Overcoming Resistance: The Persuasive Power of a Well-Told Story

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

As a thought leader focused on human-centered change and innovation, I’ve seen countless brilliant strategies—digital transformations, market pivots, organizational redesigns—fail not because of technical flaws, but because they ran headlong into the brick wall of human resistance. We, as change agents, often make a critical error: we speak in the cold, logical language of spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks, yet we expect people to respond with the emotional commitment required for true change. That gap, the gulf between data and devotion, can only be bridged by one thing: a powerful, well-told story.

Resistance to change isn’t malicious; it’s human. It’s born from fear of the unknown, loss of status, or the exhaustion of yet another corporate mandate. Facts and figures may convince the brain, but only a story can rewire the heart. Stories bypass the critical, analytical side of the brain that’s waiting to find fault, and instead engage the empathetic, imaginative centers. When you tell a story, you don’t just present a future state; you invite your audience to live in it—to experience the journey, feel the challenge, and ultimately claim ownership over the success. A compelling narrative acts as an organizational immune booster, inoculating the workforce against the cynicism and “this too shall pass” attitude that kills innovation from within.

The Three Essential Elements of the Change Story

A compelling narrative designed to drive change must contain three core, human-centered elements, regardless of whether you’re using a keynote speech or a short internal video:

1. The Crisis and the Call (Why Now?): Define the stakes. What is the burning platform—the threat or the monumental opportunity—that mandates change? This must be personal, illustrating what failure or success means for the audience, not just the balance sheet.
2. The Journey and the Hero (What’s the Path?): Establish the vision of the future, but focus on the process. Crucially, the hero of the story must be the audience. The leader is merely the guide or mentor. This element shifts the audience from passive listeners to active participants, increasing their willingness to take the risks necessary for innovation.
3. The Triumphant Future (What’s the Reward?): Paint a vivid picture of the world after the change. The reward must be meaningful to the individual: less friction, more time with family, a more meaningful job, or restored customer trust. It cannot simply be a higher stock price.

“People don’t resist change; they resist being changed. A great story allows them to choose their role in the transformation.” — Peter Senge and Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: Transforming Customer Service at Zappos

The Challenge:

In the early 2000s, Zappos made a massive, non-intuitive strategic bet: they would differentiate their online shoe company not through price or selection, but through obsessive customer service. This meant turning their call centers, often seen as cost centers in retail, into premium experience hubs. Internal employees and investors faced resistance: why invest in expensive 24/7, US-based call centers and offer free, 365-day returns? The data (initial costs) looked terrifying.

The Power of the Story:

CEO Tony Hsieh didn’t lead with cost projections; he led with the story of the “Wow” experience. He told tales of employees who were empowered to spend eight hours on a single customer call, or who sent flowers to customers whose feet had been injured. The story wasn’t about the transaction; it was about building a movement defined by happiness—for employees and customers alike. The narrative centered on the employee as the hero, capable of delivering magical moments. This story made the astronomical cost of service acceptable because it redefined service as the core, non-replicable brand innovation. The resistance dissolved as employees rallied around a story that gave their work meaning far beyond simply answering a phone.

The Innovation Impact:

The story became the operational principle. The emotional commitment it generated led to legendary word-of-mouth marketing, turning customer service into the greatest driver of revenue and allowing Zappos to command a premium price. The company’s sale to Amazon for $1.2 billion validated that the emotional story of the “Wow” was the most valuable asset.

Case Study 2: NASA and the Moonshot

The Challenge:

In 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the decade, the scientific, technical, and logistical obstacles were almost insurmountable. NASA engineers faced skepticism, limited technology, and a public wary of the massive, unprecedented expenditure. The raw data said: “Impossible.”

The Power of the Story:

The story was the Moonshot itself. It wasn’t framed as a complex series of engineering tasks, but as an epic quest—a simple, audacious narrative that transcended budgets and deadlines. Kennedy’s challenge provided the clear Crisis and the Call (a race against geopolitical rivals) and the Triumphant Future (a bold step for mankind). The story made every engineer, technician, and administrative assistant—down to the janitor—feel like an essential hero on a grand, world-changing journey. When Kennedy asked a janitor at the space center what his job was, the man famously replied, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” The story had successfully redefined his job description and purpose.

The Innovation Impact:

The compelling narrative drove innovation at a furious, impossible pace. It created a culture of extreme dedication, risk-taking, and cross-functional collaboration. The power of the story overcame the technical resistance and institutional inertia, directly impacting key innovation metrics like speed of execution and employee-driven solutions necessary to solve problems that had no known technical solution at the time.

The Leader’s Mandate: From Analyst to Author

If you are a leader charged with driving significant change, you must recognize that your job is not merely to delegate tasks; it is to craft the narrative. Stop trying to force change with directives and start creating stories that make the desired future irresistible. This narrative isn’t just a speech; it should be woven into every communication, from town halls to interactive digital campaigns.

Embrace the role of the author. Define the villain (the status quo, the market threat, the friction), outline the plot (the transformation journey), and most importantly, position your people as the central characters—the ones who will achieve the extraordinary. This human-centered approach is the single most effective way to overcome resistance and ensure that your innovation initiatives succeed, translating emotional buy-in into faster adoption and greater employee ownership. To change a culture, you must first change the conversation.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pexels

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3 Steps to Find the Horse’s A** In Your Company (and Create Space for Innovation)

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3 Steps to Find the Horse's A** In Your Company (and Create Space for Innovation)

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Innovation thrives within constraints.

Constraints create the need for questions, creative thinking, and experiments.

But as real as constraints are and as helpful as they can be, don’t simply accept them. Instead, question them, push on them, and explore around them.

But first, find the horse’s a**

How Ancient Rome influenced the design of the Space Shuttle

In 1974, Thiokol, an aerospace and chemical manufacturing company, won the contract to build the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) for the Space Shuttle. The SRBs were to be built in a factory in Utah and transported to the launch site via train.

The train route ran through a mountain tunnel that was just barely wider than the tracks.

The standard width of railroad tracks (distance between the rails or the railroad gauge) in the US is 4 feet, 8.5 inches which means that Thiokol’s engineers needed to design SRBs that could fit through a tunnel that was slightly wider than 4 feet 8.5 inches.

4 feet 8.5 inches wide is a constraint. But where did such an oddly specific constraint come from?

The designers and builders of America’s first railroads were the same people and companies that built England’s tramways. Using the existing tramways tools and equipment to build railroads was more efficient and cost-effective, so railroads ended up with the same gauge as tramways – 4 feet 8.5 inches.

The designers and builders of England’s tramways were the same businesses that, for centuries, built wagons. Wanting to use their existing tools and equipment (it was more efficient and cost-effective, after all), the wagon builders built tramways with the exact distance between the rails as wagons had between wheels – 4 feet 8.5 inches.

Wagon wheels were 4 feet 8.5 inches apart to fit into the well-worn grooves in most old European roads. The Romans built those roads, and Roman chariots made those grooves, and a horses pulled those chariots, and the width of a horses was, you guessed it, 4 feet 8.5 inches.

To recap – the width of a horses’ a** (approximately 4 feet 8.5 inches) determined the distance between wheels on the Roman chariots that wore grooves into ancient roads. Those grooves ultimately dictated the width of wagon wheels, tramways, railroad ties, a mountain tunnel, and the Space Shuttle’s SRBs.

How to find the horse’s a**

When you understand the origin of a constraint, aka find the horse’s a**, it’s easier to find ways around it or to accept and work with it. You can also suddenly understand and even anticipate people’s reactions when you challenge the constraints.

Here’s how you do it – when someone offers a constraint:

Thank them for being honest with you and for helping you work more efficiently
Find the horse’s a** by asking questions to understand the constraint – why it exists, what it protects, the risk of ignoring it, who enforces it, and what happened to the last person who challenged it.
Find your degrees of freedom by paying attention to their answers and how they give them. Do they roll their eyes in knowing exasperation? Shrug their shoulders in resignation? Become animated and dogmatic, agitated that someone would question something so obvious?

How to use the horse’s a** to innovate

You must do all three steps because stopping short of step 3 stops creativity in its tracks.

If you stop after Step 1 (which most people do), you only know the constraint, and you’ll probably be tempted to take it as fixed. But maybe it’s not. Perhaps it’s just a habit or heuristic waiting to be challenged.

If you do all three steps, however, you learn tons of information about the constraint, how people feel about it, and the data and evidence that could nudge or even eliminate it.

At the very least, you’ll understand the horse’s a** driving your company’s decisions.

Image credit: Pixabay

Endnotes:

To be very clear, the origin of the constraint is the horse’s a**. The person telling you about the constraint is NOT the horse’s a**.
The truth is never as simple as the story and railroads used to come in different gauges. For a deeper dive into this “more true than not” story (and an alternative theory that it was the North’s triumph in the Civil War that influenced the design of the SRBs, click here

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Preserving Ecosystems as an Innovation Superpower

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Lessons from Picasso and David Attenborough

Preserving Ecosystems as an Innovation Superpower

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

We probably all agree that the conservation of our natural world is important. Sharing the planet with other species is not only ethically and emotionally the right thing to do to, but it’s also enlightened self-interest. A healthy ecosystem helps equilibrate and stabilize our climate, while the potential of the largely untapped biochemical reservoir of the natural world has enormous potential for pharmaceuticals, medicine and hence long-term human survival.

Today I’m going to propose yet another reason why conservation is in our best interest. And not just the preservation of individual species, but also the maintenance of the complex, interactive ecosystems in which individual species exist.

Biomimicry: Nature is not only a resource for pharmaceuticals, but also an almost infinite resource for innovation that transcends virtually every field we can, or will imagine. This is not a new idea. Biomimicry, the concept of mimicking natures’ solutions to a broad range of problems, was first coined by Janine Benyus in 1997. But humans have intuitively looked to nature to help solve problems throughout history. Silk production in ancient bio-technology that co-opts the silk worm, while much of early human habitations were based on caves, a natural phenomenon. More recently, Velcro, wind turbines, and elements of bullet train design have all been attributed to innovation inspired by nature.

And Biomimicry, together with related areas such as biomechanics and bio-utilization taps into the fundamental core of what the front end of innovation is all about. Dig deep into virtually any innovation, and we’ll find it has been stolen from another source. For example, early computers reapplied punch cards from tapestry looms. The Beatles stole and blended liberally from the blues, skiffle, music hall, reggae and numerous other sources. ‘Uberization’ has created a multitude of new business from AirBNB to nanny, housecleaning or food prep services. Medical suturing was directly ‘stolen’ from embroidery, the Dyson vacuum from a sawmill, oral care calcium deposition technology was reapplied from laundry detergents, etc., etc..

Picasso – Great Artists Steal! This is also the creative process espoused by Pablo Picasso when he said ‘good artists borrow, great artists steal’. He ‘stole’ elements of African sculpture and blended them with ideas from contemporaries such as Cézanne to create analytical cubism. In so doing he combined existing knowledge in new ways that created a revolutionary and emergent form of art – one that asked the viewer to engage with a painting in a whole new way. Innovation incarnate!

Ecosystems as an Innovation Resource: The biological world is the biggest potential source of potential innovative ideas we have at our disposal anywhere. Hence it is an intuitive place to go looking for ideas to solve our biggest innovation challenges. But despite many people trying to leverage this potential goldmine, including myself, it’s never really achieved its full potential. For sure, there are a few great examples, such as Velcro, bullet train flow dynamics or sharkskin surfaces. But given how long we’ve been playing in this sandbox, there are far too few successes. And of those, far too many are based on hindsight, as opposed to using nature to solve a specific challenge. Just look at virtually any article on biomimicry, and the same few success stories show up year after year.

The Resource/Source Paradox. One issue that helps explain this is that the natural world is an almost infinite repository of information. That potential creates a challenging signal to noise’ search problem. The result is enormous potential, but coupled with almost inevitably high failure rates, as we struggle to find the most useful insights

Innovation is More than Ideation: Another challenge is that innovation is not just about ideas or invention; it’s about turning those ideas into practice. In the case of biomimicry, that is particularly hard, as the technical challenge of converting natural technology into viable commercial technologies is hampered because nature works on fundamentally different design principles, and uses very different materials to us. Evolution builds at a nano scale, is highly context dependent, and is result rather than theory led. Materials are usually organic; often water based, and are grown rather than manufactured. Very different to most conventional human engineering.

Tipping Point: But the good news is that materials science, technology, 3D printing and computational and data processing power, together with nascent AI are evolving at such a fast rate that I’m optimistic that we will soon reach a tipping point that will make search and translation of natural innovations considerably easier than today. Self-learning systems should be able to more easily replicate natural information processing, and 3D printing and nano structures should be able to better mimic the physical constructs of natural systems. AI, or at least massively increased computing power should make it easier for us to both ask the right questions and search large, complex databases.

Conservation as an Innovation Superpower: And that brings me back to conservation as an innovation superpower. If we don’t protect our natural environment, we’ll have a lot less to search, and a lot less to mimic. And that applies to ecosystems as well as individual species. Take the animal or plant out of its natural environment, and it becomes far more difficult to untangle how or why it has evolved in a certain way.

Evolution is the ultimate exploiter of serendipity. It does not have to understand why something works, it simply runs experiments until it stumbles on solutions that do, and natural selection picks the winner(s). That leads to some surprisingly sophisticated innovation. For example, we are only just starting to understand the quantum effects used in avian navigation and photosynthesis. Migratory birds don’t have deep knowledge of quantum mechanics; the beauty of evolution is that they don’t need to. The benefit to us is that we can potentially tap into sophisticated innovation at the leading edge of our theoretical knowledge, provided we know how to define problems, where to look and have sufficient knowledge to decipher it and reduce it to practice. The bad news is that we don’t know what we don’t know. Evolution tapped into quantum mechanics millennia before we knew what it was, so who knows what other innovations lie waiting to be discovered as our knowledge catches up with the nature – the ultimate experimenter.

Ecosystems Matter: But a species without the context of its ecosystem is at best half the story. Nature has solved flight, deep-water exploration, carbon sequestration, renewable energy, high and low temperature resilience and so many more challenges. And it has also done so with 100% utilization and recycling on a systems basis. But most of the underlying innovations solve very specific problems, and so require deep understanding of context.

The Zebra Conundrum: Take the zebra as an example. I was recently watching a David Attenborough documentary about zebras. As a tasty prey animal surrounded by highly efficient predators such as lions, leopards, cheetahs and hyenas, the zebra is an evolutionary puzzle. Why has it evolved a high contrast coat that grabs attention and makes it visible from miles away? High contrast is a fundamental visual cue that means even if a predator is not particularly hungry; it is pretty much compelled to take notice of the hapless zebra. But despite this, the zebra has done pretty well, and the planes of Africa are scattered with this very successful animal. The explanation for this has understandably been the topic of much conjecture and research, and to this day remains somewhat controversial. But more and more, the explanation is narrowing onto a surprisingly obvious culprit; the tsetse fly. When we think of the dangers to a large mammal, we automatically think of large predators. But while zebras undoubtedly prefer to avoid being eaten by lions, diseases associated with tsetse fly bites kill more of them. That means that avoiding tsetse flies likely creates stronger evolutionary pressure than avoiding lions, and that is proving to be a promising explanation for the zebras coat. Far less flies land on or bite animals with stripes. Exactly why that is remains debatable, and theories range from disrupting the flies vision when landing, to creating mini weather fronts due to differential heating or cooling from the stripes. But whatever the mechanism ultimately turns out to be, stripes stop flies. It appears that the obvious big predators were not the answer after all.

Context Matters: But without deep understanding of the context in which the zebra evolved, this would have been very difficult to unravel. Even if we’d conserved zebras in zoos, finding the tsetse fly connection without the context of the complex African savannah would be quite challenging. It’s all too easy to enthusiastically chase an obvious cause of a problem, and so miss the real one, and our confirmation bias routinely amplifies this.

We often talk about protecting species, but if, as our technology evolves to more effectively ‘steal’ ideas from natural systems, from an innovation perspective alone, preserving context, in the form of complex ecosystems may likely turn out to be at least as important as preserving individual species. We don’t know what we don’t know, and often the surprisingly obvious and critical answer to a puzzle can only be determined by exploring a puzzle in its natural environment.

Enlightened Self-Interest. Could we use an analogy to the zebra to help control malaria? Could we steal avian navigation for gps? I have no idea, but I believe this makes pursuing conservation enlightened self-interest of the highest order. We want to save the environment for all sorts of reasons, but one of the most interesting is that one-day, some part of it could save us.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Guiding Principles for Human-Centered Innovation

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The Ethical Compass

Guiding Principles for Human-Centered Innovation

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

We are living through the most rapid period of technological advancement in human history. From Generative AI to personalized genomics, the pace of creation is breathtaking. Yet, with great power comes the potential for profound unintended consequences. For too long, organizations have treated Ethics as a compliance hurdle — a check-the-box activity relegated to the legal department. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that this mindset is not only morally deficient but strategically suicidal. Ethics is the new operating system for innovation.

True Human-Centered Innovation demands that we look beyond commercial viability and technical feasibility. We must proactively engage with the third critical dimension: Ethical Desirability. When innovators fail to apply an Ethical Compass at the design stage, they risk building products that perpetuate societal bias, erode trust, and ultimately fail the people they were meant to serve. This failure translates directly into business risk: regulatory penalties, brand erosion, difficulty attracting mission-driven talent, and loss of consumer loyalty. The future of innovation is not about building things faster; it’s about building them better — with a deep, abiding commitment to human dignity, fairness, and long-term societal well-being.

The Four Guiding Principles of Ethical Innovation

To embed ethics directly into the innovation process, leaders must design around these four core principles:

1. Proactive Transparency and Explainability: Be transparent about the system’s limitations and its potential impact. For AI, this means addressing the ‘black box’ problem — explaining how a decision was reached (explainability) and being clear when the output might be untrustworthy (e.g., admitting to the potential for a Generative AI ‘hallucination’). This builds trust, the most fragile asset in the digital age.
2. Designing for Contestation and Recourse: Every automated system will make mistakes, especially when dealing with complex human data. Ethical design must anticipate these errors and provide clear, human-driven mechanisms for users to challenge decisions (contestation) and seek corrections or compensation (recourse). The digital experience must have an accessible, human-centered off-ramp.
3. Privacy by Default (Data Minimization): The default setting for any new product or service must be the most protective of user data. Innovators must adopt the principle of data minimization — only collect the data absolutely necessary for the core functionality, and delete it when the purpose is served. This principle should extend to anonymizing or synthesizing data used for testing and training large models.
4. Anticipating Dual-Use and Misapplication: Every powerful technology can be repurposed for malicious intent. Innovators must conduct mandatory “Red Team” exercises to model how their product — be it an AI model or a new biometric sensor — could be weaponized or misused, and build in preventative controls from the start. This proactive defense is critical to maintaining public safety and brand integrity.

“Ethical innovation is not about solving problems faster; it’s about building solutions that don’t create bigger, more complex human problems down the line.”

Case Study 1: Algorithmic Bias in Facial Recognition Systems

The Ethical Failure:

Early iterations of several commercially available facial recognition and AI systems were developed and tested using datasets that were overwhelmingly composed of lighter-skinned male faces. This homogenous training data resulted in systems that performed poorly — or failed entirely — when identifying women and people with darker skin tones.

The Innovation Impact:

The failure was not technical; it was an ethical and design failure. When these systems were deployed in law enforcement, hiring, or security contexts, they perpetuated systemic bias, leading to disproportionate errors, false accusations, and a deep erosion of trust among marginalized communities. The innovation became dangerous rather than helpful. The ensuing public backlash, moratoriums, and outright bans on the technology in some jurisdictions forced the entire industry to halt and recalibrate. This was a clear example where the lack of diversity in the input data (violating Principle 3) directly led to product failure and significant societal harm.

Case Study 2: The E-Scooter Phenomenon and Public Space

The Ethical Failure:

When ride-share e-scooters rapidly deployed in cities globally, the innovation focused purely on convenience and scaling. The developers failed to apply the Ethical Compass to the public space context. The design overlooked the needs of non-users — pedestrians, people with disabilities, and the elderly. Scooters were abandoned everywhere, creating physical obstacles, hazards, and clutter.

The Innovation Mandate:

While technically feasible and commercially popular, the lack of Anticipation of Misapplication (Principle 4) led to a massive negative social cost. Cities were forced to quickly step in with restrictive and punitive regulations to manage the chaos created by the unbridled deployment. The innovation was penalized for failing to be a responsible citizen of the urban environment. The ethical correction involved new technologies like integrated GPS tracking to enforce designated parking areas and mandatory end-of-ride photos, effectively embedding Contestation and Recourse (Principle 2) into the user-city relationship, but only after significant public frustration and regulatory intervention demonstrated the poor planning.

The Ethical Mandate: Making Compassion the Constraint

For innovation leaders, the Ethical Compass must be your primary constraint, just as budget and timeline are. This means actively hiring for ethical expertise, creating cross-functional Ethics Design Boards (EDBs) that include non-traditional stakeholders (e.g., anthropologists, ethicists, community advocates) for high-impact projects, and training every engineer, designer, and product manager to think like an ethicist.

The best innovations are those that successfully navigate not just the technological landscape, but the human landscape of values and consequences. When we prioritize human well-being over unbridled speed, we don’t just build better products — we build a better, more trustworthy future. Embrace ethics not as a brake pedal, but as the foundational gyroscope that keeps your innovation on course and your business resilient.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Pexels

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We Must Prepare for Future Crises Like We Prepare for War

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We Must Prepare for Future Crises Like We Prepare for War

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In a 2015 TED talk, Bill Gates warned that “if anything kills ten million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes.” He went on to point out that we have invested enormous amounts of money in nuclear deterrents, but relatively little to battle epidemics.

It’s an apt point. In the US, we enthusiastically spend nearly $700 billion on our military, but cut corners on nearly everything else. Major breakthroughs, such as GPS satellites, the Internet and transistors, are merely offshoots of budgets intended to help us fight wars more effectively. At the same time, politicians gleefully propose budget cuts to the NIH.

A crisis, in one sense, is like anything else. It eventually ends and, when it does, we hope to be wiser for it. No one knows how long this epidemic will last or what the impact will be, but one thing is for sure — it will not be our last crisis. We should treat this as a new Sputnik moment and prepare for the next crisis with the same vigor with which we prepare for war.

Getting Artificial Intelligence Under Control

In the Terminator series, an automated defense system called Skynet becomes “self aware” and launches a nuclear attack to end humanity. Machines called “cyborgs” are created to hunt down the survivors that remain. Clearly it is an apocalyptic vision. Not completely out of the realm of possibility, but very unlikely.

The dangers of artificial intelligence, however, are very real, although not nearly so dramatic. Four years ago, in 2016, I published an article in Harvard Business Review outlining the ethical issues we need to address, ranging from long standing thought experiments like the trolley problem to issues surrounding accountability for automated decisions.

Unlike the Terminator scenario, these issues are clear and present. Consider the problem of data bias. Increasingly, algorithms determine what college we attend, if we get hired for a job and even who goes to prison and for how long. Unlike human decisions, these mathematical models are rarely questioned, but affect materially people’s lives.

The truth is that we need our algorithms to be explainable, auditable and transparent. Just because the possibility of our machines turning on us is fairly remote, doesn’t mean we don’t need too address more subtle, but all to real, dangers. We should build our systems to serve humanity, not the other way around.

The Slow-Moving Climate Crisis

Climate change is an issue that seems distant and political. To most people, basic needs like driving to work, heating their homes and doing basic household chores are much more top of mind than the abstract dangers of a warming planet. Yet the perils of climate change are, in fact, very clear and present.

Consider that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has found that, since 1980, there have been at least 258 weather and climate disasters where overall damages reached or exceeded $1 billion and that the total cost of these events has been more than $1.7 trillion. That’s an enormous amount of money.

Yet it pales in comparison to what we can expect in the future. A 2018 climate assessment published by the US government warned that we can expect climate change to “increasingly affect our trade and economy, including import and export prices and U.S. businesses with overseas operations and supply chains,” and had similar concerns with regard to our health, safety and quality of life.

There have been, of course, some efforts to slow the increase of carbon in our atmosphere that causes climate change such as the Paris Climate Agreement. However, these efforts are merely down payments to stem the crisis and, in any case, few countries are actually meeting their Paris targets. The US pulled out of the accord entirely.

The Debt Time Bomb

The US national debt today stands at about 23.5 trillion dollars or roughly 110% of GDP. That’s a very large, but not catastrophic number. The deficit in 2020 was expected to be roughly $1 trillion, or about four percent of GDP, but with the impact of the Coronavirus, we can expect it to be at least two to three times that now.

Considering that the economy of the United States grows at about two percent a year on average, any deficit above that level is unsustainable. Clearly, we are far beyond that now and, with baby boomers beginning to retire in massive numbers, Medicare spending is set to explode. At some point, these bills will have to be paid.

Yet focusing solely on financial debt misses a big part of the picture. Not only have we been overspending and under-taxing, we’ve also been massively under investing. Consider that the American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that we need to spend $4.5 trillion to repair our broken infrastructure. Add that infrastructure debt to our financial and environmental debt it likely adds up to $30-$40 trillion, or roughly 150%-200% of GDP.

Much like the dangers of artificial intelligence and the climate crisis, not to mention the other inevitable crises like the new pandemics that are sure to come, we will eventually have to pay our debts. The only question is how long we want to allow the interest to pile up.

The Visceral Abstract

Some years ago, I wrote about a concept I called the visceral abstract. We often fail to realize how obscure concepts affect our daily lives. The strange theories of quantum mechanics, for example, make modern electronics possible. Einstein’s relativity helps calibrate our GPS satellites. Darwin’s natural selection helps us understand diseases like the Coronavirus.

In much the same way, we find it easy to ignore dangers that don’t seem clear and present. Terminator machines hunting us down in the streets is terrifying, but the very real dangers of data bias in our artificial intelligence systems is easy to dismiss. We worry how to pay the mortgage next month, but the other debts mounting fade into the background.

The news isn’t all bad, of course. Clearly, the Internet has made it far easier to cope with social distancing. Technologies such as gene sequencing and supercomputing simulations make it more likely that we will find a cure or a vaccine. We have the capacity for both petty foolishness and extreme brilliance.

The future is not inevitable. It is what we make it. We can choose, as we have in the past, to invest in our ability to withstand crises and mitigate their effects, or we can choose to sit idly by and give ourselves up to the whims of fate. We pay the price either way. How we pay it is up to us.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Why Consumers Demand Purpose-Led Brands

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Authenticity as a Differentiator

Why Consumers Demand Purpose-Led Brands

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the past, competitive advantage was primarily defined by two metrics: price and feature set. A better product at a lower cost was the undeniable formula for market dominance. That formula is now obsolete. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that in today’s hyper-transparent, socially conscious economy, the ultimate non-replicable differentiator Authenticity. Consumers — particularly younger generations — are no longer just buying products; they are funding missions, endorsing values, and investing in brands that clearly and consistently demonstrate a purpose beyond profit. They demand purpose-led brands, and they use their purchasing power as a moral compass.

Authenticity is the seamless, genuine alignment between what a brand says, what a brand does, and what a brand believes. It is the absence of the “Purpose Gap” — the space between stated values (on the website) and observable behavior (in the supply chain or corporate policy). In the age of social media, where a single misstep or act of hypocrisy can be exposed globally and lead to immediate reputational crisis (often termed “cancel culture”), this gap is an existential threat. Conversely, a brand that lives its purpose creates an emotional resonance that transcends mere transaction, fostering loyalty that is fiercely resilient to price competition and feature parity.

The Three Pillars of Authentic Differentiation

For organizations to embed authenticity and purpose as strategic differentiators, they must focus on three core pillars:

1. Consistency Across the Human Experience (Internal Alignment): Purpose must be lived first by the people. Employees are the brand’s first and most vocal authenticators. If the purpose doesn’t inform hiring, talent development, and daily operational policies, it fails immediately. This internal alignment is the bedrock of credibility that attracts and retains mission-driven talent, fueling the engine of innovation.
2. Transparency in Action and Failure (Proof, Not Claims): Customers are skeptical of glossy claims. Authenticity requires radical transparency in demonstrating how the purpose is achieved. This means sharing progress metrics, admitting to shortcomings, and disclosing the difficult trade-offs made in pursuit of the mission. Proof of effort and an honest accounting of failure is more valuable than a claim of perfection.
3. Co-Creation of Impact (Customer Empowerment): Purpose-led brands empower consumers to be active participants in the mission, not just passive donors. By allowing consumers to see their purchase directly contribute to the stated purpose, the brand moves from being a seller of goods to a facilitator of shared impact, deepening loyalty and providing critical feedback on how the mission can be innovated.

“Purpose is not a marketing campaign you run. It’s a design constraint you live by. If it doesn’t cost you something, it’s not a real purpose, and your customers know it.”

Case Study 1: TOMS – Institutionalizing Purpose-Driven Giving

The Challenge:

TOMS entered the highly competitive, low-barrier-to-entry footwear market, needing a powerful, unique reason for consumers to choose them over established, cheaper, or more fashionable brands.

The Authenticity Solution:

TOMS institutionalized purpose through its One for One® model. By making a direct, measurable commitment — for every pair of shoes purchased, a pair was given to a person in need — TOMS made its purpose a non-negotiable part of the product’s identity. The purchase wasn’t just acquiring footwear; it was participation in a charitable act. This wasn’t charity tacked on; it was the core business model, creating immediate, powerful differentiation and focusing early innovation efforts on scalable giving logistics.

The Market Impact:

This model created an instant, powerful emotional connection, turning customers into advocates who marketed the mission. While the model itself evolved over time (later shifting to commit one-third of profits to grassroots efforts), the original authenticity established TOMS as a pioneer of the purpose-led business. It proved that purpose, when baked into the economic structure, can justify a price premium and build profound loyalty that traditional advertising simply cannot achieve.

Case Study 2: Patagonia – Consistency and Environmental Advocacy

The Challenge:

Patagonia operates in the apparel industry, notorious for fast fashion, high waste, and opaque supply chains. Their challenge was maintaining authenticity while scaling globally, knowing that every business decision could be viewed as a compromise to their core environmental mission.

The Authenticity Solution:

Patagonia differentiates by making difficult, often counter-intuitive decisions that prove their commitment. Key examples include their infamous “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign, which directly challenged consumerism, and their dedication to repairing gear, not just replacing it, demonstrating a commitment to product longevity and the circular economy. Crucially, they use radical transparency regarding their supply chain, disclosing environmental footprints, and actively lobbying for climate policy changes—sometimes even taking political stances that risk short-term sales (e.g., suing federal governments over land protection).

The Market Impact:

Patagonia’s actions consistently reinforce its purpose as an environmental activist disguised as a clothing company. This consistency creates deep trust; consumers know that buying Patagonia is an endorsement of specific, aggressive environmental values. This dedication focuses their innovation on material science and durability, while their authenticity allows them to maintain a premium price point and creates a customer base that views the brand as an ally, not just a vendor. This is anti-fragile loyalty — loyalty that is strengthened, not weakened, by the brand’s ethical stance and political action.

The New Mandate: Purpose as the Core Innovation

The time for Purpose Washing
is over. Today’s consumers have highly sophisticated BS detectors and the digital tools to verify claims. For organizations seeking sustainable innovation, the purpose itself must become the core innovation. This means asking: How can our reason for being create value not just for shareholders, but for the world?

Authenticity is the dividend paid on decades of consistent, purpose-led behavior. It is the only true non-replicable competitive advantage remaining in a world where technology and feature parity are easily achieved. Leaders must stop viewing purpose as a charitable add-on and start treating it as a strategic design constraint for every business decision and innovation cycle. When you integrate your purpose so deeply that removing it would fundamentally destroy your business model, you have achieved authentic differentiation. That is the innovation that wins the future.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Overcoming the Top 3 Barriers to Customer-Centricity

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Overcoming the Top 3 Barriers to Customer-Centricity

GUEST POST from Alain Thys

I just finished a presentation for the leadership team of a European travel company that wanted to better understand the barriers they would face on their journey to true customer-centricity. And what they could do about it.

It was a good excuse to give a 2022 update to some of my older thinking on the topic. And while I can’t really share the presentation, I’m including as summary of the Top 3 barriers below. In case you find them of interest.

BARRIER #1: Lack of Clarity

Everyone wants to be customer centric, but no one explains what that means in practice. Not just to agree on what a great customer experience looks like. But also to think through its implications for the business.

What changes does Aïsha need to plan in her logistics department? What return can shareholders expect for investing in ‘happy faces’? What new developments do distributors and ecosystem partners need to plan for? And are any of these implications realistic within available timelines and budgets?

Without this clarity, everyone will interpret ‘being customer-centric’ in its own way, so initiatives will go in a thousand directions. Or simply grind to a halt because of an operational or financial disconnect.

Either way, with the best of intentions, the only certainty is that customers will have a variable experience depending on the touchpoint, person or time of day.

Overcoming the Barrier: Clearly describe your customer experience. What are you promising? How will you make it happen? And what does it mean for each of your internal and external stakeholders? And before you hit the ‘start’ button, check whether all of your ideas are realistic.

BARRIER #2: Lack of Empathy

Whenever a leadership team embraces customer-centricity, the buzzwords and targets start flying around. Metrics like Net Promoter, customer ease or new kid on the block TLM appear in PowerPoint decks and we focus everything on driving the numbers.

But as management teams get excited, those around them care a lot less. Employees prefer meaningful work and decent salaries over KPIs. Shareholders may not see why they should sacrifice short-term profit for customer smiles. Distribution and ecosystem partners have got their hands full in running their own business.

The result is that strategies are implemented because you say so as a leader. This compliance often works in the short-term. But it disintegrates when processes, negotiations, and culture get in the way. Or when the next budget cut or senior executive comes around.

Overcoming the Barrier: Anchor your customer-centricity drive in the culture by reframing it into what matters to your different stakeholders. Connect the customer experience to the values and culture of those who work for you. Show your shareholders how smiles and money go hand in hand. Engage your ecosystem to create a common vision, instead of imposing yours. Make the strategy theirs, instead of yours.

BARRIER #3: Lack of Vision

Customer teams focus most, if not all, of their attention on improving the customer’s experience based on feedback and competitive benchmarks. Rightly so. Dropping the ball on a touchpoint or moment may cost dearly in both loyalty and revenue.

But too much focus on ‘continuous improvement’ can blind us to the experience that ‘should exist’ tomorrow. In today’s economy, the last best experience the customers had anywhere, become their expectation everywhere. It’s just that they can’t tell what it is before they’ve had it. At which point, we’re too late.

Unfair? Totally. But also reality.

Overcoming the Barrier: Keep improving today, but allocate at least 20% of your time to imagining the customer’s future that ‘should exist’. Look at life through the eyes of your customer and prototype experiences they cannot imagine today. Be the one who raises the expectation bar, so it forces others to follow.

I’m not saying these are the only barriers. But if you tackle them, you’ve probably avoided some of the biggest pitfalls to customer-centricity out there.

May the customer force be with you!

Image credit: Pixabay

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Fostering Inclusive Innovation Environments

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Designing for Diversity

Fostering Inclusive Innovation Environments - Designing for Diversity

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

We live in an age where innovation is the ultimate currency of business survival. Yet, too many organizations pursue innovation using a narrow, homogenous lens. They gather teams of like-minded individuals, often with similar backgrounds and training, and wonder why their breakthroughs are incremental rather than disruptive. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that the most powerful, often untapped engine for exponential innovation is Diversity — specifically, the deliberate design of truly Inclusive Innovation Environments. Diversity is not a compliance metric; it is a profound competitive necessity, particularly in the creation of global products and AI systems.

Diversity, in all its dimensions — cognitive, experiential, cultural, and demographic — brings a wider array of perspectives, mental models, and pain points to the problem-solving table. However, diversity without inclusion is merely a census count. Inclusion is the act of creating a climate where every individual feels psychologically safe to contribute their unique perspective, challenge the status quo, and bring their “whole self” to the work. When inclusion is fostered, diverse inputs lead directly to superior outputs: more robust testing of assumptions, earlier identification of blind spots (including dangerous algorithmic bias), and the creation of products and services that resonate across varied global markets with reduced risk of cultural failure.

The Three Pillars of Inclusive Innovation Design

To successfully shift from mandated diversity to organic, inclusive innovation, organizations must focus on three core design pillars:

1. De-biasing the Problem Frame: Innovation often fails because the problem is defined too narrowly, based on the experience of the dominant group. Inclusive design mandates empathy research that actively seeks out and centers marginalized experiences. This involves techniques like “extreme user” interviews and mandatory cross-functional, diverse ideation teams to ensure the problem frame is broad enough to serve all potential customers, from rural users to global citizens.
2. Formalizing Psychological Safety: Creative risk-taking—the heart of innovation—cannot happen in an environment where people fear speaking up or making mistakes. Psychological safety must be formalized through explicit team norms, such as Inclusion Nudges (behavioral prompts that encourage equitable participation), and leadership commitment that celebrates “informed iteration” (learning from failure) rather than punishing it. This is essential for encouraging honest critique of an idea, regardless of who proposed it.
3. Designing for Cognitive Diversity (The “How”): Beyond demographics, true innovation power comes from blending different ways of thinking — analytic vs. intuitive, divergent vs. convergent, or specialists vs. generalists. Leaders must intentionally build teams that feature constructive abrasion, where diverse cognitive styles are encouraged to challenge one another respectfully, leading to solutions that are stress-tested from multiple angles before they hit the market.

“Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance. But true innovation is having your song played, your moves celebrated, and the playlist changed because of your input.”

Case Study 1: Microsoft and the Accessible Controller

The Challenge:

Traditional gaming controllers, designed for two-handed dexterity, excluded millions of gamers with physical disabilities. The innovation problem was framed too narrowly, focusing only on the “average” user.

The Inclusive Innovation Solution:

Microsoft’s development of the Xbox Adaptive Controller was a masterclass in inclusive design. The project wasn’t led by a single internal R&D team; it was a deep collaboration with external organizations dedicated to accessibility and, critically, with users with various physical limitations who became co-designers. They focused on a modular design that could adapt to the user’s specific needs, not force the user to adapt to the technology.

The Innovation Impact:

By centering the experience of “extreme users,” Microsoft created a product that not only opened up the multi-billion-dollar gaming market to a previously excluded demographic but also established a new, modular standard for human-computer interaction. The innovation was driven by the empathy gained through actively including and listening to a traditionally marginalized user group, demonstrating that designing for the edge ultimately expands the core market and elevates the entire product category.

Case Study 2: IDEO and the Innovation of Bathroom Fixtures

The Challenge:

A client asked IDEO to redesign a commercial bathroom fixture — a seemingly mundane, mature product—for better user experience and efficiency. The initial team, composed mostly of male engineers, risked designing based on their own, limited perspective.

The Inclusive Innovation Solution:

IDEO deliberately staffed the project with a demographically and cognitively diverse team, crucially including women from various backgrounds. Through ethnographic research, the female team members immediately identified and centered a critical, overlooked pain point: women often use the bathroom differently (e.g., using sinks to adjust clothing or makeup, the height of mirrors relative to professional dress, etc.). This insight, which the male-centric team would have missed, allowed them to re-frame the problem from mere water efficiency to improving the entire grooming ecosystem.

The Innovation Impact:

The resulting fixtures and designs addressed a wider spectrum of needs, leading to innovations in mirror placement, shelf space utility, and overall ergonomics that provided superior value and differentiation. This simple staffing decision demonstrated that when a diverse team is empowered to challenge the existing artifact based on varied lived experiences, the resulting innovation is fundamentally deeper, more empathetic, and commercially stronger, reducing the risk of creating a product that only half the population truly values.

The Leadership Mandate: From Compliance to Creativity

Designing for diversity is the ultimate act of human-centered innovation. It requires a shift in leadership focus: from viewing diversity as a mandate to viewing it as a strategic accelerator of creativity. This means actively dismantling the homogeneous echo chambers that characterize too much of corporate decision-making.

Leaders must be accountable for the quality of inclusion, not just the quantity of diversity. By adhering to the three pillars — de-biasing the problem frame, formalizing psychological safety, and designing for cognitive diversity — organizations can unlock the full, immense creative power of their people. Innovation will not thrive in silence or uniformity. It requires the beautiful, constructive chaos of difference.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Top 5 Tech Trends Artificial Intelligence is Monitoring

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Top 5 Tech Trends Artificial Intelligence is Monitoring

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Artificial Intelligence is constantly scanning the Internet to identify the technology trends that are the most interesting and potentially the most impactful. At present, according to artificial intelligence, the Top Five Technology Trends being tracked for futurology are:

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI): Artificial Intelligence is the development of computer systems that can perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. AI research is highly technical and specialized, and is deeply divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other.

2. Autonomous Vehicles: Autonomous vehicles are vehicles that can navigate without human input, relying instead on sensors, GPS, and computer technology to determine their location and trajectory. Autonomous vehicles are used in a variety of applications, from consumer transportation to military drones.

3. Virtual Reality (VR): Virtual reality is a computer-generated simulation of a three-dimensional environment that can be interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way by a person using special electronic equipment. VR uses technologies such as gesture control and stereoscopic displays to create immersive experiences for the user.

4. Augmented Reality (AR): Augmented reality is a technology that superimposes computer-generated content onto the real world to enhance or supplement a user’s physical experience. AR is used in a variety of contexts, from gaming to industrial design.

5. Internet of Things (IoT): The Internet of Things is the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and connectivity that enable these objects to connect and exchange data. The IoT has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of our lives, from manufacturing and transportation to healthcare and energy management.

It’s obviously amusing that artificial intelligence considers artificial intelligence to be the number one technology trend at present in its futurology work. I would personally rank it number one, but I would rank autonomous vehicles and virtual reality lower. I would put augmented reality and IoT number two and number three respectively, but what do I know …

Image credit: Pixabay

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If You Can Be One Thing – Be Effective

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If You Can Be One Thing - Be Effective

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you’re asked to be faster, choose to be more effective. There’s nothing slower than being fast at something that doesn’t matter.

If you’re given a goal to be more productive, instead, improve effectiveness. There’s nothing less productive than making the wrong thing.

If you’re measured on efficiency, focus on effectiveness. Customers don’t care about your efficiency when you ship them the wrong product.

If you’re asked to improve quality, that’s good because quality is an important element of effectiveness.

If you’re asked to demonstrate more activity, focus on progress, which is activity done in an effective way.

If you’re asked to improve your team, ask them how they can be more effective and do that.

Regardless of the question, the answer is effectiveness.

Image credit: Unsplash

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