Domain
Innovation
How new ideas are surfaced, funded, killed, and restarted — and whether the team experiences innovation as permission or as performance.
Innovation is the domain in which the architecture is most often the absence of a graceful way to stop. Teams are praised for starting things, and the people who start things accumulate political capital. Stopping a thing is a near-silent act with no parade.
What this teaches the team is that the safe move is to start three things and finish none. The unsafe move is to ship something that gets killed two quarters later because the strategic context shifted, and to be the person whose name is on the killed work.
Removing this architecture means giving stopping the same dignity as starting: an honest post-mortem, a named lesson, and visible credit to the people who had the courage to recommend the stop. Without that, every new initiative is a hedge.
Dr. Tim Hough · ISBN 979-8-9965397-1-0 · Buy the book →
Diagnostic
If your team has more in-flight initiatives than people who can name them all in a single breath, you are looking at an Innovation architecture in which starting is rewarded and stopping is invisible. The cost is not the wasted effort. The cost is what the team learns about which moves are safe.
Run the diagnostic
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Deep link: /field-guide/innovation
Source: Why Your Best People Stop Trying. Dr. Tim Hough.