Avoiding innovation theater and humanizing change with Amer Iqbal | Experts Unleashed | Atlassian

Atlassian

Jul 24, 2025

Amer Iqbal is an innovation expert and consultant who has guided dozens of Fortune 500 companies to build the business of tomorrow. Author of the upcoming book “The 5 Ways to Innovate” and host of the “Riding the Wave of Innovation” podcast, Amer helps organizations think, act, and behave more like startups to reimagine their future in a digital economy. Amer has spent the last 20 years leading innovation at some of the world’s top companies, including Meta (Facebook) and Deloitte Digital. Considered one of the foremost innovation experts, Amer has been interviewed by CNBC, has had his face appear on the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square, and was a finalist for the 2011 Young Executive of the Year. Amer’s writings have even been published in the Australian Financial Review, Economic Times, and WARC.

During this episode of "Experts Unleashed," Atlassian's Dom Price chats with Amer about why corporate innovation is broken, how to humanize change in the workplace, and what it means to fail fast and fail forward. They discuss how to identify if innovation is thriving in your organization (or not…), how to circumvent change resistance when you hit it, as well as how to model innovative thinking by sharing your failures with your team. Amer is a wealth of knowledge on the topic of innovative change and spends the episode providing practical tips and tricks that any leader can use to unleash innovation in their organization.

They also discuss the "My User Manual" Play from Atlassian's Team Playbook. It's an exercise designed to help leaders share with their teams and teammates HOW they work. Think of it like this: when you buy a TV, it comes with a User Manual. But when you hire a human, there's no such helpful guidance. Amer takes us through his User Manual and shares his proudest accomplishment…and it has nothing to do with corporate innovation!

More about Experts Unleashed:
The world feels full of thought leadership and frameworks, when we’re actually hungry for lived experience, science, and pragmatic insights. Experts Unleashed seeks out amazing minds from their specialty fields and brings them to you, to unleash their wisdom in a way that will help you put it in action. Each episode aims to educate, provoke, inspire, and then activate… to give you the confidence to try someone new.

In this episode:
My User Manual Play: https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/my-user-manual
More about Amer Iqbal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ameriqbal/
Forever Projects Charity: https://foreverprojects.org/

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

01:33 – Welcome innovation strategist, Amer Iqbal

02:57 – Amer’s user manual and his proudest achievement

05:35 – What it takes to complete the final mile

09:59 – Why is corporate innovation broken?

13:05 – How to know when innovation is working (and not working)

16:28 – Improving your innovation stance

21:50 – Diversify your portfolio of work with the 70/20/10 rule

26:59 – Sensing if innovation is thriving in your organization

31:08 – Humanizing change in large organizations