The Innovation Show Nokia's Comeback Explained: Emotion, Strategy & Boardroom Decisions
Mar 18, 2026
Timo Vuori, Aalto strategy professor who studies collective emotion regulation, and Quy Huy, INSEAD strategy scholar on organizational emotion, explain Nokia's turnaround. They discuss how structured emotion regulation replaced denial and fear. They cover board practices, staged strategy processes, setting kill criteria, and creating multiple options to cool panic and enable radical pivots.
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Three Structures That Regulate Executive Emotion
- Emotions are regulated socially via three structures: governance (board), advisory teams (consultants, analysts), and boundary spanners (partners, customers).
- Timo Vuori demonstrates these layers gave Nokia 'superhuman' emotion regulation capacity in strategy making.
Design Strategy Steps To Manage Emotions
- Design strategy as staged steps that surface and then manage emotions: absorb data, generate options, then quantitatively compare.
- Timo Vuori advises reserving time to reflect on triggered emotions in the early information stage to avoid denial.
Board Required A What Keeps Me Up At Night Slide
- The Nokia board forced emotional transparency by requiring a slide titled What Keeps Me Up At Night at every meeting.
- The practice normalized fears and made the CEO explicitly share worries instead of presenting only optimism.
