Six weeks after a global manufacturer’s leadership team approved a group of promising new ideas, someone asked for an update. There wasn’t one.

Not because the ideas had been rejected. Not because priorities had changed. Not because anyone had decided innovation no longer mattered. The projects had simply... stopped.

This was especially puzzling because the organization had done a lot right. Leaders had made time to bring together people throughout the business to examine how innovation actually worked. They had revealed gaps in the existing process, built a more disciplined front end for generating ideas, and created a management review process to ensure the right ideas were prioritized. Promising concepts had been discussed, challenged, refined, and ultimately approved for further exploration.

Then everyone went back to work. And that was the problem. Everyone went back to the same, previous work.

On the surface, stalled projects usually appear to be an execution issue. Maybe people need better project management. More accountability. A little more urgency.

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