"Yeah, we really want disruptive thinking here, breakthrough ideas, blue-sky initiatives, shifts in the paradigm that can revolutionise the category and our business." ('Nuff jargon, already?!)
Sounds great. Inspirational even. And rightly so - innovation is a fundamental lever to drive both brand equity and future growth.
But the sobering fact is that this kind of leadership-granted permission to "shake things up" often turns our to be unintentionally performative.
And the desired breakthroughs very rarely come to fruition.
Because the system, and specifically what the system incentivises and rewards, is geared to different outcomes.
So you get: Safety, predictability, risk-mitigation, incrementality. This is the System - with all its hidden intricacies and inter-dependencies - succeeding in its actual purpose.
And you don't get: Radical Innovations, game-changing ideas, leaps-forward in competitive advantage. Leaders don't get what they want.
Because there's a whopping great big gap between the stated or desired purpose of the System and what the system actually does, as revealed by how it performs over time.
Leader says: "You have permission to take risks and fail". Very admirable.
But the System the same Leader oversees, typically rewards (promotes, bonuses, doesn't fire) those that don't take risks and don't fail.
And guess what we, the beautifully-flawed and hard-wired-to-survive human beings that we are, tend to do?
I'm not saying that Incremental Innovation is better or worse than Radical Innovation - both absolutely have their place, dependent, as ever, on the context.
But I am saying that misalignments between the stated purpose (what leaders say or want or desire) and what the system rewards, is a problem. A big one. And one that leads to that definition of insanity feeling with which we're all familiar.
So next time you're thinking about how to grow through innovation, it's worth taking a short moment to reflect on whether the incentives hidden somewhere in the depths in the legacies of your System are appropriate to create the behaviours and outcomes you're looking for.
Just saying you want radical innovation (no matter how venerable your intentions) won't make it true - the System is more powerful than anything you can say.