Why managers reject new ideas

In 1925 Richard Drew was told by his boss to stop working on a new kind of masking tape. In 1970 Gary Starkweather was forbidden from pursuing laser printing. In 1975 Steven Sasson’s management found the first digital camera amusing and dangerous.

Two of those three ideas survived because the engineers carried on in secret, on their own time. The third obeyed instructions, and recognition arrived around the time he retired.

Ideally an original idea would be supported and encouraged by management from the outset. Obviously. Far too often, original ideas reach daylight through the sheer persistence of disobedient staff instead.

The usual explanation for why managers reject new ideas is conservatism, turf protection or fear of change. Research says something considerably less flattering to everybody and considerably more useful. The inability to spot a creative idea comes from a mindset fixed on what might not work and on finding one single solution.

Which produces the finding this article is built on. The same manager rates the same idea differently depending on their state of mind at the moment it arrives, which means the variable is not the idea and not the person judging it. It is the moment.

The usual explanation	What the research shows	The shift that follows
Conservatism and fearThe standard account of why managers reject new ideas blames risk aversion, protected territory and discomfort with change. It is a character explanation, and it produces training as the remedy.	A bias activated by uncertaintyExperiments show that people primed to reduce uncertainty rate the same idea as markedly less creative, and that the bias actively interferes with their ability to recognise creativity at all. It operates without the person noticing it.	The variable is the momentSince the same person judges the same idea differently depending on their state, the leverage sits in when and how an idea is presented rather than in the idea or the judge. That makes this a scheduling problem before it is a training problem.

Three ideas their managers tried to stop

History is full of revolutionary ideas that were not backed by the person supervising them, at least at the beginning. Three cases make the pattern visible, and the third one is the uncomfortable one.

Richard Drew and the masking tape

In 1925 Richard Drew was working for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, a company then confined to sandpaper. His experiments on a new kind of masking tape were stopped by his boss, William McKnight.

Drew continued anyway, developing the prototype in his own time. The product went on to rescue a business whose existing market was going nowhere in particular.

The postscript is the part worth noticing. McKnight later became the executive most associated with giving 3M staff freedom to pursue their own projects, which suggests the lesson was learned by the person who had blocked it rather than by the person who defied him.

Gary Starkweather and the laser printer

In 1970 Gary Starkweather, an engineer at Xerox, invented laser printing. His manager also forbade him from digging any further into the idea.

He built it in secret too, and the technology became one of the most profitable product lines the company ever had. The mechanism is identical to the first case: the work survived through disobedience rather than through sponsorship.

Two data points do not make a management theory. What they establish is that the failure to recognise an idea is not correlated with the eventual value of the idea, which is precisely what makes it worth explaining.

Steven Sasson and the digital camera

In 1975 Steven Sasson, another young engineer, built the first digital camera in the Kodak laboratories. Management found the idea entertaining and threatening in roughly equal measure, and chose a different direction.

Sasson did as he was told. Recognition arrived decades later, around the end of his career, by which point the industry his employer dominated had been rearranged by the thing he had built and been told to leave alone.

There is something to be said about that recognition, and it is not comfortable. He lacked the iconoclastic nerve of his two predecessors, which is a hard thing to hold against a junior engineer following a legitimate instruction from his own management.

Which is exactly the point. An organisation whose innovation depends on individuals being brave enough to disobey has outsourced its strategy to personality, and the people willing to do that are the ones I have argued elsewhere you should deliberately recruit and then protect.

These examples are American and old. Recent local versions are not hard to find, and any resemblance to people or situations you recognise is entirely intentional: the executive who dismissed additive manufacturing as a hobbyist’s toy, the sales director who sat on an online channel for months, and the human resources head who would not advertise a role on a social platform.

Two dilemmas that produce the rejection

Before the research, the structural explanation. Managers are caught in two conflicts at once, and neither is a character flaw. Both are produced by the job description.

The delivery dilemma

The delivery dilemma is what I call the position of a manager torn between wanting to run innovative projects on one side and being accountable for a result their own leadership is expecting on the other.

It is a perfect recipe for unambitious quick wins. Something has to be produced, it has to be produced by a date, and an original idea is the least reliable route to either.

The result resembles thinking you are an explorer while following a satellite navigation system. The motion is real, the destination was decided by somebody else, and nothing gets discovered.

A great many ideas die here rather than on merit. They were not planned, they did not come from the people authorised to have them, nobody senior can picture the outcome, and no one has tested the thing anywhere else first.

The novelty dilemma

Stuck between wanting original ideas and fearing what those ideas would imply, managers meet a second conflict I call the novelty dilemma: seeking originality and minimum risk at the same time.

Which is what forces anybody writing or speaking about innovation to produce example after example, all of them reassuring, for an audience that believes an innovation must have been tested somewhere else first.

There is no chance of being original by doing what everybody else is doing. That is true of businesses and it is true of grand gestures, all of which were charming the first thousand times.

Worth being precise here, since the vocabulary does real work. What managers are rejecting at this stage is usually creativity rather than innovation, and the two are separate rungs on a ladder I have set out in the four terms most organisations use as one.

One more thing worth saying before the research. There are no good or bad ideas, only ideas suited to a given moment and a given context, which is a statement that will look considerably less like a platitude in the next section.

What the research actually found

The inability to recognise the potential in an idea turns out to sit deep inside ordinary cognition rather than in anybody’s character. Subtle and temporary variables shift our capacity to see what is creative, which means a manager’s state of mind during a presentation, their fatigue and their feelings about the presenter can all bias them without their noticing why.

The running shoe and the uncertainty prime

Jennifer Mueller, then at the University of Pennsylvania, worked with Shimul Melwani and Jack Goncalo on a set of experiments asking people to rate a product. Participants were split into two groups before they saw it.

1. One group was placed in a state of openness to uncertainty, told their payment depended on a lottery and asked to write a short piece on the theme that every problem has more than one solution.
2. The other was primed towards certainty, told they would definitely be paid, and asked to write on the theme that every problem has exactly one solution.

Both groups then rated a running shoe using nanotechnology to adapt to the foot and reduce blistering, scoring it for novelty, creativity and practicality on a seven-point scale.

The group looking for one single solution found the shoe considerably less creative than the group comfortable with uncertainty. Published in Psychological Science, the finding was that uncertainty activates a bias against creativity and that the bias then interferes with the ability to recognise a creative idea at all.

Read that against a management job description. Managing means directing, running, checking, approving and authorising, all of which manufacture a mindset seeking results and therefore certainty. The deficit is produced by the role rather than by the person occupying it.

The researchers were building on an older observation. Barry Staw published a chapter in the mid-1990s under the title that nobody really wants creativity, and the experiments gave that intuition a mechanism.

Why beats how

A second study, published by Mueller and colleagues in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, took the work further. This time four ideas were used rather than a shoe, two of them genuinely creative and two of them not.

Participants were again split in two before rating anything. One group was asked to consider why an idea seemed innovative, which psychology calls a high-level construal, meaning the capacity to hold a whole situation in view at once.

The other group was asked to consider how the idea would be used, which produces a narrower state because it drags in delivery, logistics and practical constraints. That is a low-level construal, and it is the state most people are in during a normal working day.

The creative ideas were rated substantially more creative by the why group than by the how group. It appears these cognitive states form a second layer of assessment sitting on top of the first: the brain sorts the idea into a creative or non-creative drawer, then measures how creative it is, and the framing moves the second measurement.

The finding that stops this being manipulation

There is a result in that second study which matters more than the headline. Whichever group they were in, participants judged a non-creative idea to be, well, non-creative. An ordinary idea stayed ordinary regardless of anybody’s state of mind.

So the why framing does not make a weak idea look strong. It only removes an obstacle in front of a genuinely creative one, which makes it a detector rather than a persuasion technique.

That distinction is what allows a leadership team to adopt this without feeling manipulated by their own staff. You are not being sold to. You are being given a fair chance to see something you would otherwise have missed for reasons that have nothing to do with the proposal.

It also confirms a lesson most of us learned as children, which is to show your school report to your parents when they are in a good mood, particularly when it is a bad report. The difference is that a manager can now design the mood rather than wait for it.

What to change, and in what order

Three interventions are available and they cost very different amounts. The cheapest is the one almost nobody tries, and the most expensive is the one most organisations buy first.

Three interventions compared

Read the cost column against the evidence column. The ordering is the opposite of what most innovation budgets assume.

Intervention	What it changes	Cost	Evidence behind it
Change the sequence	What precedes an idea in the agenda, and how far it sits from a numbers review	Nothing beyond attention	Direct, since uncertainty state alters creativity ratings
Change the question	Opening with why an idea matters before asking how it would work	One instruction per meeting	Direct, and it does not rescue weak ideas
Train the managers	Capability in evaluating and sponsoring unfamiliar work	Significant, and slow to show	Indirect, and undone by the wrong agenda the following week

Training is not useless. It is third because a trained manager sitting in a badly sequenced meeting behaves like an untrained one, which makes the first two interventions the prerequisites rather than the alternatives.

Which one your organisation needs first

Two practical instructions cover most of what an organisation can do this month, and both are free.

• Remind managers that there is always more than one solution to a given problem, and that theirs may not be the best one until they have put it to their team.
• Ask them to open every creative session by having participants work on why, using the repeated-question technique of asking why five times in succession. The how comes afterwards, to bring everybody back to earth and close the meeting before anything is committed.

Note that the five whys is a different tool from the who, what, when, where and why checklist, and it is the repeated version this calls for. Asking the same question five times is what forces the abstraction the research rewards.

Once managers have adopted both, the organisational blockers become worth attacking, and they can be attacked with those managers rather than around them. Which is the right order, since a structural fix imposed on people still asking how at the wrong moment will not survive its first quarter.

How I can help your managers see the idea

Most leadership teams I work with are not hostile to new ideas and are genuinely surprised to learn how much of their judgement is being set by the previous item on the agenda. The work is structural rather than attitudinal.

Workshops and keynotes

Workshops run the why and how split live on your own material, which is the fastest way for a group to see the effect on itself rather than read about it. The demonstration is more persuasive than the research, because it happens to them.

Keynotes suit the moment when a leadership group has been blaming a lack of ideas for something that is a recognition problem. Naming the mechanism removes the blame from everybody in the room, which is usually what allows the conversation to proceed.

Diagnostics and manager programs

The diagnostic looks at where in your meeting structure new thinking gets evaluated, and how close that sits to a performance review. It is a short piece of work and it changes agendas rather than budgets.

Manager programs go further into building tolerance for uncertainty as a working capability, which connects to developing curiosity through uncertainty, and to how the whole innovation effort is organised in the four innovation strategies.

If you want to test any of this, a conversation beats a proposal. You can tell me what comes immediately before new ideas on your agenda and we can usually predict the reception.

Conclusion: ask why before you ask how

The honest answer to why managers reject new ideas is not conservatism, fear or turf. It is that the job manufactures a demand for certainty, and certainty measurably interferes with the ability to recognise creativity, which the research demonstrates in people who sincerely believe they want it.

Asking how forces attention onto the weakest point of an idea and onto everything that will prevent it happening. That is the familiar verdict that it will never work, and it explains the short-sightedness we all have about creative proposals.

Asking why produces the opposite state and it costs nothing. It will not rescue a weak idea, which is precisely what makes it worth doing, and it gives a good one the hearing it would otherwise have needed somebody’s disobedience to get.

Drew and Starkweather built their prototypes in secret. Sasson did as he was told. An organisation that wants a different outcome has to stop relying on which of those three temperaments it happened to hire, and start looking at what it puts on the agenda immediately before the new idea.

Frequently asked questions about managers and new ideas