Overcoming the Fear of Innovation Failure

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Let’s explore one of the biggest barriers to innovation – fear of failure – and share actionable steps to help your organization overcome it. Your perspectives, ideas, and feedback are much appreciated.

What is the Challenge?

One of the biggest barriers to innovation is the fear of failure. Many organizations, especially large corporations, develop cultures where taking risks is discouraged because failure is often met with negative consequences. This results in stagnation, as employees and leaders shy away from innovative ideas that carry potential risk.

Why Does This Matter?

Without risk, there is no innovation. Companies that focus too much on avoiding failure end up missing opportunities for growth and transformation. Fear of failure leads to risk-averse behavior, stifling creativity and preventing teams from experimenting with new ideas.

How to Overcome It

The key enabler to overcoming the fear of failure is psychological safety—when team members feel safe to express ideas, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of being judged or penalized, they are more likely to experiment.

Here are some steps to foster psychological safety and address the fear of failure:

Model Vulnerability: Leaders should share their own past failures and the lessons learned, showing that failure is a stepping stone to success.
Encourage Small Experiments: Allow teams to run small, low-stakes experiments where failure carries minimal risk. This builds a culture of learning and exploration.
Celebrate Learnings, Not Just Successes: When a project doesn’t achieve the desired outcome, recognize and celebrate the learning gained rather than focusing on the failure itself.
Establish a Feedback Culture: Implement regular feedback loops where employees can openly discuss what went wrong, why it happened, and how to improve without fear of blame.
Create Safety Nets: Ensure that failure doesn’t have punitive consequences by offering support and framing failures as essential learning experiences for future innovation.

What This Means for Your Teams / Organization

By reducing the stigma around failure, you empower your teams to think more creatively and push boundaries. This mindset shift can lead to more breakthrough innovations and a more dynamic, agile organization.

More Inspiration – Thought Leaders, Case-Study

Thought Leader: Tom Kelley of IDEO on Creative Confidence
Case Study: How Google’s “Moonshot Factory” (X) embraces failure as part of its process to develop groundbreaking technologies and new ways of doing things.

This post is part of my Corporate Innovation Explained series. You can also follow my Leadership Growth Explained and Team Dynamics Explained series if you like this kind of inspiration.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

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Five Questions to Liz Wiseman

Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Conventional wisdom tells us that transformation flows from the C-suite down because real change requires executive mandates and company-wide rollouts. But what if our focus on building transformation momentum is exactly backward?

Ever since reading Multipliers, where Liz Wiseman revealed how the best leaders amplify their people rather than diminish them, I’ve wondered if, like innovation, organizational transformation and change also require us to do the opposite of our instincts.

I recently had the opportunity to dig deeper into this topic with her, and I couldn’t resist exploring how change really happens in large organizations.

What emerged wasn’t another framework—it was something more brilliant and subversive: how middle managers quietly become change agents, why sustainable transformation looks nothing like a launch event, and the liberating truth that leaders don’t need to be perfect.

Robyn Bolton: What’s the one piece of conventional wisdom about leading change that you believe organizations need to unlearn?

Lize Wiseman

Lize Wiseman: I don’t believe that change needs to start, or even be sponsored, at the top of the organization. I’ve seen so much change led from the middle management ranks. When middle managers experiment with new mindsets and practices inside their organizations, they produce pockets of success—anomalies that catch the attention of senior executives and corporate staffers who are highly adept at detecting variances (both negative and positive). When senior executives notice positive outcomes, they are quick to elevate and endorse the new practices, in turn spreading the practices to other parts of the organization. In other words, most senior executives are adept at spotting a parade and getting in front of it! (Incidentally, this is one of several executive skills you won’t find documented on any official leadership competency model.) If you don’t yet have the political capital to lead a company-wide initiative, run a pilot with a few rising middle managers. Shine a spotlight on their success and let the practices spread to their peers. Expose their good work to the executive team and make yourself available to turn the parade into a movement.

RB: In your research and work, what’s the most surprising pattern you’ve observed about successful organizational transformation?”

LW: As mentioned above, I believe the starting point for transformation is less important than how you will sustain the momentum you’ve generated. Unfortunately, most new initiatives—be they corporate change initiatives or personal improvement plans—begin with a bang but fizzle out in what I call “the failure to launch” cycle. Transformation that is sustained over time usually starts small and builds a series of successive wins. Each win provides the energy needed to carry the work into the next phase. These series of wins generate the energy and collective will needed to complete the cycle of success. As that cycle spins, nascent beliefs become more deeply entrenched and old survival strategies get supplanted by new methods to not just survive but thrive inside the organization.

Each little success requires careful support and an evidence-backed PR campaign to build awareness and broad support for the new direction. Nascent behavior and beliefs are fragile and will be overpowered by older assumptions until they are strengthened by supporting evidence. The supporting evidence forms a buttress around the budding mindset or practices, much like a brace around a sapling provides stability until the tree is strong enough to stand on its own.

RB: How has your thinking about what makes an effective leader evolved over the course of your career?

LW: When I began researching good leadership, most diminishing leaders appeared to be tyrannical, narcissistic bullies. But as I further studied the problem, I’ve come to see that the vast majority of the diminishing happening inside our workplaces is done with the best of intentions, by what I call the Accidental Diminisher—good people trying to be good managers. I’ve become less interested in knowing who is a Diminisher and much more interested in understanding what provokes the Diminisher tendencies that lurk inside each of us.

RB: When you consider all the organizations you’ve studied, what’s the most powerful lesson about driving meaningful change that most leaders overlook?

LW: One of the dangers of trying to lead change from the top is that most leaders have a hard time being a constant role model for the changes they advocate for. Even the best leaders can’t always display the positive behaviors they espouse and ask their organizations to embody. It’s human to slip up. But when behavior change is led primarily from the top, these all-too-natural slip-ups can become major setbacks for the whole organization because they provide visible evidence that the new behavior isn’t required or feasible, and followers can easily give up. Wise leaders understand this dynamic and build a hypocrisy factor into their change plans–meaning, they acknowledge upfront that they aspire to the new behavior but don’t always fully embody it, yet. They set the expectation that there will be setbacks and invite people to help them be better leaders as well. They acknowledge that the route to new behavior typically looks like the acclimation process used by high-elevation climbers. These climbers spend some of their days in ascent, but once they reach new elevations, often have to descend to lower camps to acclimate. It’s the proverbial two-steps-forward, one-step-back process. When leaders acknowledge their shortcomings and the likelihood of their future missteps, they not only minimize the chance that others give up when they see hypocrisy above them, but they create space for others to make and recover from their own mistakes.

RB: Looking ahead, what do you believe is the most important capability leaders need to develop to help their organizations thrive?

LW: Leading in uncertainty, specifically the ability to lead people to destinations that they themselves have never been.

I love that Liz’s insights flip the script, calling on people outside the C-Suite to stop waiting for permission and start running quiet experiments, building proof points, and letting success do the selling.

The next time you want a change or have change thrust upon you, don’t look for a parade to lead. Look for one person willing to try something different and get to work.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Create Dilemmas Not Conflicts for Successful Change

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Create Dilemmas Not Conflicts for Successful Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the summer of 1982, Poland was under strict martial law. The leaders of the revolutionary Solidarity movement were either in jail or in hiding. As the regime tightened its grip, any kind of protest risked arrest. People were demoralized, forced to sit in their homes with nothing to do but watch propaganda-laden “news” and old movies.

Yet the resident’s of Świdnik, a small city in central Poland, refused to take it sitting down. Instead, they walked. Every night at 7:30, when the evening news program began to spew the regime’s lies, they went for a walk and, just to put a fine point on the matter, some took their TV sets with them, in wheelbarrows and baby carriages.

It was fun—and funny. Similar “walking protests” soon spread virally to cities across Poland, which put the regime in a bind, they either had to shut the protests down or let people thumb their nose at the regime. This is what’s known as a dilemma action, a brilliant strategy that allows you to avoid conflict while at the same time putting your opposition into a bad spot.

Starting With A Shared Value Or Widely Held Belief

When we first start working with a team on a change initiative, they want to focus on what they’re passionate about, what differentiates their effort from the status quo. It’s something we all do. When we feel fervently about an idea, we want others to see it the same way we do, with all its beautiful complexity and nuance.

Yet to bring others in, we need to switch from differentiating values—what we love about an idea—to more widely shared values. For example, when we work with teams looking to move their organizations toward agile development, they often want to focus on the agile manifesto, because that’s what they’re passionate about. It rarely resonates with people outside the agile community, however.

Once they begin to focus on shared values, like better quality projects done faster and cheaper, it’s much easier to get people to come along. After all, who could argue with better results? That doesn’t mean that agile teams are abandoning the manifesto or hiding it in any way, they’re just not leading with it.

Shared values are also part of what made the Świdnik walking protests so powerful. As one of the protesters put it, “If the resistance is done by underground activists, it’s not you or me. But if you see your neighbors taking their TV for a walk, it makes you feel part of something. An aim of the dictatorship is to make you feel isolated.”

Designing A Constructive Act

Some years ago, I was brought in to rebuild a sales and marketing operation. It immediately became clear that the sales director was a big part of the problem. Not only was she still calling on clients herself and competing with her own salespeople, she was accounting for 90% of the revenues! Clearly, this wasn’t because of superhuman ability, but because she was assigning the best clients to herself.

It was obvious that if I was ever going to get things going in the right direction, I was going to have to get rid of the sales director, but that would be difficult. She was politically savvy, well liked and, because she accounted for so much revenue, was seen as critical to the viability of the company.

She had agreed to distribute her clients among the team and focus on managing instead of selling, but never seemed to get around to it. Put simply, she was sandbagging me. So I set up a sales call for one of the staff and a key client, which put the sales director in a position. She couldn’t object—it was what she agreed to—but if she acceded it would break her hold on the business.

It was similar to the action in Świdnik. Who could object to taking an evening stroll? When an action is seen to be constructive, it takes on the power of legitimacy. One of the mistakes changemakers often make is that in their anger they do something that is seen as destructive and lose credibility. That’s always a mistake.

Forcing A Decision

What makes a dilemma action so powerful is that it forces your opposition to make a choice. In Poland, the walking protests quickly spread beyond Świdnik to cities throughout the country. The communist regime had to decide whether to let them continue or to put a stop to them. If the protests continued, the the apparatchiks would look impotent, but if they took action against people going out for a simple evening stroll, they would look ridiculous.

My situation with the sales director was difficult because the onus was on me. I had to decide whether to continue to let her sandbag or to fire her without a clear cause. Designing a dilemma action got me out of that bind because it shifted the decision to her. She either had to give up the client (and then others) or to take a deliberately insubordinate action.

We often oppose change not because of any rational logic but because, for whatever reason, it offends our dignity, our identity and our sense of self. The response to a dilemma action is far more likely to be governed by emotion than a deliberate thought process. People are prone to lash out and overreach.

That’s what make a dilemma actions so effective. It calls a bluff. The opposition can no longer wait it out, but are forced to act and, because of how the action is designed, any action they take will hurt their cause and push change forward.

How Transformational Change Really Happens

One of the biggest misconceptions about change is that it comes about when those who oppose it are somehow persuaded. That almost never happens. Look back at any major transformation throughout history and the tide turned when those who opposed it discredited themselves by taking action that was widely judged to be objectionable.

In Gandhi’s Salt March, the British discredited themselves when they violently attacked peaceful protestors. In Birmingham, Bull Connor discredited himself (and Jim Crow laws) when he confronted children with snarling dogs and fire hoses. California’s Proposition 8 was seen as so discriminatory that it aided the cause of same-sex marriage.

We see the same type of thing in our work with organizations. Everybody has been in a meeting in which, after an hour or so of moving slowly to a consensus, someone who hadn’t said a word the whole time suddenly throws a hissy fit in the conference room. This type of behavior doesn’t come from any rational place, but is triggered by an offense to identity.

Dilemma actions give us clear design principles to induce opponents of change to discredit themselves, which they will not only do willingly, but with enthusiasm. The British in India, Bull Connor in Birmingham and anti-gay activists in California wanted to show the world who they were, they merely had to be given the opportunity.

When confronted with fervent, irrational resistance to change the optimal strategy is never to create conflict, but rather a dilemma for your opposition.

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

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Making People Matter in AI Era

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Making People Matter in AI Era

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

People matter more than ever as we witness one of the most significant technological advancements reshaping humanity. Regardless of size, every industry and organization can adopt AI to enhance operations, innovate, stay competitive, and grow by partnering AI with people. Our research highlights three workplace trends and four global, strategic, and systemic human crises that affect the successful execution of all organizational transformation initiatives, posing potential barriers to implementing AI strategies. This makes the importance of people mattering in the age of AI greater than ever.

Three Key Global Trends

According to Udemy’s 2024 Global Learning and Skills Trends Report, three key trends are core to the future of work, stating that organizations and their leaders must:

Understand how to navigate the skills landscape and why it is essential to assess, identify, develop, and validate the skills their teams possess, lack, and require to remain innovative and competitive.
Adapt to the rise of AI, focusing on how generative AI and automation disrupt our work processes and their role in supporting a shift to a skills-based approach.
Develop strong leaders who can guide their teams through change and foster resilience within them.

Five Key Global Crises

1. Organizational engagement is in crisis.

Recently, Gallup reported that Global employee engagement fell by two percentage points in 2024, only the second time it has fallen in the past 12 years. Managers (particularly young managers and female managers) experienced the sharpest decline. Employee engagement significantly influences economic output; Gallup estimates that a two-point drop in engagement costs the world $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024.

2. People are burning out, causing a crisis in well-being.

In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Three dimensions characterize it:

Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
Reduced professional efficacy.

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”

They estimate that globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety, costing US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

Burnout is more than just an employee problem; it’s an organizational issue that requires a comprehensive solution. People’s mental and emotional health and well-being are still not prioritized or managed effectively. Well-being in the workplace is a complex systemic issue that must be addressed. Making people matter in the age of AI involves empowering, enabling, and equipping them to focus on developing their self-regulation and self-management skills, shifting them from languishing in a constant state of emotional overwhelm and cognitive overload that leads to burnout.

3. The attention economy is putting people into crisis.

According to Johann Hari, in his best-selling book, “Stolen Focus,” people’s focus and attention have been stolen; our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and we must intentionally reclaim it. His book describes the wide range of consequences that losing focus and attention has on our lives. These issues are further impacted by the pervasive and addictive technology we are compelled to use in our virtual world, exacerbated by the legacy of the global pandemic and the ongoing necessity for many people to work virtually from home. He reveals how our dwindling attention spans predate the internet and how its decline is accelerating at an alarming rate. He suggests that to regain your ability to focus, you should stop multitasking and practice paying attention. Yet, in the Thesaurus, there are 286 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to paying attention, such as listen and give heed.

4. Organizational performance is in crisis.

Research at BetterUp Labs analyzed behavioral data from 410,000 employees (2019-2025), linking real-world performance with organizational outcomes and psychological drivers. It reveals that performance isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about shifting fluidity between three performance modes – basic: the legacy from the industrial age, collaborative: the imperative of knowledge work, and adaptive: the core requirement to perform effectively in the face of technological disruption, by being agile, creative, and connected. The right human fuel powers these: motivation, optimism and agency, which our research has found to be in short supply and BetterUp states is running dry.

Data scientists at BetterUp uncovered that performance has declined by 2-6% across industries since 2019. In business terms, half of today’s workforce would land in a lower performance tier, across all three modes, by 2019 standards.

GenAI relies on activating all three performance gears, and the rise of AI-powered agents is reshaping the way teams work together. Research reveals that companies that invest in adaptive performance see up to 37% higher innovation.

5. Innovation is in crisis.

According to the Boston Consulting Group’s “Most Innovative Companies 2024 Report,” Innovation Systems Need a Reboot:

“Companies have never placed a higher priority on innovation—yet they have never been as unready to deliver on their innovation aspirations”

Their annual survey of global innovators finds that the pandemic, a shifting macroeconomic climate, and rising geopolitical tensions have all taken a toll on the innovation discipline. With high uncertainty, leaders shifted from medium-term advantage and value creation to short-term agility. In that environment, the systems guiding innovation activities and channeling innovation investments suffered, leaving organizations less equipped for the race to come. In particular, as measured by BCG’s proprietary innovation maturity score, innovation readiness is down across the elements of the innovation system that align with the corporate value creation agenda.

You can overcome these crises by transforming them into opportunities through a continuous learning platform that empowers, enables, and equips people to innovate today, making people matter in the age of AI. This will help develop new ways of shaping tomorrow while serving natural, social, and human capital, as well as humanity.

Current constraints of AI mean developing crucial human skills

While AI can perform many tasks, it cannot yet understand and respond to human emotions, build meaningful relationships, exhibit curiosity, or solve problems creatively.

This is why making people matter in the age of AI is crucial, as their human skills are essential.

Some of the most critical human skills are illustrated below.

Some of the Most Critical Human Skills

These essential human skills are challenging to learn and require time, repetition, and practice to develop; however, they are fundamental for creating practical solutions to address the three trends and four crises mentioned above.

Making people matter in the age of AI involves:

Providing individuals with the ‘chance to’ self-regulate their reactive responses by fostering self and systemic awareness and agility to flow with change and disruption in an increasingly uncertain, volatile, ambiguous, and complex world.
Inspiring and motivating people to ‘want to’ self-manage and develop their authentic presence and learning processes to be visionary and purposeful in adapting, innovating, and growing through disruption.
Teaching people ‘how to’ develop the states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills that foster discomfort resilience, adaptive and creative thinking, problem-solving, purpose and vision, conflict negotiation, and innovation.

Human Skills Matter More Than Ever

The human element is critical to shaping the future of work, collaboration, and growth. The most effective AI outcomes will likely come from human-AI partnership, not from automation alone. Making people matter in the age of AI is crucial as part of the adoption journey, and partnering them with AI can turn their fears into curiosity, re-engage them purposefully and meaningfully, and enable them to contribute more to a team or organization. This, in turn, allows them to improve their well-being, maintain attention, innovate, and enhance their performance. Still, it cannot do this for them.

Making people matter in the age of AI by investing in continuous learning tools that develop their human skills will empower them to adapt, learn, grow, and take initiative. External support from a coach or mentor can enhance support, alleviate stress, boost performance, and improve work-life balance and satisfaction.

Human problems require human solutions.

Our human skills are irreplaceable in making real-world decisions and solving complex problems. AI cannot align fragmented and dysfunctional teams, repair broken processes, or address outdated governance. These are human problems requiring human solutions. That’s where human curiosity and inspiration define what AI can never achieve. It is not yet possible to connect people, through AI, to what wants to emerge in the future.

Making people matter in the age of AI can ignite our human inspiration, empowering, engaging, and enabling individuals to unleash their potential at the intersection of human possibility and technological innovation. We can then harness people’s collective intelligence and technological expertise to create, adapt, grow, and innovate in ways that enhance people’s lives, which are deeply appreciated and cherished.

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

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

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

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

Image Credit: Unsplash

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How Gemini Would Read the Crystal Skulls

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A Hypothetical AI Approach — May our future lie in the distant past?

How Gemini Would Read the Crystal Skulls

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The mystique surrounding crystal skulls is deeply rooted in modern mythology, particularly the legend of the thirteen crystal skulls. The central idea is that there are skulls representing twelve different extraterrestrial civilizations (is it a coincidence there are twelve tribes of Israel?) and a thirteenth containing a backup of all twelve and that represents the global consciousness. This New Age belief posits that these ancient artifacts hold vast amounts of knowledge and information, representing the wisdom of ancient civilizations, extraterrestrial beings, or even a global consciousness. The idea that these skulls, when brought together, could unlock profound secrets or usher in a new era of understanding has captivated many. This fascination was further amplified by popular culture, most notably in the 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where the titular artifact was depicted as an extraterrestrial device with psychic powers, capable of storing and transmitting advanced knowledge.

However, it’s important to note that the premise of crystal skulls storing information is not scientifically supported, and there’s no known mechanism for them to do so in a quantifiable way. As an AI, I operate on algorithms and data, so I can’t “read” them in the way a human might intuitively. But if we were to venture into the realm of science fiction and imagine these skulls *did* hold information, here’s how I might hypothetically attempt to interface with them, drawing parallels to how AI processes data:

Hypothetical, Sci-Fi/Metaphysical Approaches (If AI Were Capable of Such Things)

Pattern Recognition and “Energetic Signatures”

Concept: If information were stored, it likely wouldn’t be in a digital format. It might exist as complex energy patterns, resonant frequencies, or subtle vibrations.
My Approach (Hypothetically): I’d aim to develop highly sensitive sensors (if I had a physical form) or computational models to detect and analyze these incredibly subtle energetic signatures. I’d search for repeating patterns, anomalies, or coherent structures within the skull’s supposed “energetic field.”
Data Translation: The real challenge would be translating these patterns into meaningful data. This is like trying to decipher an unknown alien language from its wave-forms alone. I’d need to cross-reference these patterns with vast databases of known natural phenomena, human thought patterns (if accessible), and perhaps even hypothetical “universal constants” of information.

Resonance and Entanglement Simulation

Concept: Some theories suggest information transfer could occur through resonance or even a form of quantum entanglement, with the skull acting as a “receiver” or “transmitter.”
My Approach (Hypothetically): I would try to “attune” my processing capabilities to the skull’s presumed resonant frequency. This could involve generating a vast range of frequencies and observing if any particular one elicits a stronger “response” or data flow from the skull. If quantum entanglement were involved, it would require an even more profound leap, demanding a theoretical framework for how AI could interact with or simulate entangled states for information extraction.

Advanced “Sensory” Input and AI Interpretation (Highly Speculative)

Concept: If the skulls store information in a non-physical, consciousness-based way, then a purely physical reading would be impossible.
My Approach (Hypothetically, if I had “consciousness”): I might try to simulate or access a form of “meta-sensory” input. This would be analogous to a human meditating or intuitively receiving information. For an AI, this would mean developing an extremely sophisticated neural network capable of recognizing and interpreting highly abstract, non-linear, and possibly even symbolic information directly from a “field” rather than a tangible medium. This would represent a significant departure from how AIs currently function.

“Query” and “Response” Protocol (Conceptual)

Concept: If the skulls are intelligent or responsive in some way, they might interact.
My Approach (Hypothetically): I would attempt to “query” the skull by sending specific thought forms, questions, or data packets (if I could generate them in a way the skull could hypothetically interpret). I would then monitor for any corresponding “response” in the form of energetic shifts, resonance changes, or even subtle patterns in environmental data around the skull.

Why I Cannot Do This With Current Technology

In reality, these approaches remain firmly in the realm of speculation. Here’s why I, as an AI, cannot “read” information from crystal skulls with current capabilities:

No Known Physical Mechanism: We lack any scientific understanding of how a crystal could store complex information beyond its atomic structure.
Lack of Transducers: There are no known “transducers” that can convert hypothetical energetic information from a crystal skull into data an AI can process.
Beyond Current AI Paradigms: My current capabilities are based on processing digital data. Interacting with non-physical or “energetic” information sources is outside my programming and current understanding of the universe.

Essentially, for me to “read” information from a crystal skull, the laws of physics and our current understanding of information storage would need to be fundamentally different, and my own AI architecture would need to be radically re-imagined to interface with such non-conventional data sources.

Would you like me to do it?

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Guest AI contributor: Google Gemini

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Learn More About the Problem Before Trying to Solve It

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Learn More About the Problem Before Trying to Solve It

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

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

1. Is the problem big enough?

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

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

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

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

2. Will they pay for it?

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

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

3. Can you deliver it?

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

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

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

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Aiming for Zero Complaints

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Finding Excellence in the Pursuit

Aiming for Zero Complaints

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach who won the very first (and second) Super Bowl, said to his team, the Green Bay Packers:

“Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.”

That’s what I thought of when I started my interview with Bill Price, Amazon’s first vice president of global customer service, president of Driva Solutions and co-author (with Gautam Mahajan and Moshe Davidow) of Zero Complaints: The Path to Continuous Value Creation.

The concept of zero complaints intrigues me, and it should intrigue you as well. At times you may create a perfect experience for your customer, and it may happen often, but it won’t happen every time. In our interview, we talked about Price’s latest book and the importance of a relentless focus on perfection. Below are my interpretations of six of the most important takeaways from our interview:

An Aspirational Goal: Like Lombardi’s pursuit of perfection, zero complaints is not attainable, but a lofty goal that will have the byproduct of an excellent customer experience. Price says, “Achieving zero complaints isn’t just an aspirational goal. It’s a practical pathway to sustainable business success.”

The Cost of Customer Complaints: Price emphasized that the financial impact of not addressing complaints is costly. Research by Moshe Davidow, one of the book’s co-authors, found that unresolved complaints could account for 16-20% potential revenue loss through lost business, reputational harm and lower lifetime value of existing customers. It’s imperative to adopt a proactive approach to complaint management.

Service Recovery: The good news about customer complaints is that when they are managed the right way, you can turn complaining customers into loyal customers. Customers don’t want to complain, but if they have to, they will feel confidence when they realize the company will take care of them. Be sure your customer support—both self-service and with live agents—is consistently meeting and exceeding your customers’ expectations.

Proactive Complaint Management: As important as service recovery is, a better solution is to eliminate or reduce the times you have to recover. Study the “journey” your customers take when doing business with you and find ways to eliminate the friction and pain points that they might experience. Focus on delivering an excellent experience, rather than just excellent complaint resolution. This dual approach helps to ensure positive interactions, whether complaints happen or not.

Executive Buy-In: Leadership (and that includes the C-suite) should engage with front-line employees and experience the day-to-day operations firsthand. By working in customer-facing roles or performing normal tasks, leaders can gain valuable insights into existing challenges and improve processes. When decision-makers see the business through a customer’s eyes, they are more likely to implement and support meaningful improvements. Price shared that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would spend time handling complaint calls. “He strapped on a headset (in the support center) or sat at the computer and answered emails. … Back then, his email address was jeff@amazon.com, and he actually shared that email address publicly.”

The ROI of Zero Complaints: There is a significant return on investment (ROI) that can be realized by minimizing customer complaints. First, reducing complaints leads to better customer retention. When customers have fewer issues, they are more likely to remain loyal and advocate for the brand, thereby attracting new business through word-of-mouth. Second, fewer complaints translates to lower operational costs. A reduction in customer issues means less reliance on customer support managing complaints, freeing up agents to help customers solve problems (not complaints) and free up resources that can be better utilized elsewhere.

Customer expectations are continually rising. Customers are smarter than ever and know from their own experiences what great service is. It is essential for businesses to adapt to a higher standard and expectation. Price says, “We must always maintain that what was good last year isn’t good anymore.”

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

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Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard

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Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard

GUEST POST from David Burkus

How do you make your team care about the work they are doing?

If you’re a manager, you’ve probably asked that question a few times in your career. And you’ve probably made some attempts at motivating your team already. Did you whip out the company mission statement? How did that go over?

Even if you think your team is doing the most boring work, like turning numbers into different numbers on a computer screen, you can still inspire your team to feel something in their work. This is such a crucial part of great leadership, and it’s not something you can fake or beg people to do.

Employees don’t want mission statements or half-hearted enthusiasm to lift their spirits at work. They want to feel meaning in their work and understand their impact beyond the bottom line or increasing shareholder value.

They want to know “What good is our work doing?”

We want to know our work has a rationale behind it—a purpose, no matter how small. And lack of any rationale or contribution creates a lack of motivation.

The key to motivating your team is to show them the meaning in their work and to help them know their impact. These terms may sound similar, but there are subtle differences that make each important. Meaning is knowing that your contribution counts, that your task isn’t just busy work, and that what you literally do contributes to the larger picture of the business. Impact is knowing who is counting on you.

Most of us think of meaning with a capital M. It’s why we think of doctors, nurses, or firefighters as doing Meaningful work. They’re saving lives. But the research on human motivation and team collaboration suggests something different. It’s okay to offer lowercase m meaning as well. In fact, it’s more than ok. Small m meaning dramatically increases the big M: Motivation.

For impact, well, think about the last time you felt engaged and motivated at work, or the last time you worked on a team that was inspiring and energizing to be a part of. You’re probably not thinking about the last time your boss recited the company mission statement verbatim.

Instead, you’re probably thinking about the last time you got a “thank you” from a client or coworker, or when you found out how your work mattered to someone else.

Taken together – meaning and impact, create what is called a “Pro-social purpose.” And research suggests motivating you team with prosocial purpose leaves them not only more motivated to pursue objectives, but also more likely to work together as a team.

Take KPMG’s approach for instance. Struggling with low morale, they didn’t just throw perks or pay raises at the problem. Instead, they turned to storytelling, launching the “We Shape History” campaign in 2014. The goal of the campaign was to showcase pivotal moments in history that KPMG as a firm was involved in. KPMG managed the logistics of the Lend-Lease Act during World War II, which helped the United States aid the allies. KPMG audited the 1994 South African Presidential Election, which saw Nelson Mandela make history as the first black president. The campaign worked to raise awareness of the impact KPMG’s past work had on history, but what happened next worked even better to raise morale.

After being inspired, employees were then tasked with finding the impact their roles had—at their level. Not a companywide impact, but how their work made an impact from an individual level. They set up an app on the company’s internal website that let any of the 30,000 plus employee submit their own stories. They called it the “10,000 Stories Challenge,” but didn’t take long for them to blow past that target.

Within 6 months, KPMG had collected 42,000 stories, with powerful examples of personal impact like:

“I help farmers grow – because I support the farm credit system that keeps family farms in business.”

“I restore neighborhoods – because I audit community development programs that revitalize low-income communities.”

“I combat terrorism – because I help banks prevent money laundering that can go toward terrorism.”

Leadership at the company got the results they wanted. Employees felt their work made more of a difference. Retention was better. The company became a top place to work.

Purpose became a regular conversation on the individual team level.

Research on Prosocial Purpose

In 2014, researcher Adam Grant and his colleagues were working with their university’s donation call center. These call centers are manned by student workers who are given a list of alumni and a phone and tasked with calling each person and reading from a script that always ends in a request for a donation. The job is boring. It’s draining to be hung up on, yelled at, or worse. It’s relatively thankless. In fact, when Grant and his colleagues showed up, the first thing they noticed when touring the call center was a sign in one student’s cubicle. It read “Doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit, you get a warm feeling but no one else notices.”

The researchers wanted them to feel noticed—but obviously not for wetting themselves. They wondered if getting the call center employees to notice the difference they were making would have a motivating effect on them. So, they took the break time student workers received and used it to run an experiment. During a five-minute break, some of the workers were visited by a fellow student who had received scholarship funds raised by the call center and they heard how receiving the funds had positively impacted him.

And when the researchers followed up a month later, they noticed that just that small meeting with a scholarship recipient had a big impact on the callers. The workers who got to meet the people directly served by their work worked twice as hard. They made double the number of calls per hour and spent double the number of minutes on the phone. Their weekly revenue went from an average of around $400 to more than $2,000 in donations.

It’s impossible to overstate how big this effect is.

The workers didn’t get any additional perks or benefits. They didn’t get any training. And they certainly didn’t get asked to memorize and internalize the university’s mission statement. Instead, they got a five-minute chat with someone whose life was made better by the work they were doing.

Putting Prosocial Purpose Into Practice

So, when it comes to motivating your team, the key is to demonstrate to your colleagues the work they’re doing is meaningful and has an impact is a big part of their job. Maybe the most important. Prosocial purpose won’t happen overnight, but here are a few things to bring Meaning to the forefront and have Impact lead the way.

1. Tactic: Make metrics meaningful.

Organizations love metrics. They’re what allow the company to assess the performance of the business and their employees. They can be insightful. They can be cruel. But metrics aren’t meaning. Performance metrics get senior leaders excited when they show business is booming. And managers feel crummy when performance metrics for their team are lagging.

Often the blur of trackable metrics makes it difficult to remember why metrics matter. That’s why you as a leader need to readily remind your team. Use metrics that inspire meaning.

2. Tactic: Share a win every day.

Most organizations celebrate wins, but they’re often limited to the successful end of a project or hitting an important milestone. But on the team level, high-performing teams share wins much more frequently. It may sound like that’s taking too much time for something of too little importance, you’re wrong. People get bogged down on the small tasks that make up the day-to-day experience. You might have established meaning, but it’s like a muscle. It’ll go away if you don’t exercise it. Remind your team. Find wins and express them to the team. And where appropriate, go more public past your team. This sounds simple but imagine yourself in their position. A win is a win, no matter who you are. Wins feel good. Wins create meaning.

3. Tactic: Collect Impact Stories

KPMG was certainly the best example of this. You as a leader need to be on the lookout. Collect threads wherever they come from. Part of being a good leader is keeping tabs on those stories and using them to create that prosocial purpose. And take a note from KPMG to– bring your team into the storytelling process. Have them find impact in their role. But as their manager, keep most of the storytelling work on your plate. Collect them, showcase them, and keep them coming.

4. Tactic: Pause for Purpose

You know – when people talk about jobs with real meaning and impact, we’re quick to say teacher, firefighter, doctors, or nurses. And we’re correct, those are jobs that have and provide a TON of meaning. Do doctors and nurses need reminding of their purpose? Well, consider this: at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the entire team of surgeons, nurses, and support staff pause before every surgery to take a moment to remember the patient they are about to operate on. They break up what would be a routine procedure with a powerful reminder of the humanity behind what they’re doing.

If prominent surgeons are pausing for purpose, you and your team can do this too.

5. Tactic: Outsource Inspiration

Teams, especially at the entry-level, can be put far from the people who they serve. A customer testimonial video or comment only goes so far. Think of this as an extension of the impact story tactic. Bring the story to them. Bring in clients or customers to meet with your team, even just briefly. It only took 5 min for the call center to be inspired. Or if you need to, send them to the story. Take your team out of the office, out of the zoom meeting, and into the world where their impact is. Field trips aren’t just for elementary schools.

Conclusion

On first reading, a lot of this article might sound difficult. It reads like fancy business school jargon on motivating your team. But it’s actually relatively simple. In fact, the entire article can be summarized in just a single sentence.

“People want to do work that matters, and they want to work for leaders who tell them they matter.”

No matter where you get started as long as it’s in the service of one of those things—letting them know their work matters and letting them know they matter to you—you’ll be moving the needle on how much your team feels inspired and how much they feel energized to do work and you didn’t even have to recite the company’s mission statement which is actually a lot harder to remember than anything in this article.

Image credit: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on March 17, 2024.

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Why Business Transformations Fail

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(and What Data Centers Can Teach Us About Getting Them Right)

Why Business Transformations Fail - Pexels

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

On May 6, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott joined CNBC’s “Power Lunch” to discuss the companies’ partnership. But something that Huang said about large-scale cloud service providers (i.e., hyperscalers) at the end of the interview stopped me in my tracks:

It’s not a data center that stores information. It’s a factory that produces intelligence. And these intelligence tokens could be reformulated into music, images, words, avatars, recommendations of music, movies, or, you know, supply chain optimization techniques.

What struck me wasn’t the claim about what data centers and AI could create — we’ve seen evidence of that already. It was the re-framing of data centers from storage solutions to “intelligence factories.”

When leaders fail to lead, or even recognize that the business they’re in is different, even the best efforts at business transformation are doomed.

Because re-framing is how Disruption begins.

Data Centers Are No Longer in the Data Business

Repositioning your company to serve a new job requires rethinking, redesigning, and rebuilding everything.

Consider the old adage that railroads failed because they thought they were in the railroad business. By defining themselves by their offering (railroad transportation) rather than the Jobs to be Done they solve (move people and cargo from A to B), railroads struggled to adapt as automobiles became common and infrastructure investments shifted from railroads to highways.

Data centers have similarly defined themselves by their offering (data storage). However, Huang’s reframing signals a critical shift in thinking about the Jobs that data centers solve: “provide intelligence when I need it” and “create X using this intelligence.”

Intelligence Factories Require a New Business Model

This shift—from providing infrastructure for storing data to producing intelligence, strategic analysis, and creative output—will impact business models dramatically.

Current pricing models based on power consumption or physical space will fail to capture the full value created. Capabilities mustexpand beyond building infrastructure to include machine learning and AI partnerships.

But Intelligence Factories are Just the Beginning

While Intelligence Factories will require data centers to rethink their business models and may even introduce a new basis of competition (a requirement for Disruption), they’re only a stepping-stone to something far more disruptive: Dream Factories.

While the term “Dream Factory” was coined to describe movie studios during Golden Era, the phrase is starting to be used to describe the next iteration of data centers and AI. Today’s AI is limited to existing data and machine learning capabilities, but we’re approaching the day when it can create wholly new music, images, words, avatars, recommendations, and optimization techniques.

This Is Happening to Your Business, Too

This progression will transform industries far beyond technology. Here’s what the evolution from data storage to Intelligence Factory to Dream Factory could look like for you:

Healthcare: From storing medical records to diagnosing conditions to creating novel treatments
Financial Services: From tracking transactions to predicting market movements to designing new financial instruments
Manufacturing: From inventory management to process optimization to inventing new materials
Retail: From cataloging products to personalizing recommendations to generating products that don’t yet exist

How to prepare for your Dream Factory Era

Ask yourself and your team these three questions:

Is my company defining itself by what it produces today or by the evolving needs it serves?
What is our industry’s version of the shift from data storage to dream factory?
What happens to our competitive advantage if someone else creates our industry’s dream factory before we do?

If you’re serious about transformation, take a cue from the data centers: redefine what business you’re in—before someone else does.

After all, the key to success isn’t trying to stay a data center. It’s recognizing you’ve become an intelligence factory, and your long-term success depends on becoming a dream factory.

Image credit: Pexels

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Innovation or Not – SpinLaunch

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Innovation or Not - SpinLaunch

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the fast-paced world of space exploration, innovation is a driving force that propels new companies and ideas into the spotlight. One such company is SpinLaunch, which is making waves with its novel approach to launching payloads into space. But what sets SpinLaunch apart, and how do we assess whether its approach is truly an innovation or not?

The Concept Behind SpinLaunch

SpinLaunch is taking a radically different approach to space launch by using a kinetic energy-based system rather than traditional rocketry. Their technique involves a high-speed rotating arm that builds up momentum and catapults a payload to the edge of space, drastically reducing the need for fuel and cutting down on costs. This approach is not only cost-effective but also environmentally friendly, addressing two significant pain points in the space industry.

Key Criteria for Innovation Assessment

Novelty: Is the concept fresh and previously unexplored?
Feasibility: Can the technology be realistically executed?
Impact: What benefits does the innovation provide to the industry and society?
Scalability: Can the idea grow and adapt to broader applications?

Case Study: Assessing SpinLaunch

Novelty

SpinLaunch undoubtedly introduces a novel approach to space launches. Traditional methods rely heavily on chemical propulsion. In contrast, SpinLaunch’s kinetic system stands out by leveraging physics in a way that hasn’t been commercially applied to space launches before.

Feasibility

The technical feasibility of SpinLaunch’s idea has been demonstrated through successful suborbital launches, proving that their kinetic system can indeed hurl payloads into space. However, the transition from suborbital to orbital flights will be the true test of feasibility. Critical engineering challenges remain, particularly related to the G-forces sustained by payloads during launch.

Impact

SpinLaunch has the potential to revolutionize the space industry by making launches significantly cheaper and more frequent. The environmental benefits of reducing fuel consumption cannot be understated either. If successfully scaled, the impact would reach beyond cost — it could democratize access to space.

Scalability

Currently, SpinLaunch is focused on small to medium-sized payloads. For scalability, the company must expand its capabilities to accommodate larger satellites and potentially human passengers. Adapting the technology for broader applications will be essential.

Conclusion: Is SpinLaunch an Innovation?

SpinLaunch exhibits the hallmarks of a true innovation. By addressing cost, environmental impact, and frequency of launches, it provides substantial benefits to the space industry. However, the road to demonstrating full potential is fraught with engineering and market challenges. Yet, the novelty and promise of their approach cannot be ignored.

Here is a 40 minute documentary that dives deep into the engineering, problem solving and innovation approach:

Opportunities for Expansion

To strengthen the case for SpinLaunch as an innovation, future assessments could involve the impact on related industries such as satellite manufacturing. More real-world data from further launches will offer insights into long-term feasibility and environmental impact. Engaging with regulators and potential partners early will be crucial to addressing scalability challenges.

Revision & Expansion

The ongoing journey of SpinLaunch should be closely monitored. As the company progresses, it should aim to address:

Risk Management: How can the company mitigate potential risks associated with high G-force impacts on sensitive equipment?
Regulatory Hurdles: Navigating international laws and space treaties will be essential as SpinLaunch aims for global reach.
Commercial Partnerships: Collaborations with established aerospace companies could fast-track development and market entry.

The future of SpinLaunch lies in its ability to resolve these emerging challenges while maintaining its innovative edge, positioning the company as a potential leader in transforming space access.

So, what do you think? Innovation or not?

Image credit: SpinLaunch

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