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!
You’ve been there.
Your team attends a dynamic innovation workshop. Everyone’s energized. Stickynotes cover every wall. Ideas flow. People leave pumped up, talking about “game-changing breakthroughs.”
Two weeks later?
Nothing has changed. Same meetings, same behaviors, same stuck projects.
Sound familiar?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth I learned after watching countless companies invest in one-time innovation sessions: workshops create temporary inspiration, but they don’t build lasting capability.
The Workshop Trap
Last month, a VP of Product at a mid-sized tech company called me. She was frustrated.
“We’ve done three different innovation workshops in the past year,” she said. “Design thinking, brainstorming sessions, even brought in a consultant who had us build things with marshmallows and spaghetti. People loved them in the moment. But literally nothing changed afterward.”
She’s not alone. This pattern repeats across the industry.
The problem isn’t the workshops themselves—it’s treating innovation as an event instead of a practice.
What the Research Actually Shows
Here’s what we know about behavior change (and yes, innovation IS behavior change):
One-time exposures don’t rewire habits. You need repeated practice over time to build new neural pathways. (A recent study reveals how this operates in the brain.)
Skills fade without reinforcement. Ebbinghaus’s classic forgetting curve suggests that people can forget up to 90% of what they learn within a month without reinforcement, with the most rapid forgetting occurring within the first day or two. Whether those statistics are accurate is debatable, but the important principle is that rapid forgetting occurs unless active review or real-world application follows training.
Context matters more than content. People revert to old patterns when they return to environments that reward old behaviors.
Think about it: Would you expect one yoga class to make you flexible? One piano lesson to make you a musician? One workout to build strength?
Of course not. So why do we expect one innovation workshop to transform how teams think?
The Micro-Experiment Alternative
Here’s what actually works: small, repeated experiments embedded into your team’s existing rhythm.
When I worked with the PMI San Francisco Bay Area Chapter earlier this month, I didn’t run a day-long workshop. Instead, I designed three micro-experiments that took 45 minutes total—and got 125 project managers practicing new behaviors immediately.
The feedback? “This made creativity feel accessible, even for those who don’t think of themselves as creative.” That’s because they experienced the behavior shift firsthand, not just learned about it theoretically.
But here’s the key: those experiments were designed to be repeatable.
The group leaders could (and shared that they were going to) run variations of those exercises in their own team meetings the following week. No special facilitation required. No elaborate setup. Just practice.
The Book as Your Innovation System
This is exactly why I structured Innovation at Work around 52 micro-experiments, not 5 big workshops.
Each experiment takes 5-20 minutes. Each targets a specific innovation barrier. And each is designed to be integrated into your existing team rhythm—weekly meetings, sprint retrospectives, project kickoffs.
Example: After a workshop on breaking down silos—or even without one—try Experiment #11 (Switch Seats, Switch Minds) for 15 minutes in your next team meeting. Have people trade roles—they might literally sit in a different colleague’s seat—and share one perspective that person might have on the current challenge.
The engineer speaks like the user, the PM thinks like the designer, the marketer responds like the developer. Everyone stays in character for 10 minutes while discussing a current challenge.
Simple? Yes. But when you do it weekly, you systematically build the muscle of perspective-taking—which is what actually breaks down silos.
Building Capability, Not Just Inspiration
The real transformation happens when innovation becomes automatic—when your team doesn’t need a special workshop to think creatively, they just do it naturally because they’ve practiced the behaviors hundreds of times.
That’s what systematic micro-experiments create: innovation capability, not innovation theater.
My Create the Impossible™ framework—Play Hard, Make Crap, Learn Fast—isn’t something you do once in a workshop. It’s a practice you embed into how your team operates daily.
The Path Forward
If you’ve invested in workshops that didn’t stick, it’s not your fault. The model itself is flawed.
The solution isn’t to stop doing innovation training—it’s to make sure one-time events are backed by ongoing practice.
That’s what Innovation at Work gives you: a systematic way to build innovation capability through 52 short, repeatable experiments your team can integrate into their existing workflow.
Whether you’re reinforcing a powerful workshop experience or building capability from the ground up, consistent practice creates lasting change.
Ready to move from inspiration to capability? Join the book waitlist to get early access to all 52 experiments, plus implementation guides for embedding them into your team’s rhythm.
Next week, I’ll share the case study of how 125 analytical project managers became comfortable with creative experimentation in 45 minutes—and why their analytical mindset was actually an advantage, not a barrier.
For organizations ready for comprehensive innovation transformation—including keynote presentations, strategic workshops, leadership development programs, and long-term culture change initiatives—let’s explore how to turn inspiration into lasting capability through expert guidance and systematic implementation: Contact Melissa
