The request lands on a Tuesday. Leadership wants a culture of innovation, and they've decided you're the person to build it.
You know the playbook. Scope a program, book the design thinking workshops, run an ideation sprint, maybe bring in a speaker to fire everyone up. Six months later the feedback scores look great and nothing about the culture has moved. Nobody's taking more risks or challenging how things get done, and the post-its are still stuck to the wall where you left them.
You were handed a training problem. What actually needed to change was the system around the training, and that wasn't going to be fixed with a curriculum.
Pocket Casts
Above is Cris Beswick's conversation with Mervyn Dinnen on the HR Means Business podcast on why most attempts to build a culture of innovation fall flat. Below are my takeaways on what that means for L&D teams who keep getting handed the innovation mandate and blamed when it stalls.
TL;DR
- Training people in innovation skills does not create an innovative culture. The system they return to has to change too.
- Leaders who sponsor innovation but hand off ownership are setting it up to stall.
- Middle managers get blamed for blocking innovation they were never set up to drive.
- The "we have no capacity" objection never resolves on its own. Real change needs a small, protected slice of time, not everyone full-time.
- Psychological safety between leaders and managers is a different problem from that between managers and their teams, and one program can't fix both.
1. Innovation skills training is the easy half of the job
Cris, who wrote Building a Culture of Innovation and ran companies before advising them, draws a distinction between the mechanics of innovation and the leadership behind it. The mechanics are the tools: the canvases, the frameworks, the design thinking sessions. Plenty of organizations bought all of that, trained everyone on it, and saw no return. The workshops happened. The culture didn't follow.
The mechanics are the part you can put on a calendar, which is exactly why they land on L&D. You can build a course, run it, measure completion, and report a satisfaction score. Culture resists all of that, because it lives in how people are managed, rewarded, and allowed to behave once they get back to their desks. You can teach the tools in two days. You cannot teach the conditions that let anyone use them.
Picture the CSM or the analyst who leaves your innovation workshop fired up, then walks back to a manager who only ever asks about this quarter's numbers. The skill has nowhere to go. It doesn't fade because the training was bad. It fades because the room they returned to hasn't changed.
This is the trap built into the way L&D is measured. Completion and satisfaction pull you toward the trainable half, because that's the half you control. The other half sits with leadership, and it rarely gets scoped into the brief.
Start by refusing the version of the request that stops at "run training." Before you design anything, ask leadership one question: what will change in how managers are measured, and what will you personally do differently? If the answer is nothing, the program is decoration, and the useful thing you can do is say so out loud.
2. Executives sponsor innovation. Owning it is a different job
Cris separates sponsoring innovation from owning it. A sponsor says it's important and wants the organization to go do it. An owner takes real responsibility for making it happen. He sees far too many leadership teams stuck in sponsor mode, and it's a pattern he runs into again and again.
You've met the sponsor. They approve the budget, show up to the kickoff, put their name on the announcement, and then disappear. When adoption comes back low, the program takes the blame.
Which means you take the blame.
The gap between sponsor and owner is where a lot of good L&D work quietly dies. You end up executing an agenda that nobody above you is actually holding, and no amount of program design can fix an ownership vacuum.
Ownership shows up on a calendar, not in a memo. If your executive sponsor forwards the launch email and then declines every session because they're slammed, the whole organization reads that correctly. The thing is important enough to announce and not important enough to attend.
Next time a capability mandate lands on your desk, get the ownership question answered before you build anything. Ask the sponsor what they will do, visibly, every single month. If they can't name one concrete thing, you're building on sponsorship, and sponsorship collapses the moment real work gets hard. Look back at the programs that stalled. How many had a real owner above them, and how many just had a sponsor who signed off?
A signature on the budget line is not the same as their attention.
