Most large organisations still run on a design built for predictability: layers of management, fixed roles, and decisions that travel up the hierarchy for approval. That design is very good at coordinating repeatable work at scale. It is very bad at learning quickly — and learning quickly is what mission-driven innovation requires.
The fourth component of the Mission-Driven Innovation System is structure and governance: how teams are organised, where decisions are made, and how many teams — and eventually many organisations — stay aligned without being controlled.
Key points
- Every approval layer filters out urgency and slows learning.
- Agile rituals on top of unchanged governance rarely change results.
- Guardrails, not gates: leaders set the boundaries, teams decide within them.
- Complex missions need governance across organisations, not just within one.
Why bureaucracy slows innovation
The “machine bureaucracy” described by Max Weber and later Henry Mintzberg was designed for control and consistency. Every approval layer is a filter; by the time an idea reaches the people who can fund it, it has often lost its urgency. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini have estimated that excess bureaucracy costs the US economy around three trillion dollars a year.
Many companies tried to fix this with agile methods, but too often the result was stand-ups and sprints layered on top of the same decision rights and annual budgets. The ceremonies changed; the operating system didn’t. Anita has written about this challenge in “Dare to Retire the Organizational Bureaucracy” (2019).
The team of teams
When General Stanley McChrystal found his task force outpaced by a faster, decentralised adversary, he concluded that the structure — not the people — was the constraint. His answer was a network of autonomous teams connected by shared purpose and radical transparency, with decisions made by the people closest to the situation. Companies such as Haier have applied a similar logic at industrial scale.
Guardrails, not gates
As missions grow, the instinctive response is another steering committee — which reintroduces the bureaucracy the mission was trying to escape. Mission-driven organisations use guardrails instead: principles and limits set by leadership, within which teams are free to explore, redirect resources and change course. Leaders become stewards of intent rather than approvers of tasks.
Innovation across ecosystems
Few missions can be delivered by one organisation. Decarbonisation, circular materials and new energy systems are system problems, and when innovation keeps stalling the cause is often the architecture of collaboration rather than the technology. Research points the same way: in two multi-partner case studies of technology maturation in advanced manufacturing, strategic partnerships built around a shared mission, combined with aligned governance, sped up the path from idea to scaled implementation (Sommer and Pisanu, 2026).
In the book
- Five design choices for building a team-of-teams organisation
- How to coordinate many teams through mission streams, participatory decisions and incentives
- Four ecosystem models — and how to choose between them
- A seven-step approach to governing innovation across organisations, with cases from P&G, the Novo Nordisk Foundation and Microsoft
Where this fits in the system
Governance is where gardener leadership either thrives or suffocates. It shapes how innovation processes run day to day, and depends on funding models that follow missions rather than fixed projects.
Further reading
- Sommer, A. F. & Pisanu, A. (2026). Design for mission-driven technology maturation. Proceedings of the Design Society, 6, 307–316. Cambridge University Press (open access).
- Sommer, A. F. (2019). Dare to Retire the Organizational Bureaucracy. Research-Technology Management.
- McChrystal, S., Collins, T., Silverman, D. & Fussell, C. (2015). Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Portfolio.