Hello Innovator!

The role of innovator can feel like an uphill battle, especially when you’re fighting against a corporate system that’s designed to make change difficult. This week, we offer up 5 key actions you can integrate into your daily work to ensure that the system doesn’t bring you down.

Here’s what you’ll find:

• This Week’s Article: You’re Not the Problem. The System Is.

• Share This: 5 Things You Can Do to Survive The System

You’re Not the Problem. The System Is.

Innovation Isn’t Broken. The Incentives Are.

You’re told to act like a founder. But you’re measured like a project manager. 

You already know how this ends. You build. You test. You prove it works. And still, they shelve it, spin it, or hand it off to someone else.

You’ve seen it happen. A project takes off only to get re-org’d to death. A colleague builds something new, then watches someone else get promoted based on the success.

You’re not imagining the pattern. Culture is what gets rewarded. And in most orgs, risk is punished, even if the language says otherwise.

You've probably already realized: the system isn’t neutral.
The system isn’t ignoring innovation. It’s actively rejecting it.

The reality is that incentives signal what really matters. And if predictability, optics, and short-term wins are what get rewarded, then that’s what survives.

Not learning. Not bets. And not you, the innovator.

How to Survive a Difficult System

Create a Safe Zone for Failure

As an innovator, you can’t wait for the system to make failure safe. You have to figure out how to survive it, strategically. Here’s how:

Design bets that expose risk early. 
Don’t pitch the big vision first. Lead with the sharp question: “What would kill this idea fastest?” Then build around answering that. When you show you’re not wasting resources—you’re testing the riskiest assumptions—you take away their excuse to shut it down.

Control the narrative before the results. 
Frame the work in terms of learning velocity, not outcomes. Call it a test. Define success as “deciding what not to build.” The more clarity you provide upfront, the less room they have to reframe it as failure later.

Socialize learnings, not wins. 
Create artifacts (internal memos, debriefs, backchannels) that highlight what was discovered. Make it public. Let others see the rigor, not just the result. If people only ever see the launch or the silence, they assume failure means incompetence. Change that pattern.

Keep a kill list. 
When something doesn’t hold up to pressure, write it down. Make it visible. Treat those killed ideas as strategic moves, not losses. The more you normalize saying “no” to weak ideas, the more cover you give yourself—and others—for not forcing something that doesn’t deserve to scale.

You may not be able to remove the risk entirely. But you can make the upside of clarity more visible than the downside of failure.

That’s how you survive long enough to try again.

Create Space to Move

You’re building inside a machine designed to protect what already works. That machine will slow you down, not out of malice, but by design. Everything about it is tuned for predictability: governance, compliance, approvals, process.

You can’t change that overnight. But you can change how your work is perceived. Here’s how:

Reframe the work.
Call your work 'early-stage,' 'exploratory,' or 'non-launch-impacting.' Say you're testing signal, not deploying product. Use language that mitigates any perceived risk so folks don’t question too deeply.

Decouple from the roadmap. 
Don’t let your project get tangled in delivery timelines or quarterly targets. Make it clear this work runs adjacent, not inside, the core planning structure.

Avoid friction points. 
If you know legal, brand, or compliance will slow you down, structure your work so it doesn’t trigger their involvement early. Don’t seek approval until you’ve got something defensible

Position your work as something that lives outside the critical path. Not because it is, but because it needs to appear that way to survive. We’re not advocating for deception. We’re aiming to create space to learn before the system notices.