Cultivating Innovation: Carving Out Time for Deliberate Thought (innovation series 3/6)

In a landscape dominated by immediate tasks, innovation is often sidelined. Balancing today's demands with tomorrow's vision requires intentional thinking time—not working harder, but smarter —with room for contemplation so you're moving forward, not just active.

What to Do During Dedicated Think Time

1. Reassess mission, vision, and values. Periodically question how they continue — or fail — to meet customer needs, and where innovation could strengthen alignment.

2. Catalog problems.   What are the enduring problems that never seem to get solved?  If you mapped out each function's top three pain points, where would patterns and themes emerge?  This can guide where innovation is most needed.

3. Learn. What's your process for taking in new ideas — reading, podcasts, research? Organizational researcher Bob Sutton has argued generalist-run companies out-innovate specialist-run ones; Mary Barra held roles across manufacturing, HR, and product development before becoming GM's CEO. David Epstein's Range found the same pattern in athletes who sampled widely before specializing. New in 2026: AI tools like Claude can dramatically compress the research phase of learning, freeing up more time for the reflection only a human can do.

4. Look outside your field. This approach can spark ideas for new products, processes, and services.  The solution to an accounting problem could be found in taking up jazz guitar.  A solution to a coding puzzle could be in a food documentary on Netflix.  Engineering and birdwatching may have more in common than you know.  Research shows innovation can come from just about anywhere.

5. Look inside your company. Talk to your customers, lead users, suppliers, business partners, and R&D labs.  Leaders should wander around, ask questions, and then connect the dots of disparate information in valuable and essential ways.  Only by forcing yourself to break free from pre-existing views can you re-categorize information and move beyond habitual thinking patterns.  Without this, you will gravitate toward the routine.

6. Take on stretch projects at least once a quarter or year to accelerate your own learning curve.

7. Upgrade capabilities continuously — people can't deliver on what they don't know how to do.

8. Embrace downtime. When you do nothing, your mind wanders, thinks, and innovates.  Walking, biking, playing music, meditating, and being in nature are all helpful.  Albert Einstein reportedly said that he did nothing 99% of the time, and ideas came to him.  Rest is often the source of great ideas, not their enemy.

Team Strategies for Innovation

1. Perspective-taking. Spend time talking to innovation teams and customers.  Bracken Darrell, CEO of Logitech, spends 40-60% of his time on innovation in conversation with others because he believes this aspect can’t be outsourced.  As a team, it’s helpful to discuss: Who are all the stakeholders involved?  What are their perspectives now?  What were their perspectives previously?  What prompted the shift?  What could their perspectives be in the future?  Why would it be different?  You can invite customers, suppliers, people from other departments, and other outsiders to your meetings to offer suggestions for improving your department. 

2. Schedule white space. You run on fumes when you go from meeting to meeting or activity to activity. When your team makes it the norm to build in an empty block or buffer between meetings, or a free morning to do nothing, ideas will visit you, and you'll have time to capture and play with them. If you don't have white space, or your teammates don't respect it, ideas will go elsewhere.

3. Incentivize innovation. When top leadership tells middle management to innovate but then incentivizes and rewards them based on revenue from current products, it sends a mixed message. You can tie innovation to the career framework. If team members participate in innovation and drive bold alternative solutions, recognize it. 

4. Allocate deep work time. Set aside time to focus, think deeply about one thing or survey the landscape, let your thoughts drift, and see what comes up.  Regular, undisturbed intervals can spark creativity and lead to substantial breakthroughs.

4A. Reflection time.  A space to regularly ask: what’s working, what’s not, what should we do differently, and what have we never tried before? 

4B. Vision work.  What is the long-term vision for your company?  What are some ideas that change the course of history, like putting a man on the moon or what Safi Bacall would call a Loonshot.  

·      Practice idealization, a proven method of peak performance thinking.  Asking questions such as, if you could wave a magic wand and make your business different today, what would it look like, and what would be the first step to get to where you have to go. 

·      What one great thing would you want to dream if you knew you could not fail?

4C. Goal setting.  What are the three most important goals for business, culture, growth, and leadership for next year, and the following three?  It may change, but engaging in the work can spark ideas.

5. Allocate meeting time for innovation. Devote a percentage of time in every staff meeting, or every other meeting, to listening to outside ideas for improving processes and tech and developing new products and services.

5A. Bring diverse groups together from the beginning.  Safi Bacall talks about the importance of bringing two types of people together in the organization: the creators/artists who come up with new ideas and work on the product, and the soldiers who execute the product.  A skilled facilitator is essential because artists are prone to take risks, and it can sting when they share ideas they've poured their soul into.  Soldiers are wired to take little risks. Steve Jobs had Johnny Ive, a legendary product guy/artist, and Tim Cook, head of inventory/soldier, balance each other out.  When Jobs reflected on his life, he said the most innovative thing he did was design his organization.  People bring their own mental models and frameworks; with that diversity, great ideas emerge when you have an effective process.

6. Dedicate innovation days, weeks, or teams.

6A. Dedicated Innovation Days – Google’s 20% time lets people spend 20% of their work hours, or one day a week, working on projects of their choice unrelated to their regular job responsibilities.  This freedom allows employees to explore their passions, experiment with new ideas, and collaborate with colleagues across the organization.  This innovation time has led to the company’s most successful products: Gmail, Google News, and Google Maps.

6B. Hack Week – Time for creatives to get together, iterate, and plan.  Spotify’s beloved Discover Weekly playlist originated as a Hack Week idea, as did the ability to exclude select playlists from your taste profile.

6C. Innovation Labs– Teams directly responsible for innovation. Google X’s lab has been responsible for Google Glass, Google driverless cars, and many more.  Amazon Lab126 focused on the reinvention of the book and, as a result, produced the Kindle, Amazon Echo, Alexa, and Fire Stick TV

7. Use sentence stems with your team.  You can have innovation meetings and do exercises such as sentence stems to spur thinking.  For example:

·      Could our product be put to a different use?

·      Could we adapt or copy what somebody else is doing to improve the product?  Taking an innovation from one industry and applying it to another is helpful.   Henry Ford got the idea for the production line by watching a meat-processing plant.

·      Could we modify, change, or repackage our idea?  Walt Disney saw that fairs were trashy and wanted to create a clean amusement park.

·      Can we magnify the product by making it bigger or shinier?

·      Could we minimize it, making it shorter or subtracting from it?

·      How about a substitute? Can we use a different manufacturer, material, or advertising approach?

·      Can we make our products more attractive and sellable?

·      Can we reverse our thinking and take an opposite approach to what we are doing?

·      Can we combine the product with something else, and can we bundle it to have a higher offering?  Can we find value in a byproduct?

·      How can we provide a superior buying experience to the competitor? Let’s identify three ways that can make our product more attractive.

Making time for innovation isn't a luxury; it's a necessity for growth.  By institutionalizing practices that foster reflective thinking and creative exploration, we pave the way for meaningful innovations that can redefine the market landscape.

Quote of the day. “Think left and think right, think low and think high. Oh, the things you can think up if only you try!” -Dr. Seuss

Reflection Question.  What are your reflection practices connected to innovation?  Comment and share below; we would love to hear from you.

As a leadership development and executive coach, I work with leaders to cultivate a culture of innovation, contact me to explore this topic further.

What time do you spend on innovation?

Optimize Your Energy By Cultivating A Healthy Mind (energy management series 3/5 )

An important part of maintaining our energy is cultivating a healthy mindset.  When we look at our beliefs and promote the ones that serve us and discount the ones that do not, we show up more energetically.

Here are some things to consider: 

1.  Cultivate conscious leadership.  In the book 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, Jim Dethmer explains two kinds of leaders, those who operate above the line (from a place of love) or those who work below the line (from a place of fear).  If you are above the line, you have a mindset of curiosity and learning, and believe that you have the power to choose the life you want to create.  If you function from below the line, you are more interested in being right than learning, mainly see yourself as a victim, and believe life is happening to you; you are choiceless.  You think your happiness lies in external circumstances (situations and other people determining your happiness) rather than assuming you can design your path.

The first step to cultivating conscious leadership is self-awareness; at any given time identifying where you are in the moment without judgment or shame or trying to avoid being below the line because as Dethmer notes, 95% of all leaders spend 98% in that space.  It is more important to recognize that you are there and think about how you want to make a productive shift.  Spending time below the line is a life-draining and disempowering experience because you wonder why bad things always happen to you, and then it becomes a perpetuating cycle because bad things continue to happen.  This is compared to being above the line, where you are empowered and living life from a point of choice.  Your most important moments are now and your next steps because that is what you can influence.

2. Reframe your experience.  Epictetus said,  “it is not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”  Reframing is when you have a different take on a situation.  For example, if you are assigned a task from your boss that you do not want to do, you can agree and feel resentful or you can reframe it by thinking, maybe this person needs assistance, and I have a great opportunity to help and advance my skillset in the process.  This is not about discounting reality but about generating additional interpretations which will make you better for it.  In the Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haight said the reframe is key to happiness because it can give you a sense of well-being in minutes when you transform negative into positive thoughts.

3. Avoid rumination.  This term means to chew continuously and is how cows digest their food.  They chew, swallow, regurgitate it back up, chew again, swallow, and repeat.  For a human, it is when you constantly replay an unhelpful track in your mind, obsess over an event, and stress out with each replay.  For example, you and your colleague worked on a presentation, and your peer presented using “I” and not “we” language to give the illusion that they did all the work without your assistance, and you quickly get upset.  You could believe they did it purposely, tried to marginalize you, and instantly feel stressed, angry, and disappointed.  You leave work, head to the gym, and continue thinking about it.  You go home and tell your partner and share how unfair it was.  Each time you mention it, you prolong the negative feelings, and the next day at a team meeting, you erupt, and it devolves into an unproductive blame game.  Rumination is a killer to a healthy mindset and the thief of joy; it puts you in a sour mood, keeps you up at night, disrupts your ability to recover and recharge, impairs your executive functioning, and increases your chances of cardiovascular disease.  Similarly, co-rumination, where you get with a friend and take them through your loop while they are fueling you with the same negative energy may feel like a bonding experience in the moment, but it is unproductive because it stirs up tension in your mind and body.  It reinforces the perception that the world is an upsetting and difficult place with no power to change circumstances.  When you ruminate, it is like picking at a scab over and over again, it simply will not heal until you stop.

Here are some of the most effective ways I’ve found to address rumination:

A. Opt for reflection.  Reflection is more about gaining insight and understanding, rumination is about stewing in negative thoughts.  You can think about what the learning is and what you want to do about it.  You may conclude that a lesson you have from working with your coworker: the next time you ask them in advance how they plan to represent the work that gives you both credit.  You can take the initiative and offer to present it or divide the work where your coworker presents their parts, and you present your parts.  Reflection is powerful and productive because there is a way forward, it does not keep you stuck in your thinking, it keeps you expansive.

B. Create an action step.  You can frame the challenge as a problem to solve.  Identify what you are upset about and how you want to tackle it.  You may want to work backwards, think about what the outcome is and visualize that.  Then think about what you can do now and the most direct route to get there.  Returning to the example of your coworker taking all the credit, your desired outcome may be for you to share the impact of their actions on you and how it would be great for two things to happen.  You email them to set up a time to discuss how the experience impacted you and share your peace.  You can say, next time, you will be the one presenting or ask them to talk to your boss and set the record straight.  They can send a thank you email to the boss appreciating the positive feedback and how they worked equally hard and were crucial to success even though you did not present.  This is a more productive option than stewing and telling the person off.  When you supply an action step, think of one thing you can do (gain insight, adopt a new perspective, or have a conversation), then you can start to shift and feel better about the situation. 

C. Time box the worry.  If you cannot pivot to rest, repair, and recovery because you are still ruminating, you can schedule 15 mins. late in your day or in your work week to worry.  It is a brain hack because once you have scheduled time, it is easier for your brain to let go or dismiss it if it knows it will get taken care of at some point.   

4. Challenge thoughts and assumptions that are not serving you.  In The Work, Byron Katie explains how she suffers when she believes her thoughts so she employs a 4-step process to question her assumptions and promote the belief that there is joy in her all the time.  She asks:

1. Is the thought true?

2. Can I absolutely know it’s true?

3. What happens when I believe the thought?

4. Who would I be without that thought?  

Once she goes through these questions, she does the work to turn around the thought.  Sometimes, it is about letting go of something to make room for something else.  For example, if your boss emailed you and said you did not speak up in that meeting, you may think your boss is out to get you.  You may ask the second question but realize you cannot be 100% certain, and know that when you believe this, it completely demotivates you.  Without that thought, you would be somebody capable of addressing this situation productively.  After going through this process, you remain calm and set up a meeting to learn and discuss with your boss the context of that email.  You may learn another explanation, that your boss likes when you speak up because you add more value and can increase your visibility.  Believing that your boss has no faith in you versus your boss thinking you are not living up to your leadership potential makes a difference in your performance.  Breakthroughs happen when we challenge our assumptions because we have limiting beliefs we do not realize, they keep us playing small and in a box.  In the workplace, it is easy to spot some of these beliefs when teammates say, “that’s not how we do it here,” or “we tried that once, and it does not work in this industry.”  Also when people speak in absolutes and use words and phrases like “I should feel this way,” “I have to do this,” “I must win,” These are signals that people are putting themselves in a box.  Believing that you do not have a choice is one of the most common limiting beliefs; we hold ourselves back and operate with diminished energy when we do not confront these unhelpful ideas. 

To break this habit, make a list of your limiting beliefs and start to alter your language.  Instead of saying, “I have to do this,” you can say, “I get to do this,” and instead of saying, “why is this happening to me,” you can choose, “ this is happening for me because…”.  Who would you be and how would you act if you operated from this messaging?

5. Cultivate an “active and rest” and “strive and detach” mindset.  Including both active and rest energy are essential, it is like inhaling and exhaling.  Descartes savored his rest time, sleeping late, and sitting by a fireplace, reflecting, and writing until late afternoon.  Many struggle with balancing being a high performer, having big dreams, and working with their ambitions while also achieving success and being happy, and cultivating a sense of inner peace.   A great lesson on this comes from a Tibetan Buddhist tradition involving the creation and destruction of Mandalas (intricate designer circles made from colored sand.)  The term is Sanskrit, which means a container/circle of essence.  The Buddhist Monks work hard to create something masterful; they start by sketching a circle outline and then meticulously drop individual grains of sand to create a panoply of colors.  It is a process that can take hours and days.  When completed, they engage in a ritualist process of dismantling the Mandala.  They sweep up the sand and let it go into the ocean, symbolizing the transitory nature.  It is the concept of striving for something great and then being able to detach and let go; and allow the universe to do what it does because when you hold on so tightly to one thing, you cause yourself stress. 

6. Practice the Dichotomy of Control.  In life, there are always things in and out of your control and when you can categorize items in their proper place, you can free yourself from unnecessary heartburn.  The idea is to release energy around the things you cannot control like determining outcomes, and directing your energy on the things you can control such as your preparation and intentions.  For example, if you are giving a Ted talk, you can control what you write and how much you prepare to get ready for the moment, but you cannot control the audience’s reaction or how many views it will receive.  Save your energy for things that will move the needle, and be comfortable with the idea that whatever happens to things outside your control, it is ok; it is all part of the human experience.

7. Cultivate a strong identity beyond work.  Sometimes our struggles occur when we overidentify with one thing.  We may attach our entire self-worth to work, and then when we are experiencing stress at work, our world feels small and in disarray.  When we can foster a strong identity outside of work and have multiple sources of joy, it makes us more successful.  It is ok if work goes south because we have our salsa dance lessons, cooking classes, painting,  and other hobbies that satisfy us because we operate from our strengths.  We also have our loved ones that add energy to our lives.  We can better get through challenging times and transitions when we have many things in our lives to add small moments of bliss.

8. Cultivate authenticity.  When you are who you are in all realms of your life it preserves great energy.  In contrast, it takes a toll when you are happy and humorous at home and show up to work serious and strict.  Embrace who you are, if you are somebody who asks a lot of questions, do not entirely censor yourself.  If you know you are an introvert who gets easily overwhelmed at networking events, take some extended breaks so you can conserve energy and find ways to recharge.

For many of us, having a healthy and robust mindset does not just happen.  It takes intentionality and practice to promote excellent habits that will help us be at our best. 

Quote of the day: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Victor E. Frankl

Q: What are your routines for cultivating a healthy mindset?  Comment and share below; we would love to hear from you!

The next blog in this series 4/5 will focus on mind practices that will energize you.    

As a leadership development and executive coach, I work with leaders to create effective personal energy management systems for themselves and their teams, contact me to explore this topic further.

Which practices keep your mind strong?

What Comes After You Have Made a Decision? (Decision Series 7/8)

Congratulations, you have taken careful steps to make the decision that is right for you.  You got clear on your values, utilized effective informational and creative strategies, followed systems, and took action.  Now what?

Depending on your goal, whether it is about improving your decision-making skills, enhancing your current situation by reversing the decision, or just enjoying your peace of mind, you may consider the following:                                                                                                     

1. Reflect.  If you are interested in improving your decision-making abilities, carve out the necessary time to reflect.  After the choice, monitor it.  What is working?  What approaches, criteria, metrics, and systems did you use that were successful?  What did you overlook and may want to include next time you choose?  Mark Twain described the complicated nature of decision-making as follows: “Good decisions come from experience, but experience comes from making bad decisions.”  This is not to say that the only way to become a great decision-maker is to make a ton of mistakes; it just means that it is important to keep past decisions in the front of your mind to capitalize on the learning moment.

You can also do long-term reflection. You can do an annual review by asking - what was your best and worst decision you made last year? How do you know they were your best or worst? To answer these questions, most people follow a concept that Annie Duke describes as “resulting” - a decision was good if the outcome was good, but that is an incomplete way to evaluate. Just because you got home safely after drunk driving does not mean you made a good choice to jeopardize your life and the lives of others. Instead, what you can do is map out a few other choices you could have made and then evaluate them against the choice that you actually made. What did you wish you would have known at the time, how could you have found out that information, what will you do differently next time? Asking these kinds of questions will improve your decision-making processes.

2. Choose to reverse a big decision.  We think that when we make a selection, we have lost all agency, but we can always choose to course-correct if we have given it enough time and decided with all our minds and hearts that it is not right for us at this time.  Decisions are not permanent sentences and when we can get creative about having the confidence to tweak our choices or even reverse them, we can attain more happiness.

3. Enjoy the peace of mind of making a small, lasting decision.  Making some irrevocable determinations can bring more happiness.  Daniel Gilbert ran a study where at the end of his photography course, students had to choose which photo of the many to keep.  Group A was told that if they changed their mind later, they could swap the photo.  Group B was told their choice was final.  You would think that many people were happy in the first group because they preserved their options, knowing they could always trade their photo.  The study found that when people made an irrevocable decision, they rationalized it easily move forward.  Once something is gone forever, the mind gets to work, figuring out why what it has is better than what it lost.  But when a decision is irrevocable, you ruminate and think, do I like this photograph, maybe the other one goes better in my living room, I should take it back and upgrade.  When it comes to smaller decisions, set yourself up for ones that do not leave you with an out, at the end of the day, it is just a picture.

Depending on your goal, there are things you can do after a decision is made.  If you are trying to be a better decision-maker, you can reflect on your choice and monitor how it works out and what you did well in the process leading up to the decision.  If you are aiming for happiness, you may choose to alter or reverse the selection.  If you are interested in attaining peace of mind relating to small decisions, you may want to make irrevocable ones.

Quote of the day: “All life is an experiment.  The more experiments you make, the better.”  -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Q: How do you reflect on your decisions once you made them to improve your future decisions?  What was your best and worst decision of last year? Comment and share below, we would love to hear from you!

[The next blog in this series 8/8 will focus on decision-making in teams.] 

As a leadership development and executive coach, I work with leaders to help them make hard decisions and reflect on their process, contact me to explore this topic further.

How do you make decisions that make you proud?

As a leadership development and executive coach, I work with leaders to help them make hard decisions, contact me to explore this topic further.