There’s a joke I’ve never forgotten. Years ago, I found myself at what I expected to be a routine Sunday Mass with my young family. Then I started to hear strange terms like “budget,” and realized I was too late to make a graceful exit. This was the one Sunday a year when the homily gave way to the annual parish financial review. After a lengthy accounting of where the community’s money had gone, our priest delivered the news that the parish was over budget by $1 million. Not a small number for a single congregation.
Then he smiled and said: “But I have good news and bad news.”
“The good news,” he said, pausing for effect, “is that we have all the money we need.”
Another pause.
“The bad news is… it’s still in your pockets.”
The congregation laughed, the collection baskets made an extra pass, and—as he predicted—the gap was covered. But I’ve thought about that moment many times since, because it captures something essential about how organizations build innovation as a core competency.
The answers are already there. That’s the good news. Just as the parish had all the money it needed sitting distributed across hundreds of pockets in the pews, organizations have all the knowledge, insight, and creative intelligence they need to continuously innovate and improve. The front-line employee who sees a customer friction point every single day, the mid-level manager who knows exactly where the process breaks down or bottlenecks, the analyst who has a hypothesis about a better approach but has never been asked: the answers are in those “pockets”. It is leadership’s job to get them out.
This is where defeating the Penske File Dilemma (see my last blog on this, covering the impulse to project knowing when we don’t) requires more than humility. It requires a genuine cultural shift from top-down communication to a two-way exchange. It requires slowing down initiatives so your people can automate and optimize processes. The insights that enable innovation aren’t always born in the C-suite. They’re often discovered closest to the customers and processes. The organizations that build the channels to surface and act on that intelligence will have an enormous advantage over those that don’t.
If there’s one book I’d make required reading for every senior leader navigating this moment, it’s Dan Pink’s Drive. Pink’s research cuts to the heart of what actually motivates people at work, and it’s intrinsic motivation through autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Not compensation or fear of consequence. When leadership invites input from across the organization and visibly acts on it, something powerful happens. People feel that their voice matters. Engagement deepens. Loyalty grows. And perhaps most importantly for our purposes, the organization begins to pulse with a continuous current of timely, relevant, ground-level intelligence that no executive team could generate on its own.
This is what a true continuous innovation culture looks like in practice. Employees are motivated to experiment with and optimize how they work so they can spend more time on strategy. Front-line observations reach decision-makers quickly enough to actually influence direction.
Leadership has the discipline and humility to listen before they act. These are the keys to enabling organizational optionality, so you can evaluate and adapt to the incredible innovations landing every day.
The money is in the pockets. The answers are too. The question is whether we’re willing to build the kind of organization where people actually want to share them.
But wait, John! I thought you were talking about AI?!
That’s true, AI is the current buzz out there creating organizational anxiety, but really, AI is just the latest in a series of technology developments that demand adapt-to-survive responses from companies. So how is this different? Although like other tech change imperatives, this latest AI phase has created a true paradigm shift. No longer can we safely think or strive for a steady state. Things are moving a bit too quickly for that. You are obsolete before you have even completed your change process. Therefore, as I will explore in my next blog, new tools are necessary and a re-identification of core competency around the ability to continuously adapt will be evident in the winners of the future.
Next in the series: Ready, Aim, Fire: The Age of the Finch