How to make different consumer mindsets work for your business

If your company is looking to build change capability, leadership should focus on increasing its organizational agility. In simple terms, organizational agility is the ability of a company to change directions quickly.

According to innovation speaker and “Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire” and “Charting Change” author Braden Kelley, the organizational agility framework helps businesses:



• Adjust to shifting external conditions.



• Maximize resources and spark innovation.



• Facilitate brisk organizational change and speed up customers’ pace of adoption.



• Build strong customer relationships.



Kelley has come up with what he calls the Eight Change Mindsets that spur individuals to choose change. Kelley’s eight change mindsets are:

Expert-minded

– seeking mastery of whatever they do.

Mover ’n’ Shaker

– motivated by the opportunity to do things first.

Teacher

– eager to teach others how to opt for change.

Thrill seeker

– energized by trying new things.

Mission-driven

– inspired by a sense of purpose.

Reward-hungry

– craving acknowledgment for accommodating change.

Team players

– eager to help once they understand why a change is beneficial.

Action-oriented

– driven to accomplish whatever needs doing.

Getting workers to choose change is important for a business, because that is how you can get them to abandon their existing solution and adopt yours — even if it is the “do-nothing” solution. This can be challenging because most people get comfortable using their existing solution and may not be open to the idea of doing something different.

Making the mindsets work for your business 

If you are going to ask people to change their behavior, you must first become good at leading change. Most people are inherently change-averse.

To get started, ask yourself why people may resist your new offering (product or service) and come up with ideas for initiatives that will help overcome potential resistance.


To apply Kelley’s Eight Change Mindsets, you must recognize that not all customers are the same. The ability to identify their different motivations can help determine whether your business is a success or failure.

Kelley recommends leveraging his Innovation is All About Value approach to ensure that you are focusing on components — namely, value creation, value success and value translation — with the product or service you are planning to bring to market:

1. Value creation

– To be worth the costs of changing from an old offering to a new one, an investment in innovation has to develop something totally new or provide sufficient incremental value.

2. Value access

– Determine whether the value you will create is easily accessible for customers.

3. Value translation

– Assess whether customers can fully grasp the value you’ve created and how they can tap into it.

Bottom line

Kelley’s innovation equation is:  

Innovation = value creation x value access x value translation

You  need to do well on all three fronts, he says, because doing badly on even one will still lead to failure. Creating something of value is not enough; people need to be able to not only understand the value you have created but also how it fits in their lives.