If every headline feels like it is rewriting the rules of business, leadership, and even identity, where does that leave the people tasked with driving innovation?

In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I sit down with Tommy Knoll, Co-Founder of the Human Innovation Institute, to make sense of a moment that feels both historic and deeply personal.

Tommy and I have worked together in the innovation community for years, and what I value most about his perspective is that he refuses to treat change as a buzzword. He sees this era as a true turning point, one where corporate strategy, geopolitics, technology, and human psychology are all shifting at once.

We talk openly about the disorientation many leaders are feeling right now. Titles are changing. Chief Innovation Officers are becoming Chief AI Officers. Five-year plans feel outdated before they are printed. Entry-level jobs are being reshaped by automation. And yet, beneath all of this turbulence, there is also an extraordinary opportunity.

Tommy shares how the Human Innovation Institute is mapping what he calls "pressure zones" of this great transition. From the human technology interface to evolving capabilities, to leadership in uncertain times, he argues that innovation today demands something deeper than tools and frameworks. It requires a new level of awareness, adaptability, and courage.

We explore what it really means to humanize AI, not as a marketing slogan, but as a discipline. How do organizations honor the stability that keeps the lights on while cultivating the experimentation that keeps them relevant? How do we lead teams who feel unmoored? And how do we design the future when we are building it in real time?

Tommy's answer may surprise you. He believes the innovation the world needs most right now is a spiritual awakening, one that allows leaders to metabolize uncertainty without panic and to create from clarity rather than fear.

If you are a corporate innovator, a transformation leader, or simply someone trying to stay grounded in a rapidly shifting landscape, this conversation will challenge you to rethink where you stand and what you are here to build.

As always, I would love to hear your perspective. In a world defined by accelerating change, how are you humanizing AI and innovation inside your own organization?

What does it really take to move innovation from idea to impact inside a 95,000-person organization?

In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I sat down with Vlora Muslimi, Senior Manager at TD Bank, whose path into innovation did not begin in a lab or a product team. It began in contact centers, in the daily friction of legacy tools, imperfect processes, and frontline employees trying to do their best work under pressure.

With more than 15 years of experience across digital, omni-channel, and contact center operations, Vlora now leads a centralized innovation team responsible for harnessing grassroots ideas from across the enterprise. We are not talking about a handful of suggestions. Her team reviews between 16,000 and 18,000 ideas annually, and TD recently celebrated surpassing 100,000 employee-submitted ideas. Behind those numbers lies a disciplined approach to listening, triaging, matchmaking across business lines, and, most importantly, storytelling.

Vlora shares how her early operational experience shaped her belief that innovation fails when it creates friction for either employees or customers. Solve only for one side, and the solution will not stick. That philosophy now guides how her team evaluates ideas, connects contact centers with technology teams, and prioritizes initiatives that balance business value with human impact.

We spend time unpacking the emotional side of innovation, especially the heartbreak of ideas that do not move forward. What surprised her most was that employees were not asking for every idea to be implemented. They were asking for transparency. Who got selected? Why? What can we learn? That insight sparked a stronger internal storytelling engine, one that highlights winning ideas, shares lessons from the journey, and builds belief that anyone can bring an idea across the finish line.

Our conversation also dives into empathy as a leadership muscle. Innovation leaders often rush toward outcomes, yet resistance frequently signals fear, confusion, or misalignment. Vlora explains why naming the discomfort in change, rather than sugarcoating it, builds trust and accelerates adoption. She reinforces that storytelling is not optional. It is the bridge between data and belief, between alignment and action.

We explore real examples, from redesigning onboarding to improve connection and retention, to evolving adjudication processes for new-to-Canada customers. These are not flashy, headline-grabbing technologies. They are human-centered transformations that create measurable impact across millions of customers and thousands of colleagues.

Looking ahead, Vlora sees growing sophistication in ideas leveraging generative AI, alongside a personal mission to increase the organization's implementation rate beyond its current 10 to 13 percent. For her, the path forward is clear. Engage more people. Strengthen the narrative. Connect impact to purpose.

And when I ask her the big questions, she names the iPhone as the greatest innovation she has lived through, imagines joining Ford's original automobile team, and closes with a powerful reminder that the story the world needs now is one rooted in understanding and empathy.

If you are leading change inside a complex organization, this episode is a masterclass in balancing listening with execution, process with people, and strategy with story.

What might happen inside your organization if every employee believed their idea could matter?

What does it really take to close a digital divide in a city as complex, diverse, and dynamic as Long Beach, California?

In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I sit down with Lea Eriksen, Director of Technology and Innovation and CIO for the City of Long Beach, to unpack the human stories behind civic innovation. We met in an unexpected setting, a steakhouse in Los Angeles during a CXO Rise gathering, where conversations about AI flowed alongside cream spinach and big ideas. That evening sparked a deeper discussion about how technology, when grounded in people and purpose, can reshape communities in meaningful ways.

Lea brings more than 25 years of experience in local government, with a career that spans budget, finance, economic development, and ultimately technology leadership. What makes her perspective stand out is that she did not arrive at innovation through a traditional tech pathway. Instead, she came through public service, relationships, and a deep belief that government can work when it listens first. In our conversation, she shares how Long Beach transformed its technology function from an internal service provider into a catalyst for digital equity, smart city experimentation, and community co-creation, earning national recognition along the way.

We explore how innovation in government differs from innovation in the private sector, why people and process often matter more than tools, and how programs like Smart City Challenge, Pitch Long Beach, and LB CoLab invited city staff, residents, and vendors into the same room to solve shared problems. Lea is refreshingly honest about what worked, what failed, and what cities can learn from pilots that did not survive. She also explains how Long Beach approached the digital divide as more than access to devices, focusing equally on connectivity, skills, language access, and trust.

At the heart of this episode is storytelling. Lea explains why data alone is never enough, and how real resident stories helped secure long-term support for digital inclusion efforts, even as federal funding declined. From building fiber infrastructure to empowering residents to participate directly in procurement decisions, this conversation shows what becomes possible when innovation is designed with communities rather than for them.

So as cities everywhere wrestle with AI hype, budget constraints, and growing inequality, what would change if more leaders started by asking whose voices are missing from the room, and whose stories still need to be told?

In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I sit down with John Elbing, Business Storytelling Strategist and founder of Standpoint, for a thoughtful conversation on how organizations can tell stronger innovation stories by shifting perspective outward. This interview is the second in The Storytellers Series, where I invite other storytellers I deeply admire, people who bring their own lenses, frameworks, and lived experience to the craft of story.

John introduces his Story Building Method, a three-stage framework built around recognition, perception, and projection. He explains why compelling stories help customers recognize themselves first, understand where a brand fits second, and finally imagine what life looks like after engaging with a product or service. Throughout the discussion, John emphasizes that storytelling works best when it allows customers to see themselves as the hero of the narrative rather than being positioned as an audience to a company's internal achievements.

The conversation also explores why narrowing focus can actually expand impact. John challenges the overuse of demographic personas and argues for building stories around aspirations and challenges instead. By targeting what people are trying to achieve or overcome, organizations can connect with audiences that may look very different on the surface but share the same underlying motivations. Susan and John unpack real-world examples from consumer brands, B2B software, and even nonprofit work to show how this approach changes clarity, positioning, and engagement.

They also address common storytelling mistakes, from overreliance on clever language to feature-heavy messaging that misses emotional relevance. John makes a strong case for clarity over cleverness and explains why the most effective brand stories are the ones that make customers feel seen, understood, and supported. The episode closes with John sharing how listeners can continue the conversation through his book, Story Building, and offering a complimentary 45-minute pre-call consultation for those looking to sharpen their own innovation story.

What if the stories you tell about innovation are actually working against you? In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I do something a little different. I open a new series by inviting other storytellers I deeply admire, people who bring their own lenses, frameworks, and lived experience to the craft of story.

I want you to think about storytelling as an expansive, evolving practice, not a single narrative you perfect once and reuse forever, but a skill you keep refining as your audiences, challenges, and ambitions change.

To begin that journey, I sat down with Park Howell, a 40-year veteran of brand storytelling and host of the Business of Story. Park shares how he found storytelling through advertising, why stories have a repeatable structure rooted in human biology, and what he calls the science and bewitchery behind stories that truly move people.

We unpack his deceptively simple "and, but, therefore" framework, why leaders lose rooms with bullet points, and how story becomes the bridge that helps people move from status quo thinking to real behavior change. We also explore why storytelling so often fails in organizations, especially when leaders make the story about themselves rather than their audience.

Park explains how innovation stories should focus on outcomes, not offerings, and why emotional connection must come before logic if you want ideas to stick. From the hero's journey and Joseph Campbell's influence to the reality of selling ideas in five-minute executive meetings, this conversation is packed with practical insights for anyone trying to communicate change under pressure.

We close by looking at how AI fits into modern storytelling, including Park's work on the Story Cycle Genie, and why emotional intelligence combined with artificial intelligence may shape the next era of leadership communication. If innovation is ultimately about getting people to move, decide, and act, how might your stories need to change to meet them where they are, and what could happen if you finally told the story they were waiting to hear?

Are you an innovator who feels caught between disruption and defensibility, wondering whether corporate innovation has lost its way?

In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I welcome back Greg Larkin, founder of Punks & Pinstripes, for a candid, often uncomfortable conversation about the current state of innovation within large organizations.

Greg does not sugarcoat it. He argues that much of corporate innovation today earns a C-minus at best, largely because it fails the ultimate test that matters when markets tighten, and investors lose patience. If an innovation team cannot clearly justify why it deserves funding when earnings miss or a disruption hits, it is already on borrowed time.

Drawing on his experience as a former Director of Innovation at Bloomberg and as an entrepreneur with multiple exits, Greg explains why innovation leadership has often been shaped by observers rather than survivors. He challenges familiar frameworks taught in boardrooms and business schools, questioning whether they prepare leaders for activist investors, AI-driven disruption, M&A fallout, or the quiet but relentless brain drain caused by the ongoing Great Resignation.

The conversation explores why pitching ideas is rarely enough anymore, why outcomes matter more than vision decks, and why many innovation teams are discovering too late that credibility is earned long before the next technological wave arrives.

The episode also moves beyond corporate structures into something more personal. Greg shares why he built Punks & Pinstripes as a community for executives climbing what he calls their second mountain. For many seasoned innovators, success on paper no longer matches purpose in practice.

Together, we unpack what happens when wartime innovators are asked to settle into peacetime routines, why that mismatch can be soul-crushing, and how authenticity, service, and reinvention are becoming essential currencies for leaders navigating the next chapter of their careers.

If innovation is facing its most precarious moment in decades, and many leaders are quietly questioning whether they still belong in the systems they helped build, what does it really take to stay relevant, investor-defensible, and human at the same time, and which mountain are you climbing right now?

How do you bring discipline to innovation without stripping away the creativity that makes it powerful in the first place?

In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I sit down with Stephen Parkins, Innovation Strategist and Founder of Culturedge, to unpack what it really takes to turn innovation into a strategic asset rather than a side project fueled by hope and enthusiasm.

Stephen brings an outside-in perspective shaped by an unconventional career spanning financial markets, startup entrepreneurship, and senior innovation roles within complex global organizations. That distance from the usual corporate playbook allows him to challenge some deeply held assumptions about how innovation should work and why so many well-intentioned efforts struggle to deliver measurable returns.

We talk openly about the tension between creativity and structure, and why innovation does not fail because teams lack ideas, but because organizations lack clarity, consistent decision-making, and shared language. Stephen offers a thoughtful perspective on innovation management systems, including the much-debated ISO standards, and explains why guardrails are often misunderstood as constraints.

Drawing on real-world experience from large enterprises, he argues that structure, when well designed, creates the conditions for better experimentation, smarter risk-taking, and stronger alignment between innovators and the core business.

The conversation also dives into strategy, funding, and culture, particularly the invisible friction between those running today's business and those inventing tomorrow's. Stephen shares how portfolio thinking, exposure to risk, and optionality can shift innovation from theater to real value creation.

We also explore his work as co-founder of Strategy Quest, a simulation-based approach that helps leaders practice decision-making under uncertainty, surface blind spots, and learn through consequence rather than theory. It is a compelling look at how scenario thinking and simulated environments can prepare the next generation of innovation leaders to see around corners.

If innovation is meant to help organizations grow stronger in uncertain times, what needs to change in how leaders think about risk, culture, and decision-making, and are we brave enough to build systems that actually support that ambition?

In this episode of the Innovation Storyteller Show, I sit down with Amy Freeze, a meteorologist, innovator, and public safety advocate who has spent decades helping people understand risk when it truly matters. Everywhere I go lately, conversations circle back to AI, but this one brings it out of the abstract and straight into our homes, our screens, and moments where trust can make all the difference.

Amy shares her remarkable journey from broadcast journalism to becoming one of the most recognized voices in weather. We talk about her work forecasting major events like Superstorm Sandy and the Joplin tornado, and how those experiences shaped her sense of responsibility to the public. As the first female chief meteorologist in Chicago and a six time Emmy Award winner, her career has been built on credibility and calm communication. What fascinated me most was why she chose to create a digital avatar, and how she sees AI as a way to deliver urgent, accurate information at scale without losing the human connection people rely on in moments of uncertainty.

We also dig into the fears and ethical questions surrounding digital twins, AI driven storytelling, and protecting name, image, and likeness. Amy offers a grounded perspective on why avoiding new technology can sometimes create more risk than adopting it thoughtfully. Together, we explore how empathy, trust, and clear storytelling help audiences move past fear toward understanding, especially when the stakes involve safety, language barriers, and real time decision making.

This conversation reminded me that innovation does not have to feel cold or distant. It can be practical, human, and deeply rooted in care. We talk about how trusted voices evolve with technology, how stories help people accept change, and why the future of AI may depend far less on hype and far more on responsibility, context, and trust.

My conversation with Elliott Parker, CEO of Alloy Partners and author of The Illusion of Innovation, was one of the most downloaded of 2025. Drawing on decades of experience launching startups with High Alpha and advising Fortune 100 companies at Innosight, Elliott explains why most corporate innovation efforts fall short.

He outlines how organizational structures, incentives, and short-term metrics often prevent innovation teams from achieving the transformation they are tasked with delivering.

Elliott also breaks down the critical difference between execution problems and learning problems, and why most corporations confuse the two.

Elliot shares how Alloy builds startups outside the core business, giving them the freedom to take risks, run fast experiments, and uncover opportunities that internal teams cannot reach. These external ventures enable corporations to explore innovative ideas, validate assumptions, and acquire the type of knowledge that drives long-term strategic advantage.

Whether you are running an innovation team, funding one, or simply wondering why they rarely deliver game-changing results, this episode offers sharp insights, real examples, and a practical framework for thinking differently about how innovation works.

What if risk management were not about playing defense, but about giving innovation the confidence to move forward?

This is a replay of one of the most-listened-to Innovation Storytellers episodes of 2025. I am revisiting my conversation with Rose Hall, a former senior innovation leader at AXA XL, professional engineer, and long-time advocate for rethinking how organizations approach risk, because the ideas shared here feel even more relevant today.

Drawing on her experience building digital platforms, business ecosystems, and client-driven innovation programs, Rose explains why risk and innovation are far more connected than most leaders realize. We talk about the often invisible role insurance plays beneath some of the world's most ambitious innovations, from advanced infrastructure projects to space exploration.

Rose shares how companies like SpaceX approach complex, layered risk and why traditional insurance models are struggling to keep pace with realities such as cyber exposure, climate volatility, and geopolitical uncertainty.

The conversation also turns to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. There is no single insurance product designed to cover AI, but Rose unpacks how existing policies may respond when things go wrong, and why that gray area demands a more adaptive and informed approach to risk management. It is a reminder that innovation rarely fits neatly into legacy frameworks.

Partnerships emerge as a central theme. Rose argues that no organization can solve these challenges alone. Progress depends on collaboration between insurers, startups, and large enterprises who are willing to share insight, experiment responsibly, and rethink old assumptions together.

This episode replay challenges the idea that risk management slows progress. Instead, Rose reframes it as a foundational enabler of growth, resilience, and long-term value. When risk is understood and managed well, innovation does not shrink; it accelerates. Has risk management been holding your organization back, or could it be the very thing that helps you move faster and smarter?