Hey there, innovation champions!
Most organizations say the right things about innovation.
They write it into their values. They announce it in all-hands meetings. They fund initiatives, run workshops, and measure engagement scores.
And then they wonder why nothing sticks.
The Party Nobody Showed Up To
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a pattern I keep noticing — in conversations with HR leaders, in research calls with team managers, in the questions that come up after my sessions.
It goes something like this: an organization surveys its employees about what they want. “Growth opportunities” and “learning and development” come back near the top of the list every time. So leadership designs programming. They clear calendar time. They do everything right.
And then people don’t show up. Or they show up, cross their arms, and wait to leave.
Not because they lied on the survey. Not because they’re ungrateful. But because there’s a gap between what people say they want in the abstract and what they’re willing to reach for when reaching feels risky.
One leader I spoke with recently described it perfectly. Her team members were waiting, she said, to be invited to the party. Even though they were the party.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that.
The Gap Between Aspiration and Structure
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: most organizations don’t have an innovation problem. They have a permission problem dressed up as an innovation problem.
They invest in creativity workshops, learning platforms, hackathons, and speaker series. They call themselves learning organizations. They post values on the wall about bold moves and risk-taking.
But structurally? They haven’t built what any of it actually requires.
Psychological safety — the real kind, not the kind that lives in a slide deck — is the soil that innovation grows in. And most teams are trying to plant seeds in concrete.
When I ask leaders what they’d change with a magic wand, the answers almost never involve tools or processes. They involve trust. They involve people feeling safe enough to say the half-formed thing. To try the thing that might not work. To question the thing everyone else is treating as settled.
The leaders who already have that? They can barely explain how they built it. It happened through a hundred small, consistent choices over time. It wasn’t a program. It wasn’t an offsite. It was a practice.
The Conversations That Don’t Happen in Boardrooms
What I find most interesting is the contrast between the official conversation about innovation — the polished case studies, the keynote narratives, the metrics that made it into the annual report — and the real one.
The real conversation happens in the hallway after the session ends. It happens when a leader quietly admits that their team’s “audacious goals” initiative terrified people because no one actually knew what would happen if they failed. It happens when someone says, almost in passing, “We want people to take smart risks, but we haven’t done the work to make it safe to take any risk.”
Those are the conversations I keep wanting to have. At scale. On the record.
Because I think there’s something important in the gap between what organizations perform around innovation and what’s actually happening inside them. And I think that gap is where the most useful, most honest, most generative thinking lives.
Something I’m Working On
I’ve been building toward something. A space for exactly these conversations — candid, peer-level, thoughtful exchanges with senior leaders who are willing to talk about the messy middle of meaningful change.
Not the polished success story. The thinking that happened before it. The misjudgments, the course corrections, the moments when the trusted playbook fell short.
The project is called The Impossible Conversations. You can see what I’m building here.
If you’re a senior leader who’s led through real ambiguity — not just growth, but genuine uncertainty — and you’re open to a reflective, unscripted conversation, there’s a guest interest form on that page. I’d love to hear from you.
More soon.
In the meantime, if you’re wrestling with why your organization’s innovation efforts aren’t landing the way you hoped, I’d love to think through it with you. Book a complimentary 30-minute Innovation Strategy Session here — no pitch, just a real conversation.
Or just hit reply and tell me: have you ever been in an organization where bold moves were the stated value, but the unwritten rule was something different? I read every response.
