A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about innovation. It’s a topic that comes up all the time in my work – usually framed as a desire for better ideas, more initiative, more strategic thinking. All good things.
But as I’ve been sitting with recent conversations and examples clients are bringing me, I keep coming back to something more foundational.
I’ve been thinking about accidents.
Not the big dramatic kind. The smaller ones where ideas don’t quite land. The idea that flops. The suggestion that hangs in the air for a second too long and then quietly disappears.
The moments that look, at first, like something went wrong.
And yet, those moments are often where something interesting is trying to begin.
We tend to summarize innovation stories as “happy accidents,” but that skips the part that actually matters. The Kellogg brothers didn’t just stumble into Corn Flakes – they noticed something unexpected and stayed with it long enough to turn it into something useful. Post-it Notes followed a similar path. What started as a failed adhesive only became valuable because someone looked at it differently and kept going.
The accident wasn’t the breakthrough. The response to it was.
And that’s the piece I think gets missed when leaders talk about wanting more innovation.
Innovation rarely shows up as a fully formed idea. It arrives incomplete, a little off, sometimes weird. At that moment, there’s a quiet decision to make: do we dismiss it, or do we get curious?
That decision is shaped by the environment.
In many organizations, there’s an unspoken expectation that ideas should make sense quickly and that you should be able to explain why something will work before you’ve had the chance to explore it. So people refine too early, share the safer version, or hold back altogether.
From the outside, it can look like a lack of creativity. More often, it’s a lack of safety.
I see this tension all the time. Leaders genuinely want new thinking – and then, without meaning to, create conditions where people feel like they’re being evaluated instead of explored.
But innovation doesn’t come from getting it right the first time. It comes from staying with something long enough to figure out what it could become.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff describes this in Tiny Experiments – treating progress as a series of small, curiosity-driven tests instead of pass/fail outcomes. When everything is pass/fail, people aim to pass. When something is an experiment, people pay attention to what they’re learning.
The leaders I see building innovative teams aren’t just encouraging ideas, they’re creating space for those ideas to develop. They give people room to test before certainty. They stay curious a little longer. They make it safer to say, “I’m not sure yet, but there might be something here.”
So as I keep thinking about innovation, I’m adding one more condition to my list:
Create safety for experiments.
Because if people don’t feel safe being a little wrong, they won’t stay in the work long enough to discover something right.
If this is something you’re wrestling with on your team—how to create more space for new thinking without losing focus—I’d love to talk. This is exactly the kind of work I’m doing with leadership teams right now.
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