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Hey there, innovation champions!
For about fifteen years, I made my living as a professional calligrapher and ketubah artist — for the first half of that time specialized in hand-illuminating hand-illuminating Jewish marriage contracts for couples who wanted something one-of-a-kind.
Every one of those projects came with a hard deadline. The wedding date doesn’t move because the artist is “still finding the right concept.”
One couple wanted a vegetable garden scene with secret icons hidden throughout. Another wanted their ketubah designed like a page of Talmud — Hebrew text in the center, English text wrapped around it, illuminated capitals like a medieval manuscript. Another asked for an oak tree with their two Labrador retrievers curled up beneath it — and I was not, and am not, an animal portrait artist.
That last one nearly broke me. I sketched. I balled up the sketch. I sketched again. About a dozen times, convinced each attempt was a failure, until the thirteenth one finally worked. My palms were sweating when the bride came to pick it up.
She loved it.
The Part Nobody Talks About
Here’s what I didn’t expect: years later, when I moved away from commissioned work into a line of prints and invitations customers could order off my website, the hard deadlines disappeared.
I thought that would be a relief — and at first, it was. No more balled-up sketches. No more sweaty palms.
But something else disappeared too: new designs.
Without a deadline forcing me to start, there was no urgency compelling me to finish. It was too easy to wait for a “good idea” to strike. So I produced far fewer new designs — not because I’d run out of ideas, but because I’d run out of reasons to stop waiting.
Waiting Isn’t Patience. It’s Perfectionism Wearing a Nicer Outfit.
This is the pattern I now see constantly in teams handed an “innovation mandate.”
Leadership wants breakthrough thinking. But nobody sets a real deadline for the messy, unfinished, possibly-bad first attempt. So the team waits. They call it “still gathering input” or “not quite ready to bring this forward.” It looks like diligence. It’s actually the same thing that happened to my print line — permission to never start.
Here’s the reusable model I want you to steal:
THE DEADLINE EFFECT
With a real deadline: You start ugly. You ship a rough version. You learn what works by Tuesday, not by “eventually.”
Without one: You wait for the idea to feel ready. You produce nothing. You call it “thinking it through.”
The uncomfortable truth is that the deadline was never what stood between me and good work. It was the thing that produced good work — by making waiting impossible.
What This Looks Like at Work
You don’t need a real wedding date to get this effect. You need a manufactured one.
That can be a 48-hour “rough draft due” rule before any idea gets refined. It can be a standing “we ship something imperfect every Friday” rhythm. It can be as small as: “You have until 3pm to bring me the ugly version.”
This is exactly what Make Crap — the second step in my Create the Impossible™ framework — is built for. Play Hard gets people loose enough to try. Make Crap gives them a forcing function to actually produce something, instead of polishing a plan that never ships. Learn Fast is what happens once there’s something real on the table to react to.
None of that works if “we’ll get to it when it’s ready” stays on the table as an option.
The Real Cost
The cost of waiting was never the lost time. It was the lost reps — the versions I never made, the feedback I never got, the thirteenth sketch that never had a chance to exist because there was no deadline forcing me to make the first twelve.
If your team is circling the same idea for the third meeting in a row, they don’t need more time to think.
They need a deadline. An artificial one, if that’s all you’ve got.
Curious what a real one would force loose in your team? That’s exactly the kind of stuck-team problem I help leaders solve — often starting with a single 90-minute session that shows people what happens when “someday” isn’t an option anymore.
👉 Not sure where your team’s stuck? Take the free Innovation Bottleneck Finder — get your results in just 2 minutes.
Build Your Innovation Muscle!
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