Just Do It

Why your organization needs a training program, not another strategy deck

I've been trying to understand innovation for over 30 years. Some days I think I've got it figured out, other days I realize how much more there is to learn. But what experience has given me is a way of thinking about innovation that keeps coming back to one insight: it's not really about process or frameworks.

It's about habits. The practices I've watched serial innovators develop, the routines that companies use to consistently generate value by doing things differently.

Now, I realize the irony here. After saying it's not about frameworks, I'm about to introduce one. Call it guilty as charged. But bear with me, because what I've observed over three decades isn't really a framework in the traditional sense. It's more like a pattern that keeps showing up. And the more I've watched, the more convinced I've become that innovation doesn't work like solving problems in a box.

It works like athletic fitness.

From Constraints to Capabilities

Every organization starts with certain characteristics that shape what it can become. Founding culture, initial resources, market timing, leadership philosophy. I used to think of these as constraints, but I'm starting to see them differently. They're more like your athletic starting point.

Some companies are born with natural advantages. Amazon's Day One culture. TSMC's manufacturing obsession. Patagonia's environmental commitment. These founding characteristics create baseline capabilities that feel almost effortless.

But here's what the fitness metaphor has helped me understand: Your starting point doesn't determine your destiny. Training does.

I've watched organizations with modest initial capabilities develop world-class innovation fitness through deliberate, systematic practice. The question isn't what you inherited. It's whether you're willing to train the capabilities required to endure.

The Pattern We Keep Repeating

We treat innovation like crash diets. Intensive bursts hoping for breakthrough results. Innovation labs launch with fanfare. Transformation initiatives mobilize resources. Consultants deliver thick strategy decks.

Then, somehow, nothing sustainable changes.

I've seen this pattern enough times to recognize what's missing: Strategy documents don't make you innovative any more than workout plans make you fit. You have to actually train.

Two Muscle Systems, Six Capabilities

Elite athletes train both slow-twitch muscles for endurance and fast-twitch muscles for explosive power. I've noticed that organizations need something similar.

After years of observation, I've identified six interconnected capabilities that function like a coordinated training program:

Slow-Twitch Innovation Muscles (Endurance Capabilities):

• Network Orchestration: Building partnerships that compound over time

• Unmet Needs Insight: Deep understanding of human motivations

• Evolution Enablement: Organizational capacity to reconfigure structure

Fast-Twitch Innovation Muscles (Explosive Response Capabilities):

• Environmental Scanning: Rapid detection of market tipping points

• Disruptive Experimentation: Fast-cycle hypothesis testing

• Resilience: Organizational capacity to absorb shocks and recover

Three slow-twitch endurance capabilities. Three fast-twitch explosive capabilities. All six creating crossover effects that strengthen the entire system.

What I've Learned from Champions

The companies that excel don't just have better strategies. They have people systems. Practices and rituals that build collective capability rather than relying on top-down performance metrics.

Resilience: Pixar's Braintrust

Take Pixar's Braintrust meetings. Every few months, directors screen their work-in-progress for fellow directors working on other films. The setup is deceptively simple: put smart, passionate people in a room and encourage honest feedback without authority.

What makes it work? First, Braintrust members have deep subject expertise. They've been through this themselves. Second, there's no authority. The director doesn't have to follow the feedback. This removes fear and enables creativity.

The ritual builds resilience because teams practice giving and receiving hard feedback in psychologically safe environments. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety shows that when teams feel safe to speak up about problems, interpersonal risk translates into reduced business risk. Organizations avoid preventable mistakes and unlock innovation that fear would suppress.

What strikes me most is that Braintrust isn't top-down performance review. It's peer-to-peer learning that builds collective problem-solving capacity and shared ownership of creative excellence.

Disruptive Experimentation: Eric Ries and the Build-Measure-Learn Ritual

Eric Ries's Lean Startup methodology isn't just theory. It's a ritual of structured experimentation that becomes organizational muscle memory.

The story Ries tells has always stuck with me: At IMVU, his team spent a year developing avatar-based instant messaging technology, perfecting every detail. At launch, nobody downloaded it. Why? The critical uncertainty of the value proposition had never been tested: did anyone want this? 

They could have learned that on day one by testing the pop-up, not after a year of development. The lesson? Ask "How can we figure out what we're trying to learn with minimum effort?" Test early. Test often. Build MVPs that resolve critical uncertainties, not perfect products.

Companies practicing this ritual develop explosive experimentation capacity that slower competitors can't match. Netflix runs over 1,000 simultaneous A/B tests. The practice becomes collective discipline, not individual heroics.

What I've noticed is that teams celebrating intelligent failures and rapid learning cycles, not just successful launches, create psychological safety for experimentation that becomes organizational identity.

Evolution Enablement: Amazon's Day One Philosophy

Jeff Bezos's "It's Always Day One" isn't just a slogan. It's a daily practice of organizational renewal.

Bezos explains it this way: "Day One is about renewal and rebirth. Every day you're deciding what you're going to do. You aren't trapped by who you were. We get to make new decisions every day about invention, about customers, even our principles. You never want to get trapped by history."

When Amazon leadership built new headquarters in Seattle in 2016, they named the main building "Day 1" with a large sign at the entrance. A daily reminder of evolution capability.

This practice creates continuous structural adaptation. Amazon evolved from bookstore to marketplace to cloud provider not through episodic transformation initiatives, but through daily practice of evolution thinking.

Teams are rewarded for questioning old assumptions and experimenting with new organizational forms, not for preserving what worked before. Self-consistency becomes a trap to avoid, not a virtue to pursue.

Network Orchestration: Google's 20% Time (When It Worked)

Before Google's 20% time became "120% time" (discretionary, done in spare time), it functioned as powerful network orchestration. Engineers spent one day per week on projects outside their job descriptions.

The genius wasn't just individual innovation time. It was cross-functional collaboration. Employees from different departments came together for 20% projects, creating rich exchange of ideas and network effects that no organizational chart could design.

Gmail, Google Maps, and AdSense emerged from these networked experiments. The ritual normalized risk-taking and failure while building dense internal networks that enabled rapid resource mobilization.

When companies trust employees to spend 20% of time on self-directed projects, they signal deep belief in collective intelligence and creativity. Networks strengthen organically through shared passions, not formal partnership agreements.

Unmet Needs Insight: Doblin's Empathy Practices

I grew up at Doblin, where we pioneered the use of social science and ethnography for business. We developed techniques to dive deep into users' lives to understand unspoken needs. But what made the difference wasn't the techniques themselves. It was making user insight a team ritual, not an individual skill.

Our teams conducted research in unexpected places, observing not just what people said they did, but understanding the unspoken needs that shape behavior and motivations. To this day, everyone who worked at Doblin shares this habit of seeing the world through the eyes of someone just trying to get through their day, seeking to understand how a company could make that journey a little better and more human.

The observations, the conversations, the practice of empathy build collective customer understanding that compounds over time. Regular immersion and curiosity about human behavior become the antidote to market surveys and AI-generated opportunities that reduce people to consumers.

When teams develop shared language and pattern recognition about human motivations, deeper insights surface naturally. Customer insight becomes collective capability, not individual expertise.

Environmental Scanning: Patagonia's Values-Driven Vigilance

Patagonia's environmental scanning isn't a strategic planning function. It's embedded in organizational identity through daily practices and rituals.

The company conducts regular environmental impact assessments, produces films about harmful business practices (like Artifishal on fish hatcheries), and gives employees Election Day off to vote. These reinforce civic and environmental awareness as organizational practice.

Patagonia's Environmental Internship Program enables employees to take up to two months off work for fully paid environmental internships. This isn't corporate social responsibility theater. It's systematic environmental scanning through distributed employee engagement.

Employees return with fresh insights about environmental trends, policy shifts, and emerging threats that inform product decisions and strategic pivots. The scanning capability is collective, not centralized in strategy teams.

Environmental consciousness isn't a department. It's everyone's job.

What Makes These Work

After watching these patterns for years, I've noticed that the rituals that actually stick share some common characteristics:

Bottom-up participation: Pixar's Braintrust, Google's 20% time, and Patagonia's internships invite employee co-creation, not compliance with executive edicts.

Psychological safety: Amy Edmondson's research shows these practices only work when people feel safe to speak up, experiment, and admit mistakes without fear.

Regular rhythm: These aren't episodic initiatives. They're recurring practices that build organizational muscle memory over time.

Shared identity: Teams develop collective pride because "this is how we work here," not because metrics demand it.

Crossover effects: Network orchestration enables experimentation. Environmental scanning builds unmet needs insight. Resilience strengthens evolution capacity.

A Simple Way to Remember

One colleague pointed out that these six capabilities spell ENDURE: Environmental scanning, Network orchestration, Disruptive experimentation, Unmet needs insight, Resilience, and Evolution enablement.

I'll admit, when I first noticed this, I thought it was a bit too neat. But the mnemonic has turned out to be surprisingly useful. It helps people remember that innovation fitness requires all six muscle groups working together. You can't just pick the easy ones or focus on what feels natural.

More importantly, ENDURE captures something essential about what we're really after. Not quick wins or flashy breakthroughs, but the kind of organizational capability that lasts.

Just Do It

Innovation fitness isn't achieved through strategy documents or periodic initiatives. It's built through consistent, deliberate practice of these six interconnected capabilities.

After decades of watching companies succeed and fail, I've become convinced that the ones that endure don't have better starting conditions. They have better training discipline. They've systematically developed slow-twitch endurance and fast-twitch explosive capabilities through people systems that build team unity and collective capability. They have mastered the skill of surging, drafting, sprinting, and recovering at just the right times. 

Your natural organizational characteristics determine your starting fitness level. But they don't determine your future fitness. That's shaped by whether you train.

Think of these six capabilities as a training program. Six muscle groups that require systematic development. The people systems you design—your Braintrust meetings, your experimentation rituals, your Day One practices—determine whether your team actually trains.

One pattern I've noticed: fast-twitch capabilities get you off the ground, but without slow-twitch endurance, organizations eventually burn out. You need both systems working together.

Elite athletes know that natural talent gets you to the starting line. Training gets you to the podium.

Your organization's endurance depends on just doing it. Consistently, deliberately, collectively.

The training isn't optional. The question is whether you'll design people systems that build fitness, or write another strategy deck that gathers dust.

I've watched enough companies rise and fall to know which choice matters.