How many times have you proposed a new idea and been told, “We can’t do that?” Probably quite a few. My favorite memory of being told, “We can’t do that,” happened many years ago while working with a client in the publishing industry:
Client: We can’t do that.
Me: Why?
Client: Because we already tried it, and it didn’t work.
Me: When did you try it?
Client: 1972
Me: Well, things certainly haven’t changed since 1972, so you’re right, we definitely shouldn’t try again.
I can only assume they appreciated my sarcasm as much as the idea because we eventually did try the idea, and, 30+ years later, it did work. But the client never would have enjoyed that success if my team and I had not seen through “we can’t do that” and helped them admit (confess) what they really meant.
Quick acknowledgment
Yes, sometimes “We can’t do that” is true. Laws and regulations define what can and can’t be done. But they are rarely as binary as people make them out to be. In those gray areas, the lie of “we can’t do that” obscures the truth of won’t, not able to, and don’t care.
“I won’t do it.”
When you hear “can’t,” it usually means “won’t.” Sometimes, the “won’t” is for a good reason – “I won’t do the dishes tonight because I have an urgent deadline, and if I don’t deliver, my job is at risk.” Sometimes, the “won’t” isn’t for a good reason – “I won’t do the dishes because I don’t want to.” When that’s the case, “won’t” becomes “can’t” in the hope that the person making the request backs off and finds another solution.
For my client, “We can’t do that” actually meant, “I won’t do that because it failed before and, even though that was thirty years ago, I’m afraid it will fail again, and I will be embarrassed, and it may impact my reputation and job security.”
You can’t work with “can’t.” You can work with “won’t.” When someone “won’t” do something, it’s because there’s a barrier, real or perceived. By understanding the barrier, you can work together to understand, remove, or find a way around it.
“I’m not able to do it.”
“Can’t” may also come with unspoken caveats. We can’t do that because we’ve never done it before and are scared. We can’t do that because it is outside the scope of our work. We can’t do that because we don’t know how.
Like “won’t,” you can work with “not able to” to understand the gap between where you are now and where you want to go. If it’s because you’re scared of doing something new, you can have conversations to get smarter about the topic or run small experiments to get real-world learnings. If you’re not able to do something because it’s not within your scope of work, you can expand your scope or work with people who have it in their scope. If you don’t know how, you can talk to people, take classes, and watch videos to learn how.
“I don’t care.”
As brave as it is devastating, “we can’t do that” can mean “I don’t care enough to do that.”
Executives rarely admit to not caring, but you see it in their actions. When they say that innovation and growth are important but don’t fund them or pull resources at the first sign of a wobble in the business, they don’t care. If they did care, they would try to find a way to keep investing and supporting the things they say are priorities.
Exploring options, trying, making an effort—that’s the difference between “I won’t do it” and “I don’t care.” “I won’t do that” is overcome through logic and action because the executive is intellectually and practically open to options. “I don’t care” requires someone to change their priorities, beliefs, and self-perception, changes that require major personal, societal, or economic events.
Now it’s your turn to tell the truth
Are you willing to ask the questions to find them?
You were born creative. As an infant, you had to figure many things out—how to get fed or changed, get help or attention, and make a onesie covered in spit-up still look adorable. As you grew older, your creativity grew, too. You drew pictures, wrote stories, played dress-up, and acted out imaginary stories.
Then you went to school, and it was time to be serious. Suddenly, creativity had a time and place. It became an elective or a hobby. Something you did just enough of to be “well-rounded” but not so much that you would be judged irresponsible or impractical.
When you entered the “real world,” your job determined whether you were creative. Advertising, design, marketing, innovation? Creative. Business, medicine, law, engineering? Not creative.
As if Job-title-a-determinant-of-creativity wasn’t silly enough, in 2022, a paper was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology that declared that, based on a meta-analysis of 259 studies (n=79,915), there is a “male advantage in creative performance.”
Somewhere, Don Draper, Pablo Picasso, and Norman Mailer high-fived.
But, as every good researcher (and innovator) knows, the headline is rarely the truth. The truth is that it’s contextual and complicated, and everything from how the original studies collected data to how “creativity” was defined matters.
But that’s not what got reported. It’s also not what people remember when they reference this study (and I have heard more than a few people invoke these findings in the three years since publication).
That is why I was happy to see Fortune report on a new study just published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The study cites findings from a meta-analysis of 753 studies (n=265,762 individuals) that show men and women are equally creative. When “usefulness (of an idea) is explicitly incorporated in creativity assessment,” women’s creativity is “stronger.”
Both studies defined creativity as “the generation of novel and useful ideas.”
However, while the first study focused on how context drives creativity, the second study looked deeper, focusing on two essential elements of creativity: risk-taking and empathy. The authors argued that risk-taking is critical to generating novel ideas, while empathy is essential to developing useful ideas.
Does gender influence creativity?
It can. But even when it does, it doesn’t make one gender more or less creative than the other.
Given “contextual moderators” like country-level culture, industry gender composition, and role status, men tend to follow an “agentic pathway” (creativity via risk-taking), so they are more likely to generate novel ideas.
However, given the same contextual moderators, women follow a “communal pathway” (creativity via empathy), so they are more likely to generate useful ideas.
How you can use this to maximize creativity
Innovation and creativity go hand in hand. Both focus on creating something new (novel) and valuable (useful). So, to maximize innovation within your team or organization, maximize creativity by:
Explicitly incorporate novelty and usefulness in assessment criteria. If you focus only on usefulness, you’ll end up with extremely safe and incremental improvements. If you focus only on novelty, you’ll end up with impractical and useless ideas.
Recruit for risk-taking and empathy. While the manifestation of these two skills tends to fall along gender lines, don’t be sexist and assume that’s always the case. When seeking people to join your team or your brainstorming session, find people who have demonstrated strong risk-taking or empathy-focused behaviors and invite them in.
Always consider the context. Just as “contextual moderators” impact people’s creative pathways, so too does the environment you create. If you want people to take risks, be vulnerable, and exhibit empathy, you must establish a psychologically safe environment first. And that starts with making sure there aren’t any “tokens” (one of a “type”) in the group.
AI is everywhere: in our workplaces, homes, schools, art galleries, concert halls, and even neighborhood coffee shops. We can’t seem to escape it. Some hope it will unlock our full potential and usher in an era of creativity, prosperity, and peace. Others worry it will eventually replace us. While both outcomes are extreme, if you’ve ever used AI to conduct research with synthetic users, the idea of being “replaced” isn’t so wild.
For the past month, I’ve beta-tested Crowdwave, an AI research tool that allows you to create surveys, specify segments of respondents, send the survey to synthetic respondents (AI-generated personas), and get results within minutes.
Sound too good to be true?
Here are the results from my initial test:
150 respondents in 3 niche segments (50 respondents each)
51 questions, including ten open-ended questions requiring short prose responses
1 hour to complete and generate an AI executive summary and full data set of individual responses, enabling further analysis
The Tool is Brilliant
It took just one hour to gather data that traditional survey methods require a month or more to collect, clean, and synthesize. Think of how much time you’ve spent waiting for survey results, checking interim data, and cleaning up messy responses. I certainly did and it made me cry.
The qualitative responses were on-topic, useful, and featured enough quirks to seem somewhat human. I’m pretty sure that has never happened in the history of surveys. Typically, respondents skip open-ended questions or use them to air unrelated opinions.
Every respondent completed the entire survey! There is no need to look for respondents who went too quickly, chose the same option repeatedly, or abandoned the effort altogether. You no longer need to spend hours cleaning data, weeding out partial responses, and hoping you’re left with enough that you can generate statistically significant findings.
The Results are Dangerous
When I presented the results to my client, complete with caveats about AI’s limitations and the tool’s early-stage development, they did what any reasonable person would do – they started making decisions based on the survey results.
STOP!
As humans, we want to solve problems. In business, we are rewarded for solving problems. So, when we see something that looks like a solution, we jump at it.
However, strategic or financially significant decisions should neverrely ona single data source. They are too complex, risky, and costly. And they definitely shouldn’t be made based on fake people’s answers to survey questions!
They’re Also Useful.
Although the synthetic respondents’ data may not be true, it is probably directionally correct because it is based on millions and maybe billions of data points. So, while you shouldn’t make pricing decisions based on data showing that 40% of your target consumers are willing to pay a 30%+ premium for your product, it’s reasonable to believe they may be willing to pay more for your product.
The ability to field an absurdly long survey was also valuable. My client is not unusual in their desire to ask everything they may ever need to know for fear that they won’t have another chance to gather quantitative data (and budgets being what they are, they’re usually right). They often ignore warnings that long surveys lead to abandonment and declining response quality. With AI, we could ask all the questions and then identify the most critical ones for follow-up surveys sent to actual humans.
We Aren’t Being Replaced, We’re Being Spared
AI consumer research won’t replace humans. But it will spare us the drudgery of long surveys filled with useless questions, months of waiting for results, and weeks of data cleaning and analysis. It may just free us up to be creative and spend time with other humans. And that is brilliant.
In 2020, the International Standards Organization, most famous for its Quality Management Systems standard, published ISO 56000, Innovation Management—Fundamentals and Vocabulary. Since then, ISO has released eight additional innovation standards.
But is it possible to create international standards for innovation, or are we killing creativity?
That’s the question that InnoLead founder and CEO Scott Kirsner and I debated over lunch a few weeks ago. Although we had heard of the standards and attended a few webinars, but we had never read them or spoken with corporate innovators about their experiences.
So, we set out to fix that.
Scott convened an all-star panel of innovators from Entergy, Black & Veatch, DFW Airport, Cisco, and a large financial institution to read and discuss two ISO Innovation Standards: ISO 56002, Innovation management – Innovation management systems – Requirements and ISO 56004, Innovation Management Assessment – Guidance.
The conversation was honest, featured a wide range of opinions, and is absolutely worth your time to watch.
Here are my three biggest takeaways.
The Standards are a Good Idea
Innovation doesn’t have the best reputation. It’s frequently treated as a hobby to be pursued when times are good and sometimes as a management boondoggle to justify pursuing pet ideas and taking field trips to fun places.
However, ISO Standards can change how innovation is perceived and supported.
Just as ISO’s Quality Management Standards established a framework for quality, the Innovation Management Standards aim to do the same for innovation. They provide shared fundamentals and a common vocabulary (ISO 56000), requirements for innovation management systems (ISO 56001 and ISO 56002), and guidance for measurement (ISO 56004), intellectual property management (ISO 56005), and partnerships (ISO 56003). By establishing these standards, organizations can transition innovation from a vague “trust me” proposition to a structured, best-practice approach.
The Documents are Dangerous
However, there’s a caveat: a little knowledge can be dangerous. The two standards I reviewed were dense and complex, totaling 56 pages, and they’re among the shortest in the series. Packed with terminology and suggestions, they can overwhelm experienced practitioners and mislead novices into thinking they have How To Guide for success.
Innovation is contextual. Its strategies, priorities, and metrics must align with the broader organizational goals. Using the standards as a mere checklist is more likely to lead to wasted time and effort building the “perfect” innovation management system while management grows increasingly frustrated by your lack of results.
The Most Important Stuff is Missing
Innovation is contextual, but there are still non-negotiables:
Leadership commitment AND active involvement: Innovation isn’t an idea problem. It’s a leadership problem. If leadership delegates innovation, fails to engage in the work, and won’t allocate required resources, you’re efforts are doomed to fail.
Adjacent and Radical Innovations require dedicated teams: Operations and innovation are fundamentally different. The former occurs in a context of known knowns and unknowns, where experience and expertise rule the day. The latter is a world of unknown unknowns, where curiosity, creativity, and experimentation are required. It is not reasonable to ask someone to live in both worlds simultaneously.
Innovation must not be a silo: Innovation cannot exist in a silo. Links must be maintained with the core business, as its performance directly impacts available resources and influences the direction of innovation initiatives.
These essential elements are mentioned in the standards but are not clearly identified. Their omission increases the risk of further innovation failures.
Something is better than nothing
The standards aren’t perfect. But one of the core principles of innovation is to never let perfection get in the way of progress.
Now it’s time to practice what we preach by testing the standards in the real world, scrapping what doesn’t work, embracing what does, and innovating and iterating our way to better.
Doing nothing fuels creativity and innovation, but that fuel is wasted if you don’t put it to use. Idleness clears the mind, allowing fresh ideas to emerge, but those ideas must be acted upon to create value.
Why is doing something with that fuel so difficult?
Don’t blame the status quo.
The moment we get thrown back into the topsy-turvy, deadline-driven, politics-navigating, schedule-juggling humdrum of everyday life, we slide back into old habits and routines. The status quo is a well-known foe, so it’s tempting to blame it for our lack of action.
But it’s not stopping us from taking the first step.
We’re stopping ourselves.
Blame one (or more) of these.
Last week, I stumbled upon this image from the Near Future Laboratory, based on a theory from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow:
There’s a lot going on here, but four things jumped out at me:
When we don’t have the skills needed to do something challenging, we feel anxiety
When we don’t feel challenged because our skills exceed the task, we feel boredom
When we don’t feel challenged and we don’t have the skills, we feel apathy
When we have the skills and feel challenged, we are in flow
Four different states. Only one of them is positive.
I don’t love those odds.
Yet we live them every day.
Every day, in every activity and interaction, we dance in and through these stages. Anxiety when given a new project and doubt that we have what it takes. Boredom when asked to explain something for the 82nd time to a new colleague and nostalgia for when people stayed in jobs longer or spent time figuring things out for themselves. Sometimes, we get lucky and find ourselves in a Flow State, where our skills perfectly match the challenge, and we lose track of space and time as we explore and create. Sometimes, we are mired in apathy.
Round and round we go.
The same is true when we have a creative or innovative idea. We have creative thoughts, but the challenge seems too great, so we get nervous, doubt our abilities, and never speak up. We have an innovative idea, but we don’t think management will understand, let alone approve it, so we keep it to ourselves.
Anxiety. Boredom. Apathy.
One (or more) of these tells you that your creative thoughts are crazy and your innovative ideas are wild. They tell you that none of them are ready to be presented to your boss with a multi-million-dollar funding request. In fact, none of them should be shared with anyone, lest they think you, not your idea, is crazy.
Then overcome them
I’m not going to tell you not to feel anxiety, boredom, or apathy. I feel all three of those every day.
I am telling you not to get stuck there.
Yes, all the things anxiety, boredom, and apathy tell you about your crazy thoughts and innovative ideas may be true. AND it may also be true that there’s a spark of genius in your crazy thoughts and truly disruptive thinking in your innovative ideas. But you won’t know if you don’t act:
When you feel anxious, ask a friend, mentor, or trusted colleague if the challenge is as big as it seems or if you have the skills to take it on.
When you feel bored, find a new challenge
When you feel apathetic, change everything
Your thoughts and ideas are valuable. Without them, nothing changes, and nothing gets better.
You are a natural-born problem solver. From the moment you were born, you’ve solved problems. Hungry? Start crying. Learning to walk? Stand up, take a step, fall over, repeat. Want to grow your business? Fall in love with a problem, then solve it more delightfully than anyone else.
Did you notice the slight shift in how you solve problems?
Initially, you solved problems on your own. As communication became easier, you started working with others. Now, you instinctively collaborate to solve complex problems, assembling teams to tackle challenges together.
But research indicates your instincts are wrong. In fact, while collaboration can be beneficial for gathering information, it hinders the process of developing innovative solutions. This counterintuitive finding has significant implications for how teams approach problem-solving.
What a Terrorism Study Reveals About Your Team
In a 2015 study, researchers used a simulation developed by the U.S. Department of Defense to examine how collaboration impacts the problem-solving process. 417 undergrads were randomly assigned to 16-person teams with varying levels of “interconnectedness” (clarity in their team structure and information-sharing permissions) and asked to solve aspects of an imaginary terrorist attack scenario, such as identifying the perpetrators and target. Teams had 25 minutes to tackle the problem, with monetary incentives for solving it quickly.
Highly interconnected teams “gathered 5 percent more information than the least-clustered groups because clustering prevented network members from unknowingly conducting duplicative searches. ‘By being in a cluster, individuals tended to contribute more to the collective exploration through information space—not from more search but rather by being more coordinated in their search,’”
The Least Interconnected teams developed 17.5% more theories and solutions and were more likely to develop the correct solution because they were less likely to “copy an incorrect theory from a neighbor.”
How You Can Help Your Team Create More Successful Solutions
You and your team rarely face problems as dire as terrorist attacks, but you can use these results to adapt your problem-solving practices and improve results.
Work together to gather and share information. This goes beyond emailing around research reports, interview summaries, and meeting notes. “Working together” requires your team to take action, like conducting interviews or writing surveys, with one another in real-time (not asynchronously through email, text, or “collaboration” platforms).
Start solving the problem alone. For example, at the start of every ideation session, I ask people to spend 5 minutes privately jotting down their ideas before group brainstorming. This prevents copying others’ theories and ensures all voices are heard. (not just the loudest or most senior)
Invite the “Unusual Suspects” into the process. Most executives know that diversity amplifies creativity, so they invite a mix of genders, ages, races, ethnicities, tenures, and industry experiences to brainstorming sessions. While that’s great, it also results in the same people being invited to every brainstorm and, ultimately, creating a highly interconnected group. So, mix it up even more. Invite people never before invited to brainstorming into the process. Instead of spending a day brainstorming, break it up into one-hour bursts at different times of the day.
Are You Willing to Take the Risk?
For most of your working life, collaboration has been the default approach to problem-solving. However, this research suggests that rethinking when and how to leverage collaboration can lead to greater success.
Making such a change isn’t easy – it invites skepticism and judgment as it deviates from the proven “status quo” process.
Are you willing to take that risk, separating information gathering from solution development, for the potential of achieving better, more innovative outcomes? Or will you remain content with “good enough” solutions from conventional methods?
