by Robyn Bolton | Aug 11, 2025 | AI
“We have to do more with less” has become an inescapable mantra, and goodness, are you trying. You’ve slashed projects and budgets, “right-sized” teams, and tried any technology that promised efficiency and a free trial. Now, all that’s left is to replace the people you still have with AI creativity tools. Welcome to the era of the AI Innovation Team.
It sounds like a great idea. Now, everyone can be an innovator with access to an LLM. Heck, even innovation firms are “outsourcing” their traditional work to AI, promising the same radical results with less time and for far less money.
It sounds almost too good to be true.
Because it is too good to be true.
AI is eliminating the very brain processes that produce breakthrough innovations.
This isn’t hyperbole, and it’s not just one study.
MIT researchers split 54 people into three groups (ChatGPT users, search engine users, and no online/AI tools using ChatGPT) and asked them to write a series of essays. Using EEG brain monitoring, they found that the brain connectivity in networks crucial for creativity and analogous thinking dropped by 55%.
Even worse? When people stopped using AI, their brains stayed stuck in this diminished state.
University of Arkansas researchers tested AI against 3,562 humans on a series of four challenges involving finding new uses for everyday objects, like a brick or paperclip. While AI scored slightly higher on standard tests, when researchers introduced a new context, constraint, or modification to the object, AI’s performance “collapsed.” Humans stayed strong.
Why? AI relies on pattern matching and is unable to transfer its “creativity” to unexpected scenarios. Humans use analogical reasoning so are able to flex quickly and adapt.
University of Strasbourg researchers analyzed 15,000 studies of COVID-19 infections and found that teams that relied heavily on AI experts produced research that got fewer citations and less media attention. However, papers that drew from diverse knowledge sources across multiple fields became widely cited and influential.
The lesson? Breakthroughs require cross-domain thinking, which is precisely what diverse human teams provide, and, according to the MIT study, AI is unable to produce.
How to optimize for efficiency AND impact (and beat your competition)
While this seems like bad news if you’ve already cut your innovation team, the silver lining is that your competition is probably making the same mistake.
Now that you know better, you can do better, and that creates a massive opportunity.
Use AI for what it does well:
- Data analysis and synthesis
- Rapid testing and iteration to refine an advanced prototype
- Process optimization
Use humans for what we do well:
- Make meaningful connections across unrelated domains
- Recognize when discoveries from one field apply to another
- Generate the “aha moments” that redefine industries
Three Questions to Ask This Week
- Where did your most recent breakthroughs come from? How many came from connecting insights across different domains? If most of your innovations require analogical leaps, cutting creative teams could kill your pipeline.
- How are teams currently using AI tools? Are they using AI for data synthesis and rapid iteration? Good. Are they replacing human ideation entirely? Problem.
- How can you see it to believe it? Run a simple experiment: Give two teams an hour to solve a breakthrough challenge. Have one solve it with AI assistance and one without. Which solution is more surprising and potentially breakthrough?
The Hidden Competitive Advantage
As AI commoditizes pattern recognition, human analogical thinking and creativity become a competitive advantage.
The companies that figure out the right balance will eat everyone else’s lunch.
by Robyn Bolton | Jun 10, 2025 | Customer Centricity, Leadership
The data speaks for itself: Your employees don’t believe you practice customer-first leadership.
According to Gallup’s research, only one in five of your people think you make decisions with customers in mind. That means four out of five watch you say one thing and do another. Every. Single. Day.
And it’s getting worse. Fewer than three in ten of your employees feel proud of what they’re building for your customers. As a result, employee pride in what they create and deliver is at an all-time low.
You know what this means, don’t you? Your customer-first messaging isn’t inspiring anyone—it’s insulting them. Because they see the truth behind your town hall speeches, and the truth is that customers aren’t first.
How Are We Still Screwing This Up?
Customer-centricity has been business gospel for decades. We’ve got libraries full of case studies, armies of consultants, and enough “customer first” wall art to wallpaper the Apple HQ. So, how the hell are we getting worse at this?
Because most leaders treat customer focus like a box to check. They say the right words in town halls and analyst calls but make decisions that prioritize quarterly numbers, internal politics, and whatever shiny new idea they come up with.
Leaders say customers come first, then cut support staff to hit margins. They preach customer obsession, then ignore feedback that requires real change. They commission expensive customer journey maps, then never look at them again.
Employees see it all.
And when employees stop believing in what they deliver, customers know it immediately. Every burned-out support call, every half-hearted sales pitch, every policy that punishes the customer to boost the company’s profit.
You CAN do better
You only need to look as far as the telecom industry (?!?!?!) for an $800 million example.
In 2005, Arlene Harris co-founded GreatCall (now Lively) and did something radical: she built a company based on the Jobs to be Done of senior citizens. While everyone else chased flashy features for younger markets, she recognized that older Americans didn’t want a smartphone—they wanted a lifeline.
Harris delivered with the Jitterbug, a simple flip phone with giant buttons. But that was just the beginning. Focusing more on helping customers stay safe and connected than cool features for the tech geeks, she quickly built an ecosystem offering emergency response, health monitoring, 24/7 human support, and caregiver connectivity.
When Best Buy acquired GreatCall for $800 million in 2018, they weren’t buying a phone company. They were buying something rare: a trusted, high-value services company with intensely loyal customers.
Harris succeeded by doing precisely what the data shows most leaders aren’t doing: genuinely understanding and serving real customer needs.
WILL you do better?
Customer-first leadership isn’t a box to check. It’s basic leadership integrity. It’s the difference between meaning what you say and just saying what sounds good.
When four out of five of your employees don’t trust your customer commitment, the problem isn’t your strategy deck, digital transformation, or tariffs. The problem is you.
So here’s your moment of truth: When was the last time you listened to customer service calls? Not the sanitized highlights your team shows you—the raw, unfiltered frustration of someone who can’t get help. When did you last sit in a waiting room and watch how people navigate your system? Or stock a shelf and see what customers actually do?
If you can’t remember, that’s your answer. If you’ve never done it, that’s worse.
The question is: Will you keep performing customer-centricity, or start practicing it?
by Robyn Bolton | May 30, 2025 | Leadership, Strategy
Conventional wisdom tells us that transformation flows from the C-suite down because real change requires executive mandates and company-wide rollouts. But what if our focus on building transformation momentum is exactly backward?
Ever since reading Multipliers, where Liz Wiseman revealed how the best leaders amplify their people rather than diminish them, I’ve wondered if, like innovation, organizational transformation and change also require us to do the opposite of our instincts.
I recently had the opportunity to dig deeper into this topic with her, and I couldn’t resist exploring how change really happens in large organizations.
What emerged wasn’t another framework—it was something more brilliant and subversive: how middle managers quietly become change agents, why sustainable transformation looks nothing like a launch event, and the liberating truth that leaders don’t need to be perfect.
Robyn Bolton: What’s the one piece of conventional wisdom about leading change that you believe organizations need to unlearn?
Lize Wiseman: I don’t believe that change needs to start, or even be sponsored, at the top of the organization. I’ve seen so much change led from the middle management ranks. When middle managers experiment with new mindsets and practices inside their organizations, they produce pockets of success—anomalies that catch the attention of senior executives and corporate staffers who are highly adept at detecting variances (both negative and positive). When senior executives notice positive outcomes, they are quick to elevate and endorse the new practices, in turn spreading the practices to other parts of the organization. In other words, most senior executives are adept at spotting a parade and getting in front of it! (Incidentally, this is one of several executive skills you won’t find documented on any official leadership competency model.) If you don’t yet have the political capital to lead a company-wide initiative, run a pilot with a few rising middle managers. Shine a spotlight on their success and let the practices spread to their peers. Expose their good work to the executive team and make yourself available to turn the parade into a movement.
RB: In your research and work, what’s the most surprising pattern you’ve observed about successful organizational transformation?”
LW: As mentioned above, I believe the starting point for transformation is less important than how you will sustain the momentum you’ve generated. Unfortunately, most new initiatives—be they corporate change initiatives or personal improvement plans—begin with a bang but fizzle out in what I call “the failure to launch” cycle. Transformation that is sustained over time usually starts small and builds a series of successive wins. Each win provides the energy needed to carry the work into the next phase. These series of wins generate the energy and collective will needed to complete the cycle of success. As that cycle spins, nascent beliefs become more deeply entrenched and old survival strategies get supplanted by new methods to not just survive but thrive inside the organization.
Each little success requires careful support and an evidence-backed PR campaign to build awareness and broad support for the new direction. Nascent behavior and beliefs are fragile and will be overpowered by older assumptions until they are strengthened by supporting evidence. The supporting evidence forms a buttress around the budding mindset or practices, much like a brace around a sapling provides stability until the tree is strong enough to stand on its own.
RB: How has your thinking about what makes an effective leader evolved over the course of your career?
LW: When I began researching good leadership, most diminishing leaders appeared to be tyrannical, narcissistic bullies. But as I further studied the problem, I’ve come to see that the vast majority of the diminishing happening inside our workplaces is done with the best of intentions, by what I call the Accidental Diminisher—good people trying to be good managers. I’ve become less interested in knowing who is a Diminisher and much more interested in understanding what provokes the Diminisher tendencies that lurk inside each of us.
RB: When you consider all the organizations you’ve studied, what’s the most powerful lesson about driving meaningful change that most leaders overlook?
LW: One of the dangers of trying to lead change from the top is that most leaders have a hard time being a constant role model for the changes they advocate for. Even the best leaders can’t always display the positive behaviors they espouse and ask their organizations to embody. It’s human to slip up. But when behavior change is led primarily from the top, these all-too-natural slip-ups can become major setbacks for the whole organization because they provide visible evidence that the new behavior isn’t required or feasible, and followers can easily give up. Wise leaders understand this dynamic and build a hypocrisy factor into their change plans–meaning, they acknowledge upfront that they aspire to the new behavior but don’t always fully embody it, yet. They set the expectation that there will be setbacks and invite people to help them be better leaders as well. They acknowledge that the route to new behavior typically looks like the acclimation process used by high-elevation climbers. These climbers spend some of their days in ascent, but once they reach new elevations, often have to descend to lower camps to acclimate. It’s the proverbial two-steps-forward, one-step-back process. When leaders acknowledge their shortcomings and the likelihood of their future missteps, they not only minimize the chance that others give up when they see hypocrisy above them, but they create space for others to make and recover from their own mistakes.
RB: Looking ahead, what do you believe is the most important capability leaders need to develop to help their organizations thrive?
LW: Leading in uncertainty, specifically the ability to lead people to destinations that they themselves have never been.
I love that Liz’s insights flip the script, calling on people outside the C-Suite to stop waiting for permission and start running quiet experiments, building proof points, and letting success do the selling.
The next time you want a change or have change thrust upon you, don’t look for a parade to lead. Look for one person willing to try something different and get to work.
