How Leaders Must Build the Foundation That Makes Bold Visions Achievable
A CEO of a global manufacturing firm recently shared a confession that should concern every board member:
“We’ve invested over £10 million in transformation over three years. We hired the best consultants. We crafted a bold vision. We launched pilots across digital, sustainability, and customer experience. Yet here’s what keeps me awake: we’re stuck in pilot purgatory—nothing scales. Our people are exhausted from change initiatives that never quite transform anything. Meanwhile, our competitors—who started later with smaller budgets—are pulling ahead.”
After two decades advising Fortune 500 companies and governments worldwide on innovation strategy, leadership, and culture, I recognise this pattern immediately. It’s not a strategy problem.
It’s not a vision problem. It’s not even an execution problem in the traditional sense.
It’s an innovation capability problem.
Business strategist Peter Fisk—whose work I’ve followed with enormous respect for over a decade—recently published a comprehensive framework on business transformation, correctly identifying it as “the new superpower of business leaders” requiring organisations to reimagine their future, redefine strategy, reinvent their organisation, and rewire performance.
His examples—Microsoft, Fujifilm, Schneider Electric, and Ping An—demonstrate how transformational companies achieve step changes in value creation.
From my perspective as an innovation thought leader, I’d add a complementary dimension to Peter’s excellent framework. None of these bold visions becomes reality without the underlying capability to systematically identify, develop, and deliver solutions that create meaningful value.
That capability is innovation—not as programmes or labs, but as an embedded organisational system that enables transformation rather than hopes for it.
This isn’t a critique of Peter’s work, which I deeply admire—it’s an innovation practitioner’s perspective on the foundational capability that makes his transformation framework achievable in practice.
More critically, in today’s context, as AI reshapes every industry, the gap between organisations with genuine innovation capability and those engaging in innovation theatre is becoming existential. AI doesn’t make innovation capability less critical—it makes it more urgent because it amplifies the consequences of having it or lacking it.
The Transformation Paradox: Adding the Innovation Capability Lens
Peter’s framework, which identifies business transformation as involving four interconnected domains—reimagining purpose and vision, redefining strategy and priorities, reinventing culture and organisation, and rewiring operations and performance—is comprehensive and robust. From my two decades of focusing specifically on innovation capability, I’d suggest that these domains rest on an underlying foundation that determines whether transformation succeeds or stalls: the systematic capability to execute transformation at scale.
Consider the mathematics: research consistently shows that while 84% of executives consider innovation essential to growth strategy, only 6% are satisfied with the results. Similarly, across companies that launched formal transformation initiatives, 72% showed no meaningful improvement in employee trust, engagement, or retention one year later.
This isn’t a coincidence—it’s causation. Transformation programmes fail for precisely the same reasons that innovation initiatives do: organisations treat them as activities to implement rather than as capabilities to build.
The pattern is predictable:
- Executives articulate bold visions (reimagining the future) but maintain governance systems that punish the experimentation required to reach that future.
- Strategy teams define new business models (redefining priorities), but resource allocation continues to favour established operations over uncertain opportunities.
- HR launches culture programmes (reinventing organisation), but performance metrics reward exactly the behaviours that transformation seeks to eliminate
- Operations invests in new technologies (rewiring performance) but lacks the collaborative, cross-functional problem-solving capacity to leverage them.
The result? Impressive transformation theatre—workshops, consultants, pilot programmes, innovation labs—that generate activity metrics whilst the actual organisational capability to transform remains fundamentally unchanged.
Why AI Amplifies the Innovation Capability Gap
The emergence of AI makes this capability gap exponentially more consequential. As I explored in my recent article on AI-driven innovation, organisations fall into two distinct categories with diverging futures:
Organisations without innovation capability use AI primarily for efficiency gains—automating existing processes, reducing headcount, and optimising current models.
These deliver quarterly savings but create zero competitive differentiation. Once efficiency gains plateau, what’s left? Smaller teams are doing the same work cheaper, whilst competitors develop AI-enabled offerings that make your business model obsolete.
Organisations with innovation capability use AI to drive growth—identifying unmet needs, creating new product categories, developing novel business models, and solving previously unsolvable problems. Each AI-enabled innovation funds the next—the advantage compounds.
The brutal reality: AI doesn’t drive transformation—it accelerates whatever capability organisations already possess. If that capability is innovation theatre, AI accelerates theatre. If it’s genuine innovation capability, AI amplifies competitive advantage.
Consider two organisations implementing identical AI platforms. The first uses it to optimise call centres and reduce workforce, generating short-term savings whilst market position erodes. The second uses it to identify customer pain points, rapidly prototype solutions, and scale before the window closes—capturing market share within 18 months.
Same technology. Radically different outcomes. The difference isn’t AI sophistication—it’s innovation capability built over years, creating the conditions where AI amplifies human problem-solving rather than merely replacing it.
The Innovation System That Supercharges Transformation
So what is this innovation capability that separates transformational success from transformation theatre?
It’s not innovation programmes. It’s not innovation labs. It’s not design thinking workshops, agile methodologies, or any of the component optimisations organisations typically pursue.
Innovation capability is a system-driven foundation comprising five interconnected elements: strategy, leadership, processes, management, and culture.
When these elements align to enable humans to solve meaningful problems systematically, they create the capacity for transformation to occur rather than merely be proclaimed.
This is why the transformation successes Peter highlights—Microsoft, Fujifilm, Schneider Electric, Ping An—achieved lasting impact whilst countless others failed. Not because they had better consultants or bolder visions, but because they built the innovation systems that made transformation achievable:
Microsoft under Satya Nadella didn’t just articulate a new vision—he systematically rebuilt the innovation capability to deliver it. The cultural shift from “know-it-alls” to “learn-it-alls” created psychological safety for experimentation. The structural changes enabled cross-functional collaboration. The resource allocation genuinely supported opportunities that were uncertain. The result wasn’t just cloud adoption—it was the systematic capability to continuously identify, develop, and scale new value streams.
Fujifilm, unlike Kodak, which faced the same disruption, possessed an innovation capability built over decades of materials science research. When film died, they didn’t need to create innovation capability from scratch—they redirected existing capability toward healthcare, cosmetics, and advanced materials. The transformation succeeded because the underlying system for identifying and solving complex problems was already in place.
Schneider Electric’s transformation into a sustainability leader wasn’t primarily about setting carbon targets—it was about building the innovation capability to achieve them systematically. Embedding sustainability KPIs throughout the organisation, reorganising around digital platforms, and empowering distributed teams to experiment—these created the conditions in which purpose translated into performance through innovation.
Ping An’s evolution from a traditional insurer to a technology-driven ecosystem exemplifies its innovation capability, enabling transformation. The investments in AI, blockchain, and platforms succeeded not because of technological sophistication but because the organisation built the collaborative, cross-functional, customer-focused problem-solving capacity to leverage them effectively.
The pattern is consistent: transformation happens when innovation capability exists; it stalls when organisations try to transform without first building that capability.
The Human-AI Innovation Partnership That Drives Transformation
Here’s where the AI dimension becomes critical. As I’ve explored extensively, the most valuable innovation in complex organisations remains fundamentally human—requiring capabilities AI cannot replicate:
- Observing actual human behaviour, not just datasets
- Understanding context, emotions, and unspoken needs
- Questioning why things work the way they do
- Imagining solutions that don’t yet exist
- Building trust across functions to collaborate
- Navigating organisational politics and constraints
- Persisting when experiments fail, and uncertainty overwhelms.
AI can analyse patterns once you’ve identified problems worth solving through human observation and empathy. But the identification itself—the recognition that something worth solving exists—requires human capabilities that algorithms lack.
This is why organisations pursuing “AI-driven transformation” often fail, whilst those building “human-led, AI-amplified innovation capability” succeed. The former hopes technology will solve capability gaps. The latter uses technology to amplify human problem-solving capacity.
The transformational organisations Peter spotlights didn’t succeed by replacing humans with AI—they succeeded by creating conditions where humans could leverage AI to solve problems they previously couldn’t. That’s the partnership that supercharges transformation: human innovation capability amplified by artificial intelligence.
The ODC Framework: How Leadership Supercharges Innovation-Led Transformation
Building innovation capability that enables transformation requires clarity about distinct roles across organisational levels. The framework I’ve developed through decades of advisory work—ODC (Own-Drive-Contribute)—provides this clarity whilst addressing why most transformation initiatives fail.
Executives: OWN the Innovation Agenda
Fisk correctly emphasises that transformation starts with leadership courage to imagine different futures. But courage without ownership of the innovation system remains aspirational. Executives must actively design the conditions, behaviours, and mechanisms that enable innovation to flourish.
This means:
- Setting an innovation vision and direction that guides decision-making, not just inspiring speeches
- Creating governance frameworks that enable rather than restrict experimentation
- Allocating dedicated resources to uncertain opportunities, especially when ROI isn’t immediately clear
- Modelling innovation behaviours through visible risk-taking, vulnerability about uncertainty, and learning from failure
Consider what this looks like practically: At Schneider Electric, Jean-Pascal Tricoire embedded sustainability into performance metrics and linked executive pay to ESG outcomes. At Microsoft, Satya Nadella restructured around cloud infrastructure and collaboration, whilst demonstrating personal curiosity about AI applications. At DBS Bank, Piyush Gupta created innovation forums, protected time for experimentation, and visibly celebrated learning from failure.
These aren’t innovation sponsors—they’re innovation owners who understand their role is to architect the system, not just articulate the vision.
Middle Managers: DRIVE Innovation Implementation
Peter’s framework addresses organisational change, which provides a foundation for exploring a dimension I’ve found critical in my innovation work: the pivotal role of middle management—what I identify as the “DRIVE” layer in any transformation ecosystem.
Research shows 69% of middle managers feel solely responsible for delivering cultural commitments, whilst only 14% believe senior leaders model those behaviours. For transformation, this disconnect is fatal because middle managers make thousands of daily decisions about resource allocation, risk tolerance, and employee recognition that collectively shape whether transformation succeeds or stalls.
Middle managers operate at the perfect intersection to leverage what I call “Differentiated Innovation”—the strategic middle ground between incremental improvements and radical moonshots. They understand both strategic priorities and operational realities, directly influence the most significant portion of the workforce, and can facilitate cross-functional collaboration.
But they require:
- Psychological safety specifically designed for the middle layer—protection from above to take calculated risks
- Innovation capabilities tailored to their unique position—navigating ambiguity, facilitating collaboration, enabling teams
- Authority to allocate resources and make decisions without requiring approval for every experiment
- Recognition systems that reward innovation enablement, not just operational delivery
Organisations that equipped middle managers this way—DBS Bank, Microsoft, Fujifilm—accelerated transformation. Those that bypassed them remained stuck regardless of executive vision or frontline creativity.
Frontline Employees: CONTRIBUTE Ideas and Insights
Transformation requires distributed capability, not concentrated genius. Frontline employees contribute innovation through their direct engagement with work and customers—identifying problems, participating in experimentation, and sharing early-stage work.
But this contribution requires:
- Frameworks for experimentation that make problem-solving accessible, not dependent on special training
- Permission to share early work without fear that incomplete ideas damage careers
- Recognition for learning alongside outcomes, celebrating productive failures that generate insight
Research from Gallup shows that when employees feel empowered to contribute to innovation, organisations see 59% less turnover and 21% higher profitability. But empowerment without the supporting system—psychological safety, resources, recognition—remains empty rhetoric.
The Three Dimensions of Innovation Capability
For the ODC Framework to function effectively, organisations must address three critical dimensions for each layer:
1. Psychological: What Safety Means and How It’s Created
Different organisational levels require other forms of psychological safety:
- Executives need safety to make bold strategic bets that might fail, to model vulnerability, to challenge their own assumptions publicly and visibly.
- Middle managers need safety from both directions—protection from above to experiment and trust from below to empower teams.
- Frontline employees need a safe environment to voice concerns, share incomplete ideas, and admit what they don’t know.
Amy Edmondson’s research quantifies that teams with high psychological safety are 67% more innovative. But this safety cannot be created through communication—it emerges from consistent leadership behaviours, system alignment, and visible consequences (or lack thereof) when people take interpersonal risks.
When leaders demand transformation whilst punishing failed experiments, when middle managers encourage risk-taking but lack authority to protect experimenters, when employees watch colleagues suffer career damage for challenging assumptions, psychological safety evaporates and with it, innovation capability.
2. Physical: What Resources, Systems, and Structures Enable Innovation
Innovation capability requires tangible resources:
- Dedicated time for problem-solving work, not squeezed into spare moments between “real” responsibilities
- Financial resources allocated to experiments with uncertain ROI
- Physical spaces designed for collaboration rather than hierarchical control
- Technology infrastructure that enables rapid experimentation and learning
- Cross-functional structures that facilitate rather than impede collaboration
Organisations operating at maximum utilisation across their workforce cannot build innovation capability, regardless of how much they proclaim it matters. The capacity crisis I’ve written about extensively—where organisations cannot spare small teams to solve significant problems—reveals this starkly.
Microsoft’s “two-pizza teams,” Spotify’s squad model, and Amazon’s structural autonomy aren’t just organisational design choices—they’re deliberate allocation of physical resources to enable innovation at scale.
3. Mental: What Skills, Capabilities, and Behaviours Each Layer Requires
Different roles require different innovation capabilities:
- Executives need skills in systems thinking, strategic foresight, portfolio management, and demonstrating vulnerability.
- Middle managers need capabilities in navigating ambiguity, facilitating cross-functional collaboration, coaching, and translating strategy into action.
- Frontline employees need frameworks for problem identification, customer empathy, experimentation design, and collaborative work.
Traditional leadership development focuses on knowledge transfer—teaching principles of innovation, design thinking, and agile methodologies. But successful people rarely become better innovators because they know more. They become better because they follow through on what they know, even when uncomfortable, costly, or politically risky.
This requires building 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. This courage develops through structured practice in controlled environments where perceived risk is high but actual consequences remain manageable.
Supercharging Transformation Through Differentiated Innovation
Peter rightly discusses balancing innovation portfolios, spanning immediate improvements to longer-term reinvention. This is a crucial insight. From my work focusing specifically on innovation capability, I’ve found that whilst most organisations understand this principle, they often polarise between incremental changes (safe but insufficient) and radical moonshots (exciting but rarely scalable).
The competitive battleground where transformation actually happens—where sustainable advantage is built—lies in what I call Differentiated Innovation: the strategic middle ground between continuous improvement and disruptive transformation.
Differentiated Innovation is characterised by:
- Strategic value: Problems representing several hundred thousand pounds annually
- Customer focus: Solutions emerging from a genuine understanding of human needs, not internal optimisation
- Manageable complexity: Challenges requiring cross-functional collaboration without enterprise-wide transformation
- Reasonable timescales: Solutions achievable within 3-6 months with focused effort
- Scalable approach: Methods deployable across multiple teams simultaneously
- Cultural integration: Capabilities becoming “how we do things” rather than special initiatives
This middle ground is precisely where innovation capability scales. It’s complex enough to require collaboration, bounded sufficiently to be achievable, valuable enough to justify investment, and frequent enough to build organisational muscle memory.
The transformational companies Peter highlights succeeded here:
- Fujifilm didn’t just pursue radical healthcare moonshots—they systematically built capability solving medium-complexity problems across materials science, enabling the eventual pivot.
- Schneider Electric transformed through hundreds of differentiated innovations in energy management, each building on the capabilities of the next.
- Microsoft shifted to the cloud not through one massive transformation but through continuous, scaled problem-solving across product lines.
- DBS Bank became a technology company through systematic capability building in customer experience, not occasional breakthroughs
When organisations build capacity to systematically solve differentiated innovation challenges—when multiple teams can tackle customer-focused problems worth hundreds of thousands annually—they develop the transformation muscle that makes bold visions achievable.
The Leadership Imperatives: Supercharging Through Innovation Capability
Peter’s leadership imperatives for transformation—having the courage to imagine different futures, translating vision into strategy, mobilising the organisation, leading cultural change, aligning systems and resources, and sustaining momentum—are spot on. From my innovation-specific perspective, I’d add a complementary lens showing how innovation capability amplifies each imperative:
1. Courage to Imagine Different Futures Through Customer-Focused Innovation
Peter rightly emphasises that transformation starts with leadership courage to imagine different futures. Building on this excellent foundation, bold visions become most potent when they emerge from a deep understanding of problems worth solving. This requires:
- Direct customer engagement where leaders personally observe behaviour, not just review analytics
- Empathy for genuine pain points that creates emotional investment in solutions
- Willingness to challenge existing business models based on what customers actually need, not what organisations currently provide
Microsoft’s vision of “empowering every person and organisation” emerged from systematic customer engagement, revealing collaboration pain points. Schneider Electric’s sustainability leadership arose from its understanding of customer demand for carbon reduction. These weren’t abstract visions—they were responses to observed human needs.
2. Translating Vision into Strategy Through Differentiated Innovation Portfolio
Strategy requires explicit choices about innovation focus:
- Defining what innovation means in your specific context—not generic definitions, but a precise articulation of problems to solve
- Balancing portfolio deliberately across incremental, differentiated, and radical opportunities
- Allocating resources aligned to strategic priorities, not historical patterns
- Saying no to attractive opportunities that don’t build core capability
Henrik Poulsen’s Ørsted transformation succeeded because he made explicit strategic choices—exit fossil fuels, invest in offshore wind, build the capability to execute at scale. These weren’t just vision statements—they were operational decisions about where to focus innovation capability.
3. Mobilising Organisation Through Middle Management Enablement
Cultural transformation happens when middle managers translate vision into daily reality:
- Equipping managers with innovation frameworks, not just inspiring them with vision
- Providing authority to experiment without seeking approval for every decision
- Creating safety to fail productively, celebrating learning alongside outcomes
- Recognising enablement in performance metrics, not just delivery
Piyush Gupta’s DBS Bank transformation worked because middle managers became innovation multipliers—equipped, empowered, and protected to drive change. Shigetaka Komori’s Fujifilm pivot succeeded because middle managers had the authority to explore healthcare applications without headquarters controlling every decision.
4. Aligning Systems Through Innovation Governance
Systems must enable, not constrain, innovation:
- Performance metrics that reward experimentation, not just flawless execution
- Resource allocation that genuinely supports uncertain opportunities
- Recognition practices celebrating learning from failure
- Governance frameworks balancing oversight with autonomy.
Jean-Pascal Tricoire’s Schneider Electric embedding sustainability into executive compensation, Shantanu Narayen’s Adobe restructuring around customer value rather than product features—these weren’t symbolic gestures but systemic alignment that enabled innovation to flourish.
5. Sustaining Momentum Through Visible Progress on Meaningful Problems
Transformation marathons require visible wins:
- Celebrating progress on problems that matter to customers, not just internal efficiency
- Sharing learning from failures that generate insight
- Demonstrating impact through tangible value creation
- Building belief through evidence that innovation capability delivers results
Paul Polman’s Unilever transformation sustained momentum by consistently demonstrating how sustainability created customer value and market advantage. The continuous evidence of progress—not just aspirational targets—maintained organisational commitment through uncertainty.
From Theatre to Supercharged Transformation: The Brutal Questions
If your organisation has launched transformation initiatives that remain stuck in pilot purgatory, the solution isn’t another consultant or framework. It’s an honest confrontation of whether you’ve built the innovation capability that makes transformation achievable.
Ask yourself these diagnostic questions:
1. Can you systematically solve complex problems worth hundreds of thousands of pounds?
Suppose your answer is “occasionally, through heroic individual efforts” rather than “routinely, through distributed team capability.” You lack the foundation for transformation. No amount of vision articulation or strategic planning compensates for the absence of systematic problem-solving capacity.
2. Do your middle managers have the psychological safety, authority, and capability to drive innovation daily?
If middle managers are caught between transformation rhetoric and operational reality—expected to enable innovation whilst lacking resources, protection, or recognition—transformation will stall regardless of executive commitment or frontline creativity.
3. Are your performance metrics, resource allocation, and recognition systems aligned with transformation aspirations?
If you’re demanding breakthrough thinking whilst punishing failed experiments, championing collaboration whilst maintaining functional silos, proclaiming customer focus whilst allocating resources based on internal politics, your systems guarantee transformation failure.
4. Have you built innovation capability before attempting AI-powered transformation?
If you’re deploying AI to accelerate innovation before building human innovation capability, you’re amplifying dysfunction. The organisations using AI for growth rather than just efficiency are those that spent years building the collaborative, customer-focused, problem-solving foundations first.
5. Can you demonstrate tangible evidence of innovation capability through solved problems and captured value?
If your evidence of innovation is activity metrics—workshops attended, ideas generated, pilots launched—rather than solving problems and creating value, you’re engaged in theatre. Innovation capability reveals itself through customer impact, not internal activity.
The answers reveal whether you’re building genuine transformation capability or staging impressive theatre that exhausts organisations whilst competitors pull ahead.
The Supercharging Imperative: Building the Foundation That Makes Bold Visions Achievable
Peter Fisk is absolutely right that transformation is the new superpower of business leaders and that relentless reinvention has become essential for survival. His framework and examples—Microsoft, Fujifilm, Schneider Electric, Ping An, DBS, Ørsted—brilliantly demonstrate what’s possible when organisations successfully transform.
From my innovation-specific vantage point, I’d offer this complementary insight: these organisations didn’t succeed at transformation solely because they had bolder visions or better strategies—they succeeded because they built the innovation capability that made transformation achievable.
That capability—the systematic ability to identify problems worth solving, develop solutions that create value, and deliver them effectively—is the foundation upon which all transformation rests. Without it, bold visions remain aspirational, strategic plans gather dust, cultural programmes generate cynicism, and technology investments optimise the wrong things efficiently.
With it, transformation shifts from traumatic periodic disruption to continuous adaptive capacity. Organisations don’t cycle through stability and crisis—they evolve continuously because solving meaningful problems collaboratively is embedded in how work gets done.
In the AI era, this foundation becomes exponentially more critical. AI amplifies whatever capability organisations possess. If that’s innovation theatre, AI accelerates theatre. If it’s genuine innovation capability built on human observation, empathy, collaboration, and problem-solving, AI becomes the amplifier that drives sustained competitive advantage and growth.
The choice facing every executive team is stark:
Continue investing in transformation programmes that articulate bold visions, hire consultants, launch pilots, and hope capability somehow emerges through activity—remaining trapped in pilot purgatory whilst competitors execute.
Or build innovation capability systematically—creating the psychological safety, physical resources, and mental frameworks that enable humans to solve meaningful problems collaboratively, then leveraging AI to amplify that human capacity.
The organisations that choose the latter don’t just survive disruption—they drive it. They don’t just respond to change—they shape it. They don’t treat transformation as periodic trauma—they embed continuous evolution as organisational DNA.
That’s the supercharging that matters: innovation capability as the foundation that makes transformation achievable, amplified by AI to drive consistent, future-shaping competitive advantage and growth.
The question isn’t whether your organisation needs transformation. The question is whether you’re prepared to build the innovation capability that makes transformation possible—or whether you’ll continue investing in theatre whilst wondering why bold visions never materialise into business results.
Your customers, your employees, and your long-term viability depend on getting this choice right.
Cris Beswick is a strategic adviser and recognised global thought leader on innovation strategy, leadership, and culture. He works with executive teams worldwide to build innovation-led organisations where transformation becomes achievable through systematic capability rather than aspirational programmes.
Peter Fisk’s article: Business Transformation … the new superpower of business leaders … reimagining the future, redefining strategy, reinventing the organisation, rewiring performance … the journey to deliver step change in value creation. Available at: https://www.peterfisk.com
Cris has followed Peter’s thought leadership with great respect for over a decade and views this article as a complementary innovation-specific perspective on Peter’s excellent transformation framework.