Innovation isn’t a thing—it’s a doing. Specifically, it’s an agentic practice that takes invention from new to normal.
The Verbness Of Innovation: Doing The New
Joseph Schumpeter describes innovation as “the doing of new things or the doing of things-already-being-done in new ways”. The new-doers, then, invest time and effort in doing things in ways that are new to them.
But why go through all that trouble? Precisely because they have jobs that need to be done—and they have doubts about their current practices. Their situated discontent prompts new-doing, because things could be better.
Schumpeter’s Shift
All innovation comes down to this Schumpeterian shift: a new doing of things, adopted as normal practice by the people ‘doing the new’. Only once enough new-doers adopt the new doing into their workflows (forming Everett Rogers’ early majority) does it cross the chasm (as Geoffrey Moore would have it) and earn the title “innovation”.
Adoption is the quantum of innovation. By doing the new, people become agents of change and growth. Adoptions—microinnovations, really—sum to macroeconomic whirlwinds. This is Schumpeter‘s gale of creative destruction and Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation in operation. A tiny shift in practice can cause a Butterfly Effect—via Bak’s self-organized criticality (or any other term for cascade phenomena).
How can companies accelerate the New-Ideas-To-New-Normal process?
Agency engineering: operationalize Kahneman’s System 2 and turn good intentions into architecture.
Top-down? Bottom-up? There’s a third option that breaks the dichotomy: agent-forward!
Innovation is not a hero‘s quest. Trying to recruit mythical heroes—the self-starters, the intrapreneurs, the innovators—is not the answer, nor a sustainable strategy. Thing is, “new-doer” is not a job description for a rare breed of person. They’re ordinary…
- thinkers that caution,
- planners that forecast, and
- doers that get shit done
but with the agency to make a difference—to do the new.
Agency means purpose, mastery, and autonomy. Daniel Pink argues that this trinity is what motivates us as humans and as agents-of-a-company in the first place. But motivation alone isn’t enough. This trinity must be encoded, embedded, embodied in workflows—to structurally empower teams to do the new.
Without agency, there is no new-doing. No adoption of new doings. No innovation. Just going through the motions—repeating old mistakes. Again and again. That light at the end of the tunnel? Hope? No, it’s an oncoming release train—the sound of inevitability. No future, as the Sex Pistols commented on organizational command-and-control schemas.
But punk’s not dead. Now listen to Refused’s The Shape Of Punk To Come.
AGENCY makes new-doing automatic
Whether laziness or necessity is the mother of invention is irrelevant. Point is, humans—left to their own devices—will always come up with new ideas, new ways to do things, and new things to do. New-doing is the natural state of the human animal. Human history, including human evolution, is a testament to this statement. Our invention and subsequent adoption of fire and flint (e.g., knives)—to pick two innovations from pre-history—has reshaped our very jaws and digestive systems.
To pick a very recent and tragicomic development: Smartphone Neck causing growth of bone spurs.
BOOSTS make new-doings effective
Now, composing teams for agency—and we say teams, because getting anything worthwhile done in a way that makes it worth the while takes a team effort—does make new-doing automatic. But not necessarily effective.
For your new-doing teams to be effective, you need to equip them with boosts.
All our space missions must be boosted to Low Earth Orbit before they can ‘boldly go’ explore space. Earth’s gravity well is a steep climb, much like the inertia of organizational systems hold new-doers back. Your new-doers are busy. They have what Christensen calls Jobs-To-Be-Done—preferably yesterday. Unsurprisingly, they are reaching for—possibly aching for—utilities, services, or self-services that they can employ to boost their new-doing. If we put this in terms of Team Topologies by Skelton & Pais, we can paint their stream-aligned teams as new-doing teams and their platform teams as boost-builders.
The agent-forward organization requires two core capabilities.
- New-doing depends on agency engineering
- Boosting depends on platform engineering (e.g., infra-as-code for Data×AI boosts)
A boost becomes a product in Christensen’s JTBD sense: a thing-to-be-employed by people doing the jobs-to-be-done.
Boost—for easier and faster scaling of new doings
Boosts don’t grant agency. They are there to amplify new-doer agency— like a Marshall stack amplifies a Stratocaster to make some noise! Boosts lower the cognitive, organizational, and technical thresholds of new-doing—and remove blockers. Boosts are capital assets: not just operational enablers, but modular infrastructure for scaling innovation.
Your portfolio of boosts constitutes innovation capital. In biology, a keystone species is one whose actions have an outsized effect on the whole ecosystem. Boosts work the same way. Get them into play, and new-doing and adoption of new doings becomes easier and faster. Ignore them, and you’ll wonder why nothing scales.
Time-To-Normal Measures Speed Of Innovation
With lower thresholds and fewer blockers, new-doing teams can shorten the New-To-Normal cycle. The outcome? Improved Time-To-Normal. We talk about about speed of innovation—in the abstract. In practice, the only viable metric for innovation is Time-To-Normal. Because innovation doesn’t happen when an idea is born—that’s mere invention. Innovation happens when the new becomes the normal.
At the end of the day, measure your Time-To-Normal—because your innovation performance hinges on Schumpeter’s Shift.
Bonus Material: Why Innovation Turns Into Theatre
Innovation is hard. Not because people resist change, because they don’t—the natural state of the human animal is new-doing. Innovation is hard because systems resist agency. Systemic stupidity is the default outcome of ignoring agentic intelligence.
My PhD in the sociology of innovation and culture starts with this age-old observation by Arthur Stinchcombe: “Organizations, once established, tend not to change”. No less true, 60 years later. Orgs don’t change because change efforts tend to become innovation theatre—exercises in smoke-and-mirrors that make little difference, leaving even less that sticks.
Innovation theatre isn’t a failure of imagination. If it’s one thing humans are good at, it’s imagining the not-real-but-should be: we have libraries full of fanciful fiction. Innovation theatre is the logical outcome of systems inadvertently optimized to eliminate new-doing.
POSIWID: Because Implementation Has Unintended Consequences
Stafford Beer put it plainly: the “Purpose Of a System Is What It Does”. Not what it says it does. Not what its makers intended. What it does.
Look at your company’s incentives, controls, and workflows. If they systematically reward orderliness, silence doubt, and prioritize throughput over thought—then your system is like a watchmaker skeletonizing the clockwork for a timepiece: it is doing precision, the antithesis of innovation.
To mix metaphors: if the trains are running like clockwork, the system is working. Who cares if they’re going to the right stations or not? That’s the passengers’ problem.
Don’t try any funny business. Most—if not all—companies go to great lengths to throttle the agency of their people in the sacred name of Business As Usual (BAU). Not intentionally, mind you. Agency-throttling is a systemic by-product of standardization and Minimization of Agent Deviation—the MAD heuristic that orgs default to. It doesn’t care about growth opportunities. It cares about command, control, and compliance. And that shit don’t innovate.
Dismiss the doubts—the what-ifs, the why-nots—and innovation dies. Not with a bang but with a whimper, as discontent withers into apathy.
‘Business As Usual’ Comes With Blind Spots Baked In
It’s not just that BAU resists change—it resists seeing that change is even needed.
- Margaret Wheatley reminded us, “To name is to make visible”
- Daniel Kahneman taught us, “What you see is all there is”
- George Box warned, “It’s inappropriate to be worried about mice when there are tigers abroad.”
Most orgs spotlight the mice—and blind themselves to the tigers in the shadows: the unintended consequences of well-meant decisions. That’s the problem with blind spots—they’re hard to even notice, let alone address.
Let’s name the big one. As long as cost reduction trumps new-doing in executive priority, any deviation–mistake–error will register as a cost-to-reduce long before it can register as an opportunity-to-grow. That’s not just an operational glitch, it’s a cultural pathology.
Culture—In Operation
Culture isn’t fluff. It’s not core values, soft skills, and wishful thinking.
Culture is the practices and policies embodied by your agents. Culture is “the collective programming of the mind”, as Geert Hofstede put it. Culture is the shared programs running as the mindware of your agents: embodied practices and policies encoded in workflows. Culture is your intellectual seed capital.
Innovation Culture: Reprogram The Organization, One Boost At A Time
If you want innovation, you have to reprogram the system—boost by boost. In practice, this starts withreprogramming the minds of managers and executives. They must understand that the gravitational pull of BAU stops any new-doing effort from getting off the ground. Else, they’ll keep demanding “transformation” while reinforcing the very system that makes it impossible.
Want your org to innovate? Stop punishing agency. Start building the infrastructure—the boosts—that make ‘doing the new’ easier, faster, and normal.
Want to kick-start an innovation culture? Innovation starts with agency. It scales with boosts. Schumpeter’s Shift is how to make new-doing the new normal.