What are Strategic and Market Foresight?

by Braden Kelley

In my previous article What’s Next – Through the Looking Glass we explored the notion that time is not linear and this is a key part of the FutureHacking™ mindset.

To paraphrase, we get to the future not in a straight line, but by hopping from lily pad to lily pad and as we do so our landings create ripples outward in all directions and our jump direction choices and the amplitude of the ripples at each waypoint determines the shape of our path choice and our view on the potential future. And ultimately futurology and futurism are the disciplines of exploring potential, possible and preferable futures.

Only from a continuous commitment to this exploration can any organization have any chance of ongoing success. But trying to make sense of the future and to find productive ways to shape it – feels incredibly dauting to most people.

To simplify this complexity, I created the FutureHacking™ methodology and tools to enable us average humans to become our own futurist.

“FutureHacking™ is the art and science of getting to the future first.”

This is our goal. To get better at finding the best possible path and the best ripples to amplify. Doing so optimizes our distance and chosen directions so that we arrive at our preferred future. The FutureHacking™ methodology and tools make this not only possible, but accessible, so that we’ll put in the work – and reap the benefits!

This article is another in a series designed to make foresight and futurology accessible to the average business professional. Below we will look at what Strategic and Market Foresight are and how they drive ongoing business success. First some definitions:

Strategic Foresight is about combining methods of futures work with those of strategic management. It is about understanding upcoming external changes in relation to internal capabilities and drivers.

Market Foresight is about the consideration of possible and probable futures in the organization’s relevant business environment, and about identifying new opportunities in that space.

Source: Aalto University

Strategic Foresight and Market Foresight are two tools in our toolbox as we sharpen our focus on the potential and possible futures as we work to define a preferable future and a path to creating it.

Market Foresight gives us permission to explore how the market we compete in is likely to change as we move forward. This includes looking at how customers may change, how their consumption of existing products and services might change, and how changing customer wants and needs will create the potential for new products, and services, and even markets. Economics, demographics, trends and other factors all have a factor to play here, and we need methods for exploring the impact of each.

Strategic Foresight gives us permission to make shifts in strategy. The magic happens when we productively look both internally and externally to identify the most important changes that we can influence AND that we would monitor. The better we can understand the external changes most likely to occur (or that we want to occur), the more focus we can bring to identifying the internal capabilities that we will need to strengthen and the capabilities that we will need to build OR to buy & integrate.

The most successful organizations do a good job of matching their timeline for strategic and capability changes to the pace of market changes that are occurring. And while not explicitly mentioned, the pacing and branching of technology is a big consideration in both Strategic Foresight and Market Foresight.

Good Market Foresight will give you a better view to where the lily pads will be, and good Strategic Foresight (and investments) will help strengthen your jumping legs and propel you through a more optimal path – increasing your chances of getting to the future first!

Public resources for those that want to learn more about Strategic Foresight:

To learn more about Market Foresight, increase your knowledge of:

Market Research methods
Trendwatching/Trendhunting
Innovation frameworks

FutureHacking™ is Within Our Grasp

I’ve created a collection of 20+ FutureHacking™ tools to help you be your own futurist.

These tools will be available to license soon, and I’ll be holding virtual, and possibly in-person, workshops to explain how to use these simple tools to identify a range of potential futures, to select a preferred future, and activities to help influence its realization.

I think you’ll really like them, but in the meantime, I invite you to share your thoughts on how you look at and plan for the future in the comments below.

Finally, make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter to get our weekly collection of articles, along with updates on the forthcoming FutureHacking™ set of tools.

Keep innovating!

Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Innovating in a Downturn

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Innovating in a Downturn

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Downturns are wake-up calls. They ask us to sharpen our focus and be more disciplined in our allocation of resources. It’s a tough-love regimen that can make our enterprises more healthy as long as we commit to the program.

There are three ways to get a return on innovation, each fit for a different purpose, as follows:

1. Differentiation

Differentiation is key for acquiring new customers. Your goal is to overcome the inertia of the status quo, and to do so, you must make an offer that is sufficiently disruptive that a prospect will come over to your side. Slightly better doesn’t cut it. You need to focus on one vector of innovation that is lights-out superior and delivers a value proposition others cannot match. Then you need to marry your offering to a customer challenge that is sufficiently urgent and important to require immediate attention, downturn or not, creating a whole product that fulfills a compelling reason to buy. That in hand, you need to rotate your marketing and sales coverage to play most of your games on this chosen turf. None of this requires heroics, but all of it goes against whatever inertial momentum inside your own enterprise remains from a decade or more of leveraging economic tailwinds.

2. Neutralization

Neutralization is key to both defending, or even expanding, your customer base when a challenger throws their hat in the ring. They are making the disruptive offer, and your goal is to get to good enough, fast enough. This allows your customer base to reject the challenger offer, good as it may be, because in the greater scheme of things, with your other value add, plus your good-enough response, it is safer and more sensible to stick with you. The key here is speed. Innovation teams want to have the best offer in the market, but there is no time for that. It is a hard ask for them to prioritize good enough, but any delay leaves your core business exposed. On the other hand, if your offer really is good enough, your account teams can pitch a consolidation offering to the customer base which can replace one or more of their current point-product vendors via a suite offering from you. Done well, you can grow share of wallet share in a downturn, which is by far the most profitable path to take.

3. Optimization

Optimization is key to maintaining viability in a downturn. Revenues are likely down, which means operating expenses must follow suit. This is particularly important in a period of rising interest rates where taking on additional debt is truly dangerous. Done well, optimization not only saves money and frees up resources to invest in differentiation or neutralization, but it also improves the customer experience by streamlining the processes that underpin the core of your business. The key is to combine the value disciplines of operational excellence and customer intimacy, focusing them on the processes that are unnecessarily slow, complex, or onerous. Again, the challenge is to overcome the lulling force of inertia. Change is never welcome, as there is a J-curve in every learning curve, and in a downturn, people are fearful of losing any ground even temporarily.

One Final Point

These three paths of innovation do not blend. Combining any two will dilute the impact of both. This leads to waste at a time when return on investment is crucial. You can run the playbooks in parallel, but you must not let them merge.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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Shedding Old Habits for New Possibilities

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Unlearning to Learn

Shedding Old Habits for New Possibilities

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In a world characterized by exponential change — where AI capabilities evolve every quarter and market demands shift before the quarterly report is filed — learning is often cited as the key to survival. Yet, leaders consistently overlook the prerequisite for true innovative learning: Unlearning. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I contend that the greatest obstacle to embracing new possibilities isn’t a lack of knowledge or resources; it’s the weight of what we already know. Our past successes, entrenched processes, and deeply held technical expertise act as cognitive anchors, preventing us from navigating uncharted waters.

Unlearning is the deliberate process of discarding obsolete information, mindsets, and behavioral routines that are no longer relevant to the current reality. It is not forgetting, but rather making room for new knowledge by consciously retiring outdated, suboptimal habits. This is a profound human and organizational challenge. We are biologically wired to favor efficiency and certainty, meaning our brains prefer to use existing cognitive pathways. For organizations, this manifests as organizational memory bias, where past triumphs dictate future strategy, causing us to learn a new tool but insist on applying it using the old, linear process. The key is shedding the old process.

The Three Strategic Imperatives of Unlearning

For organizations to transform unlearning from an abstract concept into a strategic advantage, they must focus on three core imperatives:

De-Crystallizing Core Assumptions (The ‘Why’): Challenge the sacred cows—the beliefs about customers, competitors, or processes that have been true for a decade but may be failing now. This includes unlearning technical assumptions, such as the belief that data must remain siloed, which prevents modern AI integration.
Creating Friction for Automation (The ‘How’): Old habits are dangerous when they become automated and unquestioned. We must introduce controlled friction points—such as mandatory cross-functional rotation or requiring new-hire perspectives in legacy project reviews—to force teams to pause, reflect, and consciously choose a new path over the default path. This is a deliberate intervention against autopilot thinking.
Decoupling Identity from Expertise (The ‘Who’): The most senior and successful employees often have the most to unlearn, as their identity is intrinsically linked to their obsolete expertise. Leaders must establish psychological safety where unlearning is framed not as an admission of individual failure, but as a continuous commitment to organizational relevance.

“Your past success is your organization’s greatest vulnerability. Don’t let yesterday’s win anchor you to tomorrow’s failure.” — Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: Netflix – Unlearning the Physical Asset Model

The Challenge:

In the early 2000s, Netflix achieved remarkable success by disrupting video rental with a superior mail-order, DVD-based model. Their core organizational competency was logistics — managing physical inventory, shipping, and returns. This success became a massive cognitive anchor when high-speed internet made streaming possible. Their deeply ingrained knowledge of the physical world actively worked against their digital future.

The Unlearning Solution:

Netflix’s leadership, led by Reed Hastings, made a conscious, painful decision to unlearn their core asset. They had to shed the identity of a logistics company and embrace the identity of a technology and content company. This meant separating the DVD business and the streaming business, forcing the streaming unit to build entirely new competencies and metrics focused on digital delivery and latency, rather than physical inventory and postal service efficiency. They had to unlearn the “perfect” physical delivery process.

The Innovation Impact:

This deliberate act of self-disruption and unlearning allowed Netflix to build the foundation for its streaming dominance. By voluntarily creating friction and letting go of the habits that made them successful, they freed capital, talent, and attention to master the new competencies required for the digital era, ultimately redefining an entire industry.

Case Study 2: Haier – Unlearning the Traditional Management Hierarchy

The Challenge:

Haier, a massive Chinese appliance manufacturer, faced the global challenge of becoming truly customer-centric in a bureaucratic, centrally managed corporate structure. Their organizational muscle was built on command-and-control and mass production efficiency—a model that stifled local innovation and responsiveness.

The Unlearning Solution:

Haier’s CEO, Zhang Ruimin, initiated the RenDanHeYi model, a radical exercise in organizational unlearning. They abolished nearly all traditional middle management and restructured the company into thousands of small, autonomous business units called Microenterprises (MEs). These MEs were forced to become self-governing, find their own customers, and manage their own P&L (profit and loss) against the market. They had to unlearn the security and structure of guaranteed corporate security and centralized decision-making.

The Innovation Impact:

This massive organizational unlearning forced responsiveness at the edge. By shedding the old habits of central planning and top-down control, Haier enabled its MEs to rapidly innovate and localize products (e.g., specialized washing machines for specific niche markets). The shift created an internal entrepreneurial ecosystem, proving that organizational structure itself is an outdated habit that must be unlearned to achieve true agility and customer-centricity.

Conclusion: The L&D Imperative and the Courage to Be Obsolete

Unlearning is the highest-leverage activity in a change-driven environment. It requires leaders to demonstrate courage to be obsolete — to admit that the ways that brought them success yesterday will likely be the source of their failure tomorrow.

The L&D function must pivot its focus from teaching new skills to facilitating the shedding of old, limiting beliefs and processes. This is done by actively building the three strategic imperatives—challenging core assumptions, creating friction for automated habits, and decoupling identity from expertise. Stop asking only, “What must we learn next?” and start by asking the harder, more critical question: “What must we willingly let go of first?” Only by creating empty cognitive and structural space can you truly plant the seeds of new, emerging possibilities.

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.

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Brewing a Better Customer Experience

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Brewing A Better Customer Experience

by Braden Kelley

There is probably nothing more important to the ongoing success of a business than a consistently excellent customer experience.

How many brands are you loyal to that provide a bad customer experience?

Customer Experience (CX) is more than customer service, more than the brand image your sales and marketing work so hard to project. In simple terms, everything your vendors and employees do on behalf of the company contributes to the customer experience.

But most organizations, and even customer experience professionals don’t think in these terms. It gets too complicated for most organizations. It’s much easier to think about customer touchpoints and pain points that can be identified and improved in a quest to create a great customer experience.

But what defines a great customer experience?

Seven Characteristics of a Great Customer Experience

It’s easy to get to know you
Clear communication
Transparency in what to expect
Effortless transactions (not just shopping, but problem solving and troubleshooting too)
Intentional friction (don’t over-optimize ALL transactions, sometimes waiting actually creates value by teasing the senses)
Interactions that make you feel valued not just as a customer, but as a person too
Occasional unexpected moments of delight

The Seven Characteristics of a Great Customer Experience serve as a set of guiding principles as you train employees, as you engage in service design, and as you pursue technology upgrades.

And what are the most important steps in a successful journey to a great customer experience?

Seven Steps to a Better Customer Experience

Make a shared commitment as an organization

Involve your employees in the conversation to make sure they’re committed and have a chance to help prioritize areas of opportunity

Identify the key components of your current customer experience

What creates value for customers? What can’t you change because doing so would destroy value?

Identify your differentiated customer groupings

Customers are not a homogeneous group. Create personas for a handful of customer groups that behave in distinctly different ways.

Talk to customers

Too many customer experience efforts are birthed and customer journey maps built without the team ever speaking to actual customers. Don’t assume!

Create a customer journey map

Make sure you map not only the customer touchpoints and pain points, but any points where lingering actually creates value. Focus each journey map on a single customer persona.

Create a prioritized action plan

It’s not enough to map the customer journey, people need to be excited about improving it and have a clear shared vision of when and where this is going to happen

Monitor progress vs. a baseline

Creating a journey map and identifying improvement opportunities is important. But, instrumenting and measuring progress towards a better customer experience is a step that many miss. And this step is key to sustaining excitement, momentum, and support for a customer-centric culture over time. This requires technology.

The Seven Steps to a Better Customer Experience provide a simple framework to guide your pursuit of an improved customer experience, not just in the short-term, but also as part of a continuous improvement commitment.

Going Beyond Touchpoints and Pain Points

When CX professionals begin mapping customer journeys, we often do so through the lens of touchpoints, pain points and improvement opportunities. The purpose of these activities is to give everyone a shared picture of the steps a customer goes through and the exchanges that occur between the customer and the company across a certain period of time – a journey.

But, we can more richly understand the customer experience if we go beyond a touchpoint mindset and instead explore the interfaces at which customer interactions occur, the information exchanged, and the intelligence and insights that emerge from each exchange.

In my recent white paper Riding the Data Wave to Digital Disruption I introduced the Five Keys to Digital Transformation, which are:

Information
Interfaces
Intelligence
Interactions
Insights

When considered more broadly, the Five Keys to Digital Transformation can be used to inform your customer experience improvement pursuits.

Central to customer experience is information. We must know what information customers need to be successful with our products and services. We must know what information our employees require to be successful in their job performance in service of our customers and our organization’s success.

Having good intelligence gathering in place provides us with the inputs we need to inform course corrections and better strategic decisions in service of our customers and our company.

Identifying actionable insights helps us understand why customers behave the way they do, what they value, what they prioritize, and ultimately what a good customer experience might look like.

At the edge of your organization are your interfaces, places where the organization connects with suppliers, partners, employees, and customers. Interfaces are the place where information, intelligence and insights are found and interactions occur. The quality of your interfaces is usually determined by ease of use. Interfaces can include your web site, social media, salesforce, call centers, etc.

Interactions occur at the interfaces of the organization. Interactions don’t have to involve people, but often do. We have built interactive voice response systems, chatbots, and artificial intelligence systems to streamline our interactions with our customers. We must consider the customer experience upfront in any technology development project, otherwise we risk implementing a system that will actually cost us customers.

Consciously designing and continuously improving our interactions via delightful interfaces with the right information, intelligence and insights will turbo charge our customer experience potential.

Assembling the Ingredients into the Final Brew

In this article we’ve discussed three distinct layers of crafting a better customer experience:

Focusing on the Seven Characteristics of a Great Customer Experience
Working through the Seven Steps to a Better Customer Experience
Leveraging the Five Keys to Digital Transformation in your customer experience efforts

And much a hand-pulled Guinness, when the three layers appear well-executed together, it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

Consciously designing effective information exchanges at efficient interfaces with delightful interactions should be your north star to experiences you can be proud of.

Pursuing this north star as you craft a better customer experience will ensure that it does indeed have the characteristics of a great one – in the first iteration and after improvement you undertake thereafter.

You now know what it takes to be a customer experience craftsperson. Enjoy the journey!

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Prototyping the Future

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Experimenting with Emerging Possibilities

Prototyping the Future

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In the high-stakes game of organizational change, inertia is the silent killer. Leaders often talk about innovation, but they are terrified of the risk associated with committing millions to an unproven concept. This fear traps organizations in a cycle of incrementalism. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that the most powerful antidote to this paralysis is prototyping. Prototyping is not merely a step in a design process; it is a mindset — a strategic, disciplined commitment to experimenting with the future in the present. It is the art of making the unknown tangible, allowing us to fail safely, learn quickly, and dramatically increase our Return on Learning (ROL).

We must shift from an obsession with traditional ROI (Return on Investment), which punishes failure, to prioritizing ROL (Return on Learning), which rewards clarity and speed. Prototyping the future requires moving from a culture obsessed with detailed planning to one that values informed iteration. It means creating low-fidelity, high-impact simulations of emerging possibilities — be it a new product, a process, or an entirely new business model. This commitment to creating fast, disposable versions of the future dramatically lowers the psychological cost of failure, fostering the psychological safety necessary for true breakthrough innovation. Whether it’s a cardboard model, a basic wireframe, or an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) simulation, the goal is to maximize the learning extracted per dollar spent.

The Three Imperatives of Strategic Prototyping

To successfully prototype the future, organizations must focus on three core strategic imperatives that accelerate learning and reduce risk:

1. De-Risking the Unknown with Speed: The primary function of a prototype is to identify and test the riskiest assumption in an emerging idea. It must be fast, cheap, and disposable. We aim to fail quickly and often at the conceptual stage, saving significant time and capital that would otherwise be wasted on building a perfect solution for the wrong problem.
2. Generating Empathy Through Tangibility: Abstract ideas are difficult for stakeholders and customers to critique meaningfully. A prototype — whether physical or digital (e.g., an Augmented Reality model) —forces interaction. This human interaction generates deep empathy and reveals hidden needs, emotional reactions, and critical user friction points that no spreadsheet or survey can capture.
3. Creating a Shared Vision: The future is difficult to discuss because everyone imagines it differently. A prototype serves as a Shared Artifact — a concrete, singular point of reference around which a team, and the entire organization, can align their vision, critique constructively, and unify their efforts. This speeds up decision-making and aligns cross-functional silos.

“Don’t fall in love with your first idea. Fall in love with the clarity your first prototype creates.” — Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: The IDEO Shopping Cart – Prototyping the Experience

The Challenge:

The design firm IDEO was challenged by a major grocery chain to redesign the common supermarket shopping cart. The initial, narrow focus was on engineering and durability, which would have resulted in only incremental changes.

The Prototyping Solution:

IDEO’s human-centered approach started not with engineering, but with experiential prototypes. The team quickly built several low-fidelity models using rudimentary materials (duct tape, bins, children’s seats) to test radically different concepts — like a cart with a built-in calculator or one with better maneuverability. They took these rough models into the grocery store for real-time testing, observing customer and employee interaction and failure points.

The Innovation Impact:

By prototyping the user experience rather than the final product, IDEO discovered critical, unarticulated needs—like improved maneuverability and safer child seating—that led to fundamental design shifts. The process proved that fast, visual, and highly interactive prototyping is the most efficient way to unlock breakthrough innovation by placing the human at the center of the learning loop.

Case Study 2: Amazon’s “Working Backwards” – Prototyping the Document

The Challenge:

Amazon, known for its high-velocity innovation, needed a mechanism to ensure that product teams were building things customers actually wanted and that ideas were vetted quickly without expensive software development.

The Prototyping Solution:

Amazon formalized a process called “Working Backwards,” which uses a document-based prototype. Before a single line of code is written, a team must write a Press Release (PR) announcing the finished product to the world. The PR is a one-page, customer-centric narrative explaining the product’s benefit, the problem it solves, and its release date. Accompanying the PR is a detailed FAQ and mock Customer Reviews.

The Innovation Impact:

This simple, text-based prototype forces immediate clarity and user focus. Writing the press release first ensures the team can articulate the customer value proposition before spending any engineering time. If the PR isn’t compelling, the idea is instantly shelved or iterated upon. This low-fidelity, high-discipline prototyping method de-risks multi-million-dollar projects by ensuring the idea is sound and clearly focused on the human need before the execution even begins. It is the ultimate example of prototyping the communication and the value proposition.

Conclusion: Leading with Iteration and ROL

Prototyping the future is the most responsible way to lead change. It replaces the paralyzing certainty of the five-year plan with the agile confidence of constant, low-cost learning. Leaders must create the cultural conditions for this to thrive: namely, by celebrating fast learning and treating failed prototypes as valuable data points, thereby building an organization defined by high Psychological Safety and high ROL.

The innovation landscape moves too fast for slow, secretive, and large-scale commitments. By adopting the three imperatives—speed, empathy generation, and shared vision creation—through prototyping, you ensure that your organization remains perpetually adaptive.

“Stop trying to predict the future. Start building disposable versions of it.” — Braden Kelley

That is the definitive strategy for unlocking continuous, human-centered innovation.

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.

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Things I Occasionally Forget

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Things I Occasionally Forget

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Clean-sheet designs are fun, right up until they don’t launch.

When you feel the urge to do a clean-sheet design, go home early.

When you don’t know how to make it better, make it worse and do the opposite.

Without trying, there is no way to know if it will work.

Trying sometimes feels like dying.

But without trying, nothing changes.

Agreement is important, but only after the critical decision has been made.

When there’s 100% agreement, you waited too long to make the decision.

When it’s unclear who the customer is, ask “Whose problem will be solved?”

When the value proposition is unclear, ask ‘What problem will be solved?”

When your technology becomes mature, no one wants to believe it.

When everyone believes the technology is mature, you should have started working on the new technology four years ago.

If your projects are slow, blame your decision-making processes.

Two of the most important decisions: which projects to start and which to stop.

All the action happens at the interfaces, but that’s also where two spans of control come together and chafe.

If you want to understand your silos and why they don’t play nicely together, look at the organizational chart.

When a company starts up, the product sets the organizational structure.

Then, once a company is mature, the organizational structure constrains the product.

At the early stages of a project, there’s a lot of uncertainty.

And once the project is complete, there’s a lot of uncertainty.

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Measuring the Immeasurable

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Quantifying Culture and Psychological Safety

Measuring the Immeasurable

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

For decades, organizational leaders have dismissed culture as a ‘soft skill’ — a nice-to-have byproduct of good management, but too ethereal to track on a balance sheet. Meanwhile, psychological safety — the bedrock belief that one can speak up without fear of punishment or humiliation — has been treated as an abstract ideal. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I find this reliance on intuition and anecdote to be one of the greatest systemic failures in modern leadership. We cannot optimize what we do not measure. The innovation leaders of tomorrow must learn not just to value culture and safety, but to quantify their impact with the same rigor they apply to revenue and R&D spend.

The innovation economy is built on risk-taking, honest feedback, and rapid experimentation. All three of these behaviors are direct consequences of high psychological safety. If employees fear making a mistake, they will revert to safe, incremental thinking. If they fear criticizing the status quo, change and innovation dies in silence. The great leap forward is now possible because technology — specifically AI-driven analysis of communication and behavioral patterns — allows us to move from a subjective feeling (e.g., “Our culture feels collaborative”) to objective, actionable data that drives organizational change. This means treating culture as a leading indicator of innovation and performance.

The Psychological Safety Scorecard: From Feeling to Fact

To quantify the previously unquantifiable, we must shift our focus from traditional engagement surveys to measurable behaviors and systemic friction points. Here are the three key dimensions of the Psychological Safety Scorecard, metrics now possible through NLP (Natural Language Processing) analysis of communication data:

1. Speak-Up & Challenge Density: This measures the frequency and quality of dissent. How often do junior employees challenge senior leaders? We quantify the ratio of questions to statements in meetings, and the percentage of project feedback that contains a genuinely challenging idea. A high density of low-risk, candid communication is a strong sign of safety.
2. Failure-to-Learn Ratio: True safety is evident in how organizations handle failure. Instead of measuring failure rates, measure the time, resources, and documentation dedicated to post-mortem analysis and shared learning. If a failed project is quickly buried and the individual responsible is sidelined, the Failure-to-Learn Ratio is high (bad), indicating low psychological safety.
3. Cross-Boundary Interaction (Friction Score): Innovation often occurs at the intersection of departments. We quantify friction inherent in cross-functional interactions by measuring the number of approval loops and the sentiment (via communication analysis) when one team critiques another’s work. A low friction score indicates high cross-silo safety.

“Culture is what happens when the CEO leaves the room. If you can measure that behavior, you can change the organization.”

Case Study 1: Project Aristotle and the Google Teams

The Challenge:

Google, a company renowned for hiring the best and brightest, embarked on Project Aristotle to determine what made certain teams excel while others struggled. The hypothesis was that team performance was dependent on a mix of individual skills, tenure, or co-location — all easily measurable factors.

The Quantified Discovery:

After extensive data collection, they found that none of the traditional variables mattered as much as Psychological Safety. The most impactful metrics they identified were subtle, measurable behaviors: Conversation Turn-Taking (everyone on the team spoke roughly the same amount) and Social Sensitivity (team members were good at reading and responding to non-verbal cues). These metrics effectively quantified the feeling of safety. When team members felt safe to speak up and contribute equally, they took risks, shared knowledge, and, as a result, were consistently high-performing.

The Organizational Impact:

Google shifted its focus from optimizing individual talent to optimizing team dynamics. They now had quantifiable data points — a Psychological Safety Index — that could be trained, measured, and improved across the organization. This proved that culture is not only measurable but is the single greatest multiplier of intellectual capital and, critically, the speed of change adoption.

Case Study 2: The Healthcare Anomaly – Error Reporting as a Safety Metric

The Challenge:

In high-stakes healthcare systems, traditional leadership linked low reported error rates to high quality. However, this often masked a dangerous reality: providers were hiding errors and near-misses to avoid discipline, creating a fragile system and preventing organizational learning.

The Quantified Discovery:

Leading healthcare institutions began flipping the metric. Instead of punishing error, they incentivized Error Reporting Density and the Near-Miss Ratio. They realized that a high rate of “near-miss” reporting (incidents that almost caused harm) was a positive metric, signaling high psychological safety. It meant front-line staff felt safe enough to admit mistakes and warn the system. Furthermore, they measured the time-to-reporting for non-punitive errors. Rapid, high-volume reporting indicated a learning culture, while slow, sporadic reporting indicated a blaming culture.

The Organizational Impact:

By measuring the frequency and honesty of reporting — a direct proxy for psychological safety — these organizations created a genuine Learning System. This culture of candid feedback led to thousands of small, human-centered process innovations, ultimately leading to a verifiable reduction in actual patient harm events. The ability to measure the willingness to be vulnerable became the most important metric for both innovation and life-saving operational excellence.

Conclusion: Leadership’s New Accountability

Measuring culture and psychological safety is the new mandate for human-centered change leaders. We must stop treating engagement surveys as a once-a-year formality and start integrating real-time behavioral metrics into our organizational dashboards. This isn’t about surveillance; it’s about enabling exponential performance and accelerating change adoption.

The innovation premium — the added value derived from creativity, speed, and risk-taking — is directly dependent on a culture where people feel safe. By quantifying Speak-Up Density, the Failure-to-Learn Ratio, and Cross-Boundary Friction, we provide leadership with the actionable data required to dismantle fear and build a truly resilient, innovative organization. The C-suite must recognize that this investment in cultural quantification is the most essential infrastructure project of the digital age. Leaders must understand that if they can’t measure safety, they can’t manage change. The future belongs to those who make the invisible visible, transforming soft culture into hard, strategic competitive data.

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Are You Giving Your Customers Friction or Function?

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Former VP Of Amazon Preaches a Frictionless Experience

Are You Giving Your Customers Friction or Function?

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Customers hate friction. They want easy, no hassle, low/no effort experiences. In short, they want convenience. Our 2022 customer experience research findings confirm:

70% of customers would pay more if they knew they would receive a convenient experience.

75% would switch to a competitor if they found it more convenient to do business with.

68% of customers say that a convenient customer experience alone will make them come back to a brand or company.

Examples of friction include long wait times, difficulty finding contact information on a website, too many steps to make a purchase online and more. Frictionless is almost not noticed—until it is. At some point, customers realize how easy it is to do business with a company, and they like it. In fact, they like it so much, as the findings show, they will pay more and keep coming back.

There have been several books that focus on creating a frictionless, convenient experience. The first was The Effortless Experience by Matt Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick Delisi, which focused on the customer support experience. Then along came my book The Convenience Revolution, which included the entire customer experience, not just customer support. This was followed by a few more excellent contributions to the subject, the most recent being The Frictionless Organization by Bill Price and David Jaffe.

Bill Price was Amazon’s first global vice-president of customer service. When Jeff Bezos interviewed Price for the job in 1999, he asked Price what his philosophy was for running customer service. Price responded, “The best service is no service,” which became the title of his first book. Price believes that the best customer experience is to have everything set up so well that they don’t need to contact customer support.

Of course, that would be perfection, and perfection is not reality. Amazon may have perfectly executed on its side, but once the package leaves the Amazon warehouse, UPS, USPS, FedEx and other delivery companies take over. If they lose a package, who will the customer call? Amazon, of course. Even if it wasn’t Amazon’s fault, they still received the call and, of course, took ownership of the problem.

Price knows that a frictionless experience often goes unnoticed by the customer until they realize why they like doing business with that company or brand. But it does get noticed by the company providing the experience. It shows up in the form of higher customer satisfaction scores such as NPS (Net Promoter Score). Repeat business and loyalty also go up.

In their book, Price and Jaffe share several reasons why every business should be frictionless:

Being Frictionless Reduces Cost – There is a cost to setting up a process that’s easy for customers (and employees), but the ROI far exceeds the investment. When a company is easy to do business with, it doesn’t get nearly as many customer support calls, which can be a huge drain on the customer service budget. There are fewer returns and refunds. Websites are more effective. And more.

Being Frictionless Drives Customer and Revenue Growth – Price’s experience with Amazon proves that a high customer satisfaction score translates into more business. Amazon has some of the highest ratings in the business world, and its growth proves this model works.

Being Frictionless Delivers a True Competitive Advantage – The stats at the beginning of this article prove that point. No/low friction and convenience can help bulletproof a company from the competition.

Being Frictionless Enables Business Survival – The past several years have tested the best business leaders. Survival during the pandemic, through supply-chain issues, and now a recession proves that the best companies can survive with the right strategies. A frictionless experience is more important than ever.

When I interviewed Price on Amazing Business Radio, he made the perfect closing comments for this article. “It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have. What matters is that customers just want things to be easy for them. And if you don’t make it really simple and easy for customers, someone else will.”

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Pixabay

Check out my latest research in his Achieving Customer Amazement Study, Sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Inc.

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Bringing Your Innovation to Life

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The Power of Visual Storytelling

Bringing Your Innovation to Life

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

We live in an age defined by complexity and clutter. Revolutionary ideas, transformative products, and critical organizational changes often fail—not because the innovation itself is flawed, but because the story of the innovation is invisible. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I contend that in a world saturated with information, the ability to communicate impact is as vital as the ability to create it. The future of influence belongs to those who master Visual Storytelling: the strategic use of imagery, data visualization, and narrative to connect abstract concepts to human emotion and tangible benefit. This is how you bring your innovation to life, making it understandable, memorable, and — most importantly — adoptable.

Visual storytelling is far more than marketing; it’s a human-centered design principle applied to communication. Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, and we are wired to remember stories and images over lists of features or bullet points. For innovators, this means moving beyond verbose white papers and dense slide decks. It means finding the single, compelling image, the three-second animation, or the simple diagram that instantly conveys the user’s journey, the ‘before and after,’ or the strategic shift. This capability is the essential bridge between the R&D lab and the customer’s mind, transforming complex ideas into intuitive understanding.

The Three Pillars of Innovation Storytelling

Effective visual storytelling in innovation rests on three psychological pillars designed to drive adoption and overcome the innate human resistance to change:

1. The Empathy Shot (The ‘Before’): Start by vividly illustrating the pain point or the broken process that the innovation solves. This establishes relevance by showing the current, difficult human reality. A picture of a frustrated user or a diagram of an inefficient, tangled process creates immediate emotional connection and validation.
2. The Clarity Bridge (The ‘How’): Use simple visualizations—such as journey maps, flowcharts, or metaphors—to demystify the complexity. This reduces the cognitive load required to understand the innovation. If your innovation is AI, show a graphic of data flow, not a list of algorithms. If it’s a process change, show the old spaghetti diagram next to the clean, new highway.
3. The Vision Anchor (The ‘After’): Conclude with a powerful visual depiction of the positive, human-centered outcome. This isn’t just a picture of the product; it’s a visual of the impact — the delighted customer, the streamlined workplace, or the saved time. This anchor provides the emotional payoff and fuels motivation for change.

“An innovation explained in 100 words is often forgotten. An innovation shown in one powerful visual is instantly understood.” — Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: Google’s Self-Driving Cars – Visualizing Safety and Trust

The Challenge:

Introducing autonomous vehicle technology requires overcoming profound human fear: handing over control to an unseen computer. The complexity of the software and the catastrophic risk associated with failure made verbal assurances insufficient.

The Visual Storytelling Solution:

Waymo (Google’s self-driving division) tackled this by prioritizing radical visual transparency. Their early communications focused heavily on videos and internal dashboard screens showing the vehicle’s real-time perception. Viewers saw a digital overlay of lines, colors, and boxes representing every cyclist, pedestrian, speed limit sign, and potential hazard. This provided a compelling visual metaphor for the AI’s hyper-awareness, essentially letting the viewer ‘look through the car’s digital eyes.’

The Innovation Impact:

This simple visual strategy demystified the technology and built algorithmic trust. By demonstrating, frame-by-frame, that the car ‘sees’ far more reliably than a human, they used visual storytelling to translate complex machine learning data into an understandable human concept: safety. This allowed regulators, partners, and the public to emotionally process and begin accepting the innovation much faster than if they had only read engineering statistics.

Case Study 2: Airbnb’s Storyboarding – Aligning Product and Service

The Challenge:

Early on, Airbnb’s service was inconsistent. They realized they weren’t just selling a transaction (a place to sleep); they were selling a high-quality human experience. The challenge was aligning their distributed workforce and millions of hosts on what that ideal experience looked and felt like.

The Visual Storytelling Solution:

Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia famously used storyboarding — a simple, analog, sequential visual narrative—to map the entire customer journey, from search to checkout. One famous early storyboard was the “A-Team” story, which visually detailed a host preparing for a guest and the guest’s delightful arrival. These simple, hand-drawn visuals didn’t just document the current process; they illustrated the aspirational emotional journey the company wanted to deliver.

The Innovation Impact:

These storyboards became the central communication tool for every team—product designers, customer service, and marketing. They provided an unambiguous, visual definition of quality and purpose. By aligning the organization around a shared visual narrative of the ideal host and guest experience, they focused all innovation efforts on removing friction points in those specific moments. This clarity was instrumental in scaling their quality standards and transforming their platform from a novelty into a trusted, experience-driven brand.

Conclusion: The Visual Imperative

In the end, innovation is a human endeavor. If your revolutionary idea cannot be instantly grasped and emotionally processed, it will be delayed, diluted, or dismissed. Leaders must invest heavily in Visual Fluency within their organizations—not just hiring graphic designers, but teaching every employee, from the CEO to the engineer, to think and communicate in visuals.

The future of effective change relies on your ability to make the intangible tangible. By mastering the art of the empathy shot, the clarity bridge, and the vision anchor, you move your innovation out of the laboratory and into the lives of your customers. Stop describing your innovation. Start showing its impact. That is the definitive strategy for bringing your best ideas to life and ensuring they achieve the scale they deserve.

Image credit: 1 of 950+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

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Effective Facilitation for All

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How Leadership Fundamentals Benefit Everyone

Effective Facilitation for All

GUEST POST from Douglas Ferguson

Effective facilitation isn’t limited to the inner workings of staff meetings. True facilitation goes beyond simply setting an agenda: it’s a mindset, framework, and way of being.

Excellent facilitators know how to get the best out of their teams and design conversations that are innovative, exciting, and productive.

In this article, we explore how the fundamentals of facilitation affect an organization in the following topics:

Leading with Great Expectations
Effective Facilitation for Everyone
Facilitation with a Purpose

Leading with Great Expectations

At its core, great facilitation is an engaging conversation. In practicing effective facilitation, leaders make sure all communication is as clear and thoughtful as possible. Facilitators can begin this conversation by intentionally setting their expectations with all stakeholders in every conversation, meeting, and project.

Often, meetings end with attendees unaware of their colleagues’ and leaders’ expectations. By focusing on effective facilitation, leaders can identify and communicate their expectations as well as the expectations of everyone else in the room.

Consider the following facilitation fundamentals when identifying others’ expectations and needs ahead of a meeting:

Personal Preparation

Preparation is essential for any form of facilitation. Whether you’re leading a meeting or heading up a project, participants expect you to come prepared. Demonstrate proper facilitation techniques by preparing to be physically, emotionally, and mentally ready for your presentation.

Practice

Practice is the next step in proper facilitation. In practicing, you’ll be able to review your process and identify any areas needed for adjustment. Moreover, practicing will help you visualize your upcoming session, anticipate problems, and prepare alternative plans should something go wrong.

Process

Effortless facilitation follows a seamless process designed specifically for your audience. Facilitators have a variety of processes to choose from, including strategic planning, problem-solving, decision-making, and more.

Place

Your physical or virtual environment plays an important role in your facilitation ventures. It’s essential to be as intentional as possible in selecting the space for your next session. Consider the requirements for a space, such as the size of the room, what equipment is needed, and any other elements that may affect the flow of your meeting.

Purpose

The purpose may be the single most important component of effective facilitation. Your purpose will outline the end goal of a meeting and will communicate why the session is taking place.

Perspective

Perspective is as essential to effective facilitation as the purpose. Your perspective allows you to contextualize the goals, mission, vision, and purpose of your meeting.

Product

As effective facilitation hinges on meeting with a purpose, understanding what that purpose will produce is just as important. Consider what deliverables should be created by the end of a project, meeting, or conversation. Additionally, be sure to define the most important goals and actionable steps required to achieve them.

People

Facilitate with intention by identifying who should be in attendance. Learn more about each participant by researching the bias, potential barriers, and preconceived ideas that they may bring to each meeting. Likewise, be sure to highlight their strengths to further assess how they can be an asset in your conversation.

Effective Facilitation for Everyone

Integrating effective facilitation skills and techniques goes far beyond the walls of a meeting. A facilitative approach to leadership zeroes in on the positives of leading an active and engaged group. Facilitation techniques such as active listening and encouragement work to stimulate participative group conversation and collaboration.

Every member of an organization can benefit from the power of facilitative leadership. Leaders that demonstrate and embody proper facilitation skills can impart these practices to their employees.

Facilitation techniques benefit employees in the following ways:

1. Fostering Collaboration and Learning

Facilitation skills are essential in encouraging an environment of collaboration and learning. Encouraging team members to look at a situation from a different perspective, consider new solutions, and understand how to bring the best out of each other will result in the most productive experiences.

In creating a culture of learning, leaders should take the time to learn from their teams as well. Giving your employees a platform to offer their own insights is the best way to invite them into this collaborative process of co-creating learning.

2. Getting More From Meeting Attendees

As employees adopt the elements of effective facilitation, they’ll bring more of their skills, focus, and energy to each meeting. Equipped with the skills to act as influencers amongst their peers, each employee will become an active participant in the meeting, encouraging each other to make the most out of their time together.

3. Improving Productivity

As team members work together on various projects, effective facilitation skills allow them to move forward in the most productive, cost-effective, and timely manner. When employees incorporate their finely-honed facilitation skills, they work together efficiently, converse productively, and solve problems effectively. Ultimately, facilitation fundamentals allow everyone from team members to management to make the most of their time at work.

4. Boosting Group Dynamics

Incorporating effective facilitation skills helps improve group dynamics as well. All team members benefit from improved communication strategies, both in and out of the structured setting of meetings. These strategies allow all participants to better express their thoughts, opinions, and concerns as they work together to achieve a common goal.

Teams that invest in developing their communication skills are likely to retain the best employees. Statistics show that organizations that practice strong communication skills experience 50% less attrition overall.

5. Encouraging Active Participation

While effective facilitation is often considered from a leadership perspective, it is also an excellent catalyst in driving employee participation. Oftentimes, team members don’t feel comfortable enough to share their true opinions in a meeting. Moreover, they tend to bring the bare minimum to the workplace if they don’t feel as though their participation, efforts, and insights are valued.

Organizations that champion effective facilitation as part of their company culture are actively shaping an environment that makes employees feel as though they are truly part of their team. Feeling this sense of psychological safety allows all stakeholders to feel comfortable enough to put their all into their work.

6. Encouraging Team Competency

Leaders that excel in facilitation techniques are able to engender a sense of self-efficacy in their team. Oftentimes, leaders fail to go beyond methods of coaching to help their team members understand and internalize pertinent information. Effective facilitation helps to bridge the gap of competency in an organization.

Leaders must encourage team members on the path toward true competency. This approach to facilitation is essential to incorporate a culture where facilitation skills are easily transferable.

Lauren Green, Executive Director of Dancing with Markers, shares that the path to competency starts with meeting employees where they are:

“First, you’re unconsciously incompetent. You’re unconscious. And then you become aware [of] your incompetence, and then you’re consciously competent. And then you start to grow your skills. So then you’re consciously competent. And then when you don’t have to think about it anymore, then you’re unconsciously competent.”

Facilitation with a Purpose

Just as the purpose is a powerful tool in leading a meeting, it’s also essential in building effective facilitation skills in others. Intentionally investing in facilitation training allows organizations the opportunity to teach, practice, and embody the structured techniques of effective facilitation.

The nature of effective facilitation is that nothing can take place without purpose. From managing meetings to running projects, leading with the fundamentals of facilitation helps every facet of an organization run smoothly.

Lead with purpose by focusing on the following effective facilitation practices:

Listening first and speaking second
Leading with effective communication
Managing time and tracking deadlines
Asking intentional questions
Inviting others to engage
Creating a focused and psychologically safe environment
Providing unbiased objectivity
Acting as a decider in group discussions

Effective facilitation benefits everyone, whether you’re leading a meeting or encouraging employees to take their leadership skills to the next level. At Voltage Control, we help leaders and teams harness the power of facilitation. Contact us to learn how to apply these fundamentals to your organization.

Article originally published on VoltageControl.com

Image credit: Pexels

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