What leadership does, misses, and avoids frequently determines the success of an innovation or transformation project by recognizing the behaviors that – encourage new thinking, keep ideas alive, that quietly kill them, and the silence that no one has to answer for.
Behaviors to Make It Safe to “ Skip the Safe Response “
Scenario – An innovator brings a small, early idea into a review meeting. The leader, presumably doing the job well, asks obvious questions. Can it be bigger ? Can it get to market faster ? Where does the margin come from ?
To the innovator, those questions land as pressure to deliver an answer on the spot. The only thing a team can promise at that moment is more of what already exists, or anything else that is safe to say. The new idea, the unproven one, cannot be promised, so it gets left behind. The leader who pushed for something bigger gets the team’s smallest version instead.
These types of exchanges influence what a company’s results from innovation projects looks like, and they happen in a single meeting, in the questions a leader asks and the way they react to a rough prototype. Rainer Struck, Global VP of Innovation Transformation at Mars, has been observing and then codifying the behaviors that decide which way it goes. Unlike the machinery of process and budget, which takes quarters to move, a leader can change these on their own, through consistent practice. Each is a behavior that can start tomorrow, not in the next fiscal year with – a different question, evidence over risk, an idea shared early. Together, they decide whether a team brings its boldest ideas forward or buries them under the safe promises.
1 – The questions a leader asks, and the ones that shrink the idea
Of all 10 behaviors, the questions a leader asks an innovation team in a review is the most important because it shapes the underlying culture more than any other.
The most usual questions are about scale, speed, and margin – Can it be bigger ? Can it go faster ? Where is the profit ? Most experienced leaders ask all three, believing they are pushing the team to do better work. They feel that this is the right thing to do, which is why they are so hard to give up.
To the innovator on the other side of the table, those questions land as pressure. The team has brought a small, early idea it has worked on for months, kept modest because that is what an honest early idea really is. Being asked to make it bigger and faster on the spot is, in Rainer’s words, like standing over a seedling and ordering it to grow.
What the seedling really needs is soil, water, and time. When innovators are forced, they either inflate the numbers to project a confidence the evidence does not support, or they fall back on what they already know because it is the only thing they can defend quickly.
Both are ways of playing it safe. The questions can only be answered honestly by taking more risk, yet pressure drives the team toward less, so the ambition drains out. Over time, the team learns to bring only the ideas that won’t get challenged or perceived as risky.
The fix is to replace the typical scale-and-margin questions with ones about assumptions – help me understand what you are assuming here. That single change moves the conversation onto evidence, and it lets the leader and the team look together at what it would actually take to make the idea bigger, without the leader’s own impatience setting the terms. The idea ends up larger and bolder, since it gets there on evidence the team believes in, rather than on conjecture or numbers inflated under pressure.
This is the behavior with the longest reach, because changing the type of question does not just improve an idea – It changes what the team is willing to bring to the next meeting.
2 – Stop asking what customers want, and watch what they do
Most leaders let their teams validate an idea the easy way – ask customers whether they would buy it and what they would pay. The answers come back confident and specific, feeling like solid evidence.
They are not. People are poor at predicting their own behavior, so the survey that says yes is a poor guide to the customer who walks past the shelf in the store. A team can fill a deck with purchase intent, and still be measuring nothing real.
The behavior of a leader determines what they ask the team to bring back. Instead of “go find out if customers want this”, which sends the team off to run surveys, the ask becomes “go put it in their hands and watch what they do”. The innovation or transformation team works with a real prototype, real customers, and a real question – did it end up in their basket ? A customer complaint counts as real evidence, because making a complaint takes effort, and effort reveals behavior. A stated intention to buy is not, because it is only a prediction.
When a leader forces the team to work with actionable and bold questions, the team stops collecting the easy answers and starts gathering the insights that matter.
3 – Force the collisions that produce the ideas
The best innovation and transformation outcomes tend to come from a collision between people, groups, or disciplines that do not normally meet. Interestingly, while most leaders accept that in principle, few encourage collisions to happen.
To fast track discovery, leaders should engineer them – leave the building, and bring in people the company would not usually invite, including ones outside its comfort zone. The external people with different perspectives, expand the opportunities or considerations to augment what an internal team typically cannot generate on their own.
An example of this is the Mars gum and mint brand built for gamers that helps with concentration during play. An important partnership began by chance – when an advisor to Mars was seated on a flight next to the founder of Razer, a leading gaming equipment company. From their conversation, when they realized that gamers chew a lot of gum, they quickly established a joint venture. The partnership taught Mars more about how gamers actually behave than its own research could have + Mars got access to a gamer lab where teams watched real players in their gaming environment, instead of just asking them what they might buy.
The point isn’t to rely on a happenstance plane seating encounter – but for a leader to manufacture the same kind of collision on purpose, starting by asking questions, encouraging exploration and new thinking, developing an entrepreneurial mindset and insight on where the $ are going to be, rewarding achievement and learning, etc.
4 – Identify a niche opportunity
Leadership should treat small, specific markets as the place to go looking, and to explore them purposefully – in addition to assessing opportunities that unexpectedly occur. That runs against normal practice in many organizations that dismiss niches or chance situation almost automatically since they are typically small, the company is big, next year’s number is large, so the situation gets passed over before anyone takes a closer look or understands its potential.
In reality, nothing large ever started large. The insight that seeds a big business almost always shows up first in a narrow market. The mass market is a poor hunting ground, because it already has what it wants – the unmet need lives at the edges.
Three Mars products started off small, before they became invaluable product lines. M&M’s began as a fix for soldiers in World War II whose chocolate melted in the field; a sugar coating solved it, and that wartime workaround grew into a brand worth three and a half billion dollars. Dentist sticks addressed one unglamorous problem every dog owner knows: bad breath and dental health, and became a multi-billion-dollar pet care and treats business that now reaches beyond teeth. A protein bar built for the CrossFit community, about as niche a starting audience as exists, grew into a major brand and entered the Mars portfolio through the Kellanova acquisition.
5 – Share ideas widely and early, before they are polished
Most people run innovation or transformation projects by keeping an idea quiet until it is polished, then reveal the finished version to executives and hope it gets support.
Rainer reveals the opposite advice from a well-known creative director at an advertising agency shared with him. When he asked how she guards ideas from being stolen, she said they do the reverse by sharing them as widely and as early as they can. She admitted people sometimes steal them – and that she hates it when it happens. But in about 95 % of cases the idea comes back better, because other people respond to it, add to it, or tell her it is weak (so that she can drop it and move on).
With that in mind, leaders should stop encouraging the polished reveal and start rewarding early disclosure of promising projects. Why ? Because putting rough ideas in front of more people sooner invites reactions before the idea is hardened or defensible, with probing questions that should not be viewed as ” someone poking a hole in it ” – but as part of the process to progress (rather than embarrassment). While this behavior can make legal and IP teams uneasy, recognize this isn’t about leaking genuine trade secrets. Rather, it’s that for ordinary ideas, exposure makes them better, while secrecy is mostly about control.
6 – Increase evidence instead of reducing risk
This is the first behavior that starts to touch a deeper behavioral layer – the one about a leader’s own discomfort rather than a simple principle. Risk and evidence are two sides of the same coin whereby as evidence goes up, the risk goes down. Large organizations are built to measure risk because a lot is at stake. The trouble is that assessing or measuring risk is hard, especially for something new. And recognize, the demand for a risk number tends to stall a team or lead to unintended consequences that undermine the learnings and exploration needed to create new value and opportunities.
On the flipside, gathering evidence adds up over time to be a better indicator of potential. For example, with a phone call to an expert, an hour watching people shop, doing tests to accumulate evidence – the risk decreases without having to calculate it. The reason this is a behavioral shift and not just another nice phrase is that it changes the leader’s ask to their team. Instead of demanding a risk assessment the team cannot yet produce, the leader asks what evidence exists and what is still missing – to give the team something to actually work on.
One rule goes with this – never ask for proof. While evidence is a signal you can gather now, proof is certainty the thing will work – which no one can have before it is built. When a team is pressed for proof, they will invent it, out of fear or to appear confident about the project. This is why evidence is best.
7 – Surface the assumptions and let them argue
This behavior builds on the last one – a simple way for a leader to pull a team’s hidden assumptions into the open. This is important when a group is stuck on a decision.
An example of this is when an innovation or transformation team is split on price. One person is certain a new product can sell for no more than $2.99; another is just as sure it will work at $4.99. Arguing the number directly gets teams nowhere, since the real gap is between assumptions nobody has stated.
So the leader draws a line on the wall, low price at one end and high at the other, asks each person to mark privately where they stand, and then asks them to explain what they are assuming about the customer that put their mark there.
Two things then happen at once – people realize they had never actually examined their own position until they had to explain it, and they see how well their assumptions compare with everyone else’s. The conversation shifts from who is right to what evidence would align insights and assumptions. It works for any decision where opinions are standing in for facts, turning a stuck argument into a concrete list of things worth going to check through disclosure and thinking things through.
8 – Put a CFO on the Innovation / Transformation team
In most companies the team develops an idea and then hands it to finance to build the P&L. That split is slow, and worse, it keeps the commercialization phase away from the people who understand the idea best.
The best thing a leader can do in this case is to ask everyone on the team, the scientist, the engineer, the marketer, etc. to act as the idea’s CFO and do the math a founder would do at the very start – does it roughly add up, and how can the numbers get better, what’s the value of what we’re delivering, etc. ?
When the whole team does the math, everyone learns the business side, not just the product side. If only finance handles the P&L, that learning never spreads. The math also forces the team to face the hardest phase – the time after an idea looks promising but before it earns anything, when the company is only spending money. A team that runs its own numbers can see that phase coming; a team that leaves it to finance gets the shock later.
9 – Catch the instinct that protects the core and starves the next bet
This behavior comes down to a specific feeling the leader has to manage – loss aversion, or the pull to protect a winning business rather than fund uncertainty of the next one.
Most businesses move along an S-curve with a slow start, a steep climb, then a plateau. The time to fund the next curve is before the current one peaks, while there is still money and energy for it. Wait until after the peak, and the odds of building the next business successfully drop below 10 % !
That timing is what makes the call hard. The curves cross while the core business is still growing well, and that is exactly when a leader has to move money out of something that works and into something unproven. However, two instincts stop them from doing that :
- Loss Aversion – which makes the new bet feel like a threat to the healthy business the money would come from
- The Endowment Effect – that makes leaders overvalue what they already own whereby money already in the core business seems more valuable than money put into something new.
Both are among the strongest forces in human behavior, and both intensify the longer a business has been winning. Some of Mars’s businesses have been winning for a hundred years, which makes the resistance to funding anything new about as strong as it gets !
To get past this behavior, be mindful of your tendencies and instincts (before they make the decision for you). Rather than seeing the new bet as money taken from a safe business, weigh the cost of not making it whereby if we do not build this now, we lose our lead or miss an opportunity. In Rainer’s view, this is what the big AI vendors are doing in that they do not say here is something wonderful, try it. They say use our product for advantage – before your competitors do.
The point of the reframe is to keep a leader from starving a new bet to protect the old one. It will not decide every funding call, but it forces the real risk into view – doing nothing is not as safe as it appears. And recognize even from failures, trying and learning better positions you and the organization for success in the future.
10 – Learn the corporate innovation discipline
Rainer spent 26 years at Mars, a company with $55 billion in net sales and 150,000 people. He ran brands for 23 of those years and is now Global VP of Innovation Transformation.
When he moved fully into innovation, he made an uncomfortable discovery – After more than two decades of launching products and running brands, he realized he did not actually know corporate innovation as a discipline, with its own methods and evidence. What he picked up instead was a set of instincts he had learned on the job. When he set out to learn about innovation more formally, he found he was not alone – most leaders and innovators are practicing something they have never formally studied or had experience with.
Therefore, to make innovation and transformation more rewarding, the need is to intentionally learn and be disciplined to develop the mindset. It sounds too obvious to say out loud, until you notice how many people run on instinct and gut feel rather than being entrepreneurial with the look ahead and insight needed on what will have value built on a body of knowledge that has its own experts, methods, and evidence. Further, recognize part of the gap in knowledge is that modern digitally oriented corporate innovation is a new discipline – that has only existed for around 30 years, and that few people are educated at. As a result, most leaders reach senior roles with little or no digital competencies or experience in managing the changing nature or risk. Leaders can close that gap by collaborating with people who are knowledgeable about technology and digital innovation as well as having a mindset to innovate for impact (in the same way any other non-innovation leader would expect to know the fundamentals of finance or operations).
The Payoff
Combined, the above behaviors highlight the importance the innovation leader needs to stop managing innovation through structure and doing things on their terms to shape behavior by how they act in the room. What a leader counts as evidence, the questions they ask, the ideas they let circulate, the instinct they catch before it decides a funding call or in anticipation of a business recognition. A leader can start changing things in the next review – long before any system can help.
The evidence that this works is already sitting in the Mars portfolio. A niche fix for soldiers’ melting chocolate became a $3.5 B brand. An unexpected collision between two industries that never met opened an entire category. An idea shared before it was ready came back better 95 % of the time. None of those came from a better stage-gate, but from a leader willing to watch real behavior, force an unlikely collision, and let an unfinished idea out of the room.
Every large company has their own, overlooked ideas. Surfacing them doesn’t require a new process or system, but a leader willing to be open, curious, a willingness to learn new concepts and notions of value – to behave differently in the room, consistently. And when the behaviors keep up, they turn a team that plays safe into one that brings bold thinking into the room. And overtime, gets better at Innovating for Impact to create meaningful new value and better outcomes.
July 27, 2026 By Innov8rs / CAIL CAIL Innovation commentary
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