July 17, 2026Innovation Is a Discipline, Not a Buzzword

Most companies say they want innovation. Fewer can prove it. Ask a leadership team to name a recent project that failed and explain what they learned from it, and you’ll often get silence. That silence tells you more about a company’s real appetite for innovation than any strategy deck or values poster ever could.

I’ve been thinking about this since talking with Ryan Estis, a business performance expert and keynote speaker who has spent more than 20 years studying what separates companies that adapt from companies that stall. Ryan built his career at the intersection of sales, leadership, and change. He was Chief Strategy Officer at a McCann Worldgroup agency before becoming one of the most sought-after voices on innovation and business performance for organizations like Medtronic, Liberty Mutual, and the Dallas Cowboys. Meetings & Conventions magazine named him one of the best keynote speakers ever heard, in the same breath as Tony Robbins and Bill Gates.

What struck me most in our conversation wasn’t a tactic or a framework. It was how Ryan connects three ideas most leaders treat as separate pieces of the innovation puzzle: emotional intelligence, risk-taking, and organizational agility. His argument is that they aren’t three conversations. They’re one. And missing that connection is a big reason why, according to a widely cited McKinsey statistic, 70 percent of change and transformation efforts fail.

💡 Watch and listen to the full interview about innovation here

Innovation Isn’t a Buzzword, It’s a Behavior

Ryan doesn’t dismiss the word innovation. He’s just tired of watching companies use it as decoration. In our conversation, he made the point that innovation isn’t a department, a slogan, or a slide in the annual report. It’s a pattern of behavior that shows up in how people handle uncertainty, how they respond when something breaks, and how much room they give each other to be wrong on the way to being right.

That reframe matters more than it sounds. When a company treats innovation as a program, it lives in a corner of the org chart, staffed by a small team with a big budget and a mandate nobody else feels responsible for. When innovation is a behavior, it belongs to everyone. It shows up in a sales call that takes a different approach, a customer service response that breaks from the script, a manager who asks a harder question in a meeting instead of nodding along.

This is where Ryan’s background gives him a useful vantage point. He spent years in business leadership roles, including as Chief Strategy Officer for a McCann Worldgroup agency, before shifting into a career studying and teaching what actually drives performance. That combination, having led inside a large organization and then spending two decades observing hundreds of others, is probably why he skips the theory and goes straight to the tell. He doesn’t ask companies what their innovation strategy is. He asks what happened the last time something failed.

I’ve seen this same pattern play out in organizations I’ve worked with. The companies that talk the most about innovation are often the ones most afraid of it. They want the outcome, the breakthrough product, the disruptive pivot, the headline, without wanting the mess that produces it. Real innovation is messy. It involves false starts, wasted budget, and the discomfort of admitting a bet didn’t pay off. Companies that only celebrate the wins and quietly bury the losses are training their people to avoid risk, not take it. And an organization full of people avoiding risk will never produce the innovation it claims to want.

As an innovation keynote speaker, Ryan spends a lot of time helping leaders see the gap between what they say and what they reward. That gap, more than any lack of ideas, is usually the real obstacle to innovation.

Why Self-Awareness Comes Before Strategy

If innovation is a behavior, Ryan is clear about where it starts: with the person leading it, not the market, not the competition. He put it simply. Emotional intelligence, EQ, is a mission-critical skill for both sellers and leaders, and the research backs it up. “59% of sales performance today comes down to EQ,” Ryan told me, referencing data on what actually separates high performers from everyone else in sales.

That number surprised me the first time I heard it, and it still does. We tend to think of sales performance as a product of product knowledge, market timing, or sheer persistence. Ryan’s point is that the ability to read another person, to understand what they’re feeling and why, outperforms most of the technical skills we spend so much time training for. The same is true in leadership. Understanding the feelings and experiences of the people you lead isn’t a soft skill sitting off to the side of the job. It is the job, or at least the part of the job that determines whether the rest of your strategy actually lands.

But Ryan doesn’t stop at understanding other people. He goes a step further and says EQ starts with understanding yourself. What am I not seeing? What are my blind spots? Those are the questions he says every leader needs to ask before they ask anything of their team. That takes a kind of humility that doesn’t come naturally to people who got promoted because they were usually right. Debating ideas, accepting outside input, and letting go of the need to be the smartest person in the room are all forms of self-awareness that most leadership training skips entirely in favor of frameworks and tactics.

This is also, I think, where Ryan’s own background as a Chief Strategy Officer shapes his thinking. Strategy without self-awareness is just a guess dressed up in confidence. You can have the sharpest plan in the room, but if you can’t see your own blind spots, you’ll miss the signals that tell you the plan needs to change. Self-awareness isn’t a preamble to strategy. It’s the filter that makes strategy trustworthy in the first place, and without it, innovation efforts tend to reflect a leader’s assumptions rather than reality on the ground.

The Bezos Lesson: Betting Big Without Betting the Company

The second piece of Ryan’s framework is risk-taking, but not the reckless kind. He brought up Jeff Bezos to illustrate what he means, and the example has stuck with me since our conversation ended. “Part of my job is to encourage our people to make intelligent bets,” Bezos has said, according to Ryan. Not bets that could sink the company. Intelligent ones. One’s sized so that a handful of failures don’t threaten the business, but a single success can cover the cost of all of them.

What makes this example work isn’t the size of Amazon or the size of Bezos’s wallet. It’s the honesty behind it. “I’ve made billions of dollars of mistakes at Amazon, pets.com, the Fire Phone,” Ryan recalled Bezos saying, “but it only takes one or two successes to make up for those things.” That’s not a founder protecting his image. That’s a leader normalizing failure as a cost of doing business, out loud, in front of the people who work for him. Very few leaders are willing to do that, and I think that reluctance is one of the most underrated reasons innovation stalls inside big organizations.

Most leaders say they want their teams to take risks, but their actions tell a different story. A single failed project gets picked apart in a postmortem, while a dozen quiet, safe decisions that produced nothing get treated as fine. That asymmetry sends a clear signal: play it safe and you’ll be fine, take a chance and you might not be. Over time, people stop taking chances. Not because they lack ideas, but because the incentives taught them not to.

This is where Ryan’s point about resilience and recoverability becomes so important. Innovation requires a level of failure tolerance that most companies claim to have, and very few actually practice. It also connects directly to how organizations grow. The businesses experiencing real business growth aren’t the ones avoiding every mistake. They’re the ones making enough intelligent bets that a few of them pay off big, and treating each one as fuel for the next round of innovation rather than a reason to play it safer.

That kind of openness about failure doesn’t happen by accident. It requires communication that goes in both directions, leaders talking honestly about what didn’t work, and teams trusting that honesty enough to bring their own failures forward instead of hiding them.

The Question That Separates Real Innovation From Talk

Here’s the test Ryan uses, and I think every leader reading this should steal it. When he wants to know whether a company is actually innovative, he doesn’t ask about their innovation lab or their five-year digital transformation plan. He asks one question: “Tell me about a recent project that failed, and what did you learn? How do you manage around mistakes?”

Watch what happens when you ask that question in a room full of leaders. Some answer immediately, with specifics, with what changed afterward, with something they’d do differently next time. Others go quiet, or they reach for an answer so old it barely counts as recent, or they reframe a failure as a success because they’re not comfortable admitting it happened at all. Ryan’s read on that moment is blunt. “If you’re not doing those things, you’re not an innovative team or an innovative company,” he told me. There’s no partial credit.

I find this question so useful because it cuts through language. Every company can say the word innovation. Far fewer can produce a real, recent, specific answer about what went wrong and what they did with it. The question also exposes something deeper about corporate culture: whether failure gets processed as information or buried as embarrassment. A culture that buries failure loses the very data it needs to improve, and it teaches people to hide problems instead of surfacing them early, when they’re still cheap to fix.

There’s a customer angle here too, one Ryan didn’t spell out directly but that I think is worth pulling forward. Every failed experiment, if it’s actually examined and learned from, eventually shows up in a better product, a smarter process, or a more thoughtful interaction with the people you serve. Innovation that never touches customer experience in some way isn’t really innovation. It’s just internal activity. The companies that ask the failure question and act on the answer tend to be the same ones whose customers notice something is different, even if they can’t quite say what.

That’s the real value of Ryan’s question. It’s not a gotcha. It’s a diagnostic, and once you start asking it, you can’t unhear how many organizations, and how much of their claimed innovation, fail it.

Running Experiments Without Chasing Breakthroughs

The most practical part of our conversation was also the smallest in scale. Ryan doesn’t run a Fortune 500 company anymore. He runs a small team. He told me that even at that size, he can walk in on any given day and ask three simple questions: what experiments are you running right now, and how are they going?

That’s a small habit with a big implication. Innovation gets treated like something only large organizations with dedicated budgets and innovation labs can afford. Ryan’s approach proves otherwise. The goal of any single experiment, he said, isn’t some big breakthrough. It’s feedback. It’s a data set. It’s information that helps the team make the next best decision, rather than a guess dressed up as a plan.

I think this reframe matters because it removes the pressure that kills most innovation before it starts. When people believe an experiment has to produce something dramatic to count as a win, they stop running experiments altogether, because most experiments don’t produce something dramatic. Most produce a small, useful piece of information. But a team that consistently gathers small pieces of information, week after week, ends up making sharper decisions than a team waiting around for the big idea to strike.

This is also a productivity story as much as it’s an innovation story. Running small, low-stakes experiments doesn’t slow a team down. It speeds up learning, which speeds up every decision that follows. Companies that skip the experimentation step usually aren’t moving faster. They’re moving on less information, which tends to catch up with them eventually.

What I find most compelling about Ryan’s approach is how ordinary it sounds. There’s no innovation department, no elaborate framework, no six-month pilot program. Just a leader asking his team what they’re testing and what they’re learning from it, consistently, as a habit rather than an event. That kind of discipline is a quieter version of the thought leadership Ryan is known for: practical, repeatable ideas about innovation that any size business can actually use, not theory that only works in a case study.

Why 70 Percent of Change Efforts Fail

All of this circles back to the number Ryan opened with: 70 percent of change and transformation efforts fail, according to the widely cited McKinsey statistic. I’ve heard that number thrown around in a lot of conversations, usually as a warning about poor project management or weak communication plans. Ryan’s read is different, and I think it’s more accurate. Change efforts don’t fail because of bad execution plans. They fail because the underlying culture never had the self-awareness, risk tolerance, or experimentation habits to support the change in the first place.

Think about what that means. A company can hire the best consultants, build the most detailed roadmap, and communicate the vision perfectly, and still fail, because the people inside the organization were never trained to tolerate the discomfort that real change requires. You can’t bolt agility onto a culture that punishes mistakes. You can’t expect people to take intelligent risks if the last person who took one got quietly sidelined. The 70 percent failure rate isn’t really a statistic about strategy execution. It’s a statistic about what happens when innovation is demanded from a culture that was never built to support it.

This is the connection Ryan made that stuck with me the most. Emotional intelligence, risk tolerance, and agility aren’t three separate initiatives you can staff with three separate teams. They’re upstream of every change effort a business will ever attempt. Skip them, and even a well-designed change program is standing on sand. Build them, and change stops being an event you announce and starts being a capability the organization already has, one that makes future innovation cheaper and less risky every time it’s used.

I keep coming back to how simple Ryan makes this sound, and how rarely it’s actually practiced. Self-awareness. Intelligent bets. A real answer to the failure question. Small experiments with a learning goal. None of that requires a large budget or a new department. It requires leaders willing to look at their own blind spots first, and willing to make the discomfort of failure a normal, expected part of how the business runs. That, more than any five-year plan, is what separates the organizations that actually innovate from the 70 percent that don’t.

The word innovation gets used so often that it’s easy to forget it’s supposed to describe something real. After spending time with Ryan Estis, I don’t think about innovation the same way anymore. I don’t think of it as a department, a lab, or a slide in a pitch deck. I think of it as a habit built out of three smaller habits: knowing your own blind spots, making bets sized to survive a miss, and treating failure as information instead of a problem to hide.

---

What makes Ryan’s framework so insightful is that it gives you a way to test innovation instead of just talking about it. Ask your team about a recent failure and what came from it. Watch how quickly, and how honestly, the answer comes. That single question will tell you more about your organization’s real relationship with innovation than any strategy document sitting in a drawer.

The 70 percent failure rate Ryan cited isn’t inevitable. It’s a mirror. It shows you exactly where the self-awareness, risk tolerance, and experimentation habits are missing, and exactly what needs to change before the next transformation effort has a real chance. Innovation was never about having the boldest idea in the room. It’s about building a culture patient enough, and honest enough, to learn its way there one intelligent bet at a time.

If there’s one thing I’ll carry forward from this conversation, it’s that innovation isn’t something you announce. It’s something you practice, quietly, project by project, failure by failure, until it becomes how your organization actually works.

🎥 Watch the full interview with Ryan Estis

🎙️ Hire Ryan Estis as your next innovation keynote speaker

📆 Book a 15-minute call to talk about your event

✉️ Email us your questions