by Robyn Bolton | Jan 17, 2026 | AI, Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Stories & Examples
You’ve clarified the vision and strategy. Laid out the priorities and simplified the message. Held town halls, answered questions, and addressed concerns. Yet the AI initiative is stalled in ‘pilot mode,’ your team is focused solely on this quarter’s numbers, and real change feels impossible. You’re starting to suspect this isn’t a “change management” problem.
You’re right. It’s not.
The Data You’re Not Seeing
You’ve been doing what the research tells you to do: communicate clearly and frequently, clarify decision rights, and reduce change overload. And these things worked. Until employees went from grappling with two to 10 planned change initiatives in a single year. As the number went up, willingness to support organization change crashed, falling from 74% of employees in 2016 to 43% in 2022.
But here’s what the research isn’t telling you: despite your organizational fixes, your people are terrified. 77% of workers fear they’ll lose their jobs to AI in the next year. 70% fear they’ll be exposed as incompetent. And 66% of consumers, the highest level in a decade, expect unemployment to continue to rise.
Why doesn’t the research focus on fear? Because it’s uncomfortable. Messy. It’s a people (Behavior) problem, not a process (Architecture) problem and, as a result, you can’t fix it with a new org chart or better meeting cadence.
The organizational fixes are necessary. They’re just not sufficient to give people the psychological reassurance, resilience, and tools required to navigate an environment in which change is exponential, existential, and constant.
What Actually Works
In 2014, Microsoft was toxic and employees were afraid. Stack ranking meant every conversation was a competition, every mistake was career-limiting, and every decision was a chance to lose status. The company was dying not from bad strategy, but from fear.
CEO Satya Nadella didn’t follow the old change management playbook. He did more:
First, he eliminated the structures that created fear, including the stack ranking system, the zero-sum performance reviews, the incentives that punished mistakes. These were Architecture fixes, and they mattered.
And he addressed the messy, uncomfortable emotions that drove Behavior and Culture. He role modeled the Behaviors required to make it psychologically safe to be wrong. He introduced the “growth mindset” not as a poster on the wall, but as explicit permission to not have all the answers. When he made a public gaffe about gender equality, he immediately emailed all 200,000 employees: “My answer was very bad.” No spin. No excuses. Just modeling the vulnerability that he expected from everyone.
Ten years later, Microsoft is worth $2.5 trillion. Employee engagement and morale are dramatically improved because Nadella addressed the structures that fed fear AND the fear itself.
What This Means for You
You don’t need to be Satya Nadella. But you do need to stop pretending fear doesn’t exist in your organization.
Name it early and often. Not just in the all-hands meeting, but in the team meetings and lunch-and-learns. Be honest, “Some roles will change with this AI implementation. Here’s what we know and don’t know.” Make the implicit explicit.
Eliminate the structures that create fear. If your performance system pits people against each other, change it. If people get punished for taking smart risks, stop. If people ask questions or make suggestions, listen and act.
Be vulnerable. Share what you’re uncertain about. Admit when you don’t know. Show that it’s safe to be learning. Demonstrate that learning is better than (pretending to) know.
The stakes aren’t abstract: That AI pilot stuck in testing. The strategic initiative that gets compliance but not commitment. The team so focused on surviving today they can’t prepare for tomorrow. These aren’t communication failures. They’re misaligned ABCs that allow fear to masquerade as pragmatism.
And the masquerade only stops when you align align the ABCs all at once. Because fixing Architecture without changing your Behavior simply gives fear a new place to hide.
by Robyn Bolton | Jan 11, 2026 | Leading Through Uncertainty, Strategy
We’re two full weeks into the new year and I’m curious, how is the strategy and operating plan you spent all Q3 and Q4 working on progressing? You nailed it, right? Everything is just as you expected and things are moving forward just as you planned.
I didn’t think so.
So, like many others, you feel tempted to double down on what worked before or chase every opportunity with the hope that it will “future-proof” your business.
Stop.
Remember the Cheshire Cat, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”
You DO know where you’re going because your goals didn’t change. You still need to grow revenue and cut costs with fewer resources than last year.
The map changed. So you need to find a new road.
You’re not going to find it by looking at old playbooks or by following every path available.
You will find it by following these three steps (and don’t require months or millions to complete).
Return to First Principles
When old maps fail and new roads are uncertain, the most successful leaders return to first principles, the fundamental, irreducible truths of a subject:
- Organizations are systems
- Systems seek equilibrium and resist change when elements are misaligned
- People in the system do what the system allows, models, and rewards
Returning to these principles is the root of success because it forces you to pause and ask the right questions before (re)acting.
Ask Questions to Find the Root Cause
Based on the first principles, think of your organization as a lock. All the tumblers need to align to unlock the organization’s potential to get to where you need to go. When the tumblers don’t align, you stay stuck in the dying status quo.
Every organization has three tumblers – Architecture (how you’re organized), Behavior (what leaders actually do), and Culture (what gets rewarded) – that must align to develop and execute a strategy in an environment of uncertainty and constant change.
But ensuring that you’ve aligned all three tumblers, and not just one or two, requires asking questions to get to the root cause of the challenges.
Is your leadership team struggling to align on a decision because they don’t have enough data or can’t agree on what it means? The Behavior and Culture tumblers are misaligned with the structure and incentives of Architecture
Are people resisting the new AI tools you rolled out? Architectural incentives and metrics, and leadership communications and behaviors are preventing buy-in.
Struggling to squeeze growth out of a stagnant business? Structures and systems combined with organization culture are reinforcing safety and a fixed mindset rather than encouraging curiosity and learning.
Align the Tumblers
When you diagnose the root causes you find the misaligned tumbler. And, in the process of bringing it into alignment, it will likely pull the others in, too.
By role modeling leadership behaviors that encourage transparent communication (no hiding behind buzzwords), quantifying confidence, and smart risk taking, you’ll also influence culture and may reveal a needed change in Architecture.
Modifying the metrics and rewards in Architecture and making sure that your communications and behavior encourage buy-in to new AI tools, will start to establish an AI-friendly culture.
Overhauling Architecture to encourage and reward actions that expand that stagnant business into new markets or brings new solutions to your existing customers, will build new leadership Behaviors will drive culture change.
Get to your Goals
It’s a VUCA/BANI world AND It’s only going to accelerate. That means that the strategy you developed last quarter and the operational plans you set last month will be obsolete by the end of the week.
But the strategy and the plan were never the goal. They were the road you planned based on the map you had. When the map changes, the road does, too. But you can still get to the goal if you’re willing to fiddle with a lock.
by Robyn Bolton | Dec 17, 2025 | Press Mentions
by Robyn Bolton | Dec 16, 2025 | Just for Fun, Leadership, Tips, Tricks, & Tools, Uncategorized
Everybody loves a Top X list. This past week I’ve read the Top 100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time, The 100 Best Episodes of the Century, and the NYT’s 100 Notable Books of 2025. And all this before we’re inundated with the Top 10 lists sports, politics, celebrity news, world news, and whatever other topic a writer can dream up.
Top X Lists are about big things, events that affect everyone or that will be remembered for decades. And while those Macro-moments are what stand out in our memories, they rarely define our everyday existence.
What are Micro-moments?
I first heard of Micro-moments in an interview between Dan Shipper, founder of Every, and Henrik Werdelin, founder of Prehype (and incubator that helped launch Barkbox and Ro Health). According to Werdelin:
Micro-moments for me are things when I’m in flow and things where I’m happy. It can’t be a big thing like having a family. It has to be a very concrete things like I like walking over the Brooklyn Bridge in the morning. It’s just something I get profoundly happy about, right? Or I like being in brainstorm meetings with (other entrepreneurs)
But his list of Micro-moments isn’t just a new-age happiness manifestation, it’s an actual decision-making tool. Werdelin explains:
I was basically trying to figure out what to do next and I was keeping all my options open. I got offered a job to run BBC Digital on the international side and then I got offered a job at a design agency called Wolf Collins who had an incredible CEO.
And so, I ended up having these 30 concrete [moments] where I’ve done stuff and then I started to use that as a way to measure options that would be thrown at me. The BBC sounded like it would be a lot of money, and it was like a cool job, and it would give me, I guess, self-esteem for a second. But then when I looked at what it would entail, none of the Micro-moments would be included so I was like, “ah, probably not for me.”
My first Micro-reactions
- Eye roll: Thank goodness you had a list of Micro-moments so you could avoid the soul sucking horror of running BBC Digital!
- Righteous indignation: Do you have any idea how hard it is out there to find a job? People would be thrilled to have a job that delivers only ONE Micro-moment of happiness?!
- Breathe: What a second. What if Mico-moments don’t determine your role. What if Micro-moments…perhaps…mean a little bit more! (yes, that is a terrible rephrasing of the Grinch’s epiphany)
Micro-moments are more than moments of flow and joy. They’re the moments that make up our lives, relationships, and view of the world. They’re the moments that should be on our Top 10 lists but too often get crowded out by noisier, bigger moments.
They’re also things we can create, design for, and sometimes even control.
What are YOUR Micro-moments?
As the period of end-of-year reflection approaches, think about your Micro-moments. What small, concrete moments that brought you flow, joy, or peace, this year? Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? Jot them down
When the new year dawns, go back to your list and get curious. What are the common themes, people, places, and activities in your Micro-moments. Write down what you notice.
As the year kicks into gear and everyone settles back into work and school routines, return to your list and start planning. How might you create more Micro-moments?
Life is made up of moments. Many of them are beyond our control. But some of them aren’t. And wouldn’t it be great to know which ones make us happiest so we can experience them more often?
by Robyn Bolton | Dec 10, 2025 | Customer Centricity, Innovation, Leading Through Uncertainty
In times of great uncertainty, we seek safety. But what does “safety” look like?
What we say: Safety = Data
We tend to believe that we are rational beings and, as a result, we rely on data to make decisions.
Great! We’ve got lots of data from lots of uncertain periods. HBR examined 4,700 public companies during three global recessions (1980, 1990, and 2000). They found that the companies that the companies that emerged “outperforming rivals in their industry by at least 10% in terms of sales and profits growth” had one thing in common: They aggressively made cuts to improve operational efficiency and ruthlessly invested in marketing, R&D, and building new assets to better serve customers have the highest probability of emerging as markets leaders post-recession.
This research was backed up in 2020 in a McKinsey study that found that “Organizations that maintained their innovation focus through the 2009 financial crisis, for example, emerged stronger, outperforming the market average by more than 30 percent and continuing to deliver accelerated growth over the subsequent three to five years.”
What we do: Safety = Hoarding
The reality is that we are human beings and, as a result, make decisions based on how we feel and the use data to justify those decisions.
How else do you explain that despite the data, only 9% of companies took the balanced approach recommended in the HBR study and, ten years later, only 25% of the companies studied by McKinsey stated that “capturing new growth” was a top priority coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Uncertainty is scary so, as individuals and as organizations, we scramble to secure scarce resources, cut anything that feels extraneous, and shift or focus to survival.
What now? And, not Or.
What was true in 2010 is still true today and new research from Bain offers practical advice for how leaders can follow both their hearts and their heads.
Implement systems to protect you from yourself. Bain studied Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies and found that 79% use two different operating models for innovation to combat executives’ natural risk aversion. The first, for sustaining innovation uses traditional stage-gate models, seeks input from experts and existing customers, and is evaluated on ROI-driven metrics.
The second, for breakthrough innovations, is designed to embrace and manage uncertainty by learning from new customers and emerging trends, working with speed and agility, engaging non-traditional collaborators, and evaluating projects based on their long-term potential and strategic option value.
Don’t outspend. Out-allocate. Supporting the two-system approach, nearly half of the companies studied send less on R&D than their peers overall and spend it differently: 39% of their R&D budgets to sustaining innovations and 61% to expanding into new categories or business models.
Use AI to accelerate, not create. Companies integrating AI into innovation processes have seen design-to-launch timelines shrink by 20% or more. The key word there is “integrate,” not outsource. They use AI for data and trend analysis, rapid prototyping, and automating repetitive tasks. But they still rely on humans for original thinking, intuition-based decisions, and genuine customer empathy.
Prioritize humans above all else. Even though all the information in the world is at our fingerprints, humans remain unknowable, unpredictable, and wonderfully weird. That’s why successful companies use AI to enhance, not replace, direct engagement with customers. They use synthetic personas as a rehearsal space for brainstorming, designing research, and concept testing. But they also know there is no replacement (yet) for human-to-human interaction, especially when creating new offerings and business models.
In times of great uncertainty, we seek safety. But safety doesn’t guarantee certainty. Nothing does. So, the safest thing we can do is learn from the past, prepare (not plan) for the future, make the best decisions possible based on what we know and feel today, and stay open to changing them tomorrow.
