The greatest misconception about change is that it’s about persuasion. All too often, we think that once people understand our idea, they will embrace it. Nothing can be further from the truth. Anybody who’s ever been married or had kids knows how difficult it can be to convince even a single person of something.
Clearly, if you intend to influence an entire organization — much less an entire society—of something, you have to assume the deck is stacked against you. Still, organizations routinely pay armies of change management consultants to spend endless billable hours wordsmithing internal marketing campaigns. No wonder change so often fails.
The truth is that change isn’t about persuasion, but power. If you want change and can access the power to implement it, it will happen. If not, it won’t. That’s why effective change agents learn to leverage multiple sources of power. They mobilize people to influence institutions that can further their cause. That’s how you bring genuine transformation about.
The Paradox Of Hard Power
In early March, 2022 the prominent political scientist John Mearsheimer gave an interview to The New Yorker in which he argued that the United States had blundered greatly in its support of Ukraine. According to his theory we failed to recognize Russia’s role as a great power and its right to dictate certain things to its smaller and weaker neighbor.
That conclusion had a shelf like of about a week. Very quickly, the idea that America should have left Ukraine at the mercy of Russia became not only morally questionable, but patently absurd. How could such a respected expert of foreign affairs get things so wrong? Part of the reason has to do with his misinterpretation of key facts, but perhaps an even greater problem is his misunderstanding of power.
Mearsheimer’s error is that he focused on hard power—the power to coerce—to the exclusion of everything else. The problem with hard power is that the more you use it, the weaker it gets. After brutalizing its neighbors and meddling in the affairs of western nations for over a decade, Vladimir Putin had unleashed forces whose power greatly exceeded Russia’s.
Wise leaders, whether in a political or a business context, must learn to wield coercive power wisely. Use it too little and you undermine your authority and effectiveness, but use it too much and you undermine trust, which eventually will undercut and dilute your capacity. Hard power works best when combined with other sources.
The Attraction Of Soft Power
One factor that Mearsheimer failed to consider is soft power, which Joseph Nye, who coined the term, defined as the ability to influence others without coercion. To do that requires that you build up confidence and stature, which is no easy task. You can’t simply bully or bribe people into admiring and trusting you.
For years, Putin had wielded hard power, including Russia’s military, energy assets and intelligence services, with considerable skill and alacrity. Yet by doing so, he undermined his ability to attract others to his cause. In fact, many found Russia’s actions to be so repugnant and objectionable that they became determined to work against its interests.
Businesses, especially large corporations, are increasingly attentive to soft power. Consider Apple, which is no stranger to wielding hard power. It is known as a ruthless competitor, especially with regard to its supply chain. Yet it also works hard to position itself as a consumer advocate for privacy (while taking a shot at its competitors, of course).
One reason why protestors target corporations is that they are especially vulnerable to attacks on their soft power. When activists wanted to campaign against restrictive new voting laws in Georgia, they didn’t target the politicians who wrote the legislation, but companies like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines. The firms quickly took a public stance against the laws.
Networked Power
As Anne-Marie Slaughter explained in The Chessboard and the Web, “Power in networks flows from connectedness: the number, type, and location of connections a node has… the most central nodes have the most connections and the highest likelihood of gaining more.” It is this power that Russia may have feared most in Ukraine.
It’s a salient fact that Russia sparked Euromaidan protests in 2013 not in response to any military moves, but because of an economic agreement between Ukraine and the EU. At the same time, Russia was trying to create its own network through a Eurasian Customs Union. Deeper connection between Ukraine and the EU would have undermined the centrality of that project, which had deep significance to Putin’s plans.
One of the biggest misperceptions about power in networks is that it depends on the number of connections. It doesn’t. What’s often far more important is your position in the network. Just like Ukraine’s position in between Russia and Europe increases its importance—and hence, its power—a person’s position in an organizational network or a company’s position in a market network can give them influence that far exceeds their hard or soft power.
In a now famous essay, Lina Kahn, who currently heads the Federal Trade Commission, pointed out that Amazon has attained massive network power by making itself the central node in then American retail industry. It’s not just Amazon either. The Federal Reserve has found that corporations have been increasing their power over the US economy in recent decades, leading to excessive market concentration in most industries, with lower competition and dynamism.
This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what we expected from the digital era, which was supposed to be a democratizing force. Nevertheless, here we are …
The Revenge Of Power
In 2013, the political scientist Moisés Naím published The End of Power, in which he argued that because of the increase in mobility and technology and decrease in poverty, the power of institutions was diminishing. Power hadn’t ended exactly but, as he put it, power was becoming “easier to gain but harder to use or keep.”
However, in his more recent book, The Revenge of Power, Naim points out that autocrats, governments, corporations and other institutions have been able to combine hard power, soft power and networked power to wring back control. It is the coordination and combination of the three, rather than a particular strength in any one, that yields results.
Unfortunately, few seem to learn this basic principle of change. The Occupy Movement focused exclusively on mobilizing people in the streets and, predictably, had no effect on institutions. Common Core activists, on the other hand, focused on institutions, left themselves open to mobilizations from grass-root activists and ran into serious problems.
To make a significant impact, you need to mobilize people to influence institutions and the best way to do that is through leveraging networks. In the final analysis, it is small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose that drives transformational change. As leaders, it’s our job to help those groups connect and to inspire them with purpose.
— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay
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The surprising power of reframing as an innovation tool
GUEST POST from John Bessant
Neuroplasticity. Not some weird creation of a mad 3D sculptor intent on creating a strange new species with which to threaten the world in another zombie apocalypse story but instead a wonderful feature of our brains. Research increasingly confirms our ability, in the face of unexpected shock or challenge, to rewire ourselves, make new neural connections. Defined as‘the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization’ it’s visible in the ways in which people can recover speech or movement after traumatic brain injury and it’s now understood to be critical in the process of early cognitive development in babies. It’s even offered as one explanation for the impossible and unpredictable lifestyls of teenagers; their penchant for lying in bed all day and mooching aorund may be down to their working hard at the synaptic level to reconstruct their brains!
It’s also a good description of a key capability which entrepreneurs have. Being able to reframe, seeing the world in a new way opens up significant new possibilities. Provided, of course, that you are then able to follow through, solving problems and enabling the new connections necessary to bring about that state.
Think about Malcolm Maclean, sitting on the dock of the bay one afternoon and imagining an alternative approach to shipping. Instead of the laborious loading and unloading with all its costs, its wasted time, the security challenges and so on – why not use containers? The vision involved a stretch of the imagination; the actual realisation of it considerably more but in the end you have a game changer. Reframing and then realising the possibilities.
It’s an old story; the challenge of transportation and logistics was one which engaged James Brindley 200 years earlier as the Industrial Revolution began to reshape the British economy and the landscape in which it took place. You can’t get a manufacturing-led transformation off the ground unless you can move tings around – raw materials in and finsihed products out of your factories. Which, given the worn-out and primitive state of many of the roads and tracks criss-crossing the country at the time was a big problem. Brindley was one of the pioneers of the idea of creating waterways – canals – as an alternative, providing fast and straight connections between factories, cities and ports.
Image: Watercolour of Barton aqueduct by G.F. Yates 1793, public domain
Just like Malcolm Maclean, this was an inspirational idea which required a deal of systems thinking. Not just one which could imagine an alternative world built on waterways but also one which would need a lot of practical problem solving to bring it into being. Dealing with multiple questions around how to enable the different elements of the system to come together and deliver ‘emergent properties’ where the whole has an impact much greater than the sum of its parts.
His efforts extended well beyond the map making and route planning through to the detailed construction, involving tunnels, cuttings and viaducts. He also had to think through the big challenge of hydraulics, how to fill the canals with water and keep them full – which meant, amongst other things, solving the problem of lining the canal with a water- saving clay. He also reduced the water demand by cutting narrower canals and then designing narrow-boats to navigate them. And since the country is not level means that in places vessels using the canal have to climb up or down slopes which necessitated development of intricately engineered locks and sluices.
Brindley’s work on connecting up the dots of his system into something which changed the transportation world of its time even extended to thinking in the same direction as Malcolm Mclean came to do much later. Faced with the problem of loading and unloading coal as a key bulk item Brindley devised a system involving specially built wooden containers which could be prefilled and transhipped quickly from specially-designed boats!
Above all Brindley was a systems thinker, seeing connections and working on how to best join up the dots to deliver major change. Which his legacy over 350 miles of canals criss-crossing the country and powering the Industrial Revolution seems to have done.
There’s still plenty of scope for such system rethinking today – giving opportunities even in the face of crisis. Take the example of Gridless, founded in 2022 and already a successful and growing business in the energy sector of Africa.
First the vision. Africa is the coming continent, with a huge population of around a billion largely young people and rapidly accelerating development. This creates an engine for growth through both domestic demand and – with sufficient investment – the possibility of increasing exports, not just of raw materials but of finished goods and services.
It has enormous potential – and it has a track record as a place where radical innovations can emerge and scale. Take the example of M-PESA. Where the idea of mobile money still seems fresh and exciting for citizens of the industrialised world learning to use cashless payments by phone it’s actually rather old hat to many people in East Africa. M-PESA (the word means mobile money in Swahili) is coming up towards celebrating its 20th birthday and has moved a long way from being an experiment to try and improve access to basic financial services for the largely unbanked population of Kenya. Now the M-PESA network carries 60% of GDP and delivers a growing range of services across the economy.
But Africa is also unevenly developed; not least in the case of energy. Whilst much of the population is now connected this is not the case everywhere. Over two thirds of the population – 600 million people – have no access to electricity. Mini-grids (relatively small local power stations and networks) can help solve this energy access problem, not least by tapping into the huge potential which renewable energy – solar, wind, hydro and biomass – has for the region.
There’s no shortage of technology to help construct mini and even micro-grids, and there are plenty of power sources which could potentially be tapped. The problem is economic; in order to finance the construction of such a micro-grid a lot of capital is needed up front. That needs a reasonable return to cover operating costs and recoup the investment costs – but in the short term the market to pay for this isn’t there.
When the power starts to flow there is relatively little demand to hook it up to; people who’ve survived without electricity don’t suddenly become active consumers. As Eric Hersman, one of the founders of Gridless points out, ‘ … if you’re a smallholder farmer in a rural village in Africa you’ll likely buy an LED light bulb and charge your phone at first. These don’t draw a lot of electricity, but they do change your life considerably. It might be a few years before you invest in that refrigerator, TV, irrigation pump, or electric oven’.
The consequence of this slow demand growth is that the provider ends up throwing away 80% of its energy and having to charge too high a price for the rest. What could be an important way of helping local communities develop runs aground because that high price effectively throttles the emerging demand at birth. Catch-22.
Gridless represents an entrepreneurial way of reframing this problem. Given such a stalemate their business model asks a simple question. What if there were a consumer who would guarantee to buy electricity at the necessary market rate to support the project and then gradually retreat as the prices fell and the connections rose? A stepping stone approach, essentially a temporary scaffolding to enable an infrastructure to emerge and grow. Using a horticultural metaphor it’s like putting in place a trellis to support an early sapling until the plant is able to survive and thrive on its own.
That’s the vision part of the Gridless approach – to help Africa with micro-grid development. Their website describes it simply: ‘By combining small-scale bitcoin data centres and renewables-based mini-grids they aim to develop the foundation of a new model to expand profitable electrification to communities in emerging markets without the need for charity, aid, gifts, or government subsidy…’
Bitcoin mining – the energy intensive operation of multiple computers beavering away at solving complex mathematical puzzles to earn rewards in the form of bitcoins – does not have the best of reputations in terms of sustainability. By its nature it involves consuming huge amounts of energy whose generation often contributes to pollution and global warming. But Gridless have reworked the story so that it makes a positive contribution to both sustainability of operations and community development.
It does so in a simple a practical way. It hooks up a bitcoin mine with a source of sustainable energy provided by local renewables like hydro or solar. And it deals with the ‘stranded energy’ problem by joining in the system as a ‘buyer of last resort’. Their bitcoin mining operations provide plenty of demand for energy and those operations are profitable enough to buy it at prices which are too high for local communities to pay in the short term. But as the market develops so the local demand increases – and this means the provider can reduce prices, recouping their costs over a larger market. They can also invest to extend the grid and bring yet more demand into the system.
Eventually things reach a point where there isn’t enough power left for the bitcoin mining, so Gridless pack up their operations, move on to another site where there is ‘stranded energy;’ and start the whole cycle once again. It’s a business model for development with some important social values underpinning it. The main purpose is to help connect people through micro-grids and to gradually exit as the role of the buyer of first resort becomes unnecessary. It’s a business fuelled by bitcoin profits but these are effectively being reinvested in social development – a powerful alternative vision. By providing a consistent and reliable demand for electricity, Bitcoin mining helps to utilize excess renewable energy that might otherwise go to waste, thereby unlocking the potential of stranded renewable energy projects and contributing to a more sustainable energy future.
An impressive vision – but as Messrs Maclean and Brindley will tell you, the challenge is not in creating the vision, it’s in realising it. Visions like these need a lot of different dots to be joined up, a lot of problem solving to make it all work. The Gridless solution starts with the idea of being ‘geographically agnostic’ – meaning it is mobile and can be moved anywhere, finding and helping develop micro-grids wherever there is ‘stranded energy’ opportunity.
They do this by putting the bitcoin mine in a box – literally, using a shipping container in a way which would make Malcolm Maclean proud. They move it close to sources of renewable power – like a micro-hydro system in Zambia, harvesting the abundant energy from the fast flowing Zambesi river.
They’ve worked hard on adapting their technology – computers, power supplies, software – to operate in what can still be challenging conditions. Rural Africa is a long way from the clinical clean environments of Silicon Valley and they’ve had to learn to deal with the suite of problems this throws up in order to make their system reliable. For example air quality- the dust which the wind blows up as it sweeps across the wide plains means you have to be very careful to fit suitable filters to avoid all the expensive electronics grinding to a halt. Ditto the heat; average temperatures in Kenya hover around 30 degrees Celsius so there’s a big problem in keeping things cool. And then there are the bugs.
In 2022 when they set up their first facility the lights attracted plenty of curious insects and, especially in the rainy season, they flew towards them en masse, only to crash into the ventilation fans and eventually jam them!
Problems weren’t just physical; the economics of buying containers ready made from China or the USA to use as mobile bitcoin mines posed a big challenge. Quite apart from the logistics and transportation costs of getting them to Africa there were bureaucratic costs involved in getting the various permissions needed to import such equipment. And then there were the capital costs – at over $100,000 per container it was too expensive. So the team went back to the drawing board and designed their own container which cost 75% less. It’s also had the side benefit of bypassing many of the import regulations (since it is now a domestically manufactured product)
Their problem-solving also extends to another big issue with their business model – that of micro-grid management. How to balance supply and demand and make sure that the needs of the community are served first? Gridless wanted to make sure that they weren’t using electricity which somebody else needed. They did this by writing their own software – Gridless OS – which allows for real-time response to demand, making sure people get what they need when they need it whilst also stabilising the grid.
After three years of such problem-solving the team have a robust model which they have demonstrated can work in a variety of contexts, using whatever renewable power supply is available – solar, hydro or biomass. Theirs is primarily a social mission and so they’ve codified their experience and can offer a blueprint for the same kind of model to be used by others to help African development.
And it works. Not only by connecting people to electric power but by extending the range of possibilities which that then opens up. Once you have power you can have light – which offers more than just illumination, it allows children to study at night and boosts education. Local services become possible because power enables small-scale facilities to operate and deliver healthcare. Business can connect better to markets and small-scale farms and factories can improve their operations and profitability, generating employment.
In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine one of the Gridless founders, Janet Maingi, elaborated on this novel approach which now operates in several countries including Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, ‘…for example, there’s a tea factory in Muranga, Kenya, which is in the highlands. We partnered with the energy generator in the area and they were able to give the factory power. Now, their facilities are able to support the tea factory, which has two benefits: tea farmers can bring their tea to the factory, which means it doesn’t spoil on the farms because they can’t get it to point B in time and more employment has also been created just by that tea factory becoming an electrified space….’
The potential is huge. As Eric Hersman, points out‘….just 10% – 40GW of the 400GW of hydroelectric energy in Africa – has been developed (and that’s just hydro!). There is a near unlimited supply of energy to be developed in the one place on earth that needs it most… Africa. But how to get the plants built? Despite being home to 17% of the world’s population, Africa currently accounts for just 4% of global power supply investment’.
As he points out mini-grid business models have traditionally focused on having an ‘anchor client’, a single large electricity consumer such as a telecom tower, which consumes the majority of electricity supplied by the mini-grid. The anchor client is the first step in what’s called an ABC strategy (Anchor—Business—Consumers) for mini-grid financial sustainability. The model builds on finding an anchor client with a predictable load profile and then helping develop around that a group of local businesses that can provide stable demand and promote economic growth in the communities. The last step is residential customers, bringing them in gradually by improving access and generating income from them.
Over the last 3 years Gridless has shown that mini-grids can be made profitable using their model of becoming a ‘geographically agnostic anchor tenant’. They’ve done this on 6 sites in 3 African countries, using the stranded (wasted) energy from hydro, biomass, geothermal, some of that augmented by solar. Their numbers prove that it can be done; they are confident that a 5-7 year return on investment is possible on almost any hydro mini grid.
There’s a lot to be done – figures from the World Bank estimate that Africa needs 140,000 mini-grids to help electrify the continent. But as of 2025 only 5000 have been built – around 5% of what’s required. Which opens up a huge opportunity – if we can reframe the problem.
The key thing about neuroplasticity is that it isn’t an instant process of constructing new neural pathways. Instead the connections have to be made and reinforced; only gradually does the new network become fully operational. Patients who manage to recover movement or speech after a catastrophic neural event like a stroke do so by a mixture of hard work and determination. Gradually creating those new pathways.
Fixing problems like Africa’s energy challenge won’t happen overnight. It’s not going to be simple, and it will need a lot of system-level problem-solving, joining the dots. But just like James Brindley imagining a network of canals or Malcolm Maclean picturing container routes spanning the world, it starts with an entrepreneurial vision.
In the relentless pursuit of progress, the headlines often gravitate towards the monumental—AI breakthroughs, space exploration milestones, or widely publicized medical cures. Yet, beneath the surface, a vibrant ecosystem of lesser-known scientific discoveries is quietly brewing, each holding immense potential to reshape industries, solve pressing global challenges, and fundamentally alter our human experience. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I believe it’s not just important, but *critical*, to shine a light on these unsung heroes of scientific advancement. Beyond the captivating, yet often abstract, idea of “freezing light,” here are five scientific breakthroughs poised to drive profound innovation, which you might not yet be fully aware of.
1. “Magic State” Distillation in Quantum Computing
The Discovery:
While the broad concept of quantum computing is a familiar frontier, a specific, less-heralded breakthrough known as “magic state distillation” is fundamentally critical. This advanced technique allows quantum computers to generate highly entangled quantum states (the “magic states”) from imperfect or noisy ones. Essentially, it’s a method for error reduction that makes large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computation a significantly more tangible reality. This isn’t merely an incremental improvement; it’s a foundational step towards building truly powerful and reliable quantum machines capable of tackling previously intractable problems.
Innovation Potential:
This breakthrough dramatically accelerates the timeline for practical quantum computing, unlocking possibilities across numerous sectors:
Drug Discovery & Materials Science: Simulating molecular interactions with unprecedented accuracy, leading to the rapid design and development of novel drugs, advanced catalysts, and revolutionary materials.
Artificial Intelligence: Powering next-generation AI algorithms capable of solving complex optimization problems and performing pattern recognition currently beyond the reach of even the most powerful classical supercomputers.
Financial Modeling: Optimizing intricate financial portfolios, risk assessments, and market predictions with vastly greater precision and speed.
It transforms quantum computing from a theoretical marvel into a practical, industry-redefining tool, poised to revolutionize everything from healthcare to finance.
2. Advanced Bionic Limbs with Direct Neural/Muscular Integration
The Discovery:
Moving beyond conventional prosthetics, recent advancements have enabled bionic limbs that directly integrate with a user’s nervous system and residual muscles. This groundbreaking connection allows for truly intuitive control, where the prosthetic limb responds seamlessly to the user’s thoughts and intentions, eliminating the need for cumbersome manual inputs. This innovation extends beyond mere movement; it’s about restoring a profound sense of proprioception (the body’s inherent awareness of its position in space) and even tactile feedback, making the prosthetic feel like a natural, integrated extension of the body.
Innovation Potential:
The implications of this human-machine interface are vast and extend far beyond aiding amputees:
Human Augmentation: Developing sophisticated exoskeletons for industrial workers, significantly enhancing physical capabilities for specialized tasks, or providing unparalleled assistance to individuals with severe mobility impairments.
Rehabilitation & Therapy: Revolutionizing physical therapy by providing real-time, precise feedback and facilitating more natural movement patterns for accelerated recovery.
Virtual Reality & Gaming: Creating incredibly immersive and haptically rich experiences where digital interactions feel physically real, blurring the lines between the virtual and physical worlds.
This technology is fundamentally paving the way for a future where human-machine interfaces are not just functional, but seamless, intuitive, and profoundly enhance human capabilities.
3. Metamaterials: Engineering the Impossible
The Discovery:
Metamaterials are a class of artificially engineered materials designed with properties not found in nature. Their unique, often counter-intuitive characteristics arise not from their chemical composition, but from their meticulously designed sub-wavelength microscopic structures. By precisely manipulating these architectures, scientists can control waves (be it light, sound, or heat) in unprecedented ways, leading to phenomena like “negative refraction” or perfect absorption. Think of them as materials whose fundamental properties are defined by their intricate structural design, rather than solely by their atomic makeup.
Innovation Potential:
The applications stemming from metamaterials are truly revolutionary and span diverse sectors:
Advanced Optics: Creating ultra-thin, highly efficient lenses for next-generation cameras and sensors, or even developing the foundational components for “invisibility cloaks” that precisely bend light around objects.
Wireless Communication: Drastically enhancing 5G and future wireless networks by improving signal reception, significantly reducing interference, and enabling far more efficient data transmission.
Medical Imaging: Improving the resolution, sensitivity, and safety of MRI machines and other diagnostic tools, leading to earlier, more accurate, and less invasive diagnoses.
Energy Harvesting: Designing highly efficient materials that can more effectively capture, concentrate, and convert solar or thermal energy into usable power.
Metamaterials offer a completely new paradigm for material design, empowering us to engineer properties previously considered impossible, opening doors to unimaginable technological advancements.
4. Living Building Materials (Bio-Integrated Construction)
The Discovery:
This groundbreaking and rapidly evolving field involves the deliberate integration of living organisms (such as specific strains of bacteria, fungi, or algae) directly into traditional building materials. Imagine bricks that can literally grow themselves, concrete that possesses the remarkable ability to self-heal its own cracks, or walls that actively absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These bio-integrated materials leverage natural biological processes to provide dynamic functions that inert, conventional materials simply cannot, offering profoundly sustainable and adaptive solutions for the future of construction.
Innovation Potential:
The impact on architecture, urban planning, and environmental sustainability is truly enormous:
Sustainable Construction: Drastically reducing the carbon footprint of buildings by utilizing materials that actively sequester CO2, require significantly less energy to produce, and can even be cultivated on-site from renewable resources.
Self-Healing Infrastructure: Creating resilient roads, bridges, and buildings that automatically repair minor damage, thereby extending their operational lifespan, drastically reducing maintenance costs, and enhancing safety.
Improved Indoor Air Quality: Designing walls that actively filter indoor pollutants, regulate humidity, or even produce oxygen, effectively transforming buildings into living, breathing, and healthier ecosystems.
Resource Efficiency: Developing innovative materials that can be “grown” from waste products or require minimal energy-intensive processing, promoting a circular economy in construction.
This represents a fundamental paradigm shift from static, inert structures to dynamic, biologically active, and self-sustaining built environments.
While CRISPR gene editing has deservedly garnered widespread recognition, the broader, more expansive field of precision synthetic biology pushes the boundaries even further. It involves the deliberate design and meticulous engineering of entirely new biological systems (such as cells, microbes, or enzymes) to perform novel functions or produce new materials and chemicals with unprecedented accuracy, efficiency, and control. This isn’t just about editing existing genes; it’s about building entirely new biological circuits and metabolic pathways from scratch, or precisely reprogramming organisms to act as tiny, highly efficient, and sustainable factories.
Innovation Potential:
The implications of this ability to program life itself are vast and truly transformative:
Sustainable Manufacturing: Producing advanced biofuels, fully biodegradable plastics, and high-value industrial chemicals from renewable resources using engineered microbes, significantly reducing our reliance on petrochemicals and minimizing environmental impact.
Novel Materials: Bio-fabricating materials with properties superior to conventionally manufactured ones, such as self-healing textiles, bio-inspired super-strong, lightweight composites, or even living sensors.
Food & Agriculture: Engineering crops to be inherently more drought-resistant, more nutrient-dense, or to produce their own fertilizers, fundamentally addressing global food security challenges. This also includes developing sustainable alternative proteins and lab-grown cellular agriculture products.
Advanced Therapeutics: Creating “smart” cells that can precisely detect and treat diseases within the human body, or producing vaccines and therapeutics more rapidly, affordably, and at scale.
Precision synthetic biology empowers us to program life itself, ushering in an entirely new era of bio-innovation that promises to reshape countless aspects of our world.
The Unseen Drivers of Tomorrow’s World
These five scientific discoveries, while perhaps not yet household names, represent the absolute cutting edge of human inquiry and ingenuity. They are the quiet, yet powerful, engines of future innovation, each with the profound capacity to spawn entirely new industries, provide elegant solutions to humanity’s grandest challenges, and fundamentally improve the human condition. As leaders, innovators, and conscious citizens, our collective role is not only to recognize these remarkable advancements but to actively foster the environments where they can transition seamlessly from laboratory breakthroughs to tangible, real-world impact. By understanding, championing, and strategically investing in these unsung scientific frontiers, we can truly shape a more innovative, sustainable, and profoundly human-centered future for all. 🔬🌟
Disclaimer: This article speculates on the potential future applications of cutting-edge scientific research. While based on current scientific understanding, the practical realization of these concepts may vary in timeline and feasibility and are subject to ongoing research and development.
Image credit: Gemini
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Continuous improvement is not transformation. With continuous improvement, products, processes and services are improved three percent year-on-year. With transformation, products are a mechanism to generate data, processes are eliminated altogether and services move from fixing what’s broken to proactive updates that deliver the surprising customer value.
A strategic initiative is not transformation. A strategic initiative improves a function or process that is – a move to consultative selling or a better new product development process. Transformation dismantles. The selling process is displaced by automatic with month-to-month renewals. And while product development is still a thing, it’s relegated to a process that creates the platform for the real money-maker – the novel customer value made possible by the data generated by the product.
Cultural change is not transformation.Cultural change uses the gaps in survey data to tweak a successful formula and adjust messaging. Transformation creates new organizations that violate existing company culture.
If there the corporate structure is unchanged, there can be no transformation.
If the power brokers are unchanged, there can be no transformation.
If the company culture isn’t violated, there can be no transformation.
If it’s not digital, there can be no transformation.
In short, if the same rules apply, there can be no transformation.
Transformation doesn’t generate discomfort, it generates disarray.
Transformation doesn’t tweak the successful, it creates the unrecognizable.
Transformation doesn’t change the what, it creates a new how.
Transformation doesn’t make better caterpillars, it creates butterflies.
Image credit: Pixabay
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Recently, I wrote an article about the customer service farce. One of several examples I shared was the line we often hear when calling customer support: “Your call is very important to us.” When we hear it, we hope it’s true. We hope it means that the company is going to respect our time, that someone will pick up the call quickly (versus being put on hold for an unreasonable amount of time), and that the agent we talk to will have the knowledge and skills to answer our question or resolve our complaint, and we’ll not have to repeat our story again and again.
In our most recent customer service and customer experience (CX) research, we asked a number of questions about contact centers that convey the message, “Your call is very important to us.” The answers will make you smile – maybe even laugh. I’ve shared some of these findings from surveys from the previous year. Here are the latest with a couple of new ones:
Cleaning the Toilet: Nearly four out of 10 customers (39%) say they would rather clean a toilet than call customer support. (That’s gross!)
A Root Canal Is Better Than This: A third of U.S. customers (34%) would rather visit the dentist than call customer support. (That’s painful!)
Dinner with In-Laws: Half of the customers (53%) say they would rather have dinner with their in-laws than call customer support. (That could be painful, too!)
Glossophobia (The Fear of Public Speaking): Even though speaking in public is one of the greatest fears, often ahead of death, one in four customers (26%) would rather speak in front of an audience of 1,000 than call customer support. (Yikes, that’s scary!)
But seriously … as humorous as some of these findings are, there’s some truth behind them. Consider these three findings from this year’s report:
Half of U.S. customers (51%) say that when they call customer support with a question or to resolve a problem, the company does not value their time.
And speaking of respecting time, over half of the customers we surveyed (55%) say they stopped doing business with a company or brand because it kept them on hold for too long.
Six out of 10 customers (63%) say they have stopped doing business with a company because of the inability to connect with someone from customer support. </li?
It sounds like I’m being negative, but the reality is that this information gives me hope – for the companies that get it right. The more serious findings mean that more than half of customers are ripe to switch companies, and if you’re doing it right, they are hopefully going to switch to you.
Whether your company has just a few dedicated employees to support your customers or a large contact center, this information and the opportunities we take from it are applicable to you. Your customers deserve attention and respect. Don’t make them feel as if their call is NOT very important to you!
Image Credit: Pexels
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
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Imagine holding a beam of light in your hand, not as a fleeting shimmer, but as a tangible object. Sounds impossible, right? Yet, as an innovation thought leader, I’m constantly scanning the horizon for breakthroughs that shatter our perceptions of what’s possible. Few concepts ignite my imagination quite like the audacious idea of freezing light and transforming it into something akin to a solid or even a “super liquid.” This isn’t just theoretical musing; cutting-edge science is making incredible strides towards manipulating light in ways previously confined to science fiction.
Traditionally, light—composed of photons—is thought of as a wave that travels at the fastest speed in the universe, passing through everything without interaction. But what if we could make photons “stick” together? What if we could slow them down, halt them, and then coax them into entirely new states of matter? This seemingly fantastical endeavor is precisely what researchers are achieving, primarily by forcing photons into strong interactions with specially prepared atomic systems or engineered materials. It’s a fundamental redefinition of light’s behavior.
The “Solid” State of Light: Forming Photonic Molecules
Picture light behaving like a crystal, with photons not just propagating, but forming stable, bound structures. This remarkable feat is becoming a reality. Scientists have demonstrated situations where individual photons, usually independent entities, begin to bind together, acting like “molecules of light.” This binding occurs when photons are made to interact intensely within a specific medium. One groundbreaking method involves firing photons into an extremely cold cloud of rubidium atoms. Instead of simply passing through, the photons effectively transfer their energy to the atoms, which then relay that energy in a kind of quantum bucket brigade. This process dramatically slows the photons down, making them appear to navigate an incredibly thick, viscous substance. Crucially, when two such photons enter the cloud, they don’t just slow independently; they exit together, demonstrating a newfound “stickiness” – a strong interaction previously thought impossible for light in free space. This collective, bound behavior is what gives light a solid-like quality, where a collection of photons acts as a coherent, stable entity. Think of it like water molecules freezing into ice; here, photons are forming similar, if ephemeral, bonds.
The “Super Liquid” State of Light: Flowing Without Resistance
Now, let’s pivot from a rigid solid to something that flows with zero friction and perfect coherence – a superfluid. This incredible quantum phenomenon, often seen in ultra-cold helium, is also being explored in the realm of light. Scientists have successfully created systems where light behaves as a “superfluid of polaritons.” Polaritons are fascinating hybrid quasi-particles, a blend of light and matter, formed when photons strongly couple with electronic excitations within a material, often at extremely low temperatures. In these precise conditions, these polaritons can condense into a macroscopic quantum state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. Once condensed, this “super liquid” light can flow without any resistance, and even sustain persistent currents indefinitely, much like a perpetual motion machine for light. This revolutionary state promises the potential for lossless transmission and manipulation of information, far surpassing the limitations of conventional electronics. It’s the ultimate expression of quantum coherence applied to light, enabling entirely new forms of optical circuitry and communication.
Practical Applications: Beyond the Bleeding Edge
This is where the true innovation potential of these discoveries comes into sharp focus. While currently confined to highly specialized laboratory environments, the ability to fundamentally manipulate light opens up staggering possibilities across numerous industries. We’re talking about fundamental shifts in how we store, transmit, and process information. The implications span across numerous industries:
Quantum Computing and Communication:
The ability to precisely manipulate individual photons and create stable, interacting light structures is a cornerstone for quantum computing. Imagine using qubits (the basic unit of quantum information) made of light, offering unprecedented processing speeds and inherent resilience to decoherence. “Frozen” or “solid” light could serve as quantum memory, storing delicate quantum states for extended durations, a critical bottleneck in current quantum computer designs. For quantum communication, super-fluid light could enable perfectly efficient, lossless transmission of quantum information over vast distances, potentially revolutionizing secure data transfer methods like quantum key distribution.
Ultra-Efficient Data Storage:
If we can reliably “freeze” and retrieve information encoded in the quantum state of trapped photons, we could witness the birth of optical data storage with capacities that dwarf anything available today. Instead of storing data as magnetic bits or electronic charges, imagine encoding petabytes of information in incredibly small, three-dimensional volumes using light itself. This could lead to storage devices with densities orders of magnitude greater than current technologies, transforming everything from cloud computing to personal devices.
Novel Sensing and Metrology:
The extreme sensitivity and unparalleled control over light at these quantum levels could lead to entirely new forms of sensors. Think about detectors capable of identifying single photons with near-perfect efficiency, or instruments that can measure incredibly subtle changes in magnetic fields, gravitational waves, or even biomolecules with unprecedented precision. “Solid” or “super liquid” light could also be used to create ultra-precise atomic clocks or quantum gyroscopes, significantly enhancing navigation systems, geological surveying, and fundamental physics experiments.
New Materials and Energy Technologies:
While more speculative, the principles behind creating light-matter hybrids and precisely manipulating photon interactions could inspire the development of entirely new classes of materials. Imagine materials whose optical properties can be dynamically controlled and even programmed, leading to advancements in everything from smart windows that adapt to light conditions to new forms of optical computing hardware. In energy, could we harness these light manipulation techniques to dramatically improve solar energy conversion, perhaps by “trapping” photons more effectively for enhanced energy transfer, or even creating new forms of light-driven power generation?
Challenges and The Innovation Horizon
Of course, the journey from these groundbreaking laboratory demonstrations to widespread practical applications is fraught with significant challenges. Maintaining the ultra-low temperatures required for many of these phenomena, scaling up these delicate quantum systems, and engineering robust, real-world devices are immense hurdles. Yet, these challenges are precisely what drive innovation.
As a human-centered change leader, I see not just technological advancements but a profound paradigm shift in how we interact with and utilize one of the most fundamental forces of the universe. The ability to control light at such an intimate, quantum level opens doors to innovations that are currently only limited by our collective imagination. The key to unlocking these future applications lies in continued, audacious investment in basic research, fostering deep interdisciplinary collaboration between physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, and embracing a culture of relentless experimentation. We need to empower the boldest thinkers to explore these frontiers, not just for the immediate return on investment, but for the profound and transformative societal impact they could bring. The future of light, it seems, is far from ethereal; it’s becoming increasingly tangible, solid, and incredibly fluid in its potential to reshape our world. 🚀
Disclaimer: This article speculates on the potential future applications of cutting-edge scientific research. While based on current scientific understanding, the practical realization of these concepts may vary in timeline and feasibility and are subject to ongoing research and development.
Image credit: Gemini
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You stand on the brink of an exciting new adventure. Turmoil and uncertainty have convinced you that future success requires more than the short-term strategic and business planning tools you’ve used. You’ve cut through the hype surrounding Strategic Foresight and studied success. You are ready to lead your company into its bold future.
So, where do you start?
Most executives get caught up in all the things that need to happen and are distracted by all the tools, jargon, and pretty pictures that get thrown at them. But you are smarter than that. You know that there are three things you must do at the beginning to ensure ultimate success.
Give Foresight Executive Authority and Access
Foresight without responsibility is intellectual daydreaming.
While the practice of research and scenario design can be delegated to planning offices, the responsibility for debating, deciding, and using Strategic Foresight must rest with P&L owners.
Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that when a C-Suite executive with the authority to force strategic reviews oversaw foresight activities, the results were more likely to be acted on and integrated into strategic and operational plans. Shell serves as a specific example of this, as its foresight team reported directly to the executive committee, so that when scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility, Shell executives personally reviewed strategic portfolios and authorized immediate capability building.
Start by asking:
Who can force strategic reviews outside of the traditional planning process?
What triggers a review of Strategic Foresight scenarios?
How do we hold people accountable for acting on insights?
Demand Inputs That Challenge Your Assumptions
If your Strategic Foresight conversations don’t make you uncomfortable, you’re doing them wrong.
Webb’s research also shows that successful foresight systematically explores fundamental changes that could render the existing business obsolete.
Shell’s scenarios went beyond assumptions about oil price stability to explore supply disruptions, geopolitical shifts, and demand transformation. Disney’s foresight set aside traditional assumptions about media consumption and explored how technology could completely reshape content creation, distribution, and consumption.
Start by asking these questions:
Is the team going beyond trend analysis and exploring technology, regulations, social changes, and economic developments that could restructure entire markets?
Who are we talking to in other industries? What unusual, unexpected, and maybe crazy sources are we using to inform our scenarios?
Does at least one scenario feel possible and terrifying?
Integrate Foresight into Existing Planning Processes
Strategic Foresight that doesn’t connect to resource allocation decisions is expensive research.
Your planning processes must connect Strategic Foresight’s long-term scenarios to Strategic Planning’s 3–5-year plans and to your annual budget and resource decisions. No separate foresight exercises. No parallel planning tracks. The cascade from 20-year scenarios to this year’s investments must be explicit and ruthless.
When Shell’s scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility over decades, Shell didn’t file them away and wait for them to come true. They immediately reviewed their strategic portfolio and developed a 3–5-year plan to build capabilities for multiple oil futures. This was then translated into immediate capital allocation changes.
Disney’s foresight about changing media consumption in the next 20 years informed strategic planning for Disney+ and, ultimately, its operational launch.
Start by asking these questions:
How is Strategic Foresight linked to our strategic and business planning processes?
How do scenarios flow from 20-year insights through 5-year strategy to this year’s budget decisions?
How is the integration of Strategic Foresight into annual business planning measured and rewarded?
Three Steps. One Outcome.
Strategic foresight efforts succeed when they have the executive authority, provocative inputs, and integrated processes to drive resource allocation decisions. Taking these three steps at the very start sets you, your team, and your organization up for success. But they’re still not a guarantee.
Ready to avoid the predictable pitfalls? Next week, we’ll consider why strategic foresight fails and how to prevent your efforts from joining them.
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Go to just about any business conference these days and you’re likely to see some pundit on stage telling a story about a company — often Blockbuster, Kodak or Xerox — that got blindsided by nascent trends. Apparently, the leaders who rose to the top of the corporate ladder were so foolish they just weren’t paying attention.
These stories are good for a laugh, but they usually aren’t true. People who lead successful companies are, for the most part, competent, hardworking and ambitious. That’s how they got their jobs in the first place. There are, of course, exceptions. People who have a talent for self-promotion can get to the top too.
Still it’s much better to assume competence. That’s how we learn. The truth is that we all get disrupted sooner or later. It doesn’t only happen to silly people. Every square-peg business eventually meets its round-hole world. Smart, competent people fail all the time and, if we want to have a chance at avoiding their fate, we need to understand how that happens.
Mismanagement Myths
During Apple’s rise, Microsoft was considered to be big, slow and incompetent. Its CEO, Steve Ballmer, had foolishly dismissed the iPhone and the company never seemed to gain traction in the mobile world. It launched weak products, such as the Zune music player and the Windows phone. Its failed acquisition of Nokia just seemed to add insult to injury.
Yet still even accounting for Ballmer’s mobile missteps, Microsoft’s business continued to perform well, growing its revenues at double digit rates and maintaining high margins. How can that be? Most of Microsoft’s revenues don’t come from the consumer categories that business journalists tend to cover, but in selling B2B products and services to CIOs. While everyone was focused on gadgets, it was building a monster business in the cloud.
When you look more closely, the clever pundits often miss the real story. Blockbuster didn’t ignore Netflix, but executed a viable strategy and still failed. Kodak didn’t ignore the market for digital cameras, in fact its EasyShare line were top sellers. Unfortunately, selling digital cameras couldn’t replace the profits from developing film. Yes, Xerox PARC failed to successfully market the PC, but its invention of the laser printer saved the company.
The reason why pundits tell the caricatures rather than the real stories is that imagining CEOs to be fools makes us feel better about ourselves. After all, if only foolish people get disrupted, then we—assuming we are not fools—should be okay. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works. Being smart and working hard won’t save you.
Why Do Smart, Competent People Fail?
There are many reasons why smart, competent people fail. A very common one is a category error. For example, Steve Ballmer didn’t think anyone would pay $500 for a phone, but the iPhone wasn’t just a phone, it was an entirely new business model and ecosystem. People would not only pay for it differently (through their mobile plan), they would also use it very differently than earlier phones.
That opens up a very different set of issues. How do we know if we’re making a category error? We put things into categories for a reason, to understand their relations to other things. For example, a plate is something that goes on a table. But sometimes, such as the case with a commemorative plate, they go on a wall. So when does a plate become commemorative?
Other famous failures ran into similarly thorny issues. The CEO at Blockbuster, John Antioco, developed a viable strategy and executed well, but failed to gain alignment among important stakeholders. Kodak marketed digital cameras, but they weren’t nearly profitable enough to replace developing film. Xerox PARC was designed to build the “office of the future,” not to market consumer products like the Macintosh.
What at first might seem like CEOs asleep at the wheel actually exposes some very thorny issues. How much alignment do we need before pushing an important strategy forward? What do you do when your cash cow dies? When you shoot for the moon, how should you hedge your bets?
These are tough problems with no obvious solutions. But notice that when we assume that the leaders were competent, it forces us to think about them much more seriously and, hopefully, learn something useful.
Seeing Competence All Around Us
I was recently talking to my friend Bob Burg, co-author of the Go-Giver series, and something he said reminded me of a short Borges essay I’ve long admired, called Borges and I, in which the acclaimed author writes about the challenges of balancing a public persona with a private one. I brought it up during our conversation and promised to send it to him.
The whole essay is just two short paragraphs of Borges comparing himself, who drinks coffee and walks the streets of Buenos Aires, to the famous author who will live on in posterity. “Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things,” he wrote.
Unfortunately, in sending Bob the essay, I screwed up. Because it was so short, I didn’t send a link but copy-pasted the text into the body of the email and, carelessly, didn’t include the title or the author’s name, which made the whole thing impossible to understand. Most people would have just written it off as something stupid. Bob did something different.
Instead of imagining me a fool, he humbly wrote me back, apologized for his inability to understand the essay and asked if I could explain it to him, which gave me the opportunity to correct my mistake. In doing so he did both of us a service. He got the small benefit of reading an interesting essay and I got the enormous gift of being able to redeem myself.
When we assume those around us are competent—not stupid or lazy—we do far more than give them the opportunity to be their best selves. People who feel validated actually tend to perform better too.
We Are Always Wrong
We all like to imagine ourselves as heroes in our own story. Unlike others, we are witnesses to our internal process and get to observe our logic develop. So our thoughts makes perfect sense to us and it can be incredibly frustrating when others don’t see it as we do. Our inclination is to imagine them to be fools, simply incapable of grasping basic concepts.
That’s why pundits tend to tell such facile stories. Blockbuster wasn’t paying attention to Netflix. Kodak ignored digital photography. Xerox PARC invented breakthrough products, but neglected to market them. None of these stories are accurate, but it’s far easier to portray a failure as a silly blunder, than admit to ourselves how easily it could happen to us.
The hard truth is that we’re always wrong. Sometimes we’re off by a little and sometimes we’re off by a lot, but we’re always wrong. We succeed not by coming up with the “right” idea from the start, but by taking a Bayesian approach and becoming less wrong over time.
The best way to do that is to assume other people are smart, competent and hardworking. Lazy fools will make themselves obvious soon enough. But by seeking out intelligence and virtue, we are not only much more likely to find it, but also to identify and correct deficiencies in ourselves and our thinking.
— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels
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Integrating an XMO with Customer, Employee and Partner Advisory Boards
by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
In today’s fiercely competitive landscape, merely meeting expectations isn’t enough; delivering exceptional experiences is the non-negotiable standard. Customers demand seamless, intuitive journeys. Employees seek engaging, meaningful work that fosters growth. Partners require transparent, collaborative relationships that drive mutual success. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I advocate for a truly holistic approach: the Experience Management Office (XMO). However, an XMO, while powerful in its own right, truly achieves its potential when it’s synergistically integrated with the invaluable, unfiltered insights derived from Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards. This integration forms a dynamic “experience nexus” of feedback and action, ensuring that experience strategies are not just internally conceived, but genuinely co-created and reflective of the voices that matter most.
The Strategic Imperative of the Experience Management Office (XMO)
Historically, organizations managed customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and often partner experience (PX) in isolated silos. This fragmented approach frequently led to inconsistent experiences and missed opportunities for cross-functional improvements. The XMO emerges as the strategic orchestrator, unifying these disparate efforts under a single, cohesive umbrella. Its core mandate is to ensure consistency, proactively identify and eliminate friction points, and drive continuous improvement across all critical touchpoints for every stakeholder. An effective XMO establishes robust methodologies, deploys standardized tools, provides clear governance, and acts as a central repository for all experience data, translating raw insights into prioritized, actionable initiatives.
“An XMO, while powerful in its own right, truly achieves its potential when it’s synergistically integrated with the invaluable, unfiltered insights derived from Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards.”
Amplifying Voices: The Power of Advisory Boards
While the XMO provides the essential strategic framework and operational discipline, advisory boards inject the authentic, ground-level voice of your critical stakeholders. They offer invaluable qualitative feedback that complements quantitative data.
Customer Advisory Boards (CABs): Comprising your most engaged and influential customers, CABs provide unfiltered feedback on product utility, service delivery, and overall brand perception. They offer a direct window into evolving customer needs, emerging pain points, and often highlight competitive shifts or significant unmet market opportunities. Their strategic input can be a game-changer for product roadmaps and service enhancements.
Partner Advisory Boards (PABs): For organizations deeply reliant on a robust ecosystem of distributors, resellers, integrators, or technology alliances, PABs are indispensable. They offer critical insights into channel effectiveness, the viability of joint go-to-market strategies, and operational friction points that directly impact mutual profitability and success. A strong PAB can foster greater collaboration and loyalty.
Employee Advisory Boards (EABs): Your employees are the living embodiment of your organization’s culture and processes. They are on the front lines, experiencing internal systems and customer interactions firsthand. EABs provide invaluable, real-time feedback on workplace culture, operational inefficiencies, the effectiveness of internal tools, and the direct impact of leadership decisions on morale, productivity, and retention. They serve as both early warning systems and fertile ground for grassroots innovation within the Employee Experience (EX).
The Experience Nexus: From Feedback to Breakthrough Innovation
The true magic of this holistic model is realized when the XMO functions as the intelligent central hub, systematically receiving, synthesizing, and acting upon the rich insights generated by these diverse advisory boards (the strategic spokes). This creates a dynamic, continuous improvement loop, and crucially, an engine for genuine innovation. The XMO’s role goes beyond just operational excellence; it becomes a powerful catalyst for change. By gathering and cross-referencing insights from all three boards, the XMO can identify truly breakthrough opportunities that a siloed approach would miss. It’s in the intersection of these diverse perspectives that the most profound insights for innovation emerge.
Structured Feedback Ecosystem: The XMO establishes formalized, yet flexible, processes for advisory boards to submit feedback. This ensures insights are consistently captured, meticulously categorized, intelligently prioritized, and seamlessly routed to the most relevant internal product, service, or operational teams.
Holistic Data Synthesis & Analysis: The XMO’s analytical capabilities are crucial here. It collates and cross-references qualitative insights from the advisory boards with quantitative experience data (e.g., NPS, CSAT, CES, employee engagement scores, churn rates, partner revenue contribution). This holistic analysis identifies systemic trends, uncovers root causes, and validates hypotheses across the entire experience landscape.
Actionable Insights & Strategic Prioritization: Armed with synthesized, validated data, the XMO plays a pivotal role in guiding leadership to prioritize experience initiatives. It ensures resources and effort are strategically allocated to areas that will deliver the most significant, cross-cutting impact across customer, employee, and partner journeys, driving maximum business value.
Innovation Acceleration: This is where the nexus truly shines. The XMO facilitates cross-functional “insight sharing” workshops, where product, engineering, and design teams are exposed directly to the synthesized feedback. For example, a common pain point from a Customer Advisory Board might be the lack of a specific feature, while an Employee Advisory Board highlights a related internal operational inefficiency, and a Partner Advisory Board reveals a similar competitive gap. When these three insights are combined, they don’t just solve a single problem; they can reveal a massive market opportunity for a new product, service, or business model. The XMO’s role is to identify and champion these “aha!” moments, channeling them directly into the innovation pipeline.
Transparent Closed-Loop Communication: Perhaps most critically, the XMO champions and facilitates regular, transparent communication back to the advisory boards. This demonstrates precisely how their invaluable feedback is being utilized, outlining the tangible progress of implemented initiatives, and celebrating the impact of their contributions. This transparency is vital; it builds deep trust, reinforces the perceived value of their participation, and encourages continued engagement.
Case Study 1: Global SaaS Provider – Unifying the Ecosystem Experience
From Fragmented Insights to Integrated Ecosystem Enhancement
A global B2B SaaS company faced challenges with inconsistent product adoption and suboptimal channel partner engagement. Their existing structure meant customer feedback was managed by the CX team, HR handled employee surveys, and the partner team conducted informal check-ins. This siloed approach led to fragmented insights and disjointed solutions, impacting their overall ecosystem health.
Recognizing the need for a unified strategy, they established a dedicated Experience Management Office (XMO) reporting directly to the Chief Operating Officer. The XMO’s clear mandate was to integrate and elevate all experience initiatives. Concurrently, they formalized their existing Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and launched a new, strategically focused Partner Advisory Board (PAB). The XMO developed a comprehensive quarterly insights report, meticulously combining feedback from the CABs, PABs, and internal employee surveys. A consistent, critical theme emerged from this integrated analysis: the onboarding experience for new customers and channel partners was clunky, inconsistent, and often frustrating across different product lines.
Leveraging this precise feedback, the XMO facilitated cross-functional workshops involving product development, sales, marketing, and customer support teams. This collaborative effort led to the rapid development and deployment of a unified onboarding platform and standardized, role-based training modules. The XMO rigorously tracked key metrics such as “time-to-first-value” for new customers and partner activation rates. Within 18 months, customer satisfaction scores related to onboarding surged by 25%, and partner-led sales increased by a remarkable 15%, demonstrating the profound, tangible benefits of integrating diverse external and internal voices through a centralized, action-oriented XMO.
Key Takeaway: A centralized XMO, fed by structured CAB and PAB insights, can drive enterprise-wide improvements in critical customer and partner journeys, leading to measurable business growth.
Addressing Inherent Challenges and Ensuring Success
Integrating an XMO with robust advisory boards, while incredibly powerful, is not without its inherent hurdles. Proactive mitigation strategies are essential:
Securing Executive Buy-in: This foundational step requires senior leadership to not only champion the XMO’s creation but also to genuinely value and act upon the feedback from advisory boards. Mitigation: Develop a compelling business case, demonstrate clear ROI by linking experience improvements directly to key business outcomes (e.g., revenue growth, cost reduction, retention), and involve executives directly in initial board meetings.
Resource Allocation: Establishing, staffing, and effectively maintaining both a strategic XMO and active advisory boards demands dedicated human and financial resources. Mitigation: Start small and iterate. Begin by focusing on the most critical experience touchpoints, prove incremental value, and then scale resources as the benefits become undeniable and quantifiable.
Preventing “Feedback Fatigue”: Advisory board members are busy, valuable individuals. Ensuring they feel their time is genuinely valued and their feedback consistently leads to tangible action is paramount. Mitigation: Maintain rigorous closed-loop communication, provide transparent updates on progress, celebrate their contributions publicly, and respect their time with concise, focused agendas and clear pre-reads.
Translating Insights into Action: Moving from qualitative feedback to concrete, measurable organizational actions can be complex and requires strong analytical and change management capabilities. Mitigation: The XMO must employ robust analytics, facilitate strong cross-functional collaboration to dismantle silos, and define clear ownership for implementing improvements.
Case Study 2: Regional Retail Bank – Synergistic Employee & Customer Elevation
Transforming Branch Operations Through Integrated Feedback
A prominent regional retail bank was grappling with a concerning decline in customer satisfaction related to in-branch service, compounded by alarmingly high employee turnover, particularly among its front-line tellers. Despite various internal initiatives, leadership struggled to pinpoint the true underlying root causes of these intertwined problems.
In response, the bank strategically established an XMO reporting within its operations department. Crucially, they simultaneously launched an active Employee Advisory Board (EAB), comprising a diverse cross-section of tellers, branch managers, and key back-office support staff. The EAB quickly identified several critical pain points: severely outdated core banking software leading to protracted transaction times, unclear escalation paths for complex customer issues, and insufficient, infrequent training for new product offerings. In parallel, the bank’s existing Customer Advisory Board (CAB) provided consistent feedback echoing concerns about excessive wait times, perceived inconsistencies in service quality, and a lack of personalized interaction.
The XMO proved to be the indispensable bridge. It meticulously analyzed the EAB’s feedback on software inefficiencies and training gaps, cross-referencing it with the CAB’s complaints about wait times and service quality. This integrated analysis revealed a direct, causal correlation: internal operational friction points directly translated into poor customer experiences. The XMO then championed a high-priority, cross-departmental project to modernize the core banking software, streamline digital workflows, and introduce a comprehensive, tiered training program for all branch staff, directly based on EAB recommendations. Regular, transparent updates on progress were provided to both advisory boards, reinforcing their critical role. Within a single year, teller turnover decreased by a remarkable 20%, and customer satisfaction with in-branch service experienced a significant, measurable improvement, unequivocally validating the transformative power of integrating direct employee insights into holistic customer experience enhancements.
Key Takeaway: Integrating EAB insights with CAB feedback via an XMO reveals systemic issues, leading to co-created solutions that dramatically improve both employee and customer experiences.
Conclusion: The Future of Holistic Experience Leadership
The strategic integration of a proactive Experience Management Office with thoughtfully structured Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards represents the pinnacle of human-centered innovation and leadership. This powerful nexus creates a robust, empathetic, and continuous feedback ecosystem that not only informs and validates but also dynamically refines an organization’s entire experience strategy. It ensures that all strategic decisions and operational improvements are profoundly grounded in real-world perspectives, fostering deeper trust across all stakeholder groups, accelerating the pace of meaningful innovation, and ultimately driving sustainable, differentiated growth. For leaders aspiring to truly excel in the experience economy, this holistic, integrated approach is not merely an option—it is an undeniable imperative. It’s about orchestrating a diverse symphony of voices to create a harmonious, compelling, and continuously improving experience for everyone involved, building loyalty and advocacy from the inside out.
Contact me if you’re interested in working together to build or enhance your Experience Management Office (XMO).
Content Authenticity Statement: The ideas are those of Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini to shape the article and create the illustrative case studies.
Image credit: Unsplash
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