Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in the Unleashing Digital Value issue of Workflow Quarterly.

In 1968, 3M bosses asked a company chemist named Spencer Silver to create “bigger, stronger, tougher” adhesives. Instead, he created something that had none of those qualities: an adhesive that could temporarily stick to paper without damaging it.

Although Silver insisted his adhesive had value, 3M didn’t see it—until over a decade later, when his colleague Art Fry, who’d heard Silver extolling the virtues of his invention at a seminar, stuck the adhesive onto a piece of paper. Armed with this sticky-paper prototype, Fry and Silver asked the company to conduct consumer testing on their invention. As it turned out, people loved the Post-it note.

As innumerable business school case studies have noted, the Post-it note worked because people in power listened—eventually, in 3M’s case—to what their customers wanted and what their employees knew.

Similarly, during the height of the pandemic, companies that were tuned into their customers’ and employees’ evolving needs and demands quickly thought up new products and services to stay afloat.

Yet when it comes to making fundamental decisions around innovation and digital transformation—reworking the core processes and systems upon which they run—most companies do a terrible job listening to the needs of their customers and employees, according to new research from ThoughtLab and ServiceNow (the publisher of Workflow Quarterly).