The growth gap: a number every leadership team needs

Before Robyn lets anyone near a whiteboard, she insists on a conversation that most innovation teams skip entirely: what does this actually have to deliver?

She calls it the growth gap — the difference between where a company is headed if it keeps doing what it's doing, and where leadership wants it to be in three to five years. That delta is the number innovation has to close. It's a deceptively powerful reframe. Instead of asking "what ideas do we have?" you ask "what problem are we solving for the business, and how big does the answer need to be?"

The implications are significant. "If the ideas we're getting are really cool, but they're like $10,000 revenue ideas and you have a $100 million growth gap," Robyn said, "those ideas don't work."

This is the kind of constraint that makes creative teams nervous. But Robyn pushes back on that instinct directly. Constraints don't kill creativity — they focus it. "Creativity thrives within constraints," she said, "because that's what makes it necessary. You have to think differently." A boundless brief is not an invitation to be bold. It's an invitation to be vague.

She pairs the growth gap exercise with a second question: what aren't you willing to do? She maps this using what she calls the "innovation playground" — a structured look at which parts of the business are in scope and which are genuinely off the table. This isn't about limiting ambition. It's about knowing, before you spend six months developing something, whether the organization will actually pursue it.

Innovation theater and the cynicism it breeds

There is a particular kind of organizational dysfunction that Robyn describes with uncomfortable precision. She calls it innovation theater — the performance of innovation without any of the substance.

It usually looks like this: a company runs an annual shark tank or hackathon. Teams pour nights and weekends into their ideas. There's a pitch day, a winner, a celebration. And then nothing happens. People go back to their jobs. The winning idea gets a slide in a deck somewhere and quietly disappears.

The first year, people are energized. The second year, the skeptics get louder. By the third year, veterans are pulling newcomers aside to warn them off. "I watch it breed cynicism," Robyn said. "It is doing the exact opposite thing that it's intended to do."

The fix isn't complicated, but it requires commitment: if you run an event, you need a plan for what comes after. Who owns the winning idea? How does it get funded? How does it get staffed? If there are no answers to those questions, she's direct — don't have the event.

This connects to a broader point about innovation culture that applies equally to startups and incumbents. Startups are born innovative, she explains. The scrappiness and experimentation are baked in from day one. But as companies grow — through what Robyn describes as their toddler years, their teenage years, into maturity — the culture of innovation quietly gives way to a culture of efficiency. Doing the same thing over and over, better and faster, becomes the organizational reflex. By the time leadership decides it wants innovation back, years of muscle memory are working against them.

Customer insights are everyone's job

If innovation leadership is Robyn's primary theme, customer insights are the hill she returns to again and again — and the place where she gets most pointed.

Her view: understanding customers is not a research function. It is not something you outsource to a team with "insights" in its name. It is the responsibility of every person in the organization, especially executives.

"You cannot spend too much time actually side by side talking and, more importantly, listening to the customer," she said.

She is careful about that word — listening. Too many customer conversations are really selling sessions in disguise. Leaders show up, explain how the product works, and leave having confirmed their existing assumptions. Genuine customer discovery means asking open-ended questions and then suppressing the instinct to justify, explain, or defend. What the customer says back, Robyn argues, is the truth — not the truth you wanted, but the truth of their experience.

She told a story from a medical device company that illustrated the point sharply. She and the business unit president watched video footage of patients using their products. Within ten minutes, engineers in the room were shouting at the screen, convinced the patients were doing it wrong. Robyn and the president stood there and let it land. "They're not wrong," she said. "They're teaching us."

That reframe — from "the customer is wrong" to "the customer is showing us something" — is one of the most consequential shifts a leadership team can make. And it doesn't require a new platform or a research budget. It requires humility.

AI as a tool, not a destination

Robyn's take on AI adoption follows the same logic she applies to every other innovation challenge: start with the goal, not the technology.

The companies getting real value from AI, she argues, are the ones that identified a specific pain point first and then asked whether AI could help solve it. They're treating AI as a means, not an end. "AI is a tool to achieve an end goal — it is not the end goal in and of itself," she said.

The companies chasing AI for its own sake are making a mistake she's seen before. New technology lands, everyone feels pressure to adopt it, and organizations treat it like a software rollout — a new icon on the screen, a chatbot bolted onto the intranet. Robyn is clear that this misunderstands what AI actually is. "We're not rolling out a new ERP system," she said. "This is a fundamentally different, almost business model way of operating."

Her practical advice: start small, reduce uncertainty before making big bets, and experiment before committing. She shared the example of a colleague who used AI tools to reclaim ten hours of monthly reporting work. What did she do with that time? She went and talked to customers. That, Robyn suggests, is the right instinct — use AI to create capacity for the human work that actually drives customer insight and business growth.

The George Costanza principle

Robyn closed with a piece of advice so counterintuitive it lands like a genuine surprise.

She calls it the George Costanza principle, borrowed from a famous episode of Seinfeld in which the perennial underachiever realizes that following his instincts has led him nowhere — so he tries doing the opposite of everything he'd normally do. By the end of the episode, he has his dream job, a great apartment, and a new girlfriend.

For leaders, the application is this: when someone comes to you with a problem, your instinct is to solve it. Resist that instinct. Get curious instead.

Ask what specifically is happening. Ask what's already been tried. Ask why certain approaches haven't worked. Not as a quiz, not as a performance of Socratic method, but as a genuine attempt to understand the problem more deeply before reaching for an answer.

It's a small behavior change with large downstream effects — on trust, on team capability, on the quality of the eventual solution. And it maps directly onto the customer insight philosophy Robyn champions throughout the conversation. Whether you're talking to a customer or a direct report, the discipline is the same: slow down, ask better questions, and listen to what comes back.

"When you get a question, don't give an answer," she said. "Come back with some genuine questions to learn more."

Episode resources and links

• Robyn’s website, Mile Zero
• Robyn’s book, Unlocking Innovation
• Robyn’s personal website
• Robyn on LinkedIn
• Nathan on LinkedIn
• How to tackle AI adoption to develop a competitive advantage and empower your teams — In this on-demand webinar, Robyn's advice on starting with a goal before adopting AI maps closely to this session, which covers how to evaluate AI readiness, identify high-value use cases, and avoid chasing technology for its own sake.
• Customer-first innovation and discovery guide — This guide is a practical resource that mirrors Robyn's core argument: customer insight isn't optional, it's the foundation of any innovation strategy that delivers real business outcomes.
• Continuous discovery for customer-centric products with Teresa Torres — In this Insights Unlocked episode, Teresa Torres makes a complementary case to Robyn's: that customer discovery needs to be embedded into the product development process continuously, not treated as a one-off sprint.
• Why your organization needs a customer-centric approach — This blog post Reinforces Robyn's argument that listening to customers is everyone's job, and explores how organizations can build the culture and processes needed to put customers at the center of every decision.

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