Category Archives: collaboration

Don’t Fall for the Design Squiggle Lie

Don't Fall for the Design Squiggle Lie

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Last night, I lied to a room full of MBA students. I showed them the Design Squiggle, and explained that innovation starts with (what feels like) chaos and ends with certainty.

The chaos part? Absolutely true.

The certainty part? A complete lie.

Nothing is Ever Certain (including death and taxes)

Last week I wrote about the different between risk and uncertainty. Uncertainty occurs when we cannot predict what will happen when acting or not acting. It can also be broken down into Unknown uncertainty (resolved with more data) and Unknowable uncertainty (which persists despite more data).

But no matter how we slice, dice, and define uncertainty, it never goes away.

It may be higher or lower at different times,

More importantly, it changes focus.

Four Dimensions of Uncertainty

Something new that creates value (i.e. an innovation) is multi-faceted and dynamic. Treating uncertainty as a single “thing” therefore clouds our understanding and ability to find and addresses root causes.

That’s why we need to look at different dimensions of uncertainty.

Thankfully, the ivory tower gives us a starting point.

WHAT: Content uncertainty relates to the outcome or goal of the innovation process. To minimize it, we must address what we want to make, what we want the results to be, and what our goals are for the endeavor.

WHO: Participation uncertainty relates to the people, partners, and relationships active at various points in the process. It requires constant re-assessment of expertise and capabilities required and the people who need to be involved.

HOW: Procedure uncertainty focuses on the process, methods, and tools required to make progress. Again, it requires constant re-assessment of how we progress towards our goals.

WHERE: Time-space uncertainty focuses on the fact that the work may need to occur in different locations and on different timelines, requiring us to figure out when to start and where to work.

It’s tempting to think each of these are resolved in an orderly fashion, by clear decisions made at the start of a project, but when has a decision made on Day 1 ever held to launch day?

Uncertainty in Pharmaceutical Development

Let’s take the case of NatureComp, a mid-sized company pharmaceutical company and the uncertainties they navigated while working to replicate, develop, and commercialize a natural substance to target and treat heart disease.

What molecule should the biochemists research?
How should the molecule be produced?
Who has the expertise and capability to synthetically poduce the selected molecule because NatureComp doesn’t have the experience required internally?
Where to produce that meets the synthesization criteria and could produce cost-effectively at low volume?
What target disease specifically should the molecule target so that initial clincial trials can be developed and run?
Who will finance the initial trials and, hopefully, become a commercialization partner?
Where would the final commercial entity exist (e.g. stay in NatureComp, move to partner, stand-alone startup) and the molecule produced?

And those are just the highlights.

It’s all a bit squiggly

The knotty, scribbly mess at the start of the Design Squiggle is true. The line at the end is a lie because uncertainty never goes away. Instead, we learn and adapt until it feels manageable.

Next week, you’ll learn how.

Image credit: The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com

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Invention Through Co-Creation

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Invention Through Co-Creation

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

It was an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything,” by Steve Blank, that caught my attention more than ten years ago and caused me to shift my mindset about entrepreneurship and innovation. He described a lean start-up as “favoring experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over big design up front” developments. It sparked my fascination and ignited my curiosity about start-ups and how the start-up approach could be applied to creating a collaborative, intrapreneurial, entrepreneurial, and innovative learning curriculum that supported learning new ways of co-creation in the invention and innovation processes.

Why co-creation matters

One of the essential keys to success in innovation, whether as a start-up entrepreneur, corporate intrapreneur, innovation team, aspiring innovative leader, or organization, is your ability to collaborate, experiment, create, invent, and innovate. This involves actively embracing and incorporating the lean start-up approach alongside design thinking, adult learning principles, experiential learning techniques, and change management disciplines, especially in a world that is quickly becoming dominated by AI, to both create and capture value in ways people appreciate and cherish.

What is co-creation?

Invention through co-creation involves a collaborative design process in which stakeholders and customers work together to create and invent innovative solutions. It is a challenging process because it requires people to co-create a shared purpose, ensure equal contribution, and make collective decisions to guarantee that the final product meets the needs and preferences of its users. For these core elements to be successfully implemented, start-up founders and key stakeholders must have high levels of conscious self-awareness, a willingness to accept responsibility for their thoughts and behaviors, strong listening and inquiry skills, and self-mastery to navigate and adapt to the instability and uncertainty of a constantly changing environment.

Failure of innovation educators

With extensive experience in designing and developing bespoke experiential learning programs, I quickly realized that most traditional innovation education programs in tertiary institutions mainly focus on applying project management disciplines to creative ideas. Organizations relied on idea-generation tools, applying design thinking, and agile methodologies to improve efficiency and performance. While these disciplined approaches are vital for the success of start-ups and innovation initiatives, they rarely lead to systemic awareness and continuous learning, which are essential for innovation. Other options tend to involve quick, episodic “innovation theater” or entirely chaotic open innovation initiatives, which also fail to deliver the desired or potential long-term productivity, performance improvements, and growth!

Balancing and integrating chaos and rigidity

When people concentrate on balancing and integrating the chaos of creativity with the rigidity of disciplined methodologies, they can co-create, innovate, and deliver forward-thinking solutions by being agile, adaptable, and emotionally resilient. This forms the essential foundation for start-ups, entrepreneurs, teams, and organizations to achieve balance, focus, and flow while remaining resilient in the post-pandemic era of instability and uncertainty. At the same time, the outcome of integration is harmony; the lack of integration results in chaos, unpredictability, instability, and rigidity, where individuals unconsciously display inflexible and controlling behaviors.

The Start-Up Game™ Story

The Start-Up Game™ is based on the principle that “anyone can earn to innovate”, as it has been co-created as an immersive hybrid board game that combines achievement, competition, and an AI learning component. It is a co-creation tool that guides players to think, behave, and act differently by safely exploring the language, key mindsets, behaviors, and innovative thinking skills of successful intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and innovators within a socially responsible start-up environment. The game provides a safe, playful, and energizing space for players to experiment, take strategic risks, iterate, pivot, and co-create sustainable, future-ready, innovative solutions to survive and thrive on the innovation roller-coaster ride.

TechCrunch’s Innovation initially inspired our co-creation. We wondered how we could bring our vision to life by designing a two-hour board game that delivered value beyond mere engagement. We sought to create an immersive, playful, and interactive experience that participants could enjoy and gain from, within a risk-free learning environment, while generating an unprecedented level of lasting impact. The challenge we faced was heightened by today’s shorter attention spans and the fast-paced nature of our world, all within the constraints of an online learning environment.

Traditionally, business games create an environment where participants can make decisions, take risks, and learn from mistakes, all without real-world consequences. At the same time, they encourage better teamwork, collaboration, networking, and relationship-building opportunities. However, the value we aimed to deliver went beyond that, seeking to broaden players’ horizons, change their ways of thinking, and introduce new language, mindsets, and behaviors of innovation by playing the lean start-up way.

To ensure a lasting impact, we integrated advanced technology and hybrid, blended learning processes designed to enhance delivery. This extended beyond the in-game experience to include pre-game elements, establishing the foundation and providing context for the game. A key feature is the use of Generative AI avatars for content delivery, supported by written versions to accommodate different learning styles. By applying experiential and adult learning principles and techniques, we created team pause points and check-ins to encourage teams to regularly observe and reflect on their performance, while also fostering reflection and deeper discussions on how to improve during their current phase of the game.

Invention through co-creation

Being both creative and methodical

Invention through co-creation is not an easy process; in fact, it can be highly challenging and often chaotic, requiring people to balance creative chaos with disciplined order. Many start-ups, innovation teams, and digital and innovation transformation initiatives frequently fail because they do not mitigate risks by integrating the chaos of creativity with a disciplined and methodical approach. This is why design thinking and agile have become so popular, as they involve robust, structured methodologies that are easy to learn, follow, and implement. Design thinking principles and techniques are vital to the invention process, helping to manage key stages of the co-creation cycle:

Identify the user and their problem,
Ideating a hypothetical solution,
Developing a prototype,
Getting user feedback,
Iterating the prototype,
Getting user feedback,
Pivoting prototype,
Finalising the solution.

One of the most important lessons was recognizing the need to balance the creativity of chaos with disciplined order, which is why it is crucial to introduce creative energy, passionate purpose, and innovative thinking to drive and maintain that balance. To create, invent, and innovate successfully and avoid failure, co-creators must be attentive and intentional in:

a) Developing self-regulation strategies that support co-creation:

Flow with the uncertainty of success in an unstable environment.
Be willing to disrupt their habitual thinking and feeling habits and be cognitively agile in constantly shifting their mindsets and developing multiple perspectives.
Accept responsibility for their operating styles and ensure that they have a constructive impact on each other and their stakeholders.

b) Maintaining self-management strategies that enable co-creation:

Develop conscious and systemic awareness.
Generate both deep and agile thinking processes.
Sustain their emotional energy in capturing and creating value.
Adapt to stay ahead of change; be resilient, hopeful, and optimistic.

This involves the co-creators opening their minds, hearts, and will to unleash possibilities, emerge, diverge, and converge on new ideas, while withholding evaluation and judgement through deep observation, inquiry, and reflective listening practice. To cultivate people’s neuroplasticity through structured play, encouraging new growth, wonder, and a game-based mindset, and building the foundations for thinking differently. To foster honesty, courage, and provocation in using cognitive dissonance, creative tension, and contrarian behaviors to facilitate generative debate.

Key success factors

It involves blending the generative learning process with the discipline and rigor of adopting a methodical design thinking approach. The goal is to be brave and bold, compassionate and empathic when faced with challenges, both in being challenged and challenging others to think, act, and be differently. It includes experimenting through beta testing, managing the risks and demands of limited self-funded options, while co-creating a professionally designed set of user interfaces as the start-up navigates the start-up curve and the innovation roller-coaster, aiming to reach the Promised Land.

The Start-up Game™ is ideal for corporates, academic institutions, business schools and small to medium businesses to introduce the language, key mindsets, behaviors, and innovative thinking skills as an engaging, blended and experiential learning activity at innovation and strategy off-sites and in leadership development programs, cross-functional team-building events, culture change initiatives and sustainability and ESG engagement workshops to:

Promote inclusivity, collaboration, and real co-creation through playful experimentation and equal partnership.
Enable people to make sense of innovation in the context of entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship involves bringing an innovation culture to life.
Build both awareness and the application of innovative thinking and problem-solving to real-life challenges and business problems.

Successful co-creation yields increased engagement, collaboration, experimentation, enhanced understanding, and the delivery of innovative solutions and outcomes.

Through integrating both creative and inventive people with disciplined systems, processes, and methodologies.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in early 2026.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Discover our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program. It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that provides a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also up-skill people and teams, developing their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about The Start-Up Game.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Mismanaging Uncertainty & Risk is Killing Our Businesses

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Mismanaging Uncertainty & Risk is Killing Our Businesses

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

During September 2011, the English language officially died. That was the month that the Oxford English Dictionary, long regarded as the accepted authority on the English language published an update in which “literally” also meant figuratively. By 2016, every other major dictionary had followed suit.

The justification was simple: “literally” has been used to mean “figuratively” since 1769. Citing examples from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, they claimed they were simply reflecting the evolution of a living language.

What utter twaddle.

Without a common understanding of a word’s meaning, we create our own definitions which lead to secret expectations, and eventually chaos.

And not just interpersonally. It can affect entire economies.

Maybe the state of the US economy is just a misunderstanding

Uncertainty.

We’re hearing and saying that word a lot lately. Whether it’s in reference to tariffs, interest rates, immigration, or customer spending, it’s hard to go a single day without “uncertainty” popping up somewhere in your life.

But are we really talking about “uncertainty?”

Uncertainty and Risk are not the same.

The notion of risk and uncertainty was first formally introduced into economics in 1921 when Frank Knight, one of the founders of the Chicago school of economics, published his dissertation Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. In the 114 since, economists and academics continued to enhance, refine, and debate his definitions and their implications.

Out here in the real world, most businesspeople use them as synonyms meaning “bad things to be avoided at all costs.”

But they’re not synonyms. They have distinct meanings, different paths to resolution, and dramatically different outcomes.

Risk can be measured and/or calculated.

Uncertainty cannot be measured or calculated

The impact of tariffs, interest rates, changes in visa availability, and customer spending can all be modeled and quantified.

So it’s NOT uncertainty that’s “paralyzing” employers. It’s risk!

Not so fast my friend.

Not all Uncertainties are the same

According to Knight, Uncertainty drives profit because it connects “with the exercise of judgment or the formation of those opinions as to the future course of events, which…actually guide most of our conduct.”

So while we can model, calculate, and measure tariffs, interest rates, and other market dynamics, the probability of each outcome is unknown. Thus, our response requires judgment.

Sometimes.

Because not all uncertainties are the same.

The Unknown (also known as “uncertainty based on ignorance”) exists when there is a “lack of information which would be necessary to make decisions with certain outcomes.”

The Unknowable (“uncertainty based on ambiguity”) exists when “an ongoing stream [of information] supports several different meanings at the same time.”

Put simply, if getting more data makes the answer obvious, we’re facing the Unknown and waiting, learning, or modeling different outcomes can move us closer to resolution. If more data isn’t helpful because it will continue to point to different, equally plausible, solutions, you’re facing the Unknowable.

So what (and why did you drag us through your literally/figuratively rant)?

If you want to get unstuck – whether it’s a project, a proposal, a team, or an entire business, you first need to be clear about what you’re facing.

If it’s a Risk, model it, measure it, make a decision, move forward.

If it’s an uncertainty, what kind is it?

If it’s Unknown, decide when to decide, ask questions, gather data, then, when the time comes, decide and move forward

If it’s Unknowable, decide how to decide then put your big kid pants on, have the honest and tough conversations, negotiate, make a decision, and move on.

I mean that literally.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Back to Basics for Leaders and Managers

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Back to Basics for Leaders and Managers

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Imagine that you are the CEO working with your CHRO on a succession plan. Both the CFO and COO are natural candidates, and both are, on paper, equally qualified and effective.

The CFO distinguishes herself by consistently working with colleagues to find creative solutions to business issues, even if it isn’t the optimal solution financially, and inspiring them with her vision of the future. She attracts top talent and builds strong relationships with investors who trust her strategic judgment. However, she sometimes struggles with day-to-day details and can be inconsistent in her communication with direct reports.

The COO inspires deep loyalty from his team through consistent execution and reliability. People turn down better offers to stay because they trust his systematic approach, flawless delivery, and deep commitment to developing people. However, his vision rarely extends beyond “do things better,” rigidly adhering to established processes and shutting down difficult conversations with peers when change is needed.

Who so you choose?

The COO feels like the safer bet, especially in uncertain times, given his track record of proven execution, loyal teams, and predictable results. While the CFO feels riskier because she’s brilliant but inconsistent, visionary but scattered.

It’s not an easy question to answer.

Most people default to “It depends.”

It doesn’t depend.

It doesn’t “depend,” because being CEO is a leadership role and only the CFO demonstrates leadership behaviors. The COO, on the other hand, is a fantastic manager, exactly the kind of person you want and need in the COO role. But he’s not the leader a company needs, no matter how stable or uncertain the environment.

Yet we all struggle with this choice because we’ve made “leadership” and “management” synonyms. Companies no longer have “senior management teams,” they have “senior/executive leadership teams.” People moving from independent contributor roles to oversee teams are trained in “people leadership,” not “team management” (even though the curriculum is still largely the same).

But leadership and management are two fundamentally different things.

Leader OR Manager?

There are lots of definitions of both leaders and managers, so let’s go back to the “original” distinction as defined by Warren Bennis in his 1987 classic On Becoming a Leader

Leaders	Managers
· Do the right things· Challenge the status quo· Innovate· Develops· Focuses on people· Relies on trust· Has a long-range perspective· Asks what and why· Has an eye on the horizon	· Do things right· Accept the status quo· Administers· Maintains· Focuses on systems and structures· Relies on control· Has a short-range view· Asks how and when· Has an eye on the bottom line

In a nutshell: leaders inspire people to create change and pursue a vision while managers control systems to maintain operations and deliver results.

Leaders AND Managers!

Although the roles of leaders and managers are different, it doesn’t mean that the person who fills those roles is capable of only one or the other. I’ve worked with dozens of people who are phenomenal managers AND leaders and they are as inspiring as they are effective.

But not everyone can play both roles and it can be painful, even toxic, when we ask managers to take on leadership roles and vice versa. This is the problem with labeling everything outside of individual contributor roles as “leadership.”

When we designate something as a “people leadership” role and someone does an outstanding job of managing his team, we believe he’s a leader and promote him to a true leadership role (which rarely ends well). Conversely, when we see someone displaying leadership qualities and promote her into “people leadership,” we may be shocked and disappointed when she struggles to manage as effortlessly as she inspires.

The Bottom Line

Leadership and Management aren’t the same thing, but they are both essential to an organization’s success. They key is putting the right people in the right roles and celebrating their unique capabilities and contributions.

Image credit: Unsplash

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McKinsey is Wrong That 80% Companies Fail to Generate AI ROI

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McKinsey is Wrong That 80% Companies Fail to Generate AI ROI

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Sometimes, you see a headline and just have to shake your head. Sometimes, you see a bunch of headlines and need to scream into a pillow. This week’s headlines on AI ROI were the latter:

Companies are Pouring Billions Into A.I. It Has Yet to Pay Off – NYT
MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – Forbes
Nearly 8 in 10 companies report using gen AI – yet just as many report no significant bottom-line impact – McKinsey

AI has slipped into what Gartner calls the Trough of Disillusionment. But, for people working on pilots, it might as well be the Pit of Despair because executives are beginning to declare AI a fad and deny ever having fallen victim to its siren song.

Because they’re listening to the NYT, Forbes, and McKinsey.

And they’re wrong.

ROI Reality Check

In 20205, private investment in generative AI is expected to increase 94% to an estimated $62 billion. When you’re throwing that kind of money around, it’s natural to expect ROI ASAP.

But is it realistic?

Let’s assume Gen AI “started” (became sufficiently available to set buyer expectations and warrant allocating resources to) in late 2022/early 2023. That means that we’re expecting ROI within 2 years.

That’s not realistic. It’s delusional.

ERP systems “started” in the early 1990s, yet providers like SAP still recommend five-year ROI timeframes. Cloud Computing“started” in the early 2000s, and yet, in 2025, “48% of CEOs lack confidence in their ability to measure cloud ROI.” CRM systems’ claims of 1-3 years to ROI must be considered in the context of their 50-70% implementation failure rate.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t expect rapid results. We just need to set realistic expectations around results and timing.

Measure ROI by Speed and Magnitude of Learning

In the early days of any new technology or initiative, we don’t know what we don’t know. It takes time to experiment and learn our way to meaningful and sustainable financial ROI. And the learnings are coming fast and furious:

Trust, not tech, is your biggest challenge: MIT research across 9,000+ workers shows automation success depends more on whether your team feels valued and believes you’re invested in their growth than which AI platform you choose.

Workers who experience AI’s benefits first-hand are more likely to champion automation than those told, “trust us, you’ll love it.” Job satisfaction emerged as the second strongest indicator of technology acceptance, followed by feeling valued. If you don’t invest in earning your people’s trust, don’t invest in shiny new tech.

More users don’t lead to more impact: Companies assume that making AI available to everyone guarantees ROI. Yet of the 70% of Fortune 500 companies deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot and similar “horizontal” tools (enterprise-wide copilots and chatbots), none have seen any financial impact.

The opposite approach of deploying “vertical” function-specific tools doesn’t fare much better. In fact, less than 10% make it past the pilot stage, despite having higher potential for economic impact.

Better results require reinvention, not optimization: McKinsey found that call centers that gave agents access to passive AI tools for finding articles, summarizing tickets, and drafting emails resulted in only a 5-10% call time reduction. Centers using AI tools to automate tasks without agent initiation reduced call time by 20-40%.

Centers reinventing processes around AI agents? 60-90% reduction in call time, with 80% automatically resolved.

How to Climb Out of the Pit

Make no mistake, despite these learnings, we are in the pit of AI despair. 42% of companies are abandoning their AI initiatives. That’s up from 17% just a year ago.

But we can escape if we set the right expectations and measure ROI on learning speed and quality.

Because the real concern isn’t AI’s lack of ROI today. It’s whether you’re willing to invest in the learning process long enough to be successful tomorrow.

Image credit: Microsoft CoPilot

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This AI Creativity Trap is Gutting Your Growth

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This AI Creativity Trap is Gutting Your Growth

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“We have to do more with less” has become an inescapable mantra, and goodness, are you trying. You’ve slashed projects and budgets, “right-sized” teams, and tried any technology that promised efficiency and a free trial. Now, all that’s left is to replace the people you still have with AI creativity tools. Welcome to the era of the AI Innovation Team.

It sounds like a great idea. Now, everyone can be an innovator with access to an LLM. Heck, even innovation firms are “outsourcing” their traditional work to AI, promising the same radical results with less time and for far less money.

It sounds almost too good to be true.

Because it is too good to be true.

AI is eliminating the very brain processes that produce breakthrough innovations.

This isn’t hyperbole, and it’s not just one study.

MIT researchers split 54 people into three groups (ChatGPT users, search engine users, and no online/AI tools using ChatGPT) and asked them to write a series of essays. Using EEG brain monitoring, they found that the brain connectivity in networks crucial for creativity and analogous thinking dropped by 55%.

Even worse? When people stopped using AI, their brains stayed stuck in this diminished state.

University of Arkansas researchers tested AI against 3,562 humans on a series of four challenges involving finding new uses for everyday objects, like a brick or paperclip. While AI scored slightly higher on standard tests, when researchers introduced a new context, constraint, or modification to the object, AI’s performance “collapsed.” Humans stayed strong.

Why? AI relies on pattern matching and is unable to transfer its “creativity” to unexpected scenarios. Humans use analogical reasoning so are able to flex quickly and adapt.

University of Strasbourg researchers analyzed 15,000 studies of COVID-19 infections and found that teams that relied heavily on AI experts produced research that got fewer citations and less media attention. However, papers that drew from diverse knowledge sources across multiple fields became widely cited and influential.

The lesson? Breakthroughs require cross-domain thinking, which is precisely what diverse human teams provide, and, according to the MIT study, AI is unable to produce.

How to optimize for efficiency AND impact (and beat your competition)

While this seems like bad news if you’ve already cut your innovation team, the silver lining is that your competition is probably making the same mistake.

Now that you know better, you can do better, and that creates a massive opportunity.

Use AI for what it does well:

Data analysis and synthesis
Rapid testing and iteration to refine an advanced prototype
Process optimization

Use humans for what we do well:

Make meaningful connections across unrelated domains
Recognize when discoveries from one field apply to another
Generate the “aha moments” that redefine industries

Three Questions to Ask This Week

Where did your most recent breakthroughs come from? How many came from connecting insights across different domains? If most of your innovations require analogical leaps, cutting creative teams could kill your pipeline.
How are teams currently using AI tools? Are they using AI for data synthesis and rapid iteration? Good. Are they replacing human ideation entirely? Problem.
How can you see it to believe it? Run a simple experiment: Give two teams an hour to solve a breakthrough challenge. Have one solve it with AI assistance and one without. Which solution is more surprising and potentially breakthrough?

The Hidden Competitive Advantage

As AI commoditizes pattern recognition, human analogical thinking and creativity become a competitive advantage.

The companies that figure out the right balance will eat everyone else’s lunch.

Image credit: Gemini

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Navigating Unwelcome Change

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Five Questions with Theresa Ward

Navigating Unwelcome Change

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Picture this: your boss announces a major reorganization with a big smile, expecting you to be excited about “new opportunities.” Meanwhile, you’re sitting there thinking “What the hell just happened to my job?”

Theresa Ward, founder and Chief Momentum Officer of Fiery Feather, has spent years watching this disconnect play out. Her insight? Leaders are expected to sell change while still personally struggling with it, creating what she calls “that weird middle ground” where authenticity goes to die.

Our conversation revealed why unwelcome change triggers the same response as grief, and why leaders who stop pretending they’ve got it figured out are more successful.

Robyn Bolton: What’s the one piece of conventional wisdom about leading change that organizations need to unlearn?

Theresa Ward: That middle managers need to be enthusiastic about a change, or at least appear enthusiastic, to lead their teams through it.

RB: It seems like enthusiasm is important to get people on board and doing what they need to do to make change happen. Why is this wrong?

TW: Because it makes you wonder if this person is being authentic. Are they genuinely enthusiastic? Do they really believe this is the right thing?

To be clear, I’m talking about Unwelcome Change. Change that is thrust upon you. How we experience Unwelcome Change is the same way we experience grief.

When we initially experience Unwelcome Change, our brain goes into shock or denial which can actually trigger an increase in engagement and productivity.

Then we move into anger and blame, which looks different for all of us. We’ve probably experienced somebody yelling in a meeting, but it can also look like turning off the camera, folding your arms, rolling your eyes, and disengaging.

Bargaining. I always think of that clip from Jerry Maguire, where he’s got the goldfish, and he says, “Who’s coming with me?” because he’s going to make lemonades out of this lemon, even if it’s a completely ridiculous condition.

Then depression sets in. It’s the low point but it’s also where you’re really ready to admit that you’re upset, sad, and grieving the change that has happened. It’s the dark before the dawn.

RB: If everyone goes through this grief process, why do some leaders seem genuinely enthusiastic about the change?”

TW: If they came up with the idea, they’re not going to be angry or depressed about their own idea.

But even if it’s one announcement, people don’t experience just one change. It’s not, “Our budget is going from X to Y” and everyone can just get used to it. It’s double or triple that! It’s a budget cut, then a reorg, then a new boss, then a friend being laid off, then a project you loved getting trashed. You’re dealing with onion layers of change.

We all go through different stages at speeds. You can’t rush it. Sometimes you just have to be like, “Oh, okay, I’m feeling pretty angry this week. I’m just gonna have to sit through my anger phase and realize that it’s a phase.”

RB: I get that you can’t rush the process, but change doesn’t slow down so you can catch up. What can people do to navigate change while they’re processing it?

TW: BLT, baby. These are 3 tools, not a formula, that you can use for different experiences.

B stands for Benefit of Change. This is finding the silver lining, something we often underestimate because it’s such a broad cliche. For it to be effective, you need to look for a specific and personal silver lining. For example, a friend of mine works for a company that was acquired. He was not a fan of how the culture was changing, but the bigger company offered tuition reimbursement. So he used that to get his master’s of fine arts for free.

L is Locus of Control. Take inventory of everything that’s upsetting you and place it into one of 3 categories: What can I control? What can I influence? What do I need to just surrender? Sitting up at night and worrying about whether the budget will be cut again is outside of my control. So, I shouldn’t spend my time and energy on that. Instead, I need to focus on what I can control, like my attitude and response.

T is Take the Long View. Every day we find ourselves in situations that get us emotional – a traffic jam, getting cut off in traffic, or flubbing a big client presentation. When we get more emotional than what the situation calls for, ask how you’re going to feel about the situation tomorrow, then in a month, then a year Because when our fight or flight brain mode kicks in, we catastrophize things. But the reality is that most of it won’t matter tomorrow.

RB: What’s the most important mindset shift leaders need to make to help their teams through unwelcome change?

TW: Find what works for you first then, with empathy, help your team. Like the Airline Safety Video, put your mask on first, then help others. It allows you to be authentic and builds empathy with the team. Two things required to start the shift from unwelcome to accepted.

Theresa’s BLT framework won’t make change painless, but it gives you permission to admit that transformation is hard, even for leaders. The moment you stop pretending you’ve got it all figured out is the moment your team starts trusting you to guide them through the mess.

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Escaping the Fear Trap

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What We Can Learn from Wildfire Fighters About Leading Through Uncertainty

Escaping the Fear Trap

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

What does a lightning strike in a Spanish forest have to do with your next leadership meeting? More than you think.

On June 14, 2014, lightning struck a forest on Spain’s northeast coast, only 60 miles from Barcelona. Within hours, flames 16 to 33 feet high raced out of control toward populated areas, threatening 27,000 acres of forest, an area larger than the city of Boston.

Everything – data, instincts, decades of firefighting doctrine – prioritized saving the entire forest and protecting the coastal towns.

Instead, the fire commanders chose to deliberately let 2,057 acres, roughly the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, burn.

The result? They saved the other 25,000 acres (an area the size of San Francisco), protected the coastal communities, and created a natural firebreak that would protect the region for decades. By accepting some losses, they prevented catastrophic ones.

The Fear Trap That’s Strangling Your Business

The Tivissa fire’s triumph happened because firefighters found the courage to escape what researchers call the “fear trap” – the tendency to focus exclusively on defending against known, measurable risks.

Despite research proving that defending against predictable, measurable risks through defensive strategies consistently fails in uncertain and dynamic scenarios, firefighter “best practices” continue to advocate this approach.

Sound familiar? It should. Most executives today are trapped in exactly this pattern.

We’re in the fire right now. Financial markets are yo-yoing, AI threatens to disrupt everything, and consumer behaviors are shifting.

Most executives are falling into the Fear Trap by doubling down on protecting their existing business and pouring resources into defending against predictable risks. Yet the real threats, the ones you can’t measure or model, continue to pound the business.

While you’re protecting last quarter’s wins, tomorrow’s disruption is spreading unchecked.

Four Principles for Creative Decision-Making Under Fire

The decision to cede certain areas wasn’t hasty but based on four principles enabling leaders in any situation to successfully navigate uncertainty.

1. A Predictable Situation is a Safe Situation.

Stop trying to control the uncontrollable. Standard procedures work in predictable situations but fail in unprecedented challenges.

Put it in Practice: Instead of creating endless contingency plans, build flexibility and agility into operations and decision-making.

2. Build Credibility Through Realistic Expectations.

Reducing uncertainty requires realism about what can be achieved. Fire commanders mapped out precisely which areas around Tivissa would burn and which would be saved, then communicated these hard truths and the considered trade-offs to officials and communities before implementing their strategy, building trust and preventing panic as the selected areas burned.

Put it in practice: Stop promising to protect everything and set realistic expectations about what you can control. Then communicate priorities, expectations, and trade-offs frequently, transparently, and clearly with all key stakeholders.

3. Include the future in your definition of success

Traditional firefighting protects immediate assets at risk. The Tivissa firefighters expanded this to include future resilience, recognizing that saving everything today could jeopardize the region tomorrow.

Put it in practice: Be transparent about how you define the Common Good in your organization, then reinforce it by making hard choices about where to compete and where to retreat. The goal isn’t to avoid all losses – it’s to maximize overall organizational health.

4. Use uncertainty to build for tomorrow.

Firefighters didn’t just accept that 2,057 acres would burn – they strategically chose which acres to let burn to create maximum future advantage, protecting the region for generations.

Put it in practice: Evaluate every response to uncertainty on whether it better positions you for future challenges. Leverage the disruption to build capabilities, market positions, and organizational structures that strengthen you for future uncertainty.

Your Next Move

When the wind shifted and the fire exploded, firefighters had to choose between defending everything (and likely losing it all) or accepting strategic losses to ensure overall wins.

You’re facing the same choice right now.

Like the firefighters, your breakthrough might come not from fighting harder against uncertainty, but from learning to work with it strategically.

What are you willing to let burn to save what matters most?

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3 Secret Saboteurs of Strategic Foresight

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3 Secret Saboteurs of Strategic Foresight

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You’ve done everything to set Strategic Foresight efforts up for success. Executive authority? Check. Challenging inputs? Check. Process integration? Check. Now you just need to flip the switch and you’re off to the races.

Not so fast.

While the wrong set-up is guaranteed to cause failure, the right set-up doesn’t guarantee success. Research shows that strategic foresight initiatives with the right set-up fail because of “organizational pathologies” that sabotage even well-designed efforts.

If you aren’t leading the right people to do the right things in the right way, you’re not going to get the impact you need.

Here’s what to watch out for (and what to do when it happens).

Your Teams Misunderstand Foresight’s Purpose

People naturally assume that strategic foresight predicts the future. When it doesn’t, they abandon it faster than last year’s digital transformation initiative.

Shell learned this the hard way. In 1965, they built the Unified Planning Machinery, a computerized forecasting tool designed to predict cash flow based on trends. It was abandoned because executives feared “it would suppress discussion rather than encourage debate on differing perspectives.”

When they shifted from prediction to preparation, specifically to “modify the mental model of decision-makers faced with an uncertain future,” strategic foresight became an invaluable decision-making tool.

Help your team approach strategic foresight as preparation, not prediction, by measuring success by the improvement in discussion and decision-making, not scenario accuracy. When teams build mental flexibility rather than make predictions, wrong scenarios stop being failed scenarios.

People are Paralyzed by Fear of Being Wrong

Even when your teams understand foresight’s purpose, managers are often unwilling “to use foresight to plan beyond a few quarters, fearing that any decisions today could be wrong tomorrow.”

This is profoundly human. As Webb wrote, “When faced with uncertainty, we become inflexible. We revert to historical patterns, we stick to a predetermined plan, or we simply refuse to adopt a new mental model.” We nod along in scenario sessions, then make decisions exactly like we always have.

Shell’s scenario planning efforts succeeded because it made being wrong acceptable. Even though executives initially scoffed at the idea of oil prices quadrupling, they prepared for the scenario and took near-term “no regrets” decisions to restructure their portfolio.

To help people get past their fear, reward them for making foresight-informed decisions. For example, establish incentives and promotion criteria where exploring “wrong” scenarios leads to career advancement.

Your Culture Confuses Activity with Achievement

Between insight and action, the Tyranny of Now reigns. In even the most committed organizations, the very real and immediate needs of the business call us away from our planning efforts and consume our time and energy, meaning strategic foresight is embraced only when it doesn’t interfere with their “real” jobs.

Disney’s approach made strategic foresight a required element of people’s “real jobs” by integrating foresight activities and insights directly into performance management and strategic planning. When foresight teams identified that traditional media consumption was fracturing in 2012, Disney began preparing for that future by actively exploring and investing in new potential solutions.

Resist the Tyranny of Now’s pull by making strategic foresight activities just as tyrannical – require decisions based on foresight insights to occur in 90 days or less. These decisions should trigger resource allocation reviews, even if the resources are relatively small (e.g., one or a few people, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars). If strategic foresight doesn’t force hard choices about investments and priorities, it’s activity without achievement.

How You Lead and What People Do Determine Strategic Foresight’s Success

Executive authority, challenging inputs, and process integration are necessary but not sufficient. Success requires conquering the deeper organizational and human behaviors that determine whether strategic foresight is a corporate ritual or a competitive advantage.

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Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

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Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You stand on the brink of an exciting new adventure. Turmoil and uncertainty have convinced you that future success requires more than the short-term strategic and business planning tools you’ve used. You’ve cut through the hype surrounding Strategic Foresight and studied success. You are ready to lead your company into its bold future.

So, where do you start?

Most executives get caught up in all the things that need to happen and are distracted by all the tools, jargon, and pretty pictures that get thrown at them. But you are smarter than that. You know that there are three things you must do at the beginning to ensure ultimate success.

Give Foresight Executive Authority and Access

Foresight without responsibility is intellectual daydreaming.

While the practice of research and scenario design can be delegated to planning offices, the responsibility for debating, deciding, and using Strategic Foresight must rest with P&L owners.

Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that when a C-Suite executive with the authority to force strategic reviews oversaw foresight activities, the results were more likely to be acted on and integrated into strategic and operational plans. Shell serves as a specific example of this, as its foresight team reported directly to the executive committee, so that when scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility, Shell executives personally reviewed strategic portfolios and authorized immediate capability building.

Start by asking:

Who can force strategic reviews outside of the traditional planning process?
What triggers a review of Strategic Foresight scenarios?
How do we hold people accountable for acting on insights?

Demand Inputs That Challenge Your Assumptions

If your Strategic Foresight conversations don’t make you uncomfortable, you’re doing them wrong.

Webb’s research also shows that successful foresight systematically explores fundamental changes that could render the existing business obsolete.

Shell’s scenarios went beyond assumptions about oil price stability to explore supply disruptions, geopolitical shifts, and demand transformation. Disney’s foresight set aside traditional assumptions about media consumption and explored how technology could completely reshape content creation, distribution, and consumption.

Start by asking these questions:

Is the team going beyond trend analysis and exploring technology, regulations, social changes, and economic developments that could restructure entire markets?
Who are we talking to in other industries? What unusual, unexpected, and maybe crazy sources are we using to inform our scenarios?
Does at least one scenario feel possible and terrifying?

Integrate Foresight into Existing Planning Processes

Strategic Foresight that doesn’t connect to resource allocation decisions is expensive research.

Your planning processes must connect Strategic Foresight’s long-term scenarios to Strategic Planning’s 3–5-year plans and to your annual budget and resource decisions. No separate foresight exercises. No parallel planning tracks. The cascade from 20-year scenarios to this year’s investments must be explicit and ruthless.

When Shell’s scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility over decades, Shell didn’t file them away and wait for them to come true. They immediately reviewed their strategic portfolio and developed a 3–5-year plan to build capabilities for multiple oil futures. This was then translated into immediate capital allocation changes.

Disney’s foresight about changing media consumption in the next 20 years informed strategic planning for Disney+ and, ultimately, its operational launch.

Start by asking these questions:

How is Strategic Foresight linked to our strategic and business planning processes?
How do scenarios flow from 20-year insights through 5-year strategy to this year’s budget decisions?
How is the integration of Strategic Foresight into annual business planning measured and rewarded?

Three Steps. One Outcome.

Strategic foresight efforts succeed when they have the executive authority, provocative inputs, and integrated processes to drive resource allocation decisions. Taking these three steps at the very start sets you, your team, and your organization up for success. But they’re still not a guarantee.

Ready to avoid the predictable pitfalls? Next week, we’ll consider why strategic foresight fails and how to prevent your efforts from joining them.

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