There is a decision that feels right when we are stressed. It is the decision to wait a little with things that we are not sure about or secure in.
We wait to give creativity space until the current workload has decreased. We wait with the innovation work until the strategy is ready. We wait until the budget is more secure, until the organization has more time, until someone has done a proper analysis or until it becomes clearer what the next big change in the world will actually be. In the meantime, the business continues to function. Customers get their deliveries. The monthly report comes in. Meetings are held. There is always something more important right now.
The problem is that innovation almost always loses out to what is important right now.
This makes the issue of creativity and innovation strangely similar to the issue of personal procrastination. A person can know that something is important and still postpone it. An organization can similarly know that renewal is crucial and still continue to do almost everything else first. The difference is that an individual’s procrastination may affect a week, while an organization’s procrastination may affect its future competitiveness for years.
The really interesting thing is therefore not just why people procrastinate. It is why intelligent and experienced leaders can understand the need for innovation and yet create organizations where innovation is constantly pushed further down the calendar.
What is not urgent often never gets done
In many organizations, there is a strange asymmetry between operations and renewal. Operations produce immediate signals. Something breaks and needs to be fixed. A customer calls. A competitor launches something. A performance target must be met. An employee needs support. A project must be delivered.
Innovation works differently. What is done today may not have any visible effect for several months or years. Moreover, the most important effect may be that the organization discovers something that changes the way it thinks, rather than being able to immediately show a finished product.
This makes innovation particularly vulnerable to procrastination. When time is short, priority is given to what has a clear cause and effect. Creativity, however, often requires a period in which the results are not yet known. It can be likened to planting a tree and at the same time requiring that every hour of work be accounted for in the form of fruit. One would quickly begin to question why anyone would stand and water the ground at all.
There is an important leadership question here. If the organization only rewards what produces visible results in the short term, it will gradually become better at predictability and worse at discovering the new.
What is it that actually makes us wait?
The first step towards breaking procrastination is to ask what the waiting actually consists of.
Sometimes it is about uncertainty. The leader does not know which innovation initiative will yield results and therefore wants more information before making a decision. Sometimes it is about fear of investing in something that will fail. In other cases, it is about organizational habit. There is simply no natural place in the rhythm of the business where creativity and experimentation can take place.
But there is also a more subtle form of procrastination. It occurs when the leader says that innovation is important, but never makes it concrete enough for it to actually compete for the organization’s time. It is easy to say that creativity is important. It is much more difficult to create a calendar, budget, decision-making structure and work environment that shows that it is really important.
The organization believes more in behaviors than in formulations. If management says that employees should think new things but fills every week with meetings, reporting and short-term deliveries, the message in practice is that creativity is something that you are welcome to devote yourself to when there is time to spare. And time to spare is rarely something an organization gets. It has to be created.
Urgency without panic
A common way to deal with personal procrastination is to create a sense of urgency, i.e. a clear experience that something needs to be done now rather than later. For innovation work, this is particularly important, but it must be done in the right way.
Urgency does not have to mean panic. Rather, it means creating a clear connection between today’s decisions and tomorrow’s opportunities. If the organization knows that technology is changing, customer behavior is changing, or an industry is being transformed, the question may not be whether the change will come. The question may be what capabilities the organization needs to build now to be able to act when the change becomes apparent. That is an important distinction.
You don’t have to say, “We need to find the big innovation by the end of the year.” You can instead say, “We need to get better at discovering, testing, and developing new opportunities this year.” The first tries to steer an outcome that is not yet predictable. The second creates a direction and an ability. This is often where wise innovation leadership begins.
Start with values
Another question from the work on procrastination is simple but powerful: is this in my values? Translated to the organizational level, the question becomes: what kind of organization do we want to be?
If a company’s management says that it wants to be long-term, learning, creative and relevant in ten years, but consistently prioritizes short-term efficiency over experimentation, a conflict arises between identity and behavior. You cannot resolve that conflict by writing a better innovation strategy. If innovation is actually part of the organization’s values, it needs to be visible in how resources are used, how managers act, what questions are asked and what behaviors are encouraged.
An organization that considers itself as a person may therefore need to formulate the sentence: “We are an organization that sets aside time to discover things we don’t yet know we need.” It sounds almost banal. But that is precisely why it is useful. Because when an idea later encounters resistance, you can ask: “Is this an exception to how we work, or is this actually how we said we want to work?” Values then become not words on the wall but decision support in situations where it is difficult to know what to do.
Break innovation down into smaller actions
One of the biggest reasons why innovation is postponed is that the word innovation makes the task too big. “We have to be more innovative” is almost as paralyzing as “we have to change our entire future”. It is difficult to start because no one really knows what the first step is. Therefore, innovation work may need to be broken down in the same way as other tasks that otherwise risk being postponed. Instead of trying to create the finished future solution, the organization can start with a question, an experiment, a customer conversation, a prototype or an observation.
It changes psychology. There’s a big difference between being tasked with “developing the business model of the future” and being given two weeks to research three customer behaviors that the current business model doesn’t quite explain. The first requires that people already know where they’re going. The second allows you to start discovering where you can go. Creativity often needs that kind of constraint. When the task gets smaller, it’s easier to start thinking.
Find out what you don’t know
Procrastination can sometimes masquerade as preparation.
- We’re just going to analyze a little more first.
- We’re just going to understand the technology better.
- We’re just going to talk to a few more people.
- We’re just going to develop a better basis for decision-making.
In some cases, this is wise. But sometimes, gathering information is actually a way to avoid the uncertainty of getting started.
There’s an important difference between needing more information and needing more courage. One way to spot the difference is to ask, “What don’t we actually know?” When the question becomes concrete, the organization can often see that certain uncertainties can be investigated quickly. A customer test can provide more information than three months of internal discussions. A simple prototype can reveal a problem that no analysis model could have predicted. A conversation with a user can change the entire definition of the problem. Experimentation is therefore not the opposite of analysis. Experimentation becomes a way to produce the information that the analysis needs.
Set goals for creativity, not just for the results of innovation
Here arises one of the most problematic misconceptions about innovation management. If the organization sets the goal that every innovation project must succeed, people become cautious. They choose ideas that already seem plausible. They avoid uncertainty. They refine rather than explore. In the end, the organization can be very effective at innovation that does not really change anything.
This does not mean that innovation should be aimless. On the contrary, goals are needed, but the goals can be about the creative process and the capability that the organization wants to build. It can be about how many hypotheses are tested, how quickly the organization can move from idea to learning, or how many alternative perspectives are explored before an important decision is made. In this way, incubation also becomes a legitimate part of the work.
An idea sometimes needs to be allowed to sit still. People sometimes need to think things through. An observation sometimes needs to be combined with another observation that has not yet emerged. What looks like passivity from the outside can therefore be an important part of the creative process. The difference between productive waiting and procrastination is that productive waiting has an intention.
“I am a person who…”
A powerful way to change behavior is to change the story we have about ourselves. Instead of saying “I should work more on innovation,” a leader can start thinking: “I am a person who creates space for what does not yet exist.” It is a different kind of formulation. It does not describe a task but an identity.
At the organizational level, the same principle can be used. “We are an organization that gets a lot done” is a strong identity, but it can become dangerous if the only thing that counts as getting something done is delivering according to the existing model. A more innovation-oriented identity could be: “We are an organization that makes important things happen.”
Then the question becomes not just how much is produced, but whether the organization is actually moving towards something significant. It is a small linguistic difference but a big mental shift.
When efficiency becomes an enemy of innovation
A successful organization often has a strong ability to optimize. It is one of the reasons why it has become successful. But this same ability can later become a limitation. When processes are well-tuned, deviations become disruptions. When responsibilities are clear, cross-border work becomes more difficult. When budgets are tightly bound, experiments become uncertain. When managers are rewarded for delivering what they promised, it becomes rational to avoid things that could change the plan. The organization then becomes like a machine that has become very good at going in one direction.
The problem arises when the path changes direction. Therefore, creativity does not need to be understood only as the ability to come up with ideas. It needs to be understood as the ability of the organization to create alternatives when the existing logic begins to produce worse results. This is also why innovation often needs to be protected from the organization’s own efficiency.
The leader needs to model the behavior himself
It is difficult to create a creative organization if the leader himself constantly postpones creative work. Employees observe what the leader actually does. If the boss says that the future is important but never participates in experiments, never asks open questions and never sets aside time for exploration, the message becomes clear. Therefore, the most powerful innovation message of leadership is often not what the leader says but what the leader does when the outcome is uncertain.
- Can the leader say: “I don’t know, let’s investigate”?
- Can the leader accept that an idea needs to be developed before it is assessed?
- Can the leader let an experiment fail without automatically considering it a failure?
- Can the leader prioritize a question that does not yet have a clear answer over yet another activity that is already known?
It is such behaviors that create a culture where people dare to start.
An organization also needs to be allowed to wait
At the same time, there is a risk in reacting to procrastination by making innovation work even more intensive. Everything should go faster. More workshops. More ideas. More sprints. More innovation meetings. But creativity does not always work that way. There is a paradox here. To make something new happen, the organization sometimes needs to create more activity. But for something new to emerge, it sometimes also needs to create less activity. That is why creativity needs both acceleration and incubation.
An organization may need periods where it actively searches, tests and builds. But it may also need periods where people are allowed to observe, reflect and let ideas develop. Creating space for thinking is therefore not about doing less. It is about recognizing that thinking is part of the work.
From “late” to “now”
Perhaps the most important question for a leader is therefore not “Can we afford to invest in innovation?” It is: “What is the cost of waiting?”
The cost of deferred innovation is rarely visible in the next monthly report. Instead, it can be shown in competitors learning faster, new skills never being built, employees losing the desire to create, or the organization suddenly discovering that its old assumptions no longer work. In that case, the big cost is not the innovation investment itself. It is the time that disappeared.
Starting does not therefore have to mean making a big decision about the future. It can be much less than that. A leader can set aside an hour. A team can test a hypothesis. An organization can create a place where new questions can be discussed. A project can be allowed to investigate something without first having to prove that it will succeed. The important thing is to move from the intention to do something to the behavior of actually starting.
A Long-Term Habit of Getting Things Done
Just as personal procrastination is rarely solved in a single effort, an organization needs to build a habit of action. First, management needs to create a shared understanding of why creativity and innovation are necessary. Next, it needs to make it easy to get started by breaking down big innovation ambitions into smaller actions. Then, the organization needs to create recurring rhythms for experimentation, reflection, and learning. Over time, these ways of working need to be built into structures, budgets, leadership, and follow-up. That’s when innovation moves from being a project to becoming an organizational capability.
It also means that the organization needs to learn to distinguish between being busy and to be in motion. An organization can be enormously productive and at the same time slowly move away from its future. It can also look ineffective for a period because it is investigating things that do not yet have an obvious value. But that is where the next big opportunity may lie.
The person who gets a lot done
Perhaps the whole argument can ultimately be reduced to a simple change of identity. Not: “We should be more innovative.” But: “We are an organization that gets a lot of important work done.”
This means that the unknown also has a place in the work. To ask the question before the answer is found. To try before everything is ready. To learn before you know exactly what to build. To set aside time before the need has become acute. To dare to start before anyone can guarantee the result. Innovation therefore rarely begins with the perfect strategy. It often begins with a small violation of procrastination.
A leader does not need to know exactly what future the organization will create. But the leader needs to create the conditions for the organization to be able to discover it.
And perhaps that is the real difference between organizations that innovate and organizations that slowly become obsolete.
One waits for the future to become clear enough to act.
The other begins to act so that the future can become clear.
