Tag Archives: organizational change

Innovation Mythbusters – Top 5

Leave a reply

Innovation Mythbusters - Top 5

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Amazingly Fabulous Tools is an award-winning, entrepreneurial market leader in the global machine engineering industry. The ambitious and proactive CEO Charlie Chaps invested in dispatching a Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley to research, investigate, and report on how to capture and emulate the critical ingredients of its “secret innovative sauce.” Upon their return, the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers created and shared a beautiful, illustrated PowerPoint presentation with the board despite secretly knowing and passively avoiding saying that Amazingly Fabulous Tools could not replicate what they had discovered, primarily due to how the top five innovation myths clandestinely operated in the organization.

The Corporate Antibodies

This is due to their overt experience with the organization’s “innovation antibodies,” which cause an organization to resist change and protect the status quo. These antibodies consist of rigid people and inconsistent processes that extinguish a new idea as soon as it begins to course through the organization. In the Amazingly Fabulous Tool company, most people, especially the founders and the board, unconsciously and powerfully neutralized any forces that threatened to destabilize the company’s current state and stunt its growth by shutting down the fresh ideas and unconventional thinking their company badly needed.

Charlie Chaps built a fantastic, largely incomprehensible strategic plan with a BHAG, strategic goals, and sets of individual KPIs. This plan provided concrete evidence that reassured the board that the company was taking action to sustain its leadership position in the market and would take the business to the next level by growing its ROI. It also aimed to leverage the collective genius of its owners, Bob the Brave Builder and Eric the Energetic Entrepreneur, to ensure a legacy was left no matter who was at the helm.

The Innovation Culture Diagnostic Findings

A quantitative and qualitative cultural diagnostic revealed that people lacked permission, safety, and trust to speak up, rock the boat and challenge the status quo. It also showed that the organization lacked rigor in its process disciplines and a focus on developing its people’s capabilities.

It also revealed that Amazingly Fabulous Tools was secretly driven by its founders’ and sales directors’ self-interest and greed due to the highly competitive profit-share sales model. Not by an obligation and commitment to creating, inventing, designing, and delivering disciplined, innovative process improvements, products, and services that their customers purchased and did not appreciate and cherish.

This was a stark contradiction and barrier to the company’s ability to sustain its enviable global reputation. Finally, people believed that Charlie Chaps’ fantastic strategic plan, BHAG, goals, and KPIs were confusing and disconnected from the organization’s current reality and would not produce a collaborative and innovative organization.

So, they did not accept or apply the plan and kept safe by conducting business as usual.

The Top Five Innovation Myths

Because the corporate antibodies revealed that people unanimously believed each of the key myths, including:

Myth # 1: Innovation is a solo activity; people believe that ” only the owners can innovate.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation is impossible without inclusion and collaboration, which are achieved through practical and disciplined teaming and networking.


Myth #2: Innovation is top-down; people believed they were not responsible or accountable for planning and were forced to be reactive. “The planning is difficult, that is for sure, because we are firefighting all the time, and that goes back to the frustration of not having enough time to do what needs to get done…and resources and …tools.”
The Brutal Truth: When people have the permission and safety to challenge the status quo, make mistakes, and are trusted to learn through experimentation, innovation can emerge anywhere in an organization, or team.


Myth #3: Innovation is about the newest thing; people believed that radical innovation was needed when agility was the problem; “The scary thing is our key competitor is getting more flexible (agile); we’re just getting more reliable (stable). It’s the stupid things that are so annoying. It’s the embarrassing things.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation is guided by its strategic intent. It can be incremental, continuous, radical, breakthrough, disruptive, or differentiated, as there is no one best way of innovating.


Myth # 4: Innovation can’t be taught; people believed that they did not have to learn to improve or innovate when they encountered quality issues continuously; “A lot of times, it’s not because the customer wants the machine tomorrow but because we want to ship it tomorrow because we want to get it off the floor, we want to meet numbers, we want the cash. We usually drive the time frame and rush it out the door, creating many internal problems. It also creates problems externally with the customer when they think they’re getting a machine fully intact, but half its parts are missing….”
The Brutal Truth: Innovators are not born and are made. Anyone can learn to innovate,


Myth #5: You can’t force innovation; people were dis-empowered and did not take responsibility for influencing their environment to provide order and discipline; “It’s a traffic jam. That’s what we’ve got. It’s a traffic jam. Cars sitting bumper to bumper look like they are gridlocked. It represents the log jam of our activities. Where people are trying to push so many activities through two lanes of traffic when we’ve got six lanes worth of traffic.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation can emerge when people have a sense of urgency, understand, and are motivated to engage in necessary, high-impact cultural and organizational change.

People must be prepared for it, change-ready and receptive, and intentionally pulled towards a compelling and desired future within an equalized environment that balances chaos and creativity with rigidity and discipline through rigorous planning.

The real costs to the organization

People believed that “This business makes money despite itself. There is potential to be truly great”. This was the most significant innovation antibody because there was no sense of urgency or even a financial or growth necessity to innovate. The company was quite comfortable with the status quo and had no reason to shift its habitual and unconscious comfort zone in ways that people and organizations must do to innovate because it involves being ready and receptive to mega-changes.

The significant investment in sending the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley sadly remained in the mythical realm of Innovation Dreamland.

So, lacking focus, discipline and rigor, the group of seriously qualified and intelligent engineers knowingly consistently dispatched faulty million-dollar machines to highly valued, global customers.

The cost of rework and brand erosion were considerable.

These machines required considerable analysis, problem-solving, and rework upon their return. Their costs were not recorded as repairs, causing the engineering division to be consistently over budget. Charlie Chaps reacted by restricting its budget and inhibiting its investment in critical research and development, which is needed to create, invent, and innovate to repair and sustain its global reputation as an innovator.

Innovation Dreamland remained a mythical and magical fantasy in Amazingly Fabulous Tools.

Sadly, the organization failed to shift its focus from challenge to opportunity because it could not resolve the corporate antibodies (implicit killers), remove the roadblocks, break down the internal cultural barriers to innovation and develop the agility necessary to become both a people-centric and customer-centric organization.

It lost an opportunity to make innovation a daily habit for everyone by failing to embed it in its organization as a way of life. It needed to empower, enable, and equip its talented, experienced and motivated people with the emotional energy, change, cognitive, and innovation agility to expose, challenge and resolve the underlying corporate antibodies.

It did not prioritize customer satisfaction and keep its promises by creating, inventing, and innovating high-value, quality products and services that improve the quality of their lives that are appreciated and cherished.

Many transformations and change-led innovation initiatives designed as strategic interventions fail due to a lack of alignment between strategy, structure, processes, and human skills, resulting in unproductive actions and poor human behaviors.

This is a short section from Chapter One of our new book, “Conscious Innovation – Empowering People to Be, Think and Act Differently in a Constantly Changing World”, which will be published in 2025.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, it is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and 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 up-skill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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

Igniting Innovation with Deep Dialogue

Leave a reply

Igniting Innovation with Deep Dialogue

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I have just returned from a short sabbatical in Bali, Indonesia, a place of unparalleled beauty, lushness, and deep spirituality. Bali invites and fosters opportunities for retreat, reflection, and replenishment and is a vital space for restoration and renewal. As you may know, a sabbatical is an extended period away from work for study, travel, or personal growth. In my case, it was in response to an invitation to attend a deep dialogue session that included high-level leaders from many countries and sectors of society across the Asia Pacific region.  This entailed days spent in deep listening and inquiring processes involving quietening the mind, accessing the heart and respecting the body within a unique environment. It supported people through their change fatigue, unleashed their emotional energy, and sparked collective intelligence to emerge hopefulness, unity, faith, and possibility in the future of humanity.

It allowed people to emerge, diverge, and converge their positive and creative change choices to transform their worlds.

What is deep dialogue?

Dialogue can be defined as “a sustained collective inquiry into the processes, assumptions, and certainties that structure everyday experience”. The word “dialogue” originates from two Greek roots, ‘dia’ and ‘logos’ suggesting “meaning flowing through.”

It’s important to understand that dialogue is not the same as the often unproductive and mechanistic debates we are familiar with. Deep dialogue is a sustained collective inquiry that sparks collective intelligence through a facilitated process that delves into the values, needs, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, assumptions and certainties that shape our everyday experiences, feelings and thoughts about the future.

Deep dialogue is not just a creative conversation; it involves strategic, collective and insightful inquiry, detached observation, attention and intention, and multi-faceted listening processes.

It requires a willingness to suspend and let go of reactive and defensive exchanges and delve into their systemic causes. It helps to spark people’s collective intelligence to create moments of clarity in resolving complex and critical problems creatively and differently.

In contrast with more familiar modes of inquiry, deep dialogue involves an emergence process. It begins without an agenda and a ‘leader’ but with an accomplished facilitator and without a specific task or decision to make.

One key element in fostering productive dialogue is the role of the facilitator. The facilitator’s task is to co-create a collective holding space that encourages participants to disrupt and safely challenge their habitual thinking processes. This approach is based on the understanding that our problems cannot be solved using the same thinking that created them.

Knowing that we can’t keep on producing the results we want.

Deep dialogue evokes collective intelligence, opening new possibilities for shared thinking and fostering a sense of authenticity, unity and shared purpose in any endeavour.

What are the barriers that often hinder deep and meaningful dialogue?

The constant, relentless impact of accelerating change, disruption, and uncertainty, as well as the ongoing impact of our post-COVID isolation and people’s lack of belonging, never allows or permits us the key moments that enable us to engage in and reap the benefits that deep dialogue offers.

This lack of belonging and isolation are significant barriers to meaningful dialogue that evoke the positive changes we seek in our personal and professional lives.

As a seasoned corporate trainer, facilitator, coach, and consultant, I have observed that many people unconsciously still suffer from emotional overwhelm, causing them to lose their ‘spark’ or emotional energy. They also unconsciously suffer from cognitive overload, with little mental or thinking space to explore the impact of their thoughts and feelings on who they are, which diminishes any positivity, hope, and optimism for themselves, their teams, and organisations today and in the future.

Alternately, it is much easier and more comfortable for some people to be unconsciously reactive, defensive, and singularly focused, never developing their pause power.

By avoiding taking any personal responsibility or being accountable for interrupting their busyness and shifting their inner being, and developing the deliberate calm required to be, think, and act differently in the face of any instability, insecurity, sorrow, or unwellness, they may be experiencing in their hearts and minds.

Upon arrival, I discovered I was also unconsciously doing this despite my regular wellness routine and habits.

During the three-day process, I was encouraged to pay attention and notice how energetically, emotionally, and physically exhausted I felt and how my mind had been kidnapped and overloaded by my unconscious fears and anxiety over the state of the world.

Like many others, I had also unconsciously been wilfully pushing myself as a human doing rather than as a human being.   

This left no space or safe moments for sparking moments of clarity, never mind socialising or connecting with others to spark collective intelligence and consciously effect positive change.

Why is deep dialogue critical in today’s uncertain and disrupted world?

Fortunately, I was supported to enter and engage in deep dialogue, which allowed our group of global leaders to safely interrupt our ‘busyness’, stop, and emerge a range of vital and subtle moments.  

To cultivate and nurture our inner awareness by retreating and reflecting through mindfulness, contemplation, meditation, and silence.  

It awakened us to become conscious of the subtle world that connects our unique cognitive and emotional inner structures of thoughts and feelings to the outer world we mostly unconsciously created and experienced. 

It was a powerful, transformative experience for every one of us.

Because when we change, the world changes.

Choosing to cross the bridge consciously

We can engage in deep dialogue when we are empowered, enabled and equipped to stop, pause, retreat, and reflect.

By being curious, compassionate, and courageous in opening our hearts, minds, and will, we can spark regeneration, replenishment, and renewal of the range of options, choices, and intentions.

We can cross the bridge, individually and collectively, to re-create or co-create a compelling, sustainable, inclusive, and equitable future for everyone.

Anyone can be proactive and evoke creative sparks collectively and collaboratively to unleash our options, choices, and intentions by being in the present and bridging the past with a desirable future.

It is foundational to creating, inventing, and innovating our futures and reclaiming our inner dignity and power over our lives.

To spark our collective intelligence, all leaders must commit to consciously using this moment to create what is possible rather than reacting and passively accepting what might appear inevitable to some of us.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, it is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalised innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and can be customised 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 focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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

SpaceX is a Masterclass in Innovation Simplification

2 Replies

SpaceX is a Masterclass in Innovation Simplification

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

This capture from a recent SpaceX tweet is a stunning visual example of smart innovation and simplification. 

While I’m not even close to being a rocket scientist, and so am far from familiar with all of the technical details, I’ve heard that breakthroughs incorporated into this include innovative sensor design that allows for streamlined feedback loops. But this goes beyond just impressive technical innovation.   To innovate at this level requires organizational and cultural flexibility as well as technical brilliance. That latter flexibility is probably far more broadly transferable and adoptable than specific advances in rocket science, and hence more useful to the broader innovation community. So let’s dig a little deeper into that space.

Secret Sauce?  Organizationally SpaceX is well known for less formal hierarchies, passion, ownership and engineers working on the production floor.  This hands on approach creates a different, but important kind of feedback, while passion feeds intrinsic motivation, ownership and engagement, which is so critical to consistent innovation. 

Learning from Failure – An Innovation Superpower?  But perhaps most important of all is the innovation culture. Within SpaceX there is a very clear willingness to experiment and learn from failure.  Not lip service, or the sometimes half-hearted embrace of failure often found in large, bureaucratic organizations, where rewards and career progression often doesn’t reflect the mantra of learning by failing.  This is an authentic willingness to publicly treat productive failure of individual launches as a learning success for the program, and to reward productive failure and appropriate risk taking.  Of course, it’s not always easy to walk the talk of celebrating failure, especially in spacecraft design, where failures are often spectacular, public, and visual gold for the media.  And no doubt this is compounded by Musk’s controversial public profile, where media and social media are often only too keen to highlight failures.  But the visual of Raptor 3 is for me a compelling advertisement for authentically embedding learning by failure deeply into the DNA of an innovative organization. 

Stretch Goals:  Musk is famous for, and sometimes ridiculed for setting ambitious stretch goals, and for not always achieving them.   But in a culture where failure is tolerated, or if done right, celebrated, missing a stretch goal is not a problem, especially if it propelled innovation along at a pace that goes beyond conventional expectation.    

Challenging Legacy and ‘Givens’:  Culturally, this kind of radical simplification requires the systematic challenge of givens that were part of previous iterations.  You cannot make these kind of innovation leaps unless you are both willing and able to discard legacy technical and organizational structures.  

At risk of kicking Boeing while it is down, it is hard not to contrast SpaceX with Boeing, whose space (and commercial aviation) program is very publicly floundering, and facing the potentially humiliating prospect of needing rescue from the more agile SpaceX program. 

Innovation Plaque:  But in the spirit of learning from failure, if we look a bit deeper, perhaps it should not be a surprise that Boeing are struggling to keep up. They have a long, storied, and successful history as a leader in aerospace.  But history and leadership can be a blessing and a curse, as I know from P&G. It brings experience, but also bureaucracy, rigid systems, and deeply rooted culture that may or may not be optimum for managing change.  Deep institutional knowledge can be a similar mixed blessing.  It of course allows easy access to in-domain experience, and is key to not repeating past mistakes, or making naïve errors.  But is also comes with an inherent bias towards traditional solutions, and technologies.  Perhaps even more important is the organizationally remembered pain of past failures, especially if a ‘learn by failure’ culture isn’t fully embraced.  Failure is good at telling us what didn’t work, and plays an important role in putting processes in place that help us to avoid repeating errors.  But over time these ‘defensive’ processes can build up like plaque in an artery, making it difficult to push cutting edge technologies or radical changes through the system.

Balance is everything.  Nobody wants to be the Space Cowboy.  Space exploration is expensive, and risks the lives of some extraordinarily brave people.  Getting the balance between risk taking and the right kind of failure is even more critical than in most other contexts. But SpaceX are doing it right, certainly until now. Whatever the technical details, the impact on speed, efficiency and $$ behind the simplification of Raptor 3 is stunning.  I suspect that ultimately reliability and efficiency will also likely helped by increased simplicity.  But it’s a delicate line.  The aforementioned ‘plaque’ does slow the process, but done right, it can also prevent unnecessary failure.   It’s important to be lean, but  not ‘slice the salami’ too thin.  Great innovation teams mix diverse experience, backgrounds and personalities for this reason.  We need the cynic as well as the gung-ho risk taker.  For SpaceX, so far, so good, but it’s important that they don’t become over confident.  

The Elon Musk Factor:  For anyone who hasn’t noticed. Musk has become a somewhat controversial figure of late. But even if you dislike him, you can still learn from him, and as innovators, I don’t think we can afford not to. He is the most effective innovator, or at least innovation leader for at least a generation. The teams he puts together are brilliant at challenging ‘givens’, and breaking out of legacy constraints and the ‘ghosts of evolution’. We see it across the SpaceX design, not just the engine, but also the launch systems, recycling of parts, etc. We also see an analogous innovation strategy in the way Tesla cars so dramatically challenged so many givens in the auto industry, or the ‘Boring company in my hometown of Las Vegas.

Ghosts of Evolution I’d mentioned the challenges of legacy designs and legacy constraints. I think this is central to SpaceX’s success, and so I think it’s worth going a little deeper on this topic.  Every technology, and every living thing on our planet comes with its own ghosts.   They are why humans have a literal blind-spot in our vision, why our bodies pleasure centers are co-located with our effluent outlets, and why the close proximity of our air and liquid/solid intakes lead to thousands of choking deaths every year. Nature is largely stuck with incrementally building on top of past designs, often leading to the types of inefficiency described above. Another example is the Pronghorn antelope that lives in my adopted American West. It can achieve speeds of close to 90 mph. This is impressive, but vastly over-designed and inefficient for it’s current environment. But it is a legacy design, evolved at a time when it was predated upon by long extinct North American Cheetah. It cannot simply undo that capability now that it’s no longer useful. So far, it’s survived this disadvantage, but it is vulnerable to both competition and changing environment simply because it is over-designed.

Bio-Inspiration:  I’ve long believed we can learn a great deal from nature and bio-inspired design, but sometimes learning what not to do is as useful as ‘stealing’ usable insights. It’s OK to love nature, but also acknowledge that evolution has far more failures than successes. There are far, far more extinct species than living ones.  And virtually every one was either too specialized, or lacked the ability to pivot and adapt in the face of changing context.  

As innovators, we have unique option of creating totally new 2.0 designs, and challenging the often unarticulated givens that are held within a category. And we have the option of changing our culture and organizational structures too.  But often we fail do so because we are individually or organizationally blind to legacy elements that are implicitly part of our assumptions for a category or a company.  The fish doesn’t see the water, or at least not until it’s dangling from a hook. By then it’s too late.   Whatever you think of Musk, he’s taught us it is possible to create innovation cultures that challenge legacy designs extremely effectively.  It’s a lesson worth learning

Image credits: Twitter (via SpaceX)

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

Bringing Emotional Energy and Creative Thinking to AI

1 Reply

Bringing Emotional Energy and Creative Thinking to AI

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

The impact of disruption, hyper-connectivity, and uncertainty, coupled with the pace of change, is causing many people to feel fearful and anxious. They become defensive and reactive and ‘go under’ emotionally and ‘go inwards’ cognitively by ruminating about their past and what bad things may happen in the future.  Dwelling on past mistakes, failures, and poor performance also causes them to disengage emotionally, take flight and move away, avoid taking action, fight, or freeze and become inert, paralyzed, and immobilized. The outcome is resistance to the possibilities and creative changes using Generative AI might bring. Because they lack the vital creative and emotional energy to generate creative thinking in partnership with AI, they will resist innovation-led change and stay ‘stuck’ in their habitual, safe and conventional roles, capabilities and identities.

Emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels the creative process. Understanding and harnessing this energy inspires and motivates individuals to explore and embrace creative thinking strategies in partnership with AI.

When a person’s emotional energy has contracted, it results in constrained, negative, pessimistic, and even catastrophic thinking habits.

Where there is no space, doorway, or threshold to take on anything new, novel, or different or to imagine what might be possible in an uncertain future to evolve, advance, or transform their personal or professional lives.

Emotional energy catalyzes people’s hope, positivity and optimism to approach their worlds differently.

When people are constrained from becoming hopeful, positive, and optimistic, they cannot apply foresight to explore future possibilities and opportunities at the accelerating pace that Generative AI tools offer in unleashing the human ingenuity and generating creative thinking required to solve challenges and increasingly complex problems.

Augmenting human creativity

Generative AI, as highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review article, How Generative AI can Augment Human Creativity, has the potential to assist humans in creating innovative solutions. Its role is not to replace humans but to augment their creativity, helping them generate and identify novel ideas and improve the quality of raw ideas.

To empower individuals to make intelligent decisions and solve complex problems, it is crucial to notice, disrupt, dispute and deviate from their unresourceful default patterns or habitual ways of doing things.

Because emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels the creative process, it is crucial to help people find ways to re-ignite their emotional energy.

Empowering, enabling, and equipping them to embody and take on new, more resourceful emotional states and traits that allow them to break free from the constraints by identifying and letting go of old, irrelevant roles, capabilities, and identities. To take on new ones to facilitate positive changes, solve challenges, and deliver highly valued innovative solutions in partnership with Generative AI to generate creative thinking.

Generating the power of questions in problem-solving

I applied and implemented three key strategies to partner with Generative AI during the six-month coaching partnership. I used creative thinking strategies to develop a comprehensive life-coaching plan for a coaching client that serendipitously co-created a range of transformational outcomes.

Identify the key challenges, strengths, and systemic nature of the core problem and set a goal for change.

Encouraged to experiment with coaching in partnership with Generative AI, I created a comprehensive summary of what my client and I agreed her core problem was.  We defined a goal for effecting positive and constructive change and outlined evidence of achieving a successful outcome. I incorporated these elements into a descriptive paragraph and uploaded it into the Generative AI platform.

Develop a range of catalytic questions.

I focused on designing four key catalytic questions, to evoke and provoke creative thinking strategies. I requested the platform to design and develop a life-coaching plan to achieve our goal and solve her unique problem:   

Integration involves showing that two things which appear to be different are actually the same:

  • What might be some key existing transformational coaching elements that can be integrated into the new life-coaching plan I am trying to create to solve this problem?
  • Splitting involves seeing how two things that look the same might actually be different and can be divided into useful parts, like an assembly line:
  • What might be some key components of transformational coaching plans that can be combined to connect with a life-coaching plan to help solve this problem?
  • Figure-ground reversal involves realizing that what is crucial is in the background and not in the foreground, like the invention of Slack.
  • What might be some of the missing parts in the transformational and life coaching processes that might be included to help solve this problem?
  • Distal thinking involves imagining things different from the present, like the Tesla electric car.
  • What could be possible without boundaries, rules or limitations in harnessing the emotional energy required to partner with my client in our coaching relationship?
  • How might I create value for my client? What key constraints in her whole system relate to life coaching, and how might I leverage these to solve the problem differently?

It took less than a minute and consisted of a comprehensive, step-by-step, detailed plan that would have taken me at least half a day to consider and construct.

I was delighted to have an evidence-based example of successfully augmenting human creativity, partnering with Generative AI to generate creative thinking to advance my coaching partnership.

Partner with applying a transformational process.

It took less than a minute and consisted of a comprehensive, step-by-step, detailed plan that would have taken me at least half a day of using my pause-power to construct. I was delighted to have an evidence-based example of successfully augmenting human creativity to experiment with when partnering with Generative AI to generate creative thinking in my coaching partnership:

  • Generating and identifying a range of novel ideas towards improving her well-being.
  • Exploring and improving the range and quality of the initial raw ideas by applying pause power to incubate, illuminate, and generate creative thinking.
  • Identifying and developing a range of options for my client to choose from, allowing her to let go of what was depleting her emotional energy and retain her hopefulness, positivity, and optimism.
  • Identifying and developing a range of options for my client to choose from, to take on to manifest the desired future state of well-being and re-energize her emotional energy.

What was the outcome?

By co-creating a safe and collective holding space with my client, we supported her in re-energizing emotionally and applying future-oriented creative thinking strategies. We partnered with Generative AI to innovate my coaching approach and maximize our intelligence.

The outcome was personally transformative and sustained by:

  • Ensuring she re-ignited and identified strategies and new habits to sustain her emotional energy and make the necessary changes and future choices.
  • Applying circuit breakers and divergent thinking strategies to disrupt and dispute unresourceful beliefs, biases and behavior patterns.
  • Creating a safe space allowed her to deviate from her feelings, thoughts, and mindset to identify what new roles, capabilities, and identities to take on in the future and how they could benefit her and add value to the quality of her life.
  • Assisting in creating various ideas and options to refine when making significant lifestyle change choices.

It was a powerful learning experience for both my client and myself, reinforcing and validating that “Generative AI’s greatest potential is not replacing humans; it is to assist humans in their individual and collective efforts to create hitherto unimaginable solutions. It can truly democratize innovation.”

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Check out our 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 personalised innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks and can be customised as a bespoke corporate learning program. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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

Smarter Risk Taking

Leave a reply

Smarter Risk Taking

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

After founding ImagineNation™ in Israel, I invested a year of my time and considerable money in taking what I thought were smart risks to invent an experiential business game. This involved collaborating with one of the top game design companies to co-create a live business simulation incorporating innovative gamification elements intending to teach corporations how to be innovative.

To my shock and surprise at the time, my invention initially failed!

Despite being an adult and experiential learning specialist and having designed and facilitated hundreds of corporate learning games for some of Australia’s top 100 companies over twenty-five years. It felt really horrible, and it was a visceral, heartbreaking, shameful and ego-destroying experience that I would not want anyone, anywhere, ever to experience.

Deep Learning Experience

Yet, it became a profound learning experience, enabling me to understand how:

  • My imposter syndrome played a significant self-sabotaging role. It did not set me up for success, nor did it set me up for maximising the importance of self-efficacy and self-mastery when on an innovation roller-coaster ride.
  • I had not undertaken sufficient research studies to determine if users wanted and were ready to accept such a radical innovation. Nor had I noticed how much the corporate learning market was being disrupted by technology, causing significant time and budget constraints, that I had neglected to address.
  • I had not paused long enough to consider, anticipate, plan and mitigate the risks involved in prototyping a viable minimal product in a new market.
  • I had not considered the risks involved with collaborating with a new consulting partner and co-facilitator, as well as with a new client. Nor anticipated how to resolve the values conflict that erupted when the project failed.
  • I had not fully understood the process involved in iterating and pivoting a new invention and the time it would take to produce a commercially viable product that the market would understand, be ready for, and respond to.

Finally, it seems that I had unconsciously fallen victim to the innovative start-up entrepreneur’s curse – falling in love with my product!

This was generated by my excitement, enthusiasm and energy of the possibilities rather than balancing these courageously and compassionately with the:

  • Harsh realities to be innovative.
  • Vital role of smart risk-taking and experimentation.
  • What ‘fails fast, to learn quickly’ really means at the heart (emotional), head (cognitive) and gut (visceral) levels.

Value of Failing Fast

They say that people need to teach what they need to learn themselves.

This valuable failure enabled me to invest the next ten years in learning to make sense of innovation and what it means to be innovative, including:

  • Helped me develop self-efficacy, trust my inner knowing and judgement, and make a stand for myself in the face of opposition and criticism I often received when presenting at a global conference on the people side of innovation, especially by process engineers.
  • Investing more attention, time in iterating and pivoting, testing and validating the two-day business simulation MVP to make it more tangible, simpler and teachable. 
  • Acknowledging that technology had accelerated sufficiently to accept that the original creative idea of a simple hybrid board game was the most valuable commercial option that could make the difference I wanted to make in the world. 
  • Becoming more patient, self-compassionate, and courageous in smart risk-taking and leading, coaching, and engaging in team innovation and continuous learning through various innovation, entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial learning initiatives.

Iterating and Pivoting

I iterated, pivoted, and refined my intellectual property by presenting and bespoking the Coach for Innovators, Leaders and Teams Certified Program™ for over twelve years to global change-makers.

Most importantly, I reined in my competitive, risky and restless saboteur and focused on doing just one thing, which has finally morphed into a book, supported by a board game to teach people how to be innovative and develop an innovation mindset.

Taking Risks

In the fog of a globalised, disrupted, unpredictable and increasingly uncertain world, no innovation can progress, and no one can be innovative without smart risk-taking.

No innovation can improve without rigorous experimentation, where learning mainly happens by doing things to explore, discover, and know what not to do.  

Research has shown that most successful new business ventures abandoned their original business strategies when implementing their initial plans, learned what would and would not work in the market, and conserved sufficient resources to have a second or third stab at getting it right.

Trial and Error and Cause and Effect

Innovation is a never-ending, risky, adaptive process involving trial and error and understanding cause and effect.

Because people are fearful of making mistakes and the negative consequences of failure, innovation requires leadership to develop both foresight and prospection skills to:

  • Empower and enable them to paradoxically take both a strategic and systemic perspective and a human-centred approach. 
  • Equip them to be innovative when designing business ventures and transformation initiatives that deliver commercially viable outcomes to successfully improve the quality of people’s lives that are appreciated and cherished.

Risk-taking is a Choice

In most businesses and organizations, innovation involves taking considerable risks, especially if seeking to enter a new market with a new product. It is compounded and resisted by many people in organizations because they are too focused on personal survival, personal gain, short-term gain and shareholder return.

Unfortunately, many organizations end up, paradoxically, undermining their organization’s capacity to be innovative, adapt, innovate and grow. Mainly due to their people being disengaged, resistant to change, lacking agency and being held back by bureaucracy and hierarchy that is averse to smart risk-taking and experimentation.

The Future is Permissionless

Because most people generally do not have permission, and are not allowed to make mistakes. They are not encouraged to try new things, so they become risk-averse, avoidant, oppositional and conventional, and don’t feel safe in deviating from the accepted way of doing things.

This is commonly known as the ‘status quo’ and drives people to comply with ‘what is’ (even when it no longer matters) and not apply their human ingenuity, be innovative and create new inventions from ‘what could be’ possible and through smart risk-taking to partner with AI in delivering innovative solutions in a disruptive world of complexity and unknowns.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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

Is Disruption About to Claim a New Victim?

Leave a reply

Kodak. Blockbuster. Google?

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You know the stories.  Kodak developed a digital camera in the 1970s, but its images weren’t as good as film images, so it ended the project.  Decades later, that decision ended Kodak.  Blockbuster was given the chance to buy Netflix but declined due to its paltry library of titles (and the absence of late fees).  A few years later, that decision led to Blockbuster’s decline and demise.  Now, in the age of AI, disruption may be about to claim another victim – Google.

A very brief history of Google’s AI efforts

In 2017, Google Research invented Transformer, a neural network architecture that could be trained to read sentences and paragraphs, pay attention to how the words relate to each other, and predict the words that would come next. 

In 2020, Google developed LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, using Transformer-based models trained on dialogue and able to chat. 

Three years later, Google began developing its own conversational AI using its LaMDA system. The only wrinkle is that OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. 

Now to The Financial Times for the current state of things

“In early 2023, months after the launch of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT, Google was gearing up to launch its competitor to the model that underpinned the chatbot.

.

The search company had been testing generative AI software internally for several months by then.  But as the company rallied its resources, multiple competing models emerged from different divisions within Google, vying for internal attention.”

That last sentence is worrying.  Competition in the early days of innovation can be great because it pushes people to think differently, ask tough questions, and take risks. But, eventually, one solution should emerge as superior to the others so you can focus your scarce resources on refining, launching, and scaling it. Multiple models “vying for internal attention” so close to launch indicate that something isn’t right and about to go very wrong.

“None was considered good enough to launch as the singular competitor to OpenAI’s model, known as ChatGPT-4.  The company was forced to postpone its plans while it tried to sort through the scramble of research projects.  Meanwhile, it pushed out a chatbot, Bard, that was widely viewed to be far less sophisticated than ChatGPT.”

Nothing signals the threat of disruption more than “good enough.”  If Google, like most incumbent companies, defined “good enough” as “better than the best thing out there,” then it’s no surprise that they wouldn’t want to launch anything. 

What’s weird is that instead of launching one of the “not good enough” models, they launched Bard, an obviously inferior product. Either the other models were terrible (or non-functional), or different people were making different decisions to achieve different definitions of success.  Neither is a good sign.

“When Google’s finished product, Gemini, was finally ready nearly a year later, it came with flaws in image generation that CEO Sundar Pichai called ‘completely unacceptable’ – a let-down for what was meant to be a demonstration of Google’s lead in a key new technology.”

“A let-down” is an understatement.  You don’t have to be first.  You don’t have to be the best.  But you also shouldn’t embarrass yourself.  And you definitely shouldn’t launch things that are “completely unacceptable.”

What happens next?

Disruption takes a long time and doesn’t always mean death.  Blackberry still exists, and integrated steel mills, one of Clayton Christensen’s original examples of disruption, still operate.

AI, LLMs, and LaMDAs are still in their infancy, so it’s too early to declare a winner.  Market creation and consumer behavior change take time, and Google certainly has the knowledge and resources to stage a comeback.

Except that that knowledge may be their undoing.  Companies aren’t disrupted because their executives are idiots. They’re disrupted because their executives focus on extending existing technologies and business models to better serve their best customers with higher-profit offerings.  In fact, Professor Christensen often warned that one of the first signs of disruption was a year of record profits.

In 2021, Google posted a profit of $76.033 billion. An 88.81% increase from the previous year.

2022 and 2023 profits have both been lower.

Image credit: Unsplash

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

How Eavesdropping Can Unlocked Exponential Growth

Leave a reply

How Eavesdropping Can Unlocked Exponential Growth

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

It’s easy to get caught up in the hunt for unique insights that will transform your business, conquer your competition, and put you on an ever-accelerating path to growth.  But sometimes, the most valuable insights can come from listening to customers in their natural environment. That’s precisely what happened when I eavesdropped on a conversation at a local pizza joint. What I learned could be worth millions to your business.

A guy walked into a pizza place.

Last Wednesday, I met a friend for lunch.  As usual, I was unreasonably early to the local wood-fired pizza joint, so I settled into my chair, content to spend time engaged in one of my favorite activities – watching people and eavesdropping on their conversations.

Although the restaurant is on the main street of one of the wealthier Boston suburbs, it draws an eclectic crowd, so I was surprised when a rather burly man in a paint-stained hoodie flung open the front door.  As he stomped to the take-out order window, dust fell from his shoes, and you could hear the clanging of tools in his tool belt.  He placed his order and thumped down at the table next to me.

A Multi-Million Dollar Chat

He pulled out his cell phone and made a call.  “Hey, yeah, I’m at the pizza place, and they need your help.  Yeah, they hate their current system, but they don’t have the time to figure out a new one or how to convert.  Yeah, ok, I’ll get his number.  Ok if I give him yours.  Great.  Thanks.”

A few minutes later, his order was ready, and the manager walked over with his pizza.

Hoodie-guy: “Hey, do you have a card?”

Manager: “No, I don’t.  Something I can help you with?”

H: “I just called a friend of mine.  He runs an IT shop, and I told him you’re using the RST restaurant management system, and you hate it…”

M: “I hate it so much…”

H: “So my buddy’s business can help you change it. He’s helped other restaurants convert away from RST, and he’d love to talk to you or the owner.”

M: “I’m one of the co-owners, and I’d love to stop using RST, but we use it for everything – our website, online ordering, managing our books, everything.  I can’t risk changing.”

H: “That’s the thing, my friend does it all for you.  He’ll help you pick the new system, set it up, migrate you from the other system, and ensure everything runs smoothly. You have nothing to worry about.”

M: “That would be amazing.  Here’s my direct line. Have him give me a call.  And if he’s good, I can guarantee you that every other restaurant on this street will change, too.  We all use RST, and we all hate it.  We even talked about working together to find something better, but no one had time to figure everything out.”

They exchanged numbers, and the hoodie guy walked out with his pizza.  The manager/owner walked back to the open kitchen, told his staff about the conversation, and they cheered.  Cheered!

Are You Listening?

In just a few minutes of eavesdropping, I uncovered a potential goldmine for a B2B business – 15 frustrated customers, all desperate to switch from a system they hate but unable to do so due to time and resource constraints. The implications are staggering – an entire local market worth tens of millions of dollars ripe for the taking simply by being willing to listen and offer a solution.

As a B2B leader, the question is: are you truly tapping into the insights right in front of you? When was the last time you left your desk, observed your customers in their natural habitat, and listened to their unvarnished feedback? If you’re not doing that, you’re missing out on opportunities that could transform your business.

The choice is yours. Will you stay in your office and rely on well-worn tools, or venture into the wild and listen to your customers?  Your answer could be worth millions.

Image credit: Pixabay

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

Learning to Innovate

Leave a reply

Learning to Innovate

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

One of my coaching clients shared with me recently how she was feeling insecure in her job role and lacking motivation. The company she works for is acknowledged as an entrepreneurial industry leader. Because it is currently being challenged by poor sales performance, it has hunkered down and frozen any change initiatives, learning programs or new projects until mid-2025. My client is in a substantial Research and Development function, crucial to innovation, so we aimed to explore new ways of helping the company use their existing equipment (capital investments) and resources (people and expertise) to design and deliver low-cost and sustainable innovations to the market. To create a focused, meaningful, purposeful role and a values-based motivating opportunity for my client to be proactive, that impacts the company by adding value to the bottom line by improving productivity and cost efficiency because anyone can learn to innovate.

Learning to innovate

As a result of our short time together, my client felt confident and empowered, motivated and energized, to invest time in learning how to apply her current skills and strengths, focus and attention to connect with key people and resources, explore options globally for identifying new business development opportunities, and in developing her technical skillset.

My client enrolled in an online innovation learning program to learn to innovate by acquiring the fundamentals of mindset and behavior changes to shift their thinking and act differently.  

The innovation imperative has shifted

  • Productivity growth needs to accelerate

According to McKinsey and Co, in the article “Investing in Productivity Growth” it’s not only time to raise investment and catch the next productivity wave; the world needs to and can accelerate productivity growth.

“Productivity growth means getting more from our work and our investments. It is especially needed now as the world faces the many challenges of a new geo-economic era. Productivity growth is the best antidote to the asset price inflation of the past two decades, which has created about $160 trillion in “paper wealth” and even larger amounts of new debt”.

  • Adapting to the new net zero reality

The world is currently not on track to meet net-zero targets, yet many opportunities are available to accelerate efforts and help meet de-carbonization goals. Whilst some progress has been made to reduce global carbon emissions, under the current trajectory, the world won’t achieve net-zero emissions even during this century. Again, according to McKinsey and Co., in an article “Adapting to the new net-zero reality”, mitigation efforts alone are no longer sufficient – the world will need to adapt as well by going green, ramping up technologies and increasing investments.

  • Improving cost efficiencies

According to new BCG research, corporate leaders are making better cost management a priority as a hedge against ongoing economic, financial, and political uncertainties, stating that:

“Wholesale cuts are one way to manage costs. However, drastic measures such as sudden workforce reductions may lead to unintended consequences because they fail to address the root causes of inefficiencies. Nor do they position an organization for future success”.

  • Generative Ai is a critical enabler of innovation

Whether the organization focuses on developing new products, services, processes, or business models, Generative AI (GenAI) can enhance and challenge the work of leaders and teams across all phases of the innovation cycle and process.

By learning to innovate through knowing how to generatively question and listen, reveal and challenge operating beliefs and test assumptions to enable them to emerge, diverge, converge and prioritize high-quality creative ideas for change.

According to BCG in a recent article, “To Drive Innovation with GenAI, Start by Questioning Your Assumptions.”

“GenAI’s most prominent contribution is in idea generation and validation—innovation’s divergence and convergence phases. Yet, it can play an even more critical role in helping leaders confront and update the strategic assumptions at the foundation of their business and innovation strategies: the doubt phase of the cycle. Organizations that regularly question their beliefs are more resilient because they are more likely to see and position themselves to benefit from the shifts on which competitive advantage turns”.

The innovation imperative is paradoxical.

Suppose we combine the contradictory features or qualities of developing productivity growth while adapting to the new net zero reality and improving cost efficiencies. In that case, many organizations have reverted to their conventional, business-as-usual focus, relying on Generative Ai to solve their problems.

This demonstrates a typically faddish response to a revolutionary, transformative new invention whilst being avoidant and resisting the urgent need to change by building the fundamental foundations in learning to innovate.

  • Thinking and acting differently

Anyone can learn to innovate, and it starts with allowing, accepting and acknowledging that a business-as-usual focus, avoiding risk, making the tough decisions and resisting change are no longer effective, profitable, or sustainable because:

  • We all know that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.
  • We can no longer afford to keep producing the same results that no one wants.
  • We can’t solve the problem with the same thinking that created it; we have to learn how to be, think and act differently to deliver the sustainable and innovative solution we want to have.

Learning to innovate requires a radical strategic shift

  • Harnessing collective intelligence

Anyone can learn to innovate; it’s simply a matter of knowing, combining, leveraging and scaling people’s multiple and collective intelligence – heads/cognition, hearts/emotions and hands/actions.

  • Revealing and closing knowing-doing gaps

Then, we should align these to close the significant knowing-doing gap or disconnect between what people know and what people do.

Everyone knows that innovation is the most impactful lever to use to scale and leverage change, yet are primarily unwilling to pause, stop and take time to retreat from their short-term focus, pay attention and reflect on how to equip people with the innovation fundamentals by getting people’s:

  1. Heads to make sense of innovation and what innovation means by defining and framing it in their organization’s unique context, setting a strategic focus, determining the level of risk involved in achieving it, and mitigating the roadblocks that may arise.
  2. Hearts aligned to embody and enact what innovation means by setting and sharing a passionately purposeful reason for innovation, building change receptivity and readiness for designing and delivering a range of bespoke deep learning processes and equipping people to activate it.
  3. Hands dirty by creating a safe environment where people are encouraged to emerge and share creative ideas and permission and be allowed to experiment by making small bets and mistakes and learning by doing to know what not to do.

Innovation requires a strategic and systemic focus

Innovation is subjective and contextual, so it must be defined and framed in an organization’s unique context.  It requires a strategic and systemic focus, so an organization needs to agree on whether they will choose an incremental, sustainable or disruptive strategy and the level of risk.

The 21st century requires us to unlearn, learn, and relearn a different set of mindsets, behaviors, and skills, and anyone can learn to innovate.

Commitment and conviction to learn to innovate

It’s only through being committed and having the conviction that my coaching client now has – to explore new ways of helping their organizations use their existing capital investments, collective intelligence, people resources, and expertise, supported by Generative AI and deep learning processes, to design and deliver low-cost and sustainable innovations to the market.

Image Credit: Pexels

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

Nike Should Stop Blaming Working from Home for Their Innovation Struggles

Leave a reply

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“But even more importantly, our employees were working from home for two and a half years.  And in hindsight, it turns out, it’s really hard to do bold, disruptive innovation, to develop a boldly disruptive shoe on Zoom.” – John Donahoe, Nike CEO

I am so glad CNBC’s interview with Nike’s CEO didn’t hit my feed until Friday afternoon. It sent me into a rage spiral that I am just barely emerging from. Seriously, I think my neighbors heard the string of expletives I unleashed after reading that quote, and it wasn’t because it was a lovely day and the windows were open.

Blaming remote work for lack of innovation is cowardly. And factually wrong.

I’m not the only one giving Mr. Donahoe some side-eye for this comment.  “There were a whole bunch of brands who really thrived during and post-pandemic even though they were working remotely,” Matt Powell, advisor for Spurwink River and a senior advisor at BCE Consulting, told Footwear News.  “So I’m not sure that we that we can blame remote work here on Nike’s issues.”

There’s data to back that up.

In 2023, Mark (Shuai) Ma, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and Yuye Ding, a PhD student at the university’s Katz Graduate School of Business, set out to empirically determine the causes and effects of a firm’s decision to mandate a return to work (RTO).  They collected RTO mandate data from over 100 firms in the S&P 500, worked backward to identify what drove the decision, and monitored and measured the firm’s results after employees returned to work.

Their findings are stark: no significant changes in financial performance for firm value after RTO mandates and significant declines in employee job satisfaction.  As Ma told Fortune, “Overall, our results do not support these mandates to increase firm values.  Instead, these findings are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for firm bad performance.”

Or to justify spending more than $1B to double the size of its Beaverton, OR campus.

When you start blaming employees, you stop being a leader.

CEOs make and approve big, impactful, complex, high-stakes decisions.  That’s why they get paid the big bucks.  It’s also why, as Harry Truman said, “The buck stops here.” 

Let’s examine some of the decisions Mr. Donahue made or supported that maybe (definitely) had a more significant impact on innovation than working from home two days a week.

Ignoring customers, consumers, and the market: Nike has a swagger that occasionally strays into arrogance.  They set trends, steer culture, and dictate the rules of the game. They also think that gives them the right to stop listening to athletes, retailers, and consumers, as evidenced by the recently revealed Team USA Track & Field uniforms, the decision to stop selling through major retailers like Macy’s and Olympia Sports, and invest more in “hype, limited releases, and old school retro drops” than the technology and community that has consumers flocking to smaller brands like Hoka and Brooks.

Laying off 2% of its workforce: Anyone who has ever been through a layoff senses it’s coming months before the announcement and the verdicts are rendered.  Psychological safety, feeling safe in your environment, is a required element for risk-taking and innovation.  It’s hard to feel safe when saying goodbye to 1500 colleagues (and wondering if/when you’ll join them).

Investing too much in the core: Speaking of safety, in uncertain times, it’s tempting to pour every resource into the core business because the ROI is “known.” Nike gave in to that temptation, and consumers and analysts noticed.  Despite recent new product announcements like the Air Max DN, Pegasus Premium, and Pegasus 41, “analysts point out these ‘new’ innovations rely too much on existing franchises.”

Innovation is a leadership problem that only leaders can solve

Being a CEO or any other senior executive is hard. The past four years have been anything but ordinary, and running a business while navigating a global pandemic, multiple societal upheavals, two wars, and an uncertain economy is almost impossible.

Bosses blame.  Leaders inspire. 

Mr. Donohue just showed us which one he is.  Which one are you?

One MORE thing

This is a losing battle, but STOP USING “DISRUPTIVE” INCORRECTLY!!!!  “Disruptive Innovation,” as defined by Clayton Christensen, who literally coined the phrase, is an innovation that appeals to non-consumers and is cheaper and often lower quality than existing competitors.

Nike is a premium brand that makes premium shoes for premium athletes.  Employees could spend 24/7/365 in the office, and Nike would never develop and launch a “boldly disruptive shoe.”

Image credit: Pixabay

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

Time is a Flat Circle

1 Reply

Jamie Dimon’s Comments on AI Just Proved It

Time is a Flat Circle

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton


“Time is a flat circle.  Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over and over again – forever.” –- Rusty Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, in True Detective

For the whole of human existence, we have created new things with no idea if, when, or how they will affect humanity, society, or business.  New things can be a distraction, sucking up time and money and offering nothing in return.  Or they can be a bridge to a better future.

As a leader, it’s your job to figure out which things are a bridge (i.e., innovation) and which things suck (i.e., shiny objects).

Innovation is a flat circle

The concept of eternal recurrence, that time repeats itself in an infinite loop, was first taught by Pythagoras (of Pythagorean theorem fame) in the 6th century BC. It remerged (thereby proving its own truth) in Friedreich Nietzsche’s writings in the 19th century, then again in 2014’s first season of True Detective, and then again on Monday in Jamie Dimon’s Annual Letter to Shareholders.

Mr. Dimon, the CEO and Chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co, first mentioned AI in his 2017 Letter to Shareholders.  So, it wasn’t the mention of AI that was newsworthy. It was how it was mentioned.  Before mentioning geopolitical risks, regulatory issues, or the recent acquisition of First Republic, Mr. Dimon spends nine paragraphs talking about AI, its impact on banking, and how JPMorgan Chase is responding.

Here’s a screenshot of the first two paragraphs:

JP Morgan Annual Letter 2017

He’s right. We don’t know “the full effect or the precise rate at which AI will change our business—or how it will affect society at large.” We were similarly clueless in 1436 (when the printing press was invented), 1712 (when the first commercially successful steam engine was invented), 1882 (when electricity was first commercially distributed), and 1993 (when the World Wide Web was released to the public).

Innovation, it seems, is also a flat circle.

Our response doesn’t have to be.

Historically, people responded to innovation in one of two ways: panic because it’s a sign of the apocalypse or rejoice because it will be our salvation. And those reactions aren’t confined to just “transformational” innovations.  In 2015, a visiting professor at Kings College London declared that the humble eraser (1770) was “an instrument of the devil” because it creates “a culture of shame about error.  It’s a way of lying to the world, which says, ‘I didn’t make a mistake.  I got it right the first time.’”

Neither reaction is true. Fortunately, as time passes, more people recognize that the truth is somewhere between the apocalypse and salvation and that we can influence what that “between” place is through intentional experimentation and learning.

JPMorgan started experimenting with AI over a decade ago, well before most of its competitors.  As a result, they “now have over 400 use cases in production in areas such as marketing, fraud, and risk” that are producing quantifiable financial value for the company. 

It’s not just JPMorgan.  Organizations as varied as John Deere, BMW, Amazon, the US Department of Energy, Vanguard, and Johns Hopkins Hospital have been experimenting with AI for years, trying to understand if and how it could improve their operations and enable them to serve customers better.  Some experiments worked.  Some didn’t.  But every company brave enough to try learned something and, as a result, got smarter and more confident about “the full effect or the precise rate at which AI will change our business.”

You have free will.  Use it to learn.

Cynics believe that time is a flat circle.  Leaders believe it is an ever-ascending spiral, one in which we can learn, evolve, and influence what’s next.  They also have the courage to act on (and invest in) that belief.

What do you believe?  More importantly, what are you doing about it?

Image credit: Pixabay

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