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 | 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?
by Robyn Bolton | Jul 16, 2025 | Leadership, Strategic Foresight
You’ve done everything to set Strategic Foresight efforts up for success. Executive authority? Check. Challenging inputs? Check. Process integration? Check. Now you just need to flip the switch and you’re off to the races.
Not so fast.
While the wrong set-up is guaranteed to cause failure, the right set-up doesn’t guarantee success. Research shows that strategic foresight initiatives with the right set-up fail because of “organizational pathologies” that sabotage even well-designed efforts.
If you aren’t leading the right people to do the right things in the right way, you’re not going to get the impact you need.
Here’s what to watch out for (and what to do when it happens).
Your Teams Misunderstand Foresight’s Purpose
People naturally assume that strategic foresight predicts the future. When it doesn’t, they abandon it faster than last year’s digital transformation initiative.
Shell learned this the hard way. In 1965, they built the Unified Planning Machinery, a computerized forecasting tool designed to predict cash flow based on trends. It was abandoned because executives feared “it would suppress discussion rather than encourage debate on differing perspectives.”
When they shifted from prediction to preparation, specifically to “modify the mental model of decision-makers faced with an uncertain future,” strategic foresight became an invaluable decision-making tool.
Help your team approach strategic foresight as preparation, not prediction, by measuring success by the improvement in discussion and decision-making, not scenario accuracy. When teams build mental flexibility rather than make predictions, wrong scenarios stop being failed scenarios.
People are Paralyzed by Fear of Being Wrong
Even when your teams understand foresight’s purpose, managers are often unwilling “to use foresight to plan beyond a few quarters, fearing that any decisions today could be wrong tomorrow.”
This is profoundly human. As Webb wrote, “When faced with uncertainty, we become inflexible. We revert to historical patterns, we stick to a predetermined plan, or we simply refuse to adopt a new mental model.” We nod along in scenario sessions, then make decisions exactly like we always have.
Shell’s scenario planning efforts succeeded because it made being wrong acceptable. Even though executives initially scoffed at the idea of oil prices quadrupling, they prepared for the scenario and took near-term “no regrets” decisions to restructure their portfolio.
To help people get past their fear, reward them for making foresight-informed decisions. For example, establish incentives and promotion criteria where exploring “wrong” scenarios leads to career advancement.
Your Culture Confuses Activity with Achievement
Between insight and action, the Tyranny of Now reigns. In even the most committed organizations, the very real and immediate needs of the business call us away from our planning efforts and consume our time and energy, meaning strategic foresight is embraced only when it doesn’t interfere with their “real” jobs.
Disney’s approach made strategic foresight a required element of people’s “real jobs” by integrating foresight activities and insights directly into performance management and strategic planning. When foresight teams identified that traditional media consumption was fracturing in 2012, Disney began preparing for that future by actively exploring and investing in new potential solutions.
Resist the Tyranny of Now’s pull by making strategic foresight activities just as tyrannical – require decisions based on foresight insights to occur in 90 days or less. These decisions should trigger resource allocation reviews, even if the resources are relatively small (e.g., one or a few people, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars). If strategic foresight doesn’t force hard choices about investments and priorities, it’s activity without achievement.
How You Lead and What People Do Determine Strategic Foresight’s Success
Executive authority, challenging inputs, and process integration are necessary but not sufficient. Success requires conquering the deeper organizational and human behaviors that determine whether strategic foresight is a corporate ritual or a competitive advantage.
by Robyn Bolton | Aug 26, 2020 | Customer Centricity, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
“When you say, ‘uh-huh’ over and over like that, I can tell you’re not listening to me.”
Me, age 7, to my mom
It doesn’t take a lot of experience to know when someone isn’t listening. From a young age, we can tell when someone is listening and when they’re simply responding.
When we’re with the person, we notice the lack of eye contact or the blankness in their eyes showing us where their thoughts are actually at. When we’re on the phone, we hear the repetitive and monotone mumbles that tell us they’re attention is elsewhere.
Yet often, what we want most is simply to be listened to.
This is true in our personal relationships and in our relationships with the businesses and organizations we support. We want people and businesses to listen to our opinions, to understand them, and to thoughtfully respond to them.
Instead, people and businesses simply “hear” us.
There’s a big difference between listening and hearing
According to the Oxford University Press, hearing is “the faculty of perceiving sounds” while listening is “give one’s attention to a sound” and “take notice of and act on what someone says.”
As I explain to my clients, surveys, focus groups, and even in-depth qualitative research is often a Hearing exercise – the company develops a list of questions, asks their customers to answer the questions, then tabulates the answers and passes them along to whoever needs them.
This is a transaction. An exchange of information. It is not listening.
Listening requires engagement. It happens during EPIC conversations, those typified by empathy, perspective, insights, and connection.
Listening accelerates innovation and drives transformation. When we’re listening, we’re learning new information and discovering new insights, which enables companies to create and act differently, differentiating themselves from the competition and ultimately gaining an advantage.
Listening takes practice but here are 5 simple steps to help you get started:
- Drop the agenda – Before you have a conversation within someone, identify the 1-3 things you need to learn and leave space for at least 1 surprise. If you go into a conversation with an agenda or a long list of questions, you’re only going to hear what you want to hear because your mind is primed to seek confirmation for your opinions and to reject anything counter to what you’re hoping to hear.
- Follow where they lead – During the conversation, don’t worry about trying to steer the conversation or “keep things on track.” If you only need to learn 3 things in the conversation and you have 30 minutes or an hour, you have plenty of time for tangents, stories, and random connections. This is where the surprises and the insights come from.
- Ask Why – Channel your inner two-year-old (or Toyota Production employee) and ask “Why” multiple times. When you ask “Why” you get personal, surprising answers that point to the motivations behind people’s choices and actions. When you ask “What” you get rational, expected, even obvious answers that you, and your competitors, have heard before.
- Say as little as possible – Follow the 80/20 rule and spend 80% of your time listening. When you ask a question, don’t go into a long pre-amble about why you’re asking it or follow it with a long list of options or examples. Simply ask the question and the answer will come.
- Let the silence work for you – After you ask a question, start counting silently in your head. Before you get to 8, the person you’re listening to will start talking. Silence makes people uncomfortable but it’s also when the brain goes into exploration and discovery mode. And the longer the silence goes on, the faster the brain works to come up with something to fill it. So, stay quiet and let the brain work!
Whether you’re talking to a customer, a colleague, or a friend, you’re talking to someone who wants you to listen, to hear and understand what they are saying. These 5 tips will help you do that and, if done well, discover something wonderful and unexpected with the power to transform.
Originally published on April 20, 2020 on Forbes.com
by Robyn Bolton | Aug 6, 2020 | Customer Centricity
If you’re innovating without involving your customers, you’re wasting time and money.
I believe this so deeply that I require all of my clients to spend time talking with and listening to their customers at least once during our work together. Investing in customer research, I explain, is the single smartest and best investment that any business can make. Just 5 or 10 customer conversations can dramatically alter the course of an initiative, positioning it for incredible success or killing it before too much time, energy, and money is wasted.
Understanding your customers, especially through Jobs to be Done, is the hill I will die on.
But I actively resist doing this for my business.
The idea of interviewing my customers, or investing to understand their Jobs to be Done, or altering aspects of my business based on their feedback triggers a cold sweat and a very real flight response.
So why is my business different? (It’s not)
Why am I such a customer research hypocrite?
Here are the thoughts that run through my head when I consider talking to my own customers:
- I’m supposed to be the expert in this, what if they tell me something I haven’t thought of?
- What if my customers say they don’t like or want what I’m doing and would like or want something I’m not?
- What if I do try something new and it fails?
It is SO much easier, and it feels so much safer, to keep doing what I’m doing because it’s what I’ve always done and it’s what bigger and more “successful” firms do.
I suspect that I’m not the only one with these thoughts.
Over the years, I’ve spoken with lots of corporate innovators who proposed customer research only to be told, “We already know what we need to know” or “we did research a few years ago, let’s just use that,” or “sure, but we don’t have the resources right now so check back next quarter.”
These reasons make sense. On the surface.
We all know that getting feedback is key to keeping customers and it’s cheaper to keep a customer than acquire a new one. We’ve heard AG Lafley, P&G’s former CEO, proclaim “the consumer is boss.” We understand that when Steve Jobs said he didn’t do customer research it was because he and his inner circle were the customers they designed for and the rest of us would catch-up.
So we come up with reasons why something else (waiting, referring to old data) is a better option. We decide with our hearts (emotions) and justify with our heads. We give logical reasons – we already know this, we’ve already done this, we can’t do this now – so that we don’t have to confess the emotional reasons – fear, discomfort, insecurity – for refusing to do something that seems like common (business) sense.
How do we overcome these emotional barriers?
How do we overcome the fear and take action?
Here’s what I’m doing:
- Remember “Will the Real You Please Stand Up?” the great poem my dad gave me – “If you move with the crowd, you’ll get no further than the crowd. When 40 million people believe in a dumb idea, it’s still a dumb idea. Simply swimming with the tide leaves you nowhere.”
- Find my big-girl pants. Put them on.
- Take a deep breath
- Write down what I want to learn, especially if it scares me
- Find someone to help me do the research or, better yet, do it for me so I can avoid the emotion and engage in the insights
- Do the research
- Listen to and be curious about the results (if I’m defensive, I will not benefit)
- Create an action plan and get moving
Honestly, I’m on step 4 and really not looking forward to 5, 6, and 7 but I know that, when this is all done, my business and I will be better off.
At the very least, I will no longer be a hypocrite.
