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Is All Publicity Good Publicity?

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 Originally written when the new logo was in place, it has subsequently been withdrawn and replaced with the original one.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

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Creative Confidence Beats Market Signals

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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

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Navigating Unwelcome Change

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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

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Escaping the Fear Trap

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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

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3 Secret Saboteurs of Strategic Foresight

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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

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Making it Safe to Innovate

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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.

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Strategic Foresight Won’t Save Your Company

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But Ignoring Strategic Foresight Will Kill It

Strategic Foresight Won't Save Your Company

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Are you spooked by the uncertainty and volatility that defines not just our businesses but our everyday lives? Have you hunkered down, stayed the course, and hoped that this too shall pass? Are you starting to worry that this approach can’t go on forever but unsure of what to do next? CONGRATULATIONS, consultants have heard your cries and are rolling out a shiny new framework promising to solve everything: Strategic Foresight.

Strategic foresight is the latest silver bullet for navigating our chaotic, unpredictable world.

Remember in 2016 when Agility was going to save us all? Good times.

As much as I love rolling my eyes at the latest magic framework, I have to be honest – Strategic Foresight can live up to the hype. If you do it right.

What Strategic Foresight Actually Is (Spoiler: Not a Silver Bullet)

A LOT is being published about Strategic Foresight (I received 7 newsletters on the topic last week) and everyone has their own spin. So let’s cut through the hype and get back to basics

What it is: Strategic foresight is the systematic exploration of multiple possible futures to anticipate opportunities and risks, enabling informed decisions today to capture advantages tomorrow.

There’s a lot there so let’s break it down:

Systematic exploration: This isn’t guessing, predicting, or opining. This is a rigorous and structured approach
Multiple possible futures: Examines multiple scenarios because we can’t possibly forecast or predict the one future that will occur
Enabling informed decisions today: This isn’t an academic exercise you revisit once a year. It informs and guides decisions and actions this year.
Capture advantages tomorrow: Positions you to respond to change with confidence and beat your competition to the punch

How it fits: Strategic Foresight doesn’t replace what you’re doing. It informs and drives it.

Approach	Timeline	Focus
Strategic Foresight	5-20+ years	Explore possible futures
Strategic Planning	3-5 years	Create competitive advantage
Business Planning	Annual cycles	Execute specific actions

The sequence matters: Foresight → Strategic Planning → Business Planning.

This sequence also explains why Strategic Foresight is so hot right now. Systemic change used to take years, even decades, to unfold. As a result, you could look out 3-5 years, anticipate what would be next, and you would probably be right.

Now, systemic change can happen overnight and be undone by noon the next day. Whatever you think will happen will probably be wrong and in ways you can’t anticipate, let alone plan for and execute against.

Strategic Foresight’s rigorous, multi-input approach gives us the illusion of control in a world that seems to be spinning out of it.

How to Avoid the Illusion and Get the Results.

Personally, I love the illusion of control BUT as a business practice, I don’t recommend it.

Strategic Foresight’s benefits will stay an illustion if you don’t:

Develop in-house strategic foresight capabilities. Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that companies using rigorous foresight methodologies consistently outperform those stuck in reactive mode. Shell’s legendary scenario planning helped them navigate oil crises while competitors flailed. Disney’s Natural Foresight® Framework keeps them ahead of entertainment trends that blindside others.
Integrate foresight into your annual strategic planning cycle: Strategic foresight is a front-end effort that makes your 3-5 year strategy more robust. If you treat it like a separate exercise where you hire futurists, and run some workshops, and check the Strategic Foresight box, you won’t see any benefits or results.

What’s Next?

Strategic foresight isn’t a silver bullet, but it can be a path through uncertainty to advantage and growth.

The difference between success and failure comes down to execution. Do you treat it as prediction or preparation? Do you integrate it with existing planning or silo it in innovation labs?

Ready to separate the hype from the hard results? Our next post shows you what two industry leaders learned about turning foresight into competitive advantage and how you can use those lessons to your benefit

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Employees Are Calling BS on Customer-First Leadership

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Employees Are Calling BS on Customer-First Leadership

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

The data speaks for itself: Your employees don’t believe you practice customer-first leadership.

According to Gallup’s research, only one in five of your people think you make decisions with customers in mind. That means four out of five watch you say one thing and do another. Every. Single. Day.

And it’s getting worse. Fewer than three in ten of your employees feel proud of what they’re building for your customers. As a result, employee pride in what they create and deliver is at an all-time low.

You know what this means, don’t you? Your customer-first messaging isn’t inspiring anyone—it’s insulting them. Because they see the truth behind your town hall speeches, and the truth is that customers aren’t first.

How Are We Still Screwing This Up?

Customer-centricity has been business gospel for decades. We’ve got libraries full of case studies, armies of consultants, and enough “customer first” wall art to wallpaper the Apple HQ. So, how the hell are we getting worse at this?

Because most leaders treat customer focus like a box to check. They say the right words in town halls and analyst calls but make decisions that prioritize quarterly numbers, internal politics, and whatever shiny new idea they come up with.

Leaders say customers come first, then cut support staff to hit margins. They preach customer obsession, then ignore feedback that requires real change. They commission expensive customer journey maps, then never look at them again.

Employees see it all.

And when employees stop believing in what they deliver, customers know it immediately. Every burned-out support call, every half-hearted sales pitch, every policy that punishes the customer to boost the company’s profit.

You CAN do better

You only need to look as far as the telecom industry (?!?!?!) for an $800 million example.

In 2005, Arlene Harris co-founded GreatCall (now Lively) and did something radical: she built a company based on the Jobs to be Done of senior citizens. While everyone else chased flashy features for younger markets, she recognized that older Americans didn’t want a smartphone—they wanted a lifeline.

Harris delivered with the Jitterbug, a simple flip phone with giant buttons. But that was just the beginning. Focusing more on helping customers stay safe and connected than cool features for the tech geeks, she quickly built an ecosystem offering emergency response, health monitoring, 24/7 human support, and caregiver connectivity.

When Best Buy acquired GreatCall for $800 million in 2018, they weren’t buying a phone company. They were buying something rare: a trusted, high-value services company with intensely loyal customers.

Harris succeeded by doing precisely what the data shows most leaders aren’t doing: genuinely understanding and serving real customer needs.

WILL you do better?

Customer-first leadership isn’t a box to check. It’s basic leadership integrity. It’s the difference between meaning what you say and just saying what sounds good.

When four out of five of your employees don’t trust your customer commitment, the problem isn’t your strategy deck, digital transformation, or tariffs. The problem is you.

So here’s your moment of truth: When was the last time you listened to customer service calls? Not the sanitized highlights your team shows you—the raw, unfiltered frustration of someone who can’t get help. When did you last sit in a waiting room and watch how people navigate your system? Or stock a shelf and see what customers actually do?

If you can’t remember, that’s your answer. If you’ve never done it, that’s worse.

The question is: Will you keep performing customer-centricity, or start practicing it?

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Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

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Five Questions to Liz Wiseman

Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Conventional wisdom tells us that transformation flows from the C-suite down because real change requires executive mandates and company-wide rollouts. But what if our focus on building transformation momentum is exactly backward?

Ever since reading Multipliers, where Liz Wiseman revealed how the best leaders amplify their people rather than diminish them, I’ve wondered if, like innovation, organizational transformation and change also require us to do the opposite of our instincts.

I recently had the opportunity to dig deeper into this topic with her, and I couldn’t resist exploring how change really happens in large organizations.

What emerged wasn’t another framework—it was something more brilliant and subversive: how middle managers quietly become change agents, why sustainable transformation looks nothing like a launch event, and the liberating truth that leaders don’t need to be perfect.

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

Lize Wiseman

Lize Wiseman: I don’t believe that change needs to start, or even be sponsored, at the top of the organization. I’ve seen so much change led from the middle management ranks. When middle managers experiment with new mindsets and practices inside their organizations, they produce pockets of success—anomalies that catch the attention of senior executives and corporate staffers who are highly adept at detecting variances (both negative and positive). When senior executives notice positive outcomes, they are quick to elevate and endorse the new practices, in turn spreading the practices to other parts of the organization. In other words, most senior executives are adept at spotting a parade and getting in front of it! (Incidentally, this is one of several executive skills you won’t find documented on any official leadership competency model.) If you don’t yet have the political capital to lead a company-wide initiative, run a pilot with a few rising middle managers. Shine a spotlight on their success and let the practices spread to their peers. Expose their good work to the executive team and make yourself available to turn the parade into a movement.

RB: In your research and work, what’s the most surprising pattern you’ve observed about successful organizational transformation?”

LW: As mentioned above, I believe the starting point for transformation is less important than how you will sustain the momentum you’ve generated. Unfortunately, most new initiatives—be they corporate change initiatives or personal improvement plans—begin with a bang but fizzle out in what I call “the failure to launch” cycle. Transformation that is sustained over time usually starts small and builds a series of successive wins. Each win provides the energy needed to carry the work into the next phase. These series of wins generate the energy and collective will needed to complete the cycle of success. As that cycle spins, nascent beliefs become more deeply entrenched and old survival strategies get supplanted by new methods to not just survive but thrive inside the organization.

Each little success requires careful support and an evidence-backed PR campaign to build awareness and broad support for the new direction. Nascent behavior and beliefs are fragile and will be overpowered by older assumptions until they are strengthened by supporting evidence. The supporting evidence forms a buttress around the budding mindset or practices, much like a brace around a sapling provides stability until the tree is strong enough to stand on its own.

RB: How has your thinking about what makes an effective leader evolved over the course of your career?

LW: When I began researching good leadership, most diminishing leaders appeared to be tyrannical, narcissistic bullies. But as I further studied the problem, I’ve come to see that the vast majority of the diminishing happening inside our workplaces is done with the best of intentions, by what I call the Accidental Diminisher—good people trying to be good managers. I’ve become less interested in knowing who is a Diminisher and much more interested in understanding what provokes the Diminisher tendencies that lurk inside each of us.

RB: When you consider all the organizations you’ve studied, what’s the most powerful lesson about driving meaningful change that most leaders overlook?

LW: One of the dangers of trying to lead change from the top is that most leaders have a hard time being a constant role model for the changes they advocate for. Even the best leaders can’t always display the positive behaviors they espouse and ask their organizations to embody. It’s human to slip up. But when behavior change is led primarily from the top, these all-too-natural slip-ups can become major setbacks for the whole organization because they provide visible evidence that the new behavior isn’t required or feasible, and followers can easily give up. Wise leaders understand this dynamic and build a hypocrisy factor into their change plans–meaning, they acknowledge upfront that they aspire to the new behavior but don’t always fully embody it, yet. They set the expectation that there will be setbacks and invite people to help them be better leaders as well. They acknowledge that the route to new behavior typically looks like the acclimation process used by high-elevation climbers. These climbers spend some of their days in ascent, but once they reach new elevations, often have to descend to lower camps to acclimate. It’s the proverbial two-steps-forward, one-step-back process. When leaders acknowledge their shortcomings and the likelihood of their future missteps, they not only minimize the chance that others give up when they see hypocrisy above them, but they create space for others to make and recover from their own mistakes.

RB: Looking ahead, what do you believe is the most important capability leaders need to develop to help their organizations thrive?

LW: Leading in uncertainty, specifically the ability to lead people to destinations that they themselves have never been.

I love that Liz’s insights flip the script, calling on people outside the C-Suite to stop waiting for permission and start running quiet experiments, building proof points, and letting success do the selling.

The next time you want a change or have change thrust upon you, don’t look for a parade to lead. Look for one person willing to try something different and get to work.

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Making People Matter in AI Era

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Making People Matter in AI Era

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

People matter more than ever as we witness one of the most significant technological advancements reshaping humanity. Regardless of size, every industry and organization can adopt AI to enhance operations, innovate, stay competitive, and grow by partnering AI with people. Our research highlights three workplace trends and four global, strategic, and systemic human crises that affect the successful execution of all organizational transformation initiatives, posing potential barriers to implementing AI strategies. This makes the importance of people mattering in the age of AI greater than ever.

Three Key Global Trends

According to Udemy’s 2024 Global Learning and Skills Trends Report, three key trends are core to the future of work, stating that organizations and their leaders must:

Understand how to navigate the skills landscape and why it is essential to assess, identify, develop, and validate the skills their teams possess, lack, and require to remain innovative and competitive.
Adapt to the rise of AI, focusing on how generative AI and automation disrupt our work processes and their role in supporting a shift to a skills-based approach.
Develop strong leaders who can guide their teams through change and foster resilience within them.

Five Key Global Crises

1. Organizational engagement is in crisis.

Recently, Gallup reported that Global employee engagement fell by two percentage points in 2024, only the second time it has fallen in the past 12 years. Managers (particularly young managers and female managers) experienced the sharpest decline. Employee engagement significantly influences economic output; Gallup estimates that a two-point drop in engagement costs the world $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024.

2. People are burning out, causing a crisis in well-being.

In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Three dimensions characterize it:

Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
Reduced professional efficacy.

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”

They estimate that globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety, costing US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

Burnout is more than just an employee problem; it’s an organizational issue that requires a comprehensive solution. People’s mental and emotional health and well-being are still not prioritized or managed effectively. Well-being in the workplace is a complex systemic issue that must be addressed. Making people matter in the age of AI involves empowering, enabling, and equipping them to focus on developing their self-regulation and self-management skills, shifting them from languishing in a constant state of emotional overwhelm and cognitive overload that leads to burnout.

3. The attention economy is putting people into crisis.

According to Johann Hari, in his best-selling book, “Stolen Focus,” people’s focus and attention have been stolen; our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and we must intentionally reclaim it. His book describes the wide range of consequences that losing focus and attention has on our lives. These issues are further impacted by the pervasive and addictive technology we are compelled to use in our virtual world, exacerbated by the legacy of the global pandemic and the ongoing necessity for many people to work virtually from home. He reveals how our dwindling attention spans predate the internet and how its decline is accelerating at an alarming rate. He suggests that to regain your ability to focus, you should stop multitasking and practice paying attention. Yet, in the Thesaurus, there are 286 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to paying attention, such as listen and give heed.

4. Organizational performance is in crisis.

Research at BetterUp Labs analyzed behavioral data from 410,000 employees (2019-2025), linking real-world performance with organizational outcomes and psychological drivers. It reveals that performance isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about shifting fluidity between three performance modes – basic: the legacy from the industrial age, collaborative: the imperative of knowledge work, and adaptive: the core requirement to perform effectively in the face of technological disruption, by being agile, creative, and connected. The right human fuel powers these: motivation, optimism and agency, which our research has found to be in short supply and BetterUp states is running dry.

Data scientists at BetterUp uncovered that performance has declined by 2-6% across industries since 2019. In business terms, half of today’s workforce would land in a lower performance tier, across all three modes, by 2019 standards.

GenAI relies on activating all three performance gears, and the rise of AI-powered agents is reshaping the way teams work together. Research reveals that companies that invest in adaptive performance see up to 37% higher innovation.

5. Innovation is in crisis.

According to the Boston Consulting Group’s “Most Innovative Companies 2024 Report,” Innovation Systems Need a Reboot:

“Companies have never placed a higher priority on innovation—yet they have never been as unready to deliver on their innovation aspirations”

Their annual survey of global innovators finds that the pandemic, a shifting macroeconomic climate, and rising geopolitical tensions have all taken a toll on the innovation discipline. With high uncertainty, leaders shifted from medium-term advantage and value creation to short-term agility. In that environment, the systems guiding innovation activities and channeling innovation investments suffered, leaving organizations less equipped for the race to come. In particular, as measured by BCG’s proprietary innovation maturity score, innovation readiness is down across the elements of the innovation system that align with the corporate value creation agenda.

You can overcome these crises by transforming them into opportunities through a continuous learning platform that empowers, enables, and equips people to innovate today, making people matter in the age of AI. This will help develop new ways of shaping tomorrow while serving natural, social, and human capital, as well as humanity.

Current constraints of AI mean developing crucial human skills

While AI can perform many tasks, it cannot yet understand and respond to human emotions, build meaningful relationships, exhibit curiosity, or solve problems creatively.

This is why making people matter in the age of AI is crucial, as their human skills are essential.

Some of the most critical human skills are illustrated below.

Some of the Most Critical Human Skills

These essential human skills are challenging to learn and require time, repetition, and practice to develop; however, they are fundamental for creating practical solutions to address the three trends and four crises mentioned above.

Making people matter in the age of AI involves:

Providing individuals with the ‘chance to’ self-regulate their reactive responses by fostering self and systemic awareness and agility to flow with change and disruption in an increasingly uncertain, volatile, ambiguous, and complex world.
Inspiring and motivating people to ‘want to’ self-manage and develop their authentic presence and learning processes to be visionary and purposeful in adapting, innovating, and growing through disruption.
Teaching people ‘how to’ develop the states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills that foster discomfort resilience, adaptive and creative thinking, problem-solving, purpose and vision, conflict negotiation, and innovation.

Human Skills Matter More Than Ever

The human element is critical to shaping the future of work, collaboration, and growth. The most effective AI outcomes will likely come from human-AI partnership, not from automation alone. Making people matter in the age of AI is crucial as part of the adoption journey, and partnering them with AI can turn their fears into curiosity, re-engage them purposefully and meaningfully, and enable them to contribute more to a team or organization. This, in turn, allows them to improve their well-being, maintain attention, innovate, and enhance their performance. Still, it cannot do this for them.

Making people matter in the age of AI by investing in continuous learning tools that develop their human skills will empower them to adapt, learn, grow, and take initiative. External support from a coach or mentor can enhance support, alleviate stress, boost performance, and improve work-life balance and satisfaction.

Human problems require human solutions.

Our human skills are irreplaceable in making real-world decisions and solving complex problems. AI cannot align fragmented and dysfunctional teams, repair broken processes, or address outdated governance. These are human problems requiring human solutions. That’s where human curiosity and inspiration define what AI can never achieve. It is not yet possible to connect people, through AI, to what wants to emerge in the future.

Making people matter in the age of AI can ignite our human inspiration, empowering, engaging, and enabling individuals to unleash their potential at the intersection of human possibility and technological innovation. We can then harness people’s collective intelligence and technological expertise to create, adapt, grow, and innovate in ways that enhance people’s lives, which are deeply appreciated and cherished.

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

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

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