Why Teams Fail Before Innovation Starts
Innovation is often framed as a creative challenge, but decades of research suggest it is more accurately an organizational one. When innovation initiatives fail, leaders frequently attribute the breakdown to execution gaps, insufficient talent, or a lack of resources. However, evidence consistently shows that failure occurs much earlier, before ideation, prototyping, or market testing even begins. At the root are unresolved issues of team alignment, shared understanding, and learning behavior that shape how people work together when facing uncertainty.
One of the most common early failure points is poor problem framing. Design thinking research emphasizes that teams must first agree on what problem they are solving before they can generate viable solutions. Brown (2019) argues that organizations routinely underestimate the importance of this stage, moving prematurely into solution mode in an effort to appear decisive. When teams lack a shared understanding of the problem, collaboration becomes fragmented, with individuals optimizing for different assumptions and priorities. Liedtka (2018) reinforces this finding, noting that design thinking works not because it produces better ideas, but because it forces teams to align around human needs, constraints, and organizational realities before acting.
Psychological safety plays a critical role in whether teams can engage in this kind of collective sensemaking. Edmondson and Bransby (1999) found that teams with higher psychological safety were more likely to engage in learning behaviors such as asking questions, admitting uncertainty, and experimenting with new approaches. These behaviors are essential for innovation, yet they are often absent in environments where people fear blame, judgment, or reputational risk. Frazier et al. (2017) further demonstrate, using meta-analytic evidence, that psychological safety is strongly associated with information sharing, learning, and performance, particularly in complex and uncertain work settings.
When psychological safety is low, teams may appear aligned on the surface while avoiding difficult conversations beneath it. Ideas are filtered, dissent is muted, and innovation becomes incremental at best. This dynamic explains why many innovation initiatives generate activity without progress. Teams may participate in workshops, generate ideas, and even launch pilots, but without the learning behaviors required to adapt and improve, those efforts fail to produce meaningful change.
Structural factors also contribute to early failure. Research on innovation systems highlights the importance of coherence between organizational goals, decision structures, and incentives. McKinsey & Company (2018) identifies organizational alignment and decision clarity as core elements of successful innovation, noting that even strong ideas struggle to gain traction when ownership, authority, and priorities are unclear. Castellacci (2023) extends this perspective by arguing that innovation outcomes are shaped not only by technological capability but also by how organizations coordinate knowledge, learning, and social processes over time.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that innovation does not fail because people lack creativity. It fails because teams are asked to innovate without shared clarity, without safety to learn, and without structures that support collective decision-making. Organizations that treat innovation as a downstream activity miss the upstream conditions that make innovation possible in the first place.
Innovation that succeeds begins with alignment. It requires teams to invest time in defining the problem together, creating norms that support learning and inquiry, and establishing clear pathways from ideas to decisions. These foundations may feel slower at the outset, but research shows they are what allow organizations to move faster, with greater confidence and impact, over time.
References
Brown, T. (2019). Change by Design, Revised and Updated: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (Rev. ed.). Harper Business.
Castellacci, F. (2023). Innovation and social welfare: A new research agenda. Journal of Economic Surveys, 37, 1156–1191. https://doi.org/10.1111/joes.12537
Edmondson, A. C., & Bransby, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams: A longitudinal study in hybrid environments. MIT Sloan Management Review, 64(3), 42–50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2666999?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta‐analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113-165. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183
Liedtka, J. (2018). Why design thinking works. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/09/why-design-thinking-works
McKinsey & Company. (2018). The eight essentials of innovation. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-eight-essentials-of-innovation
