July 9, 2026Innovation Needs Curiosity to Thrive with Diana Kander

My calendar used to make me feel accomplished. Meeting after meeting, task after task, box after box checked off. It took me a while to realize a full calendar and a productive life are not the same thing. That gap is at the center of my recent conversation with Diana Kander, a New York Times best-selling author, serial entrepreneur, and one of the sharpest voices working today on innovation and curiosity inside organizations.

Diana has spent her career asking a blunt question. What is actually creating value here, and what has just become habit? Her answer, built from years of research and hands-on entrepreneurship, is that innovation rarely fails because people lack ideas. It fails because people run out of room to think. When every hour is already spoken for, curiosity has nowhere to live. And without curiosity, innovation quietly stalls, long before anyone notices it happening.

That is the idea I want to spend this piece exploring. Not just what Diana said, but what it reveals about how we work, how we lead, and why so many smart, capable teams end up stuck doing work that used to matter more than it does now. If your organization talks about innovation constantly but rarely feels like it is actually happening, this conversation is probably going to feel uncomfortably familiar.

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When Busy Stops Being Productive

Diana calls one part of this problem zombie work. These are the projects, meetings, and routines that once made sense but now run on autopilot, taking up time and energy without producing anything close to their original value. Nobody kills them off, because nobody is ever asked to. They just keep shuffling forward, dressed up as productivity.

What struck me most about this idea is how familiar it feels the moment you name it. Every organization has a version of zombie work. The weekly report nobody reads anymore. The meeting that exists because it always has. The initiative that made sense three reorganizations ago and somehow survived every one since. None of it looks like waste from the inside. It looks like effort, and effort gets mistaken for progress far too often.

This is exactly where innovation gets quietly strangled. Not by bad ideas, but by good ideas that never got a fair chance to compete for attention, because the calendar was already full of yesterday’s good ideas. A team cannot build something new while it is fully occupied maintaining something old that no longer earns its keep. Diana’s point is not that people are lazy or unfocused. It is that most organizations never built a habit of asking whether something still deserves to exist.

This has real implications for corporate culture. A culture that rewards visible busyness over visible impact will always produce more zombie work, because busyness is what gets noticed and praised. Zombie work also quietly drains employee engagement because people can usually tell the difference between meaningful work and motion for its own sake. If leaders want innovation to survive contact with a real calendar, they have to build a culture that makes it safe, even expected, to say a project has run its course. That is a leadership decision, not a scheduling trick, and it has more to do with productivity than most people assume.

The Organizational Graveyard No One Talks About

Diana has a practice she calls the reverse resume, a kind of organizational graveyard where a team lists everything that used to matter and honestly asks whether it still does. It sounds almost morbid, and that is probably the point. Most of us are much better at adding new initiatives than we are at retiring old ones. We build resumes of accomplishment, but we rarely build an honest record of what should have ended already.

I have seen this same pattern play out in company after company. Nobody schedules a funeral for a dead project. It just gets smaller and quieter, mentioned less in meetings, until it exists mostly as a line item nobody wants to be the one to cut. The reverse resume forces the opposite behavior. It asks a team to look directly at the graveyard of half-finished initiatives and decide, out loud, what actually deserves to stay buried. Doing this well is its own quiet act of innovation, since it clears the ground for whatever comes next.

The deeper implication here is about honesty. Innovation requires a level of organizational honesty that most teams are not used to practicing. It is much easier to launch something new than to admit that something old is no longer working. Every initiative kept alive out of habit is space that could go toward the next real opportunity, and this is a business leadership skill few people are ever taught: how to end something well. Innovation depends on that room to grow just as much as it depends on new ideas.

Why a 1-to-10 Scale Beats a Yes-or-No Decision

One of the more practical ideas Diana shared involves how she makes decisions as a serial entrepreneur. Instead of asking herself a flat yes or no question, she rates her enthusiasm for an opportunity on a scale from one to ten. If it is not an eight or above, the answer is no. A six or seven, dressed up as a good idea, is still a distraction wearing a nice outfit.

What I like about this framework is what it removes. It takes away the social pressure to say yes to anything that sounds reasonable. Most people are not bad at spotting good opportunities. They are bad at saying no to decent ones, because decent still sounds better than nothing. A yes-or-no question invites you to talk yourself into a maybe. A number forces honesty, because a six is a six, no matter how good the pitch sounds in the room.

This reshaped how I think about strategy. Good strategy is not a list of things worth doing. It is a filter for what does not meet the bar, applied consistently, even when the idea is exciting or the person pitching it is persuasive. Entrepreneurs who protect their time this way tend to end up working on fewer things and doing each of them with more focus. That focus is often where real innovation comes from, because attention was never divided in the first place.

I think this scale matters far beyond entrepreneurship. Any team trying to build a culture of innovation eventually runs into the same problem Diana is describing: too many decent ideas competing for the same limited hours. Without a clear bar, the team ends up spread across a dozen average bets instead of concentrated on the two or three that could actually change something.

The Case for Subtraction and Why Growth Starts With Letting Go

Diana talks about something researchers call additive bias, our built-in tendency to solve problems by adding rather than removing. Give people a messy plan and ask them to fix it, and most will add a step before they consider taking one away. It is a strange quirk of how we think, but it explains so much about why organizations get heavier and slower over time instead of lighter and faster.

The fix she offers is almost stubbornly simple. Before adding anything new, ask what could be removed instead. It sounds too basic to matter, and that is exactly why it works. Most teams have never built subtraction into their planning process at all. Every planning meeting defaults to what we should start, and almost never to what we should stop.

This reframes business growth in a way I have not been able to shake since this conversation. We tend to treat growth as something you build on top of what already exists. Diana’s approach suggests real growth often requires clearing space first. A team drowning in yesterday’s commitments has no capacity left for tomorrow’s opportunity, no matter how promising it looks. Innovation is rarely blocked by a lack of good ideas. It is blocked by a lack of room to pursue them, and subtraction is what creates that room.

I have started asking the teams I work with a version of Diana’s question before they add anything new to a roadmap. What are you willing to remove to make space for this? Most people cannot answer immediately, which tells you almost everything about why innovation stalls even in organizations full of talented, well-intentioned people. The idea is not that every current project is worthless. It is that unlimited addition without subtraction that eventually collapses under its own weight.

Curiosity Is Not a Soft Skill; It Is Survival

If there is one idea running underneath everything Diana teaches, it is that curiosity is not a personality trait reserved for certain people. It is a state your brain either has access to or does not, depending on how safe and unhurried you feel. When you are anxious, rushed, or in survival mode, your brain narrows its focus to whatever feels most urgent right in front of it. Curiosity, by contrast, needs a small amount of slack to even show up at all.

This reframes an idea most leadership programs get backwards. Curiosity is usually taught as a mindset you choose, a switch you flip if you try hard enough. Diana’s work points to something closer to physiology. If a team is operating in constant survival mode, stretched thin, afraid of missing deadlines, buried in zombie work, no amount of encouragement will make people curious on command. You cannot motivate your way out of a nervous system that is already maxed out, and you certainly cannot demand innovation from a team that has no room left to think.

This is where thought leadership earns its name instead of just wearing it. Real leadership is not about telling people to be more curious. It is about building the conditions, the time, the safety, the slower pace, that let curiosity exist in the first place. Innovation does not start with a brainstorm. It starts with the conditions that make a brainstorm worth having, and building those conditions is quiet, unglamorous, and easy to skip.

The Day One Mindset and the Blank Sheet Test

Diana borrows a phrase familiar to anyone who has studied Amazon’s early culture, the idea of operating as if today is day one of the business, with none of yesterday’s assumptions locked in. She pairs this with something she calls the blank sheet test. Instead of asking how to improve the current plan, ask what you would build if you were starting completely from scratch, with no obligation to protect what already exists.

The blank sheet test is uncomfortable on purpose. Most planning starts from the current state and edits outward, which quietly protects everything already in motion, whether or not it deserves protecting. Starting from a blank sheet removes that protection. It forces a team to justify keeping something rather than defaulting to keeping it simply because it already exists.

I think this matters more than it sounds like it should. The businesses that struggle most are rarely the ones without resources. They are the ones so committed to defending what they built that they stop asking whether it still fits the world in front of them. A day one mindset is not about ignoring experience. It is about refusing to let experience quietly become a ceiling. The businesses most capable of real innovation tend to be the ones willing to question their own blueprint, even when that blueprint has produced real success in the past.

The blank sheet test also works on a personal level, and I think that is worth naming directly. Ask yourself what your role would look like if you built it today, with no history attached, instead of defending the version you inherited or grew into. That single shift in framing is often the first honest step toward innovation, because it forces you to separate what you actually believe still works from what you have simply never questioned.

The Weekly Reset, a Small Ritual With a Big Shift

One of the more actionable habits Diana shared is deceptively small. Once a week, she reviews her calendar and asks a simple question of every recurring commitment. If I were deciding today, with no history attached, would I still say yes to this? Anything that gets a hesitant answer goes on a shortlist for removal.

What makes this powerful is not the complexity of the exercise. It is the frequency. A once-a-year strategy review catches almost nothing, because a full year gives zombie work plenty of time to disguise itself as essential. A weekly check catches drift while it is still small enough to fix easily, before a habit calcifies into an identity nobody wants to challenge.

This connects directly to elite performance. High performers in almost every field, not just business, tend to build in regular moments of honest review rather than waiting for an annual reckoning. The weekly reset is a small structural choice that produces a much larger outcome over time, a calendar that reflects what actually matters now, not what mattered eighteen months ago. That is a quiet form of innovation in itself, applied not to a product but to how a person spends their most limited resource, which is attention.

The reason this ritual works better than most productivity advice is that it never asks for a dramatic overhaul. It asks for fifteen honest minutes a week. Innovation is often described as something bold and disruptive, but in practice it is usually built from small, repeated acts of honesty like this one, stacked over months until the calendar itself looks completely different.

How Past Success Quietly Becomes Future’s Biggest Obstacle

There is something almost unfair about this next idea, but Diana states it plainly. The very thing that made a business successful is often the thing that eventually holds it back. Success creates confidence, confidence creates habits, and habits, left unchecked, become the exact blind spots that competitors eventually exploit.

This is worth sitting with because it cuts against how most of us think about winning. We tend to assume success is protective, that a strong track record buys safety. Diana’s point is closer to the opposite. A strong track record buys comfort, and comfort is precisely what makes a team slow to notice when the world has moved on without them. The graveyard of once-dominant brands is full of companies doing exactly what had worked, right up until it stopped working.

Diana’s own story adds weight to this idea. She entered the United States as a refugee at the age of eight and later built and sold multiple companies, which means she has lived both ends of this equation, the discomfort of starting with nothing and the comfort that eventually creeps in once something works. That range makes her one of the more credible women leaders speaking on this topic today, and it gives her a grounded vantage point on why comfort is often more dangerous to innovation than failure ever was. Failure teaches you something. Comfort teaches you nothing, quietly, for years, until it becomes expensive to unlearn.

This is why so much writing about innovation focuses on scrappy beginnings, and so little of it focuses on what happens after the first real win. The beginning is not actually the hard part. The hard part is staying honest once things start working, which is precisely the moment most people give themselves permission to stop questioning anything.

Bringing Curiosity Back to Joy

The last idea I want to explore is less about frameworks and more about feeling. Diana talks about reconnecting curiosity with joy, noting that somewhere along the way, especially in professional settings, curiosity got treated as a serious, almost clinical exercise. Due diligence. Research. Analysis. She wants to bring back the version of curiosity that feels more like play, the kind kids have before anyone tells them a question is a waste of time.

This shows up in how she runs a room. Rather than lecturing an audience about innovation from a distance, she designs moments that shift people from passive listening into active curiosity, adjusting her approach depending on whether she is speaking to a sales team, an engineering group, or a leadership offsite. The goal is not a uniform performance. It is a genuine attempt to create a surprising, memorable moment of insight that fits the specific people in the room, which is also why she is often booked alongside the kind of TED speakers known for the same range.

What caught my attention here is how this connects back to everything else in the conversation. Zombie work drains energy. Additive bias fills space. Comfort dulls attention. All three make it harder to access the playful, low-stakes version of curiosity that tends to produce the most original thinking. If curiosity is the seed of innovation, joy might be the soil it actually grows in. Taking that seriously has implications for sales, leadership, and every other function that depends on people noticing something they would otherwise walk right past, and it is a big part of why her talks on innovation tend to stick with a room long after the event ends.

The Work Worth Protecting

If there is a single thread running through this conversation, it is that innovation is less about generating new ideas and more about protecting the conditions that let good ideas surface in the first place. A packed calendar, an unexamined pile of legacy projects, a habit of adding instead of subtracting, none of these look like obstacles to innovation from the inside. They look like normal work. That is exactly why they are so easy to miss and so hard to fix.

What has stayed with me most from this conversation is how much of Diana’s advice is really about subtraction rather than addition, about ending things rather than starting them, about making room rather than filling it. Real innovation rarely announces itself. It shows up quietly, in the space created when a team finally stops defending what used to work and starts asking what still deserves their attention. Protecting that space is not a scheduling exercise. It is a leadership decision, made and remade every single week, and it is the difference between organizations that talk about innovation and organizations that actually produce it.

If your audience needs a conversation about business, curiosity, and what it actually takes to keep innovation alive once success sets in, Diana Kander, an innovation keynote speaker with a rare mix of research and lived experience, is worth bringing into the room.

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