Peter Bregman’s compelling Harvard Business Review article, “To Develop Leadership Skills, Practice in a Low-Risk Environment,” offers a profound insight that directly applies to building innovation leadership capabilities. Most leadership training is about teaching ideas, sharing best practices, and increasing knowledge. But in my experience, successful people rarely become better leaders because they know more. They become better leaders because they follow through on what they know.
This principle is even more critical when developing innovation leadership skills, where the stakes feel higher and the psychological barriers more daunting.
The Innovation Leadership Challenge
Leading for innovation requires what I call “innovation courage” — the willingness to create psychological safety for others, challenge established processes, allocate resources to uncertain outcomes, and model vulnerability when experiments fail. These behaviours feel risky because they contradict traditional management approaches that prioritise certainty, control, and risk mitigation.
High-performing leadership isn’t easy in the first place and leading for innovation is particularly challenging because it requires leaders to work against their brain’s natural wiring. Our brains feel potential losses approximately twice as intensely as equivalent gains — a psychological reality that makes traditional leadership approaches inadequate for innovation contexts.
The result? Leaders who intellectually understand innovation principles but struggle to implement them when it matters most. They know they should encourage experimentation, but their natural risk aversion kicks in during budget discussions. They understand the importance of psychological safety, but revert to blame when projects don’t deliver expected results.
The Solution: Controlled Innovation Leadership Practice
Drawing on Bregman’s methodology, I’ve developed an approach that enables leaders to practice innovation-focused behaviours in environments where the perceived risk is significantly higher than the actual risk.
Here’s how it works:
I work with leadership teams to identify specific business problems — challenges that are costing the organisation significant money or creating operational friction, but aren’t mission-critical to daily operations. These might include operational inefficiencies or customer experience pain points.
Next, we assemble small teams, drawn from different departments and organisational levels. Each team is tasked with solving one of the identified problems, typically over a 6-month period.
But here’s the crucial difference: the primary focus isn’t on actually solving the problems. If we do, then great, but in reality, it’s about coaching leaders to enable teams to solve problems by fundamentally reengineering how they lead on a day-to-day basis.
Redesigning Culture in a Safe Environment
During this process, leaders must practice essential innovation-focused behaviours:
Creating Psychological Safety: Leaders learn to respond to early-stage ideas with curiosity rather than judgment, even when initial proposals seem impractical or incomplete.
Resource Allocation for Uncertainty: They practice providing teams with modest resources and authority without demanding detailed ROI calculations or guaranteed outcomes.
Vulnerability Modelling: Leaders share their own uncertainties and past failures, demonstrating that not having all the answers is acceptable — even valuable.
Cross-Functional Enablement: They actively remove silos and bureaucratic barriers that typically slow down collaborative problem-solving.
Recognition of Learning: Leaders practice celebrating valuable failures and insights, not just successful outcomes.
The genius of this approach is that it feels authentic to the participants. The problems are genuine business challenges, the teams are working with actual constraints, and the solutions they develop will be implemented. Leaders experience all the discomfort and uncertainty they would feel in higher-stakes situations.
Yet the actual risk remains manageable. These aren’t bet-the-company initiatives or core product developments. If a team’s approach doesn’t work, the business continues operating normally. If a leader struggles with providing psychological safety, the consequences are learning opportunities rather than career-limiting events.
Measurable Culture Change
What makes this methodology particularly powerful is its demonstrable impact. Follow-through requires what I call ‘Emotional Courage’, which is the willingness to feel the complex emotions that arise when we take risks, break old patterns, and try new ways of acting. Through this controlled practice environment, leaders develop the emotional courage necessary to produce tangible business results.
I’ve observed teams reduce process inefficiencies by 40%, identify customer experience improvements that increase satisfaction scores, and develop cross-departmental collaboration models that scale across the organisation. More importantly, the leaders who enable these outcomes gain confidence in innovation leadership behaviours, which they can then apply to larger, more strategic initiatives.
The Broader Implication
One financial services client used this approach with remarkable results. Two teams tackled seemingly mundane problems: lengthy onboarding processes and inefficient internal communication protocols. The measurable improvements were significant, but the fundamental transformation was cultural in nature. Leaders who had been sceptical about “innovation initiatives” witnessed firsthand how different leadership behaviours could unlock their teams’ problem-solving capabilities.
The ripple effects extended far beyond the initial teams. Other departments began requesting similar approaches to their challenges. Middle managers started adopting the facilitation and enablement techniques they had observed. Most critically, the executive team gained evidence that innovation-focused leadership wasn’t just theoretical — it delivered concrete business value.
Building Your Innovation Leadership Muscle
Try it yourself. Think of something you want to get better at in terms of your ability to lead for innovation. It’s providing feedback that encourages experimentation rather than compliance, listening without immediately offering solutions, and engaging in conversations about uncertain outcomes without defaulting to traditional risk management approaches.
Identify a low-stakes situation where you can practice these skills. This might be a minor process improvement challenge, a small customer experience issue, or an internal collaboration friction point. Assemble a small team and focus not on solving the problem yourself, but on enabling them to solve it through innovation-focused leadership behaviours.
Go slowly and feel all the feelings that come up. Those are the feelings you will feel in higher-risk situations because that’s what risk feels like. The discomfort you experience when not providing immediate answers or when allowing teams to pursue uncertain approaches — that’s precisely what innovation leadership feels like at scale.
Why This Matters Now
Building innovation leadership capability has never been more urgent. Organisations facing unprecedented disruption need leaders who can create the conditions for breakthrough thinking rather than manage existing operations. But developing these capabilities requires more than workshops or theoretical understanding.
As Bregman notes, that’s how we expand our freedom to act on what’s most important to us. For innovation leaders, what’s most important is creating organisational cultures where genuine innovation can emerge, be refined, and be delivered to market.
The controlled practice environment I’ve described provides a bridge between innovation leadership theory and the emotional courage required to implement it when the stakes are high. It allows leaders to discover that enabling uncertainty, embracing failure as a learning opportunity, and empowering distributed problem-solving isn’t just philosophically sound — it’s also practically effective.
Remember: innovation isn’t an activity but an effect. It’s a badge that customers and markets give you when they experience your solutions as sufficiently novel, valuable or transformative. Leaders who develop innovation leadership capabilities through low-risk practice are better equipped to create those conditions consistently, at scale, and under pressure.
The question isn’t whether your organisation needs innovation leadership capabilities. The question is whether you’re prepared to develop them systematically, starting with safe environments where the learning is real but the consequences are manageable.
Cris Beswick is a strategic advisor and recognised global thought leader on innovation strategy, leadership, and culture. He works with executive teams worldwide to build innovation-led organisations through practical, evidence-based approaches.