Leadership — The Three Great Obstacles to Innovation

The three great obstacles to innovation

Innovation isn’t the flash of a few geniuses; it’s the ability of an environment to let you put a different idea forward (which is the Innovation in MOI). But three mindsets stop it right at the source — and they’re usually unconscious.

Obstacle one: self-blindness

The first wall is not seeing your own behaviour clearly. If you’re not aware of how you currently work, what your habits and blind spots are, there is nowhere to apply any improvement — you can’t change a thing you haven’t seen. The precondition for innovation is being able to observe yourself honestly, and keeping a journal is a good way to force that.

Obstacle two: the no-problem syndrome

The second wall is assuming there’s no problem. When someone raises one, a person in this mindset rushes to apply an answer they already have and misses what was actually being asked — they assume they understood it long ago. The problem worth solving gets skipped, and the opening for innovation disappears with it. Being willing to stop and check “is this the problem I think it is?” is what gives you a chance to see something new.

Obstacle three: believing a problem has one right answer

The third wall is deciding a problem has exactly one correct answer. Think that way and you stop at the first workable solution, closing off every other possibility. But innovation usually hides in the second and third solutions — leaving room for “there’s probably another way to do this” is itself the soil innovation grows in.

Reflection

Anyone can have all three, which is why you have to look at yourself from the outside in, regularly. A few angles on my own thinking and state:

Health

I’ve been taking my physical health more seriously in recent years — once the body goes, nothing else gets done well. Nothing major right now, but some latent risk: my LDL-C is on the high side. I’m seeing a doctor, taking a statin, and adding fish oil to raise HDL and speed up LDL clearance. Dinner is hard to control because I eat with family, so the focus is breakfast and lunch. On exercise, roughly two weight sessions, one 60-minute stair machine session and one two-hour hike a week — strength and cardio both covered. I’ll keep following up on it.

IQ

The book asks: does IQ affect leadership? From my experience, yes. Years ago I tested fairly high, and I’d let the score slip out “casually on purpose” — what I said did start carrying more weight. Later it was grinding problems instead: I mentioned at work that I’d done a few thousand LeetCode problems and placed near the top of a weekly contest, and the weight went up again — to the point where everyone wanted me on their team at an escape room. What’s underneath it is simple: people conclude “you think well, so your answer has a higher chance of being right”, and that trust is one of the sources of leadership.

The exercise

The book also gives a way to break the third obstacle (one right answer): take a multiple-choice question and try treating every option as correct, giving a plausible reason for each. Translated into software work: the same problem usually has several solutions, each carrying different assumptions and different costs — and picking any one of them is a trade-off of some kind.