There is a particular type of meeting where someone leans forward, looks seriously at the PowerPoint and says: “We need to make sure that this initiative is strategically important and has a structure that we can present to everyone before we move on.” It sounds very sensible. The problem is that many of the world’s most significant initiatives would never have survived such a meeting. They would have died instantly. Not because the ideas were bad, but because their significance was not understood in the beginning.
This is one of the most underrated things about creativity. The impact is almost never where you first think it is. Some of the most valuable initiatives I have seen did not start with a business plan, a governance document or a perfect analysis. They started with someone thinking something seemed fun. This may sound provocative in a world where everything has to be motivated, measured and quality assured before it can even go live, but experience shows otherwise.
Fun is often a signal, not a distraction
We have learned to distinguish between the serious and the fun as if they were opposites. Seriousness should lead to results. Fun is something you do afterwards. But in creative processes, it often works the other way around. What feels fun is sometimes the brain’s way of signaling that something is interesting enough to explore further. Not finished. Not proven. But alive.
The problem is that organizations often try to stifle this very early on. Ideas should be realistic before they even get a chance to take off. It’s a bit like demanding that a child be able to explain their retirement plan before they can start playing soccer.
Creativity doesn’t work that way. Many initiatives first need to be a little crazy to find their true context.
Ideas find their value through movement
The most fascinating thing about ideas is that they change when people start talking about them. An idea that only exists in your head is quite limited. But when you talk about it, something happens. Someone laughs. Someone builds on it. Someone says it reminds them of a problem they have themselves. Suddenly the idea starts moving.
That’s why initiative and activity are often more important than big plans at the beginning. A test. A conversation. An improvised event. A strange pilot project. Many people think that innovation is about getting the right idea right from the start. In practice, it’s often more about daring to set something in motion long enough for others to connect their perspectives. Ideas work a bit like snowballs. They look pretty insignificant at first, but change completely when they start rolling through the right landscape.
Many small ideas are needed for something really good to emerge
This is perhaps the biggest misconception about innovation. That you have to come up with “the big idea.” In reality, strong initiatives often arise through a rather messy process where many smaller ideas collide with each other. Someone tests something internally that doesn’t really lead anywhere. But a detail from that initiative inspires another team. Someone else picks up the working method and uses it in a completely different context. And suddenly something has grown that no one could have planned from the start.
It’s a bit like composting. It doesn’t look very impressive when it happens. More like a pile of mixed scraps. But over time, something new and nutritious begins to grow out of what at first seemed quite useless and incoherent.
Organizations that understand this often become significantly more innovative than those that try to control every step from the beginning.
An initiative must be felt before it is understood
There is also another mechanism here that many underestimate. Good initiatives rarely spread because they are logically perfect. They spread because people feel something about them. That does not mean that facts are unimportant. But people rarely engage in change solely because of rational arguments. An initiative must be presented in a way that others can see themselves in it. Feel the energy. Understand why it is worth caring. That is why storytelling plays such a big role in innovation. Not as manipulation, but as a way to create meaning.
If someone presents an initiative as a dry process change, almost no one will want to get involved. If the same initiative is instead described as a way to solve a frustrating problem together, something starts to happen.
Anchoring is really about security
Many people think that anchoring is about getting approval. Often it is more about creating security. When a few people already like an idea, the rest of the organization becomes much more relaxed. Then the initiative feels less risky. Less lonely. It is a very human mechanism. We look at each other to determine what seems reasonable. That is why it is often smarter to get five people genuinely engaged than to try to convince fifty half-uninterested people right away.
Small groups act as social proof. They show that it is okay to think in that direction. That is also why change rarely starts with the majority.
Failed initiatives are often successes in disguise
This is perhaps the most frustrating and at the same time the most hopeful thing about creative initiatives. Many of them fail technically but succeed culturally. A project may be canceled. The budget runs out. The timing was wrong. But people remember the energy. The discussions. The shifts in perspective. And a few years later, the same thoughts reappear in a different form.
That’s why it’s so difficult to measure the true impact of innovation. The impact is not always in the initiative itself. It’s in the traces it leaves behind. A failed initiative can change the way people view opportunities. It can create new relationships. New ways of talking. New mental models.
It’s a bit like throwing a stone into water. The waves continue long after the stone has disappeared beneath the surface.
It takes courage to start something before it seems important
We live in a time where people want to know exactly why something is important before they start. The problem is that truly new things rarely prove their worth at first. That means that creativity almost always contains an element of social uncertainty. You sometimes have to dare to appear a little strange before others see what you see. And yes, sometimes it leads nowhere.
But sometimes it leads to something that changes cultures, organizations and the way people think. The irony is that many of the initiatives that are later described as visionary often looked quite improvised at first. A little too simple. A little too fun. A little too uncertain. That’s exactly why almost no one else dared to start them.
Maybe this is what innovation is really about
Maybe innovation is less about predicting the future and more about creating enough movement for the future to find its way to you. Because many of the most valuable things in life don’t start with certainty.
They start with curiosity.
Someone says “this would be pretty fun to try”.
And sometimes it turns out, much later, that that was exactly where something important began.
