Leaders of technology innovation are often taught to create urgency: find the burning platform, raise the pressure, and people will move. They do move — but usually defensively. Under threat, teams narrow their options, protect themselves and avoid bets that might not pay off. That is the opposite of what breakthrough work needs.
The second component of the Mission-Driven Innovation System is about a different kind of leadership: one that replaces the burning platform with a burning passion.
Key points
- Fear-based urgency produces compliance; breakthroughs need curiosity and psychological safety.
- Mission-driven leaders act like gardeners, shaping conditions instead of directing every move.
- How leaders respond to failure decides whether problems surface early or stay hidden.
Why fear is a poor innovation strategy
Under threat, people slip into fight, flight or freeze. Decisions get faster but also shorter-term and narrower, and people optimise for not being blamed. Exploratory work depends on the opposite state: calm focus, curiosity and a willingness to say “I don’t know yet”.
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson calls the enabling condition psychological safety — a shared belief that it is safe to raise a concern, admit a mistake or put forward an unfinished idea. It isn’t about comfort or lower standards. It is what allows high standards and honest learning to exist in the same room.
Gardener, not chess master
In Team of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal contrasts two images of leadership. The chess master moves the pieces. The gardener can’t make plants grow, but prepares the soil and creates the conditions in which growth happens. Nobody can micromanage a new technology into maturity, which is why mission-driven innovation needs gardeners: leaders who make the mission clear, share context rather than instructions, and clear the obstacles that slow learning down.
Making failure intelligent
Radical innovation fails more often than it succeeds. Edmondson distinguishes preventable failures from intelligent failures — well-designed experiments in new territory that don’t work out but teach something worth knowing. Mission-driven leaders make the second kind safe and fast while staying demanding about the first. Whether the person who brings bad news early is recognised or penalised is the signal that shapes everything else.
Culture ultimately lives in teams, so leaders also have to design them deliberately — who joins, which behaviours are non-negotiable, and where excellence matters most.
In the book
- The neuroscience behind “burning passion” — and why fear-based leadership backfires
- Servant and steward leadership in practice, with reflection questions for leaders
- A team blueprint for building mission teams
- Leadership lessons from Patagonia, Microsoft and the LEGO Group
Where this fits in the system
Leadership turns purpose and values into behaviour, but a gardener can’t thrive inside a bureaucracy built for control — which is why innovation governance is redesigned too. Anita explores these themes in her keynotes and leadership workshops.
Further reading
- Edmondson, A. C. (2023). Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. Atria Books.
- McChrystal, S., Collins, T., Silverman, D. & Fussell, C. (2015). Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Portfolio.