Category Archives: collaboration

74% of Companies Will Die in 10 Years Without Business Transformation

According to Executives

74% of Companies Will Die in 10 Years Without Business Transformation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

One day, an architect visited the building site of his latest project. There he saw three people all laying bricks. He asked each what they were doing. “I’m laying bricks,” the first responded. “I’m building a wall,” said the second. “I’m building a cathedral,” exclaimed the third.

The parable of the Three Bricklayers is a favorite amongst motivational speakers, urging their audiences to think beyond today’s tasks and this quarter’s goals to commit to a grandiose vision of eternal success and glory.

But there’s a problem.

The narrative changed

The person who had a vision of building a cathedral? They now believe they’re building ruins.

Is the C-Suite Quietly Quitting?

Recently published research found that three out of four executives believe that “without fundamental transformation* their organization will cease to exist” in ten years. That’s based on data from interviews with twenty-four “current or former CEOs who have led successful transformations” and 1,360 survey responses from C-Suite and next-generation leaders.

And, somehow, the news gets worse.

While 77% of C-suite executives report that they’re committed to their companies’ transformation efforts, but 57% believe their organization is taking the wrong approach to that transformation. But that’s still better than the 68% of Next-Gen executives who disagree with the approach.

So, it should come as no surprise that 71% of executives rate their companies’ transformation efforts as not at all to moderately successful. After all, it’s hard to lead people along a path you don’t agree with to a vision you don’t believe in.

Did they just realize that “change is hard in human systems?”

We all fall into the trap of believing that understanding something results in commitment and change.

But that’s not how humans work.

That’s definitely not how large groups of humans, known as organizations, work.

Companies’ operations are driven only loosely by the purpose, structures, and processes neatly outlined in HR documents. Instead, they are controlled by the power and influence afforded to individuals by virtue of the collective’s culture, beliefs, histories, myths, and informal ways of working.

And when these “opaque dimensions” are challenged, they don’t result in resistance,

They result in inertia.

“Organizational inertia kills transformations”

Organizations are “complex organisms” that evolve to do things better, faster, cheaper over time. They will continue doing so unless changed by an external force (yes, that’s Newton’s first law of motion).

That external force, the drive for transformation, must be strong enough to overcome:

Insight Inertia stops organizations from getting started because there is a lack of awareness or acceptance amongst leaders that change is needed.
Psychological Inertia emerges when change demands abandoning familiar success strategies. People embrace the idea of transformation but resist personal adaptation, defaulting to comfortable old behaviors.
Action Inertia sets in and gains power as the long and hard work of transformation drags on. Over time, people grow tired. Exhausted by continuous change, teams progressively disengage, becoming less responsive and decisive.

But is that possible when 74% of executives are simply biding their time and waiting for failure?

“There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

Did you see the crack in all the doom and gloom above?

43% of executives believe their organizations are taking the right approach to transformation.
29% believe that their organizations’ transformations have been successful.
26% believe their company will still be around in ten years.

The majority may not believe in transformation but only 33% of bricklayers believed they were building a cathedral, and the cathedral still got built.

Next week, we’ll explore how.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Reduce Innovation Risk with this Nobel Prize Winning Formula

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Reduce Innovation Risk with this Nobel Prize Winning Formula

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

As a kid, you’re taught that when you’re lost, stay put and wait for rescue. Most executives are following that advice right now—sitting tight amid uncertainty, hoping someone saves them from having to make hard choices and take innovation risk.

This year’s Nobel Prize winners in Economics have bad news: there is no rescue coming. Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt demonstrated that disruption happens whether you participate or not. Freezing innovation investments doesn’t reduce innovation risk. It guarantees competitors destroy you while you stand still.

They also have good news: innovation follows predictable patterns based on competitive dynamics, offering a framework for making smarter investment decisions.

How We Turned Stagnation into a System for Growth

For 99.9% of human history, economic growth was essentially zero. There were occasional bursts of innovation, like the printing press, windmills, and mechanical clocks, but growth always stopped.

200 years ago, that changed. Mokyr identified that the Industrial Revolution created systems connecting two types of knowledge: Propositional knowledge (understanding why things work) and Prescriptive knowledge (practical instructions for how to execute).

Before the Industrial Revolution, these existed separately. Philosophers theorized. Artisans tinkered. Neither could build on the other’s work. But the Enlightenment created feedback loops between theory and practice allowing countries like Britain to thrive because they had people who could translate theory into commercial products.

Innovation became a system, not an accident.

Why We Need Creative Destruction

Every year in the US, 10% of companies go out of business and nearly as many are created. This phenomenon of creative destruction, where companies and jobs constantly disappear and are replaced, was identified in 1942. Fifty years later, Aghion and Howitt built a mathematical model proving its required for growth.

Their research also lays bare some hard truths:

Creative destruction is constant and unavoidable. Cutting your innovation budget does not pause the game. It forfeits your position. Competitors are investing in R&D right now and their innovations will disrupt yours whether you participate or not.
Competitive position predicts innovation investments. Neck-to-neck competitors invest heavily in innovation because it’s their only path to the top. Market leaders cut back and coast while laggards don’t have the funds to catch-up. Both under-invest and lose.
Innovation creates winners and losers. Creative destruction leads to job destruction as work shifts from old products and skills to new ones. You can’t innovate and protect every job but you can (and should) help the people affected.

Ultimately, creative destruction drives sustained growth. It is painful and scary, but without it, economies and society stagnate. Ignore it at your peril. Work with it and prosper.

From Prize-winning to Revenue-generating

Even though you’re not collecting the one million Euro prize, these insights can still boost your bottom line if you:

Connect your Why teams with your How teams. Too often, Why teams like Strategy, Innovation, and R&D, chuck the ball over the wall to the How teams in Operations, Sales, Supply Chain, and front-line operations. Instead, connect them early and often and ensure the feedback loop that drives growth
Check your R&D and innovation investments. Are your R&D and innovation investments consistent with your strategic priorities or your competitive position? What are your investments communicating to your competitors? It’s likely that that “conserving cash” is actually coasting and ceding share.
Invest in your people and be honest with them. Your employees aren’t dumb. They know that new technologies are going to change and eliminate jobs. Pretending that won’t happen destroys trust and creates resistance that kills innovation. Tell employees the truth early, then support them generously through transitions.

What’s Your Choice?

Playing it safe guarantees the historical default: stagnation. The 2025 Nobel Prize winners proved sustained growth requires building innovation systems and embracing creative destruction.

The only question is whether you will participate or stagnate.

HALLOWEEN BONUS: Save 30% on the eBook, hardcover or softcover of Braden Kelley’s latest book Charting Change (now in its second edition) — FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE — using code HAL30 until midnight October 31, 2025

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How Cobots are Humanizing the Factory Floor

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The Collaborative Revolution

LAST UPDATED: October 25, 2025 at 4:33PM
How Cobots are Humanizing the Factory Floor - The Collaborative Revolution

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

For decades, industrial automation has been defined by isolation. Traditional robots were caged behind steel barriers, massive, fast, and inherently dangerous to humans. They operated on the principle of replacement, seeking to swap out human labor entirely for speed and precision. But as a thought leader focused on human-centered change and innovation, I see this model as fundamentally outdated. The future of manufacturing, and indeed, all operational environments, is not about replacement — it’s about augmentation.

Enter the Collaborative Robot, or Cobot. These smaller, flexible, and safety-certified machines are the definitive technology driving the next phase of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike their predecessors, Cobots are designed to work alongside human employees without protective caging. They are characterized by their force-sensing capabilities, allowing them to stop instantly upon contact, and their ease of programming, often achieved through simple hand-guiding (or “teaching”). The most profound impact of Cobots is not on the balance sheet, but on the humanization of work, transforming dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks into collaborative, high-value roles. This shift requires leaders to address the initial psychological barrier of automation, re-framing the technology as a partner in productivity and safety.

The Three Pillars of Cobot-Driven Human-Centered Innovation

The true value of Cobots lies in how they enable the three core tenets of modern innovation:

1. Flexibility and Agility: Cobots are highly portable and quick to redeploy. A human worker can repurpose a Cobot for a new task — from picking parts to applying glue — in a matter of hours. This means production lines can adapt to short runs and product customization far faster than large, fixed automation systems, giving businesses the agility required in today’s volatile market.
2. Ergonomic and Safety Improvement: Cobots take on the ergonomically challenging or repetitive tasks that lead to human injury (like repeated lifting, twisting, or precise insertion). By handling the “Four Ds” (Dull, Dirty, Dangerous, and Difficult-to-Ergonomically-Design), they dramatically improve worker health, morale, and long-term retention.
3. Skill Elevation and Mastery: Instead of being relegated to simple assembly, human workers are freed to focus on high-judgment tasks: quality control, complex troubleshooting, system management, and, crucially, Cobot programming and supervision. This elevates the entire workforce, shifting roles from manual labor to process management and robot literacy.

“Cobots are the innovation that tells human workers: ‘We value your brain and your judgment, not just your back.’ The factory floor is becoming a collaborative workspace, not a cage, but leaders must proactively communicate the upskilling opportunity.”

Case Study 1: Transforming Aerospace Assembly with Human-Robot Teams

The Challenge:

A major aerospace manufacturer faced significant challenges in the final assembly stage of large aircraft components. Tasks involved repetitive drilling and fastener application in tight, ergonomically challenging spaces. The precision required meant workers were often in awkward positions for extended periods, leading to fatigue, potential errors, and high rates of Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs).

The Cobot Solution:

The company deployed a fleet of UR-style Cobots equipped with vision systems. The human worker now performs the initial high-judgment setup — identifying the part and initiating the sequence. The Cobot then precisely handles the heavy, repetitive drilling and fastener insertion. The human worker remains directly alongside the Cobot, performing simultaneous quality checks and handling tasks that require tactile feedback or complex dexterity (like cable routing).

The Innovation Impact:

The process yielded a 30% reduction in assembly time and, critically, a near-zero rate of MSDs related to the process. The human role shifted entirely from physical exertion to supervision and quality assurance, turning an exhausting, injury-prone role into a highly skilled, collaborative function. This demonstrates Cobots’ power to improve both efficiency and human well-being, increasing overall job satisfaction.

Case Study 2: Flexible Automation in Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

The Challenge:

A small, family-owned metal fabrication business needed to increase production to meet demand for specialized parts. Traditional industrial robotics were too expensive, too large, and required complex, fixed programming — an impossible investment given their frequent product changeovers and limited engineering staff.

The Cobot Solution:

They invested in a single, affordable, lightweight Cobot (e.g., a FANUC CR series) and installed it on a mobile cart. The Cobot was tasked with machine tending — loading and unloading parts from a CNC machine, a task that previously required a dedicated, monotonous human shift. Because the Cobot could be programmed by simple hand-guiding and a user-friendly interface, existing line workers were trained to set up and manage the robot in under a day, focusing on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) best practices.

The Innovation Impact:

The Cobot enabled lights-out operation for the single CNC machine, freeing up human workers to focus on higher-value tasks like complex welding, custom finishing, and customer consultation. This single unit increased the company’s throughput by 40% without increasing floor space or headcount. More importantly, it democratized automation, proving that Cobots are the essential innovation that makes high-level automation accessible and profitable for small businesses, securing their future competitiveness.

Companies and Startups to Watch in the Cobot Space

The market is defined by both established players leveraging their industrial expertise and nimble startups pushing the envelope on human-AI collaboration. Universal Robots (UR) remains the dominant market leader, largely credited with pioneering the field and setting the standard for user-friendliness and safety. They are focused on expanding their software ecosystem to make deployment even simpler. FANUC and ABB are the industrial giants who have quickly integrated Cobots into their massive automation portfolios, offering hybrid solutions for high-mix, low-volume production. Among the startups, keep an eye on companies specializing in advanced tactile sensing and vision — the critical technologies that will allow Cobots to handle true dexterity. Companies focusing on AI-driven programming (where the Cobot learns tasks from human demonstration) and mobile manipulation (Cobots mounted on Autonomous Mobile Robots, or AMRs) are defining the next generation of truly collaborative, fully mobile smart workspaces.

The shift to Cobots signals a move toward agile manufacturing and a renewed respect for the human worker. The future factory floor will be a hybrid environment where human judgment, creativity, and problem-solving are amplified, not replaced, by safe, intelligent robotic partners. Leaders who fail to see the Cobot as a tool for human-centered upskilling and empowerment will be left behind in the race for true productivity and innovation. The investment must be as much in robot literacy as it is in the robots themselves.

Disclaimer: This article speculates on the potential future applications of cutting-edge scientific research. While based on current scientific understanding, the practical realization of these concepts may vary in timeline and feasibility and are subject to ongoing research and development.

Image credit: Google Gemini

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Why Best Practices Fail

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Five Questions with Ellen DiResta

Why Best Practices Fail

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

For decades, we’ve faithfully followed innovation’s best practices. The brainstorming workshops, the customer interviews, and the validated frameworks that make innovation feel systematic and professional. Design thinking sessions, check. Lean startup methodology, check. It’s deeply satisfying, like solving a puzzle where all the pieces fit perfectly.

Problem is, we’re solving the wrong puzzle.

As Ellen Di Resta points out in this conversation, all the frameworks we worship, from brainstorming through business model mapping, are business-building tools, not idea creation tools.

Read on to learn why our failure to act on the fundamental distinction between value creation and value capture causes too many disciplined, process-following teams to create beautiful prototypes for products nobody wants.

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

Ellen: That the innovation best practices everyone’s obsessed with work for the early stages of innovation.

The early part of the innovation process is all about creating value for the customer. What are their needs? Why are their Jobs to be Done unsatisfied? But very quickly we shift to coming up with an idea, prototyping it, and creating a business plan. We shift to creating value for the business, before we assess whether or not we’ve successfully created value for the customer.

Think about all those innovation best practices. We’ve got business model canvas. That’s about how you create value for the business. Right? We’ve got the incubators, accelerators, lean, lean startup. It’s about creating the startup, which is a business, right? These tools are about creating value for the business, not the customer.

R: You know that Jobs to be Done is a hill I will die on, so I am firmly in the camp that if it doesn’t create value for the customer, it can’t create value for the business. So why do people rush through the process of creating ideas that create customer value?

E: We don’t really teach people how to develop ideas because our culture only values what’s tangible. But an idea is not a tangible thing so it’s hard for people to get their minds around it. What does it mean to work on it? What does it mean to develop it? We need to learn what motivates people’s decision-making.

Prototypes and solutions are much easier to sell to people because you have something tangible that you can show to them, explain, and answer questions about. Then they either say yes or no, and you immediately know if you succeeded or failed.

R: Sounds like it all comes down to how quickly and accurately can I measure outcomes?

E: Exactly. But here’s the rub, they don’t even know they’re rushing because traditional innovation tools give them a sense of progress, even if the progress is wrong.

We’ve all been to a brainstorm session, right? Somebody calls the brainstorm session. Everybody goes. They say any idea is good. Nothing is bad. Come up with wild, crazy ideas. They plaster the walls with 300 ideas, and then everybody leaves, and they feel good and happy and creative, and the poor person who called the brainstorm is stuck.

Now what do they do? They look at these 300 ideas, and they sort them based on things they can measure like how long it’ll take to do or how much money it’ll cost to do it. What happens? They end up choosing the things that we already know how to do! So why have the brainstorm?”

R: This creates a real tension: leadership wants progress they can track, but the early work is inherently unmeasurable. How do you navigate that organizational reality?

E: Those tangible metrics are all about reliability. They make sure you’re doing things right. That you’re doing it the same way every time? And that’s appropriate when you know what you’re doing, know you’re creating value for the customer, and now you’re working to create value for the business. Usually at scale

But the other side of it? That’s where you’re creating new value and you are trying to figure things out. You need validity metrics. Are we doing the right things? How will we know that we’re doing the right things.

R: What’s the most important insight leaders need to understand about early-stage innovation?

E: The one thing that the leader must do is run cover. Their job is to protect the team who’s doing the actual idea development work because that work is fuzzy and doesn’t look like it’s getting anywhere until Ta-Da, it’s done!

They need to strategically communicate and make sure that the leadership hears what they need to hear, so that they know everything is in control, right? And so they’re running cover is the best way to describe it. And if you don’t have that person, it’s really hard to do the idea development work.”

But to do all of that, the leader also must really care about that problem and about understanding the customer.

We must create value for the customer before we can create value for the business. Ellen’s insight that most innovation best practices focus on the latter is devastating. It’s also essential for all the leaders and teams who need results from their innovation investments.

Before your next innovation project touches a single framework, ask yourself Ellen’s fundamental question: “Are we at a stage where we’re creating value for the customer, or the business?” If you can’t answer that clearly, put down the canvas and start having deeper conversations with the people whose problems you think you’re solving.

To learn more about Ellen’s work, check out Pearl Partners.

To dive deeper into Ellen’s though leadership, visit her Substack – Idea Builders Guild.

To break the cycle of using the wrong idea tools, sign-up for her free one-hour workshop.

Image credit: 1 of 950+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

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Making Decisions in Uncertainty

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This 25-Year-Old Tool Actually Works

Making Decisions in Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Just as we got used to VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) futurists now claim “the world is BANI now.” BANI (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible) is much worse than VUCA and reflects “the fractured, unpredictable state of the modern world.”

Not to get too Gen X on the futurists who coined and are spreading this term but…shut up.

Is the world fractured and unpredictable? Yes.

Does it feel brittle? Are we more anxious than ever? Are things changing at exponential speed, requiring nonlinear responses? Does the world feel incomprehensible? Yes, to all.

Naming a problem is the first step in solving it. The second step is falling in love with the problem so that we become laser focused on solving it. BANI does the first but fails at the second. It wallows in the problem without proposing a path forward. And as the sign says, “Ain’t nobody got time for this.”

(Re)Introducing the Cynefin Framework

The Cynefin framework recognizes that leadership and problem-solving must be contextual to be effective. Using the Welsh word for “habitat,” the framework is a tool to understand and name the context of a situation and identify the approaches best suited for managing or solving the situation.

It’s grounded in the idea that every context – situation, challenge, problem, opportunity – exists somewhere on a spectrum between Ordered and Unordered. At the Ordered end of the spectrum, cause and affect are obvious and immediate and the path forward is based on objective, immutable facts. Unordered contexts, however, have no obvious or immediate relationship between cause and effect and moving forward requires people to recognize patterns as they emerge.

Both VUCA and BANI point out the obvious – we’re spending more time on the Unordered end of the spectrum than ever. Unlike the acronyms, Cynefin helps leaders decide and act.

Five Contexts, Five Ways Forward

The Cynefin framework identifies five contexts, each with its own best practices for making decisions and progress.

On the Ordered end of the spectrum:

Simple contexts are characterized by stability and obvious and undisputed right answers. Here, patterns repeat, and events are consistent. This is where leaders rely on best practices to inform decisions and delegation, and direct communication to move their teams forward.
Complicated contexts have many possible right answers and the relationship between cause and effect isn’t known but can be discovered. Here, leaders need to rely on diverse expertise and be particularly attuned to conflicting advice and novel ideas to avoid making decisions based on outdated experience.

On the Unordered end of the spectrum:

Complex contexts are filled with unknown unknowns, many competing ideas, and unpredictable cause and effects. The most effective leadership approach in this context is one that is deeply uncomfortable for most leaders but familiar to innovators – letting patterns emerge. Using small-scale experiments and high levels of collaboration, diversity, and dissent, leaders can accelerate pattern-recognition and place smart bets.
Chaos are contexts fraught with tension. There are no right answers or clear cause and effect. There are too many decisions to make and not enough time. Here, leaders often freeze or make big bold decisions. Neither is wise. Instead, leaders need to think like emergency responders and rapidly response to re-establish order where possible to bring the situation into a Complex state, rather than trying to solve everything at once.

The final context is Disorder. Here leaders argue, multiple perspectives fight for dominance, and the organization is divided into fractions. Resolution requires breaking the context down into smaller parts that fit one of the four previous contexts and addressing them accordingly.

The Only Way Out is Through

Our VUCA/BANI world isn’t going to get any simpler or easier. And fighting it, freezing, or fleeing isn’t going to solve anything. Organizations need leaders with the courage to move forward and the wisdom and flexibility to do so in a way that is contextually appropriate. Cynefin is their map.

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How Compensation Reveals Culture

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Five Questions with Kate Dixon

How Compensation Reveals Culture

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

It’s time for your company’s All-Hands meeting. Your CEO stands on stage and announces ambitious innovation goals, talking passionately about the importance of long-term thinking and breakthrough results. Everyone nods enthusiastically, applauds politely, and returns to their desks to focus on hitting this quarter’s numbers. After all, that’s what their bonuses depend on.

Kate Dixon, compensation expert and founder of Dixon Consulting, has watched this contradiction play out across Fortune 500 companies, B Corps, and startups. Her insight cuts to the heart of why so many innovation initiatives fail: we’re asking people to think long-term while paying them to deliver short-term.

In our conversation, Kate revealed why most companies are inadvertently sabotaging their own innovation efforts through their compensation structures—and what the smartest organizations are doing differently.

Robyn Bolton: Kate, when I first heard you say, “compensation is the expression of a company’s culture,” it blew my mind. What do you mean by that?

Kate Dixon: If you want to understand what an organization values, look at how they pay their people: Who gets paid more? Who gets paid less? Who gets bigger bonuses? Who moves up in the organization and who doesn’t? Who gets long-term incentives?

The answers to these questions, and a million others, express the culture of the organization. How we reward people’s performance, either directly or indirectly, establishes and reinforces cultural norms. Compensation is usually the biggest, if not the biggest, expenses that a company has so they’re very thoughtful and deliberate about how it is used. Which is why it tells you what the company actually does value.

RB: What’s the biggest mistake companies make when trying to incentivize innovation?

KD: Let’s start by what companies are good at when it comes to compensations and incentives. They’re really good about base pay, because that’s the biggest part of pay for most people in an organization. Then they spend the next amount of time and effort trying to figure out the annual bonus structure. After that comes other benefits, like long term incentives, assuming they don’t fall by the wayside.

As you know, innovation can take a long time to payout, so long-term incentives are key to encouraging that kind of investment. Stock options and restricted shares are probably the most common long-term incentives but cash bonuses, phantom stock, and ESOP shares in employee-owned companies are also considered long term incentives.

Large companies are pretty good using some equity as an incentive, but they tie it t long term revenue goals, not innovation. As you often remind us, “innovation is a means to the end, which is growth,” so tying incentives to growth isn’t bad but I believe that we can do better. Tying incentives to the growth goals and how they’re achieved will go a long way towards driving innovation.

RB: I’ve worked in and with big companies and I’ve noticed that while they say, “innovation is everyone’s job,” the people who get long-term incentives are typically senior execs. What gives?

Long-term incentives are definitely underutilized, below the executive level, and maybe below the director level. Assuming that most companies’ innovation efforts aren’t moonshots that take decades to realize, it makes a ton of sense to use long-term incentives throughout the organization and its ecosystem. However, when this idea is proposed, people often pushback because “it’s too complex” for folks lower in the organization, “they wouldn’t understand.” or “they won’t appreciate it”. That stance is both arrogant and untrue. I’ve consistently seen that when you explain long-term incentives to people, they do get it, it does motivate them, and the company does see results.

RB: Are there any examples of organizations that are getting this right?

We’re seeing a lot more innovative and interesting risk-taking behaviors in companies that are not primarily focused on profit.

Our B Corp clients are doing some crazy, cool stuff. We have an employee-owned company that is a consulting firm, but they had an idea for a software product. They launched it and now it’s becoming a bigger and bigger part of their business.

Family-owned or public companies that have a single giganto shareholder are also hotbeds of long-term thinking and, therefore, innovation. They don’t have that same quarter to quarter pressure that drives a relentless focus on what’s happening right now and allows people to focus on the future.

What’s the most important thing leaders need to understand about compensation and innovation?

If you’re serious about innovation, you should be incentivizing people all over the organization. If you want innovation to be a more regular piece of the culture so you get better results, you’ve got to look at long term incentives. Yes, you should reward people for revenue and short-term goals. But you also need to consider what else is a precursor to our innovation. What else is makes the conditions for innovating better for people, and reward that, too.

Kate’s insight reveals the fundamental contradiction at the heart of most companies’ innovation struggles: you can’t build long-term value with short-term thinking, especially when your compensation system rewards only the latter.

What does your company’s approach to compensation say about its culture and values?

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Three Steps from Stuck to Success

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Managing Uncertainty

Three Steps from Stuck to Success

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

When a project is stuck and your team is trying to manage uncertainty, what do you hear most often:

“We’re so afraid of making the wrong decision that we don’t make any decisions.”
“We don’t have time to explore a bunch of stuff. We need to make decisions and go.”
“The problem is so multi-faceted, and everything affects everything else that we don’t know where to start.”

I’ve heard all three this week, each spoken by teams leads who cared deeply about their projects and teams.

Differentiating between risk and uncertainty and accepting that uncertainty would never go away, just change focus helped relieve their overwhelm and self-doubt.

But without a way to resolve the fear, time-pressure, and complexity, the project would stay stuck with little change of progressing to success.

Turn Uncertainty Into an Asset

It’s a truism in the field of innovation that you must fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Falling in love with the problem ensures that you remain focused on creating value and agnostic about the solution.

While this sounds great and logically makes sense, most struggle to do it. As a result, it takes incredible strength and leadership to wrestle with the problem long enough to find a solution.

Uncertainty requires the same strength and leadership because the only way out of it is through it. And, research shows, the process of getting through it, turns it into an asset.

Three Steps to Turn Uncertainty Into an Asset

Research in the music and pharmaceutical industries reveals that teams that embraced uncertainty engaged in three specific practices:

Embrace It: Start by acknowledging the uncertainty and that things will change, go wrong, and maybe even fail. Then stay open to surprise and unpredictability, delving into the unknown “by being playful, explorative, and purposefully engaging in ventures with indeterminate outcome.”
Fix It: Especially when dealing with Unknowable Uncertainty, which occurs when more info supports several different meanings rather than pointing to one conclusion, teams that succeed make provisional decisions to “fix” an uncertain dimension so they can move forward while also documenting the rationale for the fix, setting a date to revisit it, and criteria for changing it.
Ignore It: It’s impossible to embrace every uncertainty at once and unwise to fix too many uncertainties at the same time. As a result, some uncertainties, you just need to ignore. Successful teams adopt “strategic ignorance” “not primarily for purposes of avoiding responsibility [but to] allow postponing decisions until better ideas emerge during the collaborative process.

This practice is iterative, often leading to new knowledge, re-examined fixes, and fresh uncertainties. It sounds overwhelming but the teams that are explicit and intentional about what they’re embracing, fixing, and ignoring are not only more likely to be successful, but they also tend to move faster.

Put It Into Practice

Let’s return to NatureComp, a pharmaceutical company developing natural treatments for heart disease.

Throughout the drug development process, they oscillated between addressing What, Who, How, and Where Uncertainties. They did that by changing whether they embraced, fixed, or ignored each type of uncertainty at a given point:

As you can see, they embraced only one type of uncertainty to ensure focus and rapid progress. To avoid the fear of making mistakes, they fixed uncertainties throughout the process and returned to them as more information came available, either changing or reaffirming the fix. Ignoring uncertainties helped relieve feelings of being overwhelmed because the team had a plan and timeframe for when they would shift from ignoring to embracing or fixing.

Uncertainty is Dynamic – You Need to Be Dynamic, Too

You’ll never eliminate uncertainty. It’s too dynamic to every fully resolve. But by dynamically embracing, fixing, and ignore it in all its dimensions, you can accelerate your path to success.

Image credit: Pexels

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Don’t Fall for the Design Squiggle Lie

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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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