by Robyn Bolton | Apr 21, 2025 | Innovation, Leadership
Innovation efforts get stuck long before they scale because innovation isn’t an idea problem. It’s a leadership problem. And one of those problems is that leaders are expected to spark transformation, without rocking the boat.
I’ve spent my career in corporate innovation (and wrote a book about it), so I was thrilled to sit down with Tendayi Viki, author of Pirates in the Navy and one of the most thoughtful voices on corporate innovation.
Our conversation didn’t follow the usual playbook about frameworks and metrics. Instead, it surfaced something deeper: how small wins, earned trust, and emotional intelligence quietly power real change.
If you’re tasked with driving innovation inside a large organization—or supporting the people who are—this conversation will challenge what you think it takes to succeed.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Robyn Bolton: You work with a lot of corporate leaders. What’s one piece of conventional wisdom they need to unlearn about innovation?
Tendayi Viki: That you need to start with a big bang. That transformation only works if it launches with maximum support and visibility from day one.
But we don’t think that way about launching new products. We talk about starting with early adopters. Steve Blank even outlines five traits of early evangelists: they know they have the problem, they care about solving it, they’re actively searching for a solution, they’ve tried to fix it themselves, and they have budget. That’s where momentum comes from.
But in corporate settings, I see leaders trying to roll out transformation as if it is a company-wide software update. I once worked with someone in South Africa who was introduced as the new head of innovation at a big all-hands event. He told me later, “I wish I hadn’t started with such a big bang. It created resentment—I hadn’t even built a track record yet.”
Instead of struggling and pushing change on people, I try to help leaders build momentum. Think of it like a flywheel. You start slow, with the right people, at the right points of leverage. You work with early adopter leaders, tell stories about their wins, invite others to join. Soon, you’re not persuading anyone—you’ve got movement.
RB: Have you seen that kind of momentum work in practice?
TV: A few great examples stand out.
Claudia Kotchka at P&G didn’t go around talking about design thinking when she started. She picked a struggling brand and applied the tools there. Once that project succeeded, people paid attention. More leaders asked for help. That success did the selling.
And there’s a story from Samsung that stuck with me. A transformation team was tasked with leading “big innovation,” but they didn’t start by preaching theory. They said, “Let’s help senior leaders solve the problems they’re dealing with right now.” Not future-state stuff—just practical challenges. They built credibility by delivering value, not running roadshows.
If you can’t find early adopters, then take one step back. Solve someone’s actual problem. People are always fans of solving their own problems.
RB: When you think about leaders who are good at building momentum, what qualities or mindsets do they tend to have?
TV: Patience is huge. This stuff takes time. And you have to set expectations with the people who gave you the mandate: “It’s not going to look like much at first—but it’s working.”
And I think you can measure momentum. Not just adoption metrics, but something simpler: how many people are coming to you without you pushing them? That’s real traction. You don’t have to chase them. They’re curious. They’ve seen the early wins.
Another big one is humility. You’ve got to respect the people who resist you. That doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but it means understanding. Maybe they need to see social proof. Maybe they’re waiting for cover from another leader. Maybe they’re not comfortable standing out.
None of that means they’re wrong. It just means they’re human. So work with the confident few first and bring in the rest when they’re ready.
RB: Have you always approached resistance that way?
TV: Oh no—I learned that one the hard way.
Early in my career, I was running a workshop at Pearson. I was beating up on this publishing group about how they’re going to get killed by digital, and they were arguing. It was a really difficult conversation, and I was convinced I was right and they were wrong.
Afterward, one of the leaders pulled me aside and said, “I don’t disagree with what you said. I think you’re right. But I didn’t like how you made us feel.”
And that was the moment. They weren’t resisting because of the content. They were reacting to how I delivered it. I made them feel stupid, even if I didn’t mean to. And their only move was to push back.
It took me years to absorb that lesson. But now I never forget: if people are resisting, check the emotional tone before you check the content.
RB: Last question. What is one thing you’d like to say to corporate leaders trying to drive innovation?
TV: Just chill!
Seriously. There’s so much *efforting* in corporate transformation. All the chasing, tracking, nudging, following up. “Have they responded to the email? Did you call them?” All that pressure to push, to prove.
But it reminds me of this Malcolm Gladwell podcast, Relax and Win, about San Jose State sprinters. Their coach taught them that to run their fastest, they had to stay relaxed. When you tense up, you actually slow down.
Innovation works the same way. Don’t force it. Build momentum. Let it grow. And trust it once it’s moving.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
The real challenge in corporate innovation isn’t convincing people that change is needed—it’s helping them feel safe enough to join you.
This conversation with Tendayi reminded me that the most effective innovation leaders don’t lead with pressure or pitch decks. They lead with patience, empathy, and small wins that build momentum.
by Robyn Bolton | Apr 15, 2025 | Innovation, Leadership
“The call is coming from inside the house” is one of those classic quotes that crossed over from urban legend and horror movies to become a common pop-culture phrase. While originally a warning to teenage babysitters, recent research indicates that it’s also a warning to corporate execs that murderous business threats are closer than they think.
In the early weeks of 2025, Box of Crayons, a Toronto-based learning and development company, partnered with The Harris Poll to survey over 1500 business leaders and knowledge workers to diagnose and understand the greatest challenges facing organizations.
They found that “while there is a tendency to focus on external pressures like economic uncertainty, technological disruptions, and labor market issues, our research shows the most critical challenges are unfolding within the workplace itself.”
The threat is coming from inside your house.
Here’s what they found and what you can do about it
Nearly 1 day each workweek “is lost to the fear of making mistakes.”
Fear is at the core of all the issues making headlines – burnout, disengagement, lost productivity. It “breeds doubt, prompting individuals to question themselves and others, instigating anxiety, hindering productivity, and promoting blame instead of teamwork.”
Fear is also a virus, spreading rapidly from one person to their team members and on and on until it infects the entire organization, embedding itself in the culture.
Executives and managers are key to breaking the cycle of fear that kills innovation, initiative, and growth. By reframing mistakes and learnings, rewarding smart risks even if they result in unexpected outcomes, and role-modeling behaviors that encourage trust and psychological safety, their daily and consistent actions can encourage bravery and remaking the culture.
70% of people don’t see value in listening to people they disagree with.
Unless you’re employed by Lumon Industries, it’s impossible to be a completely different person at work compared to who you are outside of work. So, it should come as no surprise that most people no longer listen to opinions, perspectives, or evidence with which they disagree.
The problem is that different perspectives and experiences are essential to elements of the problem-solving process. Without them, we cannot learn, develop new solutions, and innovate.
Again, executives and managers play a critical role in helping to surface diverse points of view and helping employees to engage in “productive conflict.” Rather than rushing to “consensus” or rapidly making a decision, by expressing curiosity and asking questions, people-leaders create space for new points of view and role model how to encourage and use it.
87% of leaders lack the skills needed to adapt. 64% say funding to build those skills has been cut.
Business leaders are fully aware of the changes happening within their teams, organizations, and the broader world. They recognize the need to constantly adapt, learn, and develop the skills required to respond to these changes. They can even articulate what they need help with, why, and how it will benefit the team or organization.
But leadership training is often one of the first items to be cut, leaving new and experienced people-leaders “ill-equipped to manage the increasing complexity of today’s workplace, stifling their ability to inspire, guide, and support their teams effectively.”
The solution is simple – invest in people. Given the acute need for support and training, forget big programs, multi-day offsites, and centralized learning agendas. Talk to the people asking for help to understand what they want and need and how they learn best. Share what you can do right now with the resources you have and engage them in creating a plan that helps them within the constraints of the current context.
Answer the phone
Just like that terrifying movie moment, the call threatening your business isn’t coming from mysterious outside forces—it’s echoing through your own hallways. The good news? Unlike those helpless babysitters in horror films, you can change the ending by confronting these internal threats head-on.
What internal “call” is your organization ignoring that deserves immediate attention?
by Robyn Bolton | Apr 9, 2025 | Innovation, Leadership, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
“A Few Good Men” is one of my favorite movies. As much as I love Jack Nicholson’s classic line, “You can’t handle the truth!” lately, I’ve been thinking more about a line delivered by Lt. Daniel Kaffee, played by Tom Cruise – “And the hits just keep on comin’.”
But, just like Lt. Kaffee had to make peace with Lt. Cdr JoAnne Galloway joining his Cuba trip, we must make peace with uncertainty and find the guts to move forward.
This is much easier said than done, but these three steps make it possible. Even profitable.
Where We Begin
Imagine you’re the CEO of Midwest Precision Components (MPW), a $75 million manufacturer of specialized valves and fittings. Forty percent of your components come from suppliers now subject to new tariffs, which, if they stay in effect, threaten an increase of 15% in material costs. This increase would devastate your margins and could require you to reduce staff.
Your competitors are scrambling to replace foreign suppliers with domestic ones. But you know that such rapid changes are also risky since higher domestic prices eat into your margins (though hopefully less than 15%), and insufficient time to quality test new parts could lead to product issues and lost customers. And all this activity assumes that the tariffs stay in place and aren’t suddenly paused or withdrawn.
3 Steps Forward
Entering the boardroom, you notice that the CFO looks more nervous than usual, and your head of Supply Chain is fighting a losing battle with a giant stack of catalogs. Taking a deep breath, you resolve to be creative, not reactive (same letters, different outcomes), and get to work.
Step 1: Start with the goal and work backward. The goal isn’t changing suppliers to reduce tariff impact. It’s maintaining profit margins without reducing headcount or product quality. With your CFO, you whiteboard a Reverse Income Statement, a tool that starts with required (not desired) profits to calculate necessary revenues and allowable costs. After running several scenarios, you land on believable assumptions that result in no more than a 4% increase in costs.
Step 2: Identify and prioritize assumptions. With the financial assumptions identified, you ask the leadership team to list everything that must be true to deliver the financial assumptions, their confidence that each of their assumptions is true, and the impact on the business and its bottom line if the assumption is wrong.
Knowing that your head of Sales is an unrelenting optimist and your Supply Chain head is mired in a world of doom and gloom, you set a standard scale: High confidence means betting your annual salary, medium is a team dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant, and low is a cup of coffee. High impact puts the company out of business, medium requires major shifts, and low means extra work but nothing crazy.
Step 3: Attack the deal killers. Going around the room, each person lists their “Deal Killers,” the Low Confidence – High Impact assumptions that pose the highest risk to the business. After some discussion to determine the primary assumptions at the beginning of causal chains, you select two for immediate action: (1) Alternative domestic suppliers can be found for the two highest-cost components, and (2) Current manufacturing processes can be quickly adapted to accommodate parts from new suppliers.
A Plan. A Timeline. A Sense of Calm.
With this new narrowed focus, your team sets a shared goal of resolving these two assumptions within 30 days. Together, they set clear weekly deliverables and reallocate time and people to help meet deadlines.
A sense of calm settles on the team. Not because they have everything figured out, but because they know exactly what the most important things to be done are, that those things are doable, and they are working together to do them.
How could you use these three steps to help you move forward through uncertainty?
by Robyn Bolton | Mar 19, 2025 | Innovation, Leadership, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
Risk management is critical in uncertain times. But traditional approaches don’t always help when volatility, ambiguity, and complexity are off the charts.
What many leaders overlook in their rush to safety is that many of the most effective tools for managing risk come from an unexpected place: innovation.
The Counterintuitive Truth About Risk Management
Risk Management’s purpose isn’t to eliminate risks. It’s to proactively identify, plan for, and minimize risk. Innovation is inherently uncertain, so its tools are purpose-built to proactively identify, plan for, and minimize risk. They also help you gain clarity and act decisively—even in the most chaotic environments.
Here are just three of the many tools that successful companies use to find clarity in chaos.
Find the Root Cause
When performance dips, most leaders jump to fix symptoms. True risk management means digging deeper. Root cause analysis—particularly the “5 Whys”—helps uncover what’s really going on.
Toyota made this famous. In one case, a machine stopped working. The first “why” pointed to a blown fuse. The fifth “why” revealed a lack of maintenance systems. Solving that root issue prevented future breakdowns.
IBM reportedly used a similar approach to reduce customer churn. Pricing and product quality weren’t the problem—friction during onboarding was. After redesigning that experience, retention rose by 20%.
Focus on What You Can Actually Control
Trying to manage everything is a recipe for burnout. Better risk management starts by separating what you can control, what you can influence, and what you can only monitor. Then, allocate resources accordingly.
After 9/11, most airlines focused on uncontrollable external threats. Southwest Airlines doubled down on what they could control: operational efficiency, customer loyalty, and employee morale. They avoided layoffs and emerged stronger.
Unilever used a similar approach during the global supply chain crisis. Instead of obsessing over global shipping delays, they diversified suppliers and localized sourcing—reducing risk without driving up costs.
Attack Your “Deal Killer” Assumptions
Every plan is based on assumptions. Great risk management means identifying the ones that could sink your strategy—and testing them before you invest too much time or money.
Dropbox did this early on. Instead of building a full product, they made a simple video to test whether people wanted file-syncing software. They validated demand, secured funding, and avoided wasted development.
GE applied this logic in its FastWorks program. One product team tested their idea with a quick prototype. Customer feedback revealed a completely different need—saving the company millions in misdirected R&D.
Risk Management Needs Innovation’s Tools for a VUCA World
The best risk managers don’t just react to uncertainty—they prepare for it. These tools aren’t just for innovation—they’re practical, proven ways to reduce risk, respond faster, and make smarter decisions when the future feels murky.
What tools or strategies have helped you manage risk during uncertain times? I’d love to hear in the comments.
by Robyn Bolton | Mar 11, 2025 | Innovation, Leadership, Stories & Examples
Ideas and insights can emerge from the most unexpected places. My mom was a preschool teacher, and I often say that I learned everything I needed to know about managing people by watching her wrangle four-year-olds. But it only recently occurred to me that the most valuable business growth lessons came from my thoroughly unremarkable years playing the flute in middle school.
6th Grade: Following the Manual and Falling Flat
Sixth grade was momentous for many reasons, one being that that was when students could choose an instrument and join the school band. I chose the flute because my friends did, and there was a rumor that clarinets gave you buck teeth—I had enough orthodontic issues already.
Each week, our “jill of all trades” teacher gathered the flutists together and guided us through the instructional book until we could play a passable version of Yankee Doodle. I practiced daily, following the book and playing the notes, but the music was lifeless, and I was bored.
7th Grade: Finding Context and Direction
In seventh grade, we moved to full band rehearsals with a new teacher trained to lead an entire band (he was also deaf in one ear, which was, I think, a better qualification for the job than his degree). Hearing all the instruments together made the music more interesting and I was more motivated to practice because I understood how my part played in the whole. But I was still a very average flutist.
To help me improve, my parents got me a private flute teacher. Once a week, Mom drove me to my flute teacher’s house for one-on-one tutoring. She corrected mistakes when I made them, showed me tips and tricks to play faster and breathe deeper, and selected music I enjoyed playing. With her help, I became an above-average flutist.
Post-Grad: 5 Business Truths from Band Class
I stopped playing in the 12th grade. Despite everyone’s efforts, I was never exceptional—I didn’t care enough to do the work required.
Looking back, I realized that my mediocrity taught me five crucial lessons that had nothing to do with music:
- Don’t do something just because everyone else is. I chose the flute because my friends did. I didn’t choose my path but followed others—that’s why the music was lifeless.
- Following the instruction manual is worse than doing nothing. You can’t learn an instrument from a book. Are you sharp or flat? Too fast or slow? You don’t know, but others do (but don’t say anything).
- Part of a person is better than all of a book. Though spread thin, the time my teachers spent with each instrumental section was the difference between technically correct noise and tolerable music.
- A dedicated teacher beats a distracted one. Having someone beside me meant no mistake went uncorrected and no triumph unrecognized. She knew my abilities and found music that stretched me without causing frustration.
- If you don’t want to do what’s required, be honest about it. I stopped wanting to play the flute in 10th grade but kept going because it was easier to maintain the status quo. In hindsight, a lot of time, money, and effort would have been saved if I stopped playing when I stopped caring.
The Executive Orchestra: What Grade Are You In?
How many executives remain in sixth grade—following management fads because of FOMO, buying books, handing them out, and expecting magic? And, when that fails, hiring someone to do the work for them and wondering why the music stops when the contract ends?
How many progress to seventh grade, finding someone who can teach, correct, and celebrate their teams as they build new capabilities?
How do what I should have done in 10th grade and be honest about what they are and aren’t willing to do, spending time and resources on priorities rather than maintaining an image?
More importantly, what grade are you in?
by Robyn Bolton | Feb 26, 2025 | Automation & Tech, Innovation
We’ve all seen the apocalyptic headlines about robots coming for our jobs. The AI revolution has companies throwing money at shiny new tech while workers polish their résumés, bracing for the inevitable pink slip. But what if we have it completely, totally, and utterly backward? What if the real drivers of automation success have nothing to do with the technology itself?
That’s precisely what an MIT study of 9,000+ workers across nine countries asserts. While the doomsayers have predicted the end of human workers since the introduction of the assembly line, those very workers are challenging everything we think we know about automation in the workplace.
The Secret Ingredient for Technology ROI
MIT surveyed workers across the manufacturing industry—50% of whom reported frequently performing routine tasks—and found that the majority ultimately welcome automation. But only when one critical condition is present. And it’s one that most executives completely miss while they’re busy signing purchase orders for the latest AI and automation systems.
Trust.
Read that again because while you’re focused on selecting the perfect technology, your actual return depends more on whether your team feels valued and believes you are invested in their safety and professional growth.
Workers Who Trust, Automate
This trust dynamic explains why identical technologies succeed in some organizations and fail in others. According to MIT’s research:
- Job satisfaction is the second strongest indicator of technology acceptance, with a 10% improvement that researchers identified as consistently significant across all analytical models
- Feeling valued by their employer shows a highly significant 9% increase in positive attitudes toward automation
- Trust also consistently predicts automation acceptance, as workers scoring higher on trust measures are significantly more likely to view new technologies positively.
For example, Sam Sayer, an employee at a New Hampshire cutting tool manufacturer, has become an automation champion because his employer helped him experience how factory-floor robots could free him from routine tasks and allow him to focus on more complex problem-solving. “I worked in factories for years before I ever saw a robot. Now I’m teaching my colleagues on the factory floor how to use them.”
This contrasts with an aerospace manufacturer in Ohio that hired a third party to integrate a robot into its warehouse processes. Despite the company’s efforts to position the robot as a teammate, even giving it a name, workers resisted the technology because they didn’t trust the implementation process or see clear personal benefits.
These patterns hold across industries and countries: When workers perceive their employer as invested in their development and well-being, automation initiatives succeed. When that foundation is missing, even the most sophisticated technologies falter.
Four Steps to Convert Resistors to Champions
Whether it’s for the factory floor or the office laptop, if you want ROI and revenue growth from your automation investments, start with your people:
- Design roles that connect workers to outcomes: When people see how their input shapes results, they become natural technology allies.
- Create visible growth pathways. Workers motivated by career advancement are significantly more likely to embrace new technologies.
- Align financial incentives with implementation goals. When workers see the personal benefits of adoption, resistance evaporates faster than free donuts in the break room.
- Make safety improvements the leading edge of your technology story. It’s the most universally appreciated benefit of automation.
A Provocative Challenge
Ask yourself this (potentially) uncomfortable question: Are you investing as much in trust as you are in technology?
Because if not, you might as well set fire to a portion of your automation budget right now. At least you’d get some heat from it.
The choice isn’t between technology and workers—it’s between implementations that honor human relationships and those that don’t. The former generates returns; the latter generates résumé updates.
What are you choosing?
