Mile Zero Logo
Emotional Contagion is the Real Driver of Change’s Success

Emotional Contagion is the Real Driver of Change’s Success

by | Jun 23, 2026 | Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Tips, Tricks, & Tools

For eight days, the Tartan Army filled Boston’s streets with kilts, bagpipes, and the constant refrain of “No Scotland. No Party.”  Bars ran out of beer, traffic cones adorned statues, and resident’s souls were healed.

Now, some are saying corporate managers should have the same effect on the people around them (presumably without consuming all the beer in the office).

The possibility of collective effervescence

Collective effervescence is everywhere right now: in New York at the Knicks’ championship parade, the Tarps Off shirtless section at baseball games, at every unexpected draw or win at the World Cup.

It’s the “emotional electricity or excitement that lifts people outside of themselves and makes them feel like they’re connecting to something transcendent,” explains Christina Simko, and associate professor of sociology at William College. “They (members of a crowd) have to have a common focus and a common mood, and through that physical interaction, they generate something … greater than the sum of its parts.”

Greater than the sum of its parts.

Where have a I heard that before?

Could it be in every press release announcing an acquisition, all-hands meeting kicking of a transformation, and email confirming a re-org?

Which explains why I’m reading about the need for executives to create collective effervescence to ensure the success of transformational initiatives.

Seventy percent of transformations fail and one of the leading causes of failure is insufficiently high aspirations. Collective effervescence is sufficiently high but setting that as a metric of success will only drive up the failure rate.

The probability of emotional contagion

Emotional contagion is also everywhere: in the laugh that spreads through a room, the frown that moves around a conference table, the yawns that can’t be suppressed in meetings.

It’s the “phenomenon in which a person unconsciously mirrors or mimics the emotions of those around them” through nonverbal, conversational, or behavioral cues. It can be positive, like smiles and laughs, or negative like frowns or the tension from a tough conversation.

That’s good news for executives.

Leaders are “emotional amplifiers” because team members are more likely to mirror the leader’s tone than their peers. Research out of USC also indicates that, historically, positive emotions are more contagious than negative ones.

It’s also bad news for executives.

The emotional amplifier role cuts both ways and research shows that people tend to “overperceive” negative cues from leaders, even magnifying small emotional cues well beyond what a leader intended.

That means the frown everyone on the company-wide Zoom was most likely interpreted as disagreement, even opposition, to what was being discussed. And not that your shoes are too tight.

 The reality of leading humans through change

Leading people through change is hard. It’s even harder when you’re under a microscope and every smile, frown, sigh, cough, and eye roll is scrutinized and interpreted as if it were a secret code foretelling the future of thousands.

It’s not. But your team believes it is.

And perception is reality.

Here’s how to start shaping reality to make the changes happen:

  • Start with self-awareness. What is your mood right now? If it’s useful to the team, spend time with them. If it’s not, reschedule the meeting or send a proxy.
  • Make direct eye contact with people. According to the research, eye contact during verbal communication activates brain regions that help us understand what someone is saying and what they mean. Just don’t stare. That’s creepy.
  • Neutralize the negativity publicly. A bit of skepticism can be healthy for teams going through change but too much easily crosses over into pessimism and even hostility that spreads throughout the team. So stop the spread by publicly and patiently calling out the behavior and seeking to understand the root cause.

You don’t need collective effervescence to successfully lead change.

You do need spread the belief that change is possible and beneficial.

And you can do that without wearing a kilt.

Want to Know Your 2027 Priorities? Look to Nebraska.

Want to Know Your 2027 Priorities? Look to Nebraska.

by | Apr 15, 2026 | Customer Centricity, Innovation, Leadership

In October, at InnoLead’s annual conference in Boston MA, everything was AI. When the facilitator of a LEGO Serious Play workshop announced we would not talk about AI, the room erupted in applause.

In April, at Inside Outside Innovation’s biannual conference in Lincoln NE, everything was human. By day’s end, speakers and attendees alike were celebrating the sweet relief of a human-led, AI-supported future.

Why the difference? AI hasn’t fallen out of the news cycle, nor have AI-driven layoffs ceased.

Perspective.

InnoLead’s conference featured practitioners living the day-to-day reality of change and innovation. IO 2026 spotlighted thought leaders like Eric Ries, David Bland, and Erin Stadler, advisors able to see across organizations and invited into the C-Suite’s inner sanctum.

One conference talks about what is. One about what will be.

So, if you want to know what your C-Suite will task you with in six months, look to Nebraska.

 

To move forward, we must face hard truths

Eric Ries, the creator of Lean Startup and author of the forthcoming Incorruptible, exposed the myth that free markets reward value creation. They reward value extraction. Companies focused on extraction forget their purpose, serve themselves over their customers, and ultimately fail.

Elliott Parker, CEO of Alloy Partners and author of  The Illusion of Innovation, declared corporate innovation to be alchemy. Isaac Netwon spent his life pursuing alchemy (creating calculus was just a side quest) but failed because the basic building block of matter, the atom, is immutable. The same is true of big company executives pursuing innovation. The atomic elements of corporations (efficiency) and entrepreneurship (autonomy, passion, urgency, skin in the game, and freedom) are immutable and incompatible. Just as lead cannot become gold, companies can’t create like startups.

 

 

To do better, we must focus on people

Erin Stadler, founder of Design Culture and author of one of my all-time favorite articles on innovation, shared a forgotten truth: “When we lead with people, the human element, the science, the innovation comes with it.”  To do this requires leaders and organizations to find and state their purpose, to build principles and values, and to act on them every day

Dan Hassenplug, VP of Design at sport tech company Hudl, boldly declared that customer obsession is the “real AI strategy.”  After all, getting 10x faster at something doesn’t matter if it’s on something that doesn’t matter. And what matters are your customers. Living with them, talking to them, listening to them. You’ll get radical and game changing insights that no competitor, survey, or synthetic persona can.

David Bland, founder of Precoil and author of Testing Business Ideas, implored the audience to flip the 80/20 ratio of feasibility experiments to desirability experiments. Why? “We can make anything these days. It doesn’t matter if you can make it if no one wants it.”

 

 

To focus on people, we must serve them

Ted Ullrich, co-founder of Tomorrow Lab, reminded us that “simplicity is earned,” not a starting point. We start by trying to do all the thingsfor customers, but that’s overwhelmng and unnecessary. Only by listening to humans and staying humble can we create the simple solutions that create value.

Julie Ann Crommet, founder of Collective Moxie and former VP at Disney, dazzled us with the simple fact that “the more specific the story, the more universal.”  She backed this up with data that films with Authentically Inclusive Representation perform nearly 3x better at the box office and the story behind how Coco became Pixar’s highest grossing movie in China, despite content that is typically banned.

 

 

The future is wonderfully human

AI isn’t going away and it will change almost all aspects of life and work. But if the thought leaders, advisors, and designers in Nebraska are right (and I think they are), the future will be far more human than machine.

Uncertainty, Overwhelm, and the Wisdom of Bull Durham

Uncertainty, Overwhelm, and the Wisdom of Bull Durham

by | Mar 30, 2026 | Just for Fun, Leading Through Uncertainty

We survived the first quarter of the year. Congratulations everyone, job well done.

Did we hope for more than just survival? Of course we did! But hey, sometimes just living to fight another day is a victory and we still have nine more months to hit our KPIs, deliver our OKRs, and nail this fiscal’s BHAG.

So, let’s take a moment to focus on what really matters: Baseball is back!

Along with the hope of the new season, and the warm weather that comes with it, comes an excuse to revisit the wisdom of classic baseball moves. In 2021, I wrote about Moneyball’s lessons in innovation and it continues to be one of the top read posts on my blog.

If you feel overwhelmed by Q1, fear not! There’s no greater source of advice on finding simplicity, solving problems, and leading people than Bull Durham.

 

When you’re overwhelmed, go back to the basics.

Skip: This… is a simple game. You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.

The Durham Bulls are 8-16 and Skip (the manager) has had enough. He’s tried every tool in his coaching toolkit and the team continues to perform poorly, display a poor attitude, and deliver a halfhearted performance. Overwhelmed and frustrated, he turns to veteran player Crash Davis for advice. “Scare ‘em,” Crash offers and what comes next is one of the greatest tirades on film.

But the greatest lesson here is what comes towards the end of the tirade: a description of the utter simplicity of baseball. There’s no strategy, no competitor analysis, no number-crunching, just a simple explanation of the most basic elements of the job. Throw. Hit.  Catch.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by news, technology, corporate politics, the list goes on. That overwhelm causes us to worry, lollygag, and obsess about what could happen. But when we cut through all that to find the essence of what we do and why we do it, things become remarkably clear and the next steps feel obvious.

 

 

Fall in love with the problem.  Not the solution.

Zeke: We need a night off just to stop our losing streak. We need a rainout.

Crash: I can get us a rainout.

The Bulls are on another losing streak but this time on the road. As the team bus pulls into another motel and the players gather their bags, they complain about their problem (losing streak), propose an approach (night off) and propose a specific solution (rainout).

When Crash promises a rainout, it’s not because he knows something about the forecast the others don’t. It’s because he understands that there’s more than one way to get a night off. Like breaking into the ballpark, turning on the sprinklers, and flooding the field.

When we fall in love with a solution (rainout) we get stuck. We focus on making one thing happen, when critical dependencies are beyond our control. But when we fall in love with the problem (need a night off to stop a losing streak), we’re able to see less obvious but more likely and effective solutions.

 

People first. Problem solving second

Larry: [Jogs out to the mound to break up a players’ conference] Excuse me, but what the hell’s going on out here?

Crash Davis: Well, Nuke’s scared because his eyelids are jammed and his old man’s here. We need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose’s glove and nobody seems to know what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present. We’re dealing with a lot of sh*t.

Larry: Okay, well, uh… candlesticks always make a nice gift, and uh, maybe you could find out where she’s registered and maybe a place-setting or maybe a silverware pattern. Okay, let’s get two! Go get ’em.

The Bulls are finally on a winning streak, but off-the-field issue are affecting on-the-filed play and things aren’t looking good. As the players gather on the mound, the team’s Assistant Manager trots out to figure out what’s going on and get the game going again.

After Crash sums up the personal issues, instead of telling the players to be professional, leave their problems at home, and get on with things, Larry focuses on solving the single issue affecting the most people first. It’s only when the players start nodding that he shifts everyone back into work-mode.

Only on Severance can we separate ourselves into work and life modes. Pretending that isn’t the case is counterproductive and toxic. But we can’t let one consume the other because it will ultimately degrade both our professional and personal lives.

As leaders, we need to find the balance between helping the humans grapple with real and personal issues and getting the team (back) on track and doing great work.

 

Ready to keep playing?

Baseball is a game of survival. A foul tip keeps the at bat alive. A walk keeps the inning alive. A bloop single to score a runner send the game into extra innings.

Winning takes patience and perseverance because the game is rarely won or lost in a single at-bat or inning. Just like you don’t win or lose your KPIs, OKRs, or BHAGs in a quarter.

As we start a new quarter, let’s keep it simple, focus on solving problems, and put people first.

Go get ‘em.

Picasso and the Redefinition of Leadership in the Age of AI

Picasso and the Redefinition of Leadership in the Age of AI

by | Jan 25, 2026 | AI, Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty

Spain, 1896

At the tender age of 14, Pablo Ruiz Picasso painted a portrait of his Aunt Pepa a work of brilliant academic realism that would go on to be hailed as “without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.”

In 1901, he abandoned his mastery of realism, painting only in shades blue and blue-green.

There’s debate over why Picasso’s Blue Period began. Some argue that it’s a reflection of the poverty and desperation he experienced as a starving artist in Paris. Others claim it was a response to the suicide of his friend, Carles Casagemas. But Bill Gurley, a longtime venture capitalist, has a different theory.

Picasso abandoned realism because of the Kodak Brownie.

Introduced on February 1, 1900, the Kodak Brownie made photography widely available, fulfilling George Eastman’s promise that “you press the button, we do the rest.”

An ocean away, Gurley argues, Picasso’s “move toward abstraction wasn’t a rejection of skill; it was a recognition that realism had stopped being the frontier….So Picasso moved on, not because realism was wrong, but because it was finished.”

 
 
 
Washington DC, 2004

Three years before Drive took the world by storm, Daniel Pink published his third book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.

In it, he argues that a combination of technological advancements, higher standards of living, and access to cheaper labor are pushing us from a world that values left brain skills like linear thought, analysis, and optimization towards one that requires right brain skills like artistry, empathy, and big picture thinking.

As a result, those who succeed in the future will be able to think like designers, tell stories with context and emotional impact, and combine disparate pieces into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Leaders will need to be empathetic, able to create “a pathway to more intense creativity and inspiration,” and guide others in the pursuit of meaning and significance.

  

California, 2026

Barry O’Reilly, author of Unlearn, published his monthly blog post, “Six Counterintuitive Trends to Think about for 2026,” in which he outlines what he believes will be the human reactions to a world in which AI is everywhere.

Leadership, he asserts, will cease to be measured by the resources we control (and how well we control them to extract maximum value) but by judgment. Specifically, a leader’s ability to:

  • Ask better questions
  • Frame decisions clearly
  • Hold ambiguity without freezing
  • Know when not to use AI

 

The Price of Safety vs the Promise of Greatness

 Picasso walked away from a thriving and lucrative market where he was an emerging star to suffer the poverty, uncertainty, and desperation of finding what was next. It would take more than a decade for him to find international acclaim. He would spend the rest of his life as the most famous and financially successful artist in the world.

Are you willing to take that same risk?

You can cling to the safety of what you know, the markets, industries, business models, structures, incentives that have always worked. You can continue to demand immediate efficiency, obedience, and profit while experimenting with new tech and playing with creative ideas.

Or you can start to build what’s next. You don’t have to abandon what works, just as Picasso didn’t abandon paint. But you do have to start using your resources in new ways. You must build the characteristics and capabilities that Daniel Pink outlines.  You must become the “counterintuitive” leader that embraces ambiguity, role models critical thinking, and rewards creativity and risk-taking.

Do you have the courage to be counterintuitive?

Are you willing to embrace your inner Picasso?

Winning in Times of Uncertainty Requires Doing what 91% of Executives Won’t

Winning in Times of Uncertainty Requires Doing what 91% of Executives Won’t

by | Dec 10, 2025 | Customer Centricity, Innovation, Leading Through Uncertainty

In times of great uncertainty, we seek safety. But what does “safety” look like?

 

What we say: Safety = Data

We tend to believe that we are rational beings and, as a result, we rely on data to make decisions.

Great! We’ve got lots of data from lots of uncertain periods. HBR examined 4,700 public companies during three global recessions (1980, 1990, and 2000).  They found that the companies that the companies that emerged “outperforming rivals in their industry by at least 10% in terms of sales and profits growth” had one thing in common: They aggressively made cuts to improve operational efficiency and ruthlessly invested in marketing, R&D, and building new assets to better serve customers have the highest probability of emerging as markets leaders post-recession.

This research was backed up in 2020 in a McKinsey study that found that “Organizations that maintained their innovation focus through the 2009 financial crisis, for example, emerged stronger, outperforming the market average by more than 30 percent and continuing to deliver accelerated growth over the subsequent three to five years.”

 

What we do: Safety = Hoarding

 

The reality is that we are human beings and, as a result, make decisions based on how we feel and the use data to justify those decisions.

How else do you explain that despite the data, only 9% of companies took the balanced approach recommended in the HBR study and, ten years later, only 25% of the companies studied by McKinsey stated that “capturing new growth” was a top priority coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Uncertainty is scary so, as individuals and as organizations, we scramble to secure scarce resources, cut anything that feels extraneous, and shift or focus to survival.

 

What now? And, not Or.

What was true in 2010 is still true today and new research from Bain offers practical advice for how leaders can follow both their hearts and their heads.

Implement systems to protect you from yourself. Bain studied Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies and found that 79% use two different operating models for innovation to combat executives’ natural risk aversion.  The first, for sustaining innovation uses traditional stage-gate models, seeks input from experts and existing customers, and is evaluated on ROI-driven metrics.

The second, for breakthrough innovations, is designed to embrace and manage uncertainty by learning from new customers and emerging trends, working with speed and agility, engaging non-traditional collaborators, and evaluating projects based on their long-term potential and strategic option value.

Don’t outspend. Out-allocate. Supporting the two-system approach, nearly half of the companies studied send less on R&D than their peers overall and spend it differently: 39% of their R&D budgets to sustaining innovations and 61% to expanding into new categories or business models.

Use AI to accelerate, not create. Companies integrating AI into innovation processes have seen design-to-launch timelines shrink by 20% or more. The key word there is “integrate,” not outsource. They use AI for data and trend analysis, rapid prototyping, and automating repetitive tasks. But they still rely on humans for original thinking, intuition-based decisions, and genuine customer empathy.

Prioritize humans above all else. Even though all the information in the world is at our fingerprints, humans remain unknowable, unpredictable, and wonderfully weird. That’s why successful companies use AI to enhance, not replace, direct engagement with customers. They use synthetic personas as a rehearsal space for brainstorming, designing research, and concept testing. But they also know there is no replacement (yet) for human-to-human interaction, especially when creating new offerings and business models.

 

In times of great uncertainty, we seek safety.  But safety doesn’t guarantee certainty. Nothing does. So, the safest thing we can do is learn from the past, prepare (not plan) for the future, make the best decisions possible based on what we know and feel today, and stay open to changing them tomorrow.