One of the best ways to make and keep your company innovative is to have people invent solutions to their own problems or needs. In other words, be your own customer and satisfy yourself. If that is not possible—if you are in a business where you cannot be your own customer—then figure out a way to experience the world as a customer experiences it.

There is a crucial yet hard-to-understand concept here. Most people grasp the need to set priorities; they put the biggest problems at the top, with smaller problems beneath them. There are simply too many small problems to consider them all. So they draw a horizontal line beneath which they will not tread, directing all their energies to those above the line. I believe there is another approach: If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed. When a random problem pops up in this scenario, it causes no panic, because the threat of failure has been defanged. The individual or the organization responds with its best thinking, because the organization is not frozen, fearful, waiting for approval. Mistakes will still be made, but in my experience, they are fewer and farther between and are caught at an earlier stage.

If you're preparing for significant growth, we recommend paying loving attention to even the small problems. Most organizations have an implicit 80-20 rule, a belief that 20 percent of the problems are causing 80 percent of the harm. The built-in assumption is that if you can resolve the big ones, you'll be OK. But an HBS colleague, AnitaTucker, has found that it's the small problems that often cripple companies. Small problems often don't get addressed, because they don't seem significant enough to warrant focus. But because they don't get addressed, they always require a work-around, and that work-around can consume 20 percent of an employee's day. People can spend 20 percent of their time on the job working around problems that will never make it onto the priority list to be fixed. Tucker conducted a study of a nursing unit and found that on average, each employee wasted one hour per day working around problems that could be fixed, but that no one deemed important enough to address. An hour every day. What could your company achieve if it gave an extra five hours a week to every employee?

If you're preparing for significant growth, we recommend paying loving attention to even the small problems. Most organizations have an implicit 80-20 rule, a belief that 20 percent of the problems are causing 80 percent of the harm. The built-in assumption is that if you can resolve the big ones, you'll be OK. But an HBS colleague, AnitaTucker, has found that it's the small problems that often cripple companies. Small problems often don't get addressed, because they don't seem significant enough to warrant focus. But because they don't get addressed, they always require a work-around, and that work-around can consume 20 percent of an employee's day. People can spend 20 percent of their time on the job working around problems that will never make it onto the priority list to be fixed. Tucker conducted a study of a nursing unit and found that on average, each employee wasted one hour per day working around problems that could be fixed, but that no one deemed important enough to address. An hour every day. What could your company achieve if it gave an extra five hours a week to every employee?

The person closest to the problem often has the most accurate information about it. What they tend to lack is a broader perspective. The person working on the line at McDonald’s knows how to fix a recurring problem at their restaurant better than a person merely analyzing some data. What they don’t know is how it fits into the bigger picture. They don’t know whether the problem exists everywhere, or whether the solution wold cause more harm than good if implemented globally, or how to roll the idea out to everyone.