Ten ways organizations stifle creativity and innovation

For many reasons and in many ways, American corporations tend to stifle creativity and innovation within their organizations. The exceptions to this stand out as the market leaders who constantly introduce new products, new services, and new visions of how the customers can work, play, travel, etc. What separates the leaders from the also-rans? Within the organization, what separates the visionaries from the status-quosies? More important, what distinguishes the successful EnVisionaries in an organization from the frustrated would-be visionaries?

A visionary is an explorer, somebody who wants to go where others have not yet gone and who has an idea or ideas of what it would be like if we could get there. Many visionaries have no idea how to get to there vision. Often, that alone will stop a weak-hearted visionary. Most visionaries never take even the first step toward realizing their vision. There are many reasons for this: fear of failure, lack of energy, lack of self confidence, perceived lack of resources. But the main reason and the topic of this paper is the total lack of empowerment that they feel within their organization.

Much of what follows could be applies to families, churches, and other non-business organizations, but for the purpose of simplicity, I am going to focus on American for-profit businesses in this discussion. The ten most frequent ways businesses stifle creativity and innovation are:

1. the culture discourages foolish risk taking and encourages well thought out planning of projects.
2. the reward system encourages doing the things faster and cheaper.
3. the "heroes" in the organization are company men who followed the rules and rose through the ranks. While top management talks about taking chances, they got to their positions by playing it safe.
4. mistakes are analyzed and documented and those who made them are punished.
   a suggestion box or something similar is available to collect good ideas. These are processed by senior management.
5. there is neither time nor money for basic tools needed to try out an idea. tight budget controls force decision making up the organizational structure.
6. there is no process for screening / filtering ideas and funding some.
7. the company is focused on its core objectives and refuses to allow its management team to get defocused / diluted.
8. lack of accountability
9. short term mentality and overemphasis on the P&L.

Most of these statements could be interpreted as good things for a company to do: planning, suggestion boxes, do things faster, and analyze mistakes. Indeed all of those are good management practices. No board of directors sits down one day and decides to discourage innovation and creativity. They all want new ideas to flow around their company; they want new products and services. Yet while trying to meet other important corporate goals, e.g., cost control, focus, they create an environment and a culture that kills creativity.

An EnVisionary can succeed even in the worst anti-innovation culture and, in fact, the great EnVisionaries i have known, grew up in anti-innovation cultures. A company can make it too easy to be an explorer, a pioneer. Here is a definition of "pioneer" that i read sometime back:

"the pioneer is that guy out in front lying in the dirt with the arrows sticking out of him"

There is some truth to that definition and, if you are a true visionary and have been at it for more than 2 years, you probably have some arrow holes to show. But, you persevered. The most important quality of an EnVisionary is his stick-to-it-ness, his perseverance! Let's look at each of the ten ways companies kill creativity and innovation and see how a true EnVisionary gets around those.

A Risk Averse Culture
Notice that the purpose of this note is not to tell a visionary how to change his organization's culture. Even a senior manager will need years to change a culture. Having a perfect, innovation-encouraging culture would probably be just a little boring to a true EnVisionary. I can hear to moans from you suffering visionaries, but it's true. The challenge of getting your idea to market in a non-optimal culture is what should get you out of bed in the morning and motivate you during the day.

I remember seeing a comic strip of a CEO and his assistant walking out of a business presentation by some consultants. The CEO is saying to his assistant, "That culture idea sounds great. Get me one of those by Monday." Cultures are notoriously difficult to change.

A culture is defined in some business text books as the totality of the habits, beliefs, and working style of an organization. You may have a better definition, one that mentions values or objectives. Whatever your definition, there are three main things that determine a culture:

1. the stated and real values of the organization
2. the reward system
3. how senior management reacts emotionally to events

The stated values of an organization usually are posted somewhere or appear in the employee handbook. "We stand for… " or "This company exists to …". You may call this a vision statement and then you have a code that defines acceptable behavior on the job. Those are the stated values. Often the real values of an organization that shine through loud and clear are significantly at odds with the stated values. The real values are much more important than the stated values and, to the extent that they differ, that sends an extremely strong message about trust.

Regardless of the brilliance of the stated values and how well management represents them in daily business life, the reward system will counteract any stated values about risk taking and innovation. Take a look at your company's bonus plans if you can get your hands on them. What is rewarded? Most plans have splits with some rewards for maintaining the flow of work and making continual, small improvements and other rewards to successful, new, big projects. Look at the weighting of the splits.

Look at VP and Director level managers. How did they get promoted into those roles? Or were they hired from the outside, which certainly sends a clear message about the opportunity for rewards for risk takers (not to mention the condemnation of the company's management development program!). Some companies think their employees must be blind or stupid when they publish value statements that claim to reward merit while promoting the incompetent son-in-law of the CEO!

These first two factors are important, but the third factor by far outweighs both the first two in influence on the culture, especially those aspects that affect innovation and creativity.

Anybody who has worked for a boss with a temper knows how the behavior of everybody in the organization changes based on the boss' moods, hot buttons, and reactions to event. On the other side, some of us have experienced the warmth and encouragement of seeing a boss beaming over some success in the organization. If there was one message i could send to senior C-level managers it would be this:

train yourself to delay emotional reactions by 0.1 seconds and, during that split second, ask yourself this: what is the emotional reaction i'm about to show going to do to the culture?

This does not mean that we need a group of business managers who never display emotion - all of America's great business leaders have been highly emotional managers. Rather, you need to realize the affect that your emotional response to failures and mistakes has on future innovation and creativity within your organization. If you celebrate great innovation efforts, even if they fail, your will get a lot more innovation than if you blow up at failures. Many failures, like those that are slips in ethics or judgment, deserve your anger. But you need to publicly celebrate failures of new creative ideas. You want your people thinking: make more mistakes faster, as long as the mistakes were in the pursuit of ideas that will delight and amaze your customers, improve your internal processes, or create improvements to your image in the market.

A note to the visionary who is walking back to his office after being scorched by the boss for wasting a bunch of time and money on an idea that didn't work. One out of ten senior managers in America has control over his emotions (emotional maturity). What didn't kill you made you stronger. Learn from the mistake and more on. Illegitimous non carborandum.

Reward System
Most reward systems are not designed to create more innovation and creativity in the organization. As mentioned above, the reward system takes on many forms: salaries, raised, bonuses, promotions, pats on the back, public recognition, opportunities to work on choice projects, etc. Most rewards go to people who set reasonable goals and achieve them. While an attitude of continual improvement is vital to the success of most companies (and should be encouraged), there needs to be room in the reward system for the maverick who is not thinking in terms of incremental, evolutionary improvement but in terms of radical, revolutionary improvement. How do you set up a reward system that encourages radical thinking? How do porcupines make love? Very carefully!

While working at TRW, i was privileged to participate in a four day program called the 2 + 2. It was two days of t-grouping, team building, etc., followed by two days of Guerilla OD (Organization Development) training. The t-grouping was designed to hone interpersonal skills and teach group dynamics. The Guerilla OD was designed to create revolutionaries within the organization - how to sneak projects past your boss, how to divert resources to a stealth innovation project, how to hijack a project and turn it into your creative idea. I am not sure if senior TRW management really know what was being taught to director-level managers in the hills of Ojai, but the results were some innovative projects that would not have gotten off the ground otherwise.

If you are a frustrated visionary reading this, there is not much you can do about your organization's reward system. If your situation is bad enough and your idea is good enough, consider going out on your own and building your own business. Envisions can help if your idea will result in a commercial software product. Even if it won't, but you want somebody to bounce ideas off of, give us a call or send us an email.

If you are a manager reading this who wants to stimulate innovation and creativity in his organization, consider adding some opportunities to your formal reward system for bonuses for people who persevere in pushing a new idea through. Rewards include money (salaries, bonuses, stock options), promotion, choice assignments and recognition. If, because of corporate policies higher up, you are limited in what you can do with some of these, then use the others.

There is certainly nothing stopping you from throwing a party to celebrate some innovation success or failure. Get the group together and give the visionary a plaque or even just a certificate. For a variety of reasons, stock options are particularly effective rewards for visionaries and you might find it easier than you think to get these approves as they have no cash or P&L impact.

Heroes
Who are the heroes in your organization? Think back on your first few weeks on the job. You probably heard some stories about specific events, catastrophes, strategic moves, or enormous flops. Or maybe you heard about how Joe spent 40 years with the company, never made waves, and now is the CEO. There is a body of lore or legends, that every company has. These stories tell a lot about the culture of the organization even if the players are retired and gone.

As a manager, you can have a lot impact on the culture and your team's willingness to take risks in pursuit of creative and innovative ideas, even if the larger organization celebrates "no mistakes", "toe the line", and "nose to the grindstone". You can do this by talking about innovation at every opportunity.

You should have a set of "canned speeches" prepared. Write them down and practice them. The speeches should be five minute stories you can tell when the opportunity presents. Never pass up an opportunity to tell one of your stories to any audience. The stories should be about visionaries who were beat down repeatedly, but who persevered to bring some important new concept to market. If these people are still in the company, introduce them to groups you talk with. This costs nothing and can have a tremendous impact on creativity and innovation within your organization.

Even as a non-manager visionary, you can contribute stories to the body of legends that influence the culture toward more innovation-friendliness. It doesn't cost the company anything to introduce new stories into the culture. First, select one or two great innovation successes or failures. Then approach a senior manager who you think might be sympathetic to the cause of innovation and creativity. Ask him to write an article (which you draft) for the company newsletter or website. Ask him if he would mind telling a story or two about innovators the next time he addresses a large audience. Give him the five minute story you have drafted. Remind him that it costs nothing to turn the culture a few degrees toward more innovation. If he has arguments about the danger of non-managed experimentation, then you have a great opportunity to discuss with him the pros and cons of innovation. If you can't get through, maybe it is time to branch out on your own.

Handling Mistakes
One of the strongest innovation messages that is sent by senior management to a team is the handling of mistakes. Regardless of stories you tell, value statements you publish, and reward systems you install, if you beat up the next visionary who has a bad idea, then all the rest of the effort was wasted.

Face it, most ideas stink. In decades of watching visionaries struggle in organizations, i have seen ideas sort out into several categories. Using the analogy of a batter in a baseball game, ideas seem to fall into these types. Out of 100 new ideas in an American business, about

• 60 will be just plain bad ideas
• 25 will be singles. They are good enough to payback the investment required to develop them. You could count these as marginal successes.
• 10 will be doubles of triples. They more than pay back the investments and are real successes for the company.
• 5 will be home runs, those ideas that launch a new revenue source for you or your company, dramatically improve the experience your customers have in dealing with your company, or significantly reduce costs by improving processes.

Well, this sounds easy. All you have to do is fund the home runs and the triples and forget about the rest. More on this in the next point. Regardless of how well you screen, most ideas will turn out to be flops somewhere in the research or development process, hopefully near the front of the process. How do you, as a senior manager, react to these flops? This is critical. You have to celebrate failures. You have to adopt an attitude of "let's make more mistakes faster". Why? Because, no matter how good your screening process is (that only influences the ratio of good ideas to bad at any point in your process), the more ideas you cram through the process, the more triples and home runs are going to pop out the back.

Of course there are resource restraints. That is why the wise manager thinks of ideas as trees. He only has a limited amount of space and fertilizer and he wants to grow as many large successful trees as possible. How does he optimize the process. In general, the optimal strategy is to have lots and lots of seedlings, little trees that require little space and fertilizer. As trees grow, they must constantly be reviewed, analyzed, and screened. No more than half of the young seedlings should survive their first winter. See the Trees white paper for more details.

If you are a visionary reading this, there is not a lot you can do about how your managers handle mistakes. You are going to make a lot of mistakes; it's in the nature of the innovation process. Even if you find yourself being beaten up from the outside, at least keep a strong awareness internally that you are doing the right thing. The German's have a wonderful expression for this: "Halt die Ohren steif" - keep your ears stiff. Don't let the culture beat you down. If it is too oppressive, let's help you start your own company to commercialize your best ideas.

Note to managers: Envisions is not the only company after your best visionaries to help them realize their visions. If you don't help them internally, you may find them being your biggest competitor in ten years. There are plenty of examples of this in every industry. So nourish and cherish your visionaries!

The suggestion box
Companies nicely sort themselves into two camps:

1. those who believe that senior management, which its higher experience, better judgment, and superior knowledge of the business, is best qualified to recognize good ideas, and
2. those who believe that the people nearest the ground are the ones best qualified to recognize good ideas.

There is very little middle ground. It should not take more than one minute for you to recognize which camp your organization falls into. How are new ideas handled in your company? Who makes decisions about which new ideas will be pursued and which won't.

Most ideas are bad; that is simply the way it is. But some ideas could turn into the singles, triples, and home runs that your company needs to grow and stay ahead of competition in years to come.

The challenge, of course, is recognizing which ideas fit into which category. That is why the Envisions philosophy emphasizes an on-going process of testing and weeding out ideas so that the most investment goes into the ideas with the biggest probability of success. But, even then, how do decide which ideas to weed out?

This brings us to the two most important statements in this paper:

1. the people best qualified to distinguish the good ideas from the bad are the ones closest to the market, the customers, and the technology.
2. the only test that counts is the market. The only opinion that counts is the customer's.

So the challenge for most senior managers, when it comes to making innovation happen, is to set up a process that works (information flow, reward system, internal VC team, resources allocated to undefined projects), establish screening criteria and procedures are various points in the process, recognize innovators and put them on a pedestal, and then stay out of the process. For most of us who have been in CEO or COO roles, this is extremely difficult because of pride. We think that we got to where we are because of our own creativity and an ability to sort out good ideas from bad. Well, that probably is true. Nevertheless, you will do much more harm than good if you attempt to be too much involved in the innovation process.

I recall a story about the founder of a middle-sized computer company a few decades back. He was concerned about the lack of progress on some technical development but he thoroughly understood the importance of not getting involved in the process. So he snuck into the labs at night and fixed one of the technical problems that was holding up progress. Why did he sneak around when his idea obviously was the right one and he had every right, organizationally, to march in and tell the research engineers how to fix the problem? Because he knew that, due to his position, his ideas would be given more attention then they perhaps deserves and he was humble enough to admit that he didn't always have the right answer. Nothing pleases me more than to hear a CEO say, "Why in the world should I assume that I have a better answer than the people working on the problem?"

So the wrong way to handle ideas is to take them away from the visionary who came up with the idea and give it to senior managers to analyze. The right way is to push the idea right back to the inventor of the idea and force / allow him to develop it up to a certain point (i.e., the first screen). Ideas alone, without the passion and intense ownership of the inventor, will not get far in your organization. Taking the idea away from an inventor is one sure way of getting fewer ideas out of that inventor in the future. This seems to be the hardest creativity lesson for companies to learn.

No time or money
This may be repetitive, but the best response by senior management to a new idea is to give the inventor a little time and money to pursue the idea up to a point. In order for this process to work, there are a few required steps:

1. some way of finding out about ideas - the best way is certainly not a suggestion box, although there should be a relief valve for anonymous suggestions somewhere in the organization. If too many ideas come in through that route, then something is seriously wrong with the culture. The best way is the normal communication channels, i.e., the management structure.
2. an initial investment policy - companies must discard certain ideas right up front, but that should not be the norm. If the company's vision and goals and values are communicated well through the organization, then a self-screening process will take place in the minds of inventors before ideas are put forward. It's a fine balance for senior management to achieve: you do not want too much or too little screening. If you as a CEO are worrying about these kinds of things, then you are truly doing the CEO's job.
3. a progressive screening system - see the next point and the Tree article
4. a follow-on investment policy that funds on-going idea development activities as they need funds, not next year when the new annual budget gets approved!

At one company where i led the strategy, product management, and product development teams for a world-leading niche software company, we introduced "butterfly weeks" in order to stimulate the innovation process. We were at a point with two market dominating products that we needed some new products, new features, and new ways to "delight and amaze" our customers. So, in our resource allocation system, we introduced one special week every ten weeks in which every team member was free to innovate.

Each team member had one week in ten to do whatever he wanted to as long as it:

1. resulted in moving us toward a new product or feature which would delight and amaze customers -or-
2. a process improvement that would make us more productive.

I steered my team toward the second category first because of leverage. By saving ourselves time internally, we created even more time that would be used for more improvement projects. The trick, as I learned, was recognizing when to start pointing people more toward externally focused projects. There is a point of diminishing return on internally-focused projects where you end up making improvements just for the sake of making improvements. Sometimes you have to push engineers out of the nest and force them to look at competitors and at the market and apply their creativity to things that will have an impact there.

The result of this effort, which i had from the CEO initially, was a flurry of internal process improvements that cut our development time by 15 - 20%. Externally, several new products were seeded during this time and, for our flagship product, an Artificial Intelligence module was added that was the first ever in a commercial software product in our industry. The inventor who came up with the AI idea was one of the best EnVisionaries i was ever privileged to work with. He persevered for years, in an extremely innovation-hostile environment, to create a Windows version of our product and do many other innovations that, in retrospect, seemed so obvious. With just a little encouragement (in the form of time and resources), he thrived and produced numerous innovations that kept our company in the lead.

One last note to senior managers: you can go overboard in this area. You may think that one week in ten is already overboard. Maybe it would be during a different phase of our company's life cycle, but it was just right at that time. The best EnVisionaries develop in a friendly but no easy environment. I'll leave the discussion of why that is to the psychologists. You want the process to be demanding. The screening points should be difficult; the whole idea, after all, is to screen out some ideas that some inventors think are the hottest thing since hoola-hoops. You want to give EnVisionaries help, resources, emotional support, and encouragement, but you don't want to provide too many crutches. In a way, the screening process is a foretaste of the open market. It is cold and it clearly separates with winners from the losers. Don't forget to make a hero out of the losers and celebrate their mistakes and be prepared for some of them to leave to find another source of funding who will continue to fund their idea.

No screening / filtering process
If there is no formal screening / filtering process for ideas as they start to develop then all sorts of bad things happen in a culture. In any company, some ideas do get pushed forward. If the decision process is not transparent, then the organization (and the culture) will make assumptions about the decision process which may be wrong or right. The organization will assume that the CEO plays favorites or that political power determines whose ideas get advanced.

Second, if the screening process is not well defined, then the basis for the screening will be somebody's gut feel, probably some senior manager's. That is the worst place and the worst method for screening good ideas. Ideas have to be screened at a low level and by people most directly in touch with the market, ideally including customers themselves.

So, two aspects of a screening process are vital:

1. It must be well defined and transparent
2. It must be market - driven.

Developing a transparent and well defined screening process can be quite a challenge. Envisions is ready to help you with this, if you desire. In doing this, you will discover any weaknesses that exist in the verbalization of your values and your strategy. Resource allocation for new ideas is an important element of corporate strategy and setting up the screening process will force you to be very specific if what kinds of ideas for new products, services, and process improvements you desire. It will also force you to draw clear boundaries around the definition of your business. The are examples, i am sure, in your industry, of companies that had a great idea, pursued it, and found that they unintentionally had left their core business behind for competitors. You may also have examples of companies that did this intentionally as a brilliant strategic move. The point is you have to know what directions you are willing to pursue and what directions you are not. This is not a sales document, but this is one area in which getting experienced help would be wise. Please give us a call if you would like to discuss this vital process.

The best way to be market driven is to involve customers at the very earliest stage of idea development. As you will see, Envisions fundamental approach is to find customers who will work with us to develop their ideas and / or old technology into commercial products that can provide a new source of revenue for them, as well as new growth opportunities for their team members. We believe 100% in customer-driven innovation.

There is absolutely no reason not to get customers involved the instant an idea surfaces. If you cannot find a customer willing to invest some time in helping you flesh out an idea, it probably belongs to the 60% bad idea category. Later, at a future screening step, if you cannot find a customer to invest some money, as well as time, in the idea, it probably is a bad idea.

The screening process must reflect market realities. It must be an education process for the inventor, forcing him to interact with the market. Ideally this will be through direct partnering with customers, but it also could be through industry groups, making presentations at industry shows, and such other forms of market interaction.

Company Focus
The best companies in the world are tightly focused on their core business. Many are the examples of companies who, through internal investment or acquisition, have allowed themselves to become disastrously defocused. Do not be one of them!

However, as a senior manager, you have to balance focus with innovation. You can channel innovation through speeches, rewards, resource allocation decisions, and the screening process. You can insure that innovation stays focused within your core business area however you choose to define that. This is a key strategic decision that should be made at the CEO level. If the CEO cannot or is not willing to clearly define the boundaries for innovation in his company, then you may have bigger problems than the lack of innovation. This is an important part of overall strategy.

Although the examples of disastrous defocusing outnumber the examples of brilliant core business shifts about ten to one, you must not overlook the possibility that you are in a "buggy whip business" that needs to be changed. Even if your core business is not headed for extinction, there may be better opportunities to build revenue, profits, and shareholder value. This is a personal choice, but if the management team is strong enough, i would always allow a little room in the innovation process for wild-card innovations that appear initially to have nothing to do with our core business. You can always kill the idea later or spin it off into a whole new company, if it threatens to be successful and dilute the focus on the core business. But it is perfectly understandable if you, as a CEO, choose to remain tightly focused.

Commercial software products are a great way to create a second revenue stream for the company. Depending on your situation, you may choose to develop a new division internally to commercialize some of the ideas that come through the screening process and old technology you have laying around. Envisions can help with that by providing everything you need to create and launch the new product and nurture it during its first year. We can train your people, provide managers on a temporary basis to establish the new business, and help you integrate it into your existing businesses. Should you decide to stay tightly focused, Envisions can handle the whole lifecycle of the product and you just book the royalties and / or value growth of the spawned joint venture.

The one option you should be very careful about considering, as a CEO, is the option to not do anything. See the FAQ document for some discussion of the tradeoff between apparent competitive advantage (of not commercializing) and external market advantage (of commercializing). In short, the issue is not as obvious or clear as it may appear. The lifetime competitive advantage of internal technology is shrinking rapidly due to the ease with which people move between organizations today and the technology advances that make it harder and harder to maintain security and barriers to entry.

Lack of Accountability
This is the point on which i most i expect senior managers to ask, "Why is that a barrier to innovation? I would have thought inventors would love a free and uncontrolled environment." The answer to that question comes down to basic human character and the reality of government and authority. People need authority over them and inventors are no different. They need to feel that the authority is fair and encouraging. In general, visionaries appreciate a safety net of second opinions and screening systems.

The visionary who doesn't appreciate this probably does not work for you. He has started his own company already and is getting his feedback directly from the market.

The worst environment for a visionary is one in which there is no accountability. People are not held responsible for errors, failures, and mistakes and neither are the rewarded for successes or good efforts. We discussed both the reward and the punishment sides above, but this point here is a little different. EnVisionaries do not mind being help accountable for the success and failure of their ideas as long as:

1. there is as much accountability for successes as failures,
2. the punishment for individual failures is not so severe as to discourage future experimentation,
3. good efforts are celebrated and not punished at all (except perhaps for the lack of the potential reward). The screening process ensures that all efforts are "good efforts".

In an environment with no accountability, it is unpredictable how visionaries may react. They may simply do nothing creative because there is no payoff to foresee. Or they may try to push through any idea just for the fun of it. Or they may get involved in the politics that so often accompanies a lack of accountability and create more problems for you than they create new ideas. The best environment for an EnVisionary is one with clear rules and boundaries and clear consequences for various outcomes. Perhaps this statement applies to all team members and not just EnVisionaries.

Short Term Emphasis
In America, short term focus and an over focus on the P&L may be a facts of life that public companies have to accept. For the potential visionary, though, a company that is only focused on this quarter's results is going to have a challenge changing the nine factors that preceded this one. By their nature, new ideas will produce more costs than benefits this quarter. How can companies get around this issue and create pockets of innovation and creativity within their organizations that remain immune to the pressures of the next quarterly results report?

By budgeting for innovation projects each quarter without specifying exactly where that money will go. This runs contrary to the mantra of tight cost control, but it is the only way to have resources available when they are needed to nurture the next small step for an idea. At a certain point in an ideas lifecycle (as defined by resource needs, both in terms of people and money), an idea should become part of the quarterly and later annual planning cycles. But in the early days of an idea life cycle, spending too much time on cost / benefit analyses and optimizing resource allocation will result in killing ideas rather than nurturing them.

It is not difficult, during a budgeting cycle, to allocate innovation funds from the top down with each manager keeping a little in reserve for some special idea that bubbles up and needs some extra funding.

Summary
In summary, a CEO can do much to shift his company's culture to encourage more innovation and creativity. Much of what he can do involved little expenditure, but rather just giving more attention to visionaries and telling stories about great creative successes and failures - the failure stories are more important! Setting up processes for managing ideas through their life cycles is important. Then stepping back and letting EnVisionaries "do their thing" is the hardest part of your role.

For you visionaries out there with ideas. Let us help you sell your ideas to your organization. We have heard all of the arguments about why it does not make business sense to pursue some idea and we have good counter-arguments to most of them. Most often, senior managers have not been exposed to the powerful barriers they created inadvertently to innovation and creativity. Once they become aware of how they have been blocking new ideas, they quickly adjust and look for ways to generate more home runs for their team. You can be part of the education process and, again, Envisions would love to help.