by Robyn Bolton | Oct 6, 2025 | 5 Questions, Customer Centricity, Innovation, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
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.
by Robyn Bolton | Sep 30, 2025 | Leading Through Uncertainty, Strategy, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
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.
5 Contexts. 5 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.
by Robyn Bolton | Sep 16, 2025 | Leading Through Uncertainty, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
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.
3 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:
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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.
by Robyn Bolton | Sep 2, 2025 | Leading Through Uncertainty, Strategy
In 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.
by Robyn Bolton | Aug 4, 2025 | Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Stories & Examples, Strategy
The best business advice can destroy your business. Especially when you follow it perfectly.
Just ask Johnny Cash.
After bursting onto the scene in the mid-1950s with “Folsom Prison Blues”, Cash enjoyed twenty years of tremendous success. By the 1970s, his authentic, minimalist approach had fallen out of favor.
Eager to sell records, he pivoted to songs backed by lush string arrangements, then to “country pop” to attract mainstream audiences and feed the relentless appetite of 900 radio stations programming country pop full-time.
By late 1992, Johnny Cash’s career was roadkill. Country radio had stopped playing his records, and Columbia Records, his home for 25 years, had shown him the door. At 60, he was marooned in faded casinos, playing to crowds preferring slot machines to songs.
Then he took the stage at Madison Square Garden for Bob Dylan’s 30th anniversary concert.
In the audience sat Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Recordings and uber producer behind Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and Slayer, amongst others. He watched in awe as Cash performed, seeing not a relic but raw power diluted by smart decisions.
The Stare-Down that Saved a Career
Four months later, Rubin attended Cash’s concert at The Rhythm Café in Santa Anna, California. According to Cash’s son, “When they sat down at the table, they said: ‘Hello.’ But then my dad and Rick just sat there and stared at each other for about two minutes without saying anything, as if they were sizing each other up.”
Eventually, Cash broke the silence, “What’re you gonna do with me that nobody else has done to sell records for me?”
What happened next resurrected his career.
Rubin didn’t promise record sales. He promised something more valuable: creative control and a return to Cash’s roots.
Ten years later, Cash had a Grammy, his first gold record in thirty years, and CMA Single of the Year for his cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” and millions in record sales.
When Smart Decisions Become Fatal
Executives do exactly what Cash did. You respond to market signals. You pivot your offering when customer preferences shift and invest in emerging technologies.
All logical. All defensible to your board. All potentially fatal.
Because you risk losing what made you unique and valuable. Just as Cash lost his minimalist authenticity and became a casualty of his effort to stay relevant, your business risks losing sight of its purpose and unique value proposition.
Three Beliefs at the Core of a Comeback
So how do you avoid Cash’s initial mistake while replicating his comeback? The difference lies in three beliefs that determine whether you’ll have the creative courage to double down on what makes you valuable instead of diluting it.
- Creative confidence: The belief we can think and act creatively in this moment.
- Perceived value of creativity: Our perceived value of thinking and acting in new ways.
- Creative risk-taking: The willingness to take the risks necessary for active change.
Cash wanted to sell records, and he:
- Believed that he was capable of creativity and change.
- Saw the financial and reputational value of change
- Was willing to partner with a producer who refused to guarantee record sales but promised creative control and a return to his roots.
Your Answers Determine Your Outcome
Like Cash, what you, your team, and your organization believe determines how you respond to change:
- Do I/we believe we can creatively solve this specific challenge we’re facing right now?
- Is finding a genuinely new approach to this situation worth the effort versus sticking with proven methods?
- Am I/we willing to accept the risks of pursuing a creative solution to our current challenge?”
Where there are “no’s,” there is resistance, even refusal, to change. Acknowledge it. Address it. Do the hard work of turning the No into a Yes because it’s the only way change will happen.
The Comeback Question
Cash proved that authentic change—not frantic pivoting—resurrects careers and disrupts industries. His partnership with Rubin succeeded because he answered “yes” to all three creative beliefs when it mattered most. Where are your “no’s” blocking your comeback?
