An innovator brings a small, early idea into a review meeting. The leader, presumably doing the job well, asks the obvious questions. Can it be bigger? Can it get to market faster? Where does the margin come from?

To the innovator, those questions land as pressure to deliver an answer on the spot. The only thing a team can promise at that moment is more of what already exists, or anything else that is safe to say. The new idea, the unproven one, cannot be promised, so it gets left behind. The leader who pushed for something bigger gets the team's smallest version instead.

These types of exchanges influence what a company's results from innovation projects looks like, and they happen in a single meeting, in the questions a leader asks and the way they react to a rough prototype. Rainer Struck, Global VP of Innovation Transformation at Mars, has been observing and then codifying the behaviors that decide which way it goes. Unlike the machinery of process and budget, which takes quarters to move, a leader can change these on their own, through consistent practice.

Each is a behavior that can start tomorrow, not in the next fiscal year: a different question, evidence over risk, an idea shared early. Together, they decide whether a team brings its boldest ideas forward or buries them under the safe promises.

Of all ten behaviors, Rainer puts the most weight on this one, because it also shapes the underlying culture more than any other: the questions a leader asks an innovation team in a review.

The most usual questions are about scale, speed, and margin: Can it be bigger? Can it go faster? Where is the profit? Most experienced leaders ask all three, believing they are pushing the team to do better work. They feel that this is the right thing to do, which is why they are so hard to give up.

To the innovator on the other side of the table, those questions land as pressure. The team has brought a small, early idea it has worked on for months, kept modest because that is what an honest early idea really is. Being asked to make it bigger and faster on the spot is, in Rainer's words, like standing over a seedling and ordering it to grow.

What the seedling really needs is soil, water, and time. When innovators are forced, they either inflate the numbers to project a confidence the evidence does not support, or they fall back on what they already know because it is the only thing they can defend quickly.

Both are ways of playing it safe. The questions can only be answered honestly by taking more risk, yet pressure drives the team toward less, so the ambition drains out. Over time, the team learns to bring only the ideas that won't get challenged.

The fix is to replace the typical scale-and-margin questions with ones about assumptions: help me understand what you are assuming here. That single change moves the conversation onto evidence, and it lets the leader and the team look together at what it would actually take to make the idea bigger, without the leader's own impatience setting the terms. The idea ends up larger and bolder, since it gets there on evidence the team believes in, rather than on numbers it inflated under pressure.

This is the behavior with the longest reach, because changing the type of question does not just improve an idea. It changes what the team is willing to bring to the next meeting.

Most leaders let their teams validate an idea the easy way: ask customers whether they would buy it and what they would pay. The answers come back confident and specific, feeling like solid evidence.

They are not. People are poor at predicting their own behavior, so the survey that says yes is a poor guide to the customer who walks past the shelf in the store. A team can fill a deck with purchase intent, and still be measuring nothing real.

The behavior a leader changes is what they ask the team to bring back. Instead of “go find out if customers want this”, which sends the team off to run surveys, the ask becomes “go put it in their hands and watch what they do”. The innovation team works with a real prototype, real customers, and a real question: did it end up in their basket? A customer complaint counts as real evidence, because making a complaint takes effort, and effort reveals behavior. A stated intention to buy is not, because it is only a prediction.

When a leader forces the team to work with actionable, bold questions, the team stops collecting the easy answers and starts gathering the ones that hold up.

The best innovations tend to come from a collision between disciplines that do not normally meet. But while most leaders accept that in principle, few do something to make the collisions happen.

That’s why leaders should engineer them: leave the building, and bring in people the company would not usually invite, including ones outside its comfort zone. The external, unfamiliar insight is exactly what an internal team cannot generate on its own.

Mars has a real example with a gum and mint brand built for gamers, which helps with concentration during play. An important partnership began by chance: an advisor to Mars was seated on a flight next to the founder of Razer, a leading gaming equipment company, and in conversation the two realized that gamers chew a lot of gum. The pair quickly established a joint venture, and the partnership taught Mars more about how gamers actually behave than its own research could have: Mars got access to a gamer lab where teams watched real players in their gaming environment, instead of just asking them what they might buy.

The point isn’t to rely on a plane encounter; this example is rare. It is that a leader should manufacture the same kind of collision on purpose, starting from leaving the building.

Leadership should treat small, specific markets as the place to go looking, and to explore them purposefully - rather than stumble into them. That runs against normal practice in large companies, which dismiss niches almost automatically: a niche is small, the company is big, next year's number is large, so the tiny opportunity gets waved off before anyone takes a closer look.

In reality, nothing large ever started large. The insight that seeds a big business almost always shows up first in a narrow market. The mass market is a poor hunting ground, because it already has what it wants; the unmet need lives at the edges.

Three Mars products started off small, before they became invaluable product lines. M&M's began as a fix for soldiers in World War II whose chocolate melted in the field; a sugar coating solved it, and that wartime workaround grew into a brand worth three and a half billion dollars. Dentist sticks addressed one unglamorous problem every dog owner knows: bad breath and dental health, and became a multi-billion-dollar pet care and treats business that now reaches beyond teeth. A protein bar built for the CrossFit community, about as niche a starting audience as exists, grew into a major brand and entered the Mars portfolio through the Kellanova acquisition.

Most leaders run innovation the way they were taught to protect it: keep an idea quiet until it is polished, then reveal the finished version to the senior room and hope it holds up.

Rainer reveals the opposite advice a well-known creative director at an advertising agency shared with him. When he asked her how she guards her ideas from being stolen, she said she does the reverse; she shares them as widely and as early as she can. She admitted people sometimes steal them — and that she hates it when it happens. But in about ninety-five percent of cases the idea comes back better, because other people react to it, add to it, or tell her it is weak so that she can drop it and move on.

With that in mind, leaders should stop rewarding the polished reveal and start rewarding early circulation. Putting rough ideas in front of more people sooner, invites reactions before the idea is defensible, and treats "someone poked a hole in it" as progress rather than embarrassment. This behavior can make legal and IP teams uneasy. However, this isn't about leaking genuine trade secrets. It's that for ordinary ideas, exposure makes them better, while secrecy mostly protects the leader's sense of control.

This is the first behavior that starts to touch a deeper behavioral layer — the one about a leader's own discomfort rather than a simple principle. Risk and evidence are two sides of the same coin: as evidence goes up, the risk takes care of itself. Large organizations are built to measure risk — as they should, because a lot is at stake. The trouble is that measuring risk directly is genuinely hard, especially for something new. Eventually, the demand for a risk number tends to stall a team.

On the flipside, gathering evidence is easier, as it adds up over time. A phone call to an expert, an hour watching people shop, one small test: as the evidence accumulates, the risk drops on its own, without anyone having to calculate it. The reason this is a behavioral shift and not just another nice phrase is that it changes the leader's ask toward their team. Instead of demanding a risk assessment the team cannot yet produce, the leader asks what evidence exists and what is still missing. That gives the team something it can actually do tomorrow.

One rule goes with this: never ask for proof. While evidence is a signal you can gather now, proof is certainty the thing will work — which no one can have before it is built. When a team is pressed for proof they will invent it, out of fear. This is why evidence is the honest alternative.

The next behavior builds on the last one: a simple way for a leader to pull a team's hidden assumptions into the open. It works in any room where a group is stuck on a decision.

Say an innovation team is split on price. One person is certain a new product can sell for no more than $2.99; another is just as sure it will work at $4.99. Arguing the number directly gets teams nowhere, since the real gap is between assumptions nobody has stated.

So the leader draws a line on the wall, low price at one end and high at the other, asks each person to mark privately where they stand, and then asks them to explain what they are assuming about the customer that put their mark there.

Two things then happen at once: people realize they had never actually examined their own position until they had to place it, and they see how far their assumptions sit from everyone else's. The conversation shifts from who is right to what evidence would move the marks closer together. It works for any decision where firm opinions are standing in for facts, turning a stuck argument into a concrete list of things worth going to check.

In most companies the team develops an idea and then hands it to finance to build the P&L. That split is slow, and worse, it keeps the commercial logic away from the people who understand the idea best.

The best thing a leader can do in this case is to ask everyone on the team, the scientist, the engineer, the marketer, to act as the idea's CFO and do the math a founder would do at the very start: does it roughly add up, and how can the numbers get better?

When the whole team does the math, everyone learns the business side, not just the product side. If only finance handles the P&L, that learning never spreads. The math also forces the team to face the hardest phase: the time after an idea looks promising but before it earns anything, when the company is only spending money. A team that runs its own numbers can see that phase coming; a team that leaves it to finance gets the shock later.

The last behavior comes down to a specific feeling the leader has to manage: loss aversion, or the pull to protect a winning business rather than fund the next one.

Most businesses move along an S-curve: a slow start, a steep climb, then a plateau. The time to fund the next curve is before the current one peaks, while there is still money and energy for it. Wait until after the peak, and the odds of building the next business successfully drop below ten percent.

That timing is what makes the call hard. The curves cross while the core business is still growing well, and that is exactly when a leader has to move money out of something that works and into something unproven. However, two instincts stop them from doing that: loss aversion, which makes the new bet feel like a threat to the healthy business the money would come from, and the endowment effect, that makes leaders overvalue what they already own — so money already in the core business seems more valuable than money put into something new.

Both are among the strongest forces in human behavior, and both intensify the longer a business has been winning. Some of Mars's businesses have been winning for a hundred years, which makes the resistance to funding anything new about as strong as it gets.

The behavior is to catch those instincts in yourself before they make the decision for you. Rather than seeing the new bet as money taken from a safe business, a leader can weigh the cost of not making it: if we do not build this now, we lose our lead. Today, this is exactly the move the big AI vendors use to sell, Rainer mentions. They do not say here is something wonderful, try it. They say if you do not adopt this, your competitors will.

The point of the reframe is to keep a leader from starving a new bet to protect the old one. It will not decide every funding call, but it forces the real risk into view: doing nothing is not as safe as it feels.

Rainer spent twenty-six years at Mars, a company with $55 billion in net sales and 150,000 people. He ran brands for twenty-three of those years and is now Global VP of Innovation Transformation.

When he moved fully into innovation, he made an uncomfortable discovery. After more than two decades of launching products and running brands, he realized he did not actually know corporate innovation as a discipline, with its own methods and evidence. What he picked up instead was a set of instincts he had learned on the job. When he set out to learn about innovation properly, he found he was not alone: most leaders and innovators are practicing something they have never formally studied.

Therefore, the behavior number is to intentionally learn the innovation discipline. It sounds too obvious to say out loud, until you notice how many leaders run innovation on instinct and gut feel rather than on a body of knowledge that has its own experts, methods, and evidence. Part of the gap in knowledge is that corporate innovation is a new discipline: it exists for around thirty years, and few people study it at university, so most leaders reach senior roles having never read the work. Leaders can close that gap by studying the people who built the field, the way any other non-innovation leader would expect to know the fundamentals of finance or operations.

Combined, the behaviors describe one shift: the innovation leader stops managing innovation through structure alone, and starts shaping it through how they act in the room. What a leader counts as evidence, the questions they ask, the ideas they let circulate, the instinct they catch before it decides a funding call — none of this waits on a reorg. A leader can start changing them in the next review, long before any system is ready to help.

The evidence that this works is already sitting in the Mars portfolio. A niche fix for soldiers' melting chocolate became a three-and-a-half-billion-dollar brand. A collision between two industries that never met opened an entire category. An idea shared before it was ready came back better ninety-five percent of the time. None of those came from a better stage-gate, but from a leader willing to watch real behavior, force an unlikely collision, and let an unfinished idea out of the room.

Every large company has their own, overlooked ideas. Surfacing them doesn’t require a new system, but a leader willing to behave differently in the room, consistently. And when the behaviors keep up, they turn a team that plays safe into one that brings its boldest thinking into the room.

None of the ten behaviors above are complicated. Practicing them consistently is. Misha de Sterke has spent years watching why — the instincts sitting underneath the behavior, undoing it before it sticks.

A leader can stop demanding a risk number and start asking only what evidence exists, and the same team will still bring back the version of an idea it can already defend. The behavior changed — but whatever was actually shaping the team did not move.

The leader did nothing wrong — asking for evidence instead of a risk number is a smart move. But the team continues to be cautious. Over many meetings, they have watched how the leader reacts when someone brings a bold idea: the sharper scrutiny, the questions about scale and margin, the skepticism a rough concept meets. So every time, they bring the safe version.

The leader's fear, the need to stay in control, and the instinct to defend themselves when someone questions the work shapes a team more than any meeting ever will. So when a behavioral change does not stick, this is usually why.

These instincts show up in the everyday situations every innovation team runs into, and each one looks like a leader managing well: holding the team accountable, pushing for rigor, setting the direction, protecting the culture. In reality, they quietly keep the team's best work from getting through.

Misha de Sterke, a longtime innovation expert and author of The Death of Average, spent years watching capable teams stall for reasons that had nothing to do with strategy or resources. They were stopped, by the instincts of the people leading them.

These instincts are not fixed: each shows up in a specific, recognizable situation, and each has a way out — but only if the leader is willing to do the internal work first.

A project starts to wobble. The numbers slip, the demo underwhelms, and the team looks unsure in the review. The leader's instinct is to step in and rescue it, feeling like that’s the responsible move — a senior person taking ownership of an outcome that matters. That instinct is exactly the behavior to avoid, because stepping in removes the one thing the team actually needed: the chance for the team to work the problem out itself.

A parent who grabs the spoon every time a toddler spills never lets the child learn to feed itself. Leaders are doing the same thing to their teams, and for the same reason: watching someone struggle with a problem you could solve in five minutes is uncomfortable, so you solve it yourself. And while the relief is immediate, the cost lands later, since the team maintains a passive role in every single project meeting.

Underneath a rescued project lies an ownership problem, running in two directions:

During a project rescue, both of these happen at the same time: the leader over-owns by stepping in, and the team under-owns by stepping back. Neither ends up the real owner. The leader patches the problem and moves on to the next one, and the team has stopped treating this project as theirs.

The fix for the leader is to hold back from the urge to over-own. But in order for that to work, two conditions need to be in place:

The two depend on each other: without the safety to name a problem out loud, no one can own it, because it never reaches the table. When they both exist in harmony, they empower a leader to leave a struggling project with its team and still hold everyone to the result.

A four-person innovation team, two people in the Netherlands, one in China, and one in Russia, had ground to a halt. Decisions dragged, and the group had stopped working together. From the outside, it looked like the project was wobbling — the kind a leader steps in to rescue. But the project was fine; the problem was within the team.

One of the team members was especially ambitious and pushed hard for results. However, this behavior was landing as domineering, especially on the member in China who was used to a different type of communication. Nevertheless, no one had spoken openly to him about the friction he was causing, since they assumed he would take it badly. Instead, they stayed silent. He simply had no idea how he was coming across.

In most cases, many innovation leaders would take over the project, to resolve the friction quickly. In this example, the innovation leader held two sessions over two weeks, encouraging team members to say the thing no one was saying. In the open, things moved fast: the team member could see how he was coming across and eased off, the others stopped working around him and started saying what they actually thought, and the decisions that had been stuck began to move again. Within two to three weeks the project was back in flow.

The leader never touched the work. Making it safe to say the hard thing, and holding the person causing the friction to account, was enough: the four-person team that had ground to a halt was making decisions again within three weeks, and it took two sessions rather than a takeover that would have pulled the leader in for months.

A leader who checks every detail, gathers everyone's agreement before moving, and rebuilds a plan four times is considered careful, inclusive, and thorough. However, that same behavior often stems from a deeper behavior: it’s a way to manage their own anxiety about the work. Micromanagement, consensus-seeking, over-planning, and blame that always lands one level down are the visible symptoms. What drives them sits underneath, and rarely gets named.

Moreover, the leader’s sense of authority turns these from occasional habits into ones that happen automatically. A senior role removes the pushback that used to keep bad habits in check. It also changes what matters: a leader is now judged by what the team and their own bosses think of them, not by what they actually deliver. That brings its own set of fears: of failing, of looking incompetent, of losing the respect the title gave them. Those fears rarely show up in the open, and turn into control instead.

For example, an innovation leader who had spent years advising companies on innovation saw these habits in himself when he became a senior partner and managing director at a venture-building firm. The day he took the role, he stopped feeling like one of the group. He now held the power to set salaries, to hire, and to fire.

Impatience, arrogance, and a habit of dodging the hardest conversations all showed up upon taking up the leadership role. It was only when he reflected that he realized: none of these were making his decisions sharper. In fact, they were making them worse, because each habit was serving his need to feel in control, rather than make the right decisions.

Left unexamined, instincts like these do not fade. They harden, and the behavior they produce gets stranger and more damaging the longer it goes unacknowledged. Chris Argyris found that even capable executives fall into defensive routines, patterns that shield them from hearing anything that threatens how they see themselves. In practice, this looks like this: the leader says they support innovation, then kills the project the first time it produces a bad result. The team notices the gap between what the leader said and what the leader did. In the end, that gap costs more trust than an honest "no" up front would have, because now the team knows the leader's word does not hold.

The fix here is to catch the fear before it turns into control. Five concrete practices help:

The payoff? Empowerment that actually functions — the thing every large company says it wants and few get. Empowerment means the people closest to the customer make the call, instead of sending every decision up the chain and waiting on it. And that only happens when the leader can let go of their own fear.

Consensus is not the same thing as being right. A leader can consult forty people, walk every stakeholder through the plan, and get a room full of nods — and still be heading the wrong way. All that sign-off proves is that forty people agreed.

Those two things are easy to confuse: once most of the room is on board, the direction starts to feel correct, even though no one has checked whether it is. And the harder a leader pushes for agreement, the less likely anyone is to ask the question that matters most: is this the right direction at all?

Someone still has to answer that question, and it falls to the leader. That means forming a view of the right direction and committing to it before the rest of the room gets there — sometimes ahead of what the group can see, sometimes against what it wants.

Being that far out in front is uncomfortable. For a while, the leader is the only one who believes in the call, and that’s hard. The easy way out is to soften the decision: send it back for another round of discussion, water it down until no one objects, or quietly switch to the option the room already prefers. All three hand the choice back to the group. And just like that — the leader has stopped leading.

Three mindsets keep a leader on the safe, familiar path instead of setting a real direction:

All of the three feel meaningful — which is why they are mistaken for progress. A leader can chase the quarterly number, copy what worked elsewhere, and keep everyone energized, and still never set a direction that takes the business somewhere new.

So how does a leader actually set one? It comes down to two moves.

The first is to set the direction by asking bolder questions. When a leader sets what the team should aim for, the safe instinct is to pick a modest, reachable target, the kind everyone signs off on without argument. Setting a much bigger one changes how the team thinks about the whole problem.

Take a consultancy running a $100 million IT project: 400 engineers, 18 months behind schedule, and a $30 million penalty waiting if they miss the deadline. The obvious response is to list everything that is broken and start grinding. A leader thinking actively about direction raises the ambition instead, and asks a different question: what would it take to finish a week early? The question assumes the deadline can be beaten, so the team starts looking for a way through rather than cataloguing what went wrong. No group would have set that goal on its own.

The second is to hold that direction without waiting for everyone to get on board. One way to move forward without softening the decision is to agree the criteria before the debate, not during it. Score the option on a shared set of dimensions so finance, marketing, and R&D stop arguing from their own definitions of value and start arguing the same question:

Even then, the leader needs support to move, but they don’t always need a full room. It is acceptable to go ahead knowing a stakeholder is only sixty percent on board, which is fine as long as they are not in a position to block the work. The whole point is to get through the resistance rather than remove it, even if that brings some unhappiness among the group. Waiting until everyone agrees is chasing consensus all over again.

The capsule system was invented inside Nestlé in the mid-1970s by an engineer named Eric Favre, and the company nearly killed it at the start, out of fear. Premium single-serve capsules threatened Nescafé, the instant-coffee business that was one of Nestlé's biggest earners. Despite the pushback, the system was launched in 1986. It sold very poorly, and by the late 1980s the company had effectively decided to shut it down.

By then, the organization had aligned on a common theme: “the bet has failed”. The person who disagreed was Jean-Paul Gaillard, the innovation leader brought in to run the unit at the end of the 1980s. Rather than try to fix the failing office product, he fearlessly set a far more ambitious target and a new model to reach it: sell to affluent households instead of offices, give the machines away cheap and make the money on the capsules, build a members-only club that shipped pods by mail, and recast the whole thing as a small luxury rather than an appliance.

Jean-Paul’s direction worked. He later described Nespresso going from "a spare tire, to being one of the main engines of Nestlé." Sales passed three billion Swiss francs by 2011 and roughly doubled again over the following decade, making it one of Nestlé's billion-franc "billionaire brands" and among its most profitable.

The business that most internal stakeholders had agreed to kill became one it could not do without. It is both moves at once: a direction bold enough to be worth backing, set and held without the agreement of a company that had already decided to quit.

A leader feels a tension in the room and decides not to address it. There is real objection from a stakeholder, a project everyone privately knows is failing, a disagreement no one wants to raise. The leader runs the agenda, keeps things civil, and lets the hard thing go unsaid. Avoiding escalation feels like protecting the team.

This is conflict avoidance, and it is rarely just the leader's fault. Large organizations are built to keep the peace, so avoiding conflict is often the default. The reasons for avoiding it are:

While each of these reasons make sense, together they steer the whole room toward silence. The result looks like agreement but is really just avoidance wearing its clothes: comfort standing in for alignment, politeness standing in for progress.

Conflict is information. When a team is trying out a new innovation, friction is the sign it is pushing into real territory. Therefore, when a leader smooths out the conflict, they are deleting the signal the work depends on.

Instead of avoiding conflict, leaders must build conflict competence in themselves and their teams. Arguing hard about the work, in the open, allows the friction to sharpen decision-making.

There are three concrete ways to build conflict competence:

Run red team sessions where one group's job is to attack the plan's assumptions and expose the blind spots.

Set one ground rule that makes debate safe, argue the ideas hard and never go at the person.

And when a discussion overheats, call a structured pause and ask what the conflict is really about.

However, a team will not argue in the open on its own; it waits to see whether doing so is safe. The fastest way to fix that is by the leader going first, naming the hard thing before anyone else has to. Making this a habit, rather than a one-off act, requires three things: a way to open the hard conversation, a routine to keep it happening, and curiosity from the leader's side: the conversation opens by asking what the other person is worried about, instead of the leader arriving with the answer.

At a multi-billion company, getting an innovation from idea to market took two years. The delay was not due to bad processes, but due to lack of hard conversations. The moment a senior stakeholder pushed the innovation team back with "we are not going in that direction, we tried it before and it did not work," the leader in the room stayed silent. Decisions got deferred, projects looped back around, and weeks became months.

In view of this, the company started treating these conversations as a skill to build instead of a moment to dread. They started with the groundwork: for each key sponsor, they spelled out what their role was, what the project needed from them, and what a leader should do when one of them pushed back.

Then, they rehearsed the hard part with professional actors. Leaders ran the pushback moment live: an actor played the stakeholder who insists the idea was tried before and failed, while the leader practiced holding the direction instead of caving or deferring. The rehearsals showed something else too: each leader has a default style under pressure, so running the same conversation a different way let them see what actually landed.

With this approach, the time from idea to market dropped from two years to six months. The methods barely changed; the leaders did. They stopped avoiding the conversations that used to stall everything, and started having them first.

The four invisible behaviors share one shape. Rescuing a project looks like accountability. Keeping control looks like rigor. Pushing for alignment looks like direction. Avoiding conflict looks like a healthy culture. Each one is the easiest choice — but not the most responsible one.

The fix for the leader is the same every time: tolerating the discomfort. The wobble of a struggling project, the loss of control, the isolation of an unpopular call, the conversation no one wants to start.

Weak innovation is more a choice than a condition. A leader who blames the market, the process, or a risk-averse culture hides the problem in a closet, and then there is nothing left to do about it. A leader who owns the version of the problem that lives inside them can make considerable changes tomorrow.

A leader can change how they run a review tomorrow, with the same people and the same meetings already on the calendar. But those changes are only the floor. What a leader is willing to face in themselves sets the ceiling, and the more discomfort a leader can sit with, the higher that ceiling goes.

To the innovator, those questions land as pressure to deliver an answer on the spot. The only thing a team can promise at that moment is more of what already exists, or anything else that is safe to say. The new idea, the unproven one, cannot be promised, so it gets left behind. The leader who pushed for something bigger gets the team's smallest version instead.

Rescue, control, consensus, avoidance — name the instinct and you can catch it. But there's a fifth failure mode that doesn't even look like a decision, because it isn't one. It's the absence of one.

The fastest way to kill an idea is to never respond to it. No meeting rejects the project and no leader owns the decision, so the idea dies in the gap between committees — while everyone believes they behaved responsibly.

An innovator brings an outside idea into the organization, sends the email, shares the report, and puts the opportunity in front of the people who can move it. Then the waiting starts. Weeks pass with no reply, nobody turns the idea down, and it fades for lack of an answer. The leaders on the receiving end never rejected it; their silence did the rejecting for them.

A VP of Innovation in the pharmaceutical industry who has watched this behavior play out across several companies calls it “the silent killer”: the idea is never refused out loud, it is just left to die of neglect. Then, another committee reviews the idea again, a fresh request for information arrives, and the decision slides to next quarter until the innovator stops hearing anything at all. The opportunity vanishes into what he calls “the black hole”, and leadership rarely gets blamed for this outcome.

The trouble is that a postponed decision is still a decision — one that quietly instructs the organization to stay the same. That works when change moves slowly enough to wait out, but it fails in a market that moves faster than a planning cycle. AI is the clearest case: it went from an outside curiosity to the core of how companies run their operations in only a handful of years, therefore a leader who meets new ideas with silence lets the company fall behind its competitors. For this VP, who works in pharma, the delay eventually reaches the patient the company exists to serve.

This behavior also carries a human cost that compounds over time. Each non-answer chips away at the innovator's willingness to try again, so after enough of them she stops floating the risky idea and keeps to the topics her colleagues already reward — the ones tied to this quarter's numbers. The leader ends up losing the very person whose job was to widen the company's view of the future — barely noticing the moment it happened.

What lets the behavior survive is that it looks responsible from the inside. Leaders describe the organization as “consensus-based” and treat the silence as due diligence. The habit runs hardest where internal R&D is strongest, because a proud research culture distrusts an idea it did not invent, and would rather wait it out. Moreover, underneath the language of alignment, the organization is protecting the status quo on the belief that past success guarantees future success. That spreads accountability so thin that no one has to answer for the idea that died.

The VP points to three structural fixes for the leader who decides to act — but is candid about the cost of each. A senior sponsor can force an opportunity through, but that route collapses the day the sponsor moves on. A sandbox can let an outside idea gather evidence until it answers the skeptics, at the price of added internal complexity and a fight for funding. The company can push its scouting work outside its own walls through a venture arm or an external hub, but then live with the risk that the unit drifts away from the strategy it was meant to serve. Therefore, the VP insists that none of the three is a clean solution. The choice depends on the situation and the organization, rather than a template.

The move that matters most, the VP argues, is smaller than any of these fixes, costs nothing to build, and sits with the leader alone: the willingness to answer. A simple no beats silence, because a team can argue a no, revise around it, or learn from it. Silence, on the other hand, teaches them that raising ideas wastes their time.

His rule, from years of experiencing this, is blunt: give the idea a negative decision rather than no decision at all. That answer can come in the next review, with the same people already in the room. Say a clear no, and the team moves on with something to build on. Keep withholding the decision, and the option does not stay open. It just gets buried, while the leader avoids any accountability.

That’s it for today.

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Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Chief @ Innov8rs

PS- this edition is a great one to share within your team, and with your leadership, with or without direct mentions haha… they can all read the full edition even if not subscribed, via this public link.