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!

Plus a death in the family has thrown an added curveball into the mix. I’ll be out of state for the funeral for a few days.

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

Hey there, innovation champions!

Imagine that your team just completed another innovation session. Everyone’s energized, the walls are covered with ideas, and there’s genuine excitement about breakthrough possibilities.

Three months later? The same bottlenecks persist. The same communication gaps slow progress. The brilliant insights from that session never made it into daily operations.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most innovation work fails not because the ideas are bad, but because it focuses on generating solutions instead of removing the barriers that prevent teams from innovating naturally.

This is the multi-billion dollar innovation theater problem—initiatives that create the feeling of progress while the real innovation killers remain completely untouched.

The Innovation Paradox That’s Killing Your Competitive Edge

The more pressure organizations put on “innovation,” the less actual innovation happens.

Why? When stakes feel highest, teams default to their safest behaviors. They stick to proven processes, avoid “risky” ideas, and create busy work that feels innovative but sidesteps the psychological risk-taking that real breakthroughs require.

According to Gallup’s research, disengaged employees cost the global economy $438 billion in lost productivity annually. But the innovation penalty runs deeper—breakthrough insights that never get implemented, communication gaps that kill cross-functional solutions, and talented employees who disengage because their creative contributions can’t break through systematic barriers.

The Real Innovation Killers (And They’re Not What You Think)

Through my work with teams across tech companies, I’ve identified the four predictable patterns that kill breakthrough thinking before it can emerge:

The Perfectionism Trap: Teams delay sharing ideas until they’re “perfect,” missing market windows while competitors ship “good enough” solutions and iterate based on real feedback.

The Communication Gap: Functional expertise creates tunnel vision. Engineers can’t communicate with designers. Product teams can’t understand research insights. Brilliant ideas die in translation between departments.

Analysis Paralysis: Teams generate lots of ideas but lack systematic methods for rapid testing, leading to endless debate about theoretical solutions instead of real-world validation.

Creative Invisibility: Organizations hire creative, innovative people—then bury their breakthrough thinking under processes designed for predictable work.

What Actually Works: The Meta Breakthrough

Let me share a real example from my communication work that reveals how innovation really happens. A research manager at Meta told me, “We don’t have time for games.” Her team was brilliant—they’d developed UX insights that could transform product development. But their breakthrough insights where gathering dust instead of having the impact they deserved.

The problem wasn’t lack of innovation. It was communication barriers that made innovation invisible.

I started by teaching them “yes, and…” principles—how to validate others’ ideas rather than instantly dismissing them. We practiced finding the positive within negative feedback and explored exercises in seeing multiple sides of complex issues. The perspective-taking and translation skills were just one piece of a comprehensive “communicating for influence” program.

The shift was immediate. After our first session together, the team and manager could already see the value. They began changing their behaviors, developing a shared language for collaboration, and finding new ways to communicate technical insights in terms of product impact.

That manager started recommending me to her colleagues before we’d even finished the pilot program. The transformation scaled across multiple teams over six months—not because we generated new ideas, but because we systematically removed the specific barriers preventing breakthrough thinking from spreading throughout the organization.

The Science Behind Systematic Creativity

Micro-interventions work where elaborate programs struggle for a neurological reason: perfectionism activates the brain’s threat-detection system, shutting down the networks responsible for creative thinking.

When teams operate in what neuroscientists call “explore mode”—the mental state we naturally enter during structured play—they generate significantly more novel solutions and make unexpected connections between previously unrelated concepts.

The breakthrough happens when you systematically remove friction rather than just adding more brainstorming sessions.

Your Innovation Reality Check

Ask yourself these questions about your team’s creative capacity:

• How often do your best ideas actually make it into implementation?
• Are brilliant insights trapped in individual expertise instead of becoming organizational knowledge?
• When facing new challenges, do people suggest experiments or default to familiar approaches?
• How effectively do breakthrough insights travel between departments and functions?

If you’re honest, most teams have far more creative capacity than they can access through current systems. The problem isn’t idea generation—it’s systematic barrier removal.

What’s Coming Next

Real innovation culture happens when you combine the right systematic practices with comprehensive culture change. Neither quick fixes nor standalone workshops create lasting transformation—but the right strategic approach can unlock breakthrough thinking across entire organizations.

Over the next four weeks, I’ll share the framework that helps teams move from innovation theater to systematic breakthrough creation:

• Week 2: The neuroscience of psychological safety and why breakthrough thinking requires permission to explore
• Week 3: Why your brain needs permission to make crap (and how productive failure becomes competitive advantage)
• Week 4: How teams learn fast by turning every failure into competitive intelligence
• Week 5: Putting it all together—the Create the Impossible™ roadmap for systematic innovation

Because here’s the thing: Your team already has way more creative capacity than you might realize. The question isn’t whether innovation is possible—it’s whether you have the strategic method to unlock it consistently.

Ready to transform your team’s innovation capability from theater to systematic competitive advantage? 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 practical tools for unlocking creative capacity. ​Join the early access list​ for behind-the-scenes insights and preview content.

Click to watch (10:27) or scroll down to read more

Hey there, innovation champions!

When I was a kid, much as I dreaded the end of summer freedom, I confess I loved the fresh start feeling of “back to school.” New binder, new backpack, new pencils and erasers.

With the unknown territory of a new teacher and classroom, it was almost as if I could walk into school as a new me!

Who doesn’t love that feeling? A reboot. A refresh. Like clearing cache or rebooting your computer to see things with new eyes, like a beginner again.

September gives us a great opportunity to mindfully adopt that beginner’s mindset, just like a kid going back to school. But what if we could aim to do so continuously? What if we could create organizations that learn and adapt as naturally as a child discovering something for the first time?

The Power of Beginner’s Mind

You know that feeling when you watch a child encounter something for the first time? They don’t bring preconceived notions about what’s possible or impossible. They just explore, ask questions, and try things.

As adults, especially in our professional lives, we accumulate expertise—which is valuable. But sometimes that expertise becomes a cage. We know so much about what shouldn’t work that we can’t see what might.

That’s why the back-to-school mindset is so powerful. It’s not about becoming naive—it’s about temporarily setting aside what we know to discover what we don’t know we don’t know.

Creating a Learning Organization Through Play, Imperfection, and Rapid Learning

Here’s where my Create the Impossible™ framework comes in. The three principles—Play Hard, Make Crap, Learn Fast—are essentially a systematic way to cultivate that beginner’s mindset at scale.

Play Hard: The Foundation of Learning

In a learning organization, play isn’t frivolous—it’s foundational. When we approach challenges with curiosity and a sense of exploration, we open ourselves to possibilities we might otherwise miss.

Play reduces our fear of being wrong, which is crucial for learning. Think about it: kids learn language by babbling nonsense until it gradually becomes coherent. They don’t wait until they can speak perfectly before they start trying.

The same principle applies to innovation. When teams give themselves permission to experiment without the pressure of immediate perfection, they discover solutions they never would have found through analysis alone.

Make Crap: Embracing Productive Imperfection

This principle flies in the face of most organizational cultures, which demand excellence from the start. But learning organizations understand something counterintuitive: the fastest path to excellence often runs through deliberate imperfection.

When we give ourselves permission to create rough drafts, to build prototypes that don’t work quite right, to test ideas before they’re fully formed, we accelerate the learning process exponentially.

It’s like that first day of school when you’re still figuring out where everything is. You’re not expected to navigate perfectly—you’re expected to learn as you go.

Learn Fast: Turning Every Experience into Growth

The third principle is about creating rapid feedback loops. In a true learning organization, every experiment—successful or not—becomes valuable data.

This means celebrating the insights that come from “failures” just as much as we celebrate successes. It means asking “What did we learn?” instead of “Who’s to blame?” It means treating setbacks as stepping stones rather than roadblocks.

The Continuous September Mindset

Imagine if your organization could capture that back-to-school energy not just once a year, but continuously. Where teams approach each project with fresh eyes, where it’s safe to try new approaches, where learning happens as naturally as breathing.

This isn’t about abandoning expertise or throwing caution to the wind. It’s about creating space for both mastery and discovery to coexist.

Your Back-to-School Challenge

As we embrace this season of fresh starts, I challenge you to identify one area where your expertise might be limiting your vision. Where could you benefit from approaching an old problem with fresh eyes?

Maybe it’s a product feature that’s been “impossible” to implement. Maybe it’s a team dynamic that’s been stuck in patterns. Maybe it’s a process that’s always been done “this way.”

Whatever it is, try approaching it with the curiosity of a first-grader. Ask questions that might seem obvious. Suggest ideas that might seem silly. Create something imperfect just to see what happens.

Because the most successful organizations aren’t just good at what they know—they’re excellent at learning what they don’t know yet.

And that learning never ends. Every day can be the first day of school when you’re committed to Creating the Impossible™.

What will you discover when you give yourself permission to be a beginner again?

I’d love to hear from you: What’s one area where your expertise might be limiting your perspective? Click here to let me know!

Senior Leaders: Ready to turn your team’s knowledge into a competitive advantage through continuous learning? Book a complimentary Innovation Strategy Session and let’s explore how the Create the Impossible™ framework can transform your organization into a learning powerhouse.

Click to watch (14:44) or scroll down to read more

Hey there, innovation champions!

This past week, I had the incredible opportunity to step inside what might be the most effective innovation lab I’ve ever witnessed.

No, I wasn’t at Google’s X Lab or Meta’s Reality Labs. I wasn’t surrounded by cutting-edge technology or million-dollar prototypes.

I was sitting in a theater.

Specifically, I was at Theatreworks’ New Works Festival here in Silicon Valley—an annual showcase where playwrights test their works-in-progress with live audiences over the course of a week and a half. And what I witnessed there taught me more about real innovation than many corporate innovation sessions you may have attended.

Picture this: A bare stage. Just chairs, microphones, and music stands. No sets, no costumes—just phenomenal actors with scripts they’d received that very day, performing after maybe four rehearsals total.

Before each show, the audience was prepared: “The cast just got these scripts today. They’ve had minimal rehearsal time. If they restart a song or stumble, give them grace. This is all about the process.”

And here’s the kicker—QR codes in every program led to custom feedback forms with three specific questions for each play. Not generic surveys. Targeted questions crafted by the artists themselves to get exactly the feedback they needed to improve.

The Innovation Magic in Action

What happened next was pure innovation theater. Between the first and second performances, audiences watched plays transform in real-time:

• Ten minutes trimmed from one show based on pacing feedback
• The sound of bells—mentioned in opening dialogue—brought to life by the cast’s voices in another production
• Even a typo in the festival program materials was woven into the actual dialogue of one play, creating one of the biggest laughs of the night

This wasn’t just creativity—this was systematic innovation using the exact principles that drive breakthrough thinking in tech. And it maps perfectly to my Create the Impossible™ framework.

Play Hard: Embracing Experimentation with Joy

The first principle of Create the Impossible™ is Play Hard—and these theater artists were masters of it. They approached their work with the kind of fearless experimentation that most tech teams only dream of.

Think about it: These performers were willing to get on stage with minimal preparation, knowing they might stumble, restart, or completely bomb a scene. But instead of paralysis, there was excitement. They were playing at the highest level, treating each performance as an adventure rather than a test.

How often do we see that attitude in corporate innovation labs? Usually, teams are so focused on looking professional and avoiding mistakes that they never truly experiment. They create “safe” prototypes that won’t embarrass anyone—and consequently, won’t surprise anyone either.

The theater artists reminded me that real innovation requires us to get comfortable with public imperfection. Their willingness to “fail” in front of an audience is exactly the mindset that leads to breakthrough discoveries.

Make Crap: The Power of Productive Imperfection

The second principle, Make Crap, was beautifully demonstrated in the festival’s entire structure. These weren’t polished, final productions—they were intentionally rough drafts brought to life.

The audience was explicitly told these were works-in-progress. Everyone understood they were witnessing creative “crap” in the best possible sense—early iterations that needed refinement but contained the seeds of something extraordinary.

This is where most innovation initiatives fail. We wait until our ideas are “good enough” to show anyone. We polish and perfect in isolation instead of getting feedback early when it can actually shape the direction of our work.

The playwrights understood something crucial: you can’t know if a joke will land, if a song will move people, or if a plot twist will surprise audiences until you put it in front of real people. No amount of theoretical analysis can replace that lived feedback.

In tech terms, they were running the ultimate minimum viable product tests, gathering user feedback, and iterating rapidly based on real data rather than assumptions.

Learn Fast: Systematic Feedback for Rapid Improvement

The third principle, Learn Fast, was perhaps the most sophisticated element of the entire festival. This wasn’t random feedback collection—it was strategic, targeted learning designed for maximum impact.

Each play had exactly three questions. Not ten, not twenty—three. The questions were different for each production and crafted specifically to gather the insights that particular piece needed most. And here’s the brilliant part: the artists would see every piece of feedback, so respondents were coached to be constructive and kind.

This approach solved one of the biggest challenges in corporate innovation: feedback overload and irrelevance. Instead of drowning in generic survey responses, the artists got precisely the information they needed to make meaningful improvements between performances.

The learning cycles were incredibly tight—sometimes less than 48 hours between performances. Changes were implemented immediately, tested with the next audience, and refined again if needed. This is the kind of rapid iteration that separates truly innovative organizations from those that just talk about innovation.

The Secret Ingredient: Psychological Safety

What made all of this possible wasn’t just the framework—it was the environment. The festival had created what psychologist Amy Edmondson calls “psychological safety” at the highest level.

Audiences were primed to be supportive. Mistakes were normalized. The focus was entirely on learning and improvement rather than judgment or evaluation. Everyone—artists and audience members—understood they were participating in a collaborative creative process.

This is the missing piece in most corporate innovation efforts. We talk about wanting breakthrough ideas, but we create environments where people are afraid to truly experiment. We say we want innovation, but we punish the “failures” that are essential to the creative process.

Your Innovation Challenge

Here’s what I want you to try this week: Pick one project or challenge your team is working on and run it through the theater innovation model.

First, Play Hard: What would you attempt if you knew it was okay to “restart the song” if things went wrong? What experiment would you run if failure was expected and celebrated rather than feared?

Second, Make Crap: Instead of waiting until your idea is polished, share the roughest possible version with a real user or stakeholder. Be explicit that this is a work-in-progress and you’re seeking specific feedback.

Finally, Learn Fast: Don’t ask for general feedback. Craft 2-3 specific questions that will give you exactly the insights you need to improve. Make sure the person giving feedback knows their input will directly influence the next iteration.

Most importantly, create the psychological safety that makes all of this possible. Let your team know that the goal isn’t perfection—it’s learning and rapid improvement.

The theater artists reminded me that innovation isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about having the courage to ask questions in public, learn from the responses, and iterate rapidly based on what you discover.

That’s how you Create the Impossible™—not in isolation, but in collaboration with the very people you’re trying to serve.

Stay curious, stay experimental, and keep creating the impossible!

I’d love to hear about your own innovation experiments. What would you test if you knew it was safe to “restart the song”? Click here to let me know!

Senior Leaders: Ready to create an innovation environment where your team feels safe to experiment boldly? Let’s explore how to build the psychological safety and rapid feedback systems that drive breakthrough thinking. Book a complimentary Innovation Strategy Session—we’ll design a custom approach that fits your organization’s unique culture and challenges.

Click to watch (12:08) or scroll down to read more

Hey there, innovation champions!

Have you ever noticed how some of your best ideas come when you’re under pressure? Today I want to share a story that completely changed how I think about deadlines and creativity—and how you can harness the power of the pressure cooker to fuel innovation in your tech teams.

The Ten-Minute Song Challenge

The last time I went to music camp, I took a songwriting class. At one point, the instructor gave us a prompt and sent us off for ten minutes to write a song. We were on the hook to share whatever we had when the ten minutes were up.

“Ten minutes?” we all cried. “That’s crazy!”

And it was. Completely nuts. But here’s the thing: everyone actually came back with something.

Now, I won’t say that the verses I wrote were anything worth sharing publicly, but they were more than I’d created in a long time. And without that deadline—and, critically important, the psychological safety that had been established in the group—I guarantee most of us would have sat on that prompt for weeks. Months. Maybe forever without ever doing a thing.

The time pressure got us started.

The Two Essential Parts of Innovation

In creativity and innovation, much of the work comes down to two essential parts: starting and iterating.

In my book, The Creative Sandbox Way™, I talk about ten guideposts that lead to creative flow. Number five is “Just start. Anywhere.” Deadlines can help get you past the starting friction that can keep you stuck. From there, it’s a matter of iterating.

But here’s what I’ve learned working with tech teams: the pressure cooker environment isn’t just about getting started—it’s about creating the optimal conditions for breakthrough thinking.

When Pressure Becomes Your Innovation Ally

Think about it. How many times have you seen your team produce their most creative solutions in the final sprint before a product launch? Or watched a developer come up with an elegant workaround when the original approach hits a wall at 2 AM?

That’s not accident. That’s the pressure cooker effect in action.

When we’re under time pressure, three magical things happen:

First, perfectionism gets pushed aside. There’s no time to endlessly polish that first draft or debate every edge case. You have to move forward with what you have.

Second, overthinking gets short-circuited. You can’t spend three hours analyzing the pros and cons of every approach. You have to trust your instincts and dive in.

Third, collaboration accelerates. Suddenly, everyone’s ego takes a back seat to getting the job done. Barriers between departments dissolve. People start saying “yes, and…” instead of “but what if…”

The Create the Impossible™ Framework Under Pressure

This is where my Create the Impossible™ framework becomes absolutely essential. The three steps—Play Hard, Make Crap, and Learn Fast—are specifically designed to thrive under pressure.

Play Hard means approaching even high-stakes challenges with curiosity and joy. When your team knows they have permission to be playful, even under deadline pressure, innovation flows more freely.

Make Crap is about embracing imperfection when time is tight. Instead of getting paralyzed by the pressure to deliver something perfect, you give yourself permission to create something good enough to iterate on.

Learn Fast becomes your superpower when every moment counts. You’re not learning for learning’s sake—you’re learning to immediately apply and improve.

The Psychological Safety Factor

But here’s the crucial piece that made my music camp experience work—and what makes the difference between pressure that creates innovation and pressure that creates panic: psychological safety.

The instructor had spent the entire week building trust. We knew our “crappy” ten-minute songs wouldn’t be judged harshly. We knew everyone was in the same boat. We knew the purpose was exploration, not perfection.

Without psychological safety, deadlines create stress, not creativity.

With psychological safety, deadlines become launching pads for innovation.

Creating Your Own Innovation Pressure Cooker

So how do you create this environment for your tech teams? Here are three strategies I’ve seen work beautifully:

Strategy 1: Set Micro-Deadlines with Purpose

Instead of just having one massive project deadline, break it into smaller sprints with specific creative challenges. Give your team 30 minutes to brainstorm ten completely different approaches to a problem. Or 2 hours to build the ugliest possible prototype that demonstrates your core concept.

The key is making the deadline short enough that perfectionism doesn’t have time to kick in, but purposeful enough that the pressure drives focus.

Strategy 2: Establish Creative Ground Rules

Before the pressure cooker session begins, establish what I call “Creative Sandbox Rules.” Remind everyone that in this space, there is no wrong. Wild ideas are welcome. Building on others’ ideas is encouraged. And most importantly, volume matters more than polish.

Strategy 3: Celebrate the Iterations

At the end of each pressure cooker session, celebrate what was created—not for being perfect, but for existing. Then immediately move into iteration mode. What did we learn? What surprised us? What wants to be explored further?

This builds the learning mindset that makes future pressure cooker sessions even more productive.

The Innovation Paradox

Here’s the beautiful paradox: when you remove the pressure to create something perfect, you create the perfect conditions for innovation.

When you give teams permission to make crap under pressure, they often create gold.

When you combine tight deadlines with psychological safety and clear creative principles, you transform time constraints from creativity killers into innovation accelerators.

Your Challenge This Week

So here’s my challenge for you: Choose one project your team is working on and create a mini pressure cooker experience. Give them a tight deadline for one specific creative challenge within that project. Establish psychological safety. Apply the Create the Impossible™ framework. And see what emerges.

Remember, innovation in the pressure cooker isn’t about working faster—it’s about working with more focus, more trust, and more willingness to start before you’re ready.

The next time your team faces a tight deadline, don’t see it as a creativity killer. See it as an innovation opportunity. Because sometimes, the pressure cooker is exactly what your breakthrough idea has been waiting for.

Are you ready to turn your next deadline into an innovation launchpad?

Stay curious, stay playful, and keep creating the impossible!

I’d love to hear from you: What’s one time when pressure led to your most creative solution? Click here to let me know!

Senior Leaders: Ready to transform how your team approaches innovation under pressure? Book a complimentary Innovation Strategy Session and let’s explore how the Create the Impossible™ Framework can turn your deadlines into competitive advantages