Too often, efforts to innovate fall short within organizations. The good news is that, whether the focus is on new products, services, processes or business models, Generative AI (GenAI) can enhance and challenge the work of teams across all phases of the innovation cycle. GenAI's most obvious contribution thus far has been in idea generation and validation-the divergence and convergence phases of innovation. Yet the authors show that it can play an even more important role in helping leaders confront and update the strategic assumptions at the foundation of their strategies-what they call the 'doubt phase' of the cycle. They show that GenAI's role in innovation is not to take humans out of the creative process, just to make them better at it by pointing out old assumptions that box them in and stymie the quest for true innovation.

Managing uncertainty has always been part of the executive challenge. But the global pandemic upped the ante significantly: Rarely have leaders been forced to tackle volatility in so many areas all at once. The COVID-19 crisis has underscored just how interconnected people, markets and events have become. The authors-consultants at the Boston Consulting Group-argue that to gain uncertainty advantage, companies need to get better at three things: detecting signals, acting on them and building practices that foster resilience. In the end they show that by tracking signals, visualizing what the world might look like three or five years down the line and imagining what it will take to win in that future, organizations can take uncertainty from a scary abstraction to a practice that energizes their workforce and reshapes performance for years to come.

In an excerpt from their book, Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity (Random House, 2013), the authors describe the power of embracing doubt to move beyond the status quo to value-added solutions. Both leaders at the Boston Consulting Group, they describe a process for innovation that begins with questioning your 'boxes'-the mental models you are currently operating with. In the end, they show that embracing doubt is a critical element of a new paradigm for creativity that recognizes that no idea is good forever. In the end, surviving success can be just as challenging as succeeding in the first place.