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Hey there, innovation champions!
The Mandate Lands on a Tuesday
Nobody hands you an innovation mandate with a start date that makes sense. It lands mid-quarter, in a meeting that was supposed to be about something else, usually as a single sentence: “We need your team to be more innovative.”
Then everyone moves on to the next agenda item, and you’re left holding it. No budget line. No template. No week one.
There’s a predictable mistake that happens here, and it’s not really anyone’s fault.
The Month-One Mistake
Typically, the instinct is to go straight to strategy. You block time to research frameworks. You draft a rollout plan. Maybe you sketch an all-hands presentation with a bold new value statement.
By the time month one ends, your team has heard the word “innovation” a lot — and experienced exactly none of it.
I’m a performer, so I’ll use performance analogies: Think of it like staging a performance. You wouldn’t start rehearsals by blocking the final act. You start with the fundamentals, run them badly, and build up.
What happens if you skip that? If you’re really lucky, the opening night might look impressive for about two minutes before it falls apart.
Just like a performance doesn’t need all the blocking and sets done on the first day, the mandate doesn’t need a strategy document in month one. It needs a first rep.
What Actually Works in the First 30 Days
My book, Innovation at Work, already answers this, if you know where to look. Tucked in the back there is an Implementation Strategy that maps a 12-week arc, and the first four weeks — Foundation Building — are designed to happen before anything else. Here’s one suggested protocol.
Week 1: Start with permission. I suggest you run Experiment #13, the Permission Slip Protocol. Each person writes themselves a permission slip for one specific behavior they’ve been hesitant to try — could be sharing a half-formed idea, questioning an assumption, speaking up in a meeting. Very important: as the leader, you go first. Eight minutes, one piece of paper.
Week 2: Run your first “real” experiment. Experiment #1, the Crappy First Draft Showcase. Ten minutes to create something deliberately terrible, then a show-and-tell celebrating the terribleness. This is the week your team experiences, rather than hears about, what “safe to be bad” actually feels like.
Weeks 3–4: Make the attempt itself the win. Experiment #50, Celebrate the Attempt. Each person shares one intelligent risk they took recently — regardless of outcome — and the team celebrates the attempt, not the result. Repeated over two weeks, this is what turns one good experience into an actual foundation.
That’s Foundation Building. Weeks 5–8 shift into integrating experiments directly into your existing meetings. Weeks 9–12 use systematic practice to make the habit outlast the initial enthusiasm. The full 12-week roadmap is mapped out in the book’s appendix — this newsletter is just phase one.
Why Starting Small Works Better Than Starting Big
The ambitious version of month one is tempting, but it tends to backfire: a month spent planning and rolling out a big initiative burns credibility before your team has run a single experiment together. Innovation at Work is built around the opposite bet. One reviewer described it as delivering “52 concrete, low-lift micro-experiments leaders can run immediately” — which is exactly the point. Month one doesn’t need a program. It needs one small, repeatable move your team can actually feel.
If you’re in week zero of this right now — mandate in hand, no map yet — the book already has your next twelve weeks laid out, starting with Experiment #13 this week. You don’t need to build the plan. You need to run it.
And if you’d rather talk through what your specific week one should look like, that’s what the Innovation Strategy Session is for. Thirty minutes, no pitch — just a conversation about where you’re starting from.
Build Your Innovation Muscle!
Want more ready-made experiments to help your team build their innovation muscle? Grab the book!
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👉Click here for a special Leadership Edition — available only on my website — which includes an exclusive 5-part “Innovation Leader’s Edge” video series. Everything you need to run your first micro-experiment, get leadership buy-in, and build lasting innovation culture.
