Leaders have gone to great lengths in the name of innovation—and yet far too often these efforts fall short, according to Scott Anthony (MBA 2001), a senior partner at the growth-strategy consulting firm Innosight and one of the authors of Eat Sleep Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organization. The book, co-authored by Innosight partners Andy Parker and Natalie Painchaud, as well as Paul Cobban of DBS Bank in Singapore, suggests there is a better way. The authors present a roadmap for making innovation a daily habit. Just as you eat and sleep every day, “today’s quickly changing world means that you should innovate every day,” they write.

The current moment, when routines have been disrupted by the pandemic, presents an opportunity for leaders to purge old behaviors and build a more creative culture for their organization. In the following excerpt, the authors suggest a strategy to determine whether valuable resources in your operation are being drained by projects that aren’t viable.

Do you feel like you don’t have sufficient resources to take promising ideas forward? It is possible that you have succumbed to a pernicious plague that can kill innovation energy: the plague of the zombie project. Do you shuffle and linger on, sucking the innovation energy out of your organization? If so, then a zombie amnesty, where you kill projects but pardon people, may be for you! Innosight’s fieldwork and the work of like-minded academics—most notably Rita Gunther McGrath of Columbia University (a certified zombie killer if ever one existed)—suggests six keys to success:

1. Predetermine criteria. Shutting a project down can be very emotional. Setting and sharing a shortlist of criteria before the process begins can help participants to view the process as being as rational as possible. These criteria will be guidelines, not rules, as final decisions will always require subjective judgment.
2. Involve outsiders. Parents can attest to how hard it is to be objective about something you played a part in conceiving. An uninvolved outsider can bring important impartiality to the process.
3. Codify reusable learning. McGrath teaches that any time a company innovates, two good things can happen. Successfully commercializing an idea is clearly a good outcome. So too, however, is learning something that sets you up for future success. As seminal research into product failure notes, “knowledge gained from failures [is] often instrumental in achieving subsequent successes.” So capture knowledge to maximize the return on your investments in innovation.
4. Celebrate success. Any time you innovate, future success is unknown. Therefore, learning that an idea is not viable is a successful outcome—as long as that learning happened in a reasonably resource-efficient way. Prospect theory holds that people hate losses more than they enjoy equivalent gains. Add this to a culture in which taking well-thought-out risks carries the potential for punishment, and it is no surprise that people hesitate to take risks.
5. Communicate widely. Innovation happens most naturally at companies that “dare to try.” ... Shining a spotlight on purged zombies naturally makes it safer for people to push the innovation boundaries.* After all, if you don’t dare to try, how can you hope to succeed?
6. Provide closure. This idea is ripped straight from McGrath’s excellent 2011 Harvard Business Review article “Failing by Design”: “Have a symbolic event—a wake, a play, a memorial—to give people closure.” Without closure, it is too easy for someone, somewhere to revive the zombie. ...

Almost every company has more resources than it realizes. Find and put the zombies down, reallocate resources on your most promising projects, and you will suddenly see your innovation efforts become bigger, better, and faster.

*On the phrases “zombie killer” and “purged zombies,” one organization that Innosight worked with preferred to talk about transforming zombies into angels. It certainly sounds more pleasant than purging or killing zombies! We do purposefully call this a zombie amnesty to highlight the fact that the people working on zombie projects should be safe from punishment.

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