Hey there, innovation champions!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about why I was publishing a book of experiments before every single one had been tested with every possible team.

The short version: because that’s how innovation actually works. You don’t wait for perfect conditions. You run the experiment and see what happens.

Well, the experiment is officially live.

Innovation at Work: 52 Micro-Experiments for Brave Leaders Who Want to Unstick Teams, Spark Ideas, and Build What’s Next is now on Amazon, and I have to tell you — the moment I hit “publish,” a very familiar voice showed up in my head.

Is it ready? Is it good enough? What if people try Experiment #37 and it completely bombs?

You know what I did with that voice? The same thing I teach teams to do: I thanked it for its concern, and I ran the experiment anyway.

What Publishing Taught Me About Shipping

There’s a saying I come back to constantly, which I think I first heard from author Patti Digh: “A book is never finished. It’s only published.”

That idea has rewired how I think about creative work. There’s a moment in every creative process where the work needs to leave your hands and meet the world. Not because you’ve solved everything, but because the world is where the real learning happens.

As a professional artist, I know this feeling intimately. Every painting reaches a point where continuing to tinker will actually make it worse. The discipline isn’t in perfecting — it’s in letting go.

Innovation at Work hit that point. It’s curated, it’s structured, it’s grounded in real experience with real teams — and it’s also, by design, not finished.

Because finishing it is your job.

Pick One Experiment. Run It. Tell Me What Happened.

This isn’t false modesty. I’ve facilitated these kinds of experiments with teams at Google, Meta, Salesforce, PMI, NHRMA, and everywhere in between. But I’ve never run Experiment #14 with your engineering team at 3pm on a Thursday when everyone’s burned out from sprint reviews. I’ve never tested Experiment #41 with your cross-functional group that has three people who haven’t spoken to each other since the reorg.

You have context I’ll never have. And that context is where the real data lives.

So here’s what I’m asking — and I mean this as genuinely as I’ve ever meant anything in a newsletter:

Pick one experiment. Run it. Then tell me what happened.

I want to know three things:

1. What did you try?
2. What actually happened (not what you expected — what actually happened)?
3. What would you change?

Hit reply. I read every single response. Your data makes the next edition of this book better for every team that picks it up after you.

That’s not a flaw in the book. That’s the entire design of the book.

Want to See What’s Inside?

The paperback edition of Innovation at Work launches March 10. If you want a head start, you can download a preview of the book right now — including the full framework and sample experiments:

👉 Download a preview of Innovation at Work

Want to be notified the moment the paperback drops (and grab launch-week bonuses)? Get on the list:

👉 Join the waitlist 

And if you’re already thinking, “I don’t just want the book — I want to bring this to my whole team,” let’s talk. I work with analytical teams to build systematic innovation capabilities, often starting with a keynote or workshop that creates the kind of shift those 125 project managers experienced at PMI.

👉 Book an Innovation Strategy Session

Next week: a peek inside Innovation at Work, and how to use the book.

Hey there, innovation champions!

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about innovation initiatives: most of them don’t fail because the idea was bad. They fail because everyone expected them to be perfect before they started.

Sound familiar?

I’ve been inside enough tech teams (heck, teams in general!) to know that this is one of the quietest innovation killers out there. Not the lack of smart people. Not the lack of good ideas. The insistence that every new approach needs to be bulletproof before it gets a chance to breathe.

So when I sent out the Advance Reader Copy of my new book, Innovation at Work, on Monday — a book built around 52 micro-experiments I haven’t personally run with every possible team — I wasn’t nervous about it.

I was practicing what I teach.

The Night Half a Room Raised Their Hands

The first time I ran my Communicating for Influence workshop with a research team at Meta, everything was on Zoom. I’d worked with corporate tech teams before — including a workshop with Uber — but always in person. Running these kinds of activities virtually was completely new territory, and I had no idea how a Meta research team would respond to an improv exercise on a video call.

I knew something was landing partway through, but the moment I’ll never forget came during an activity called Time Traveler.

The setup: in pairs, one partner is from the present day, the other is a time traveler from 500 years ago. The present-day partner has two minutes to explain how a cell phone works — without their partner wanting to condemn them to burn at the stake for witchcraft. It’s an impossible task by design.

When we came back together, I polled the room: “How many witches in the room?”

Half the hands went up.

Then I asked the time travelers if anything their partner said actually worked. A few raised their hands. One shared that their partner had used an analogy based in something someone from the 1500s could relate to — and it clicked. We switched roles, and the present-day partner had to convince their time-traveling partner to put a broken finger into an x-ray machine. Fewer witches this time, but still plenty of challenge.

The activity itself? Completely unproven with this audience. I had no idea how a Meta research team would respond to an improv exercise on a Zoom call.

Here’s what happened next week: the team started using “Who’s the witch?” as shorthand. When someone on the team was struggling to communicate with a cross-functional colleague, they’d ask it — a playful way of saying are we speaking different languages right now? It became a tool they actually used, organically, because the experiment had given them both the language and the permission.

When the “Failed” Activity Became the Breakthrough

Not every experiment lands cleanly. And sometimes, the ones that don’t are the most valuable.

At a day-long retreat with a nonprofit team, I ran an activity I’d designed specifically for them. It wasn’t working. About three-quarters of the way through, one of the team members raised her hand and said, plainly, that she wasn’t getting anything out of it.

In that moment, I had a choice: power through the planned agenda, or follow what was actually happening in the room.

I followed the room.

What unfolded was a 45-minute conversation — completely unscripted, completely unplanned — that turned out to be the conversation this team had needed to have for months. I scrapped two activities I’d planned. The “failed” experiment had cracked something open, and the breakthrough didn’t come from the activity. It came from what the activity made possible.

Why Imperfect Experiments Beat Perfect Plans

Here’s the pattern I keep seeing, across Meta research teams and nonprofit retreats and PMI conferences and everywhere else I’ve worked: the teams that move fastest aren’t the ones with the best plans. They’re the ones willing to run the experiment and see what actually happens.

The Meta team didn’t need a perfect activity. They needed one that was good enough to spark something real — and then they needed the space to take it somewhere I never could have predicted.

The nonprofit team didn’t need an activity that worked. They needed one that failed in exactly the right way to open a door.

This is why I’m not losing sleep over the fact that Innovation at Work contains 52 experiments I haven’t personally facilitated with every kind of team in every kind of organization. Some of them I’ve used directly with clients. Others are synthesized from proven practices in innovation, improv, and creative problem-solving — curated and organized within my Create the Impossible™ framework, but not all personally field-tested with every possible audience.

The book is designed to evolve. I want to know how these experiments work when your team runs them. What surprises you. What doesn’t land. What you’d tweak.

Because that’s not a weakness in the book. That’s the entire point of the book.

What This Means for Your Team

If you’ve tried an innovation initiative before — and it didn’t stick — I’d gently push back on the assumption that the initiative itself was the problem.

More likely, the expectation was wrong. We set up innovation programs as if they should produce polished results on Day One. As if the first experiment needs to be the final product.

But innovation doesn’t work that way. It works the way that Meta research team stumbled into “Who’s the witch?” — through an imperfect experiment that created something nobody could have designed in advance.

The question isn’t whether your team’s next experiment will be perfect. It won’t be.

The question is whether you’re creating conditions where imperfect experiments are allowed to happen — and where what emerges from them actually gets used.

If You’re Thinking About What This Could Look Like

If you’re a leader who’s been thinking about how to build genuine innovation capability in your organization — not a one-off workshop, but the kind of systematic, ongoing experimentation that actually changes how people work — I’d love to explore what that could look like for your specific team.

Not a sales pitch. Just a conversation about where you are and what might actually move the needle.

​Book an Innovation Strategy Session →​

It’s 30 minutes, no strings, and no deck. Just us figuring out what’s possible.

And if you’re ready to start building innovation muscles the way you’d build muscles in a gym — one experiment at a time, consistently — grab a preview of Innovation at Work:

​Download a preview →​

Or if you want the whole book before it’s available to the public — in exchange for an honest review — you can still join the Launch Team:

​Join the Launch Team →​

Next week: a peek inside Innovation at Work, and how to use the book.

Quick note: No video this week, as I’m head-down working on my second book, Innovation at Work. I’ve cleared my calendar to devote every spare minute to book production, which meant making some hard choices! 

Watch for videos to return in a few weeks. In the meantime, enjoy this week’s article! 

Hey there, innovation champions!

Here’s the pattern I’ve noticed across every successful innovation transformation I’ve witnessed:

Teams that build sustainable creative capabilities don’t rely on isolated workshops or special innovation sessions. Instead, they systematically practice three interconnected principles that compound over time: creating psychological safety for exploration (Play Hard), embracing productive failure (Make Crap), and extracting learning from every experience (Learn Fast).

When teams combine these approaches consistently, something remarkable happens: breakthrough thinking transforms from occasional accident into automatic organizational capability.

This is the Create the Impossible™ framework in action—and it’s the foundation for everything I teach teams about systematic innovation.

The Integration Challenge

Most innovation approaches focus on individual techniques or isolated workshops. Teams get temporary energy boosts but return to the same underlying patterns that created problems in the first place.

The Create the Impossible™ framework works differently. Each principle builds systematically on the others:

Play Hard creates the psychological foundation where innovation can emerge 

Make Crap provides permission to fail productively and iterate rapidly

Learn Fast transforms every experience into competitive intelligence

Together, they create a self-reinforcing system where teams naturally approach challenges with creative problem-solving rather than defaulting to familiar solutions.

The Systematic Method Behind the Magic

Here’s what makes this approach different from typical innovation initiatives:

It’s micro, not macro: Instead of requiring elaborate programs, teams can practice 5-15 minute interventions that remove specific friction points and build innovation muscle systematically.

It’s systematic, not episodic: Rather than being limited to special innovation sessions, teams embed these principles into daily operations—sprint planning, retrospectives, project kickoffs, problem-solving meetings.

It’s evidence-based, not feel-good: Each intervention targets specific innovation barriers backed by neuroscience research on creativity, collaboration, and learning.

The Compound Effect in Practice

Teams that systematically practice all three principles don’t just solve problems faster—they fundamentally change how they think, collaborate, and respond to uncertainty.

Here’s what systematic implementation looks like:

Month 1-2: Foundation Building – Teams focus on Play Hard experiments that normalize risk-taking and create psychological safety for sharing imperfect ideas.

Month 3-4: Productive Failure – With safety established, teams practice Make Crap techniques that accelerate iteration and reduce perfectionist paralysis.

Month 5-6: Learning Acceleration – Teams embed Learn Fast practices that turn every setback into organizational intelligence.

Month 7+: Automatic Innovation – Teams naturally combine all three principles to approach new challenges with breakthrough thinking.

Real-World Evidence: When Systems Create Breakthroughs

The most innovative companies already operate these principles intuitively:

Google’s systematic curiosity: That executive meeting where someone got distracted by satellite mapping software (creating Google Maps) wasn’t random—it was enabled by a culture that prioritizes exploration (Play Hard), accepts productive failure (Make Crap), and systematically captures learning (Learn Fast).

Slack’s productive failure system: The transformation from failed gaming company to $27.7 billion communication platform happened because the team had systematic practices for extracting value from setbacks and rapidly testing new approaches.

Amazon’s innovation velocity: Their ability to experiment with new services comes from systematic approaches to all three principles—psychological safety for bold ideas, permission to fail fast, and systematic learning extraction from every experiment. (Though it should be said there is ongoing internal debate regarding the consistency of these practices in employee experience.)

The Micro-Experiment Strategy

The breakthrough happens through systematic practice of micro-experiments that address specific innovation friction points:

Play Hard micro-experiments: 5-minute perspective-taking exercises, random problem trading, permission slip protocols that remove psychological barriers to creative risk-taking.

Make Crap micro-experiments: Deliberately terrible first draft sessions, rapid ugly prototyping, constraint challenges that force creative solutions.

Learn Fast micro-experiments: Learning autopsies after setbacks, systematic assumption testing, micro-pilots that validate ideas in 48 hours.

Each experiment takes minimal time but compounds over months into systematic innovation capabilities.

From Book to Breakthrough: Multiple Paths to Transformation

The Create the Impossible™ framework can be implemented at different levels depending on your team’s needs and organizational context:

Self-Directed Implementation: My forthcoming book Innovation at Work: 52 Micro-Experiments for Brave Leaders Who Want to Unstick Teams, Spark Ideas, and Build What’s Next provides the complete toolkit for teams ready to start building systematic innovation capabilities immediately. The 52 experiments are designed for leaders who want to begin transformation right away using proven methods.

Guided Transformation: While the book provides the foundation, many organizations accelerate their innovation culture development through strategic workshops, keynote presentations, and comprehensive programs that I design specifically for their context and challenges.

Systematic Integration: The most powerful transformation happens when teams combine the book’s micro-experiments with strategic facilitation, leadership development, and organization-wide culture change initiatives that embed these principles across multiple departments and functions.

Each approach has its place. Some teams thrive with self-directed implementation using the book’s systematic approach. Others benefit from the energy and alignment that comes from shared experiences during retreats and workshops. Many organizations find that combining both approaches—practical tools plus expert guidance—creates the deepest and most sustainable transformation.

The Transformation Indicators

Teams operating with systematic Create the Impossible™ capabilities demonstrate specific behavioral changes:

• Share work-in-progress without prompting rather than waiting for perfection
• Suggest experiments when facing new challenges instead of defaulting to familiar approaches
• Extract and apply learning from setbacks instead of avoiding difficult conversations
• Generate breakthrough solutions through rapid iteration rather than extended planning
• Proactively seek diverse perspectives instead of relying on domain expertise alone

Beyond Individual Teams: Organizational Transformation

The real leverage happens when multiple teams practice these principles simultaneously. Cross-functional collaboration improves because teams share approaches to psychological safety, productive failure, and systematic learning.

Organizations develop innovation capabilities that compound across departments rather than remaining isolated in individual teams or special innovation groups.

Your Next Impossible

Innovation culture isn’t built through wishful thinking or annual team-building exercises. It emerges through systematic practice of the conditions that enable breakthrough thinking.

Your team already has the capability to Create the Impossible™. The framework provides the method to unlock it consistently.

Whether you start with one micro-experiment this week or implement comprehensive organizational transformation, the principle remains the same: systematic practice of Play Hard, Make Crap, and Learn Fast creates the conditions where breakthrough thinking becomes automatic rather than accidental.

Your next breakthrough is one experiment away.

Ready to begin implementing the Create the Impossible™ system? My book Innovation at Work: 52 Micro-Experiments for Brave Leaders Who Want to Unstick Teams, Spark Ideas, and Build What’s Next provides the complete toolkit for immediate implementation. Join the early access list for the full collection of experiments and strategic implementation guides.

For organizations ready for comprehensive innovation transformation—including strategic workshops, leadership development programs, keynote presentations, and culture change initiatives designed specifically for your challenges—let’s explore how to accelerate your team’s breakthrough potential through expert guidance and systematic implementation: Contact Melissa

Quick note: I had an amazing time facilitating an interactive session in Oakland for PMI San Francisco Bay Area this weekend! And October 8 I’m leading a virtual session for AMA New Jersey on “Communicating for Influence: A Taste of the Toolkit.” It’s a busy week!

No video this week, aside from client work, I’m head-down working on my second book, Innovation at Work. I’ve cleared my calendar to devote every spare minute to book production, which meant making some hard choices! 

Watch for videos to return in a few weeks. In the meantime, enjoy this week’s article! 

Hey there, innovation champions!

Here’s a moment that changed everything for a research team I was working with at Meta.

They’d been struggling for months to get their algorithmic insights heard by product teams. Every presentation felt like speaking different languages. But during one of our communication exercises, Dr. Sarah had a breakthrough: “I’ve been focusing on technical efficiency,” she said, “when they need to understand user impact.”

That realization—multiplied across the team—transformed how they approached every future collaboration. It wasn’t just about fixing one communication problem. They’d learned to systematically extract insights from every interaction and apply them going forward.

This is “Learn Fast” in action: turning every experience—especially the uncomfortable ones—into competitive intelligence.

The Learning Velocity Problem

Most teams treat learning like an accident that occasionally happens during retrospectives. But in rapidly changing markets, the teams that systematically extract intelligence from every experiment, setback, and unexpected outcome consistently outperform those with better initial strategies.

Why? Because learning velocity compounds. Teams that get 1% better at extracting insights from each iteration quickly outpace teams that execute perfect plans but adapt slowly to new information.

The difference isn’t intelligence or resources—it’s systematic practice in converting experience into actionable knowledge.

The Micro-Experiment Revolution

Traditional innovation approaches test big ideas with big investments over long timeframes. By the time you learn whether something works, competitors have already moved on to new opportunities.

But what if you could test core assumptions in 5 minutes? What if every team meeting became a learning laboratory? What if failures became your competitive advantage because you extracted intelligence faster than anyone else?

This is the power of micro-experiments: rapid, low-risk tests that generate maximum learning with minimum resource investment. A 15-minute exercise can reveal communication gaps that would otherwise take months to surface. A 5-minute prototype can validate assumptions that might otherwise require weeks of analysis.

The Science of Systematic Learning

Neuroscience research reveals something crucial about how teams process failure: when setbacks trigger blame and defensiveness, they activate threat-detection systems that actually prevent learning extraction. But when failures are framed as intelligence-gathering, teams access cognitive networks associated with pattern recognition and strategic thinking.

This explains why some teams get stronger through adversity while others get stuck repeating the same mistakes. It’s not about the quality of failures—it’s about the systematic practice of learning extraction.

When teams operate in what researchers call “learning mode,” they naturally identify patterns, connect insights across different contexts, and build capabilities that transfer to new challenges.

The Learning Autopsy Method

One of the most powerful tools I’ve developed with teams is what I call the “Learning Autopsy.” After any setback—missed deadline, failed experiment, miscommunication, budget overrun—spend 10 minutes asking one question: “What would we do differently if we could replay this situation?”

The key is focusing exclusively on future behavior changes, never on blame assignment. This isn’t about who made mistakes—it’s about what the team learned that will make them smarter next time.

Teams that practice this systematically stop repeating the same categories of mistakes. They build organizational memory that compounds over time.

When Learning Becomes Competitive Advantage

Here’s what systematic learning looks like in practice:

Amazon’s “failure resume” culture: Teams document what didn’t work as carefully as what did, creating organizational knowledge that prevents others from repeating expensive mistakes.

Atlassian’s “fail fast, learn faster” approach: They run rapid experiments knowing most will fail, but extract learning velocity that enables them to iterate toward solutions faster than competitors.

Netflix’s culture of intelligent risk-taking: They systematically analyze both successes and failures to understand what drives user engagement, turning every piece of content into market research.

The pattern? These companies treat learning extraction as a core competency, not an occasional activity.

The Perspective Trading Breakthrough

One of my favorite learning acceleration techniques is what I call “Trade a Problem.” Each person writes down a current challenge they’re facing, then randomly trades problems with someone else. Each person brainstorms solutions for their new problem in 8 minutes.

What’s fascinating is how much clearer thinking becomes when you’re not emotionally attached to the problem. Teams consistently discover solutions that seemed impossible when they were stuck inside their own perspective.

This works because emotional detachment enables pattern recognition. The same cognitive biases that make you protective of your own approach help you see obvious solutions to someone else’s challenge.

Your Learn Fast Reality Check

Ask yourself:

• When did your team last extract specific learning from a setback and apply it to prevent future problems?
• How often do insights from one project get transferred to improve other initiatives?
• What percentage of your team’s intelligence comes from systematic learning extraction versus accidental discovery?

If your team treats learning like something that happens to you rather than something you manufacture, you’re probably leaving competitive advantage on the table.

The Create the Impossible™ Framework Acceleration

Learn Fast is the third principle of my Create the Impossible™ framework because it transforms the first two principles from individual activities into systematic capabilities. When teams Play Hard (explore with psychological safety) and Make Crap (embrace productive failure), but then systematically extract learning from every experience, they build innovation muscle that compounds over time.

This is how teams move from occasional breakthrough moments to consistent competitive advantage.

What’s Coming Next Week

Next week, I’ll show you how all three principles—Play Hard, Make Crap, and Learn Fast—combine into the Create the Impossible™ system for systematic innovation. Because individual experiments are just the beginning. The real transformation happens when teams embed breakthrough thinking into their daily operations.

The goal isn’t just to learn from experience. It’s to learn faster than your competition can adapt.

Ready to help your team build systematic learning capabilities that compound over time? My forthcoming book Innovation at Work: 52 Micro-Experiments for Brave Leaders Who Want to Unstick Teams, Spark Ideas, and Build What’s Next provides the exact methods for extracting maximum intelligence from every team experience. Join the early access list for insights and preview content.