says You Shouldn’t Waste Too Much Time Trying to Convince People — by Greg Satell
  3. A Manager’s Guide to Employee Engagement — by David Burkus
  4. Decoding the Code of Life – Human-Centered Innovation in Synthetic Biology — by Art Inteligencia
  5. Why Innovators Can’t Ignore the Quantum Revolution — by Art Inteligencia
  6. Performance Reviews Don’t Have to Suck — by David Burkus
  7. Why Explainable AI is the Key to Our Future – The Unseen Imperative — by Art Inteligencia
  8. Goals Require Belief to be Achievable — by Mike Shipulski
  9. The Future is Rotary – Human-Centered Innovation in Rotating Detonation Engines — by Art Inteligencia
  10. The Killer Strategic Concept You’ve Never Heard Of – You Really Need to Know About Schwerpunkt! — by Greg Satell

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in July 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!

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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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Science Says You Shouldn’t Waste Too Much Time Trying to Convince People

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Science Says You Shouldn't Waste Too Much Time Trying to Convince People

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Experts have a lot of ideas about persuasion. Some suggest leveraging social proof, to show that people have adopted the idea and had a positive experience. Others emphasize the importance of building trust and using emotional rather than analytical arguments. Still others insist on creating a unified value proposition.

These are, for the most part, constructive ideas. Yet they are more a taxonomy than a toolbox. Human nature can be baffling and our behavior is rarely consistent. Sometimes we’ll dig in our heels on a relatively minor point and others we’ll give in on a major issue relatively easily, often without any constable rhyme or reason.

Yet consider this one simple science-based principle that explains a lot: The best indicator of what we think and what we do is what the people around us think and do. Once you internalize that, you can begin to understand a lot of otherwise bizarre behavior and work to spread the ideas you care about. Often it’s not opinions we need to shape, but networks.

Majorities Don’t Just Rule, They Also Influence

Consider a famous set of conformity studies performed by the psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s. The design was simple, but ingenuous. He merely showed people pairs of cards, asking them to match the length of a single line on one card with one of three on an adjacent card. The correct answer was meant to be obvious.

However, as the experimenter went around the room, one person after another gave the same wrong answer. When it reached the final person in the group (in truth, the only real subject, the rest were confederates), the vast majority of the time that person conformed to the majority opinion, even if it was obviously wrong!

The idea that people have a tendency toward conformity is nothing new, but that they would give obviously wrong answers to simple and unambiguous questions was indeed shocking. Now think about how hard it is for a more complex idea to take hold across a broad spectrum of people, each with their own biases and opinions.

The truth is that majorities don’t just rule, they also influence, even local majorities. So if you want people to adopt an idea or partake in an action, you need to take into account the communities they are already a part of—at home, at work, in their neighborhood and in other aspects of their social circles. That’s where their greatest influences lie.

The 3 Degrees of Influence Rule

In 1948, Congress authorized funding for the Framingham Heart Study, which would track the lifestyle and health habits, such as diet, exercise, tobacco use and alcohol intake, of 5209 healthy men and women. It was originally intended to last 20 years, but the results were so incredibly useful, it lasted for decades and even included the children of early cohorts.

More than a half century after the study began two researchers, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, began to suspect that the Framingham Heart Study could be used for a very different, but important purpose. What they noticed was that the data included not only information about people’s habits, but their social networks as well.

So they set out to see if they could identify causal links between people’s health and their social connections. Using 32 years of data, they were able to establish a strong effect in areas as diverse as happiness, smoking and even obesity. As it turns out, the people around us not only help to shape our opinions, but our health as well.

The really astounding discovery, however, was that the effect extended to three degrees of influence. So not only our friends’ friends, influence us deeply, but their friends too—people that we don’t even know. Wherever we go, we bring that long, complex web of influence with us and we, in turn, help to shape others’ webs of influence too.

So when set out to shape someone else’s opinion, we need to account for social networks. We may, for example, be able to play on a target’s emotions, give them all the facts and evidence and demonstrate strong social proof, but their communities — extending out to three degrees of influence — will always factor in. While we’re working to persuade, those invisible webs of influence may be working against us.

Thanksgiving Dinners And Earnings Guidance

There is no greater American tradition than the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. No matter what your political persuasion, you are bound to have some relative who holds very different opinions than the rest of the family and who feels no compunction about making clear to everyone at the table exactly where they stand.

As should be clear by now, the reason our crazy uncles are so impervious to persuasion is that we aren’t actually arguing with them at all, but the totality of their social networks. Their friends at work, buddies at the bar, people in their neighborhood and everybody else who they interact with on a regular basis, all get a say at our holiday table.

In much the same way, there isn’t any real reason for CEOs to provide earnings guidance for investors. Steve Jobs refused do it and Apple’s stock during his tenure. Same thing with Unilever under Paul Polman. In 2018, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and uber-investor Warren Buffett wrote a strong Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal urging CEOs to end the practice.

During the pandemic many companies stopped giving earnings guidance to investors but, as soon as things began to stabilize, they started up again. It seems incredible, because all of the experts, even McKinsey, have advised against it. Still the vast majority of CEOs are unconvinced, despite all the contrary evidence. Could their networks be playing a role?

Don’t Try To Shape Opinions, Shape Networks

We like to think we can shape the ideas of others. It can sometimes seem like a puzzle. How can we conjure up the right combination of value proposition, analysis, emotive argument and social proof, to persuade our target?. There is, in fact, an enormous communication industry dedicated to exactly that proposition.

Decades of scientific research suggests that it’s not so easy. Our thoughts aren’t just the product of neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters reacting to different stimuli, but also our social networks. The best indicator of what people think and do is what the people around them think and do. While we’re trying to score debate points, those complex webs of influence are pushing back in often subtle, but extremely powerful ways.

We need to be far more humble about our persuasive powers. Anybody who has ever been married or had kids knows how difficult it is to convince even a single person of something. If you expect to shift the opinions of dozens or hundreds—much less thousands or millions—with pure sophistry, you’re bound to be disappointed.

Instead of trying to shape opinions, we’re often better off shaping networks. That’s why we advise our clients pursuing transformational change efforts to start with a majority, even if that majority is only three people in a room of five. You can always expand a majority out, but once you’re in the minority you’re going to get immediate pushback.

Rather than wordsmithing slogans, our time and efforts will be much better spent working to craft cultures, weaving the complex webs of influence that lead to genuinely shared values and shared purpose.

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

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Change the World With a Keystone Change

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Change the World With a Keystone Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

On December 31st, 1929, the Indian National Congress, the foremost nationalist group on the subcontinent, issued a Declaration of Purna Swaraj, or complete independence from British rule. It also announced a campaign of civil disobedience, but no one had any idea what form it should take. That task fell to Mohandas Gandhi.

The Mahatma returned to his ashram to contemplate next steps. After his efforts to organize against the Rowlatt Act a decade earlier ended in disaster, he struggled to find a way forward. As he told a friend at the time, “I am furiously thinking day and night and I do not see a way out of the darkness.”

Finally, he decided he would march for salt, which impressed almost no one. It seemed to be an incredibly inconsequential issue, especially considering what was at stake. Yet what few realized at the time was that he had identified a keystone change that would break the logjam and the British hold on power. Today the Salt March is known as Gandhi’s greatest triumph.

A Tangible And Achievable Goal

One of Gandhi’s biggest challenges was to connect the lofty goals and high-minded rhetoric of the elites who led the Indian National Congress with the concerns of everyday Indians. These destitute masses didn’t much care whether they were ruled by British elites or Indian elites and, to them, abstract concepts like “freedom” and “independence” meant little.

Salt, on the other hand, was something that was tangible for everyone, but especially for the poorest Indians and the British salt laws provided a clear and actionable target. All you had to do to defy them was to boil seawater to produce salt. What at first seemed trivial became a powerful call for mass action.

In my book, Cascades, I found that every successful movement for change, whether it was a corporate turnaround, a social initiative or a political uprising, began with a keystone change like Gandhi’s salt protests. To achieve a grand vision, you always have to start somewhere and the best place to begin is with a clear and achievable goal.

In some cases, as with voting rights in the women’s movement in the 19th century and, more recently, marriage equality for the LGBT movement, identifying a keystone change took decades. In other cases, such as improving worker safety in Paul O’Neil’s turnaround of Alcoa or a campaign to save 100,000 lives in Don Berwick’s quest to improve quality in medical care, the keystone change was part of the initial plan.

Involving Multiple Stakeholders

The concept of Indian independence raised a number of thorny issues, many of which have not been resolved to this day. Tensions between majority Hindus and minority Muslims created suspicions about how power would be structured after British rule. Similarly, coordinating action between caste Hindus and “untouchables” was riddled with difficulty. Christians and Sikhs had their own concerns.

Yet anger about the Salt Laws helped bring all of these disparate groups together. It was clear from the outset that everyone would benefit from a repeal. Also, because participating was easy—again, it was as simple as boiling sea water—little coordination was needed. Most of all, being involved in a collective effort helped to ease tensions somewhat.

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals took a similar approach to its quest to reduce costs by 25% through implementing lean manufacturing methods at its factories. Much like Gandhi, the executives understood that transforming the behaviors of 20,000 employees across 16 large facilities, most of whom were skeptical of the change, was no simple task.

So they started with one process — factory changeovers — and reduced the time it took to switch from producing one product to another in half. “That changed assumptions of what was possible,” an advisor that worked on the project told me. “It allowed us to implement metrics, improve collaboration and trained the supervisor to reimagine her perceived role from being a taskmaster that pushed people to work harder to a coach that enables improved performance.”

Breaking Through Higher Thresholds Of Resistance

By now most people are familiar with the diffusion of innovations theory developed by Everett Rogers. A new idea first gains traction among a small group of innovators and early adopters, then later spreads to the mainstream. Some have suggested that early adopters act as “influentials” or “opinion leaders” that spur an idea forward, but that is largely a myth.

What is much closer to the truth is that we all have different thresholds of resistance to a new idea and these thresholds are highly contextual. For example, as a Philadelphia native, I will enthusiastically try out a new cheesesteak place, but have kept the same hairstyle for 30 years. My wife, on the other hand, is much more adventurous with hairstyles than she is with cheesesteaks.

Yet we are all influenced by those around us. So if our friends and neighbors start raving about a cheesesteak, she might give it a try and may even tell people about it. Or, as network theory pioneer Duncan Watts explained to me, an idea propagates through “easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.”

That’s how transformative ideas gain momentum and it’s easy to see how a keystone change can help move the process along. By starting out with a tangible goal, such as protesting the salt tax or reducing changeover time at a single factory, you can focus your efforts on people who have lower thresholds of resistance and they, in turn, can help the idea spread to others who are more reticent.

Paving The Way For Future Change

Perhaps most importantly, a keystone change paves the way for larger changes later on. Gandhi’s Salt March showed that the British Raj could be defied. Voting rights for women and, later, blacks, allowed them to leverage their newfound power at the polls. Reducing changeover time showed how similar results could be achieved in other facets of manufacturing. The 100,000 lives campaign helped spur a a quality movement in healthcare.

None of these things happened all at once, but achieving a keystone change showed what was possible, attracted early adopters to the cause and helped give them a basis for convincing others that even more could be achieved. As one of Gandhi’s followers remarked, before the Salt March, the British “were all sahibs and we were obeying. No more after that.”

Another benefit of a keystone change is that it is much less likely to provoke a backlash than a wider, sweeping vision. One of the reasons that the Salt March was successful is that the British didn’t actually gain that much revenue from the tax on salt, so were slow to react to it. The 100,000 lives campaign involved only six relatively easy to implement procedures, rather than pushing hospitals to pursue wholesale change all at once.

So while it’s important to dream big and have lofty goals, the first step is always a keystone change. That’s how you first build a sense of shared purpose and provide a platform from which a movement for change can spread. Before the Salt March, Gandhi was considered by many to be a Hindu nationalist. It was only after that he truly became an inspiration to all Indian people and many others around the world.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pexels

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Planning to Spread

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We’ve all seen the viral videos that seemingly come out of nowhere to garner millions of views on YouTube, videos like this one where five people play one guitar singing Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”, which as of this date has garnered more than 163 million video views:

And if you add up all of the other postings of this same video, the total number of video views goes much, much higher.

Now, surely Gotye’s version of the song couldn’t have possibly garnered more views than this viral sensation that Walk Off the Earth’s cover created, could it?

Um, actually it did. To date Gotye’s official video has captured nearly 600 million video views, or nearly FIVE TIMES as many video views. So, it hasn’t turned out all bad for Gotye.

Now you might ask yourself, how could the huge success of the Walk Off the Earth viral campaign be trumped by traditional marketing if viral marketing is supposed to be the silver bullet?

Well, the truth is that whether you pursue traditional marketing and advertising or supposedly “viral” marketing activities, the goals are the same:

  1. Awareness
  2. Interest
  3. Desire
  4. Action

And it is within that first bullet point, that you find the viral component that any marketing activity or any evangelism activity (for innovation, for change, etc.) should always contain – spreadability.

Now, WordPress doesn’t seem to think that spreadability is a word, but let’s assume for a moment that it is and focus on the fact that most of the time, one of your goals in business (and your personal life) is spreadability. Ultimately, in many cases, success is determined by whether or not you can get your idea to spread.

This is true whether we are talking about an IT project, a Six Sigma continuous improvement effort, a change initiative, a Lean event, a marketing campaign, or a project commercializing an invention into a potential innovation.

So, can anyone guarantee that an idea or marketing campaign will spread?

The short answer is no.

Sorry, I wish I had better news for you, but the fact is that nobody can guarantee that your idea or your marketing campaign will go viral. Why?

You’re dealing with humans living in a complicated world. We’re not all built the same and the same person can have different reactions to the same stimulus (driven by mood and context among other things). This can result in a perfectly spreadable idea or message being stopped dead in its tracks, depriving you of all of the potential downstream sharing that you might have been hoping for or counting on.

Sorry, you can’t guarantee spreadability, despite what opportunistic marketing consultants claiming to know the magic formula might tell you.

Spreading ChangeBut, an idea can be built to spread.

And I’d like to share with you a simple framework, for free, that you can download and spread far and wide.

Click here to download the “Planning to Spread” starter worksheet as a PDF.

It’s based on the same priniciples as mind mapping and it will help you start either with a particular node in mind (someone you’d like to reach and influence) and work backwards, identifying both how to evolve your idea to best influence that particular node, and how you might be able to reach them (at the same time). Or you can work from the idea outwards. Focusing primarily on the WHO and the WHY as you move outward.

The key questions to consider as you are “Planning to Spread” your idea are the following:

  1. What is your idea or message? (Does it resonate with my target audience?)
  2. Who are you trying to reach?
  3. How will you reach them?
    • When will they be most receptive to the message or idea?
    • Where will they be most receptive to the message or idea?
  4. Why will they engage? (What value will they get?)
  5. Why will they share? (What value will they derive?)
  6. How will they share?

Working your way thoughtfully through these questions will increase the chances that your idea or message will spread, but they won’t guarantee it. Going through the process however will help you refine your idea or message, help you think through the mechanics of how you might encourage and increase engagement, and may even help you uncover flaws in your idea or message that you missed (and give you a chance to fix them).

Planning to Spread WorksheetHappy spreading!
(and please let me know in the comments below any things I might have missed)

So what am I trying to spread?

Well, in the run up to my second book (this time focusing on the best practices and next practices of organizational change), soon I will be releasing a new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit to help organizations work smarter by planning their change initiatives (and projects) in a less overwhelming, more human way that will help get everyone literally on the same page.

This is the idea that I will be spreading and there are many ways that you can benefit.

One way is by becoming a case study volunteer. I’m looking to select a handful of companies to teach how to use the toolkit for free and feature their experience in my next book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change. If you would like to get a jump on the competition by increasing your speed of change (and your ability to work smarter), register your interest here.

But there are several other ways you can benefit, and all of them can be found here (including upcoming chances for consultants to train on the methodology and boost their revenue and success as they work with their clients around the world to deliver positive change). I’ll be focusing on teaching and tools, not consulting.

What message or idea are you trying to spread?


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