Written by Michiel R. De Boer
She had been working on the idea for eight months before she took it to her manager. Not casually working on it. Seriously. She had built the prototype on her own time. She had run an informal pilot with three willing clients who had responded with genuine enthusiasm. She had written a business case that was, by any reasonable assessment, coherent and credible. The market opportunity was real. The investment required was modest. The potential return was not transformative, but it was meaningful, and the risk was contained.
Her manager liked it. He took it to the head of the division. The head of the division liked it too, and asked for a more detailed financial model and a risk assessment. She produced both. A steering committee review was scheduled. The steering committee asked for a competitive analysis and a regulatory review. Both were done. The regulatory review flagged a low-probability compliance consideration that needed to be cleared with legal. Legal took six weeks and concluded that the consideration was, as she had originally assessed, low-probability. The project was resubmitted to the steering committee.
The steering committee’s next review was three months away, because the quarterly meeting schedule had been set before the project was submitted. The slot was on the agenda. Then it was bumped for a higher-priority item. Then the head of the division moved to a different role, and the incoming leader wanted to assess the project from scratch before endorsing it at committee.
Fourteen months after the initial submission, the project had not been approved. The three pilot clients had gone to a competitor who had moved faster. She had accepted a job offer from a smaller company that had offered her the chance to run the idea as a standalone business unit.
The organisation had lost the idea, the market position, and the person. And the governance process that produced this outcome had functioned exactly as designed.
The Organisation’s Immune System
The metaphor of an organisation’s immune system is imperfect. It is precise enough to be useful. Immune systems evolved to protect organisms from things that are foreign, unfamiliar, and potentially dangerous. They do this by identifying anything that does not look like the organism itself and generating a response designed to contain, neutralise, or expel it. They do not discriminate reliably between what is genuinely dangerous and what is merely novel. A transplanted organ that is foreign but healthy will produce the same immune response as a pathogen. The system does not assess intent or outcome. It responds to difference.
Organisational governance systems, particularly in large, established organisations, exhibit the same pattern. They evolved to protect the organisation from things that are risky, non-standard, and potentially costly: compliance failures, budget overruns, reputational damage, operational disruption. They do this by subjecting proposals to scrutiny, requiring evidence, insisting on alignment with existing frameworks and precedents, and routing decisions through multiple layers of authority.
This is appropriate and necessary for many categories of decision. The problem is that genuine innovation, as distinct from the incremental optimisation that governance processes handle reasonably well, is inherently novel, inherently uncertain, and inherently difficult to evaluate using the frameworks built for established business. It does not fit the existing models cleanly. It cannot provide the same quality of evidence that established business lines can provide, because it has no history. It is, by definition, something the organisation has not done before.
Put these properties into a governance system designed to identify and respond to the non-standard, and the outcome is predictable: the innovation is treated as a risk to be managed rather than an opportunity to be pursued. Each layer of the approval process adds uncertainty about outcome and certainty about delay. And the delay itself is not neutral, in most markets, the opportunity that exists when the idea is generated is not the same opportunity that exists fourteen months later. Time is a cost that the governance process does not typically measure.
Why The Most Disruptive Ideas Face The Most Resistance
Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation framework identifies a pattern that is counterintuitive until you understand its logic: the ideas most likely to define an organisation’s future competitive position are precisely the ideas most likely to be rejected by its existing governance structures.
Sustaining innovations (improvements to existing products and services that make them better at what they already do) are well-served by standard governance. They fit existing financial models. They are assessed by people with relevant experience. Their risk profile is familiar. They are, in short, easy to approve because they are easy to evaluate.
Disruptive innovations: ideas that create new value propositions, serve different customer segments, or use different business model architectures, are poorly served by standard governance for the same reasons inverted. They do not fit existing financial models. The people assessing them may lack relevant experience. Their risk profile is genuinely unfamiliar. They cannot be evaluated well by people whose entire expertise is the existing business.
This structural bias is not a management failure. It is a feature of how governance systems are built, and of the cognitive and institutional pressures that operate on the people within them. A committee member who approves a sustaining innovation that fails is seen as someone who made a reasonable bet that did not work out. A committee member who approves a disruptive innovation that fails is seen as someone who took an irresponsible risk. The asymmetry of consequences produces asymmetric behaviour: the rational choice, in most governance processes, is to approve the familiar and question the novel.
The result is an innovation portfolio that over-invests in the things the organisation already knows how to do and under-invests in the things that might define its future.
The People Cost
The story of the innovation project is almost always the story of a person: the person who believed in the idea enough to invest in it, to protect it through the early stages when it was fragile and undefined, to advocate for it through a process designed with much better arguments than it has yet assembled.
These people: the ones who bring ideas before they are ready, who push against institutional inertia, who have the specific combination of conviction and resilience that innovation advocacy requires, are the most valuable and the most fragile asset an innovative organisation can have. They are rare. They are not made; they are made available, by environments that take their ideas seriously and move on them quickly enough to sustain the conviction that the effort is worthwhile.
When the idea dies in the approval process, the damage is not only the loss of the idea. It is the lesson that the person takes from the experience, and the decision they make based on it. The lesson is that this organisation’s governance systems are calibrated to protect what exists rather than to build what could be. The decision, for many of the most capable innovators, is the one described in the story above: to find an environment where their energy will be met with movement rather than managed through delay.
Research on innovation culture consistently identifies the perceived willingness of the organisation to act on ideas as a primary driver of whether employees generate ideas in the first place. People do not invest in idea generation where they believe idea generation is futile. They reserve their creative thinking for environments that they believe will use it. A governance process that reliably delays or deflects innovation creates exactly those expectations, and then wonders why its innovation culture is weak.
The Governance Design Problem
The root problem is not the governance process itself. It is the assumption that a single governance process can appropriately assess all categories of decision.
A process calibrated for steady-state business: requiring full financial modelling, regulatory review, competitive analysis, and multi-layer sign-off, is appropriate for large, irreversible decisions with significant resource implications. It is destructive when applied to early-stage innovation, where the right governance response is not exhaustive evaluation but rapid, contained experimentation.
The appropriate governance logic for innovation is different: smaller, faster, hypothesis-driven. The question is not “does this business case prove the idea will succeed?”, because no business case for a genuinely novel idea can prove that. The question is “is this hypothesis worth testing, and what is the cheapest way to test it?” The governance role is not to approve the idea but to create the conditions for a rapid, learning-oriented experiment. The experiment produces evidence. The evidence informs the next decision. The process is iterative rather than sequential.
This is the logic of lean experimentation, applied at the governance level. It is more administratively complex than running all proposals through a single process, because it requires the organisation to distinguish between categories of decision and route them to different governance structures. But the complexity is manageable, and the alternative: a single governance process that suppresses innovation, is not.
Practical Recommendations
Create a separate, faster governance track for early-stage innovation. This track should have different criteria: not full business case, but clear hypothesis and containable experiment. Different timelines: not quarterly committee schedules, but defined decision windows of two to four weeks. Different risk thresholds: the question is not whether the idea is proven, but whether the experiment is worth running. And different sponsors: people in the organisation who have the authority to approve small experiments and the judgment to distinguish between legitimate risk and recklessness.
Define a protected innovation budget that does not compete with operational delivery. One of the most common structural failures is the absence of budget that is specifically allocated to experimentation. When every resource request for an innovation initiative has to compete with operational delivery on the same budget line, operational delivery wins: because it has the most immediate and most measurable returns. A protected innovation budget, small in absolute terms, significant in signal, creates the conditions for experimentation that does not require defeating the existing business in an internal resource competition.
Make the approval process’s timeline a performance metric. Organisations measure many things about innovation outcomes. Very few measure the speed of their innovation governance. Time-to-decision should be a tracked metric, visible to leadership, with clear expectations about maximum acceptable duration for early-stage proposals. When the speed of approval is invisible, delays accumulate without consequence. When it is visible, the pressure to move is real.
Separate the risk management conversation from the idea assessment conversation. Risk management and opportunity assessment are different cognitive processes that are best conducted separately. In many governance processes, they are fused: the assessment of the idea is conducted simultaneously by the same people through the same lens as the risk assessment, which systematically biases the outcome toward risk identification rather than opportunity evaluation. A simple structural fix: begin every innovation review with a dedicated conversation about what would need to be true for this to succeed: the opportunity case, before turning to the risk case.
Protect and publicly recognise the advocates. The person who brings a novel idea through a difficult approval process is performing a service to the organisation regardless of whether the idea is ultimately approved. Organisations that publicly recognise this: that name and celebrate the people who generate and advocate for ideas, independent of whether those ideas succeed, build the psychological safety that sustains innovation culture over time. Organisations that leave innovators to absorb the cost of a failed or delayed approval process without acknowledgment teach everyone else to keep their ideas to themselves.
The Immune Response And What It Costs
The innovation project that died in the approval process is not a tragedy about one idea. It is a signal about the organisation’s relationship with novelty: whether the governance systems are designed to enable the organisation’s future as well as to protect its present.
Every organisation needs to protect its present. The compliance function, the risk management process, the financial controls. These are not optional. They are what prevent the organisation from destroying itself through unmanaged risk. The question is not whether to have governance. It is whether the governance system is designed to protect the present without consuming the future.
An immune system that is so aggressive it attacks healthy tissue as well as pathogens is called an autoimmune condition. It is, in medical terms, a failure of the self-recognition function: the inability to distinguish between what is genuinely threatening and what is merely different.
Organisations have the same failure mode. And it is, like autoimmune conditions, both debilitating and treatable, once you name what is happening and decide to do something about it.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Think about the last genuinely new idea that someone in your organisation proposed — something that did not fit the existing model cleanly and required a different kind of evaluation.
How long did it take to get a decision? And what happened to the person who proposed it, during and after that process?
The answers tell you what your governance system is actually calibrated to protect. And they tell your people something too, whether you intended them to or not.
This is Piece 9 of an eleven-part series exploring the patterns behind organisational dysfunction: and what the GITO® Approach reveals about addressing them at the system level.
The next piece: The reorganisation that was supposed to fix the silos: and created new ones: structure without culture change, and the most expensive way to stay in the same place.
