When innovation gets strangled

By Dino Zafirakos

An organization recently called me in to help them clarify and prioritize their strategic innovation portfolio. They felt as if they were underperforming on strategic innovation. We brought together 27 people from different parts of the organization. All were invited to contribute, generate ideas and create buy-in for changes that would build the business.

What is worth solving?

After the initial meet-and-greet, the group was confronted with a deceptively simple question:

What are the biggest problems worth solving right now?

There were many possible directions. Opinions differed. Focus became the first real challenge. Eventually, the group aligned on one area: the organization’s innovation pipeline.

Innovation needs oxygen

We mapped out the full strategic innovation portfolio and assessed where each one stood in terms of progress and commitment. At first glance, things looked… acceptable. But when we overlaid this map with the current business objectives and priorities, the first aha moment appeared:

Every single innovation initiative was being slowly strangled.

Not because they lacked ideas. Not because people didn’t care. But because business-as-usual consumed almost all available time and capacity.

Innovation existed, but it had no oxygen.

“It’s the organization, not me”

What followed was telling.

There was recognition, but also distance. A quiet narrative of: “Yes, this is how the organization works, but that’s not really me.”

So we turned the lens inward. Each participant mapped their own allocation of time and energy during a normal working week. The pattern was unmistakable. Even the people most vocal about innovation had very little time actually allocated to it.

The organizational pattern was being perfectly mirrored at the individual level.

The real tension

This brought us to the real question: How do we balance business-as-usual with future-focused initiatives that may or may not pay off? You can ask Google or your favourite LLM and get a neat answer: “Allocate 20–30% to innovation.”

If only it were that simple.

If it were, everyone would already be doing it. In reality, this tension never disappears. What’s needed is not a number, but a shared understanding, a sweet spot, and a support system that can hold that balance until new information arrives.

And that’s where the group got stuck.

From frustration to possibility

The emotional weight was palpable. Frustration. Fatigue. A sense of being caught in something bigger than any one person. Then someone reframed it:

“This is the kind of challenge we’re meant to innovate around.”

That was the turning point.

The group was invited to do something deceptively simple: use their innovation tools on their own innovation challenge. Before jumping to solutions, they reflected on why this tension mattered individually and collectively. Sharing that purpose unlocked something.

Energy returned.

Collective intelligence at work

Nothing was sacred.
Nothing was dismissed.

Ideas were thrown on the wall – literally. They were challenged, combined, dismantled, rebuilt.

Groups formed organically around ideas with energy and interest. They experimented. Shared feedback across groups. Strengthened their thinking through multiple iterations.

By the end of the workshop, five compelling ideas had emerged.

Not all survived beyond the room. Some lost traction. Others evolved into genuinely promising solutions for the organization.

That’s how it should be.

The deeper lesson

This work reminds me why I do what I do. Many organizational challenges are so complex that no single mind, not even the leader’s, can solve them alone.

But when multiple minds work together in constructive, well-held ways, the range of possibilities expands dramatically. Most organizations are full of creative people. What they often lack is the conditions to access their collective intelligence.

When those conditions are created, even temporarily, teams rediscover something important: We are capable of more than we think. And once a team has experienced that, it’s much easier to trust it again.

That, for me, is what it means to Win Wisely.