Innovation from within…

Reflection Series #1

In my consultancy work, I meet thoughtful, capable people every day.
People who care deeply about their work.
People who want to do things differently and improve what’s around them.

There is rarely a shortage of ideas, or a lack of commitment or good intent.
And yet, meaningful change often feels elusive and impossible.

How do you keep up with the day job, whilst thinking about and improving the systems and culture around you…?

You know that quality could be improved, if everyone had time to come together and agree on what to do…

Culturally we are taught that busy is productive and means security - saving the organisation, bringing in the next piece of business, managing our teams to deliver and get on with doing a good job - keeping us in a job…

So innovation frequently happens somewhere else, out of a perceived necessity. It moves into pilots, labs, or specialist teams. It becomes removed from everyday work, and from the people living it.

Innovation progresses.
Projects move forward.
New language appears.

And still, organisational challenges stay the same and the culture that sustains them continues.

Those closest to the day-to-day reality are rarely shaping the change itself.
Their experience is not always fully heard or held. As a result, new ideas can feel distant or imposed. Sometimes they are accepted just enough to comply.
Rarely are they embedded deeply enough to endure.

This pattern is not something I only see in practice.
It shows up clearly in my innovation studies as well.

Responsible innovation often struggles, not because ideas are weak, but because the conditions for change are not quite right.

People do not feel safe enough to act differently where they work.
Not consistently.
Not together.

Participation is often invited. Responsibility, however, feels blurred.
Change is designed outside the system, and then expected to land back inside it.

Over time, this can create fatigue. A quiet scepticism.
And a subtle sense that innovation belongs somewhere else, with someone else, for someone else. Disconnected from your lived reality.

I find myself holding a different question.

What happens when innovation is seeded inside organisations,
rather than delivered to them?

What conditions feed innovation?
Where is shared risk felt, carried, and navigated together?

I’m curious about what shifts when people are supported to see things differently.
When they are able to connect across roles and perspectives, and make conscious choices about what matters.
Then act together in small, meaningful ways to sustain changes.

From what I’m learning, culture rarely shifts because it is targeted directly.
It shifts when the conditions around it begin to change.

When people feel trusted.
When responsibility is genuinely shared.
When learning is valued alongside delivery.

In those conditions, innovation no longer needs protecting at the edges.
It doesn’t need to live elsewhere.
It begins to grow where the work already is, and shapes -

Quietly.
Naturally.
From within.