You keep waiting for innovation to come from the bold ones:
So you look outside for it. You study the startups. You wonder why your own organisation, full of capable people, feels so slow to produce anything genuinely new. And you conclude that your team just isn't very innovative.
I want to challenge that, because it's costing you more than you think.
The innovation you're looking for is almost certainly already inside your building.
Sitting with someone who has a half-formed idea they haven't said out loud. And the reason they haven't said it isn't that they lack ideas. It's that somewhere along the way, your company taught them it isn't safe to offer one before it's fully baked.
Think about how most organisations actually respond to a rough, early-stage idea:
The idea dies in its first thirty seconds, and the person who offered it learns the lesson: don't bring the messy version, it's not worth the exposure.
But the messy version is the only version any idea ever starts as. There is no other kind.
So when you make it unsafe to say the half-formed thing, you don't get better-formed ideas. You get silence. And silence looks exactly like a team that isn't innovative, which is why so many leaders misdiagnose it.
I had this sharpened for me by Kaihan Krippendorff on the podcast this week. He's the founder of Outthinker and one of Thinkers50's top 20 management thinkers, and he'd gone looking for where big innovations actually come from.
He looked at the 30 most transformative innovations of the last 30 years. The internet. Email. DNA sequencing. Advances in solar. Around 70% of them were conceived by employees inside established companies. Not by founders. Not in a garage.
From people inside organisations exactly like yours.
We tell the garage-founder story anyway, Kaihan said, because it's a great story, not because it's a true one.
And that story does real damage, because if the only version of innovation we celebrate is quit, disrupt, go it alone, then most people quietly write themselves out of the conversation. They decide innovation is something other people do, and they stop offering.
The fix is smaller and harder than a strategy.
It's whether it's safe, in your company, to say a half-baked idea out loud and not get shot down. Kaihan pointed to the difference between feeling safe to raise a problem and feeling safe to propose an unfinished solution.
Most companies have neither.
The ones that innovate from within protect that fragile early moment, the thirty seconds where an idea is still ugly, on purpose.
So the question isn't how do I make my people more innovative. They already are. The question is what happens in your building in the first thirty seconds after someone offers something rough.
If the honest answer is that it gets picked apart, you've found the problem. And it isn't them.
🎬 Watch the episode with Kaihan Krippendorff here
Andrea
One idea a week on how top CEOs lead when the stakes are high, from inside rooms most people never enter. Free, and you can leave any time.