If you’re asked to do cost reduction, before doing that work, ask for objective evidence that the work to grow the top line is adequately staffed. You can’t secure your company’s future through cost reduction, so before you spend time and effort to grow the bottom line, make sure the work to grow the top line is more than fully staffed. Without top-line growth, cost reduction is nothing more than a race to the bottom.
If you’re asked to do more of what was done last time, before doing that work, look back and plot how that line of goodness has improved over time. If the goodness over time is flat (it hasn’t increased), the technology is mature, there’s nothing left, and you should improve something else (a new line of goodness). If the goodness continues to increase over time, ask customers if it’s already good enough. Do this by asking if they’d pay more for more goodness. If they won’t pay more, it’s already good enough. Stop work on that tired, old line of goodness and work on a new one. If goodness over time is still increasing and customers will pay more, teach someone else how to improve that line of goodness so you can establish the next line of goodness which will be needed when the old one gets tired.
If you’re asked to make your product do more, before doing that work, figure out if the planet will be better off if your product does more. If the planet will frown if your product does more, make your product do less with far less. In that way, your customers will get a bit less, but they’ll use far fewer resources and the planet will smile. And when the planet smiles, so will the stockholders of the company that provides less with far less.
If you’re asked to improve a specific line of goodness, before doing that work, look to see if competitive technologies are also improving on that same line of goodness. If their improvement slope is steeper than yours, you will be overtaken. Find a new line of goodness to improve, or buy the dominant company in that’s making progress with the competitive technology. Don’t wait, or sooner rather than later, they’ll buy you.
If you’re asked to make your product do more, before doing that work, look at the byproducts that will increase and how that relates to the regulatory standards. If those nasty byproducts are (or will be) regulated, future improvements will be blocked by regulatory limits. You can argue about when those limits will be a problem, but you can’t argue that those regulatory limits will ultimately take you out by the knees. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s time to look to a new technology because your existing one will soon be outlawed.
Everything changes. Nothing is static. Technologies get better, then it’s difficult to make the next improvement. Competitors get better, then it’s difficult to be better than them. Environmental constraints get tighter, then you’re legally blocked from improvements that violate those constraints. Last year’s solutions become obsolete. Last year’s analysis tools become obsolete. Last year’s best materials are no longer best. And last year’s manufacturing best processes are no longer best. That’s just how it works.
Before you allocate precious resources to do what you did last time, spend a little time to analyze the situation in a dynamic sense. What changed since last time? Has the regulatory environment changed? Have competitors made improvements? Have new competitors emerged with new technologies? Has your legacy technology run out of gas or does it still have legs? Have new tools come of age and who is using them?
Everything has a half-life – technologies, products, services, tools, processes, business models, and people. When new things are come to be, the only thing you can guarantee is that time will run out and they will run their course. Even if your business model has been successful, it has a half-life and it will die.
Success causes us to think statically, but the universe behaves dynamically. The trick is to use the resources created by our success to sow the seeds that must grow into the solutions of an uncertain future. The best time to plant a tree was fifteen years ago, and the next best time to plant one is today.
Image credit: Pexels
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Oh, what a difference a year makes. A few months ago I traveled to Las Vegas to attend the Customer Contact Week (CCW), the largest conference and trade show in the contact center industry. For the past several years, the big discussion has centered on artificial intelligence (AI), and that continues, but Customer Experience (CX) is also moving into the spotlight. AI and natural language models can give customers an almost human-like experience when they have a question or complaint. However, no surprise, some companies do it better than others.
First, all the hype around AI is not new. AI has been in our lives for decades, just at a much simpler level. How do you think Outlook and other email companies recognize that an email is spam and belongs in the junk/spam folder? Of course, it’s not 100% perfect, and neither are today’s best AI programs.
Many of us use Siri and Alexa. That’s AI. And as simple as that is, it’s obviously more sophisticated when you apply it to customer support and CX.
Let’s go back 10 years ago when I attended the IBM Watson conference in Las Vegas. The big hype then was around AI. There were some incredible cases of AI changing customer service, sales and marketing, not to mention automated processes. One of the demonstrations during the general session showcased AI’s stunning capability. Here’s what I saw:
A customer called the contact center. While the customer service agent listened to the customer, the computer (fueled by AI) listened to the conversation and fed the agent answers without the agent typing the questions. In addition, the computer informed the agent how long the customer had been doing business with the company, how often they made purchases, what products they had bought and more. The computer also compared this customer to others who had the same questions and suggested the agent answer those questions. Even though the customer didn’t yet know to ask them, at some point in the future, they would surely be calling back to do so.
That demonstration was a preview of what we have today. One big difference is that implementing that type of solution back then could have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more than a million. Today, that technology is affordable to almost any company, costing a fraction of what it cost back then (as in just a few thousand dollars).
Voice Technology Gets Better
Less than two years ago, ChatGPT was introduced to the world. Similar technologies have been developed. The capability continues to improve at an incredibly rapid pace. The response from an AI-fueled chatbot is lightning fast. Now, the technology is moving to voice. Rather than type a question for the chatbot, you talk, and it responds in a human-like voice. While voice technology has existed for years, it’s never been this good. Google introduced voice technology that seemed almost human-like. The operative word here is almost. As good as it was, people could still sense they weren’t talking to a human. Today, the best systems are human-like, not almost human-like. Think Alexa and Siri on steroids.
Foreign Accents Are Disappearing
We’ve all experienced calling customer support, and an offshore customer service agent with a heavy accent answers the call. Sometimes, it’s nearly impossible to understand the agent. New technologies are neutralizing accents. A year ago, the software sounded a little “digital.” Today, it sounds almost perfect.
Why Customers Struggle with AI and Other Self-Service Solutions
As far as these technologies have come, customers still struggle to accept them. Our customer service research (sponsored by RingCentral) found that 63% of customers are frustrated by self-service options, such as ChatGPT and similar technologies. Furthermore, 56% of customers admit to being scared of these technologies. Even though 32% of the customers surveyed said they had successfully resolved a customer service issue using AI or ChatGPT-type technologies, it’s not their top preference as 70% still choose the phone as their first level of support. Inconsistency is part of the problem. Some companies still use old technology. The result is that the customer experience varies from company to company. In other words, customers don’t know whether the next time they experience an AI solution if it will be good or not. Inconsistency destroys trust and confidence.
Companies Are Investing in Creating a Better CX
I’ve never been more excited about customer service, CX and the contact center. The main reason is that almost everything about this conference was focused on creating a better experience for the customer. The above examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Companies and brands know what customers want and expect. They know the only way to keep customers is to give them a product that works with an experience they can count on. Price is no longer a barrier as the cost of some of these technologies has dropped to a level that even small companies can afford.
Customer Service Goes Beyond Technology: We Still Need People!
This article focused on the digital experience rather than the traditional human experience. But to nail it for customers, a company can’t invest in just tech. It must also invest in its employees. Even the best technology doesn’t always get the customer what they need, which means the customer will be transferred to a live agent. That agent must be properly trained to deliver the experience that gets customers to say, “I’ll be back.”
Team building is a crucial element of creating a strong team culture. Understanding each other’s differences and preferences is a vital step in becoming a high-performing team. But many leaders struggle to find and deliver effective team building exercises. There are many too choose from, and many fall short. So many exercises focus solely on getting teammates to understand each other’s differences—often expressed as personality, identity, or experiences.
But for team building exercises to work, teams can’t just understand each other. They need to understand each other’s behavior.
And that’s what makes the “manual of me” activity the single best team building exercise. Instead of assigning different letters or numbers to different team members based on personality. It focuses on having teammates share their different work preferences. This tool allows team members to gain a deeper understanding of each other’s strengths, weaknesses, preferred environments, and working preferences. And over time, teams become be able to coordinate and even predict each other’s behavior.
In this article, we will delve into the concept of a Manual of Me, how to construct one, and the benefits of sharing and collecting these manuals within the team.
The “Manual of Me”
The Manual of Me is a powerful tool that enables team members to gain insights into each other’s behavior and preferences. It consists of a core of four, fill-in-the-blank questions: “I’m at my best when _____,” “I’m at my worst when _____,” “You can count on me to _____,” and “What I need from you is _____.”
By discussing these questions, team members can understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, preferred environments, and working preferences. This understanding is crucial for creating a harmonious and productive team culture.
Constructing a Manual of Me
Constructing a Manual of Me involves a conversation within the team where each member shares their answers to the four core questions. Before starting the activity, it is important to inform the team about the purpose and provide them with the template and questions ahead of time.
The first question, “I’m at my best when _____,” focuses on identifying individual strengths, preferred activities, and environments for optimal performance. This question allows team members to understand how they can bring their best selves to the team.
The second question, “I’m at my worst when _____,” helps identify tasks and environments where individuals may struggle or under-perform. By understanding these limitations, team members can provide support and create an environment that minimizes challenges.
The third question, “You can count on me to _____,” highlights each person’s contributions and areas where they can provide help to the team. This question promotes collaboration and allows team members to leverage each other’s strengths.
The fourth question, “What I need from you is _____,” identifies areas where individuals need support or assistance from others. This question fosters open communication and helps team members understand how they can best support each other.
Additional questions can be added to the Manual of Me based on the team’s industry and level of familiarity with each other. These questions can delve deeper into specific aspects of work or personal preferences that are relevant to the team’s dynamics.
Sharing and Collecting Manuals of Me
Once each team member has shared their answers, there should be time for discussion and clarification. This allows team members to gain a deeper understanding of each other’s perspectives and preferences.
The completed Manuals of Me can be in various formats such as PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoints, or videos. It is important to choose a format that is easily accessible and can be stored in a shared folder or platform where the team can easily access them.
The ongoing conversation and understanding fostered by the Manuals of Me can lead to improved collaboration and performance within the team. By referring back to these manuals, team members can ensure that they are effectively supporting each other and leveraging their strengths.
When new team members join, they can be introduced to the Manuals of Me and encouraged to share their own once they feel comfortable. This helps integrate new members into the team and ensures that everyone is on the same page.
The Manual of Me is a powerful team building exercise that promotes understanding and collaboration within a team. By discussing strengths, weaknesses, preferred environments, and working preferences, team members can create a strong team culture and enhance their performance. The ongoing conversation and understanding fostered by the Manuals of Me can lead to improved collaboration and performance within the team.
At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?
But enough delay, here are November’s ten most popular innovation posts:
If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!
SPECIAL BONUS: While supplies last, you can get the hardcover version of my first bestselling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for 51% OFF until Amazon runs out of stock or changes the price. This deal won’t last long, so grab your copy while it lasts!
Have something to contribute?
Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.
P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations are recognizing the importance of not just their customers’ experience, but also their employees’. The concept of employee experience encompasses every touchpoint a worker encounters from recruitment to retirement. However, what often remains underappreciated is the systematic examination of this experience through regular audits. Today, we’ll explore why annual employee experience audits are critical for any forward-thinking organization.
Understanding Employee Experience
The employee experience can be defined as the sum total of all interactions an employee has with their employer. This includes the culture, the physical workspace, tools and technology provided, leadership behavior, and organizational practices. Together, these elements shape how employees perceive their organization and directly influence engagement, productivity, and retention.
The Need for Regular Audits
Conducting regular audits of the employee experience is crucial for several reasons:
Identifying Pain Points: Just as businesses conduct customer journey mapping to understand customer pain points, employee experience audits help uncover hidden obstacles impacting employee satisfaction and performance.
Measuring Impact of Changes: Organizations implement initiatives to improve the work environment regularly. Audits provide a structured approach to assess the impact of these initiatives, offering insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
Aligning with Strategic Goals: As companies evolve, ensuring that the employee experience aligns with the organization’s strategic goals becomes imperative. Audits help in recalibrating experiences to support these objectives.
The Benefits of Annual Audits
Moving from sporadic reviews to a structured annual audit brings several benefits:
Enhanced Engagement: Regular audits demonstrate a commitment to employee well-being, fostering a culture of trust and transparency which enhances overall engagement.
Improved Retention: By identifying factors that contribute to dissatisfaction or turnover, organizations can proactively address issues, making it easier to retain top talent.
Informed Decision Making: Comprehensive data from audits enable leaders to make informed decisions about policies, benefits, and strategic initiatives that can enhance the employee experience.
What a Complete Employee Experience Audit Looks Like
A thorough employee experience audit should include several key components:
Comprehensive Surveys: Distribute surveys that cover a wide range of topics including workplace culture, management effectiveness, communication, work-life balance, career development, and employee satisfaction.
Focus Groups and Interviews: Conduct focus groups and one-on-one interviews that allow employees to provide detailed feedback and personal insights that might not surface through surveys alone.
Observation: Observe working conditions, team dynamics, and workflow interactions to gain an understanding of the daily employee experience.
Data Analysis: Analyze HR data, turnover rates, and performance metrics to identify trends and areas needing improvement.
Technology and Tool Assessment: Evaluate the tools and technologies available to employees for their effectiveness in enhancing productivity and satisfaction.
Leadership and Management Review: Assess leadership styles and their alignment with employee needs and organizational values.
Feedback Loop: Establish a mechanism for continuous feedback and updates to the audit process to ensure it evolves with organizational changes.
What An Employee Experience Audit IS NOT
An employee experience audit is not an employee experience survey. Like a financial audit, it should also typically be conducted by a small group from outside the organization to maintain objectivity and honesty in the observations, devoid of assumptions and rationalizations of design tradeoffs. Employee experience auditors are trying as much as possible to walk in the shoes of employees across channels for key activities and so they must not be isolated from key systems or key employee groups to determine the most important activities and systems to dive the deepest into the experience of.
An employee experience audit is not a solution but research with recommendations. It is worthless without a commitment to act on the findings found. The leadership commitment and plans for how deficiencies will be addressed is EVEN MORE IMPORTANT than how the employee experience audit is conducted.
Implementing Effective Audits
For an audit to be effective, it should be thorough and inclusive. Consider the following steps:
Define Objectives: Clearly outline what you aim to achieve with the audit.
Utilize Surveys and Interviews: Gather quantitative and qualitative data through employee surveys and interviews.
Analyze Data: Use data analytics to identify trends and patterns. Pay attention to anomalies and outliers.
Actionable Recommendations: Transform insights into actionable steps that can be implemented to drive positive change.
Leadership Commitment: Secure commitment from leadership to fund and implement the greatest improvement opportunities identified during the audit.
Conclusion
The workplace is fundamentally changing, and so too must our approach to understanding it. Annual employee experience audits provide a robust framework for consistently enhancing the environments we create for our workforces. In doing so, we not only improve the lives of our employees but also drive innovation, loyalty, and performance that propels our organizations forward. But an employee experience audit is not the same thing as an employee survey. It is instead an outside-in evaluation of the experience employees have while executing key activities across key systems. By embedding an annual employee experience audit practice into our routine, we fortify the human connection at the heart of every successful enterprise.
If you would like to team up to conduct an Employee Experience Audit at your company, please contact me and we can get you on the calendar to meet with our team.
Image credits: Pixabay
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
Content Authenticity Statement: The core premise and structure for this article was created by Braden Kelley. The OpenAI Playground, taking on the role of human-centered change and innovation thought leader Braden Kelley has helped to flesh out the content of the article with supplementary content added by Braden Kelley, including the section on What An Employee Experience Audit IS NOT.
It’s that time of year again – the annual ritual of strategic planning. But as Seth Godin points out in “How to Avoid Strategy Myopia,” we often mistake annual budgets and operational efficiency plans for true strategy. Strategies are not plans or guarantees; they’re informed choices to pursue possibilities that may or may not work.
Godin’s insights, while often associated with innovation, are fundamentally about strategy in its purest form. They challenge us to look beyond next quarter’s earnings and focus on transformative potential just beyond our current vision.
The Myth of “Strategic Planning”
Consider for a moment the last strategic planning session you attended. Was it dominated by discussions of cost-cutting measures, market share percentages, and incremental improvements? If so, you’re not alone. Many organizations focus on optimizing their current operations, behavior that is reinforced by the processes, templates, and forms required to secure next year’s funding.
However, as Godin warns, “When the boss demands a strategy that comes with certainty and proof, we’re likely to settle for a collection of chores, tasks, and tactics, which is not the same as an elegant, resilient strategy. To do strategy right, we need to lean into possibility.”
The Realities We Must Confront
Godin challenges us to confront several uncomfortable truths:
Today’s data doesn’t predict tomorrow: Executives rely heavily on easily measurable metrics based on false proxies when they make decisions. While these metrics provide a sense of control and comfort, they close our eyes to emerging opportunities and threats. When AT&T’s executives considered exiting the cell phone market in the 1980s, they turned to McKinsey to find data to inform their decision. Estimating that the total worldwide market for cell phones was 900,000, AT&T executives were comfortable exiting. It’s unknown if that comfort was worth the $11.5 billion AT&T spent to acquire McCaw Cellular in 1995.
Serving everyone serves no one: “Strategy myopia occurs when we fail to identify who we seek to serve and focus on what we seek to produce instead.” AMEN! True strategy begins with a deep understanding of our customers’ evolving needs, not just their current preferences. This requires empathy, foresight, and a willingness to challenge our assumptions. It also requires us to listen and act on what we hear from customers and not just from our bosses.
“All of the Above” is not an option: Strategy requires that we make choices and is as much about what we choose not to do as what we commit to doing. It requires the courage to say no to good opportunities in service of great ones. It requires facing your FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), loss aversion bias, and finding the courage to keep going.
5 Practical Steps You Can Take
If any of these sound familiar, it’s because they’re also innovation best practices.
Dedicate One Day per Month for Strategic Thinking: Set aside one full day each month for long-term strategic questions, free from the “Tyranny of Now.”
Cultivate Diverse Perspectives: Invite and listen to voices from different backgrounds, disciplines, and levels within the organization.
Embrace Small-Scale Experimentation: Run a series of small, low-cost, low-profile experiments instead of betting everything on a single initiative.
Redefine Success Metrics: Move beyond traditional financial metrics to include indicators of future potential, such as customer lifetime value and adaptability to change.
Foster a Culture of Questioning: Channel your inner two-year-old and ask “why” with genuine curiosity. Encourage your team to challenge assumptions because the most transformative strategies often emerge from questioning the status quo.
As we continue through this season of strategic planning, let’s challenge ourselves to think beyond the annual budget. Let’s envision the future we want to create and chart a course to get there. After all, in the words of Godin himself, “It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction.”
Image credit: Pexels
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Throughout history there have been certain times and places that have given rise to phenomenal intellectual activity. The Vienna Circle and Cambridge’s Bloomsbury Group in the early 20th century are certainly examples, as is the Golden Age of Russian Literature in the mid-19th century and the post-war existentialist movement in Paris.
In a certain sense, these seem random, but they aren’t really. In each case, we can see undercurrents of politics, economics and other forces that gave rise to tensions people were trying to resolve. Great thinkers would explore, meet and influence each other, creating new directions and possibilities.
Yet it isn’t only intellectual life that converges in this way. History has a way of assembling forces around certain points of time and space, when long-standing trends intersect and give rise to new things. That’s why we study past events and learn about the lives of great personages long gone, so that we can hope to proactively recognize these forces and adapt.
1948: The Birth Of The Post-War Era
1948 was a pivotal year in many ways. Harry Truman was elected in a surprise upset over Thomas Dewey. Gandhi was assassinated in India. In South Africa, the white supremacist Nationalist party took power, making way for a half-century of Apartheid. The communists took power in Czechoslovakia and the Soviets sealed off Berlin. The western allies responded with a massive airlift, the likes of which the world had never seen.
Yet what probably would have more lasting effects than anything else that year didn’t involve great powers, armies or even political parties. In fact, the most consequential events that year hardly made the newspapers and most people probably weren’t even aware of them. It was in 1948 that two breakthrough innovations at Bell Labs ushered in the digital age.
The first was the transistor, invented by John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain. Up until that time, computers used vacuum tubes, which were big, clunky, slow and tended to burn out. Transistors made it possible to make computers exponentially faster and more reliable. They also made way for the integrated circuits we still use today.
The second breakthrough, Claude Shannon’s creation of information theory, was less obvious, but no less important. The basic idea was that information can be broken down into quantifiable entities he called binary digits (or bits for short). It was information theory, along with Shannon’s earlier work that showed how Boolean algebra could be transformed through mechanical means into logic gates, that made the information age possible.
When I spoke to Fred Brooks, who led the development of IBM’s legendary System 360 that would dominate computing for a generation, he explained how both innovations proved pivotal to his work. Of course, it was the transistor that made the IBM 360 possible, but he also told me that it was his decision to switch from a 6-bit byte to an 8-bit byte, which enabled the use of lowercase letters, that helped make it transformative.
1968 – A Historically Tumultuous Year
While 1948 is remembered as a year of great events, 1946 is remembered for very different reasons. With armistices firmly in place in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, soldiers coming home from war started settling down and making love. With the inevitable result that came in the years that followed, the Baby Boom generation was born.
As the horrors of war receded and a new era of prosperity emerged, the Boomers began to see things very differently than previous generations. They would question authority, challenging old values and ways of doing things. Many began to advocate for gender and racial equality. Unwilling to take the world as it was, they sought to remake it in their own image.
Tensions simmered throughout the 60s, but in 1968 they would combine and explode. The year started with the Prague Spring, when a number of modest reforms in Czechoslovakia, intended to bring about “Socialism with a human face,” were met by a brutal Soviet crackdown. A few months later, Polish authorities got the message and crushed internal protests advocating for similar reforms.
During the American spring of that year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated. The summer brought, if anything, greater tumult. Bloody clashes between police and demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention discredited the party amongst many and paved the way for the election of Richard Nixon. Tommie Smith and John Carlos would raise their hands in a black power salute on the Olympic Podium.
Perhaps most of all, 1968 represented a handing of the baton. The 20-somethings of the 1960s would become 30-somethings of the 1970s. In the 1980s, they voted for Reagan in droves, and would shift how the the United States saw and governed itself as well as its place in the world.
1989 – Berlin Wall and World Wide Web
In November 1989, there were two watershed events that would fundamentally change how the world worked. 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.
Like in 1948 and 1968, the forces leading up to these events had been building for some time. The Polish Solidarity movement, which had been active since 1980, united activists from labor and the intelligentsia. It showed that the Soviets could be successfully defied. As the price of oil dropped throughout the 1980s, the Eastern Bloc became increasingly untenable.
In a similar way, the development of the World Wide Web had been brewing for decades. The US government had been building out ARPANET and computer scientists had been developing hypertext since the 1960s. All of the technology was in place in 1989 and Berners-Lee was able to create what became the World Wide Web in less than a month.
1989 would mark an inflection point in which the world would shift from hierarchies to networks and the global village which Marshall McLuhan had envisioned came into being. Much like he predicted, however, this village was not a friendly place, but would result in a “release of human power and aggressive violence” from which we are still reeling.
The Power Of Cascades
In my book Cascades, I explained how small groups, loosely connected but united by a shared purpose drive transformational change. It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly, at first. Connections accumulate under the surface, barely noticed, as small groups slowly begin to link together and congeal into a network. Eventually things hit a tipping point.
It’s not just people that are networked though, events are as well. There are always unseen connections between the forces of economics, technology, culture, politics and many other things. Much like social and political movements, the effects are almost impossible to detect at first, but can accelerate in nonlinear ways that defy the prediction of experts.
By all indications, we are in such a period now. We are undergoing four major shifts in technology, resources, migration and demography that will be transformative. Clearly, these shifts will create significant opportunities, but also great peril. The last time we saw this much change afoot was during the 1920s and that didn’t end well.
Yet that doesn’t have to happen. In 1948 we were able to create a new world order that ushered in an era of peace and prosperity unequalled in human history. The events of 1968 and 1989 also helped to bring about enormous progress. The difference between those epochs wasn’t so much due to any underlying forces, but the choices that were made.
Every generation faces great challenges. Some are remembered for their achievements, others for their tragedies. Like earlier generations, we have important choices to make. We should endeavor to choose wisely.
Looking back at the beginning of this decade now that we’re closing in on the halfway point, it’s clearly been a wild ride!
We’ve had a global pandemic, groundbreaking technological breakthroughs, geopolitical shocks, supply chain disruptions, and so much more.
These challenges have revealed a critical truth: organizations need to adapt and innovate faster than ever before.
Add to this the tough economic climate, shrinking capital availability, the disillusionment many business leaders feel toward their innovation teams (sometimes justified, sometimes less so), and we’re looking at a highly turbulent environment for corporate innovation.
The mandate has never been so clear: deliver more results, faster, and with fewer resources. For seasoned innovators, that’s just business as usual. However, structural shifts are poised to reshape the innovation management landscape.
With that background, here’s our take on the top trends to watch in 2025.
1. Innovation as a Distributed Core Capability
With tighter budgets, the rise of AI and other transformative technologies, the pressing need for organizations to reinvent themselves, and you can see why innovation is increasingly owned by individual business units.
This shift can arise from necessity—businesses needing to transform—or simply from a desire for better strategic alignment and more measurable outcomes.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a need for innovation expertise, but the role of corporate innovators is undoubtedly evolving. Instead of driving innovation directly, they are now enablers and educators, equipping the broader organization to innovate effectively. Embodying this phenomenon is TD Bank, for example:
“The program is truly driven by each line of business—we’re here as a tool to empower their innovation, not to direct it.”
– Josh Death, VP of Intellectual Property and Ideation at TD Bank.
To pull that off, every organization needs to have 3 key elements in place:
Innovation is now at a similar transition point as IT was during the digital transformation era a couple of decades ago: the exact method and approach can be debated, but one thing is clear: every organization must embed innovation as a core capability. Just as some organizations are “digital natives,” the situation is the same for “innovation natives.”
Frameworks, toolkits, and best practices: Innovation isn’t (always) rocket science, but you still need to know what you’re doing. To pull this off, the organization needs to provide its employees with practical tools, frameworks and practices, preferably in the format of a well-designed Innovation System or Program. The recently published ISO 56000 series of standards is now a great starting point, but they need to be complemented with tools that innovators across the organization can use.
Education, coaching, and enablement: A good framework serves as an efficient and effective launching pad, but without proper education, most employees won’t benefit from it. This is where corporate innovation leaders play a key role. They need to organize education and enablement for innovators across the organization, and coach people on how to get past common obstacles. However, doing that at the scale of a large organization is complex—that’s where programs such as The Innovation System, which is included for all HYPE software customers, can be highly effective.
Scalable and adaptive system support: To get measurable outcomes from innovation, you need to operationalize your program. Even the best designed programs with highly effective leaders and coaches can struggle to scale their work and get the outcomes they want without proper system support. That’s where a holistic innovation platform, such as the HYPE Suite, can play a key supporting role.
Generative AI has been the focus of most of the hype around AI lately, and for good reason, but there’s more to AI than that. When you combine the latest generative AI models with proven innovation best practices, more traditional machine learning algorithms, and data from your innovation ecosystem, you have a powerful toolkit that enables a variety of different use cases.
AI can:
Analyze and structure large datasets.
Provide actionable recommendations.
Help users locate relevant information more efficiently.
Detect market signals earlier.
Generate novel ideas.
Coach innovators to enhance their work.
The common denominator for all of them is that AI can help streamline, automate, and accelerate work, and provide easier access to information and skills that used to be the domain of only a few experts within the organization.
However, scaling AI’s benefits isn’t without challenges. Most employees aren’t going to be expert prompters or data analysts that know all the right innovation best practices. So, to unlock the real benefits of using AI, you’re going to need a capable system that is specifically designed for corporate innovation and deeply integrated with AI across the board. When deployed right, AI can help democratize, scale and accelerate innovation like never before.
3. Democratization of Innovation
The third trend builds on the first two. As innovation becomes a core capability better supported by tools, processes, and technology, it will also become more democratized.
Here are the three key shifts are driving this transformation:
Innovation tools, frameworks, and best practices are becoming more widely available, understood, and easier to use: This makes it easier for anyone that wants to be an innovator to get started on the right path and avoid many of the common beginner mistakes.
Technology reduces barriers to entry: Thanks to technologies such as 3D printing, low or no-code software, and Gen AI, it’s never been easier, faster, and cheaper to prototype innovations, whether focused on digital solutions, physical products, or process improvements.
Organizations are looking for more bottom up, employee and team-led innovation and intrapreneurship: Corporate innovation is no longer solely driven by top management. While management needs to set the strategy and targets, more and more organizations are looking towards empowering their employees to help them get where they want to go. It all starts from ideas, but self-organized teams, business units, and intrapreneurship programs are all on the rise. Companies increasingly want to encourage employees to think and act more like entrepreneurs.
When you put all three together, they create a powerful combination that can propel organizations to new heights of innovation and growth.
4. Partner Innovation and the Venture Client Model
No organization, no matter how large or powerful, can house all the best talent on every topic. That’s why the “Not Invented Here” syndrome can be particularly dangerous.
When you need to move fast, and do so with a lower budget, your best bet is to leverage talent from outside your organization.
The trick? Partnering with leaders and early movers in your area of interest to accelerate time to market and gain valuable insights. These partners can include research institutes, universities, or, increasingly, startups.
Historically, large organizations have relied on accelerators or Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) investments to engage with startups. However, both approaches have limitations:
Learning is indirect and secondhand.
They often fail to directly contribute to strategic business goals.
CVC investments require significant capital that could be allocated elsewhere.
The better approach? The Venture Client Model. This approach allows organizations to act as customers and development partners to startups that align with their strategic goals, resulting in:
Lower costs and faster time to market.
Accelerated learning through direct engagement.
Quick ROI by leveraging the organization’s existing scale.
To succeed with this model, you need a systematic approach, the right tools—like HYPE Partnering—and a clear focus on addressing real business problems, not just nice to haves.
The Venture Client Model, featured in Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for Innovation Practices, brings all these elements together, making it a proven and effective strategy for driving innovation.
5. Cross-industry Collaboration
Building on the trend of partnering, companies are increasingly looking beyond their industries to find innovation opportunities.
Experienced innovators know that there’s no such thing as a new idea. Every idea is simply a combination of previous concepts and ideas applied to solve a specific problem. By partnering with organizations in different industries, companies can leverage highly advanced, specialized capabilities to uncover surprising opportunities and tackle the often-difficult execution phase of innovation.
As such, we’re seeing more and more strategic partnerships between companies from different industries, such as automotive or life science firms partnering with tech companies, to not just learn from one another, but to cocreate hybrid solutionsand products that unlock new value for customers and enable breakthroughs that neither industry could achieve alone.
6. Sustainability and ESG-driven Innovation
Last decade, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) was all the rage. In the last couple of years, many of these initiatives took a backseat due to economic pressures and growing disillusionment with some of the failures associated with many of these programs.
The problem was that many organizations implemented ESG at a superficial level—promises and policies with little real-world impact—leading to skepticism about the value behind the topic at large.
However, the fundamental need for transformation remains critical. From addressing government deficits to combating climate change, the urgency for sustainable innovation is greater than ever.
What’s different now? The drivers and enablers are firmly in place:
Regulatory Pressure: Many governments across the globe are introducing stricter mandates for sustainable practices.
Technological Advancements: Breakthroughs in renewable energy, electrification, AI, and circular solutions provide tools for real change.
Consumer Preferences: Shifts toward sustainability are influencing demand and shaping circular economic models.
For innovators, this is a perfect storm—a unique opportunity to create breakthroughs that move the needle for both their organizations and the planet. Sustainability has been through the Hype Cycle, and is now nearing the plateau of productivity. For many, it’s no longer a “nice-to-have” but a strategic imperative, making ESG-driven innovation one of the most significant trends shaping the future of corporate innovation and strategy.
Conclusion
These trends highlight a clear shift toward more agile, sustainable, and externally focused innovation practices. For many organizations, they’re not just a nice addition, but a must to stay competitive in increasingly complex and fast-moving global markets. What hasn’t changed, is that those organizations that master innovation, unlock new opportunities to create value, drive impact. They will be able to future-proof themselves and leave the competition in the dust.
This article was originally published in HYPE’s blog. Images from Unsplash and Pixabay.
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Everything has a half-life, but we don’t behave that way. Especially when it comes to success. The thinking goes – if it was successful last time, it will be successful next time. So, do it again. And again. It is an efficient strategy – the heavy resources to bring it to life have already been spent. And it is predictable – the same customers, the same value proposition, the same supply base, the same distribution channel, and the same technology. And it is dangerous.
Success is successful right up until it isn’t. It will go away. But it will take time. A successful product line will not fall off the face of the earth overnight. It will deliver profits year-over-year and your company will come to expect them. And your company will get hooked on the lifestyle enabled by those profits. And because of the addiction, when they start to drop off the company will do whatever it takes to convince itself all is well. No need to change. If anything, it is time to double-down on the successful formula.
Here’s a rule: When your successful recipe no longer brings success, it’s not time to double-down.
Success’ decline will be slow, so you have time. But creating a new recipe takes a long time, so it is time to declare that the decline has already started. And it is time to learn how to start work on the new recipe.
Hardship 1 – Allocate resources differently. The whole company wants to spend resources on the same old recipes, even when told not to. It is time to create a funding stream that is independent of the normal yearly planning cycle. Simply put, the people at the top have to reallocate a part of the operating budget to projects that will create the next successful platform.
Hardship 2 – Work differently. The company is used to polishing the old products and they don’t know how to create new ones. You need to hire someone who can partner with outside companies (likely startups), build internal teams with a healthy disrespect for previous success, create mechanisms to support those teams and teach them how to work in domains of high uncertainty.
Hardship 3 – See value differently. How do you provide value today? How will you provide value when you cannot do it that way? What is your business model? Are you sure that’s your business model? Which elements of your business model are immature? Are you sure? What is the next logical evolution of how you go about your business? Hire someone to help you answer those questions and create projects to bring the solutions to life.
Hardship 4 – Measure differently. When there is no customer, no technology and no product, there is no revenue. You must learn how to measure the value of the work (and the progress) with something other than revenue. Good luck with that.
Hardship 5 – Compensate differently. People that create something from nothing want different compensation than people that do continuous improvement. And you want to move quickly, violate the status quo, push through constraints and create whole new markets. Figure out the compensation schemes that give them what they want and helps them deliver what you want.
This work is hard, but it’s not impossible. But your company doesn’t have all the pieces to make it happen. Don’t be afraid to look outside your company for help and partnership.
Image credit: Pixabay
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
More and more, customers are open to using self-service solutions. Our customer experience research shows that while customers might prefer the human touch, some expect digital, self-service solutions. In certain cases, they even demand it. And it’s not just in customer service.
Consider Amazon, the perfect example of a self-service retailer. From researching to purchasing a product, and even in most customer service situations, everything is a self-service experience. Each step of the process is logical and intuitive. For customer service issues, the customer is prompted through a process. Along the way, if the customer still wants a live agent to help, they are able to share their phone number and an agent calls back within a minute. The point is, it’s as easy as can be. The learning curve is minimal and comes from just doing it.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re not Amazon, so getting a customer to use your self-service solutions requires a different technique. Keep in mind that there’s a right way and a wrong way. My friend Lance Gruener, EVP of Customer Experience at MasterCard, knows a thing or two about what great service looks like. In addition to his leadership at one of the largest companies on the planet, he’s president of the advisory board of the contact center industry’s largest association. In a recent board meeting, he shared an excellent example of the right way – and wrong way – to get customers to use self-service.
Not long ago, Lance walked into a store. Other than the employees, he was the only person in the store. He approached an employee to ask for help, but rather than helping, the employee pointed to a kiosk and said, “If you go over there, you can do it yourself.”
Lance, who, like me, is acutely aware of good – and unfortunately bad – customer experiences, resented the unwillingness of the employee to help. So, how should the employee have handled this situation?
Ultimately, the company wants customers to use its self-service solutions. But encouraging customers to do so takes a little tact. For Lance, the employee could have done it for him, then taken him to the kiosk and showed him how to do it the next time.
I love this approach. First, take care of the customer and then train them for next time. Or, train the customer while you help them. In effect, you’re saying, “Let’s do this together.” Either way, it combines high touch with technology.
In today’s digital world, a balance between technology, including self-service solutions, and the high-touch experience with a live agent is essential. Empowering customers to confidently use your self-service options can increase customer satisfaction ratings while streamlining operations. To do that, it will take time to train customers to use your technology. Success hinges on good technology integrated with personal support to ensure customers feel valued and capable.
Image Credits: Pixabay, Shep Hyken
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Drum roll please…
