For years I’ve helped teams turn rough early ideas into real products and businesses. We used the familiar innovators’ and startup-building toolkit — design thinking, jobs to be done, lean startup, open innovation. And the longer I did it, the clearer one thing became: the frameworks were never the real win. The win was what people learned by using them.
Founders learn the same way. Y Combinator, the accelerator behind thousands of startups, hands its founders a famously short playbook — make something people want, talk to your users, do things that don’t scale. Different world, same underlying skills.
Strip the slogans back and each is really a discipline: “talk to your users” is how you generate rich customer insight; “do things that don’t scale” is learning by doing and testing small first, getting your hands dirty before you automate; “make something people want” is the hardest one of all — building for real demand rather than your own enthusiasm.
The mantras stick because they compress a skill into a sentence. How to spot an opportunity others miss. How to understand what customers really need. How to frame the right problem before chasing a solution. How to test an idea cheaply rather than bet big on a hunch. How to pull a mixed group of people towards a shared goal. We treat these as the preserve of innovators and founders — people with “innovation” in their job title, or a pitch deck in their bag. That is a mistake. The finance chief pressure-testing a forecast, the operations director redesigning a process, the head of sales working out why deals stall, the banker weighing a new market — every one of them is doing the work these skills were built for. They are among the most useful skills any leader can have, and most of us were never taught them.
The good news is that they can be taught. When Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen compared hundreds of the world’s best innovators with thousands of ordinary executives, they didn’t find a gift people are born with. They found five habits: questioning the way things are, observing closely, experimenting constantly, networking with people whose world looks nothing like yours, and — the habit that ties the others together — associating, the knack of connecting ideas that don’t obviously belong together. Steve Jobs sitting in on a calligraphy class that later shaped the Macintosh’s typography is associating; the more you question, observe and experiment, the more your mind has to connect.
None of it is exotic, and all of it can be practised. Innovation is a skill, not a gift. Those habits don’t have to stay abstract: over a few decades, innovation and entrepreneurship have hardened them into methods and playbooks — repeatable ways to put them to work on a real problem. Five skills, in particular, are worth any leader’s time. Taken together — not in a tidy straight line, because real work loops back on itself, but in roughly this order — they describe how almost any business challenge, or any decision under uncertainty, can be tackled.
It starts with paying attention to what people do and what drives them.
People are poor witnesses to their own preferences and needs, so what matters is real behaviour, not the made-up reasons offered on a survey. Clayton Christensen made the point with milkshakes: a fast-food chain only sold more once it noticed people were buying them to get through a dull commute — the real rivals were bananas, bagels and boredom. Bob Moesta, who helped build the jobs-to-be-done approach, interviews people who have just bought something or just switched away and reconstructs what actually happened, digging past their first answers to the forces behind the decision: the frustration that pushed them, the promise that pulled them, the worry and habit that held them back. The same holds inside a company: your “customer” may be the division that lives with your process, the team that depends on your report, or the client across the table — and the rule doesn’t change, watch what they actually do with what you give them. The practice is humbler than it sounds — sit in on a few customer calls, follow one deal end to end, or watch a colleague struggle through a process you own. It teaches you more than a stack of reports.
Then comes framing the right problem and turning it into priority goals.
Most expensive mistakes aren’t failures of effort; they’re teams working hard on the wrong problem. The oldest tool is still among the sharpest: the “five whys”, which Toyota has used since the 1930s — ask why a problem happens, then why that happens, until you reach the cause beneath the symptom. A drop in sales taken at face value leads to a discount; followed through a few honest whys, it might turn out to be a confusing sign-up step or a promise the product never kept. The Design Council’s Double Diamond makes the same demand in plainer terms: work out whether you are solving the right problem before you reach for a solution. A test any leader can run tomorrow — before approving the next big project, ask the team to state the problem it solves in a single sentence. If they can’t, you have found where to start.
Solving problems creatively — questioning and reimagining the answer.
Reimagining means refusing to accept the status quo and searching for better ways — moving from “this is how we do it” to “what if we didn’t do it this way at all?”, whether that is a finance team rebuilding how the budget gets set or a bank rethinking how it takes on a client or creates better financing solutions. The block is rarely lack of creativity; it is actually nerve to express it freely in a business context. In Creative Confidence, Tom and David Kelley of IDEO set out to kill the myth that creativity belongs to a special few. What stops people creatively solving challenges around them is the fear of looking foolish — and, as David Kelley learned from the psychologist Albert Bandura, conquering fear happens in small steps, each success making the next one easier. Try the rough version, see that nothing terrible happens, attempt something bolder. It is the difference between the manager who waits to be asked because creativity is “someone else’s job” and the one who quietly changes how the team thinks.
Adaptability requires experimentation — everything is a guess until tested.
One principle runs through all of innovation work: experiment early, in small cheap loops, and learn before you bet big on anything uncertain. The tools differ. Design thinking uses rapid prototyping — building something rough, even a sketch or a cardboard mock-up, to think with and provoke a reaction long before there is a real product. Eric Ries’s lean startup pushes further with the minimum viable product: the smallest real version you can put in front of actual users to see whether they want it, then decide whether to persevere or change course. Different tools, one instinct — find the assumption that would make the whole bet fail, and test it cheaply to de-risk it before you commit. That test might be a prototype, a stripped-down feature shipped to a handful of users, a new process tried on one team, a pricing change in a single region, or a report redesigned for one division before the whole company sees it. Leaders often say they can’t experiment with shareholders watching; it is the other way round. A cheap test before a big commitment isn’t reckless — it is how you avoid betting the business on a guess no one checked. The same logic serves most big decisions in life.
And none of it happens alone. Collaboration is key to solving problems.
No major development has been built by one person, and in many cases not by a single organisation. IDEO sums up the inside view in a line: “all of us are smarter than any of us.” Stanford’s d.school calls it radical collaboration, and treats a mix of disciplines and backgrounds not as something to be managed but as the source of a better answer. Henry Chesbrough’s open innovation extends the same logic outward: the knowledge you need is usually scattered across startups, partners, universities and customers rather than locked in your own department, so part of the skill is building with people beyond your walls — and giving your own ideas a route out into the world. Either way, this is the daily work of founding a company: getting a mismatched group of co-founders, first hires and early customers to commit to the same goal before there is much proof it will work. The habits are portable — grasp a view you don’t share, make your own thinking visible so others can build on it, and hold a shared goal steady while the details keep changing and build together. The leader who can do that turns a room of specialists who would otherwise talk past one another into a team that builds, and knows when to reach beyond the room for new ideas, buy-in and resources.
None of this is new. What has changed is the world around it. The strategist Rita McGrath has argued for years that no competitive advantage lasts the way it used to — you win one, use it hard, and move on before it fades, which now happens fast. AI is accelerating that: almost any capability can be copied or automated in months, so the edge goes to whoever can find and shape the next thing fastest. Which is why these skills matter more, not less. When AI can produce a draft, a prototype or an analysis in an afternoon, doing the work stops being the hard part. The hard part is judgement — which problem is worth solving, what people really need, which idea to back — and the nerve to keep moving while the answer is still unclear. Managing that kind of uncertainty is a creative act before it is an analytical one.
Others agree too. The World Economic Forum’s latest survey of employers ranks creative thinking, resilience and flexibility, and curiosity and lifelong learning among the human skills rising fastest this decade, and expects nearly 40% of today’s core skills to change by 2030.
There is a catch, though, and it is where most attempts come unstuck: culture. Skills like these only grow where it is safe to try new things and sometimes be wrong — to fail fast and cheaply. Microsoft’s latest global study of work found that the culture and management around a person shaped whether AI improved their work about twice as strongly as that person’s own ability. Only 13% felt rewarded for rethinking how they work when the attempt didn’t pan out; nearly half said it felt safer to keep their heads down and hit their existing targets. Punish the experiments that fail and people quietly stop running them. So the first job of a senior leader is not to master the methods — it is to nurture them in everyone else.
That is mostly about conditions, not more training: ask the awkward questions out loud yourself, emphasise curiosity and evidence over opinions; protect a little time and budget for small bets; reward what people learned from an experiment, not only whether it paid off; pull different voices into the room and credit them; build diverse teams of unconventional thinkers; and treat changing your own mind as a strength. Skills grow with practice and permission — and a leader who role-models the first while granting the second will get more of both.
Which is the real point. This was never about innovation as a job title. Hans Balmaekers, who has spent years among corporate innovators, notes that the people who build these habits carry them into whatever they do next: the title can disappear, but the way of working stays.
You don’t need a mandate to start — only courage, questions, and the room to ask them. What problem are we actually solving? Why does it matter? Why does it happen? What is the person trying to do, and why? What if we did something else? How could we collaborate? What would have to be true for this to work, and how could we test it cheaply? Asked often enough, those questions change more than your output. They change how you lead — towards the right outcomes, with curiosity over certainty and evidence over opinion. They change what you choose to build, and whether it leaves the world a little better off.
And underneath all of it, they change how you think — in business and in life. That, in the end, is what these skills really give you: not a career move or a method, but a way of thinking. And as machines take over the routine, how we think is the part that will matter most.
Sources and further reading
· Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen & Clayton Christensen, “The Innovator’s DNA” (HBR, 2009; book, 2011): hbr.org/2009/12/the-innovators-dna
· Clayton Christensen & Bob Moesta, jobs-to-be-done and the “switch” interview (the milkshake study, Harvard Business School): library.hbs.edu
· The “five whys” root-cause method (Sakichi Toyoda / Toyota Production System): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys
· UK Design Council, the Double Diamond (2005): designcouncil.org.uk
· Tom & David Kelley, “Creative Confidence” (IDEO); David Kelley on guided mastery, TED2012: ted.com
· Eric Ries, “The Lean Startup”; and rapid prototyping in design thinking (Stanford d.school): theleanstartup.com/principles
· Henry Chesbrough, “Open Innovation” (2003): corporateinnovation.berkeley.edu
· Y Combinator’s essential startup advice: ycombinator.com/library
· IDEO and Stanford d.school on radical collaboration and multidisciplinary teams: dschool.stanford.edu
· Rita McGrath, “The End of Competitive Advantage” (2013): ritamcgrath.com
· World Economic Forum, “Future of Jobs Report 2025”: weforum.org
· Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index, via Charter, “Why your AI efforts have a culture problem”: charterworks.com
· Hans Balmaekers (Innov8rs), on innovation skills outlasting the role: linkedin.com/in/hansbalmaekers