Firstly, I want to congratulate Aaron De Smet, Arne Gast, Erik Mandersloot, Richard Steele, and Carmen James for producing an insightful analysis of organisational change in their article, Change is changing: How to meet the challenge of radical reinvention. Their four-level framework—from tactical execution through mobilisation and transformation to the existential challenge of reinvention—provides leaders with a valuable structure for navigating today’s relentless change demands.
Their observation that employees now face ten planned change programs annually, a fivefold increase from just a decade ago, mirrors the exhaustion I’ve witnessed across industries and continents. Their call for leaders to demonstrate “humility” and “humanity” strikes at the heart of the matter.
But there’s a reinvention we’re not discussing—one that may be more fundamental than any business model transformation. And I’d argue it’s this: “In an age of artificial intelligence, how do we reinvent organisations to place human capability at the centre of innovation, recognising that the very nature of humanity—our capacity for empathy, connection, curiosity, and compassionate problem-solving—is not just valuable but irreplaceable?”
And if I were more provocative: “What if building this deeply human-centred innovation capability is the strategic choice that makes traumatic, disruptive reinventions increasingly unnecessary?”
The Human Innovation Paradox
The McKinsey authors correctly note that reinvention “requires rethinking how organisations create value and who they are at their core.” But here’s what we’re missing in our rush toward AI-powered transformation: the organisations that rarely need existential reinvention are those that have built their innovation capability on the foundation of what makes us distinctly human.
These are organisations that understand a fundamental truth: innovation doesn’t emerge from algorithms, processes, or technologies. It emerges from humans caring deeply about problems faced by other humans and feeling compelled to solve them. It comes from curiosity about why things work the way they do. It springs from empathy that allows us to truly understand another person’s experience. It requires emotional courage to persist when solutions don’t come easily.
Consider the automotive manufacturer from the article—struggling to shift from traditional vehicles to electric and autonomous technology. The technical challenges are significant, certainly. But the more profound crisis is human: How do you ask people whose identity is rooted in internal combustion expertise to emotionally invest in technologies that make their skills obsolete? How do you build the psychological safety required for engineers to admit what they don’t know? How do you create the human connections across traditionally siloed functions that enable the collaborative problem-solving this transformation demands?
These aren’t technical problems. They’re human problems. And in the age of AI, our ability to solve them becomes our most crucial competitive advantage.
The organisations that navigate disruption most successfully—Microsoft under Satya Nadella being a prime example from the article—don’t do so by having better AI or more sophisticated processes. They succeed because they’ve created environments where human curiosity, compassion, and connection flourish, and where people feel psychologically safe to experiment. Where emotional investment in solving customer problems drives behaviour more powerfully than any incentive structure could.
AI and Humans, Not AI or Humans
As organisations grapple with AI integration, we’re witnessing a false choice emerge: should we invest in AI capabilities or in human development? The question itself reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives innovation.
AI is extraordinary at pattern recognition, data processing, and optimising known solutions. But innovation—genuine innovation that creates value humans recognise and embrace—requires something AI cannot provide: the deep human capacity to care about other people’s problems and feel motivated to solve them.
The most successful innovation-led organisations understand this distinction viscerally. They deploy AI to amplify human capability, not replace it. They use AI to handle the computational heavy lifting so humans can focus on what we do uniquely well: connecting with other humans, building empathy for their circumstances, imagining solutions that don’t yet exist, and navigating the emotional complexity of bringing those solutions to life.
This isn’t about being “anti-AI.” It’s about understanding that in the age of AI, “our most sustainable competitive advantage lies in building organisations that enable human connection, curiosity, and compassionate problem-solving at scale.”
When we talk about “building innovation capability,” we’re really talking about creating conditions where humans can do what evolution designed us to do: observe our environment, connect with others, feel empathy for their challenges, get curious about solutions, and collaborate to make things better. These aren’t soft skills that become less important in a technical age—they’re the foundational human capabilities that determine whether our AI investments create value or optimise the wrong things efficiently.
The Human System of Innovation
The McKinsey framework treats innovation primarily as an output of reinvention. But this misses the causal chain. Innovation capability built on human-centred foundations isn’t just an outcome—it’s the preventive medicine that makes traumatic reinvention increasingly unnecessary.
Organisations that deeply understand this don’t cycle through periods of stability followed by disruptive change. They’ve built what I call systematic innovation capability—the alignment of strategy, leadership, and culture around enabling humans to do what humans do best: solve problems collaboratively for the benefit of other humans.
This creates a fundamentally different relationship with change. Instead of AI-powered transformations that leave people feeling replaceable and exhausted, these organisations foster continuous human-led adaptation. People don’t resist change; they drive it because solving meaningful problems is intrinsically rewarding to humans.
The distinction is crucial. When change happens “to” people, it depletes energy and creates resistance. When change happens “through” people—when they’re solving problems they care about, collaborating with colleagues they trust, seeing tangible impact from their work—it generates energy. This is the difference between organisations that experience change fatigue and those that build change resilience.
Four Human-Centred Principles for Innovation-Led Organisations
To understand why placing humanity at the centre of innovation capability transforms the change equation, we need to examine four principles that successful organisations consistently apply:
1. Innovation as Impact, Not an Initiative
Most organisations treat innovation as something they “do”—programs, labs, initiatives, AI implementations. But this misses what innovation actually “is”: a judgment made by other humans when they experience our solutions as meaningfully valuable.
No internal committee determines what’s innovative. No AI system can declare something innovative. Only when real humans engage with our solutions and feel that their problems have been solved, their lives improved, and their needs met in ways that matter, only then have we truly innovated.
Organisations that understand this stop asking “How do we innovate?” and start asking “How do we create conditions where people who care deeply about solving human problems can collaborate effectively to do so?” This subtle shift—from innovation as corporate activity to innovation as human impact—changes everything about how organisations build capability.
2. Middle Management as the Human Bridge
The McKinsey authors identify middle managers as critical change translators. But in my work across industries, I’ve observed something more profound: middle managers serve as the essential human bridge between strategic aspiration and daily reality.
These leaders don’t just translate strategy—they create the human conditions where innovation can emerge. They build trust, enabling people to take risks. They facilitate the human connections across functions that collaborative problem-solving requires. They model the curiosity, vulnerability, and persistence that innovation demands. They protect the psychological space where people can experiment without fear.
Research shows organisations with highly engaged middle management in innovation achieve 38% higher success rates. But this isn’t about “engagement” in an abstract sense. It’s about middle managers who understand their role is fundamentally human: creating the relationships, trust, and emotional safety that allow innovation to flourish.
In the age of AI, this human role becomes more critical, not less. As AI handles more routine decision-making, middle managers’ value shifts entirely to their human capabilities: coaching, connecting, empathising, inspiring, and creating the conditions where teams can do their best work.
3. The Strategic Middle Ground of Human-Centred Innovation
Organisations often oscillate between two extremes: incremental improvements (safe but insufficient) and radical moonshots (exciting but rarely achievable). Both approaches miss where human-centred innovation actually scales.
What I call Differentiated Innovation—customer-focused work of medium scale with manageable risk and justifiable investment—is where systematic innovation capability develops. This is work that multiple teams across an organisation can pursue simultaneously. Work that requires genuine collaboration. Work that solves real problems for real people.
This middle ground is where humans thrive. It’s complex enough to be engaging but not so overwhelming that people shut down. It requires creativity but isn’t purely speculative. It builds skills and confidence. Most importantly, it allows people to see the human impact of their work—to know that their efforts tangibly improved someone’s, in most cases, their customers’ life.
This emotional connection to impact is what sustains innovation over time. When people solve meaningful problems and witness the human benefit, they’re intrinsically motivated to do it again. You don’t need elaborate incentive structures when people feel the deep satisfaction of making things better for others.
4. Psychological Safety as the Foundation
Amy Edmondson’s research shows teams with high psychological safety are 67% more innovative. But we need to understand “why”: humans are wired for social connection and are acutely sensitive to threats to belonging.
When people fear judgment, ridicule, or punishment for mistakes, their brains enter threat response mode. Creativity shuts down. Curiosity disappears. Risk aversion dominates. They focus solely on self-protection rather than problem-solving.
Conversely, when people feel psychologically safe—when they trust that they belong, that their contributions matter, and that mistakes are learning opportunities—their brains can engage in the complex cognitive and emotional work innovation requires: perspective-taking, pattern synthesis, creative connection-making, and persistent experimentation.
This isn’t “soft” organisational psychology. It’s fundamental neuroscience. Leaders who understand this don’t just intellectually endorse psychological safety—they actively cultivate it through their own vulnerability, curiosity, and compassion.
The Human Dimension of Each Change Level
When we view the McKinsey framework through the lens of human-centred innovation capability, each change level takes on deeper meaning:
C1 (Execute): Rather than mere tactical implementation, this becomes about building organisational muscle memory for experimentation. Every execution offers an opportunity for people to practice curiosity—asking “Could this be done differently?”—and to experience the satisfaction of improving processes collaboratively.
C2 (Mobilise): Instead of mobilising employees around specific initiatives, this is about cultivating the human conditions that enable sustained innovation: trust between people, psychological safety to take risks, genuine curiosity about problems, and emotional investment in solutions that help others.
C3 (Transform): Rather than periodic transformations, this becomes about embedding human-centred ways of working so deeply that innovation becomes “how we do things around here”—not because of processes or incentives, but because people find meaning in collaboratively solving problems that matter.
C4 (Reinvent): With human-centred innovation capability in place, reinvention becomes less about existential crises and more about channelling collective human curiosity toward new opportunities. People don’t resist because they’re not being forced to abandon their identity—they’re being invited to apply their problem-solving capabilities to new domains.
The Five Questions Reimagined: Where Humanity Meets Technology
The McKinsey authors pose five essential questions for leaders navigating reinvention. Each takes on profound new dimensions when we centre human capability and thoughtfully integrate AI:
Question 1: “Where will we find value amid creative destruction?”
Traditional answer: Identify new markets and business models.
Human-centred answer: Value emerges where human empathy meets unmet needs. Organisations with strong innovation cultures don’t wait for creative destruction—their people are continuously curious about human problems worth solving. They work “future back”, not from strategic necessity, but because caring about improving others’ lives is fundamentally human.
The AI integration: Use AI to surface patterns in customer behaviour and market signals, freeing humans to apply empathy and imagination to understanding what those patterns mean for human experience.
Question 2: “How can we play a central role in the emerging ecosystem?”
Traditional answer: Map ecosystems and identify strategic positions.
Human-centred answer: Ecosystems aren’t abstract networks—they’re communities of humans collaborating to create value for other humans. Organisations that continuously solve problems collaboratively with partners, suppliers, and customers naturally become ecosystem shapers because they’ve built the trust, relationships, and shared purpose that healthy ecosystems require.
The AI integration: Deploy AI to manage ecosystem complexity and information flows, enabling humans to focus on building the relationships and trust that make ecosystems function effectively.
Question 3: “What organisational rewiring can help us shift?”
Traditional answer: Restructure and reallocate resources.
Human-centred answer: Organisations aren’t boxes and lines—they’re networks of human relationships. “Rewiring” means reconfiguring how people connect, collaborate, and create together. When innovation is embedded, these human networks are already designed for flexibility because people trust each other enough to work across boundaries and reconfigure as needs evolve.
The AI integration: Use AI to optimise decision flows and resource allocation mechanics, freeing leadership attention for the human work of building trust, facilitating connections, and creating psychological safety.
Question 4: “How will we learn faster than others?”
Traditional answer: Implement agile processes and rapid experimentation.
Human-centred answer: Learning isn’t just about speed—it’s about creating conditions where humans feel safe to experiment, curious enough to question assumptions, and emotionally invested enough to persist through difficulties. Organisations that operate in continuous learning cycles haven’t just adopted methodologies; they’ve built cultures where people genuinely enjoy learning together.
The AI integration: Leverage AI to accelerate insight synthesis and pattern recognition from experiments, allowing humans to focus on the creative and collaborative aspects of turning insights into innovations.
Question 5: “What do my people need from me?”
Traditional answer: Clear direction and resources.
Human-centred answer: People need to feel that their humanity—their curiosity, empathy, creativity, and desire to make things better—is valued and essential to the organisation’s success. They need leaders who demonstrate vulnerability, who model the very human truth that we don’t have all the answers, and who create space for others to bring their full human capabilities to work.
The AI integration: As AI handles more routine decision-making, leaders must double down on the distinctly human aspects of leadership: inspiring, connecting, coaching, creating meaning, and building the emotional conditions where innovation thrives.
The Reinvention Imperative: Choosing “And” Over “Or”
Here’s the critical choice facing every organisation: Will you frame AI adoption as “AI or Humans”—a zero-sum competition where efficiency demands we replace expensive human judgment with cheaper computational power? Or will you choose “AI and Humans”—a complementary relationship where AI amplifies what makes us distinctly human?
Organisations making the first choice may achieve short-term cost savings. But they’re systematically destroying the very human capabilities—curiosity, empathy, connection, compassion—that enable genuine innovation. I’d argue that they’re optimising themselves into irrelevance!
Organisations making the second choice are building something fundamentally more powerful: environments where human creativity, emotional intelligence, and collaborative problem-solving are amplified by computational capabilities that handle the work computers do better than humans.
This isn’t just philosophically sound—it’s strategically essential. In a world where AI can rapidly replicate technical capabilities, your sustainable competitive advantage lies in what AI cannot replicate: human beings caring about other human beings’ problems and feeling emotionally compelled to solve them.
The Human Mathematics of Continuous Alignment
Here’s the compelling human logic behind building innovation capability: organisations where people continuously solve meaningful problems for others maintain fundamentally different relationships with change.
Every day that an organisation’s people are disconnected from real customer problems, empathy atrophies. Every week that passes without collaborative problem-solving, trust between functions erodes. Every month that teams don’t experience the satisfaction of making things better, intrinsic motivation diminishes. This creates what we might call “human capability debt”—a progressive weakening of the very capacities organisations need most for innovation.
Conversely, organisations where people routinely connect with customers, collaborate across boundaries, and experience the impact of solving meaningful problems are continuously building human capability. They’re not accumulating debt; they’re compounding capability.
The mathematics are straightforward but profound: when people consistently practice the human skills of empathy, curiosity, collaboration, and problem-solving, those capabilities strengthen. The organisation doesn’t just stay aligned with market needs—it develops the human capacity to shape markets. It doesn’t just respond to change—it builds resilience through humans who are confident problem-solvers and emotionally invested in outcomes.
This is why organisations with deeply embedded human-centred innovation capability experience strategic inflexion points not as existential crises but as challenges their people feel equipped to address. Why? Because human confidence, trust, and collaborative muscle memory already exist.
Innovation as a Human System
The McKinsey authors note that organisations “should really be thought of as networks of relationships.” This insight is crucial, but it needs to go further: “innovation capability emerges from the complex interplay of human relationships, trust, curiosity, and emotional investment—all of which are either enabled or inhibited by leadership, culture, processes, strategy, and management practices.”
These aren’t components you optimise independently. They form an integrated human system where changes to any element affect all others. When executives treat innovation as another program to layer on top—especially if that program centres on AI adoption while marginalising human capability—they’re trying to impose new technology without understanding the human system that must absorb and leverage it.
When organisations build innovation capability systemically—ensuring that strategy, leadership, culture, processes, and management all align to enable human connection, curiosity, and compassionate problem-solving—they create conditions where AI becomes an amplifier of human capability rather than a replacement for it.
This is the crucial distinction. AI deployed into organisations without a strong human-centred innovation capability often creates more problems than it solves: people feel threatened rather than empowered, work becomes more disconnected rather than more meaningful, and the organisation optimises for efficiency while destroying the creativity and collaboration it needs for adaptation.
AI deployed into organisations with robust human-centred innovation capability does something entirely different: it frees people from computational drudgery to focus on what humans do uniquely well—understand other humans, imagine new possibilities, build trust through relationships, and persist through the emotional complexity of bringing innovations to life.
Investing in Human Capability, Not Just Change Programs
The practical implication is that leaders must fundamentally reconsider where they’re investing organisational attention and resources. Rather than allocating primarily to tactical changes, periodic transformations, and crisis reinventions, they should invest heavily in building human capabilities that make adaptation natural rather than traumatic.
What does this investment look like? It’s not training programs on innovation methodologies or workshops on design thinking. It’s creating the conditions where people can practice being human together in service of solving meaningful problems:
Dedicated time for teams to work on problems they care about, with genuine authority to experiment and freedom to fail productively.
Cross-functional collaboration that builds trust and empathy across organisational boundaries, where people learn to see problems through different perspectives.
Direct customer engagement that allows people to build an emotional connection with the humans whose problems they’re solving.
Psychological safety is cultivated through leaders who demonstrate vulnerability, curiosity, and compassion in their own behaviour.
Recognition that celebrates not just successful outcomes but the human qualities that enable innovation—curiosity, collaboration, persistence, empathy.
This doesn’t mean abandoning the McKinsey framework—it remains valuable for managing necessary changes. But it does mean recognising that the meta-investment that changes the nature of all other changes is investment in human capability: creating environments where people can be curious, empathetic, collaborative, and emotionally invested in solving meaningful problems.
Leadership as Creating Space for Humanity
The McKinsey authors emphasise that leaders must “change their personal operating model, fostering an environment of trust and collaboration.” But this understates both the challenge and the opportunity facing leaders in the age of AI.
Leaders building human-centred innovation organisations aren’t just adopting new operating models for specific reinventions—they’re fundamentally redefining what leadership means.
They’re shifting from being chief decision-makers to chief capability cultivators. From controlling resources to creating space for human connection. From driving change to enabling humans to solve problems they care about.
This requires what might be called “leadership courage”—the willingness to:
Be vulnerable about uncertainty, admitting what you don’t know and modelling the curiosity to figure it out together.
Demonstrate empathy not as a soft skill but as the foundation for understanding what motivates people and what barriers prevent them from contributing fully.
Create psychological safety through your own behaviour, showing that mistakes are learning opportunities and that questioning assumptions is valued.
Trust human judgment over AI outputs when human context, emotion, and relationship matter more than computational accuracy.
Invest time in human connection—the conversations, relationships, and moments of genuine care that build the trust necessary for collaborative problem-solving.
This isn’t a temporary posture adopted during change initiatives. It’s a permanent orientation toward leadership that recognises humans as the source of innovation, with AI as the amplifier of human capability.
The Irreplaceable Human Advantage
In the age of AI, organisations that build deep human-centred innovation capability gain advantages that compound over time—and that AI cannot replicate:
Empathetic Market Understanding: They detect shifts in human needs earlier because people across the organisation continuously connect with customers emotionally, not just analytically. AI can process behavioural data; humans understand the “why” behind behaviours.
Creative Problem Synthesis: They generate better solutions because diverse humans collaborating bring different perspectives, experiences, and intuitions that no AI can replicate. AI can optimise known solutions; humans imagine solutions that don’t yet exist.
Trust-Based Collaboration: They execute faster because people trust each other across functional boundaries, communicate with nuance and emotional intelligence, and navigate conflict constructively. AI can facilitate communication; humans build the relationships that make collaboration meaningful.
Intrinsic Motivation: They sustain innovation over time because people find genuine satisfaction in solving meaningful problems and seeing the human impact of their work. AI can optimise incentive structures; humans feel the deep reward of helping other humans.
Adaptive Resilience: They weather disruptions better because continuous problem-solving has built confidence, collaborative muscle memory, and emotional resilience. AI can model scenarios; humans develop the courage to act despite uncertainty.
Reduced Change Exhaustion: They experience less change fatigue because changes feel like natural evolution driven by people solving problems they care about, rather than mandated disruptions imposed from above. AI can manage change mechanics; humans create the meaning that makes change sustainable.
Most importantly, these organisations develop something AI cannot provide: humans who care deeply about what they’re doing and feel emotionally connected to making things better for other humans. This isn’t a competitive advantage that can be copied through technology adoption. It’s built through patient cultivation of human relationships, trust, and shared purpose.
A Call to Action: Honour the Human
The McKinsey authors conclude that “change becomes a movement, and the vision becomes a light that never goes out.” This is beautiful and true. But I would add: “the most important movement organisations need to create is toward honouring what makes us human—our curiosity, empathy, creativity, and fundamental desire to make things better for each other.”
Leaders should definitely ask themselves the five questions the authors pose. But, I’d like to pose this additional question, and suggest it may prove most consequential: “Are we building an organisation where human capability—connection, empathy, curiosity, and compassionate problem-solving—is recognised as our most valuable asset, with AI deployed to amplify rather than replace those uniquely human capacities?”
Organisations that answer this question affirmatively—that make the deliberate choice to place humanity at the centre of their innovation capability—will find that the frequency, severity, and trauma of required reinventions diminish dramatically. They’ll still face change challenges, certainly. But those challenges will be navigated by confident, collaborative humans who have built the emotional resilience, trust, and capability to adapt continuously.
The future belongs not to organisations with the most sophisticated AI, but to organisations that most effectively combine human capability with artificial intelligence. That means organisations where curiosity, empathy, connection, and compassionate problem-solving are cultivated, celebrated, and leveraged at every level.
This is the reinvention we’re not talking about. It’s time we did.
Cris Beswick is a strategic advisor and recognised global thought leader on innovation strategy, leadership, and culture. He works with executive teams worldwide to build innovation-led organisations capable of solving complex problems and shaping the future.