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Fearless Fashionistas Are Staying Ahead of Change

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Why Aren’t You?

Fearless Fashionistas Are Staying Ahead of Change

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

As a fashion and lifestyle conceptualist and analyst for a major Australian department store group during the pre-Internet era, I co-created, with the GM of Marketing and GM of Women’s, Men’s, Children’s Apparel and Accessories, a completely new role. I took on the responsibility of forecasting and predicting customer, lifestyle, and fashion trends two to three years ahead of the present. While forecasting involves estimating future events or trends based on historical and statistical data, making predictions involves forming educated guesses or projections that do not necessarily rely on such data. Both forecasting and predictive skills are vital for developing strategic foresight—an organized and systematic approach to exploring plausible futures and anticipating, better preparing for, and staying ahead of change.

In this exciting new role, I had to ensure that my forecasts and predictions did not cause people to become anxious and tense, leading to poor or conflicting decisions involving millions of dollars. Instead, I needed to make sure that my forecasts convinced people that the well-researched information had been collected, captured, analyzed, and synthesized effectively. To ensure that the discovery of new marketing concepts is prompted by the development of strategic foresight, which enables people to make informed, million-dollar investment decisions by staying ahead of change.

This was before the revolutions in Design Thinking and Strategic Foresight. It taught me the fundamentals of agile and adaptive thinking processes, as well as the importance of creating and capturing value by viewing it from the customer’s perspective. It was initiated through rigorous research that involved framing the domain and scanning for trends by mentally moving back and forth among many scenarios, making links, connections, and unlikely associations. The information could then be actualized, analyzed, and synthesized to focus on evaluating a range of plausible futures as forecast scenarios. To envision the future by identifying the most promising or commercially viable trends in Australian marketing and merchandising, thereby supporting better policy-making across the organization, which consisted of forty-two department stores.

At the time, Australian fashion and lifestyle trends were considered six months behind those in Europe and the USA. This allowed me to utilize current and historical sales data, along with statistical methods, to create a solid foundation for the sales and marketing situation across various merchandise segments. Having completed a marketing degree as an adult learner, I applied and integrated marketing concepts and principles from product and fashion lifecycle management. Through being inventive, I built a fashion and lifestyle information system that had not previously existed, enabling the whole organization to stay ahead of change.  

I conducted backcasting research and built relationships with top Australian manufacturers that supplied our customers, gathering evidence and feedback that supported or challenged my approach to developing trend-tracking processes over a three-year period. I traveled widely four times a year to Europe and the USA to research the fashion and lifestyle value chain, visiting yarn, textile, couture, and ready-to-wear shows to explore, discover, identify, and validate emerging and diverging trends, providing context and evidence of their evolution and convergence. This was further tested and validated by analyzing and synthesizing the most critical and commercially successful fashion and lifestyle ranges marketed and merchandised at that time in major global department stores and leading retail outlets.

Formal research was also carried out through various channels, including desktop research, fashion and lifestyle forecasting services, as well as USA and European media, to gather customer insights that could then be identified, analyzed, synthesized, and developed and implemented into key fashion marketing and merchandising trends across the entire group of forty-two department stores. This enabled them to present a coordinated marketing and merchandising approach across all apparel to customers and stay ahead of change.

This was my journey into what is now known as strategic foresight, laying the vital foundations for developing my brain’s neuroplasticity and neuroelasticity, and becoming an agility shifter, with a prospective mind and adaptive thinking strategy that enables me to stay ahead of change.

Staying ahead of change

It took me many years to realize that I was chosen for this enviable role, not because of my deep knowledge and extensive experience, but for my intuitive and unconventional way of thinking. In Tomorrowmind, Dr Martin Seligman calls this ‘prospection’, an ability to metabolize the past with the present to envisage the future. He states that a prospective mind extracts the nutrients from the past and the present, then excretes the toxins and ballast to prepare for tomorrow. He defines prospection as “the mental process of projecting and evaluating future possibilities and then using these projections to guide thought and action.”

This develops the ability to stay ahead of change by anticipating and adapting to it, and includes many elements, such as:

  • Being able to adopt both a systemic and tactical approach, as well as a structured and detailed perspective alongside an agile and flexible view of the current reality or present state, simultaneously.
  • Sensing, connecting, perceiving, and linking operational patterns, and analyzing and synthesizing them within their context.
  • Generating, exploring, and unifying possibilities and options for selecting the most valuable commercial applications that match customers’ lifestyle needs and wants.
  • Unlearning and viewing the world with fresh eyes through sensing and perceiving it through a paradoxical lens, and cultivating a ‘both/and’ bird’s-eye perspective.
  • Opening your heart, mind, and will to relearning and learning, letting go of what may have worked in the past, focusing your emotional energy, towards learning new mindsets and mental models and relearning how to perceive the world differently.
  • Wondering and wandering into fresh and multiple perspectives underlie the development of a strategic foresight capability.

This approach helps shift your focus across the polarities of thought, from a fixed, binary, or linear and competitive approach to one that is neuro-scientifically grounded. It aims to foster your neuroplasticity and neuroelasticity within your brain, enabling the development of new and diverse perspectives that support prospective, strategic, critical, conceptual, complementary, and creative thinking processes necessary for staying ahead of change.

  • Improves strategic thinking

Strategic foresight aims to anticipate, analyze, synthesize, adapt to, and shape the factors relevant to a person, team, or company’s business, enabling it to perform and grow better than its competitors and stay ahead of change. It requires confidence, capacity, and competence to partner effectively and to think and act differently, using cutting-edge analytics, proven creative tools, and artificial intelligence (AI). This approach empowers, enables, and equips individuals with better, more risk-informed strategic thinking. It also provides a foundation for creative thinking by helping people better understand the options and alternatives available to them. Additionally, it identifies potential developments that could lead to building a competitive advantage at the individual, team, or organizational level, enabling them to stay ahead of change, innovate, and succeed in an uncertain business environment.  

  • Increases adaptability

In a recent article, ‘Navigating the Future with Strategic Foresight, the Boston Consulting Group stated:

“It’s not about gathering more data than everyone else but about being able to detect forward-looking signals, stretch perspectives, and interpret the data with fresh eyes. Uncertainty does not dissipate; rather, strategic foresight offers the clarity of direction that comes from greater confidence in data, assumptions, and analysis”.

The information gathered through strategic foresight enhances people’s ability and willingness to adapt their responses to uncertainty and unexpected situations and embrace change. It provides concrete evidence, in the form of data, assumptions, and analysis, to support people in being adaptive. This requires being open to unlearning, relearning, and learning, protecting you against anxiety, stress, and burnout, and helping you stay ahead of change and become resilient to create, invent, and innovate through chaos, uncertainty and disruption.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in early 2026.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Making it Safe to Innovate

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Building Emotional Safety

Making it Safe to Innovate - Building Emotional Safety

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

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

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

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

What does it mean to be safe?

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

What is emotional safety?

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

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

  • Improving well-being, engagement and productivity

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

  • Building mutuality

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

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

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

  • Becoming attuned

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

According to Dr. Dan Seigal:

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

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

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

Developing a psychologically safe culture

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

  • Embodying a way of being

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

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

Benefits of emotional and psychological safety

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

AI will continue to disrupt job stability and security.

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

  • Both job losses and opportunities

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

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

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

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Innovation is Unknowable Not Uncertain

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Innovation is Unknowable Not Uncertain

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Where’s the Marketing Brief? In product development, the Marketing team creates a document that defines who will buy the new product (the customer), what needs are satisfied by the new product and how the customer will use the new product. And Marketing team also uses their crystal ball to estimate the number of units the customers will buy, when they’ll buy it and how much they’ll pay. In theory, the Marketing Brief is finalized before the engineers start their work.

With innovation, there can be no Marketing Brief because there are no customers, no product and no technology to underpin it. And the needs the innovation will satisfy are unknowable because customers have not asked for the them, nor can the customer understand the innovation if you showed it to them. And how the customers will use the? That’s unknowable because, again, there are no customers and no customer needs. And how many will you sell and the sales price? Again, unknowable.

Where’s the Specification? In product development, the Marketing Brief is translated into a Specification that defines what the product must do and how much it will cost. To define what the product must do, the Specification defines a set of test protocols and their measurable results. And the minimum performance is defined as a percentage improvement over the test results of the existing product.

With innovation, there can be no Specification because there are no customers, no product, no technology and no business model. In that way, there can be no known test protocols and the minimum performance criteria are unknowable.

Where’s the Schedule? In product development, the tasks are defined, their sequence is defined and their completion dates are defined. Because the work has been done before, the schedule is a lot like the last one. Everyone knows the drill because they’ve done it before.

With innovation, there can be no schedule. The first task can be defined, but the second cannot because the second depends on the outcome of the first. If the first experiment is successful, the second step builds on the first. But if the first experiment is unsuccessful, the second must start from scratch. And if the customer likes the first prototype, the next step is clear. But if they don’t, it’s back to the drawing board. And the experiments feed the customer learning and the customer learning shapes the experiments.

Innovation is different than product development. And success in product development may work against you in innovation. If you’re doing innovation and you find yourself trying to lock things down, you may be misapplying your product development expertise. If you’re doing innovation and you find yourself trying to write a specification, you may be misapplying your product development expertise. And if you are doing innovation and find yourself trying to nail down a completion date, you are definitely misapplying your product development expertise.

With innovation, people say the work is uncertain, but to me that’s not the right word. To me, the work is unknowable. The customer is unknowable because the work hasn’t been done before. The specification is unknowable because there is nothing for comparison. And the schedule in unknowable because, again, the work hasn’t been done before.

To set expectations appropriately, say the innovation work is unknowable. You’ll likely get into a heated discuss with those who want demand a Marketing Brief, Specification and Schedule, but you’ll make the point that with innovation, the rules of product development don’t apply.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Don’t Get Fooled by Hucksters, Gurus and Consultants

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Don't Get Fooled by Hucksters, Gurus And Consultants

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When I lived in Poland, it was common to say that “life is cruel, and full of traps.” From an American perspective, the aphorism can be a bit of a culture shock. We’re raised to believe in the power of positivity, the American dream and the can-do spirit. Negativity can be seen as something worse than a weakness, both an indulgence and a privation at the same time.

Over the years, however, I came to respect the Poles’ innate suspicion. The truth is that we are far too easily fooled and taken in by those prey on the glitches in our cognitive machinery. Sometimes the ones peddling bunk have fooled also themselves. Their claims seem to be supported by logic and evidence, but their promises never quite pan out.

We’re taken in because we want their claims to be true. We’d like to think that there is a secret we’re missing, that there’s a black magic that we’re not privy to and, if we prove our worth and obtain access to a few simple truths, we’ll capture the success that eludes us. Yet these frauds follow common patterns and there are telltale signs we can learn to spot.

1. The Survivorship Bias Trick

In 2005 W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, both distinguished professors at INSEAD, published Blue Ocean Strategy. In their study of 108 companies the authors found that “blue ocean” launches, those in new categories without competition, far outperformed the shark-infested “red ocean” line extensions that are the norm in the corporate world. It was an immediate hit, selling over 3.5 million copies.

Bain consultants Chris Zook and James Allen’ book, Profit from the Core, boasted even more extensive research encompassing 200 case studies, a database of 1,854 companies, 100 interviews of senior executives and an “extensive review” of existing literature. They found that firms that focused on their ”core” far outperformed those who strayed.

It doesn’t take too much thinking to start seeing problems. How can you both “focus on your core” and seek out “blue oceans”? It betrays logic that both strategies could outperform one another. Also, how do you define “core?” Core markets? Core capabilities? Core customers? While it’s true that “blue ocean” markets lack competitors, they don’t have any customers either. Who do you sell to?

Yet there is an even bigger, more insidious problem and it is a trick that hucksters, gurus and consultants regularly employ to falsely establish dubious claims. It’s called survivorship bias. Notice how “research” doesn’t include firms that went out of business because there were no customers in those “blue oceans” or because they failed to diversify outside of their “core.” The data only pertains to the ones that survived.

Can you imagine a medical researcher failing to include the results of patients that died? Or an airplane designer forgetting to mention the prototypes that crashed? Yet hucksters, gurus and consultants get away with it all the time.

2. Dressing Up Social Proof As “Research”

Another trick hucksters, gurus and consultants use is to dress up social proof as research in order to increase their credibility as experts and establish a need for their services. They say, for example, that they find company profitability is strongly correlated with a customer focus or that culture has a statistically powerful effect on performance.

At first glance, these claims seem reasonable, but as Phil Rosenzweig explained in The Halo Effect, it’s all part of a subtle bait and switch. What is being “researched” is not really “customer focus” or “culture,” but perceptions about those things in responses to a survey. So it is highly likely that successful companies are merely being perceived as having these traits.

For example, in 2000, before the dotcom crash, Cisco was flying high. A profile in Fortune reported it to have an unparalleled culture with highly motivated employees. But just one year later, when the market tanked, the very same publication described it as “cocksure” and “naive.” Did the “culture” really change that much in a year, with the same leadership?

Some might say that it’s “obvious” that a strong culture and customer focus contribute to performance, but then why go through the whole kabuki dance of “research?” Why not just say, “if you believe these things are important, we can help you with them?” It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that their is either an intent to deceive or just pure incompetence.

You don’t have to look far to see that this is an ongoing con. A few quick Google searches led me to major consulting firms currently selling halo effects as causal relationships to trusting customers here and here.

3. The VUCA World

Today it’s become an article of faith that we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Business pundits tell us that we must “innovate or die.” These are taken as basic truths that are beyond questioning or reproach. Those who doubt the need for change risk being dismissed as out of touch.

The data, however, tell a very different story. A report from the OECD found that markets, especially in the United States, have become more concentrated and less competitive, with less churn among industry leaders. The number of young firms have decreased markedly as well, falling from roughly half of the total number of companies in 1982 to one third in 2013.

A comprehensive 2019 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found two correlated, but countervailing trends: the rise of “superstar” firms and the fall of labor’s share of GDP. Essentially, the typical industry has fewer, but larger players. Their increased bargaining power leads to more profits, but lower wages.

The truth is that we don’t really disrupt industries anymore. We disrupt people. Economic data shows that for most Americans, real wages have hardly budged since 1964. Income and wealth inequality remain at historic highs. Anxiety and depression, already at epidemic levels, worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

So why do hucksters, gurus and consultants insist that industries are under constant threat of disruption?

4. The Allure Of Pseudoscience

In Richard Feynman’s 1974 commencement speech at Cal-Tech, he recounted going to a new-age resort where people were learning reflexology. A man was sitting in a hot tub rubbing a woman’s big toe and asking the instructor, “Is this the pituitary?” Unable to contain himself, the great physicist blurted out, “You’re a hell of a long way from the pituitary, man!”

His point was that it’s relatively easy to make something appear “scientific” by, for example, having people wear white coats or present charts and tables, but that doesn’t really make it science. True science is testable and falsifiable. We can’t merely state what you believe to be true, but must give others a means to test it and prove us wrong.

This is important because it’s very easy for things to look like the truth, but actually be false. That’s why we need to be careful, especially when it’s something we already believe in. The burden is even greater when it’s an idea that we want to be true. That’s when we need to redouble our efforts, dig in and make sure we verify our facts.

Hucksters, gurus and consultants love to prey on our weakness for authority by saying that “the science says…” The truth is that science doesn’t “say”anything, it merely produces hypotheses that haven’t been disproven yet. Some, like Darwin’s theory of natural selection, have been around a long time, so we’re pretty sure that they’re true, but even in that case a large part of it was debunked within months. The ‘theory” as we know it now is what survived.

There are no absolute answers. There is, as Sam Arbesman has put it, a half life of facts. We can only make decisions on higher or lower levels of confidence. In the real world, there are no “sure things,” and don’t let hucksters, gurus and consultants tell you any different.

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

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

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

  1. Turning Bold Ideas into Tangible Results — by Robyn Bolton
  2. Leading Through Complexity and Uncertainty — by Greg Satell
  3. Empathy is a Vital Tool for Stronger Teams — by Stefan Lindegaard
  4. The Role Platforms Play in Business Networks — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  5. Inspiring Innovation — by John Bessant
  6. Six Keys to Effective Teamwork — by David Burkus
  7. Product-Lifecycle Management 2.0 — by Dr. Matthew Heim
  8. 5 Business Myths You Cannot Afford to Believe — by Shep Hyken
  9. What Great Ideas Feel Like — by Mike Shipulski
  10. Better Decision Making at Speed — by Mike Shipulski

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

SPECIAL BONUS: While supplies last, you can get the hardcover version of my first bestselling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for 44% OFF until Amazon runs out of stock or changes the price. This deal won’t last long, so grab your copy while it lasts!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

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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Leading Through Complexity and Uncertainty

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Leading Through Complexity and Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Leaders need to make decisions and we rarely get to choose the context. Most often, we need to take action without all the facts, in a rapidly changing environment and a compressed time frame. We need to do so with the knowledge that if we get it wrong, we will bear the blame and no one else. It will be our mess to clean up.

That’s a hard bridge to cross and many, if not most, are never quite able to get there. I think that’s why we admire great leaders so much, because they have the courage to take responsibility on their backs and be accountable, to inspire confidence even in an atmosphere of confusion and to point the way forward, even if they aren’t sure it’s the right direction.

The truth is that you can never really be certain until you take that step forward. The simple and inescapable truth is that to accomplish anything significant you need to travel on an uncertain journey. It is tautologically true that the well-trod path will take us nowhere new. We can never fully control uncertainty, but we can learn to lead through it.

How Things Get So Complicated And Uncertain

Generally, we prefer to operate with some degree of predictability, which is why we build structure into daily life. On a personal level, we create habits and routines to give us a sense of grounding. On a societal level, we create laws and norms, so that we know what to expect from our interactions with each other.

Yet in Overcomplicated, mathematician Sam Arbesman gives two reasons why uncertainty is, to a great extent, unavoidable. The first is accretion. We build systems, like the Internet or the laws set down in the US Constitution, to perform a limited number of tasks. Yet to scale those systems, we need to build on top of them to expand their initial capabilities. As systems become larger, they get more complex and uncertain.

The second force is interaction. We may love the simplicity of an iPhone, but don’t want to be restricted to its capabilities alone. So we increase its functionality by connecting it to millions of apps. Those apps, in turn, connect to each other as well as to other systems. Every connection increases complexity and makes things harder to predict.

These two forces lead to what Benoit Mandelbrot called Noah effects and Joseph effects. Joseph effects, as in the biblical story, support long periods of continuity. Noah effects, on the other hand, are like a big storm creating a massive flood of discontinuity, washing away the previous order. Uncertainty, for better or worse, will always be somewhat unavoidable.

The Problem With Simplicity

The most straightforward solution to complexity and uncertainty is to boil things down and make them more simple. Politicians are fond of highlighting the thousands of pages pieces of legislation contain, because complexity is widely seen as a fatal flaw. “If it was thought through clearly, why couldn’t it have been devised more simply?” is the implication.

Yet while we yearn for simple rules, those rules often lead us astray. As Ludwig Wittgenstein explained in his rule following paradox, “no course of action could be determined by a rule because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” Simple rules tend to be necessarily vague, which limits their usefulness.

Something similar happens when we try to tame complexity by summarizing it through identifying patterns. Random points of data, if there are enough of them, will always generate patterns as well, so we can never be quite sure if we are revealing an underlying truth or just creating a convincing illusion. To discern between the two is, unfortunately, complex.

In Why Information Grows, MIT’s Cesar Hidalgo explains that it is through emergent complexity that we create value. To understand what he means, let’s take another look at an iPhone. Its simple design belies incredible complexity, not only in the technology it contains, but in what it connects to, a complex ecosystem of apps, servers and data.

Steve Jobs didn’t intend to create an App Store, because he wanted to keep the iPhone simple. However, eventually he was convinced that by limiting complexity he was curtailing the potential value of his creation and, ultimately, he relented. It is through managing complexity, not avoiding it, that we can most effectively impact the world.

Narrowing Scope And Limiting Variables

The Franciscan friar William of Occam is best remembered for Occam’s razor, which he didn’t exactly invent, but did much to popularize. The technique, which is often mischaracterized as “the simplest solution is often the best,” actually had a lot more to do with variables and assumptions, which he advises to keep to a minimum.

It’s an interesting distinction that makes a big difference. William wasn’t advising us to ignore complexity, but to avoid increasing it by injecting things that don’t need to be there. We can acknowledge the messiness of the world and still tidy up our little corner of it, by narrowing our scope and limiting the variables we deal with.

Steve Blank advises startups to develop minimum viable products to test assumptions, rather than investing resources into a full-featured prototype. The idea is by narrowing scope you can get a better idea of the marketplace and then increase complexity from there. In our work helping organizations drive transformation, we advise our clients to start out with a keystone change, rather than rolling out everything all at once.

Whatever strategy you use, the key, as William of Occam pointed out long ago, is to limit variables where you can, while still recognizing that the universe is far more complex than our scaled down model of it. Or, as the statistician George Box put it, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Innovation Is Exploration

The truth is that uncertainty is only a problem if you try to control it. The framers of the US Constitution designed it to be a guide, not a blueprint. That’s been the key to its success. They recognized it would have to evolve and grow over time and designed a system of checks and balances to curb the human potential for malice.

We need to start thinking less like engineers, designing just the right combination of levers and pulleys to account for every eventuality, and more like gardeners, seeding and nurturing ecosystems, pruning as we go. Gardeners don’t need to know the exact outcome of everything they plant, but can seek to improve the harvest each season.

In a world driven by networks and ecosystems, we can no longer treat strategy as if it were a game of chess, planning out each move with near perfect precision and foresight. The world moves far too fast for that. By the time we’ve put the final touches on the master plan, the assumptions upon which it was made are often no longer true.

Rather, we must constantly explore, widening and deepening connections to ecosystems of talent, technology and information. That’s how we uncover new paths that are often unseen from our usual perch and leverage complexity to our advantage. Breakthrough innovations arise out of unexpected encounters.

The next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. Today, competitive advantage is no longer the sum of all efficiencies, but the sum of all connections.

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

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

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

  1. A Toolbox for High-Performance Teams — by Stefan Lindegaard
  2. Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2024 — Curated by Braden Kelley
  3. The Twelve Killers of Innovation — by Robyn Bolton
  4. Building Trust for High Performing Teams — by David Burkus
  5. Be Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With — by Shep Hyken
  6. Uncertainty Isn’t Always Bad — by Mike Shipulski
  7. The Real Winners of Mega Events — by Shep Hyken
  8. Five Must Reads for 2025 — by Robyn Bolton
  9. Don’t Slow Roll Your Transformation — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  10. Is it Time to ReLearn to Work? — by Geoffrey A. Moore

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

SPECIAL BONUS: While supplies last, you can get the hardcover version of my first bestselling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for 44% OFF until Amazon runs out of stock or changes the price. This deal won’t last long, so grab your copy while it lasts!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

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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Uncertainty Isn’t Always Bad

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Uncertainty Isn't Always Bad

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you think you understand what your customers want, you don’t.

If you’re developing a new product for new customers, you know less.

If you’re developing a new technology for a new product for new customers, you know even less.

If you think you know how much growth a new product will deliver, you don’t.

If that new product will serve new customers, you know less.

If that new product will require a new technology, you know even less.

If you have to choose between project A and B, you’ll choose the one that’s most like what you did last time.

If project A will change the game and B will grow sales by 5%, you’ll play the game you played last time.

If project A and B will serve new customers, you’ll change one of them to serve existing customers and do that one.

If you think you know how the market will respond to a new product, it won’t make much of a difference.

If you don’t know how the market will respond, you may be onto something.

If you don’t know which market the product will serve, there’s a chance to create a whole new one.

If you know how the market will respond, do something else.

When we have a choice between certainty and upside, the choice is certain.

When we choose certainty over upside, we forget that the up-starts will choose differently.

When we have a lot to lose, we chose certainty.

And once it’s lost, we start over and choose uncertainty.

Image credits: Pexels

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

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

  1. A Shared Language for Radical Change — by Greg Satell
  2. Leadership Best Quacktices from Oregon’s Dan Lanning — by Braden Kelley
  3. Navigating Uncertainty Requires a Map — by John Bessant
  4. The Most Successful Innovation Approach is … — by Howard Tiersky
  5. Don’t Listen to These Three Change Consultant Recommendations — by Greg Satell
  6. What We Can Learn from MrBeast’s Onboarding — by Robyn Bolton
  7. Does Diversity Increase Team Performance? — by David Burkus
  8. Customer Experience Audit 101 — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
  9. Daily Practices of Great Managers — by David Burkus
  10. An Innovation Leadership Fable – Wisdom from the Waters — by Robyn Bolton

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

SPECIAL BONUS: While supplies last, you can get the hardcover version of my first bestselling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for 51% OFF until Amazon runs out of stock or changes the price. This deal won’t last long, so grab your copy while it lasts!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

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:

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.






Do you prize novelty or certainty?

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Do you prize novelty or certainty?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you follow the best practice, by definition your work is not new. New work is never done the same way twice. That’s why it’s called new.

Best practices are for old work. Usually, it’s work that was successful last time. But just as you can never step into the same stream twice, when you repeat a successful recipe it’s not the same recipe. Almost everything is different from last time. The economy is different, the competitors are different, the customers are in a different phase of their lives, the political climate is different, interest rates are different, laws are different, tariffs are different, the technology is different, and the people doing the work are different. Just because work was successful last time doesn’t mean that the old work done in a new context will be successful next time. The most important property of old work is the certainty that it will run out of gas.

When someone asks you to follow the best practice, they prioritize certainty over novelty. And because the context is different, that certainty is misplaced.

We have a funny relationship with certainty. At every turn, we try to increase certainty by doing what we did last time. But the only thing certain with that strategy is that it will run out of gas. Yet, frantically waving the flag of certainty, we continue to double down on what we did last time. When we demand certainty, we demand old work. As a company, you can have too much “certainty.”

When you flog the teams because they have too much uncertainty, you flog out all the novelty.

What if you start the design review with the question “What’s novel about this project?” And when the team says there’s nothing novel, what if you say “Well, go back to the drawing board and come back with some novelty.”? If you seek out novelty instead of squelching it, you’ll get more novelty. That’s a rule, though not limited to novelty.

A bias toward best practices is a bias toward old work. And the belief underpinning those biases is the belief that the Universe is static. And the one thing the Universe doesn’t like to be called is static. The Universe prides itself on its dynamic character and unpredictable nature. And the Universe isn’t above using karma to punish those who call it names.

Image credit: Pixabay

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