by Robyn Bolton | Mar 3, 2026 | Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Strategy
“Change is changing: How to meet the challenge of radical reinvention” – McKinsey
“End to End Reinvention Unleashes a Technology’s Full Potential” – BCG
“Reinvention: The Overlooked Skills Leaders Need Right Now” – Forbes
Don’t look now but we’ve got a new buzzword!
Hello, REINVENTION
Wait, what happened to Transformation?
Oh hon, “Transformation” is so 2025 and for good reason. In a survey of 750 global organizations, researchers found that 52% of respondents suffer from “transformation fatigue,” 44% cite constant change as the reason for their burnout, and more than one-third are considering quitting as a result of never-ending transformations.
Unfortunately, massive technologic, economic, and societal shifts demand executives rethink every aspect of their organizations. So, what do you do when you need to transform but using the word is likely to lead to a revolution?
As fans of The Wire know, you rebrand.
So, Reinvention is the new Transformation?
Yes and no.
Both terms apply to large-scale organizational changes that often hit at the heart of an organization’s operations. As a result, they require leadership commitment, employee buy-in, and lots of money and time to execute.
The difference is that Transformation is positioned as a finite endeavor to increase performance, usually through technology adoption and integration or restructuring. Reinvention, however, “requires leaders to embrace more radical approaches and actions – in effect, to embrace the creative destruction of the company so it creates value in new ways.”
On-going. Radical approaches. Creative destruction.
Just what C-Suite execs want.
Honestly, it sounds like Reinvention is needed so why is it BS?
To be fair, it’s only two-thirds BS.
Building a capability for ongoing change, iteration, and learning isn’t BS. In fact, it’s mission critical in a world of constant change and uncertainty. But this capability requires new mindsets and skills that take time, consistent role modeling by senior leaders, before they stick.
What is BS is the need for radical approaches and creative destruction.
Instead, leaders need to return to their roots and reimagine their future.
Return and Reimagine?
Return
Jørgen Vig Knudstorp is widely credited with saving LEGO from bankruptcy and turning it into the world’s biggest toy company. At the 2025 Thinkers50 Summit, he shared his 10 rules for a successful transformation. Number one, “Why do we exist?” He spent three years trying to answer this question.
Why do we exist? What makes us relevant, valuable, rare, hard to imitate?
The answer isn’t your industry, products, or processes. It’s something more fundamental. It’s the Job to be Done that your organization and ONLY your organization can do.
John Fallon, who led Pearson’s turnaround as their CEO, answered this question in a recent conversation with Outthinkers’ Kaihan Krippendorf.
“The job to be done was not publishing textbooks. The job to be done was empowering people to progress in their lives through learning.”
Reimagine
When you know why you exist, you’re able to go beyond rebuilding to reimagining what your organization could be. Knowing your Why changes how you think about your organization and its potential. It enables you to step out of the hype, ignore the peer pressure, and explore all the future Whats and Hows before committing to action.
Then, and only then, do you commit to action. To concrete changes in business models, operations, and capabilities. To Reinvention.
I think I get it. Reinvention is BS not because it’s wrong but because it skips two essential steps.
Reinvention implies rebuilding, but if you don’t know why your company exists, how can you be sure you’re building something that matters?
And, if your “reimagining” is focused only on the latest tech or doubling down on a dying business model, you’ll never see all the other possibilities that may be more resilient.
Return. Reimagine. Reinvent. The 3Rs. That’s a buzzword I can support.
by Robyn Bolton | Feb 2, 2026 | AI, Leadership, Strategic Foresight, Strategy
It was a race. And the whole world was watching.
In 1911, Captain Robert Scott set out to reach the South Pole. He’d been to Antarctica before and because of his past success, he had more funding, more expertise, and more experience. He had all the equipment needed.
Racing him to fame, fortune and glory was Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Originally heading to the North Pole, he turned around when he learned that Robert Peary had beaten him there. He had dogs and skis, equipment perfect for the Arctic but unproven in Antarctica.
Amundsen won the race, by over a month.
Scott and his crew died 11 miles from the South Pole.
When the Playbook Stops Working
Scott wasn’t guessing. He’d tested motor sledges in the Alps. He’d seen ponies work on a previous Antarctic expedition. He built a plan around the best available equipment and the general playbook that had served British expeditions for decades: horses and motors move heavy loads, so use horses and motors.
It just wasn’t right for Antarctica. The motors broke down in the cold. The ponies sank through the ice. The plan that looked solid on paper fell apart the moment it met the actual environment it had to operate in.
The same thing is happening today with AI.
For decades, when new technologies emerge, executives have followed a similarly familiar playbook: assess the opportunity, build a business case, plan the rollout, execute.
And for decades it worked. Cloud migrations and ERP implementations were architectural changes to known processes with predictable outcomes. As time went on, information grew more solid, timelines became better understood, and the playbook solidified.
AI is different. Executives are so focused on picking the right AI tools and building the right infrastructure that they aren’t thinking about what happens when they hit the ice. Even if the technology works as designed, you have no idea whether it will deliver the intended results or create a ripple of unintended consequences that paralyze your business and put egg on your face.
Diagnose Before You Prescribe
The circumstances of AI are different too, and that requires a new playbook. Make that playbooks. Picking the right playbook requires something my clients and I call Calibrated Decision Design.
We start by asking how long it will take to realize the ultimate goals of the investment. Do we need to break even this year, or is this a multi-year bet where results slowly roll in? Most teams have a sense of this, so it allows us to move quickly to the next, much harder question.
What do we know and what do we believe? This is where most teams and AI implementations fail. To seem confident and indispensable, people present hypotheses as if they are facts resulting in decisions based on a single data points or best guesses. The result is a confident decision destined to crumble.
Where you land on these two axes determines your playbook. Apply the wrong one and you’ll either waste money on over-analysis or burn through budget on premature action.
Pick from the Four Playbooks
Go NOW!: You have the facts and need results now. Stop deliberating. Execute.
Predictable Planning: You have confidence in the outcome, but the payoff takes patience. Build a flexible strategy and operational plan to stay responsive as things progress.
Discovery Planning: You need results fast, but you don’t have proof your plan will work. Run small, fast experiments before scaling anything.
Resilient Strategy: The time horizon is long and you’re short on facts. The worst thing you can do is go all in. Instead, envision multiple futures, identify early warning signs, find commonalities and prepare a strategy that can pivot.
Apply it
Which playbook are you using and which one is best for your circumstance?
by Robyn Bolton | Jan 25, 2026 | AI, Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty
Spain, 1896
At the tender age of 14, Pablo Ruiz Picasso painted a portrait of his Aunt Pepa a work of brilliant academic realism that would go on to be hailed as “without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.”
In 1901, he abandoned his mastery of realism, painting only in shades blue and blue-green.
There’s debate over why Picasso’s Blue Period began. Some argue that it’s a reflection of the poverty and desperation he experienced as a starving artist in Paris. Others claim it was a response to the suicide of his friend, Carles Casagemas. But Bill Gurley, a longtime venture capitalist, has a different theory.
Picasso abandoned realism because of the Kodak Brownie.
Introduced on February 1, 1900, the Kodak Brownie made photography widely available, fulfilling George Eastman’s promise that “you press the button, we do the rest.”
An ocean away, Gurley argues, Picasso’s “move toward abstraction wasn’t a rejection of skill; it was a recognition that realism had stopped being the frontier….So Picasso moved on, not because realism was wrong, but because it was finished.”
Washington DC, 2004
Three years before Drive took the world by storm, Daniel Pink published his third book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.
In it, he argues that a combination of technological advancements, higher standards of living, and access to cheaper labor are pushing us from a world that values left brain skills like linear thought, analysis, and optimization towards one that requires right brain skills like artistry, empathy, and big picture thinking.
As a result, those who succeed in the future will be able to think like designers, tell stories with context and emotional impact, and combine disparate pieces into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Leaders will need to be empathetic, able to create “a pathway to more intense creativity and inspiration,” and guide others in the pursuit of meaning and significance.
California, 2026
Barry O’Reilly, author of Unlearn, published his monthly blog post, “Six Counterintuitive Trends to Think about for 2026,” in which he outlines what he believes will be the human reactions to a world in which AI is everywhere.
Leadership, he asserts, will cease to be measured by the resources we control (and how well we control them to extract maximum value) but by judgment. Specifically, a leader’s ability to:
- Ask better questions
- Frame decisions clearly
- Hold ambiguity without freezing
- Know when not to use AI
The Price of Safety vs the Promise of Greatness
Picasso walked away from a thriving and lucrative market where he was an emerging star to suffer the poverty, uncertainty, and desperation of finding what was next. It would take more than a decade for him to find international acclaim. He would spend the rest of his life as the most famous and financially successful artist in the world.
Are you willing to take that same risk?
You can cling to the safety of what you know, the markets, industries, business models, structures, incentives that have always worked. You can continue to demand immediate efficiency, obedience, and profit while experimenting with new tech and playing with creative ideas.
Or you can start to build what’s next. You don’t have to abandon what works, just as Picasso didn’t abandon paint. But you do have to start using your resources in new ways. You must build the characteristics and capabilities that Daniel Pink outlines. You must become the “counterintuitive” leader that embraces ambiguity, role models critical thinking, and rewards creativity and risk-taking.
Do you have the courage to be counterintuitive?
Are you willing to embrace your inner Picasso?
by Robyn Bolton | Dec 17, 2025 | Press Mentions
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.
