How leaders push for real systemic change (and what happens when you don’t)

Organizations demand creativity and innovation, yet their work environments often stifle both. Employees are buried under meetings, short deadlines, and constant demands, leaving no time for deep thinking. Leaders talk about innovation but fail to make space for it in daily operations. True innovation requires time, freedom, and a culture that supports exploration. Without it, organizations fall behind.

The Innovation Breakdown: Saying One Thing, Doing Another

Many workplaces engage in "innovation theater," discussing creativity without fostering it. They prioritize speed and cost over quality, create rigid bureaucracies, and punish mistakes rather than learn from them.

• Example: Healthcare’s Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Nightmare
  Hospitals pushed for digital transformation, but clunky EMR systems slowed down doctors and increased administrative tasks instead of easing the burden, making patient care less efficient. The intent was innovation, but the execution failed by ignoring frontline needs.

How to Build a Culture That Supports Innovation

Organizations must change their structure, not just their rhetoric, to make innovation real. Here’s how:

• Protect Thinking Time: Innovation requires uninterrupted time for deep work. Cutting unnecessary meetings and administrative burdens allows employees to think and create.
  Example: Finland’s Education System
  By reducing classroom hours and eliminating excessive testing, Finland gives teachers time to plan, collaborate, and innovate—leading to higher student achievement.

• Normalize Questions and Challenges: Employees must feel safe to challenge assumptions and ask, “What are we missing?” Example: Trauma-Informed Child Welfare
  Agencies that encourage social workers to question punitive approaches have shifted from removing children from homes to family preservation models, leading to better long-term outcomes.

• Redefine Failure as Learning: Mistakes shouldn’t be punished but treated as essential steps toward progress. By learning from our failures, we can prepare for future success.
  Example: NASA’s Apollo Program 

NASA embraced rigorous post-mission debriefs, ultimately enabling the Apollo 11 moon landing. By contrast, the Challenger disaster happened because engineers’ concerns were ignored.

• Encourage Cross-Functional Collaboration: Innovation happens when different perspectives come together.
  Example: Mayo Clinic’s Team-Based Model
  The Mayo Clinic pioneered team-based medicine, where doctors, nurses, and researchers collaborate across disciplines—leading to better patient outcomes and more innovative solutions.

The Cost of Failing to Make Room for Innovation: Ignoring innovation isn’t neutral—it has real consequences. It is common to fail to consider these costs because they are, by definition, outside of the operational paradigm systems operate within.
Example: No Child Left Behind’s Unintended Consequences
A push for accountability in U.S. schools led to an overemphasis on standardized testing, discouraging creative teaching and harming student engagement. Other consequences include:

• Missed opportunities: Healthcare’s slow adaptation to telehealth before COVID-19 left many scrambling.

• Loss of competitive edge: The U.S. military initially resisted cyber warfare, allowing adversaries to advance first.

• AI threats: Systems prioritizing automation over human insight risk eliminating creativity.

Innovation Requires Action, Not Just Words

“Leadership is action, not position.” – Donald McGannon

Leaders must do more than demand innovation—create conditions for it. Leaders need to adopt a proactive stance whereby they can gain the skills to support teams, push for more creativity, and manage the interactions within and outside their teams that promote positive change. Doing so will develop positive solutions for the problems that plague systems the most. 

• Invest in Prevention: Kaiser Permanente’s proactive healthcare model has reduced hospital readmissions by focusing on prevention rather than waiting for patients to get sick. 

• Empower Hands-On Learning: Schools using Project-Based Learning (PBL) see increased student engagement and problem-solving skills. Experiment with New Approaches: Cities testing guaranteed income models are seeing promising results in poverty reduction.

Innovation doesn’t happen in rushed, overloaded environments. Organizations that don’t make space for creativity will stagnate. However, those who embrace structured experimentation will lead the future, opening up a world of possibilities and potential success.

It’s time to stop talking about innovation and start making room for it. Let's take action and create the conditions for innovation to thrive in our organizations.