Yet in our experience, few companies appreciate the distinction between project risk and portfolio risk. Each potential experiment gets evaluated on its own merits and is expected to clear a high bar of feasibility. That pretty much ensures the company will never invest in the sort of crazy-ass idea that might actually deliver a thousand-fold return.

CONTRARIAN THINKING. If a problem’s been around for a while, it probably can’t be cracked with conventional thinking. Seek out the positive deviants, like Nucor and Haier. Borrow ideas from other domains, like biology, startups, and crowdsourcing. Rigorously challenge your deepest assumptions. Do all this, and you’ll increase the odds of finding a novel solution.

COMPASSION. People aren’t merely skeptical; they’re cynical—and with good reason. Everyone’s fighting their own corner and looking out for their own interests. When asked to help, most people will ask, “What’s in it for me?” To jump this hurdle, you have to put others first. When colleagues see you working to understand their needs, when you help them craft their experiments, and ensure they get the credit, they’ll start to trust you. When your compassion shines through, people will take risks with you and pick you up when you fall.

CONNECTIONS. Building a community is the most important thing an activist can do. This is the ultimate multiplier of individual effort. Employees eager to try something new often make the mistake of asking their boss for permission. Usually they get shot down, or win only grudging support. This isn’t entirely the manager’s fault. A priori, it’s hard to know whether an underdeveloped idea is brilliant or batty. Since great ideas are rare, the default setting for most managers is to say no. So don’t go up, go out. Talk to your peers. Find a few colleagues who will help you build and run an experiment. It’s easy for a manager to say no to a lone supplicant, but much harder to turn aside a small band of partisans who are passionate about making things better and have already made a start.

These days, I’m wary of seemingly simple incentive rules that promise amazing results. They are rarely simple, and often leave collateral damage. Usually, a better option is to have a frank discussion about what we should value and why. Why should we care about exploring more designs early on? Why should we aim to speed up engineering velocity? Once people understand and buy into those values, they can make the best decisions on how to apply them.

Experimentation creates tension. It carries a risk of failure. Moreover, when such experiments succeed, and companies innovate, people have to integrate change. The potential of failure and the need for change can terrify people. It can feel like the conflicts from their childhood that folks were programmed to avoid.

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes that “people tend to flirt only with serious things—madness, disaster, other people.” When we craft experiments, we are flirting with our many selves, a serious endeavor because it matters so much to us. The stronger the attraction, the more vulnerable we are to biases that affect how we perceive alternatives. Since we are not neutral about which outcome we prefer, we can fall into the trap of evaluating our experiments with a positive bias, one that encourages us to escalate commitment, even when we have evidence that it would be better to abandon ship or put the pet project on hold. A related danger is inadvertently putting a current work situation at risk. The exploration feels risk free, because we hide it from work associates. But the project becomes all-consuming, and it becomes obvious to everyone around us that our attention is divided.