by Robyn Bolton | Apr 28, 2026 | Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Strategy
“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” – Ron Swanson, Parks and Rec
With all due respect to Ron Swanson, leaders today need to whole-ass two things. In a world of constrained resources, you don’t have enough time, money, or people to put against your highest priority, let alone multiple high priorities.
But if you think you must choose between investing in today or the future, know that you’re most likely choosing between killing your company quickly or slowly. That’s what “And, not or,” and it’s required in these three areas.
Development AND Research
“Right now, it’s not sufficient to just keep treading water.” – L. Rafael Reif, former MIT president and current professor of electrical engineering and computer science
“America Is Losing the Innovation Race” screamed the Foreign Affairs article in which Reif detailed evidence that America is falling behind China in electric vehicles, nuclear energy, war technologies, and other areas of critical technology.
Since 2015, as China invested in science and technology to develop the capability to produce high-end products at scale, US federal spending on basic research, as measured in real 2017 dollars, has declined.
Even the research that is funded isn’t keeping up. A paper published in 2022 examined nearly 50 million academic papers and patents from 1945 to 2010 and found a precipitous decline in the “disruptiveness” (i.e. makes previous findings obsolete or pushes the field in a new direction) of research across all scientific fields, including a 100% drop in the physical sciences and a 78.7% decline in computer and communications patents.
The funding story is quite different but no less alarming on the corporate side. Between 1964 and 2022, business funding as a source of R&D funds more than doubled but the vast majority of those funds are spent on applied research (13%) and development (80%), not the type of fundamental research that launches a country forward economically or societally.
Operators AND Innovators
“It’s a trap” – MBA student
For two hours, we discussed Netflix’s culture: the no vacation policy” policy, the “act in Netflix’s best interest” expense policy, and the management philosophy that stresses hiring people for their expertise and then trusting them to make decisions.
To me it sounded like a dream. So, when I asked who wanted to work for Netflix, I was shocked when not a single hand went up.
To my students, it sounded like a trap.
And that’s ok. Not everyone wants to face the accountability and repercussions of taking risks, exercising judgment, and making decisions.
Companies need people who want to follow processes, become experts in their fields, and keep the business steady and growing. AND they need people who question processes, explore far beyond their industries, and challenge the business to do better and grow further.
AI AND Humans
“What keeps me up is the fact that so many people are being convinced that they don’t matter anymore.” – Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
When 16,000 jobs, on average, have been lost each month for the past year due to AI, it’s pretty hard to convince a human and they matter.
Yet a growing body of research shows that humans enabled by AI generate new and novel ideas more quickly and cost efficiently than either AI or humans alone. In a battle between 125 “global problem solvers” and one expert in prompt engineering, the latter produced 180 ideas in 5.5 hours at a total cost of $27.01 and none of the ideas were meaningfully different in terms of strategic viability, environmental or financial value, or overall quality than the human-only ideas. At P&G, researchers found that the most innovative ideas were generated by AI-enabled teams and that those teams worked about 12% faster than other teams and AI-enabled individuals.
Ultimately, the companies that succeed won’t be the ones that make the best bets.
They’ll be the ones that learn to whole-ass two things.
by Robyn Bolton | Apr 15, 2026 | Customer Centricity, Innovation, Leadership
In October, at InnoLead’s annual conference in Boston MA, everything was AI. When the facilitator of a LEGO Serious Play workshop announced we would not talk about AI, the room erupted in applause.
In April, at Inside Outside Innovation’s biannual conference in Lincoln NE, everything was human. By day’s end, speakers and attendees alike were celebrating the sweet relief of a human-led, AI-supported future.
Why the difference? AI hasn’t fallen out of the news cycle, nor have AI-driven layoffs ceased.
Perspective.
InnoLead’s conference featured practitioners living the day-to-day reality of change and innovation. IO 2026 spotlighted thought leaders like Eric Ries, David Bland, and Erin Stadler, advisors able to see across organizations and invited into the C-Suite’s inner sanctum.
One conference talks about what is. One about what will be.
So, if you want to know what your C-Suite will task you with in six months, look to Nebraska.
To move forward, we must face hard truths
Eric Ries, the creator of Lean Startup and author of the forthcoming Incorruptible, exposed the myth that free markets reward value creation. They reward value extraction. Companies focused on extraction forget their purpose, serve themselves over their customers, and ultimately fail.
Elliott Parker, CEO of Alloy Partners and author of The Illusion of Innovation, declared corporate innovation to be alchemy. Isaac Netwon spent his life pursuing alchemy (creating calculus was just a side quest) but failed because the basic building block of matter, the atom, is immutable. The same is true of big company executives pursuing innovation. The atomic elements of corporations (efficiency) and entrepreneurship (autonomy, passion, urgency, skin in the game, and freedom) are immutable and incompatible. Just as lead cannot become gold, companies can’t create like startups.
To do better, we must focus on people
Erin Stadler, founder of Design Culture and author of one of my all-time favorite articles on innovation, shared a forgotten truth: “When we lead with people, the human element, the science, the innovation comes with it.” To do this requires leaders and organizations to find and state their purpose, to build principles and values, and to act on them every day
Dan Hassenplug, VP of Design at sport tech company Hudl, boldly declared that customer obsession is the “real AI strategy.” After all, getting 10x faster at something doesn’t matter if it’s on something that doesn’t matter. And what matters are your customers. Living with them, talking to them, listening to them. You’ll get radical and game changing insights that no competitor, survey, or synthetic persona can.
David Bland, founder of Precoil and author of Testing Business Ideas, implored the audience to flip the 80/20 ratio of feasibility experiments to desirability experiments. Why? “We can make anything these days. It doesn’t matter if you can make it if no one wants it.”
To focus on people, we must serve them
Ted Ullrich, co-founder of Tomorrow Lab, reminded us that “simplicity is earned,” not a starting point. We start by trying to do all the thingsfor customers, but that’s overwhelmng and unnecessary. Only by listening to humans and staying humble can we create the simple solutions that create value.
Julie Ann Crommet, founder of Collective Moxie and former VP at Disney, dazzled us with the simple fact that “the more specific the story, the more universal.” She backed this up with data that films with Authentically Inclusive Representation perform nearly 3x better at the box office and the story behind how Coco became Pixar’s highest grossing movie in China, despite content that is typically banned.
The future is wonderfully human
AI isn’t going away and it will change almost all aspects of life and work. But if the thought leaders, advisors, and designers in Nebraska are right (and I think they are), the future will be far more human than machine.
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.
by Robyn Bolton | Nov 19, 2025 | Innovation, Stories & Examples
I can’t believe that I’m writing this. Honestly, I can’t believe I’m even thinking this. I’m an open-minded person, but I truly never thought that anything would ever change my mind on this topic. And yet, I must confess that I’ve come to the conclusion that…
(deep breath)
Innovation Theater is important.
(Sorry, needed a minute to recover. It’s one thing to think something. It’s another to see it in writing.)
Why We All Hate(d) Innovation Theater.
The term “Innovation Theater” was coined by Steve Blank in a 2019 HBR article to describe innovation activities like hackathons, shark tanks, and workshops that “shape and build culture, but they don’t win wars, and they rarely deliver shippable/deployable product.”
The name stuck because it gave the Innovation Industrial Complex a perfect scapegoat. Innovation efforts weren’t producing results because companies were turning real strategy into theater—events that could be delegated and scheduled instead of the courage, commitment, and willingness to change that actual innovation requires.
And in many cases, this criticism was warranted.
But in our rush to dismiss Innovation Theater, we missed something important.
What I (Almost) Missed.
Recently, I visited a company’s Innovation Center, curious to see what ten years of innovation investments and two floors in a downtown high-rise had produced.
The answer was a framework to think more deeply about equity and inclusion. My immediate reaction was rage. A decade of investments for this? Millions of dollars spent on the very definition of Innovation Theater? And they’re bragging about it?!?
Once the rage subsided, something remained. Something that I couldn’t shake. An inkling that I had missed something. That inkling became the realization that I was wrong.
Over the past five years, the framework had been used in carefully curated workshops to help teams across the organization see things they had previously overlooked, understand topics that were sensitive or taboo, and envision solutions that no one their heavily regulated industry had even considered.
Not every workshop resulted in action. But over time, something shifted.
Seasons. Not Shows.
Repetition created a shared language. Multiple touchpoints built permission. Small success stories accumulated to make risk feel manageable. The workshops didn’t send off isolated sparks of innovation. They built the conditions were acting on new ideas became progressively safer and more normal.
And after several seasons, enduring value was created. The company now enjoys the highest retention rate of customers in its industry and has attracted more new customers than all its competitors combined. A decade of “Innovation Theater” delivered exactly what innovation is supposed to deliver: measurable competitive advantage and revenue growth.
Don’t Cancel Your Next Innovation Event.
The problem isn’t Innovation Theater itself. It’s how we practice it.
A one-off hackathon? Theater. An annual workshop? Theater. But sustained investment over years, touching dozens of teams, building shared language and accumulated proof points? That’s a strategic bet on transformation that creates lasting competitive advantage.
The question isn’t whether Innovation Theater works. It’s whether you’re willing to commit to the season, not just the show. Are you prepared to invest consistently, measure differently, and wait for compounding effects that won’t show up in next quarter’s results?
Because when you commit to the season, not just the show, it’s the most strategic bet you can make.
