Tag Archives: problem solving

Seeing the Invisible

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Seeing the Invisible

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

It’s relatively straightforward to tell the difference between activities that are done well and those that are done poorly. Usually sub-par activities generate visual signals to warn us of their misbehavior. A bill isn’t paid, a legal document isn’t signed or the wrong parts are put in the box. Though the specifics vary with context, the problem child causes the work product to fall off the plate and make a mess on the floor.

We have tools to diagnose the fundamental behind the symptom. We can get to root cause. We know why the plate was dropped. We know how to define the corrective action and implement the control mechanism so it doesn’t happen again. We patch up the process and we’re up and running in no time. This works well when there’s a well-defined in place, when process is asked to do what it did last time, when the inputs are the same as last time and when the outputs are measured like they were last time.

However, this linear thinking works terribly when the context changes. When the old processes are asked to do new work, the work hits the floor like last time, but the reason it hits the floor is fundamentally different. This time, it’s not that an activity was done poorly. Rather, this time there’s something missing altogether. And this time our linear-thinker toolbox won’t cut it. Sure, we’ll try with all our Six Sigma might, but we won’t get to root cause. Six Sigma, lean and best practices can fix what’s broken, but none of them can see what isn’t there.

When the context changes radically, the work changes radically. New-to-company activities are required to get the new work done. New-to-industry tools are needed to create new value. And, sometimes, new-to-world thinking is the only thing that will do. The trick isn’t to define the new activity, choose the right new tool or come up with the new thinking. The trick is to recognize there’s something missing, to recognize there’s something not there, to recognize there’s a need for something new. Whether it’s an activity, a tool or new thinking, we’ve got to learn to see what’s not there.

Now the difficult part – how to recognize there’s something missing. You may think the challenging part is to figure out what’s needed to fill the void, but it isn’t. You can’t fill a hole until you see it as a hole. And once everyone agrees there’s a hole, it’s pretty easy to buy the shovels, truck in some dirt and get after it. But if don’t expect holes, you won’t see them. Sure, you’ll break your ankle, but you won’t see the hole for what it is.

If the work is new, look for what’s missing. If the problem is new, watch out for holes. If the customer is new, there will be holes. If the solution is new, there will be more holes.

When the work is new, you will twist your ankle. And when you do, grab the shovels and start to put in place what isn’t there.

Image credit: Pixabay

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

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of June 2025Drum roll please…

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

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

  1. Why Business Transformations Fail — by Robyn Bolton
  2. Three Ways Strategic Idleness Accelerates Innovation and Growth — by Robyn Bolton
  3. Overcoming the Fear of Innovation Failure — by Stefan Lindegaard
  4. Making People Matter in AI Era — by Janet Sernack
  5. Yes the Comfort Zone Can Be Your Best Friend — by Stefan Lindegaard
  6. Your Digital Transformation Starting Point — by Braden Kelley
  7. Learn More About the Problem Before Trying to Solve It — by Mike Shipulski
  8. Putting Human Agency at the Center of Decision-Making — by Greg Satell
  9. Innovation or Not – SpinLaunch — by Art Inteligencia
  10. Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard — by David Burkus

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

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

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Have something to contribute?

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

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

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Learn More About the Problem Before Trying to Solve It

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Learn More About the Problem Before Trying to Solve It

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Ideas are cheap, but converting them into a saleable product and building the engine to make it all happen is expensive. Before spending the big money, spend more time than you think reasonable to answer these three questions.

1. Is the problem big enough?

There’s no sense spending the time and money to solve a problem unless you have a good idea the payback is worth the cost. Before spending the money to create the solution, spend the time to assess the benefits that will come from solving the problem.

Before you can decide if the problem is big enough, you have to define the problem and know who has it. One of the best ways to do this is to define how things are done today. Draw a block diagram that defines the steps potential customers follow or draw a picture of how they do things today. Define the products/services they use today and ask them what it would mean if you solved their problem. What’s particularly difficult at this point is they may not know they have a problem.

But before moving on, formalize who has the problem. Define the attributes of the potential customers and figure out how many have the same attributes and, possibly, the same problem. Define the segments narrowly to make sure each segment does, in fact, have the same problem. There will be a tendency to paint with broad strokes to increase the addressable market, but stay narrow and maintain focus on a tight group of potential customers.

Estimate the value of the solution based on how it compares to the existing alternative. And the only ones who can give you this information are the potential customers. And the only way they can give you the information is if you interview them and watch them work. And with this detailed knowledge, figure out the number of potential customers who have the problem. Do all this BEFORE any solving.

2. Will they pay for it?

The only way to know if potential customers will pay for your solution is to show them an offering – a description of your value proposition and how it differs from the existing alternatives, a demo (a mockup of a solution and not a functional prototype) and pricing. (See LEANFOUNDRY for more on an offering.) There will be a tendency to wait until the solution is ready, but don’t wait. And there will be a reluctance attach a price to the solution, but that’s the only way you’ll know how much they value your solution. And there will be difficulty defining a tight value proposition because that requires you to narrowly define what the solution does for the potential customer. And that’s scary because the value proposition will be clear and understandable and the potential customer will understand it well enough to decide they if they like it or not.

If you don’t assign a price and ask them to buy it, you’ll never know if they’ll buy it in real life.

3. Can you deliver it?

List all the elements that must come together. Can you make it? Can you sell it? Can you ship it? Can you service it? Are your partners capable and committed? Do you have the money do put everything in place?

Like with a chain, it takes one bad link to make the whole thing fall apart. Figure out if any of your links are broken or missing. And don’t commit resources until they’re all in place and ready to go.

Image credit: 1 of 850+ free quote slides at misterinnovation.com

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Seeing Things as They Cannot Be

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Seeing Things as They Cannot Be

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When there’s a big problem, the first step is to define what’s causing it. To do that, based on an understanding of the physics, a sequence of events is proposed and then tested to see if it replicates the problem. In that way, the team must understand the system as it is before the problem can be solved.

Seeing Things as They Are

The same logic applies when it’s time to improve an existing product or service. The first thing to do is to see the system as it is. But seeing things as they are is difficult. We have a tendency to see things as we want them or to see them in ways that make us look good (or smart). Or, we see them in a way that justifies the improvements we already know we want to make.

To battle our biases and see things as they are, we use tools such as block diagrams to define the system as it is. The most important element of the block diagram is clarity. The first revision will be incorrect, but it must be clear and explicit. It must describe things in a way that creates a singular understanding of the system. The best block diagrams can be interpreted only one way. More strongly, if there’s ambiguity or lack of clarity, the thing has not yet risen to the level of a block diagram.

The block diagram evolves as the team converges on a single understanding of things as they are. And with a diagram of things as they are, a solution is readily defined and validated. If when tested the proposed solution makes the problem go away, it’s inferred that the team sees things as they are and the solution takes advantage of that understanding to make the problem go away.

Seeing Things as They May Be

Even whey the solution fixes the problem, the team really doesn’t know if they see things as they are. Really, all they know is they see things as they may be. Sure, the solution makes the problem go away, but it’s impossible to really know if the solution captures the physics of failure. When the system is large and has a lot of moving parts, the team cannot see things as they are, rather, they can only see the system as it may be. This is especially true if the system involves people, as people behave differently based on how they feel and what happened to them yesterday.

There’s inherent uncertainty when working with larger systems and systems that involve people. It’s not insurmountable, but you’ve got to acknowledge that your understanding of the system is less than perfect. If your company is used to solving small problems within small systems, there will be little tolerance for the inherent uncertainty and associated unpredictability (in time) of a solution. To help your company make the transition, replace the language of “seeing things as they are” with “seeing things as they may be.” The same diagnostic process applies, but since the understanding of the system is incomplete or wrong, the proposed solutions cannot not be pre-judged as “this will work” and “that won’t work.” You’ve got to be open to all potential solutions that don’t contradict the system as it may be. And you’ve got to be tolerant of the inherent unpredictability of the effort as a whole.

Seeing Things as They Could Be

To create something that doesn’t yet exist, something does things like never before, something altogether new, you’ve got to stand on top of your understanding of the system and jump off. Whether you see things as they are or as they may be, the new system will be different. It’s not about diagnosing the existing system; it’s about imagining the system as it could be. And there’s a paradox here. The better you understand the existing system, the more difficulty you’ll have imagining the new one. And, the more success the company has had with the system as it is, the more resistance you’ll feel when you try to make the system something it could be.

Seeing things as they could be takes courage – courage to obsolete your best work and courage to divest from success. The first one must be overcome first. Your body creates stress around the notion of making yourself look bad. If you can create something altogether better, why didn’t you do it last time? There’s a hit to the ego around making your best work look like it’s not all that good. But once you get over all that, you’ve earned the right to go to battle with your organization who is afraid to move away from the recipe responsible for all the profits generated over the last decade.

But don’t look at those fears as bad. Rather, look at them as indicators you’re working on something that could make a real difference. Your ego recognizes you’re working on something better and it sends fear into your veins. The organization recognizes you’re working on something that threatens the status quo and it does what it can to make you stop. You’re onto something. Keep going.

Seeing Things as They Can’t Be

This is rarified air. In this domain you must violate first principles. In this domain you’ve got to run experiments that everyone thinks are unreasonable, if not ill-informed. You must do the opposite. If your product is fast, your prototype must be the slowest. If the existing one is the heaviest, you must make the lightest. If your reputation is based on the highest functioning products, the new offering must do far less. If your offering requires trained operators, the new one must prevent operator involvement.

If your most seasoned Principal Engineer thinks it’s a good idea, you’re doing it wrong. You’ve got to propose an idea that makes the most experienced people throw something at you. You’ve got to suggest something so crazy they start foaming at the mouth. Your concepts must rip out their fillings. Where “seeing things as they could be” creates some organizational stress, “seeing things as they can’t be” creates earthquakes. If you’re not prepared to be fired, this is not the domain for you.

All four of these domains are valuable and have merit. And we need them all. If there’s one message it’s be clear which domain you’re working in. And if there’s a second message it’s explain to company leadership which domain you’re working in and set expectations on the level of uncertainty and unpredictability of that domain.

Image credits: Pexels

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The Secrets of Customer Support Triage

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The Secrets of Customer Support Triage

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Recently, I had the privilege of being a keynote speaker on customer experience (CX) at a company’s quarterly event. Following the speech, the CEO shared an insight into their approach to customer service and CX, comparing it to a medical emergency room. “Our response to customer complaints and issues is akin to triage,” he said. “We effectively diagnose the problems, yet find ourselves treating similar cases repeatedly as if sending them to an emergency room that never addresses the underlying causes.”

Triage is an interesting word. It’s a medical term, but I wanted to better understand the definition, so I did what most people do. I Googled the word, and this is the definition from Merriam-Webster:

  1. The sorting and allocating of treatment to patients, especially battle and disaster victims, according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors.
  2. The assigning of priority order to projects on the basis of where funds and other resources can be best used, are most needed, or most likely to achieve success.


The first definition confirmed that the CEO’s comment was accurate. They fix problems, but don’t seem to be preventing the problems. The second definition sounds like common practice for most businesses, not just hospital emergency rooms. They prioritize projects – in this case, customer service issues – and focus on what will provide the best return.

I loved the CEO’s comment because he recognized the end goal wasn’t to deliver great customer service when there was a problem but to create a customer experience that had few, if any, problems. Put another way, it’s one thing to fix problems. It’s another to understand why there’s a problem and create a preventative solution or system that eliminates – or at least mitigates – the problem in the future. Yes, there will be customer service issues, but with this line of thinking, you can eliminate many problems and complaints.

This reminded me of commercials I remember seeing when I was a kid. From 1967-1988, there were commercials for Maytag washers and dryers. Many of you are too young to remember the Maytag repairman known as “Ol’ Lonely,” who was lonely and bored because the Maytag equipment was so dependable. Of course, the machines weren’t perfect, but they were reputed to be more reliable than competitors.

I like the idea of boring – when it comes to problems and complaints. Nothing would make me happier than to see the true depiction of a company’s customer service agents sitting around bored because customers seldom called with complaints.

So, consider this question: Would you rather be the company known for solving problems when they happen or the company that doesn’t have problems?

Image Credits: Unsplash

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Grow Your Business by Answering Two Questions

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Grow Your Business by Answering Two Questions

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Two important questions to help you grow your business:

  1. Is the problem worth solving?
  2. When do you want to learn it’s not worth solving?

No one in your company can tell you if the problem is worth solving, not even the CEO. Only the customer can tell you if the problem is worth solving. If potential customers don’t think they have the problem you want to solve, they won’t pay you if you solve it. And if potential customers do have the problem but it’s not that important, they won’t pay you enough to make your solution profitable.

A problem is worth solving only when customers are willing to pay more than the cost of your solution.

Solving a problem requires a good team and the time and money to run the project. Project teams can be large and projects can run for months or years. And projects require budgets to buy the necessary supplies, tools, and infrastructure. In short, solving problems is expensive business.

It’s pretty clear that it’s far more profitable to learn a problem is not worth solving BEFORE incurring the expense to solve it. But, that’s not what we do. In a ready-fire-aim way, we solve the problem of our choosing and try to sell the solution.

If there’s one thing to learn, it’s how to verify the customer is willing to pay for your solution before incurring the cost to create it.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Five Things Most Managers Don’t Know About Innovation

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Five Things Most Managers Don't Know About Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Every business knows it needs to innovate. What isn’t so clear is how to go about it. There is no shortage of pundits, blogs and conferences that preach the gospel of agility, disruptive innovation, open innovation, lean startups or whatever else is currently in vogue. It can all be overwhelming.

The reality is that there is no one ‘true’ path to innovation. In researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I found that organizations of all shapes and sizes can be great innovators. Some are lean and nimble, while others are large and bureaucratic. Some have visionary leaders, others don’t. No one model prevails.

However, there are common principles that we can apply. While there is no “right way” to innovate, there are plenty of wrong ways. So perhaps the best way forward is to avoid the pitfalls that can undermine innovative efforts in your organization and kill promising new solutions. Here are five things every business should know about innovation.

1. Every Square-Peg Business Eventually Meets Its Round-Hole World

IBM is many peoples’ definition of a dinosaur. Not too long ago, it announced its 22nd consecutive quarter of declining revenues. Nevertheless, it seems to be turning a corner. What’s going on? How can a century-old technology company survive against the onslaught of the 21st century phenoms like Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook?

The truth is that this is nothing new for IBM. Today, its business of providing installed solutions for large enterprises is collapsing due to the rise of the cloud. In the 90s it was near bankruptcy. In the 50s, its tabulating machine business was surpassed by digital technology. Each time eulogies are paraded around for Big Blue it seems to come back even stronger.

What IBM seems to understand better than just about anybody else is that every square-peg business eventually meets its round-hole world. Changes in technology, customer preferences and competitive environment eventually render every business model irrelevant. That’s just reality and there really is no changing it.

IBM’s secret weapon is its research division, which explores pathbreaking technologies long before they have a clear path to profitability. So when one business dies they have something to replace it with. Despite those 22 quarters of declining revenues it has a bright future with things like Watson, quantum computing and neuromorphic chips.

It’s better to prepare than adapt.

2. Innovation Isn’t About Ideas, It’s About Solving Problems

Probably the biggest misconception about innovation is that it’s about ideas. So there is tons of useless advice about brainstorming methods, standing meetings and word games, such as replacing “can’t” with “can if.” If these things help you work more productively, great, but they will not make you an innovator.

In my work, I speak to top executives, amazingly successful entrepreneurs and world class scientists. Some of these have discovered or created things that truly changed the world. Yet not once did anyone tell me that a brainstorming session or “productivity hack” set them on the road to success. They were simply trying to solve a problem that was meaningful to them.

What I do hear a lot from mid-level and junior executives is that they are not given “permission” to innovate and that nobody wants to hear about their ideas. That’s right. Nobody wants to hear about your ideas. People are busy with their own ideas.

So stop trying to come up with some earth shattering idea. Go out and find a good problem and start figuring out how to solve it. Nobody needs an idea, but everybody has a problem they need solved.

3. You Don’t Hire Or Buy Innovation, You Empower It

One of the questions I always get asked when I advise organizations is how to recruit and retain more innovative people. I know the type they have in mind. Someone fashionably dressed, probably with some tasteful piercings and some well placed ink, that spouts off a never-ending stream of ideas.

Yet that’s exactly what you don’t want. That’s exactly the type of unproductive hotshot that can stop innovation in its tracks. They talk over other people, which discourages new ideas from being voiced and their constant interruptions kill collaboration.

The way you create innovation is by empowering an innovative culture. That means creating a safe space for ideas, fostering networks inside and outside the organization, promoting collaboration and instilling a passion for solving problems. That’s how you promote creativity.

So if you feel that your people are not innovating, ask yourself what you’re doing to get in their way.

4. If Something Is Truly New And Different, You Need a “Hair On Fire” Use Case

As a general operational rule, you should seek out the largest addressable market you can find. Larger markets not only have more money, they are more stable and usually more diverse. Identifying even a small niche in a big market can make for a very profitable business.

Unfortunately, what thrives in operations can often fail for innovation. When you have an idea that’s truly new and different, you don’t want to start with a large addressable market. You want to find a hair-on-fire use case — somebody that needs a problem solved so badly that they either already have a budget for it or have scotched-taped together some half solution.

The reason you want to find a hair-on-fire use case is that when something is truly new and different, it is untested and poorly understood. But someone who needs a problem solved really badly will be willing to work with you to find flaws, fix them and improve your offer. From there you can begin to scale up and hunt larger game.

5. You Need To Seek Out A Grand Challenge

Most of the problems we deal with are relatively small. We cater to changing customer tastes, respond to competitive threats and fix things that are broken. Sometimes we go a bit further afield and enter a new market or develop a new capability. These are the bread and butter of a good business. That’s how you win in the marketplace.

Yet every business is ultimately disrupted. When that happens, normal operating practice will only make you better and better at things people care less and less about. You can’t build the future by looking to the past. You build the future by creating something that’s new and important, that solves problems that are currently unsolvable.

That’s why every organization needs to seek out grand challenges. These are long, sustainable efforts that solve a fundamental problem in your industry or field that change the realm of what’s considered possible. They are not “bet the company” initiatives and shouldn’t present a material risk to the business if they fail, but have a transformational impact if they succeed.

As I noted above, there is no one “true” path to innovation. Everybody needs to find their own way. Still, there are common principles and by applying them, every business can up their innovation game.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Harvard Business Review
— Image credits: Pexels

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Bringing Emotional Energy and Creative Thinking to AI

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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

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

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

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

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

  1. The Surprising Downside of Collaboration in Problem-Solving — by Robyn Bolton
  2. Designing Organizational Change and Transformation — by Stefan Lindegaard
  3. Four Principles of Successful Digital Transformation — by Greg Satell
  4. Managers Make the Difference – Four Common Mistakes Managers Make — by David Burkus
  5. Learning to Innovate — by Janet Sernack
  6. Think Outside Which Box? — by Howard Tiersky
  7. Innovation the Amazon Way — by Greg Satell
  8. Irrelevant Innovation — by John Bessant
  9. Nike Should Stop Blaming Working from Home for Their Innovation Struggles — by Robyn Bolton
  10. Time is a Flat Circle – Jamie Dimon’s Comments on AI Just Proved It — by Robyn Bolton

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

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Problems are Required for Progress to Occur

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Problems are Required for Progress to Occur

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Without a problem, there can be no progress.
And only after there’s too much no progress is a problem is created.
And once the problem is created, there can be progress.

When you know there’s a problem just over the horizon, you have a problem.
Your problem is that no one else sees the future problem, so they don’t have a problem.
And because they have no problem, there can be no progress.
Progress starts only after the calendar catches up to the problem.

When someone doesn’t think they have a problem, they have two problems.
Their first problem is the one they don’t see, and their second is that they don’t see it.
But before they can solve the first problem, they must solve the second.
And that’s usually a problem.

When someone hands you their problem, that’s a problem.
But if you don’t accept it, it’s still their problem.
And that’s a problem, for them.

When you try to solve every problem, that’s a problem.
Some problems aren’t worth solving.
And some don’t need to be solved yet.
And some solve themselves.
And some were never really problems at all.

When you don’t understand your problem, you have two problems.
Your first is the problem you have and your second is that you don’t know what your problem by name.
And you’ve got to solve the second before the first, which can be a problem.

With a big problem comes big attention. And that’s a problem.
With big attention comes a strong desire to demonstrate rapid progress. And that’s a problem.
And because progress comes slowly, fervent activity starts immediately. And that’s a problem.
And because there’s no time to waste, there’s no time to define the right problems to solve.

And there’s no bigger problem than solving the wrong problems.

Image credit: Pexels

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