From Burnout to Breakthroughs

Prioritizing Well-being for Peak Performance

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the relentless pursuit of growth and innovation, many organizations have fallen into a dangerous trap: equating long hours and constant stress with dedication and productivity. The result is a global epidemic of burnout, a state of physical and emotional exhaustion that stifles creativity, diminishes engagement, and ultimately erodes performance. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I am here to challenge this outdated paradigm. I believe the path to true peak performance is not paved with exhaustion, but with well-being. It’s a shift from a culture of busyness to a culture of breakthroughs, where prioritizing the mental and physical health of our people is seen not as a luxury, but as a strategic imperative.

For too long, the narrative around work has been a zero-sum game: either you prioritize well-being and sacrifice performance, or you prioritize performance and sacrifice well-being. This is a false choice. The human brain, the ultimate engine of innovation, is not a machine that can run indefinitely at maximum speed. It requires rest, recovery, and a sense of purpose to function at its best. Burnout, on the other hand, is the antithesis of innovation. It leads to cognitive decline, a decrease in problem-solving ability, and a fear of taking risks—all of which are fatal to a company’s ability to adapt and grow.

Prioritizing well-being is not a soft, feel-good initiative. It is a hard-nosed, data-driven strategy for unlocking sustainable, high-level performance. When employees feel supported, trusted, and empowered to take care of themselves, they are more engaged, more creative, and more resilient. This creates a virtuous cycle of positive reinforcement that benefits everyone involved. The strategic shift from managing for burnout to designing for breakthroughs requires us to:

Redefine Productivity: Move away from measuring hours worked and focus on tangible outcomes and impact.
Promote Psychological Safety: Create an environment where people feel safe to be vulnerable, take risks, and share their ideas without fear of retribution.
Encourage Boundaries: Actively model and promote a culture where disconnecting from work is not only accepted but encouraged.
Invest in Holistic Well-being: Provide resources that address mental, physical, and emotional health, from mental health days to wellness stipends.
Empower Autonomy: Give employees a sense of control over their work and their schedules, as autonomy is a key driver of motivation and well-being.

Case Study 1: Microsoft Japan and the Four-Day Work Week

The Challenge: Boosting Productivity and Employee Engagement

In 2019, Microsoft Japan embarked on a bold experiment to address employee engagement and productivity. The company recognized that long hours and a rigid work schedule were not necessarily leading to better results. In a society known for its strong work ethic and long work hours, Microsoft sought to challenge the status quo and prove that a different approach could yield better outcomes.

The Well-being Innovation:

Microsoft Japan implemented a “Work-Life Choice Challenge” pilot, which gave all 2,300 employees paid Fridays off for an entire month, effectively creating a four-day work week. The goal was to see if a compressed work schedule could boost productivity and employee well-being. The company also encouraged shorter meetings (with a 30-minute cap) and promoted the use of online communication tools to streamline workflows and reduce time-wasting activities. The focus was shifted from “time spent” to “results produced.”

The Results:

The results of the trial were remarkable. Productivity, measured by sales per employee, jumped by a staggering 40% compared to the previous year. Employees took 25% fewer days off during the trial, and electricity consumption in the office dropped by 23%. Most importantly, 92% of employees surveyed said they preferred the four-day work week. The experiment showed that giving employees the gift of time and trust, and actively helping them work smarter, led to a more energized, engaged, and productive workforce. This was a clear example of prioritizing well-being as a direct driver of business success.

Key Insight: A shorter work week, when combined with a focus on efficiency and outcomes, can significantly boost productivity and employee morale by prioritizing rest and rejuvenation.

Case Study 2: The New Zealand-Based Financial Services Company

The Challenge: Overcoming Burnout and Low Employee Engagement

A New Zealand-based financial services company, like many organizations, was struggling with low employee engagement and high rates of burnout. The traditional 9-to-5, five-day work week was leading to a feeling of being constantly overworked and under-appreciated. The company’s leadership understood that for their employees to innovate and provide exceptional service, they needed to be happy, healthy, and engaged.

The Well-being Innovation:

In a groundbreaking move, the company’s leadership implemented a “100-80-100” model: employees were paid 100% of their salary for working 80% of the time, while being tasked with maintaining 100% of their productivity. The core of this innovation was not just the extra day off, but the empowerment of teams to redesign their own workflows. They were asked to identify and eliminate time-wasting activities, shorten meetings, and use technology more effectively to ensure that the work could be completed in fewer hours. This shift was a direct investment in employee autonomy and well-being, trusting them to manage their own time and output.

The Results:

The results were stunning. Employee engagement, as measured by surveys, increased by a remarkable 24%. Stress levels among employees decreased significantly, and their sense of work-life balance improved dramatically. Crucially, the company’s performance metrics either remained the same or saw a slight increase, as the teams had become more focused and efficient in their shortened work week. The company’s innovative approach not only improved the lives of its employees but also became a global case study for how prioritizing well-being and trust can lead to superior business outcomes and a more resilient, innovative culture.

Key Insight: Trusting employees to manage their own time and empowering them to find efficiencies is a powerful way to reduce burnout and drive bottom-up innovation.

The Path Forward: From Busyness to Breakthroughs

These case studies serve as powerful evidence that a change in mindset is required. The old model is broken. The most successful organizations of the future will not be those that push their employees to the brink of exhaustion, but those that design systems and cultures that prioritize human well-being. By fostering a culture of trust, empowering autonomy, and redefining productivity to focus on outcomes over hours, we can unlock the full potential of our teams. The journey from burnout to breakthroughs begins with a single, profound realization: our greatest asset is not our technology, our capital, or our brand—it’s the health, happiness, and creative energy of our people. It’s time to build a new foundation for success, one that is truly human-centered.

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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The Ways Inflection Points Define Our Future

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The Ways Inflection Points Define Our Future

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Humans tend to think in a linear fashion. If something is growing, we expect it to keep growing. If it is decreasing, we expect it to continue to decrease. We are natural trend watchers and instinctively look for patterns. Yet it is often the discontinuities, rather than the continuities, that have the biggest impact.

The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot referred to this cycle of continuity punctuated by discontinuity as “Noah effects and Joseph effects.” Joseph effects, as in the biblical story, support long periods of continuity. Noah effects, on the other hand, are like a big storm creating a massive flood of discontinuity, washing away the previous order.

Throughout history, inflection points have defined the future. Business models, built on top of Joseph effects, are disrupted by Noah effects, creating new opportunities for those who are able to identify and adapt. Today, we’re in the midst of a series of inflection points in what was already a time of enormous flux. We can’t predict the future but we can prepare for it.

1920s: A Second Industrial Revolution

By 1920, electricity was already nearly a 40-year old technology. In 1882, just three years after he had almost literally shocked the world with his revolutionary electric light bulb, Thomas Edison opened his Pearl Street Station, the first commercial electrical distribution plant in the United States. By 1884 it was already servicing over 500 homes.

Yet although electricity and electric lighting were already widespread in 1919, they didn’t have a measurable effect on productivity and a paper by the economist Paul David helps explain why. It took time for manufacturers to adapt their factories to electricity and learn to design workflow to leverage the flexibility that the new technology offered. It was the improved workflow, more than the technology itself, that drove productivity forward.

Automobiles saw a similar evolution. It took time for infrastructure, such as roads and gas stations, to be built. Improved logistics reshaped supply chains and factories moved from cities in the north — close to customers — to small towns in the south, where labor and land were cheaper. That improved the economics of manufacturing further.

It was the confluence of electricity and internal combustion, along with the secondary innovations they spawned, that led to mass manufacturing and mass marketing. Enterprises scaled up into huge bureaucracies exemplified by the organization Alfred Sloan built at General Motors. Firms were designed to move large numbers of men and materiel efficiently. Information flowed up, orders went down and your rank determined your responsibility.

1990s – Globalization and Digitization

In November 1989, there were two watershed events that would change the course of world history. The fall of the Berlin Wall would end the Cold War and open up markets across the world. That very same month, Tim Berners-Lee would create the World Wide Web and usher in a new technological era of networked computing.

Much like in the 1920s, these forces had been building for some time. Commercial computers had been around since the 1950s and global trade as a percentage of GDP began to sharply increase in the 1970s. Yet 1989 marked an inflection point and the world would never be the same after that.

The combined forces of globalization and digitization favored the quick and agile over the large and powerful. Rather than spending months or years to develop products, startup firms could rapidly prototype and iterate their way to launching a product in months or weeks. So called “unicorns”, startup companies valued at over a billion dollars, began to emerge and disrupt incumbent industry giants.

Perhaps the biggest shift of the globalized, digital world was from hierarchies to networks. While in the industrial era strategy was focused on linear value chains and the sum of all efficiencies, in the networked world strategy increasingly focused on the sum of all connections. A leader’s role was no longer simply to plan and direct action, but to inspire and empower belief.

Yet much like technologies that came of age in the 1920s, the second and third order effects of globalization and digitization were very different than anyone had predicted. Instead of the triumph of democracy we got a rise in authoritarian populism. Instead of a new era of prosperity, we got stagnant wages, reduced productivity growth and weaker competitive markets.

2020s – A New Era of Innovation

Today, as Moore’s law nears its theoretical limits, the digital revolution is coming to a close and we’re about to embark on a new era of innovation. Much like in the 1920s and the 1990s, the future is likely to surprise us, but the rough outlines of new inflection points are already beginning to take shape.

The first is in energy. The World Economic Forum reports that wind and solar now produce energy cheaper than coal and gas in North America. In fact, in some sunny parts of the world, solar costs less than half as much as coal. Costs for energy storage are still too high, but here too there is significant progress and we’re likely to see a scaled solution within a decade.

Another is the rise of synthetic biology. Driven by new technologies such as CRISPR, we’re beginning to go beyond merely reading genomes and starting to write them. Andrew Hessel, CEO of Humane Genomics, told me that we’re nearing the point that the value of a genome exceeds the cost to produce one. That will unleash a new wave of biologically driven business models. A similar revolution is underway in materials science.

Over the next decade we will also see the emergence of post-digital computing architectures such as quantum and neuromorphic computing, which are potentially thousands, if not millions of times more powerful than today’s technology. Although we don’t expect much of an impact from either of these for at least a decade, they will accelerate advancements in biology, materials and artificial intelligence.

Clearly these new technologies will open up new possibilities, but right now it’s impossible to see beyond first order effects. Nobody looked at a light bulb and saw household appliances empowering women to enter the workplace, or looked at a Model T and saw suburbs and the transformation of retail, or came across an IBM mainframe and said, “Gee, this thing will put journalists out of work one day.”

Preparing For the Future

Six years ago, I wrote how 2020 was shaping up to be a pivotal year. Boy, I had no idea! In addition. In addition to the convergence of longstanding trends in technology, energy and transportation, Covid-19 and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement burst onto the global consciousness.

Two things stick out about these new inflection points. First, they were not only predictable, but were, in fact, predicted by a number of people. Second, both will accelerate already existing trends. Covid-19 has shifted digital transformation and synthetic biology into high gear. Black Lives Matter will likely expedite the shift in political power from Boomers to Millennials.

We can think of various scenarios that can play out. Covid may catalyze nascent trends, such as telemedicine and genomic medicine to greatly improve healthcare in the US. Black Lives Matter may cause a shift in hiring patterns that may help to accelerate productivity. On the other hand, the tensions both inflection points create may exacerbate underlying divisions and make things worse.

Those are just two possible scenarios. There are many more, each of which will create their sets of Noah and Joseph effects and then combine secondary and tertiary changes in ways that are unknowable today. What we can do, however, is explore new possibilities and prepare for them. The most important inflection points are often the ones that we create ourselves through the choices we make. No future is inevitable.

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

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Unlocking New Frontiers of Innovation with Strategic Partnerships

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Unlocking New Frontiers of Innovation with Strategic Partnerships

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, the idea of an organization achieving greatness alone is a myth. The most impactful innovations rarely happen in isolation; they are the product of collaboration, shared vision, and complementary strengths. As a thought leader in human-centered change and innovation, I’ve seen firsthand that strategic partnerships are not just a business tactic—they are a core competency for unlocking new frontiers of innovation and creating value that no single company could achieve on its own.

For too long, companies have viewed their competitive advantage through a narrow lens: what can we do better than everyone else? This mindset, while valuable for internal efficiency, can also lead to a dangerous form of tunnel vision. It prevents us from seeing the powerful opportunities that lie just beyond our organizational walls. Strategic partnerships are about embracing this external reality, recognizing that our biggest weaknesses can often be solved by another’s greatest strengths, and that by joining forces, we can create something far greater than the sum of our individual parts.

A strategic partnership is more than a simple transaction or a vendor relationship. It’s a deliberate, long-term collaboration built on a foundation of trust, shared goals, and a deep understanding of each other’s value proposition. It requires us to move beyond a culture of “not invented here” to one of “co-created here.” The power of these partnerships lies in their ability to:

Accelerate Innovation: Gain access to new technologies, intellectual property, and R&D capabilities without the long and costly internal development cycle.
Access New Markets: Leverage a partner’s established distribution channels, brand reputation, or customer base to enter markets that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Enhance Customer Experience: Combine complementary products or services to create a more holistic and valuable offering for the end user.
Mitigate Risk: Share the financial burden and operational risks associated with launching a new product or entering a new and uncertain market.

Case Study 1: The Nike and Apple Partnership

The Challenge: Marrying Physical Fitness with Digital Technology

In the mid-2000s, both Nike and Apple were industry leaders, but in completely separate domains. Nike dominated the world of athletic apparel, and Apple was revolutionizing personal technology. Both companies were aware of the growing consumer interest in personal fitness tracking but were individually limited in their ability to create a truly seamless, integrated experience. Nike had the expertise in footwear and athletic performance, but lacked the technological prowess. Apple had the technology, but lacked the deep understanding of athletic culture and the trust of the running community.

The Strategic Partnership and Innovation:

In 2006, the two giants formed a strategic partnership that was revolutionary for its time. They collaborated to create the “Nike+iPod Sport Kit.” This innovation involved a small sensor placed in a Nike shoe that wirelessly communicated with an iPod Nano, tracking the runner’s speed, distance, and calories burned. This was not a simple co-branding exercise; it was a deep collaboration between engineering, design, and marketing teams from both companies. The partnership allowed Nike to offer a tech-forward product and Apple to expand the functionality of its iPod into a new, lifestyle-focused category.

The Results:

The Nike+iPod partnership was a resounding success. It created a powerful new product category and a highly engaged community of users. The collaboration set the stage for the modern era of fitness wearables and was a precursor to the Apple Watch, which now integrates similar fitness tracking capabilities. By combining their core competencies, Nike and Apple were able to create a product that neither could have produced on their own, demonstrating the power of strategic partnerships to unlock entirely new markets and product experiences.

Key Insight: Strategic partnerships can create entirely new product categories and markets by combining complementary expertise from different industries.

Case Study 2: The Starbucks and Spotify Collaboration

The Challenge: Enhancing Customer and Employee Experience

In the mid-2010s, Starbucks was looking for a way to deepen its connection with customers and improve the employee experience. At the same time, Spotify, a leading music streaming service, was looking for new ways to expand its user base and build deeper brand loyalty. Both companies understood the powerful role of music in shaping an atmosphere and a brand experience.

The Strategic Partnership and Innovation:

The two companies announced a comprehensive partnership. Spotify became the official music partner for Starbucks, allowing baristas to help curate the in-store playlists from a centralized library of music. This wasn’t just a simple licensing agreement. Starbucks employees, who are avid music fans, were given premium Spotify accounts, and the partnership created a feedback loop where they could influence the music played in stores. Furthermore, Starbucks’ rewards members were offered unique access to exclusive Spotify playlists and could influence the music being played in-store. This initiative blurred the lines between a retail experience and a digital one.

The Results:

The Starbucks-Spotify partnership was a win for everyone involved. Starbucks enhanced its in-store ambiance and provided a unique benefit to its most loyal customers, strengthening their emotional connection to the brand. The partnership also served as a powerful employee engagement tool, empowering baristas to take ownership of the in-store experience and creating a sense of shared community. For Spotify, the collaboration provided a massive new platform for brand exposure and user acquisition, introducing the service to millions of Starbucks customers who might not have otherwise used it. It’s a prime example of a strategic partnership that created value not just for the companies, but for their employees and customers as well.

Key Insight: A well-designed strategic partnership can create value for multiple stakeholders—including customers and employees—by integrating complementary brand experiences.

The Path Forward: Embracing a Collaborative Future

In a world of increasing complexity and rapid change, the ability to form and manage strategic partnerships is no longer a luxury; it is a necessity for survival and growth. The most forward-thinking leaders will move beyond a mindset of isolated competition and embrace a new era of collaborative innovation. They will understand that the most significant challenges and the greatest opportunities require the combined strength of diverse perspectives, expertise, and resources. By thoughtfully identifying potential partners and building relationships based on trust and shared purpose, we can unlock new frontiers of innovation and create a more valuable future for our businesses, our customers, and our world.

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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Kicking the Copier Won’t Fix Your Problem

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Kicking the Copier Won't Fix Your Problem

GUEST POST from John Bessant

Have you ever felt the urge to kick the photocopier? Or worse? That time when you desperately needed to make sixty copies of a workshop handout five minutes before your session begins. Or when you needed a single copy of your passport or driving license, it’s the only way you can prove your identity to the man behind the desk about not to approve your visa application? Remember the awful day when you were struggling to print your boarding passes for the long-overdue holiday; that incident meant you ended up paying way over the odds at the airport?

The copiers may change, the locations and contexts may differ but underneath is one clear unifying thread. The machines are out to get you. Perhaps it’s just a random failure and you are just the unlucky one who keeps getting caught. Or maybe it’s more serious, they’ve started issuing them with an urgency sensor which detects how critical your making a copy is and then adjusts the machine’s behavior to match this by refusing to perform.

Whatever the trigger you can be sure that it won’t be a simple easy to fix error like ‘out of paper’ which you just might be able to do something about. No, the kind of roadblock these fiendish devices are likely to hurl on to your path will be couched in arcane language displayed on the interface as ‘Error code 3b76 — please consult technician’.

Given the number of photocopiers in the world and the fact that we are still far from being a paperless society in spite of our digital aspirations, it’s a little surprising that the law books don’t actually contain a section on xeroxicide — the attempt or execution of terminal damage to the lives of these machines.

Help is at hand. Because whilst we may still have the odd close and not very enjoyable encounter with these devices the reality is that they are getting better all the time. Not only through adding a bewildering range of functionality so that you can do almost anything with them apart from cook your breakfast, but also because they are becoming more reliable. And that is, in large measure, down to something called a community of practice. One of the most valuable resources we have in the innovation management toolkit.

The term was originally coined by Etienne Wenger and colleagues who used it to describe “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” Which is where the idea of communities of practice comes in. It’s a simple enough idea, based on the principle that we learn some things better when we act together.

Shared learning helps, not least in those situations where knowledge is not necessarily explicit and easily available for the finding. It’s a little like mining for precious metals; the really valuable stuff is often invisible inside clumps of otherwise useless rock. Tiny flecks on the surface might give us the clue to something valuable being contained therein but it’s going to take quite a lot of processing to extract it in shiny pure form.

Knowledge is the same; it’s often not available in easy reach or plain sight. Instead it’s what Michael Polanyi called tacit as opposed to explicit. We sometimes can’t even speak about it, we just know it because we do it.

Which brings us back to our photocopiers. And to the work of Julian Orr who worked in the 1990s as a field service engineer in a large corporation specializing in office equipment. He was an ethnographer, interested in understanding how communities of people interact, rather as an anthropologist might study lost tribes in the Amazon. Only his research was in California, down the road from Silicon Valley and he was carrying out research on how work was organized.

He worked with the customer service teams, the roving field service engineers who criss-cross the country trying to fix the broken machine which you’ve just encountered with its ‘Error code 3b76 — please consult technician’ message. Assuming you haven’t already disassembled the machine forcibly they are the ones who patiently diagnose and repair it so that it once again behaves in sweetly obedient and obliging fashion.

They do this through deploying their knowledge, some of which is contained in their manuals (or these days on the tablets they carry around). But that’s only the explicit knowledge, the accumulation of what’s known, the FAQs which represent the troubleshooting solutions the designers developed when creating the machines. Behind this is a much less well-defined set of knowledge which comes from encountering new problems in the field and working out solutions to them — innovating. Over time this tacit knowledge becomes explicit and shared and eventually finds its way into an updated service manual or taught on the new version of the training course.

Orr noticed that in the informal interactions of the team, the coming together and sharing of their experiences, a great deal of knowledge was being exchanged. And importantly that these conversations often led to new problems and solutions being shared and solved. These were not formal meetings and would often happen in temporary locations, like a Monday morning meet-up for breakfast before the teams went their separate ways on their service calls.

You can imagine the conversations taking place across the coffee and doughnuts, ranging from catching up on the weekend experience, discussing the sports results, recounting stories about recalcitrant offspring and so on. But woven through would also be a series of exchanges about their work — complaining about a particular problem that had led to one of them getting toner splashed all over their overalls, describing proudly a work-around they had come up with, sharing hacks and improvised solutions.

There’d be a healthy skepticism about the company’s official repair manual and a pride in keeping the machines working in spite of their design. More important the knowledge each of them encountered through these interactions would be elaborated and amplified, shared across the community. And much of it would eventually find its way back to the designers and the engineers responsible for the official manual.

Orr’s work influenced many people including John Seely Brown (who went on to be Chief Scientist at Xerox) and Paul Duguid who explored further this social dimension to knowledge creation and capture. Alongside formal research and development tools the storytelling across communities of practice like these becomes a key input to innovation, particularly the long-haul incremental improvements which lie at the heart of effective performance.

Tacit Explicit Knowledge An important theme which Japanese researchers Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi were aware of and formalised in their seminal book about ‘the knowledge creating company’. They offered a simple model through which tacit knowledge is made explicit, shared and eventually embedded into practice, a process which helped explain the major advantages offered by engaging a workforce in high involvement innovation. Systems which became the ‘lean thinking’ model which is in widespread use today have their roots in this process, with teams of workers acting as communities of practice.

Their model has four key stages in a recurring cycle:

Socialization — in which empathy and shared experiences create tacit knowledge (for example, the storytelling in our field service engineer teams)

Externalization — in which the tacit knowledge becomes explicit, converted into ideas and insights which others can work with

Combination — in which the externalized knowledge is organized and added to the stock of existing explicit knowledge — for example embedding it in a revised version of the manual

Internalization — in which the new knowledge becomes part of ‘the way we do things around here’ and the platform for further journeys around the cycle

CoPs are of enormous value in innovation, something which has been recognized for a long time. Think back to the medieval Guilds; their system was based on sharing practice and building a community around that knowledge exchange process. CoPs are essentially ‘learning networks’. They may take the form of an informal social group meeting up where learning is a by-product of their being together; that’s the model which best describes our photocopier engineers and many other social groups at work. Members of such groups don’t all have to be from the same company; much of the power of industrial clusters lies in the way they achieve not only collective efficiency but also the way they share and accumulate knowledge.

Small firms co-operate to create capabilities far beyond the sum of their parts — and communities of practice form an excellent alternative to having formal R&D labs. John Seely Brown’s later research looked at, for example, the motorcycle cluster around the city of Chongquing in China whose products now dominate the world market. Success here is in no small measure due to the knowledge sharing which takes place within a geographically close community of practice.

CoPs can also be formally ‘engineered’ created for the primary purpose of sharing knowledge and improving practice. This can be done in a variety of ways — for example by organizing sector level opportunities and programs to share experience and move up an innovation trajectory. This model was used very successfully in, for example, the North Sea oil industry first to enable cost-reduction and efficiency improvements over a ten-year period in the CRINE (Cost reduction for a new era) program. It resulted in cumulative savings of over 30% on new project costs and as a result a similar model was deployed to explore new opportunities to deploy the sector’s services elsewhere in the world as the original North Sea work ran down.

It can work inside a supply network where the overall performance on key criteria like cost, quality and delivery time depends on fast diffusion of innovation amongst all its members. One of Toyota’s key success factors has been in the way in which it mobilizes learning networks across its supplier base and the model has been widely applied in other sectors, using communities of practice as a core tool.

CoPs have been used to help small firms share and learn around some of the challenges in growth through innovation — for example in the highly successful Profitnet program in the UK. It’s a model which underpins the start-up support culture where expert mentoring can be complemented by teams sharing experiences and trying to help each other in their learning journeys towards successful launch. And it’s being used extensively in the not-for-profit sector where working at the frontier of innovation to deal with some of the world’s biggest humanitarian and development challenges can be strengthened by sharing insights and experiences through formal communities of practice.

At heart the idea of a community of practice is simple though it deals with a complex problem. Innovation is all about knowledge creation and deployment and we’ve learned that this is primarily a social process. So, working with the grain of human interaction, bringing people together to share experiences and build up knowledge collectively, seems an eminently helpful approach.

Which suggests that next time you are thinking of taking a chainsaw to the photocopier you might like to pause — and maybe channel your energies into thinking of ways to innovate out of the situation. A useful first step might be to find others with similar frustrations and mobilize your own community of practice.

You can find a podcast version of this here

If you’d like more songs, stories and other resources on the innovation theme, check out my website here

And if you’d like to learn with me take a look at my online course here

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Beyond UI/UX: Crafting Truly Holistic Human Experiences

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Beyond UI/UX: Crafting Truly Holistic Human Experiences

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

From my vantage point here in America, I’ve observed a growing tendency to equate human-centered design solely with UI (user interface) and UX (user experience). While these elements are undoubtedly crucial, they represent only a fraction of what it truly means to craft holistic human experiences. True innovation in this space requires us to look beyond the screen and consider the entire journey, encompassing not just usability and aesthetics, but also emotional resonance, social impact, and long-term well-being.

The focus on UI/UX has brought significant improvements to the digital products we use every day, making them more intuitive and visually appealing. However, a beautifully designed interface or a seamless user flow is insufficient if the underlying service or product fails to meet deeper human needs or creates negative externalities. Think of a highly addictive social media app with a flawless UX but detrimental effects on mental health, or a convenient delivery service that contributes to unsustainable traffic congestion and gig worker precarity. These examples highlight the limitations of a design approach that stops at the surface level.

Crafting truly holistic human experiences demands a broader perspective, one that considers the entire ecosystem surrounding a product or service. It requires us to empathize not just with the direct user, but with all stakeholders impacted, including employees, communities, and the environment. This involves moving beyond user-centricity to a more human-centric approach, where we consider the broader consequences of our creations and strive to design solutions that contribute to overall human flourishing. Key elements of this holistic approach include:

Emotional Resonance: Designing for positive emotional connections and memorable moments throughout the entire experience, not just during direct interaction with a digital interface.
Ethical Considerations: Proactively addressing potential negative consequences, biases, and unintended harms that our creations might inflict on individuals or society.
Accessibility and Inclusivity: Designing experiences that are usable and equitable for people of all abilities, backgrounds, and contexts.
Service Design Integration: Mapping the entire customer journey, both online and offline, to identify opportunities for improvement and ensure a consistent and positive experience across all touchpoints.
Sustainability and Impact: Considering the environmental and social impact of our designs throughout their lifecycle, striving for solutions that are both beneficial and sustainable.

Case Study 1: Airbnb – Beyond the Booking Interface

The Initial Focus: Streamlining the Accommodation Search

Initially, Airbnb’s primary focus was on creating a user-friendly platform for finding and booking accommodations. Their UI and UX were designed to make this process as seamless and efficient as possible. However, as the platform grew, Airbnb recognized that the true value proposition extended far beyond the transaction itself.

Crafting a Holistic Experience:

Airbnb began to focus on the entire travel experience, recognizing that it encompasses not just finding a place to stay but also the sense of connection with a local community. They introduced “Experiences,” allowing travelers to book unique activities led by local hosts, fostering cultural exchange and deeper connections. They also invested in building trust and safety within their community through enhanced verification processes and host-guest communication tools. Furthermore, they have begun to address their environmental impact through initiatives aimed at promoting sustainable travel. By expanding their focus beyond the booking interface, Airbnb aimed to create a more holistic and enriching human experience for both travelers and hosts.

The Results:

Airbnb’s evolution beyond a simple booking platform has led to increased customer loyalty and a stronger brand identity. The introduction of “Experiences” has diversified their revenue streams and provided unique value to travelers seeking more than just a place to sleep. Their focus on trust and safety has been crucial for scaling their community globally. By considering the broader human needs and the wider impact of their platform, Airbnb has moved beyond providing a service to facilitating meaningful human experiences centered around travel and connection.

Key Insight: Truly holistic design considers the entire user journey and seeks to create meaningful connections and positive impact beyond the core functionality of a product or service.

Case Study 2: IDEO and the Redesign of the Hospital Experience

The Initial Challenge: Focusing on Clinical Efficiency

Traditional hospital design often prioritizes clinical efficiency and medical needs, sometimes at the expense of the patient’s emotional and psychological well-being. While UI/UX might apply to digital interfaces within the hospital, the overall patient experience can feel sterile, confusing, and disempowering.

A Human-Centered Approach to Service Design:

Design firm IDEO has worked with numerous healthcare organizations to redesign the entire hospital experience from a human-centered perspective. This goes far beyond the layout of rooms or the design of medical devices. They have focused on understanding the emotional journey of patients and their families, identifying pain points and opportunities for creating a more supportive and healing environment. This includes rethinking communication between staff and patients, improving wayfinding, creating more comfortable waiting areas, and even designing systems that empower patients to have more control over their care. Their approach considers all touchpoints, both physical and digital, to create a cohesive and empathetic experience.

The Results:

IDEO’s holistic design approach in healthcare has led to significant improvements in patient satisfaction, reduced anxiety, and even better clinical outcomes. By focusing on the emotional and psychological needs of patients, they have transformed the hospital experience from a purely clinical one to a more human and supportive one. Their work demonstrates that truly impactful design considers the entire service ecosystem and aims to create positive experiences for all stakeholders, not just the direct users of a specific interface. This comprehensive approach recognizes that healing involves more than just medical treatment; it also requires emotional support and a sense of well-being.

Key Insight: Holistic human experience design in complex service environments like healthcare requires mapping the entire journey and addressing emotional, physical, and informational needs across all touchpoints.

Moving Towards a More Human-Centered Future

As we continue to innovate here in America and beyond, it’s crucial that we broaden our definition of design to encompass the full spectrum of human experience. By moving beyond a narrow focus on UI/UX and embracing a more holistic, human-centered approach, we can create products, services, and systems that not only are usable and aesthetically pleasing but also contribute to emotional well-being, ethical considerations, accessibility, and a sustainable future. The true power of design lies in its ability to shape not just interfaces, but entire human experiences that are both meaningful and beneficial in the long run. It’s time to design for humanity, in its fullest sense.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2022

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Drum roll please…

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

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

You Can’t Innovate Without This One Thing — by Robyn Bolton

Importance of Measuring Your Organization’s Innovation Maturity — by Braden Kelley

3 Ways to Get Customer Insights without Talking to Customers
— by Robyn Bolton

Four Lessons Learned from the Digital Revolution — by Greg Satell

Are You Hanging Your Chief Innovation Officer Out to Dry? — by Teresa Spangler

Why Good Job Interviews Don’t Lead to Good Job Performance — by Arlen Meyers, M.D.

Six Simple Growth Hacks for Startups — by Soren Kaplan

Why Diversity and Inclusion Are Entrepreneurial Competencies
— by Arlen Meyers, M.D.

The Seven P’s of Raising Money from Investors — by Arlen Meyers, M.D.

What’s Next – The Only Way Forward is Through — by Braden Kelley

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

How Consensus Kills Innovation — by Greg Satell

6 Ways to Leverage Virtual Tools to Create an Innovation Culture — by Soren Kaplan

Unlocking the Power of Cause and Effect — by Greg Satell

Driving the Next Era of Growth: Leveraging Data to Innovate — by Teresa Spangler

The Phoenix Checklist – Strategies for Innovation and Regeneration — by Teresa Spangler

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

Have something to contribute?

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

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

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021

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Igniting Innovation Through Shared Values

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From Mission Statement to Movement

Igniting Innovation Through Shared Values

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

As my colleague Braden Kelley works with organizations striving for meaningful change, he often sees beautifully crafted mission statements gathering dust on corporate websites. These well-intentioned pronouncements articulate purpose but fail to ignite the very innovation they hope to inspire. The critical missing ingredient? Shared values that resonate deeply within the organization, transforming a static statement into a dynamic movement that fuels creativity and drives impactful change.

A mission statement defines what an organization does and why it exists. While essential for clarity, it often operates at a strategic level, lacking the emotional connection needed to truly motivate individuals. Shared values, on the other hand, articulate how an organization operates, the principles that guide its decisions, and the behaviors it champions. When these values are genuinely embraced and lived by the people within the organization, they create a powerful cultural foundation for innovation to flourish. They provide a moral compass, guiding experimentation, fostering collaboration, and ensuring that innovation efforts are aligned with a larger, unifying purpose.

Think of shared values as the DNA of your organizational culture. They influence everything from hiring decisions and internal communication to product development and customer interactions. When values are clear, consistent, and deeply ingrained, they create a sense of psychological safety, where individuals feel empowered to take risks, challenge the status quo, and contribute their most creative ideas. Conversely, a disconnect between stated values and actual behavior breeds cynicism and stifles innovation, as individuals become hesitant to step outside the perceived norms.

Transforming a mission statement into a movement driven by shared values requires a conscious and sustained effort. It involves:

Co-creation and Internalization: Values should not be dictated from the top; they should be co-created with employees at all levels, ensuring genuine buy-in and a sense of ownership.
Living the Values: Leaders must model the desired values consistently in their own behavior. Actions speak louder than words, and any perceived hypocrisy will undermine the entire effort.
Integrating Values into Processes: Embed values into hiring, performance management, decision-making, and reward systems to reinforce their importance and ensure they are not just abstract concepts.
Storytelling and Celebration: Regularly share stories that exemplify the organization’s values in action, celebrating individuals and teams who embody these principles in their work.
Continuous Reflection and Adaptation: Regularly revisit and discuss the organization’s values to ensure they remain relevant and continue to guide behavior in a changing landscape.

Case Study 1: Patagonia – Innovation Rooted in Environmental Values

The Challenge: Maintaining Authenticity and Driving Sustainable Innovation

Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company, has long been lauded for its commitment to environmental sustainability. Their mission statement reflects this, but it is their deeply ingrained shared values that truly drive their innovative practices. These values, centered around environmental responsibility, integrity, and not being bound by convention, permeate every aspect of their business.

The Values-Driven Innovation:

Patagonia’s commitment to environmental values fuels numerous innovative initiatives. Their “Worn Wear” program encourages customers to repair and reuse their gear, reducing waste and promoting a circular economy. They invest heavily in using recycled and organic materials, even when it’s more expensive or challenging. Their “1% for the Planet” initiative donates a percentage of their sales to environmental organizations. These aren’t just marketing tactics; they are deeply held principles that guide their product design, supply chain decisions, and customer engagement strategies. Employees are empowered to innovate solutions that align with these values, knowing they have the full support of the organization.

The Results:

Patagonia’s unwavering commitment to its values has not only built a fiercely loyal customer base but has also driven significant innovation in sustainable materials and business models. Their transparency and authenticity resonate with consumers who care about more than just the product itself. By living their values, Patagonia has transformed their mission into a powerful movement, inspiring other companies and individuals to prioritize environmental responsibility. Their innovation is not just about creating better products; it’s about creating a better world, and their shared values are the engine of this movement.

Key Insight: Deeply embedded and consistently lived values can be a powerful engine for driving innovation that aligns with a greater purpose, building brand loyalty and societal impact.

Case Study 2: Zappos – Cultivating Customer-Obsessed Innovation Through Core Values

The Challenge: Building a Differentiated Brand in a Competitive E-commerce Market

Zappos, the online shoe and clothing retailer, recognized early on that to stand out in a crowded market, they needed to offer more than just products; they needed to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Their mission statement hinted at this, but it was their ten core values, such as “Deliver WOW Through Service,” “Embrace and Drive Change,” and “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness,” that truly shaped their innovative approach to customer service and company culture.

The Values-Driven Innovation:

Zappos famously empowered its customer service representatives to go above and beyond to delight customers, guided by their core value of “Deliver WOW Through Service.” This led to innovative practices like no time limits on customer calls, surprising customers with free upgrades or gifts, and even helping customers find products from competitors if Zappos didn’t have what they needed. Their value of “Embrace and Drive Change” fostered a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement. Employees were encouraged to suggest new ideas and challenge existing processes. This values-driven culture fueled innovation not just in customer service but also in their supply chain, employee engagement, and overall business model.

The Results:

Zappos’ unwavering commitment to its core values created a legendary customer service reputation and a highly engaged workforce. This, in turn, drove significant customer loyalty and organic growth, ultimately leading to their acquisition by Amazon for over $1 billion. Their story demonstrates how a clear set of shared values, actively lived and integrated into every aspect of the business, can be a powerful differentiator and a catalyst for customer-obsessed innovation, transforming a transactional business into a beloved brand and a thriving movement centered around exceptional service.

Key Insight: Clearly defined and consistently reinforced core values can empower employees to drive customer-centric innovation, leading to exceptional experiences and strong business outcomes.

Igniting Your Own Innovation Movement

As we navigate an era of rapid change and increasing complexity here from our vantage point in Sammamish, the need for organizations to be agile and innovative has never been greater. The journey from mission statement to movement begins with a conscious effort to define, embody, and champion a set of shared values that truly resonate with your people and your purpose. By creating a cultural foundation built on these principles, you can unlock the collective creativity of your organization, foster a sense of shared ownership, and ignite a powerful movement that drives meaningful innovation and lasting impact. It’s time to let your values be the spark that ignites your innovation engine.

Image credit: Unsplash

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The Power of Praise

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The Power of Praise

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Praise happens when you tell someone they did something wonderful. Praise is virtually free and almost the most powerful force in the universe.

When you tell someone what they did was amazing, they stand three inches taller. Right in front of you, they get taller. They grow. They expand. Don’t believe me? Try it. And bring a ruler.

To deliver praise, you must pay attention. You must invest in what’s going on, you must hear what is said, and watch what is done. Congratulations. Though you have yet to deliver praise, you’ve already differentiated yourself. Next, you must compare the behavior against the norms and recognize a difference. Sure, it’s a simple difference calculation, but it’s a calculation that takes attention and caring, which in today’s rat race are in short supply. Now, you must find words the right words to describe the specialness of the behavior-why it’s different and why it matters. Then, you’ve got to deliver it in a way that is worthy of the specialness.

Deliver praise in public and be specific. This person (use their name) did (say what they did) and it’s important because (and say why it is important). And tell people what you think and feel. They (use their name) did (say what they did) and I feel (e.g., happy, excited, proud) because (tell them why you feel as you do). Feel free to steal that script, but if you do, stick to it because it’s a good one.

A rule: If you don’t praise people, you don’t know what you’re doing.

But here’s the thing about praise. If you fake it, you bring about its opposite. When you fake it, people get smaller and they get angry. They get smaller because they know they are being patronized. And they get angry for the same reason. So, a word of caution. If you deliver paise that’s fake, you will lose all credibility with the recipient and anyone in earshot. And it’s such a violation of their dignity, I don’t know a way to resurrect their trust. In short, if you fake it, it’s over for you.

Another rule: If you have the urge to deliver fake praise, don’t.

Praise is powerful, but in today’s environment is almost extinct. It’s not that praise-worthy behavior is uncommon, rather, the time and attention required to recognize and formally acknowledge praise-worthy behavior is uncommon.

If you want to elevate the performance of a team, praise their behavior. And do it in public. Pay attention and praise. Schedule a meeting, buy the pizza, and praise. Be specific, be genuine, and praise.

Yes, you will spend a lot of money on pizza, and, yes, that is the best return on investment in the universe.

“Alex and his lion friend” by Tambako the Jaguar is marked with CC BY-ND 2.0.

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Building Seamless Human-AI Workflows

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Designing for Collaboration

Building Seamless Human-AI Workflows

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The rise of artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic fantasy; it’s a present-day reality reshaping our workplaces. However, the narrative often focuses on AI replacing human jobs. As a human-centered innovation thought leader, I believe the true power of AI lies not in substitution, but in synergy. The future of work is not human versus AI, but human with AI, collaborating in seamless workflows that leverage the unique strengths of both. Designing for this collaboration is the next great frontier of innovation.

The fear of automation is understandable, but it overlooks a critical point: AI excels at tasks that are often repetitive, data-intensive, and rule-based. Humans, on the other hand, bring creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and the ability to handle ambiguity and novel situations. The sweet spot lies in designing workflows where AI augments human capabilities, freeing us from mundane tasks and empowering us to focus on higher-level strategic thinking, innovation, and human connection. This requires a fundamental shift in how we design work, moving away from a purely task-oriented approach to one that emphasizes collaboration and shared intelligence.

Building seamless human-AI workflows is a human-centered design challenge. It demands that we deeply understand the needs, skills, and workflows of human workers and then thoughtfully integrate AI tools in a way that enhances their capabilities and improves their experience. This involves:

Identifying the Right Problems: Focusing AI on tasks that are truly draining human energy and preventing them from higher-value work. This means conducting thorough journey mapping and observational studies to pinpoint the most repetitive and tedious parts of a person’s workday. The goal is to eliminate friction, not just automate for automation’s sake.
Designing Intuitive Interfaces: Ensuring that AI tools are user-friendly and seamlessly integrated into existing workflows, minimizing the learning curve and maximizing adoption. The user should feel like the AI is a helpful partner, not a clunky, foreign piece of technology. The interaction should be conversational and natural.
Fostering Trust and Transparency: Making it clear how AI is making decisions and providing explanations when appropriate, building confidence in the technology. We must move away from “black box” algorithms and towards a model where humans understand the reasoning behind an AI’s suggestion, which is crucial for building trust and ensuring the human remains in control.
Defining Clear Roles and Responsibilities: Establishing a clear understanding of what tasks are best suited for humans and what tasks AI will handle, creating a harmonious division of labor. This requires ongoing communication and training to help people understand their new roles in a hybrid human-AI team. The human’s role should be elevated, not diminished.
Iterative Learning and Adaptation: Continuously monitoring the performance of human-AI workflows and making adjustments based on feedback and evolving needs. A human-AI workflow is not a static solution; it’s a dynamic system that requires continuous optimization based on both quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback from the people using it.

Case Study 1: Augmenting Customer Service with AI

The Challenge: Overwhelmed Human Agents and Long Wait Times

A large e-commerce company was struggling with an overwhelmed customer service department. Human agents were spending a significant amount of time answering repetitive questions and sifting through basic inquiries, leading to long wait times and frustrated customers. This was impacting customer satisfaction and agent morale, creating a vicious cycle of burnout and poor service.

The Human-AI Collaborative Solution:

Instead of simply replacing human agents with chatbots, the company implemented an AI-powered support system designed to augment human capabilities. An AI chatbot was deployed to handle frequently asked questions and provide instant answers to common issues, such as order status updates and password resets. However, when the AI encountered a complex or emotionally charged query, it seamlessly escalated the conversation to a human agent, providing the agent with a complete transcript of the interaction and relevant customer data, like past purchases and support history. The AI also assisted human agents by automatically summarizing past interactions and suggesting relevant knowledge base articles, allowing them to resolve issues more quickly and efficiently. The human agent’s role shifted from being a frontline information desk to a skilled problem-solver and relationship builder.

The Results:

The implementation of this human-AI collaborative workflow led to a significant reduction in average wait times (by over 30%) and a noticeable improvement in customer satisfaction scores. Human agents were freed from the burden of repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more complex and nuanced customer issues, leading to higher job satisfaction and lower burnout rates. The AI provided efficiency and speed, while the human agents provided empathy and creative problem-solving skills that the AI couldn’t replicate. The result was a superior customer service experience that leveraged the strengths of both humans and AI, creating a powerful synergy that improved the entire customer journey.

Key Insight: AI can significantly improve customer service by handling routine inquiries, freeing up human agents to focus on complex issues and build stronger customer relationships.

Case Study 2: Empowering Medical Professionals with AI-Driven Diagnostics

The Challenge: Improving Diagnostic Accuracy and Efficiency

Radiologists in a major hospital were facing an increasing workload, struggling to analyze a high volume of medical images (X-rays, MRIs, CT scans) while maintaining accuracy and minimizing diagnostic errors. This was a demanding and pressure-filled environment where human fatigue could lead to oversights with potentially serious consequences for patients. The backlog of images was growing, and the time a radiologist could spend on each case was shrinking.

The Human-AI Collaborative Solution:

The hospital integrated AI-powered diagnostic tools into the radiologists’ workflow. These AI algorithms were trained on vast datasets of medical images to identify subtle anomalies and patterns that might be difficult for the human eye to detect, acting as a highly efficient “second pair of eyes.” For example, the AI would highlight a small nodule on a lung scan, prompting the radiologist to take a closer look. However, the AI did not replace the radiologist’s expertise. The AI provided suggestions and highlighted areas of concern, but the final diagnosis and treatment plan remained firmly in the hands of the human medical professional. The radiologist’s role evolved to one of critical judgment, combining their deep clinical knowledge with the AI’s data-processing power. The AI’s insights were presented in a clear, easy-to-understand interface, ensuring the radiologist could quickly integrate the information into their workflow without feeling overwhelmed.

The Results:

The implementation of AI-driven diagnostics led to a significant improvement in diagnostic accuracy (reducing false negatives by 15%) and a reduction in the time it took to analyze medical images. Radiologists reported feeling more confident in their diagnoses and experienced reduced levels of cognitive fatigue. The AI’s ability to process large amounts of data quickly and identify subtle patterns complemented the human radiologist’s clinical judgment and contextual understanding. This collaborative workflow enhanced the efficiency and accuracy of the diagnostic process, ultimately leading to better patient outcomes and a more sustainable workload for medical professionals. The innovation wasn’t in the AI alone, but in the thoughtful design of the human-AI partnership.

Key Insight: AI can be a powerful tool for augmenting the capabilities of medical professionals, improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency while preserving the crucial role of human expertise and judgment.

The Human-Centered Future of Work

The examples above highlight the immense potential of designing for seamless human-AI collaboration. The key is to approach AI not as a replacement for human workers, but as a powerful partner that can amplify our abilities and allow us to focus on what truly makes us human: our creativity, our empathy, and our capacity for complex problem-solving. As we continue to integrate AI into our workflows, it is crucial that we maintain a human-centered perspective, ensuring that these technologies are designed to empower and enhance the human experience, leading to more productive, fulfilling, and innovative ways of working. The future of work is collaborative, and it’s up to us to design it thoughtfully and ethically.

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Three Ways Technology Improves the Retail Customer Experience

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Three Ways Technology Improves the Retail Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

E-commerce hasn’t killed retail—it’s just transformed it.

For years we’ve been hearing that retail is dead, and the rash of store closures in cities across the country would seem to confirm the trend. The local mall no longer serves as a de facto community hub, if it’s even stayed open at all.

Given what we think we know, would it surprise you to learn that retail sales in 2021 were actually up more than 10% over the previous year, topping $4.44 trillion? Although fears of recession loom, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that both personal income and consumer spending continued to rise in June. And while e-commerce may be an unstoppable force, much of this consumer spending is still happening in brick-and-mortar stores.

That said, there’s no question that the retail experience is changing—and must continue to change. E-commerce growth and tech developments, in general, have transformed customer expectations. I always advise my clients to meet customers where they are, and where retail shoppers are right now is standing in an aisle, smartphone in hand, comparing prices and reading online reviews. Technology has become an integral part of the retail experience, and retailers would be fools to ignore that.

Luckily, they aren’t fools. Whether saving their customers time or offering them unique experiences, retailers are incorporating technology to improve the customer experience. Here are three ways they’re doing it:

1. Smart Screens Digitize the In-Store Experience – You probably remember the first time you went to fill your soda cup at your favorite fast-casual spot and found yourself facing a dizzying digital array of fountain soda choices. Smart screens are on the march, and they’re not just in restaurants anymore.

Clothing retailers are using touchscreens to help customers build their wardrobes, while furniture stores use similar tech to let shoppers design rooms in their homes. Smart screens can offer retail customers what they love about online shopping—plentiful product information, eye-catching photos and on-the-spot promotions—in an in-store setting.

Consider the cooler aisle at Walgreens, where high-resolution smart screens from Cooler Screens have transformed the drugstore chain’s fridge and freezer doors. Shoppers no longer have to brave an icy blast—they can see the beverages and frozen treats inside at a glance without even opening the door. Plus, they can get calorie counts and take advantage of instant deals—and soon will also see customer ratings and reviews.

Data showed that 90% of Walgreens customers prefer the new smart screen cooler doors to the traditional kind. For retailers looking to bridge the online/in-store gap, smart screens present the opportunity to both accomplish some point-of-sale digital marketing and enhance the customer experience.

2. Click-and-Collect Services Save Time – Another way retailers are meeting their customers’ hybrid shopping expectations is by beefing up their click-and-collect capabilities. Buying items online and picking them up in person offers consumers the best of both shopping worlds. They can browse a store’s product selection on their desktop or phone, and once their order is assembled, there’s no wait or shipping expense. Curbside pickup goes one better by allowing people to order products online and pick them up without stepping foot in the store.

I admit it’s not rocket science, but I believe that high-quality customer service depends on listening to what customers want, and many of them clearly value this hassle-free shopping experience. The 2022 Click-and-Collect Forecast shows that U.S. buyers will spend $95.87 billion via click-and-collect this year, a 19.4% increase over 2021. Retailers that expand their click-and-collect offerings stand to increase revenue by giving customers more of what they want.

Enabling this experience requires an up-to-date e-commerce website that’s optimized for mobile. Furthermore, retailers will need to achieve seamless integration between their online shopping platforms and on-the-ground operations. Many are already adapting by adding more parking spaces for click-and-collect customers and hiring more personal shoppers to gather orders.

3. Self-Service Improves Convenience – Another thing the e-commerce revolution has changed is customers’ expectations of self-service. From product page to shopping cart to checkout, the typical online shopping experience is a solo affair. While a retail store offers the possibility of assistance from a real person, many shoppers would rather take care of themselves. Smart retailers are using tech to let them.

Digital self-service kiosks help in-store shoppers get their bearings, look up product information, scan prices and see whether the item they want is in stock—and order it on the spot if it’s not. Retailers’ mobile apps enable customers to locate products, read reviews, compare prices and pounce on in-store discounts. By offering the right tech assistance, retailers give their customers a sense of control.

When customers think of self-service, self-checkout is usually the first thing that comes to mind, but even that is evolving. Going beyond the usual “Scan your first item and put it in the bag,” Amazon has launched fully autonomous checkouts. In its Amazon Go stores, customers scan a barcode going in and get charged electronically for purchased items as they leave. Instead of making customers do more work, Amazon employs its “Just Walk Out” technology to make customers’ lives easier and the retail experience friction-free.

Technology has greatly impacted people’s lives, and the retail setting is no exception. Retailers that use tech to improve the customer experience will see increased profit and customer satisfaction. Research has shown that experiences increase happiness more than things, so retailers that can provide both are setting themselves up for success.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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