Imagine that you are standing in front of the mirror and thinking about changing your appearance. You can choose to put on a new hat. If you don’t like it, you can take it off five minutes later and no major damage has been done.
You can also go to the hairdresser and get a haircut. If the result is not as you had hoped, you can undo it, but not immediately. You have to live with the decision until the hair grows back.
The third option is to get a tattoo. There is no easy way back. The decision will follow you for a long time and even if a tattoo can be removed, the process almost always leaves some kind of trace.
The interesting thing is that these three examples actually describe three different levels of decision risk. The first decision is easy to undo. The second is temporary but costly to change. The third changes the future in a way that cannot be easily undone.
Now comes the uncomfortable question. What kind of decision are most organizations trying to make when they say they want to be innovative? Too often, the answer is that they try to create tattoo results by making hat decisions.
Creativity requires decisions that matter
Innovation is often about ideas. But ideas change nothing unless they are followed by decisions. The big difference between creativity and innovation is that creativity can stay on the drawing board. Innovation only begins when someone chooses to realize the idea. That’s where the problem arises. Most organizations are happy to encourage new ideas as long as the decisions are easy to take back. They are happy to discuss ideas, maybe test something small, do a pilot project or run an experiment that doesn’t affect the core business. These are important steps, but tougher decisions are needed to change the entire system.
Real innovation sooner or later requires decisions that feel more like a tattoo than a hat. It’s about choosing a new business model, closing an old business, investing in technology that hasn’t been proven yet, or changing a way of working that has worked for decades. These kinds of decisions change the future, and that’s why they feel uncomfortable. That’s also why they’re so uncommon.
Risk and innovation follow each other
There is a strange connection between the degree of innovation and decision risk. The greater the change we want to create, the greater the risk that the decision will turn out to be wrong. This does not mean that all risky decisions lead to innovation. But almost all real innovations contain a decision that was perceived as risky when it was made.
This applies to companies that dared to change their business model before the market demanded it. This applies to municipalities that changed their entire way of working with residents. This applies to researchers who left established theories to follow a new idea. This applies to entrepreneurs who invested everything in a solution that no one else believed in. When we look back, these decisions often seem obvious. When they were made, they often seemed far from obvious.
Those who should be the bravest are often the most cautious
There is also a human paradox in how we make decisions. Younger people are often perceived as brave because they do not yet know all the obstacles. They see opportunities where others see risks. They have not yet learned why something is said to be impossible. Older people can also be brave, but for a different reason. They often have greater security in their professional role. They know who they are even if a project fails. Careers are no longer as fragile. Failure does not define their identity in the same way.
Between these groups are often the people who make the most strategic decisions in organizations. These are middle managers, project managers and decision-makers in the middle of their careers. They often have a lot to lose. The next promotion, budget responsibility, reputation, bonuses and expectations from management and the board. Ironically, it is often the people who have the greatest opportunity to change the systems who have the most difficulty making the truly brave decisions. It is not about a lack of skills. It is about how people work.
A culture that rewards safety gets safe results
Many organizations say they want innovation, but their reward systems say something completely different. Mistakes are noticed. Delays are questioned. Budget deviations are scrutinized. Failed investments become topics of conversation. It sends a clear signal. The safest decision is the best decision.
But if everyone makes safe decisions, the organization will also get safe results in the short term. That’s great if the goal is stability. It’s much less good if the goal is innovation and long-term success. Innovation requires people to sometimes dare to make decisions where the outcome is uncertain.
The four-dimensional grid that reveals the courage of the organization
A simple way to understand this is to place decisions in a model with two dimensions. One axis describes how much risk the decision poses to the person making it. The other describes how much innovation potential the decision has.
In the first box, there is low risk and low innovation rate. These are the hat decisions. They are easy to take back and rarely affect the business very much. They are important in everyday life but rarely change the future. In the second box, there is low risk and high innovation rate. This is the ideal situation that many organizations are looking for, but it is quite unusual. If a decision really has the potential to change a system, there is almost always some kind of risk associated with it.
The third box consists of high risk but low innovation rate. Here, people take great personal risks without creating much value, which is the worst combination. In the fourth box, there is both high risk and high innovation rate. These are the tattoo decisions. This is where the really big changes occur and this is also where organizations need to build the most security. The interesting thing is that many organizations say they want to be in the upper right corner but in practice steer people towards the lower left through their processes, incentives and follow-up systems.
Psychological security is the insurance for innovation
If people are to dare to make decisions at the tattoo level, something else must change. Security.
When people know that they will not lose their credibility if a well-thought-out experiment fails, their decision-making changes. When organizations begin to pay attention to courage instead of just results, the culture changes. When leaders talk about their own failures, norms change. When a project that failed is still celebrated because it created important knowledge, people begin to understand that learning is actually valued. That’s when innovation truly becomes possible.
Celebrating failure is actually celebrating learning
Many people react negatively to the idea of celebrating failure. It sounds unreasonable. But in reality, it is not the failure that is celebrated. It is the courage to make a decision where the outcome was unknown. It is the learning that occurred. It is the knowledge that makes the next decision better.
Just as a researcher does not consider an experiment a failure just because the hypothesis turned out to be wrong, innovation work should be about reducing uncertainty rather than always being right. It changes the entire view of decisions and makes the organization gradually better at making increasingly advanced decisions with an ever-increasing level of innovation.
What does this mean for sustainability?
The same logic applies to the great sustainability challenges of our time. We will not change energy systems, transportation systems or consumption patterns by making decisions at the drop of a hat. We will need to make decisions that feel much bigger than that. We need to dare to change business models. We need to dare to leave old ways of consuming. We need to dare to invest in solutions that are not yet perfect. We need to dare to create new regulations before all the answers are available.
If every decision has to be completely risk-free before it is made, the transition will always come too late. The really big societal challenges therefore require organizations that dare to make decisions at the tattoo level, even when the future cannot be predicted with complete certainty.
Courage can be organized
The beauty is that courage is not just a personal trait. It is also something that can be designed. Organizations can create decision-making processes where more perspectives are taken into account before decisions are made. You can build experiments where the consequences are limited without reducing ambition. You can spread responsibility instead of putting everything on one individual. You can create forums where uncertainty can be discussed openly. You can reward well-thought-out attempts even when the outcome did not go as planned.
In this way, courage does not become dependent on individual heroes. It becomes a characteristic of the entire system and part of the organization’s culture.
From hats to tattoos
Perhaps the most important question an innovation leader can ask is not which idea is the best. Perhaps the most important question is instead: What decisions do we actually dare to make?
Because that is where the difference arises between organizations that talk about innovation and organizations that actually change the world. Of course, we still need hat decisions. They make everyday life flexible and help us test small changes. We also need hairstyle decisions where we gradually learn and adjust along the way. But if we really want to create something that lasts, we sometimes have to dare to make decisions that feel more like a tattoo.
Not because the risk itself is worth pursuing, but because the changes that truly shape the future almost always require decisions that cannot be easily undone.
And perhaps that is precisely where the greatest innovation begins.
Not in the brilliant idea, but in the courage to say yes to it when no one yet knows whether it will succeed.
