Arkaro Insights: adapt and thrive in complexity

What should a team do when there is no problem to solve, only a future to imagine?

In this episode of Arkaro Insights, Mark Blackwell talks with Thomas Gillier, Associate Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management and scientific coordinator of the ANR InnovAI project. Their subject is visionary concepts: ambiguous yet coherent pictures of possible futures from which concrete innovations can later grow.

Thomas shares findings from his award-winning study with Victor Seidel, Akin Kazakci and Gérald Piat, published in the Academy of Management Discoveries. Ten teams had 90 minutes to design a visionary concept for a museum of Antarctica. The researchers mapped every idea as a node in a network. They found that the most visionary teams avoided early fixation, linked their most original ideas together and selected as they went. The ideas that survived into the strongest final concepts were the most connected ones.

In this episode:

• Why visionary concepts are deliberately ambiguous, yet still need coherence
• Why expert panels could judge originality and feasibility but could not agree on customer value
• How to use a visionary concept as a stepping stone, backcasting to innovations you can sell now
• How the facilitator's role changes when a workshop is about imagining the future
• What Thomas calls the "archaeology of the future", studying how Nokia imagined the smartphone
  
  
  About Thomas Gillier
  Thomas Gillier, Associate Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management, studies innovation management and creativity, with a particular interest in how ideas emerge, evolve and are elaborated over time. His research examines these processes in close collaboration with technology-intensive organisations such as Renault, STMicroelectronics and CEA.
• 
  Links
  • The paper: Gillier, T., Seidel, V.P., Kazakci, A. and Piat, G. (2024), "Crafting Future Innovations: The Network Structure of Ideas for Visionary Product Concepts", Academy of Management Discoveries, 10(4), 611–629. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2023.0120

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How do you lead people through AI when you don't have all the answers? Joe Davis spent 37 years at Boston Consulting Group, including as head of BCG North America. In his book, The Generous Leader, he turns nearly four decades of leadership experience into seven ways leaders can give of themselves for everyone's gain.

Mark Blackwell and Joe talk about why command and control struggles in a world where work and life have blurred, anxiety is rising and technology keeps speeding up. Joe sees a leader's role as helping others grow, thrive and develop. Sometimes that means giving blunt, clear feedback, even when the kindest message is that someone should move on.

Joe draws on stories from Procter & Gamble and BCG. He also shares what he learned from Johnson & Johnson CEO Joaquin Duato and United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby.

In this episode:

• Why mushy feedback leaves people stuck, and how clarity can free them
• The number one trait Joe found in the best leaders: they ask questions, ask questions, ask questions
• How three simple words, "I don't know", can unlock a stuck team
• Why AI projects stall on the human side, and why you should engage the sceptics and uncover the nos
• The signal you send by asking the most junior person in the room the first question
• How to make communication land by testing your message and saying the key point three times
• How to balance board expectations with experimentation: pilot, test, adjust and keep people informed
• Small acts with big impact that you can start on Monday morning
  
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Two regional business units run the same S&OP or IBP software, trained by the same team. One flies, one flounders. It's rarely the technology. It's rarely even the process. It's culture.

In this episode, Mark is joined by Eric Wilson, Director of Thought Leadership at the Institute of Business Forecasting (IBF) and author of Beyond Borders: Cultural Complexity in Global Business. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and over 25 years in planning leadership roles at Tempur Sealy, Berry Plastics and Escalade Sports, Eric explains why IBP is fundamentally a human, social process rather than an engineering one, and why so many organisations approach it the wrong way round: technology first, process second, people forgotten.

Mark and Eric explore Eric's 16 regional cultures and nine business dimensions, the contrast between fail fast Silicon Valley thinking and Japan's consensus-built, fail proof approach, and the difference between cultures that trust the process and those that trust the person, memorably summed up as "meat eaters and olive oils." They also dig into a real story of cross-cultural collaboration on an academic paper, the surprising links between trust and every one of Eric's nine dimensions, and a live debate on why AI adoption may divide along East-West lines.

Eric closes with three pieces of advice for any S&OP or IBP leader wanting to design a process that works with human nature rather than against it.

In this episode:

• Why organisations default to a technology first mindset, and what it costs them
• Eric's 16 cultural regions and nine dimensions for global business planning
• Fail fast versus fail proof: the US-Japan planning culture clash
• Trust as the golden thread running through every dimension
• The Sven Crone story: big D versus little d decision making
• Cognitive diversity, East-West AI adoption, and what it means for planning teams
• Three things to change on Monday morning

About Eric Wilson
Eric Wilson is Director of Thought Leadership at the Institute of Business Forecasting (IBF) and host of the IBF On Demand podcast. An Advanced Certified Professional Forecaster with over 25 years of experience, he previously held senior planning leadership roles at Tempur Sealy, Berry Plastics and Escalade Sports. He was named a "Pro to Know" by Supply + Demand Chain Executive and received the IBF Excellence in Forecasting & Planning award. He is the author of Practical Guide to Sales and Operations Planning and, most recently, Beyond Borders: Cultural Complexity in Global Business.

Links
Book: https://a.co/d/06lu6xuK
Eric's website: https://ericwilsonauthor.com
Eric on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilsondemand

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Most transformation programmes don't fail from poor project management. They fail because leaders are managing how they believe the world ought to be, rather than facing how it actually is.

In this episode, Mark speaks with Deborah Rowland, one of the world's foremost thinkers on leading large, complex change, formerly of Shell, PepsiCo, Gucci and the BBC, and author of the new book From Ought to Is: Catalysing Change and Movement in a Polarised World.  Deborah argues that our "oughts", the implicit codes we carry about how the world should be, act as bouncers on the doors of the night club of truth, letting in only the facts that confirm what we already believe. Real change starts only when leaders can put those oughts aside long enough to face what is actually true, however uncomfortable that truth might be.

Mark and Deborah cover why resistance in a change process usually signals an ought clinging to an old loyalty rather than reality breaking through, why the body registers truth before the mind can name it, and how Deborah's own hemisphere thinking connects to Iain McGilchrist's work discussed in a recent episode with David Hurst. Deborah also shares a striking story from her consulting practice, and a simple daily discipline, bracketing, equalising and describing, for facing reality one ordinary working day at a time.

About Deborah Rowland
Deborah Rowland is a leading thinker, speaker, writer, coach and practitioner in the leadership of large, complex change. Over a career spanning more than three decades, she has led change inside global organisations including Royal Dutch Shell, PepsiCo, Gucci Group and BBC Worldwide, and founded the Still Moving consultancy. She was named to the Thinkers50 Radar list and the 2021 HR Most Influential Thinker list. She is the co-author of Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works and the author of the bestselling Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change and the Still Moving Field Guide. Her latest book, From Ought to Is: Catalysing Change and Movement in a Polarised World, is out now.

Deborah Rowland / From Ought to Is
🌐 Deborah's website: https://www.deborahrowland.com/
📖 From Ought to Is (Wiley): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781394265145
🛒 From Ought to Is (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Ought-Catalysing-Change-Movement-Polarised/dp/1394265115

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Most senior leaders in mature businesses know something is wrong. Their organisation is efficient, profitable and increasingly unable to move. What they lack is a language for what to do about it.

David Hurst has spent fifty years developing that language. In this episode of Arkaro Insights, the author of The New Ecology of Leadership and Crisis & Renewal joins Mark Blackwell to revisit the ecocycle in the age of AI. The result is a rare kind of conversation: theoretically deep, practically usable and honest about what generative AI can and cannot do for a mature organisation.

David maps a two-loop trajectory of organisational life. The front loop of growth, maturity and conservation is where large language model AI does its best work, predicting stable patterns from yesterday's data. The back loop of crisis and renewal is where the map runs out and only a compass will do. Most large businesses in agriculture, food and chemicals sit at the top of the front loop, brilliant at yesterday's logic and vulnerable to today's change. Escaping the rigidity trap means learning to toggle between two postures: the engineer who optimises a known system and the gardener who creates conditions for an unknown future to emerge.

About David Hurst

David K. Hurst is a reflective practitioner, speaker, educator and writer on management. He spent twenty-five years as a senior operating executive in Canadian industry, followed by three decades as a writer and educator. Author of Crisis & Renewal (Harvard Business School Press) and The New Ecology of Leadership (Columbia Business School Publishing). Contributing editor at strategy+business. Regular contributor to the Global Peter Drucker Forum. Based in Oakville, Ontario.

Website: www.davidkhurst.com
Recent essays: davidkhurst.medium.com

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Many businesses are brilliant at execution, and brilliant at executing the wrong things. Dov Shenkman, CEO of Atid Group and author of Value Centric, explains why efficiency alone is a downward spiral, and how AI is about to close the gap between planning and value.

Profit is not the goal. Profit is a result.

That single reframe sits at the heart of this conversation with Dov Shenkman, CEO of Atid Group and author of the newly published Value Centric. Dov spent more than three decades leading global supply chains and operations, including major overhauls at Medtronic and Walgreens Boots Alliance, before turning his attention to a blind spot he sees in most S&OP and IBP processes, they are built for efficiency in a stable world that no longer exists.

Mark and Dov trace the evolution of S&OP through to Integrated Business Planning, and why even organisations that have mastered the methodology can still be playing brilliantly in the wrong ocean.

What we cover:

The premise behind "brilliant execution of the wrong things" — why efficiency-focused planning, however well run, tends to reinforce a downward spiral rather than reverse it.

Value as the missing trade-off currency — Dov's case for treating value, not revenue or forecast accuracy, as the true bridge between sales and operations.

The Customer-Business Value Matrix — how to segment customers into value partners, retention risks, margin diluters and value destroyers, and why the hardest conversations are usually about the last group.

From paper maps to self-driving cars — Dov's analogy for where AI takes S&OP and IBP next, and why most organisations are still navigating with a GPS rather than letting the system close the loop.

Reactive versus proactive transformation — why roughly 90% of the transformations Dov has led in his career were reactive, and what it takes to get ahead of the curve instead of responding to it.

This episode is essential listening for Business leaders, S&OP leaders, supply chain and operations executives, commercial and finance leaders, and anyone responsible for turning planning into genuine value creation.

Related episodes:

• Fusion Strategy: The $75 Trillion Industrial AI Opportunity | Venkat Venkatraman — https://www.buzzsprout.com/2012667/episodes/19324094
• Niels Van Hove on Human-AI Collaboration in S&OE, S&OP & IBP — https://www.buzzsprout.com/2012667/episodes/18425013
  
  
  Connect with Dov Shenkman
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dov-shenkman-a090162/
  Book: Value Centric: The Proven Framework for How Modern Companies Transform and Win — https://a.co/d/0j4X7F8G
  Blog: https://www.valuecentricibp.com/blog

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Most corporate values are useless. Not because values don't matter, but because organisations have spent thirty years reaching for the same twenty-four words, integrity, collaboration, respect, excellence, and wondering why nobody believes them.

Erika Clegg is the co-founder of Larkenby, creator of the Active Ethos method and author of Junk Values. She joins Mark Blackwell to explain why generic values actively damage the organisations that adopt them, and what it takes to build values that are, in her words, magnetic: ones that attract the right people and repel the wrong ones.

The conversation covers:

• Why the values problem started in the mid-nineties and has got steadily worse
• The Oxford Character Project finding that over 50% of FTSE 350 companies share the same top value
• How the Active Ethos method works, from diagnostic to embedded culture
• The difference between an essential purpose and an inspiring vision, and why you need both
• Why Cook's "Churchill's Pig" is one of the best corporate values ever created
• Mary Parker Follett's invisible leader, and why her century-old ideas are more relevant than ever

Erika's book Junk Values is shortlisted for the Smart Thinking category of the Business Book Awards 2026 and is available from all good bookstores. Her podcast, Slow Values, is available wherever you listen.

🌐 erikaclegg.com

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Most people assume food miles are the enemy of sustainable sourcing. They are wrong. Transportation and freight account for less than 10% of a food product's total environmental impact. The real challenge — and the real opportunity — is at the farm.

Defne Saral, Senior Vice President of Sales at ofi, one of the world's largest processors of cocoa, coffee, nuts, spices, and dairy ingredients, joins Mark Blackwell to explain how ofi is building a verified sustainability data infrastructure across 2 million hectares of land managed by millions of independent smallholder farmers in West Africa and beyond.

They discuss ofi's Choices for Change framework and what the 2025 Impact Report actually shows; how ofi's proprietary AtSource platform measures greenhouse gas emissions at farm level, independently verified by Carbon Trust; why Scope 3 emissions represent around 80% of most food companies' carbon footprint, and what that means for ingredient suppliers; the role of satellite polygon mapping, drone technology, and agronomic science in building a data graph without connected machinery; the EU deforestation directive and what compliance actually requires; and how AI could compress the sustainability reporting cycle and sharpen the signal-to-noise ratio in natural ingredient data.

Defne also makes the case for democratising sustainability data — making it affordable and accessible for small and medium-sized food companies, not just those with the scale to bear the compliance cost.

This episode follows directly from last week's conversation with Professor Venkat Venkatraman on Fusion Strategy and industrial AI. Together they form a two-part picture of what it looks like to design intelligence into a business model rather than paint it on top.

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What if the companies that think AI is someone else's problem are about to lose their most valuable competitive ground?

Professor Venkat Venkatraman from Boston University's Questrom School of Business is the co-author of Fusion Strategy (Harvard Business Review Press) and one of the world's leading authorities on how legacy industrial firms use real-time data networks and AI to reinvent their business models.

In this episode, Mark and Venkat explore:

• Why roughly $75 trillion of the global economy has yet to be systematically digitised — and why that is the most significant business opportunity of the next decade
• The difference between digital paint and digital structure: how to know whether your organisation is adding AI at the periphery or redesigning around intelligence at the core
• What datagraphs are, why they matter more than systems of record, and how industrial companies can unlock the same network effects that drove Netflix, Amazon and Spotify
• Why the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to an AI researcher — and what that tells us about the fusion of traditional industries with data and intelligence
• The ecosystem shift from economies of scale to economies of expertise — and why a mid-sized chemicals or food ingredients company may be better placed than it thinks
• What a CEO should actually do in the next 90 days to prepare for the intelligence age without simply automating the past

Connect with Venkat Venkatraman: LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/venkatraman/

Fusion Strategy: available now from Harvard Business Review Press
Agentic Intelligence: Strategy at the Speed of Data — exploring how humans and machines can work together to create intelligence. Published 15 September 2026.

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What if the teams that struggle to define their problem early are actually your best innovation bet?

Dr Johnathan Cromwell, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of San Francisco, shares findings from a study of over 1,100 real innovation teams at a Fortune Global 500 company. The results overturn one of the most deeply held assumptions in innovation management: teams that started with low problem clarity but gained it by the midpoint achieved an implementation rate of over 80% — compared to approximately 50% for teams that defined their problem clearly from the outset.

In this episode, Mark and Johnathan explore:

• Why problem and solution co-evolve rather than follow a linear sequence — and what that means for how you run innovation projects
• The critical midpoint transition: why the halfway point of any project is the moment that determines success or failure
• How to manage a portfolio of front-end innovation projects when ambiguity is a feature, not a bug
• Why Jobs to Be Done are not as stable over time as the framework assumes — and where the five whys technique changes the game
• How AI is not just solving existing problems faster but revealing entirely new problems companies did not know they had
• The three modes of AI adoption: exploiting existing problems (Instacart), expanding the problem (Khan Academy), and exploring new ones entirely

Johnathan also shares practical advice for the VP of Innovation under pressure to show return on investment — and why dismissing projects without a clear problem definition may mean dismissing your best future innovations.

Published research referenced in this episode:

• Cromwell & Harvey (2026). The Hidden Power of Messy Teams. MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2026.
• Cromwell & Harvey (2025). A Problem Half-Solved Is a Problem Well-Stated. Research Policy, 54(3).

Connect with Johnathan Cromwell: LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/johncromwell/

Connect with Mark Blackwell and Arkaro: Website: www.arkaro.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/markrblackwell

📺 YouTube: www.youtube.com/@arkaro 🎧 Audio: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com/

Connect with Arkaro:

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🌐 Visit our website: www.arkaro.com

📺 Subscribe to our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@arkaro

Audio Podcast: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com

📧 For business enquiries: [email protected]