I've been told to 'be more innovative' and I don't know what that means.

What to do when you are told to be more innovative and don't know what it means

St. Louis, January two thousand and nineteen. Penny Pennington has just become Managing Partner of Edward Jones — the first woman to lead the hundred-year-old St. Louis firm in its history.

The strategic mandate she walks into is the kind of mandate that, in most firms, gets answered with an innovation programme. Workshops. Hackathons. An incubator fund. A press release with the word digital in it.

Edward Jones serves seven million clients across nineteen thousand advisor branches. The diagnosis at headquarters is that the broker model the firm has been built on for a century is being structurally outflanked. Digital advisory firms. Robo-advisors. The fee compression that comes with both. Be more innovative is a real mandate, with a real answer required.

The choice Pennington makes is structural rather than rhetorical.

She frames Edward Jones publicly as an Advice Company rather than a brokerage. Planning-led. Advice-first. The product is no longer transactions; it is the long-arc relationship of the planning process itself. The framing is a decision. The system that will make the decision land is a one-billion-dollar annual change-agenda, sustained year after year, that puts real capital behind the structural pivot rather than treating it as positioning.

The system produces specific outputs the Advice Company framing requires.

Five thousand of the firm's twenty thousand financial advisors achieve Certified Financial Planner credentials — a record for any firm in the sector. The firm rolls out Microsoft Copilot Chat to all of its advisor practice teams, with a thousand advisors already using the integration in two thousand and twenty-five and the full deployment scheduled within months. Generative AI is deployed across fraud detection, document processing, lead-generation, and live-chat tools. The framing Pennington offers is amplification, not replacement — the AI is structured to expand what advisors can carry, not to remove them from the relationship.

The contrarian piece is the framing that holds the system together. Across the sector, the dominant narrative is advisor independence — financial advisors leaving large firms to set up independently, on the argument that the firm's structure constrains the advisor's value. Pennington's argument is the inverse. Interdependence over independence. The firm's scale — nine million clients across two countries — is its greatest asset, but only if the advisors at the firm share insights and capital. The structural choice is to deepen the firm's value to advisors rather than to accept the sector's drift toward independence as inevitable.

When you've been told to be more innovative and you don't know what that means, the question worth asking is not what activity should we run? It is what system could we build that would produce the innovation as its output?

So let's go to the office and work through it.

Start by testing whether the mandate is real or just a slogan

"I've been told to be more innovative and I don't know what that means."

The feeling is suspicious.

The instruction is real. The intent behind it is unclear. And the gap between be more innovative and here is the budget, the support, and the failure tolerance you will need is the gap your team is going to be walking through, alone, unless you can close it before the work starts.

Two choices. The instruction is the same. What lies behind it is not.

When leadership genuinely wants the risk

Choice one: leadership actually wants innovation. The mandate is real, the intent is serious, they are willing to accept the consequences of taking actual risks.

If that's the read, ask them for their failure budget for the quarter. Not a slogan. A number. How much money, how many missed deadlines, how many failed experiments are they prepared to sign off on in the name of the innovation they are asking for?

Amy Edmondson, working on psychological safety as the precondition for real innovation, has been clear about the test. The conversation almost always tells you which camp you are in within about ninety seconds. If they give you a number, you are working with people who understand what they have asked for. If the question makes them uncomfortable or they change the subject, you now know the mandate is theatre, and you can plan accordingly.

When the brief is a moving target

Choice two: the mandate is vague. Nobody has defined what innovation means. You are being asked to hit a moving target in the dark.

If that's the read, mandate that your team's next feature has to be a direct, unashamed adaptation of something from a different industry. Not inspired by. Adapted from. Explicitly copying how restaurants handle reservations, or how airlines handle check-in, or how libraries handle returns.

Austin Kleon, in Steal Like an Artist, names the discipline plainly. The copying isn't the point; the point is that be more innovative becomes tractable when you remove the pressure to invent from scratch and replace it with the much more manageable task of translating something that already works in a different context. Nobody ever invented anything that wasn't a remix of things that already existed, and leaning into that plainly is more honest than pretending otherwise.

Real-mandate, or vague-mandate. Same instruction. Two different first moves.

How to turn a fuzzy brief into a delivery system

Three tools. The discipline is to turn the vague mandate into a system that produces the thing the mandate named.

Make well-intentioned failure visibly safe

The first is

Innovation Culture Building.

Innovation Culture Building as a structured discipline traces through Amy Edmondson's writing on psychological safety — The Fearless Organization, two thousand and eighteen, is the canonical reference — with deeper roots in Edgar Schein's Organizational Culture and Leadership, nineteen eighty-five, and the broader organisational-development literature on culture as a strategic variable.

The reason Innovation Culture Building matters is that the useful definition isn't rewarding innovation, it's making well-intentioned failure visibly safe for the people who tried. Most innovation programmes focus on the upside — bonuses for successful initiatives, recognition for new ideas. The structural variable is the downside. What happens to the team that tried something ambitious and failed?

The unique insight is the post-failure test. The test of whether a culture supports innovation isn't whether new ideas get celebrated. It's whether the people who tried something ambitious and failed are still in post three months later. If they are, the culture is real. If they aren't, no amount of innovation theatre will produce the thing.

What you get when the culture is real is a team willing to take ambitious risks because the cost of failure has been demonstrated to be survivable. What you get when it isn't is a team that performs innovation in slogans and never actually risks anything that could fail.

So. How to test it.

Look. Across the team or organisation, the last three projects or initiatives that didn't work. What happened to the people who led them?

Read. Did they keep their roles? Get a different role? Get quietly removed from interesting work? Get pushed out entirely? The trajectory is the diagnostic.

Test. A team or organisation with no visible failures isn't innovating. It's selecting against attempts that could fail, which is the failure mode the framework is supposed to prevent. If you can't find three failures, that is itself the answer.

Explicit. In this team, a project that fails on its merits is a learning event, not a career event. Then make sure the next failure proves the statement true.

Reward. The team that runs an honest postmortem on a failed project produces information; the team that hides it produces nothing. Reward the visibility — the postmortem, not the project.

Run many ideas cheaply and kill the weak ones early

The second is

Innovation Funnel.

The Innovation Funnel as a structured discipline was popularised by Henry Chesbrough in Open Innovation, two thousand and three, and further codified in stage-gated product-development practice traceable to Robert Cooper's Stage-Gate methodology, nineteen eighty-six. The framework runs candidate ideas through a series of evaluation gates, each one cheaper-to-fail than the next, with progressively larger investments at each successful gate.

The reason the Innovation Funnel matters when you've been told to be more innovative is that it provides the failure tolerance the mandate requires while preventing the best ideas from being strangled by the process for approving the worst ones. Most organisations either accept all ideas (and waste resources) or reject all ideas (and produce nothing). The funnel does both.

The unique insight is the cheap entry, expensive deep-end. Ideas at the top of the funnel are cheap to admit. Most fail at the first gate, having consumed only a small amount of resource. The few that survive have, by the time they reach the bottom, accumulated enough evidence that the larger investment is structurally defensible.

What you get is a system that can run many candidate ideas in parallel without any individual idea threatening the budget — and a structural defence against the no time to try anything failure mode that kills most innovation programmes.

So. How to design it.

Gates. Three to five gates is usually right. Each gate has explicit pass-or-fail criteria.

Top. Ideas enter the funnel cheaply — a one-page proposal, a small experiment, a problem-interview pass. The first gate tests whether the idea has any signal at all.

Middle. Each gate increases the investment. Solution interviews, prototype, small-audience pilot, full launch. Each gate is more expensive than the last and produces more evidence than the last.

Kill. At each gate, what would cause the idea to be killed rather than progressed? Define the kill criteria in advance so the gate decision isn't subjective.

Pipeline. How many ideas are in the funnel? How many at each gate? How many killed per quarter? The aggregate view is the innovation programme's diagnostic.

Buy the innovation you cannot build in-house

The third is

Open Innovation.

Open Innovation as a strategic concept was formalised by Henry Chesbrough at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, codified in Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, two thousand and three. The discipline distinguishes between closed innovation — where the firm assumes it must develop all the ideas it uses internally — and open innovation — where the firm deliberately uses external sources of ideas, talent, and capability alongside internal ones.

The reason Open Innovation matters when your internal talent pool is too thin to generate the breakthroughs leadership is asking for is that there is no shame in buying the innovation you can't build. The companies that pretend otherwise are usually the ones trapped in theatre. The ones that take the framework seriously buy what they can buy and build only what they have to build.

The unique insight is the category split. Some innovation has to be built internally because it depends on context only the team has. Some innovation can be acquired through partnerships, hackathons, strategic acquisitions, or external competitions because the necessary expertise lives outside the firm. The discipline is sorting which category each innovation requirement falls into, and acting accordingly.

What you get is a wider innovation surface than the team's internal capacity could produce. Combined with the funnel discipline, the surface stays affordable.

So. How to use it.

Map. What specifically does the be more innovative mandate translate into in your business? List the capability gaps.

Categorise. Internal-only — depends on context only the team has. External-available — commodity expertise the firm could acquire. Partnership-required — capability that requires combining internal and external. The categories drive different procurement strategies.

Run. Internal-only goes through the standard innovation funnel. External-available goes through procurement, hackathons, or external competitions. Partnership-required goes through deliberate strategic-partnership work.

Acknowledge. The external innovation is not less real because it came from outside the firm. The acquired expertise, integrated thoughtfully, produces capability the firm did not have, and the firm's competitive position is what matters, not the source of the capability. Don't apologise for the external work.

Track. Most acquired innovation fails not at the acquisition but at the integration. The acquired capability has to be embedded in the firm's processes and culture; without integration, the firm has paid for capability it can't use.

A precedent: adopting an operating system someone else had built

That's the toolkit. One more story before we close.

The Pennington story we opened with showed an executive responding to be more innovative by building the system her firm needed itself, sustained over years, with a billion dollars a year behind it. The story we close with shows the same structural move at a different scale — an executive who, faced with the same mandate, found the system someone else had already worked out and brought it inside her organisation.

Crotonville, New York, two thousand and eleven. Beth Comstock is GE's Chief Marketing Officer and later Vice Chair, operating under a CEO — Jeff Immelt — who has publicly made be more innovative the company's strategic posture without specifying what that means in operational terms.

GE has three hundred thousand employees. Billions in research and development. A world-class industrial-research organisation. And no playbook for how to move faster on early-stage commercial products without sinking them through the existing capital-allocation machinery.

Around two thousand and eleven, at a book signing for Eric Ries's The Lean Startup, Comstock and her colleague Viv Goldstein approach Ries directly. Over the following two years, they bring him into GE as an adviser. They co-develop what becomes FastWorks — GE's internal adaptation of Lean Startup principles. And in a four-month stretch, they train five thousand GE senior managers in the method.

Comstock describes the decision and its aftermath in her two thousand and eighteen memoir Imagine It Forward.

The move is structurally interesting. Comstock's response to be more innovative was not to invent a GE-specific innovation methodology. It was to find someone who had already worked out a usable operating system for the problem, adopt it, and adapt it.

When you have been told to be more innovative and you don't know what that means, the first useful question is rarely what should we invent? It's who has already built the thing I need? — followed by the question of what it would take to get them in the room.

So. Your Next Move from this playbook.

When was the last visible failure on your team that wasn't quietly punished — and if you can't think of one, what does your team actually believe about your appetite for risk?