Hey there, innovation champions!

Quick heads-up before we get into it: The Podcast Is Coming

Here’s the news: I’ve been producing weekly videos for a while now. Soon, I’ll be turning those into a full podcast — audio and video, on all the platforms — under a new name: Create the Impossible™.

It’ll be a mix of solo episodes (like this week’s video) and guest conversations, published weekly.

I’ll share the official launch date soon. In the meantime, you can get the details here:​ Create the Impossible™ Podcast​

This Week’s Episode: The Binder Problem

Watch it right here, or read the written version below.

Click to watch (12:40) or scroll down to read more

In this episode:

• Why fresh-start energy on any new initiative fades by Q4 — and why that’s not a motivation failure
• The neuroscience of why habitual routines quietly slide into autopilot
• Experiment #45, “Interrupt the Routine” — the specific, one-week move that resets a team’s attention
• The two questions to ask your team after the interruption ends

Full story below: 

Every September, I made the same pilgrimage to the office supply store.

New binder. Crisp dividers, not yet ripped. A pencil case with all three rings still intact.

For about six weeks, that binder was pure potential. I didn’t know yet which classes would be hard, which projects would drag, which teacher would assign the worst homework. There was only a title and a name — and all the room in the world for things to go well.

By winter break, the vinyl was peeling at the corners. The rings barely closed over the mess of college-ruled paper crammed inside. The pencil case was black with graphite, hanging on by one working hole out of three.

The Binder Isn’t the Problem

Here’s what I didn’t understand as a kid: the binder didn’t fall apart because I was careless.

It fell apart because nothing ever interrupted the wear. Same folder, same routine, every single day, for nine months straight.

I see the exact same arc in the teams I work with.

A new initiative launches. A new tool rolls out. An “innovation culture” push kicks off with genuine energy — because for a minute, it’s all potential. Nobody’s hit the hard part yet.

By Q4, the initiative’s rings are straining. Half the team has quietly stopped using the new process. The tool sits open in a browser tab nobody clicks anymore.

Leadership calls this “poor adoption” or “change fatigue.”

It’s neither. It’s autopilot — and autopilot is what happens to any routine, no matter how good the intentions were on day one.

Why Fresh-Start Energy Always Fades

Novelty is what makes a new binder — or a new initiative — feel exciting. New things get our full attention because our brains haven’t automated them yet.

But automation is the whole point of a routine. Once your brain can run something without thinking, it stops paying attention to it. That’s efficient. It’s also how good ideas quietly die.

If you’re the VP who greenlit that initiative, this is the part that feels personal. You championed it. You spent the political capital. And now attendance is dropping and nobody wants to say so out loud.

That’s not a failure of your leadership. It’s a signal that the system needs a designed interruption — not a bigger push.

Most leaders respond to fading energy by trying to recreate the original launch: another all-hands, another kickoff deck, another motivational nudge.

That doesn’t work, because the problem was never motivation. It’s attention. And you don’t get attention back by trying harder. You get it back by interrupting the pattern.

Try This: Interrupt the Routine

This is Experiment #45 in Innovation at Work — one of the simplest ways to keep any practice from going stale.

The move: Pick one team routine that’s gone flat — a standup, a retro, a weekly status update. Change it dramatically for one full week. Walk the standup outside. Swap written updates for two-minute videos. Open every meeting with a random, unrelated question instead of the agenda.

Why it works: Novelty re-triggers attention. For one week, people notice the routine again instead of running it on autopilot — and noticing is where new ideas come from.

The debrief: At the end of the week, ask the team two questions: What did we notice? What’s worth keeping? Some interruptions get adopted permanently. Most don’t. Either way, the team just practiced paying attention on purpose — which is the actual skill.

The Binder You Actually Want

I can’t go back and interrupt my own binder’s slow decline. Nine-year-old me didn’t have Experiment #45.

But your team’s initiatives don’t have to follow the same arc mine did.

Fresh-start energy isn’t something you protect by hoping it lasts. It’s something you renew, on purpose, before it needs rescuing.

That’s the whole premise behind Create the Impossible™: Play Hard, Make Crap, Learn Fast — on repeat, in small enough doses that you never need a September pilgrimage to feel it again.

Build Your Innovation Muscle!

Want more ready-made experiments to help your team build their innovation muscle? Grab the book!

👉Click here for more info 

👉Click here for a free preview PDF

👉Click here to buy now on Amazon

👉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.

Click to watch (10:16) or scroll down to read more

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!

👉Click here for more info 

👉Click here for a free preview PDF

👉Click here to buy now on Amazon

👉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.

Click to watch (11:05) or scroll down to read more

Hey there, innovation champions!

A year ago, I got a call from the then-president of the PMI San Francisco Bay Area Chapter.

She wasn’t calling about a keynote. She was calling because she’d been searching for a LEGO® Serious Play® facilitator, and my name had come up.

Her chapter’s Professional Development Day usually followed a familiar shape: keynote, breakouts, networking, a panel, a closing keynote. This year, she wanted to open the day differently — something to unlock strategic thinking before the rest of the agenda even started. LEGO, or maybe a treasure hunt, seemed like the obvious way to get 125 project managers out of spreadsheet-brain.

I asked her more about the room. The timing. The actual constraint she was solving for.

And then I told her I didn’t think LEGO was the right tool for the job.

The Part Where I Said No

This is the part of the story that’s easy to skip past, but it’s the part that actually matters for anyone hiring outside expertise: she’d come to me with a specific request, and I pushed back on it.

Not because LEGO Serious Play doesn’t work. It works beautifully in the right setting. But a 45-minute opening slot, a room full of rows of chairs with no tables to build LEGO models on, called for something different — something built from the ground up for that constraint, not retrofitted from a format designed for something else.

I proposed a session drawn from the world of improv instead. No slides. No bricks. Just structured play designed to get people moving, laughing, and — most importantly — thinking differently about how they handle surprise and uncertainty.

She said yes. Not to the format she’d originally imagined. To the problem actually getting solved.

What That “Yes” Made Possible

That 45-minute session became one of the most talked-about parts of PMI-SFBAC’s entire Professional Development Day. Chris Petapermal, the chapter’s Chief Administrative Officer, later wrote that the session was “a masterclass in creative facilitation,” and that it proved creativity is “not fluff but a true leadership capability.”

Marie Spark, watching the room shift in real time, put it more bluntly: “I could see the breakthroughs happening — it was ELECTRIC!”

Here’s the part that actually matters for you, though — not the applause, but what happened next.

That same design — the one built specifically for a 45-minute PMI opening slot — has since run for a SHRM chapter (which led to one of the best letters of recommendation I’ve ever received), a women’s leadership group, and a SaaS company’s leadership team.

Four audiences. Four very different rooms. One core design, built right the first time because it was built for the actual constraint — not for the format someone originally had in mind.

But this is the stat I actually care about: when attendees at the SaaS company session were asked afterward whether they had at least one specific action they were taking back to work, 93% said yes.

Not “it was fun.” Not “great energy.” A specific action they were taking back to work this week,  from a room full of people who are paid to be skeptical of anything that smells like a gimmick.

The Question Underneath All of This

If you’re the one doing the hiring — booking a keynote, planning a professional development day, building an offsite agenda — you almost always walk in with a picture in your head of what the session should look like.

That’s normal. It’s also, sometimes, the thing standing between you and the outcome you actually want.

Before you lock in the format, run it through this filter:

The 3-Question Permission Check

1. What’s the outcome I actually want — not the activity I pictured, but the shift I’m trying to create in the room?
2. What are the real constraints — the time, the room, the audience — that the format has to survive contact with?
3. Did I hire an expert, and am I letting them act like one?

I didn’t get hired to build LEGO towers. I got hired to help 125 people who solve problems for a living loosen their grip on certainty for 45 minutes. The format was never the point. The outcome was.

That’s the whole idea behind Innovation at Work, too — not a single big swing, but the daily practice of asking what the room actually needs, and having the permission to build for that instead of for the plan you walked in with.

If you’re sitting on an innovation mandate and a picture in your head of what the “session” should look like, let’s talk about the actual constraint you’re solving for — not the format you assumed you needed.

Build Your Innovation Muscle!

Want more ready-made experiments to help your team build their innovation muscle? Grab the book!

👉Click here for more info

👉Click here for a free preview PDF

👉Click here to buy now on Amazon

👉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. 

Click to watch (09:39) or scroll down to read more

Hey there, innovation champions!

Last Saturday, my improv team took the stage for the seventh time in twelve weeks. Same ritual every time: we walk out with nothing. No script. No idea what the story is, who we’re playing, or what song we’re about to make up on the spot.

I should hate this.

I’m not a natural improviser. I’m a planner. I like scripts, and contingency plans for the scripts. If you’ve ever sat across from me in a strategy meeting, you know I like to see three moves ahead before I commit to move one.

Which is exactly why improv has taught me more about leadership than almost anything else in my toolkit.

The Skill Nobody Hires For

Here’s the pattern I see constantly with the leaders I work with: they were promoted because they’re rigorous. Because they reduce uncertainty. Because they’re the person in the room who can be trusted to have a plan.

That’s a real skill, and it matters.

But it’s not the same skill as leading through uncertainty — the moments when there is no plan yet, when the ground is still moving, when your team is looking at you for direction you don’t actually have.

Eliminating ambiguity and leading through ambiguity are different muscles. Most leadership development — the standard stuff most companies budget for — trains the first one. But right now, the second one matters just as much, maybe more. 

And here’s the problem: you can’t build that muscle by sitting in a workshop and being told to ’embrace uncertainty.’ You have to actually practice responding to something you didn’t see coming, in real time, again and again, until it stops being a theory and starts being a reflex. That’s exactly what improv does.

The “Yes, And” Reflex

In improv, there’s a moment every performer eventually faces: you had a direction in mind for the scene, and your partner just took it somewhere completely different.

You have two options. Fight it — try to drag the scene back to your plan — and it collapses. Or “yes, and” it: accept what just happened as true, and build on top of it.

The scenes that work are never the ones where someone successfully executed their original plan. They’re the ones where someone let go of the plan fast enough to build something better with what was actually in front of them.

That’s not a performance trick. It’s a decision-making pattern. And it’s trainable.

Try This Today: Improv the Process

This is Experiment #43 from Innovation at Work, and it’s one of the fastest ways I know to build that muscle on a real team, with a real problem, in under fifteen minutes.

The Experiment:
Pick one recurring process your team complains about — a status meeting, a handoff, a review cycle, anything that’s gone stale. Set a 10-minute timer. Using “yes, and” thinking, improvise a Version 2.0 of that process out loud, as a group. No one is allowed to say “that won’t work” — only “yes, and here’s how we’d handle that.”

Why it works:
The constraint is the point. Ten minutes is too short for careful planning, which is exactly what forces the group into the same reflex improvisers use onstage — building on what’s offered instead of defending what’s familiar.

Watch for this:
Your most analytical team members will often be better at this than your self-described “creative” ones. This isn’t about creativity as a personality trait — it’s about giving rigorous thinkers a structure where rapid iteration feels safe instead of reckless.

Run the old process and the new one side by side for a week, then compare.

What This Actually Builds

None of this is about becoming less rigorous, less analytical, or more “go with the flow.” It’s the opposite. It’s building the specific capacity to stay engaged and clear-headed when the plan stops being reliable — which, for every team I’ve ever worked with, is not an edge case. It’s Tuesday.

This is the muscle Create the Impossible™ is built to train: Play Hard (treat the ambiguity as something to work with, not around), Make Crap (let the first version of the new process be rough), Learn Fast (compare, adjust, move on).

I’ve also started having quiet, unscripted conversations with senior leaders who’ve actually led through real ambiguity — not just growth, but genuine uncertainty — for something new I’m building. More on that soon.

In the meantime: what’s one process on your team that’s gone stale and could use a “yes, and”? Click here and tell me — I read every response.

Click to watch (12:58) or scroll down to read more

Hey there, innovation champions!

The Room That Changed Me

It was around 2012. World Domination Summit, Portland. A few thousand people packed into a theater.

Brené Brown walked onstage and, within the first few minutes, had us doing something deeply uncool.

First, she had us strike a “cool” pose — arms crossed, chin up, maximum detachment. Easy enough.

Then she had us dance. Still manageable.

Then she had us sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” at the top of our lungs.

There was no aiming for cool anymore.

Her talk was about the difference between fitting in and belonging. About how “cool” is, by definition, the absence of vulnerability — and how belonging, by definition, requires it.

I’ve heard that idea described a hundred different ways since.

But I still feel it. Because she didn’t just tell me. She made me experience it — three times, in escalating order of social exposure — before she named it.

That’s not a speaking trick. That’s a learning design principle.

And it’s the same principle behind every innovation initiative I’ve seen actually work — and every one I’ve watched quietly die by February.

The Pattern That’s Costing You

Here’s what I see again and again.

A company books a speaker. Or runs an offsite. Or invests in a two-day innovation workshop. People leave fired up. The energy is real.

And then Monday arrives.

The team is back at their desks, inbox overflowing, sprint planning in an hour.

The insight that felt so alive on Friday is already starting to fog over.

By the end of the month, the vocabulary has faded. By February, the initiative has been quietly shelved. By Q2 reviews, the leader who championed it has less credibility than before — because they tried something, and it didn’t stick.

This is not a people problem. It’s not a motivation problem.

It’s a design problem.

The Two Halves That Can’t Work Alone

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of facilitation work: a single powerful experience, no matter how well-designed, is still just a single data point.

Learning that sticks requires both halves.

Half 1: The Immersive Experience This is what creates the initial shift — the new possibility, the shared language, the felt sense of “oh, this is actually doable.” Offsites, keynotes, workshops: when they’re designed well, they do something no book or email can replicate. They get learning into the body.

Half 2: The Ongoing Practice This is what turns that shift into a new way of working. Not another event. Not a follow-up training. Just small, consistent experiments woven into the rhythms teams already have — retrospectives, sprint reviews, standups, weekly 1:1s.

Without the immersive experience, practice feels mechanical. People do the thing without understanding why.

Without the practice, the immersive experience is just a memory.

Together, they compound.

(This is also why I say this as someone who does keynotes for a living: a keynote without a practice plan is a really expensive motivational moment.)

Why “Just Do More Training” Doesn’t Fix It

When an initiative fails to stick, the instinct is to add more: a follow-up workshop, a refresher, a second offsite.

More immersive content on top of more immersive content.

But this misses the design flaw entirely.

The problem wasn’t that the first experience wasn’t good enough. The problem is that experience without practice doesn’t transfer.

The research on learning retention has been clear on this for decades. Application matters. Repetition matters. Low-stakes practice matters — not because it’s nice to have, but because without it, the neural pathways that hold new behaviors don’t form.

What that means practically: a 15-minute experiment run consistently beats a two-day workshop run once.

Not because the experiment is better content. Because the experiment creates practice.

The Experiment: Try This at Your Next Retrospective

Here’s Experiment #5 from Innovation at Work.

The Learning Autopsy ⏱ Time: 15 minutes 👥 Team size: 2–8 people 🚨 Crisis-ready: Yes 🏠 Remote-friendly: Yes

After any setback — a missed deadline, a failed prototype, a miscommunication, a decision that didn’t land — spend 10 minutes asking one question:

“What would we change if we could replay this?”

Not: what went wrong. Not: whose fault was it. Just: what would we do differently, and what do we now know that we didn’’t know before?

Document the specific insights while they’re fresh.

That’s it.

Run it once and it’s a useful exercise. Run it every sprint retrospective for two months, and it becomes how your team thinks.

Psychological safety doesn’t get built through declarations. It gets built through repeated evidence: here, learning from mistakes is the point.

That’s the difference between an initiative and a practice.

What This Means for Your Next Initiative

Before you book the next speaker or plan the next offsite — and I say this as someone who does keynotes for a living — ask yourself:

What happens after?

What’s the practice that will keep this alive when I’m gone and the energy has settled?

If the answer is “we’ll figure that out later,” you already know what February looks like.

The good news: you don’t need to overhaul anything. You need one experiment, one meeting slot, one manager willing to go first.

Start there.