Tag Archives: Innovation

Back to Basics for Leaders and Managers

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Imagine that you are the CEO working with your CHRO on a succession plan. Both the CFO and COO are natural candidates, and both are, on paper, equally qualified and effective.

The CFO distinguishes herself by consistently working with colleagues to find creative solutions to business issues, even if it isn’t the optimal solution financially, and inspiring them with her vision of the future. She attracts top talent and builds strong relationships with investors who trust her strategic judgment. However, she sometimes struggles with day-to-day details and can be inconsistent in her communication with direct reports.

The COO inspires deep loyalty from his team through consistent execution and reliability. People turn down better offers to stay because they trust his systematic approach, flawless delivery, and deep commitment to developing people. However, his vision rarely extends beyond “do things better,” rigidly adhering to established processes and shutting down difficult conversations with peers when change is needed.

Who so you choose?

The COO feels like the safer bet, especially in uncertain times, given his track record of proven execution, loyal teams, and predictable results. While the CFO feels riskier because she’s brilliant but inconsistent, visionary but scattered.

It’s not an easy question to answer.

Most people default to “It depends.”

It doesn’t depend.

It doesn’t “depend,” because being CEO is a leadership role and only the CFO demonstrates leadership behaviors. The COO, on the other hand, is a fantastic manager, exactly the kind of person you want and need in the COO role. But he’s not the leader a company needs, no matter how stable or uncertain the environment.

Yet we all struggle with this choice because we’ve made “leadership” and “management” synonyms. Companies no longer have “senior management teams,” they have “senior/executive leadership teams.” People moving from independent contributor roles to oversee teams are trained in “people leadership,” not “team management” (even though the curriculum is still largely the same).

But leadership and management are two fundamentally different things.

Leader OR Manager?

There are lots of definitions of both leaders and managers, so let’s go back to the “original” distinction as defined by Warren Bennis in his 1987 classic On Becoming a Leader

Leaders	Managers
· Do the right things· Challenge the status quo· Innovate· Develops· Focuses on people· Relies on trust· Has a long-range perspective· Asks what and why· Has an eye on the horizon	· Do things right· Accept the status quo· Administers· Maintains· Focuses on systems and structures· Relies on control· Has a short-range view· Asks how and when· Has an eye on the bottom line

In a nutshell: leaders inspire people to create change and pursue a vision while managers control systems to maintain operations and deliver results.

Leaders AND Managers!

Although the roles of leaders and managers are different, it doesn’t mean that the person who fills those roles is capable of only one or the other. I’ve worked with dozens of people who are phenomenal managers AND leaders and they are as inspiring as they are effective.

But not everyone can play both roles and it can be painful, even toxic, when we ask managers to take on leadership roles and vice versa. This is the problem with labeling everything outside of individual contributor roles as “leadership.”

When we designate something as a “people leadership” role and someone does an outstanding job of managing his team, we believe he’s a leader and promote him to a true leadership role (which rarely ends well). Conversely, when we see someone displaying leadership qualities and promote her into “people leadership,” we may be shocked and disappointed when she struggles to manage as effortlessly as she inspires.

The Bottom Line

Leadership and Management aren’t the same thing, but they are both essential to an organization’s success. They key is putting the right people in the right roles and celebrating their unique capabilities and contributions.

Image credit: Unsplash

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

McKinsey is Wrong That 80% Companies Fail to Generate AI ROI

1 Reply

McKinsey is Wrong That 80% Companies Fail to Generate AI ROI

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Sometimes, you see a headline and just have to shake your head. Sometimes, you see a bunch of headlines and need to scream into a pillow. This week’s headlines on AI ROI were the latter:

Companies are Pouring Billions Into A.I. It Has Yet to Pay Off – NYT
MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – Forbes
Nearly 8 in 10 companies report using gen AI – yet just as many report no significant bottom-line impact – McKinsey

AI has slipped into what Gartner calls the Trough of Disillusionment. But, for people working on pilots, it might as well be the Pit of Despair because executives are beginning to declare AI a fad and deny ever having fallen victim to its siren song.

Because they’re listening to the NYT, Forbes, and McKinsey.

And they’re wrong.

ROI Reality Check

In 20205, private investment in generative AI is expected to increase 94% to an estimated $62 billion. When you’re throwing that kind of money around, it’s natural to expect ROI ASAP.

But is it realistic?

Let’s assume Gen AI “started” (became sufficiently available to set buyer expectations and warrant allocating resources to) in late 2022/early 2023. That means that we’re expecting ROI within 2 years.

That’s not realistic. It’s delusional.

ERP systems “started” in the early 1990s, yet providers like SAP still recommend five-year ROI timeframes. Cloud Computing“started” in the early 2000s, and yet, in 2025, “48% of CEOs lack confidence in their ability to measure cloud ROI.” CRM systems’ claims of 1-3 years to ROI must be considered in the context of their 50-70% implementation failure rate.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t expect rapid results. We just need to set realistic expectations around results and timing.

Measure ROI by Speed and Magnitude of Learning

In the early days of any new technology or initiative, we don’t know what we don’t know. It takes time to experiment and learn our way to meaningful and sustainable financial ROI. And the learnings are coming fast and furious:

Trust, not tech, is your biggest challenge: MIT research across 9,000+ workers shows automation success depends more on whether your team feels valued and believes you’re invested in their growth than which AI platform you choose.

Workers who experience AI’s benefits first-hand are more likely to champion automation than those told, “trust us, you’ll love it.” Job satisfaction emerged as the second strongest indicator of technology acceptance, followed by feeling valued. If you don’t invest in earning your people’s trust, don’t invest in shiny new tech.

More users don’t lead to more impact: Companies assume that making AI available to everyone guarantees ROI. Yet of the 70% of Fortune 500 companies deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot and similar “horizontal” tools (enterprise-wide copilots and chatbots), none have seen any financial impact.

The opposite approach of deploying “vertical” function-specific tools doesn’t fare much better. In fact, less than 10% make it past the pilot stage, despite having higher potential for economic impact.

Better results require reinvention, not optimization: McKinsey found that call centers that gave agents access to passive AI tools for finding articles, summarizing tickets, and drafting emails resulted in only a 5-10% call time reduction. Centers using AI tools to automate tasks without agent initiation reduced call time by 20-40%.

Centers reinventing processes around AI agents? 60-90% reduction in call time, with 80% automatically resolved.

How to Climb Out of the Pit

Make no mistake, despite these learnings, we are in the pit of AI despair. 42% of companies are abandoning their AI initiatives. That’s up from 17% just a year ago.

But we can escape if we set the right expectations and measure ROI on learning speed and quality.

Because the real concern isn’t AI’s lack of ROI today. It’s whether you’re willing to invest in the learning process long enough to be successful tomorrow.

Image credit: Microsoft CoPilot

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Is All Publicity Good Publicity?

Leave a reply

Some Insights from Cracker Barrel

Is All Publicity Good Publicity?

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

The Cracker Barrel rebrand has certainly created a lot of media and social media attention. Everything happened so fast that I have had to rewrite this introduction twice in as many days. Originally written when the new logo was in place, it has subsequently been withdrawn and replaced with the original one.

It’s probably been a expensive, somewhat embarrassing and sleepless week for the Cracker Barrel management team. But also one that generated a great deal of ‘free’ publicity for them. You could argue that despite the cost of a major rebranding and de-branding, this episode was priceless from a marketing penetration perspective. There is no way they could have spent enough to generate the level of media and social media they have achieved, if not necessarily enjoyed.

But of course, it raises the perennial question ‘is all publicity good publicity?’ With brands, I’d argue not always. For certain, both good and bad publicity adds to ‘brand fluency’ and mental availability. But whether that is positively or negatively valanced, or triggers implicit or explicit approach or avoid responses is less straightforward. A case in point is of course Budweiser, who generated a lot of free media, but are still trying to drag themselves out of the Bud Light controversy.

Listening to the Customer: But when the dust settles, I suspect that Cracker Barrel will come out of this quite well. They enjoyed massive media and social media exposure, elevating the ‘mindshare’ of their brand. And to their credit, they’ve also, albeit a little reluctantly, listened to their customers. The quick change back to their legacy branding must ave been painful, but from a customer perspective, it screams ‘I hear you, and I value you’.

The Political Minefield. But there is some lingering complexity. Somehow the logo change became associated with politics. That is not exactly unusual these days, and when it happens, it inevitably triggers passion, polarization and outrage. I find it a quite depressing commentary on the current state of society that a restaurant logo can trigger ‘outrage. But like it or not, as change agents, these emotions, polarization and dubious political framing are a reality we all have to deal with. In this case, I personally suspect that any politically driven market effects will be short-lived. To my eye, any political position was unintentional, generated by social media rather than the company, and the connection between logo design and political affiliation is at best tenuous, and lacks the depth of meaning typically required for persistent outrage. The mobs should move on.

The Man on the Moon: But it does illustrate a broader problem for innovation derived from our current polarized society. If a logo simplification can somehow take on political overtones, pretty much any change or innovation can. Change nearly always comes with supporters and detractors, reflecting the somewhat contradictory nature of human behavior and cognition – we are change agents who also operate largely from habits. Our response to innovation is therefore inherently polarized, both as individuals and as a society, with elements of both behavioral inertia and change affinity. But with society deeply polarized and divided, it is perhaps inevitable that we will see connections between two different polarizations, whether they are logical or causal or not. We humans are pattern creators, evolved to see connections where they may or may not exist. This ability to see patterns using partial data protected us, and helped us see predators, food or even potential mates using limited information. Spotting a predator from a few glimpses through the trees obviously has huge advantages over waiting until it ambushes us. So we see animals in clouds, patterns in the stars, faces on the moon, and on some occasions, political intent where none probably exists.

My original intent with this article was to look at the design change for the logo from a fundamental visual science perspective. From that perspective, I thought it was quite flawed. But as the story quickly evolved, I couldn’t ignore the societal, social media and political element. Context really does matter. But if we step back from that, there are stillo some really interesting technical design insights we can glean.

1. Simplicity is deceptively complex. The current trend towards reducing complexity and even color in a brands visual language superficially makes sense. After all, the reduced amount of information and complexity should be easier for our brains to visually process. And low cognitive processing costs come with all sorts of benefits. But unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. With familiar objects, our brain doesn’t construct images from scratch, but instead takes the less intuitive, but more cognitively efficient route of unconsciously matching what we see to our existing memory. This allows us to recognize familiar objects with a minimum of cognitive effort, and without needing to process all of the visual details they contain. Our memory, as opposed to our vision, fills in much of the details. But this process means that dramatic simplification of a well established visual language or brand, if not done very carefully, can inhibit that matching process. So counterintuitively, if we remove the wrong visual cues, it can make a simplified visual language or brand more difficult to process than it’s original, and thus harder to find, at least for established customers. Put another way, the way our visual system operates, it automatically and very quickly (faster than we can consciously think) reduces images down to their visual essence. If we try to do that ourselves, we need to very clearly understand what the key visual elements are, and make sure we keep the right ones. Cracker Barrel has lost some basic shapes, and removed several visual elements completely, meaning it has likely not done a great job in that respect.

2. Managing the Distinctive-Simple Trade Off. Our brains have evolved to be very efficient, so as noted above, we only do the ‘heavy lifting’ of encoding complex designs into memory once. We then use a shortcut of matching what we see to what we already know, and so can recognize relatively complex but familiar objects with relatively little effort. This matching process means a familiar visual scene like the old Cracker Barrel logo is quickly processed as a ‘whole’, as opposed to a complex, detailed image. But unfortunately, this means the devil is in the details, and a dramatic simplification like Cracker Barrels can unintentionally remove many of the cues or signals that allowed us to unconsciously recognize it with minimal cognitive effort.

And the process of minimizing visual complexity can also remove much of what made the brand both familiar and distinctive in parallel. And it’s the relatively low resolution elements of the design that make it distinctive. To get a feel for this, try squinting at the old and new brand. With the old design, squinting loses the details of the barrel, or the old man, But the rough shape of them, and of the logo, and their relative positions remain. That gives a rough approximation of what our visual system feeds into our brain when looking for a match with our memory. Do the same with the new logo, and it has little or no consistency or distinctivity. This means the new logo is unintentionally making it harder for customers to either find it (in memory or elsewhere) or recognize it.

As a side effect, oversimplification also risks looking ‘generic’, and falling into the noise created by a growing sea of increasingly simplified logos. Now, to be fair, historical context matters. If information is not encoded into memory, the matching process fails, and a visual memory needs to be built from scratch. So if we were a new brand, Cracker Barrels new brand visual language might lack distinctivity, but it would certainly carry ease of processing benefits for new customers, whereas the legacy label would likely be too complex, and would quite likely be broadly deselected. But because the old design already owns ‘mindspace’ with existing customers, the dramatic change risks and removal of basic visual cues asks repeat customers to ’think’ at a more conscious level, and so potentially challenges long established habits. A major risk for any established brand

3. Distinctivity Matters. All visual branding represents a trade off. We need signal to noise characteristics that stand out from the crowd, or we are unlikely to be noticed. But we also need to look like we belong to a category, or we risk being deselected. It’s a balancing act. Look too much like category archetypes, and lack distinctivity, and we fade into the background noise, and appear generic. But look too different, and we stand out, but in a potentially bad way, by asking potential customers to put in too much work to understand us. This will often lead a customer to quickly de-select us. It’s a trade off where controlled complexity can curate distinctive cues to stand out, while also incorporating enough category prototype cues to make it feel right. Combine this with sufficient simplicity to ease processing fluency, and we likely have a winning design, especially for new customers. But it’s a delicate balancing act between competing variables

4. People don’t like change. As mentioned earlier, we have a complex relationship with change. We like some, but not too much. Change asks their brains to work harder, so it needs to provide value. I’m skeptical the in this case, it added commensurate value to the customer. And change also breaks habits. So any major rebrand comes with risk for a well established brand. But it’s a balancing act, and we should remain locked into aging designs forever. As the context we operate in changes, we need to ‘move with the times’, and remain consistent in our relationship with our context, at least as much as we remain consistent with our history.

And of course, there is also a trade off between a visual language that resonates with existing customers and one designed to attract new ones, as ultimately, virtually every brand needs both trial and repeat. But for established brands evolutionary change is usually the way to achieve reach and trial without alienating existing customers. Coke are the masters of this. Look at how their brand has evolved over time, staying contemporary, but without creating the kind of ‘cognitive jolts’ the Cracker Barrel rebrand has created. If you look at an old Coke advertisement, you intuitively know both that it’s old, but also that it is Coke.

Brands and Politics. I generally advise brands to stay out of politics. With a few exceptions, entering this minefield risks alienating 50% of our customers. And any subsequent ‘course corrections’ risk alienating those that are left. For a vast majorities of companies, the cost-benefit equation simply doesn’t work!

But in this case, we are seeing consumers interpreting change through a political lens, even when that was not the intent. But just because it’s not there doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, as Cracker barrel is discovered. So I’m changing my advice from ‘don’t be political’ to ‘try and anticipate if you’re initiative could be misunderstood as political’. It’s a subtle, but important difference.

And as a build, marketers often try to incorporate secondary messages into their communication. But in todays charged political climate, I think we need to be careful about being too ‘clever’ in this respect. Consumer’s sensitivity to socio-political cues is very high at present, as the Cracker Barrel example shows. So if they can see political content where none was intended, they are quite likely to spot any secondary or ‘implicit’ messaging. So for example, an advertisement that features a lot of flags and patriotic displays, or one that predominately features members of the LBGTQ community both run a risk of being perceived as ‘making a political statement’, whether it is intended to or not. There is absolutely nothing wrong with either patriotism or the LBGT community, and to be fair, as society becomes increasingly polarized, it’s increasingly hard to create content that doesn’t somehow offend someone. At least without becoming so ‘vanilla’ that the content is largely pointless, and doesn’t cut through the noise. But from a business perspective, in today’s socially and politically fractured world, any perceived political bias or message in either direction comes with business risks. Proceed with caution.

And keep in mind we’ve evolved to respond more intensely to negatives than positives – Caution kept our ancestors alive. If we half see a coiled object in the grass that could be a garden hose or a snake, our instinct is to back off. If we mistake a garden hose for a snake to cost is small. But if we mistake a venomous snake for a garden hose, the cost could be high.

As I implied earlier, when consumers look at our content though specific and increasingly intense partisan lens, it’s really difficult for us to not be perceived as being either ‘for’ or ‘against’ them. And keep in mind, the cost of undoing even an unintended political statement is inevitably higher than the cost of making it. So it’s at very least worth trying to avoid being dragged into a political space whenever possible, especially as a negative. So be careful out there, and embrace some devils advocate thinking. Even if we are not trying to make a point, implicitly or explicitly, we need to step back and look at how those who see the world from deeply polarized position could interpret us. The ‘no such thing as bad publicity’ concept sits on very thin ice at this moment in time, where social media often seeks to punish more than communicate

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

This AI Creativity Trap is Gutting Your Growth

1 Reply

This AI Creativity Trap is Gutting Your Growth

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“We have to do more with less” has become an inescapable mantra, and goodness, are you trying. You’ve slashed projects and budgets, “right-sized” teams, and tried any technology that promised efficiency and a free trial. Now, all that’s left is to replace the people you still have with AI creativity tools. Welcome to the era of the AI Innovation Team.

It sounds like a great idea. Now, everyone can be an innovator with access to an LLM. Heck, even innovation firms are “outsourcing” their traditional work to AI, promising the same radical results with less time and for far less money.

It sounds almost too good to be true.

Because it is too good to be true.

AI is eliminating the very brain processes that produce breakthrough innovations.

This isn’t hyperbole, and it’s not just one study.

MIT researchers split 54 people into three groups (ChatGPT users, search engine users, and no online/AI tools using ChatGPT) and asked them to write a series of essays. Using EEG brain monitoring, they found that the brain connectivity in networks crucial for creativity and analogous thinking dropped by 55%.

Even worse? When people stopped using AI, their brains stayed stuck in this diminished state.

University of Arkansas researchers tested AI against 3,562 humans on a series of four challenges involving finding new uses for everyday objects, like a brick or paperclip. While AI scored slightly higher on standard tests, when researchers introduced a new context, constraint, or modification to the object, AI’s performance “collapsed.” Humans stayed strong.

Why? AI relies on pattern matching and is unable to transfer its “creativity” to unexpected scenarios. Humans use analogical reasoning so are able to flex quickly and adapt.

University of Strasbourg researchers analyzed 15,000 studies of COVID-19 infections and found that teams that relied heavily on AI experts produced research that got fewer citations and less media attention. However, papers that drew from diverse knowledge sources across multiple fields became widely cited and influential.

The lesson? Breakthroughs require cross-domain thinking, which is precisely what diverse human teams provide, and, according to the MIT study, AI is unable to produce.

How to optimize for efficiency AND impact (and beat your competition)

While this seems like bad news if you’ve already cut your innovation team, the silver lining is that your competition is probably making the same mistake.

Now that you know better, you can do better, and that creates a massive opportunity.

Use AI for what it does well:

Data analysis and synthesis
Rapid testing and iteration to refine an advanced prototype
Process optimization

Use humans for what we do well:

Make meaningful connections across unrelated domains
Recognize when discoveries from one field apply to another
Generate the “aha moments” that redefine industries

Three Questions to Ask This Week

Where did your most recent breakthroughs come from? How many came from connecting insights across different domains? If most of your innovations require analogical leaps, cutting creative teams could kill your pipeline.
How are teams currently using AI tools? Are they using AI for data synthesis and rapid iteration? Good. Are they replacing human ideation entirely? Problem.
How can you see it to believe it? Run a simple experiment: Give two teams an hour to solve a breakthrough challenge. Have one solve it with AI assistance and one without. Which solution is more surprising and potentially breakthrough?

The Hidden Competitive Advantage

As AI commoditizes pattern recognition, human analogical thinking and creativity become a competitive advantage.

The companies that figure out the right balance will eat everyone else’s lunch.

Image credit: Gemini

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Creative Confidence Beats Market Signals

Leave a reply

And How Johnny Cash Used it to Resurrect His Career

Creative Confidence Beats Market Signals

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

The best business advice can destroy your business. Especially when you follow it perfectly.

Just ask Johnny Cash.

After bursting onto the scene in the mid-1950s with “Folsom Prison Blues”, Cash enjoyed twenty years of tremendous success. By the 1970s, his authentic, minimalist approach had fallen out of favor.

Eager to sell records, he pivoted to songs backed by lush string arrangements, then to “country pop” to attract mainstream audiences and feed the relentless appetite of 900 radio stations programming country pop full-time.

By late 1992, Johnny Cash’s career was roadkill. Country radio had stopped playing his records, and Columbia Records, his home for 25 years, had shown him the door. At 60, he was marooned in faded casinos, playing to crowds preferring slot machines to songs.

Then he took the stage at Madison Square Garden for Bob Dylan’s 30th anniversary concert.

In the audience sat Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Recordings and uber producer behind Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and Slayer, amongst others. He watched in awe as Cash performed, seeing not a relic but raw power diluted by smart decisions.

The Stare-Down that Saved a Career

Four months later, Rubin attended Cash’s concert at The Rhythm Café in Santa Anna, California. According to Cash’s son, “When they sat down at the table, they said: ‘Hello.’ But then my dad and Rick just sat there and stared at each other for about two minutes without saying anything, as if they were sizing each other up.”

Eventually, Cash broke the silence, “What’re you gonna do with me that nobody else has done to sell records for me?”

What happened next resurrected his career.

Rubin didn’t promise record sales. He promised something more valuable: creative control and a return to Cash’s roots.

Ten years later, Cash had a Grammy, his first gold record in thirty years, and CMA Single of the Year for his cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” and millions in record sales.

“I wasn’t prepared for what I saw, what I had written in my diary was now superimposed on the life of this icon and sung so beautifully and emotionally. It was a reminder of what an important medium music is. Goosebumps up the spine. It really made sense. I thought: ‘What a powerful piece of art.’ I never got to meet Johnny, but I’m happy I contributed in the way I did. It wasn’t my song anymore.” — Trent Reznor

When Smart Decisions Become Fatal

Executives do exactly what Cash did. You respond to market signals. You pivot your offering when customer preferences shift and invest in emerging technologies.

All logical. All defensible to your board. All potentially fatal.

Because you risk losing what made you unique and valuable. Just as Cash lost his minimalist authenticity and became a casualty of his effort to stay relevant, your business risks losing sight of its purpose and unique value proposition.

Three Beliefs at the Core of a Comeback

So how do you avoid Cash’s initial mistake while replicating his comeback? The difference lies in three beliefs that determine whether you’ll have the creative courage to double down on what makes you valuable instead of diluting it.

Creative confidence: The belief we can think and act creatively in this moment.
Perceived value of creativity: Our perceived value of thinking and acting in new ways.
Creative risk-taking: The willingness to take the risks necessary for active change.

Cash wanted to sell records, and he:

Believed that he was capable of creativity and change.
Saw the financial and reputational value of change
Was willing to partner with a producer who refused to guarantee record sales but promised creative control and a return to his roots.

Your Answers Determine Your Outcome

Like Cash, what you, your team, and your organization believe determines how you respond to change:

Do I/we believe we can creatively solve this specific challenge we’re facing right now?
Is finding a genuinely new approach to this situation worth the effort versus sticking with proven methods?
Am I/we willing to accept the risks of pursuing a creative solution to our current challenge?”

Where there are “no’s,” there is resistance, even refusal, to change. Acknowledge it. Address it. Do the hard work of turning the No into a Yes because it’s the only way change will happen.

The Comeback Question

Cash proved that authentic change—not frantic pivoting—resurrects careers and disrupts industries. His partnership with Rubin succeeded because he answered “yes” to all three creative beliefs when it mattered most. Where are your “no’s” blocking your comeback?

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Navigating Unwelcome Change

Leave a reply

Five Questions with Theresa Ward

Navigating Unwelcome Change

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Picture this: your boss announces a major reorganization with a big smile, expecting you to be excited about “new opportunities.” Meanwhile, you’re sitting there thinking “What the hell just happened to my job?”

Theresa Ward, founder and Chief Momentum Officer of Fiery Feather, has spent years watching this disconnect play out. Her insight? Leaders are expected to sell change while still personally struggling with it, creating what she calls “that weird middle ground” where authenticity goes to die.

Our conversation revealed why unwelcome change triggers the same response as grief, and why leaders who stop pretending they’ve got it figured out are more successful.

Robyn Bolton: What’s the one piece of conventional wisdom about leading change that organizations need to unlearn?

Theresa Ward: That middle managers need to be enthusiastic about a change, or at least appear enthusiastic, to lead their teams through it.

RB: It seems like enthusiasm is important to get people on board and doing what they need to do to make change happen. Why is this wrong?

TW: Because it makes you wonder if this person is being authentic. Are they genuinely enthusiastic? Do they really believe this is the right thing?

To be clear, I’m talking about Unwelcome Change. Change that is thrust upon you. How we experience Unwelcome Change is the same way we experience grief.

When we initially experience Unwelcome Change, our brain goes into shock or denial which can actually trigger an increase in engagement and productivity.

Then we move into anger and blame, which looks different for all of us. We’ve probably experienced somebody yelling in a meeting, but it can also look like turning off the camera, folding your arms, rolling your eyes, and disengaging.

Bargaining. I always think of that clip from Jerry Maguire, where he’s got the goldfish, and he says, “Who’s coming with me?” because he’s going to make lemonades out of this lemon, even if it’s a completely ridiculous condition.

Then depression sets in. It’s the low point but it’s also where you’re really ready to admit that you’re upset, sad, and grieving the change that has happened. It’s the dark before the dawn.

RB: If everyone goes through this grief process, why do some leaders seem genuinely enthusiastic about the change?”

TW: If they came up with the idea, they’re not going to be angry or depressed about their own idea.

But even if it’s one announcement, people don’t experience just one change. It’s not, “Our budget is going from X to Y” and everyone can just get used to it. It’s double or triple that! It’s a budget cut, then a reorg, then a new boss, then a friend being laid off, then a project you loved getting trashed. You’re dealing with onion layers of change.

We all go through different stages at speeds. You can’t rush it. Sometimes you just have to be like, “Oh, okay, I’m feeling pretty angry this week. I’m just gonna have to sit through my anger phase and realize that it’s a phase.”

RB: I get that you can’t rush the process, but change doesn’t slow down so you can catch up. What can people do to navigate change while they’re processing it?

TW: BLT, baby. These are 3 tools, not a formula, that you can use for different experiences.

B stands for Benefit of Change. This is finding the silver lining, something we often underestimate because it’s such a broad cliche. For it to be effective, you need to look for a specific and personal silver lining. For example, a friend of mine works for a company that was acquired. He was not a fan of how the culture was changing, but the bigger company offered tuition reimbursement. So he used that to get his master’s of fine arts for free.

L is Locus of Control. Take inventory of everything that’s upsetting you and place it into one of 3 categories: What can I control? What can I influence? What do I need to just surrender? Sitting up at night and worrying about whether the budget will be cut again is outside of my control. So, I shouldn’t spend my time and energy on that. Instead, I need to focus on what I can control, like my attitude and response.

T is Take the Long View. Every day we find ourselves in situations that get us emotional – a traffic jam, getting cut off in traffic, or flubbing a big client presentation. When we get more emotional than what the situation calls for, ask how you’re going to feel about the situation tomorrow, then in a month, then a year Because when our fight or flight brain mode kicks in, we catastrophize things. But the reality is that most of it won’t matter tomorrow.

RB: What’s the most important mindset shift leaders need to make to help their teams through unwelcome change?

TW: Find what works for you first then, with empathy, help your team. Like the Airline Safety Video, put your mask on first, then help others. It allows you to be authentic and builds empathy with the team. Two things required to start the shift from unwelcome to accepted.

Theresa’s BLT framework won’t make change painless, but it gives you permission to admit that transformation is hard, even for leaders. The moment you stop pretending you’ve got it all figured out is the moment your team starts trusting you to guide them through the mess.

Image credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Escaping the Fear Trap

Leave a reply

What We Can Learn from Wildfire Fighters About Leading Through Uncertainty

Escaping the Fear Trap

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

What does a lightning strike in a Spanish forest have to do with your next leadership meeting? More than you think.

On June 14, 2014, lightning struck a forest on Spain’s northeast coast, only 60 miles from Barcelona. Within hours, flames 16 to 33 feet high raced out of control toward populated areas, threatening 27,000 acres of forest, an area larger than the city of Boston.

Everything – data, instincts, decades of firefighting doctrine – prioritized saving the entire forest and protecting the coastal towns.

Instead, the fire commanders chose to deliberately let 2,057 acres, roughly the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, burn.

The result? They saved the other 25,000 acres (an area the size of San Francisco), protected the coastal communities, and created a natural firebreak that would protect the region for decades. By accepting some losses, they prevented catastrophic ones.

The Fear Trap That’s Strangling Your Business

The Tivissa fire’s triumph happened because firefighters found the courage to escape what researchers call the “fear trap” – the tendency to focus exclusively on defending against known, measurable risks.

Despite research proving that defending against predictable, measurable risks through defensive strategies consistently fails in uncertain and dynamic scenarios, firefighter “best practices” continue to advocate this approach.

Sound familiar? It should. Most executives today are trapped in exactly this pattern.

We’re in the fire right now. Financial markets are yo-yoing, AI threatens to disrupt everything, and consumer behaviors are shifting.

Most executives are falling into the Fear Trap by doubling down on protecting their existing business and pouring resources into defending against predictable risks. Yet the real threats, the ones you can’t measure or model, continue to pound the business.

While you’re protecting last quarter’s wins, tomorrow’s disruption is spreading unchecked.

Four Principles for Creative Decision-Making Under Fire

The decision to cede certain areas wasn’t hasty but based on four principles enabling leaders in any situation to successfully navigate uncertainty.

1. A Predictable Situation is a Safe Situation.

Stop trying to control the uncontrollable. Standard procedures work in predictable situations but fail in unprecedented challenges.

Put it in Practice: Instead of creating endless contingency plans, build flexibility and agility into operations and decision-making.

2. Build Credibility Through Realistic Expectations.

Reducing uncertainty requires realism about what can be achieved. Fire commanders mapped out precisely which areas around Tivissa would burn and which would be saved, then communicated these hard truths and the considered trade-offs to officials and communities before implementing their strategy, building trust and preventing panic as the selected areas burned.

Put it in practice: Stop promising to protect everything and set realistic expectations about what you can control. Then communicate priorities, expectations, and trade-offs frequently, transparently, and clearly with all key stakeholders.

3. Include the future in your definition of success

Traditional firefighting protects immediate assets at risk. The Tivissa firefighters expanded this to include future resilience, recognizing that saving everything today could jeopardize the region tomorrow.

Put it in practice: Be transparent about how you define the Common Good in your organization, then reinforce it by making hard choices about where to compete and where to retreat. The goal isn’t to avoid all losses – it’s to maximize overall organizational health.

4. Use uncertainty to build for tomorrow.

Firefighters didn’t just accept that 2,057 acres would burn – they strategically chose which acres to let burn to create maximum future advantage, protecting the region for generations.

Put it in practice: Evaluate every response to uncertainty on whether it better positions you for future challenges. Leverage the disruption to build capabilities, market positions, and organizational structures that strengthen you for future uncertainty.

Your Next Move

When the wind shifted and the fire exploded, firefighters had to choose between defending everything (and likely losing it all) or accepting strategic losses to ensure overall wins.

You’re facing the same choice right now.

Like the firefighters, your breakthrough might come not from fighting harder against uncertainty, but from learning to work with it strategically.

What are you willing to let burn to save what matters most?

Image credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

3 Secret Saboteurs of Strategic Foresight

Leave a reply

3 Secret Saboteurs of Strategic Foresight

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You’ve done everything to set Strategic Foresight efforts up for success. Executive authority? Check. Challenging inputs? Check. Process integration? Check. Now you just need to flip the switch and you’re off to the races.

Not so fast.

While the wrong set-up is guaranteed to cause failure, the right set-up doesn’t guarantee success. Research shows that strategic foresight initiatives with the right set-up fail because of “organizational pathologies” that sabotage even well-designed efforts.

If you aren’t leading the right people to do the right things in the right way, you’re not going to get the impact you need.

Here’s what to watch out for (and what to do when it happens).

Your Teams Misunderstand Foresight’s Purpose

People naturally assume that strategic foresight predicts the future. When it doesn’t, they abandon it faster than last year’s digital transformation initiative.

Shell learned this the hard way. In 1965, they built the Unified Planning Machinery, a computerized forecasting tool designed to predict cash flow based on trends. It was abandoned because executives feared “it would suppress discussion rather than encourage debate on differing perspectives.”

When they shifted from prediction to preparation, specifically to “modify the mental model of decision-makers faced with an uncertain future,” strategic foresight became an invaluable decision-making tool.

Help your team approach strategic foresight as preparation, not prediction, by measuring success by the improvement in discussion and decision-making, not scenario accuracy. When teams build mental flexibility rather than make predictions, wrong scenarios stop being failed scenarios.

People are Paralyzed by Fear of Being Wrong

Even when your teams understand foresight’s purpose, managers are often unwilling “to use foresight to plan beyond a few quarters, fearing that any decisions today could be wrong tomorrow.”

This is profoundly human. As Webb wrote, “When faced with uncertainty, we become inflexible. We revert to historical patterns, we stick to a predetermined plan, or we simply refuse to adopt a new mental model.” We nod along in scenario sessions, then make decisions exactly like we always have.

Shell’s scenario planning efforts succeeded because it made being wrong acceptable. Even though executives initially scoffed at the idea of oil prices quadrupling, they prepared for the scenario and took near-term “no regrets” decisions to restructure their portfolio.

To help people get past their fear, reward them for making foresight-informed decisions. For example, establish incentives and promotion criteria where exploring “wrong” scenarios leads to career advancement.

Your Culture Confuses Activity with Achievement

Between insight and action, the Tyranny of Now reigns. In even the most committed organizations, the very real and immediate needs of the business call us away from our planning efforts and consume our time and energy, meaning strategic foresight is embraced only when it doesn’t interfere with their “real” jobs.

Disney’s approach made strategic foresight a required element of people’s “real jobs” by integrating foresight activities and insights directly into performance management and strategic planning. When foresight teams identified that traditional media consumption was fracturing in 2012, Disney began preparing for that future by actively exploring and investing in new potential solutions.

Resist the Tyranny of Now’s pull by making strategic foresight activities just as tyrannical – require decisions based on foresight insights to occur in 90 days or less. These decisions should trigger resource allocation reviews, even if the resources are relatively small (e.g., one or a few people, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars). If strategic foresight doesn’t force hard choices about investments and priorities, it’s activity without achievement.

How You Lead and What People Do Determine Strategic Foresight’s Success

Executive authority, challenging inputs, and process integration are necessary but not sufficient. Success requires conquering the deeper organizational and human behaviors that determine whether strategic foresight is a corporate ritual or a competitive advantage.

Image credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

1 Reply

Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You stand on the brink of an exciting new adventure. Turmoil and uncertainty have convinced you that future success requires more than the short-term strategic and business planning tools you’ve used. You’ve cut through the hype surrounding Strategic Foresight and studied success. You are ready to lead your company into its bold future.

So, where do you start?

Most executives get caught up in all the things that need to happen and are distracted by all the tools, jargon, and pretty pictures that get thrown at them. But you are smarter than that. You know that there are three things you must do at the beginning to ensure ultimate success.

Give Foresight Executive Authority and Access

Foresight without responsibility is intellectual daydreaming.

While the practice of research and scenario design can be delegated to planning offices, the responsibility for debating, deciding, and using Strategic Foresight must rest with P&L owners.

Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that when a C-Suite executive with the authority to force strategic reviews oversaw foresight activities, the results were more likely to be acted on and integrated into strategic and operational plans. Shell serves as a specific example of this, as its foresight team reported directly to the executive committee, so that when scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility, Shell executives personally reviewed strategic portfolios and authorized immediate capability building.

Start by asking:

Who can force strategic reviews outside of the traditional planning process?
What triggers a review of Strategic Foresight scenarios?
How do we hold people accountable for acting on insights?

Demand Inputs That Challenge Your Assumptions

If your Strategic Foresight conversations don’t make you uncomfortable, you’re doing them wrong.

Webb’s research also shows that successful foresight systematically explores fundamental changes that could render the existing business obsolete.

Shell’s scenarios went beyond assumptions about oil price stability to explore supply disruptions, geopolitical shifts, and demand transformation. Disney’s foresight set aside traditional assumptions about media consumption and explored how technology could completely reshape content creation, distribution, and consumption.

Start by asking these questions:

Is the team going beyond trend analysis and exploring technology, regulations, social changes, and economic developments that could restructure entire markets?
Who are we talking to in other industries? What unusual, unexpected, and maybe crazy sources are we using to inform our scenarios?
Does at least one scenario feel possible and terrifying?

Integrate Foresight into Existing Planning Processes

Strategic Foresight that doesn’t connect to resource allocation decisions is expensive research.

Your planning processes must connect Strategic Foresight’s long-term scenarios to Strategic Planning’s 3–5-year plans and to your annual budget and resource decisions. No separate foresight exercises. No parallel planning tracks. The cascade from 20-year scenarios to this year’s investments must be explicit and ruthless.

When Shell’s scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility over decades, Shell didn’t file them away and wait for them to come true. They immediately reviewed their strategic portfolio and developed a 3–5-year plan to build capabilities for multiple oil futures. This was then translated into immediate capital allocation changes.

Disney’s foresight about changing media consumption in the next 20 years informed strategic planning for Disney+ and, ultimately, its operational launch.

Start by asking these questions:

How is Strategic Foresight linked to our strategic and business planning processes?
How do scenarios flow from 20-year insights through 5-year strategy to this year’s budget decisions?
How is the integration of Strategic Foresight into annual business planning measured and rewarded?

Three Steps. One Outcome.

Strategic foresight efforts succeed when they have the executive authority, provocative inputs, and integrated processes to drive resource allocation decisions. Taking these three steps at the very start sets you, your team, and your organization up for success. But they’re still not a guarantee.

Ready to avoid the predictable pitfalls? Next week, we’ll consider why strategic foresight fails and how to prevent your efforts from joining them.

Image credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Making it Safe to Innovate

Leave a reply

Building Emotional Safety

Making it Safe to Innovate - Building Emotional Safety

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When my husband and I became accredited as foster parents for children in need, I thought my skills as a trainer and facilitator would help me navigate the challenges we faced. I quickly discovered that when children arrived at our home late at night, often physically injured and emotionally distraught due to a tragic accident or being separated from their families, their primary need was for emotional safety. This began my long and enlightening quest into what it truly means for someone to develop both emotional and psychological safety. To discover and explore why both emotional and psychological safety are crucial for people to survive, innovate and thrive in the post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

The whole issue of “safety” is a crucial one. Causing many people, especially those in the change, learning and coaching space, to stop, pause, retreat, and reflect upon how to personalize and contextualize it for ourselves and others we care about and interact with. Yet so few people understand the importance of creating safe environments, especially today when there is so much hatred and violence happening on many of our streets.

We all deserve to, and are entitled to, feel emotionally safe and secure in all aspects of our lives.

What does it mean to be safe?

Because safety: the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury, impacts everyone and everything in our entire world system. It is an essential element required for our survival, growth, and ability to navigate and innovate in the post-pandemic era. Safety is critical in enhancing people’s capacity to connect, belong, and engage in purposeful relationships, build happy families and secure communities, as well as produce creative, inventive, and innovative work that helps make the world a better place.

What is emotional safety?

Emotional safety exists in an environment where individuals feel valued, respected, and heard, regardless of their values, beliefs, or religious or cultural origins. It involves allowing people to feel safe and secure, nurturing vulnerability, and sharing personal thoughts and feelings without fear of having their words judged as “bad” or “wrong.” Without facing punishment, discrimination, persecution, diminishment, blame, shame, hatred, or violence by others.

It’s a space where it’s safe to say “I don’t know” or “I made a mistake” without being labelled as incompetent or “lacking” in some vital way.

Improving well-being, engagement and productivity

Emotional safety is a vital element of an emotionally and mentally healthy environment that fosters well-being, boosts engagement, and enhances productivity. In such an environment, individuals feel secure enough to express, explore, and share their thoughts and feelings about themselves, their colleagues, managers, leaders, and even their organization as a whole. People feel respected and trusted to share ideas, establish boundaries, and be accepted for who they are, what they believe in, flaws and all.

Building mutuality

The intention is to build mutuality, defined by the American Psychological Association as:

“The tendency of relationship partners to think of themselves as members of a dyadic relationship rather than as distinct individuals. As close relationships, particularly romantic ones, develop over time, partners display increasing levels of mutuality, which may influence their affect, cognition, and behavior. In interdependence theory, the tendency of partners to depend equally on each other’s behavior for the attainment of desirable outcomes”.

We live in an interdependent, globalized world where developing emotionally safe, positive, and interactive mutual relationships across geographies, technologies, demographics, and functions is more important than ever. Mutuality lays the groundwork for creating a shared understanding that fosters a safe and open space for learning and effective interactions, based on cooperative, co-petitive, and collaborative relationships in the workplace.

Becoming attuned

Emotional intelligence, empathy, trust, and effective communication are vital for fostering emotional safety and form the basis for developing effective emotional regulation and management strategies. This enables us to attune to and connect with others with whom we wish to build relationships.

According to Dr. Dan Seigal:

“When we attune with others, we allow our internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.”

As a foster carer, my ability and willingness to attune with them represented the most important gift I could offer the children. It allowed them to feel close and connected to someone who genuinely cared for them by simply providing the most basic essentials. With no judgement or strings attached, and with both detachment and empathy, it also provided them with crucial evidence that this could indeed continue to be possible for them in their future lives.

As a trainer, facilitator, and coach, these are the key ingredients for establishing an emotionally safe and effective learning intervention, particularly about the people side of innovation and in building an organization that fosters a culture of failure.

Developing a psychologically safe culture

Emotional safety is closely linked to psychological safety, which is the belief that individuals can be themselves at work and share their opinions and ideas without fear of negative repercussions. According to Dr Timothy Clarke at the Leaderfactor, psychological safety empowers individuals and teams to reach new levels of creativity, collaboration, and innovation by nurturing a culture of inclusion and vulnerability. It is a social condition where people feel accepted and secure enough to learn, contribute, and question the status quo, free from fear of embarrassment, marginalization, or punishment, by creating an environment founded on permission, safety, and trust.

Embodying a way of being

Creating this emotional state or culture is much harder than most people think. Most organizations believe it’s something they must achieve through process and system changes, rather than by embodying it as a way of being a manager, leader, trainer, or coach who creates:

Sanctuaries of inclusion—a space where individuals feel safe and are encouraged to express their feelings, thoughts, opinions, and ideas, fostering a profound sense of inclusion, connection, and belonging.
Safe containers – a space where individuals confidently disrupt conventional or habitual ways of doing things, step outside their comfort zones, and challenge the status quo, allowing dissonance, contradiction, paradox, and conflict as sources of creative tension to disrupt, differ, and deviate from the norm.
Collective holding spaces—where individuals accept responsibility, take ownership, and are trusted to contribute to the entire system. By fostering co-creative, interdependent relationships both internally and externally, we work towards achieving the team’s and organization’s vision, mission, purpose, and collective goals.
Incubators and accelerators of innovation—where team members are free to emerge, diverge, and converge possibilities. They are empowered, enabled, and equipped to transform these into creative ideas and opportunities. Individuals and teams feel safe in unlearning, learning, and relearning new ways of being, thinking, and acting. This environment challenges the status quo by encouraging disruptive questions, taking calculated risks, and experimenting with new ideas within an authentic, fail-fast culture that promotes quick learning.

Benefits of emotional and psychological safety

Enhances individual, team, and collective engagement, connection, and belonging. It establishes a foundation for harnessing and mobilizing people’s collective intelligence in line with the organization’s vision, mission, and purpose.
Promotes effective team collaboration, where individuals feel at ease sharing their ideas, opinions, and concerns. It cultivates an environment where diverse perspectives can be openly discussed alongside differing views:
Inspires people to be emotionally energetic, agile, and adaptable in the face of uncertainty and chaos, as well as in a rapidly changing business landscape.

AI will continue to disrupt job stability and security.

Developing emotional and psychological safety is a key success factor that underpins a culture of innovation, as it creates the essential space for individuals to think and act differently. This is achieved through experimentation, learning from failures, and exploring new methods that lead to breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions, enabling individuals to survive and thrive in the age of AI.

Both job losses and opportunities

Fast Company shares that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a stark warning for the developed world about job losses resulting from AI. The CEO told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. This could result in a 10% to 20% rise in the unemployment rate over the next one to five years, Amodei says. The losses could come from tech, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, with entry-level jobs being hit the hardest.

Just as the children we fostered needed emotional safety, we all require emotional safety when walking our city streets. Similarly, while at work, we all need a psychologically safe working environment rooted in mutuality and trust. This is what allows individuals to attune to each other, feel secure, bonded, and connected, fostering a sense of belonging and unity. This requires investing in the co-creation of emotionally and psychologically safe spaces that attract and retain top talent, enabling individuals to feel valued, as they truly matter, and helping them adapt, innovate, grow, perform and thrive in a post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

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 nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

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-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.