It’s with great pleasure that we welcome back Robyn Bolton! Robyn, welcome back to the Podcast!

Robyn is the founder and chief navigator at MileZero, a consulting and coaching firm that helps leaders use innovation to confidently and consistently grow business revenue. Robyn is also an assistant professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design where she teaches courses in strategy and product innovation in the college’s master of design innovation program.

Prior to founding MileZero, she was a partner at Innosight, the innovation and growth strategy consulting firm cofounded by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, a manager at the Boston Consulting Group’s offices in Boston and Copenhagen and was assistant brand manager at P&G for the development and launch of Swiffer.

I strongly recommend her blog and newsletter you can find it at milezero.io. Because Robyn is an awesome and concise writer: Every word you spend reading is valuable. She was voted the number one blogger of 2022 and 2023 on human-centered design and innovation. And today we’re going to take a bit of a dive into her new book “Unlocking innovation, a leaders guide for turning bold ideas into tangible results.” So, let’s dive in – we might even touch on chocolate cookies!

We continue our discussion with software engineer and agile coach William Bartlett.

Last time we spoke, in episode 68, we discussed William's journey from waterfall to agile. We discussed the many potential benefits of taking an agile approach when it is done well, but also the difficulty many teams face in making it work for them, even when they are serious about making it work.

William argued that the issue goes deeper than a simple problem of mindset and that it has to do with how to teach and learn tacit knowledge.

In this episode we dive deeper into the topic of tacit knowledge and how it plays a role in design and innovation more generally, beyond just the teaching of agile concepts,. We will be discussing 4E cognition, gibsonian ecological psychology and Cynevin.

Topics touched upon:

Can tacit knowledge be taught?

Why is tacit knowledge an important part of innovation?

4E cognition

Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility