Innovation is a change you choose. Lead it like one, and the same team delivers twice the impact.
By Todd Girvin, founder of Futuremakers
The 32-hour win nobody wanted to celebrate
A CEO I coach told me a story a few weeks ago that I haven’t been able to put down.
His marketing firm had just won a bid to analyze a client’s position in its market and build a strategy from what they found. The team scoped it at 120 hours. Even at that, they knew the honest truth about engagements like this one: you only get to look at a fraction of the competitive landscape, the market dynamics, and what the customer’s customer actually needs. You do your best inside the hours you sold.
This time, one of his researchers used AI to help with the assessment.
She didn’t hand the work to a machine. She steered it. She pointed it at hundreds of potential competitors instead of the twenty or thirty she would normally have had time for. She used what came back to identify the client’s real niche and true differentiators, then went deep on the handful of competitors who actually mattered. She shaped the findings into an approach for a strategic plan, polished it, and presented it.
The client was elated.
Total time: 32 hours.
Here’s the part that matters most. The client could not have done this with AI on their own. They don’t have the market understanding or the expertise to steer the research to the right level and pull out what’s salient. Her judgment was the product. AI just gave her judgment more room, both breadth and depth, to work.
The innovation brought more value for the client, more profit for the firm, and less effort for the researcher. By any scoreboard you’d care to pick, that’s a huge win.
So why was the CEO worried about how it would be received?
Because some of his people are already afraid of being replaced by AI. They resist the tools, especially for the creative work that they take pride in. Meanwhile, the colleagues who have embraced the tools are far more productive and far less stressed. The gap between the two groups was widening, and a 32-hour win was about to make it visible to everyone.
That’s the moment I keep coming back to.
It’s not the tool, not the hours – it’s the fear that a genuine win would land as a threat.
I’ve heard versions of this story from several of the leaders I coach, in companies that make things, companies that serve people, and nonprofits that exist to change lives. The details change. The pattern doesn’t. The innovation works. But, the people aren’t sure they want it to.
That CEO’s marketing firm is now doing what I’d recommend to anyone: taking a systematic look at its core processes, finding the biggest inefficiencies, and addressing them one at a time, with the team. AI happens to be the innovation on his desk this year. It won’t be the last. A new service line. A redesigned intake process. A merger. A program that finally reaches the people you’ve been missing. Innovation comes in many flavors, and every one of them lands on people the way the 32-hour win did. From that firm and others like it, I’ve pulled out an approach I call innovating on purpose, in both senses of the phrase. Chosen deliberately, because it serves the future your organization exists to create. And managed deliberately, as the intentional change it is, so every person on your team can see how it helps them do more of the work they already care about.
The rest of this paper lays out that approach. But first, a word about what happens when the purpose quietly goes missing and the scoreboard takes its place.
When the scoreboard becomes the purpose
Every organization keeps score: revenue, margin, growth, utilization, dollars raised, families served.
Let me be clear: I’m not against the numbers. Money is the lifeblood of an organization, and the scoreboard tells you whether you’re healthy and whether you’re moving forward.
The trouble starts when the numbers stop describing the mission and start replacing it.
You know the pattern. A team that exists to hit a better number makes short-sighted choices. People work for the quarter instead of the customer. Your best performers start to wonder what all the effort is really for, and some of them go find the answer somewhere else. Meanwhile the scoreboard looks fine, so nobody notices the organization is drifting. Drift is hard to see from the inside.
Here’s the version every CEO has lived. A sales team, or a development team, gets measured on activity: calls made, meetings booked, goals met. Activity is easy to count and easy to coach, so it becomes the number. Before long the team is hitting it every month. The calls go out. The meetings happen. The revenue and the donations drift anyway, because the people on the phone are working for the tally, not the customer or the donor on the other end. And your best closer, the one who brings in half the money on a third of the calls, starts to wonder why she’s being graded on dials.
Numbers can tell you how you’re doing. They can’t tell you why you’re doing it.
Innovation is a change you choose
Here’s a second story, from another CEO I work with, and it has nothing to do with AI.
His company books hotel rooms for traveling work crews: restaurant openings, construction projects, disaster recovery. The relationship managers are the heart of the business. They know the clients, they know the hotels, and they know how to get a crew of twelve into a town where every room is taken.
Over the past year his team built some automation to handle the paperwork and trained a lower-cost support team to take the simple, short bookings: the one-night stay, the extension, the cancellation at nine at night. The idea was straightforward. Pull the time-consuming, low-value tasks away from the highest-value people so they can spend their days listening for future needs, negotiating better rates, and solving the hard problems for their biggest clients. Lower cost on the simple work + Higher value on the complex work = Better margins and better service, at the same time.
The relationship managers pushed back.
Not on the technology. On the change itself. Those small tasks felt like their work. Booking the one-night stay at nine at night was how they showed a client they cared. Giving it up felt like giving up a piece of the relationship.
Which was exactly backwards. The whole point was to give them MORE of the relationship.
People don’t resist the innovation. They resist losing the part of the old way that felt like them.
Put the two stories side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. One is a researcher with an AI tool. One is a reorganization with some automation underneath it. The flavor is different. The human response is the same.
That’s why I don’t think of this as an AI problem. Innovation comes in many flavors: a new tool, a new service, a redesigned process, a merger, a program that finally reaches the people you’ve been missing. Every one of them changes how someone does their work. And every one of them lands on people before it lands on the scoreboard.
Author Jimmy Blackman put it best: “The only thing that likes change is a wet baby!”
So here’s the thesis of this paper in two lines.
Innovation is a change you choose. So, manage it like one.
This summer I heard a change-management consultant, Alison French of Alto Solutions, speak to a room of CEOs. The biggest pothole she sees? Leaders who call her six months after the rollout started, once the resistance has set in. The playbook for leading change has been around for decades. Build the case for change. Align the leaders. Check readiness level by level. Communicate by group. Train, reinforce, repeat. Most of us know it. Most of us skip it when the innovation is exciting enough, because we assume a good idea sells itself.
But it doesn’t. One line from her talk stuck with me: leaders who rely solely on data and logic can increase resistance. The 32-hour win is data. To the colleagues watching, it was also a message, and the message they heard wasn’t the one the CEO meant.
What’s different this time
If innovation has always been change, why does this moment feel harder? Three reasons.
- Change used to come in projects. Now it comes continuously. Leaders are testing ideas in an afternoon that used to take a month. Individuals are reshaping their own work week by week. Whole departments are changing how they operate. The old habit of “roll it out and get back to normal” no longer works, because there is no back to normal.
- The fear is personal. The question under the surface isn’t “I don’t get it.” It’s “Will I still matter?” Facts alone don’t reach that question. Trust does.
- The tools are cheap. For the first time in my career, the people are the bottleneck, not the technology. The 32-hour win was the easy part. The reception was the hard part.
That last point is the one I want you to sit with. It used to take months to change things. And whether you built custom solutions or bought off-the-shelf products, it was an expensive endeavor that you managed to ensure a positive ROI. But software is getting cheaper and changing faster. And if the technology is no longer the limiting factor, then the limiting factor is how well you lead people through the change. That’s good news. It’s the one factor you control.
The questions people are quietly asking
While you’re wrestling with strategy, your people are wrestling with something more personal. Most of them won’t say it in a meeting. But they’re asking it anyway, and each question deserves a plain answer that you can stand behind.
- Q: “Will this replace me?” A: If it’s true, say it directly: “We’re doing this to grow with the team we have, not to shrink it.” If it isn’t true, don’t say it. Say what IS true.
- Q: “If I give this up, what’s left of my job?” A: “The parts that need judgment, care, and relationships just became more valuable, not less.” That was true for the relationship managers. It was true for the researcher.
- Q: “What if it gets something wrong, and I’m the one blamed?” A: “The tools draft. People decide. You stay in charge of the work, and we’ll set clear ground rules for what it’s used for.”
- Q: “Can I keep up?” A: “Yes, and you won’t do it alone. We’ll learn together, on real work, at a pace we can manage.”
- Q: “What happens to my team?” A: “The time we get back goes toward serving more people, better.”
A leader who ignores these questions finds that fear travels faster than any new tool or innovation. A leader who names them, and answers them in light of the organization’s purpose, builds trust at exactly the moment it’s needed most.
Which brings me to the approach. Four steps. I’ve watched leaders use them on AI, on reorganizations, on new service lines, and even on mergers. The steps don’t change. The flavor does.
Step 1: Set the vision, and share it until you’re tired of hearing yourself
The first job is yours, and you can’t delegate it.
A clear purpose answers one question: what future is our organization helping create? For a leader, that answer becomes a North Star. Not a slogan on the wall. A practical filter. When two good opportunities compete for the same time and money, purpose helps you choose. When a decision is hard, it tells you what you’re protecting. When you’re tired, it reminds you why the work is worth it.
Author Patrick Lencioni tells of a friend who built a billion-dollar company and summed it up this way: “If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”
Purpose points the boat. The vision for a specific innovation tells the crew why this stroke, right now, moves us toward it.
So for every innovation you choose, connect it to the purpose and say out loud what it does for the people you serve. For the research firm, the WHY was never “faster.” It was this: our clients get a strategy built on the whole landscape instead of a sliver of it, and our people spend their hours on the judgment only they can provide. For the lodging company, the WHY was that the biggest clients get a partner, negotiator, and problem-solver instead of just an order-taker.
Then name the loss. This is the step most of us skip. Alison French put it plainly: people focus first on what they must give up. So say it for them. “Here’s what we’re giving up. And here’s why it’s worth it.” A loss you name is a loss people can grieve and move past. A loss you skip becomes a rumor quietly whispered in online chats.
And say all of it more often than feels natural. The test is simple: could each person on your team say the WHY back in their own words? If not, you haven’t finished step 1, no matter how many times you think you’ve said it.
If the WHY lives only in your head, it isn’t a vision. It’s just a secret dream.
One more thing belongs here. Choose your innovations on purpose. Don’t adopt a tool because it’s new. Start where your customers wait: the slow process, the delayed response, the question that takes days to answer, the engagement scoped at 120 hours because that’s all the client could afford. Faster there means more people served, and it means the WHY is visible to everyone from the first week.
Step 2: Hand the HOW to the people who do the work
You own the WHY. You don’t own the HOW.
Start with your top leaders. Give them the vision, then ask them how their part of the organization gets there. Then ask them to do the same with their teams. And their teams with theirs, all the way down to the individual contributor. Each level gets the WHY handed to them and the HOW handed back.
Why so? Because:
- People support what they help create. A plan someone designed is a plan someone owns and defends.
- The people closest to the work know the obstacles. They know which step is really the bottleneck and which “simple task” isn’t that simple.
- It’s how you find the resistance before it finds you. Fear that comes out in a planning conversation is workable. Fear that comes out in the hallway discussion or the Slack channel is not.
Imagine the lodging company running step 2. The CEO asks the relationship managers one question: “Which of these tasks could you hand off without your client noticing, and which ones can’t you?” Now they’re designing the handoff. The worry about losing the client is in the room, where it can be answered, instead of in the private chat, where it grows and the fear compounds. And the one-night stay at nine at night gets a real conversation, because maybe one or two clients really do need the relationship manager’s voice on that call, and the rest never did.
This is also where you align your leadership team first and check readiness level by level before you move down. Alison shared a list of the ways leaders unintentionally create resistance. I’ve seen every one of them (usually in the mirror):
- Deciding what people think instead of asking them.
- Not naming the losses.
- Treating every group the same when their stakes are different.
- Launching the next change before the last one landed.
- Forgetting to keep answering “What’s in it for me?”
Step 2 is the cure for all five. You can’t hand someone the HOW without asking what they think.
Advice doesn’t create ownership. Authorship does.
Step 3: Decide what you’ll measure, and which behaviors have to change
Now we come back to the scoreboard, and this time it’s on our side.
The numbers that drift an organization off course are the ones that replaced the purpose. The numbers that keep an innovation on course are the ones that serve it. The difference is whether you chose them on purpose.
You need two kinds.
The first is the outcome you want to improve: Hours per engagement, Days from inquiry to answer, The share of short bookings handled by the support team, Families served per staff member. Pick the one or two that prove the WHY is working. Measure the baseline before you start, so your 32-hour win is a result everyone can see and not just a story that one person tells.
The second is the few behaviors that have to change to get there. This is the part most leaders leave out, and it’s the part people can actually do on Monday. Some examples:
- Every engagement starts with an AI-assisted scan of the whole landscape before anyone opens a document.
- Every booking under ten nights goes to the support team, no exceptions, for ninety days.
- Every proposal gets a second pass with the tool before it leaves the building.
Keep both lists short. Three behaviors you can see are worth thirty that you can’t.
And set a rhythm your team can absorb. One change at a time. Measure it, let it take root, then add the next. A steady monthly rhythm beats a big-bang rollout every time, because people can only carry so much change at once. Alison calls it cognitive load. I call it the difference between a team that’s learning and a team that’s drowning.
Measure the outcome so you know it worked. Name the behavior so people know what to do.
Step 4: Practice on purpose, and celebrate out loud
Another line from Alison’s talk with the group: confidence drops before it rises.
When you hand someone a new way of working, they feel clumsy at something they used to be good at. The researcher who’s great at interviews feels like a beginner in front of the tool. The relationship manager who could book a crew in her sleep now has to explain the job to someone else – and learn to trust them to do it. That dip is normal. Left alone, it’s also where people quit the change and go back to what has always worked.
So don’t leave it alone. Four moves.
- Make time for deliberate practice. Not a one-hour demo. Regular, protected time to use the new tools or processes on real work, with permission to be bad at it for a while. Pair your champion early adopters with the cautious. The researcher who found the 32-hour win can teach her technique in an afternoon, and that afternoon is worth more than any outside training.
- Teach the techniques, and keep teaching them. Show people exactly how a win was made. What she asked. How she steered. Where she overrode the tool with her own judgment. Skill is what turns the fearful question “Can I keep up?” into “Oh, that’s all it is.”
- Highlight the benefits and celebrate wins out loud, at every level. This is the CEO’s part, and it’s the part my client was nervous about. The 32-hour story only lands as a threat if it’s told as “look how fast.” Told as “look what we gave the client, and look what she didn’t have to spend her nights on,” it’s an invitation. Tell it so the hero is her judgment and the beneficiary is the customer. Then ask who wants to be the next story. Celebrate the people who are learning and sharing, not just the fastest.
- Put it in the compensation. Make individual and departmental achievements against the metrics from step 3 part of how people get paid and promoted. What gets rewarded gets repeated. Team incentives work better than individual ones here, because they take the “you versus me” out of a change that already feels personal. Alison French puts recognition from direct leaders, celebration of small wins, and team incentives together under one word: reinforcement. Without it, old habits come back.
And keep listening. Create regular moments for people to raise concerns and ideas, then act on what you hear. The questions from earlier in this paper don’t get asked once. They get asked every time something new arrives.
What you celebrate, you get more of. What you pay for, you keep.
Innovating on purpose
Back to the CEO from the opening.
He was worried about how a genuine win would land. I understand the worry. I also think he’s holding the best story his company has had all year, and the four steps tell him how to use it.
Say the WHY: our clients deserve a strategy built on the whole landscape, and our people deserve to spend their hours on judgment. Hand the HOW to the team: which of our engagements should work this way next, and how? Pick the measures: hours per engagement, and one new behavior at the start of every project. Then practice it, teach it, and tell the story out loud, with the researcher as the hero and the client as the winner. Over time, let the people who make the next win see it in their paycheck.
Do that, and the gap between his two groups stops widening. Not because the fearful group was argued out of their fear, but because they were handed a way through it.
I believe business can be one of the most powerful forces for good in the world, and this moment doesn’t change that. If anything, it raises the stakes. Innovation is coming to your organization whether you lead it well or not. The question is whether you’ll lead it on purpose.
Here’s one step for next week. Pick one place your customers wait on you. Gather the people who do that work and ask two questions: “If we did this in half the time, who could we serve better?” and “How would you do it?” Then let the people closest to the work lead the first try.
What’s the innovation sitting on your desk right now?
Who on your team is quietly asking if they’ll still matter?
And have you told them the WHY, or just the what?
Innovation isn’t something that happens to your organization. It’s something you choose, and something you lead.
I’d love to hear what you’re choosing.
If you’d like to work through this with other leaders, two ways to start. Explore joining the CEO peer group I lead, where a dozen CEOs work on exactly these decisions together every month. Or bring one real business problem to the next AI Lab for CEOs, a half day where you use AI on a challenge of your choosing and leave with a usable first draft. Either way, you won’t be innovating alone.
