why do I do this?

Once upon a time, a corporate innovator was having trouble bringing innovation into their organization.

No matter how hard they tried to guide the culture of the organization to be more innovative or convince leadership to invest both time and money into innovative new products, service and businesses, its seemed that no matter what effort was made, they were never able to go beyond “innovation theater.”

• Innovation = made your company sound cooler than it was, to draw new hires
• Innovation = gave your company more cachet in the industry
• Innovation = let your leadership buy and play with all of the cool toys

Innovation was a buzzword, a marketing term. Nothing more. The innovator was frustrated and said, to no one in particular:

“Why do I do this? Maybe if I stopped banging my head against the wall, its would feel better.”

This is the reality in most human-driven organizations. Very few humans like change. Very few humans are not lazy. Very few humans want to break things that are not broken to see if they can do things better. Most humans are creatures of inertia and habits — they want to keep doing what they are doing since they have been doing it this way up until now, and it seems to be working. So far. So why rock the boat?

This is why: the boat-rockers are the ones who can create massively beneficial things for the human race. Do you think Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Marie Curie, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk were creatures of inertia? On the contrary, their inventions greatly advanced the human race forward. They were boat-rockers.

But in your typical organization — boat-rockers are few and far between. You are probably a boat-rocker. But how do you help others to be boat-rockers too? How do you get them to move fast and break things? They need a few things:

• they need permission: they need to know that leadership wants them to rock the boat — an executive sponsor who has stepped up or is ready to step up
• They need psychological safety — they need to know that if they reveal their ideas to others that they will not be ridiculed or marginalized — they need to know that no matter how far-fetched the idea is — or how…