What if the single greatest barrier to innovation in your company is the one thing you take for granted —management itself?
The industrial-era orthodoxies that created scalable enterprises have become brittle shackles in today’s world. We were told to prepare for volatility (VUCA), but we now operate in an environment that is actively Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and often Incomprehensible. In this new BANI reality, the old management playbook is not just outdated; it is dangerous.
Perhaps you’ve felt this firsthand. You’ve been in the room, looking at the innovation pipeline, and felt that familiar, sinking frustration. You see the phantom projects, the wasted resources, the trail of dead ends. You see the exhaustion in the eyes of your most passionate people, their creativity crushed by the gears of a machine that rewards compliance over contribution.
The incandescent frustration you feel in those moments is not a personal failure. It is the human spirit rebelling against the silent, soul-crushing tenets of a bureaucracy that was never designed for innovation.
To break these shackles, we don’t need another workshop. We need a management revolution. And every revolution needs a blueprint.
Dismantling the Dogma
The data is a damning indictment of our current management model. It’s a system defined by:
- A 90% failure rate for strategic initiatives, which isn’t a rounding error—it’s a systemic feature.
- A bureaucracy with no formal architecture for turning human ingenuity into tangible value.
- A level of waste that you would find outrageous in any other part of your business.
You would demand a revolution if 90% of your products failed. So why do you tolerate a system that suffocates 90% of your company’s future?
The answer is to architect a new system—an Innovation Management System built for the 21st century. This is not about adding more process. It is about replacing the old, oppressive orthodoxies with a new architecture designed to liberate and amplify the innovative capability of every person in your organization. This is the core purpose of the ISO 56001 framework. It is not another standard; it is the globally-recognized blueprint for systematically dismantling innovation-killing bureaucracy by providing a structured framework for all organizations to manage their innovation processes.
The Freedom of a Well-Designed System
The fear that a “system” will crush the human spirit comes from our experience with bad, bureaucratic systems. But think of a Formula 1 team. They operate under ferocious constraints. Yet, these rules don’t kill creativity; they focus it with incandescent intensity. The framework forces them to rebel against the status quo, to innovate relentlessly to find every possible millisecond of advantage.
A well-architected Innovation Management System does the same. It creates freedom through framework, unleashing your people’s talent by providing a clear and supportive structure in which to win.
The results of this architected approach, as seen in our work at BOLD Group, are not accidents; they are the deeply satisfying outcomes of a deliberate architectural choice.
For example, our work with Siemens to re-architect their service maintenance process for gas turbines crushed a 7-day ordeal into a 24-hour operation.
Even more counter-intuitive was our project with BMW, where redesigning the robotic automation process led to the elimination of one-third of the required robots.
This thinking—that sometimes the right answer is less automation, not more—was validated nearly a decade later when Elon Musk admitted that “excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake” and that “humans are underrated”. The lesson is the same: when you architect the system correctly, you unleash breakthrough performance.
“The frustration you feel is not a failure of strategy. It is the human spirit rebelling against the shackles of bureaucracy.”
Your Next Move: A Call to Arms
As a leader, you are in a unique position to become a revolutionary. You can begin by challenging the old dogma in your very next meeting. Ask these questions:
- “Are we funding the bureaucracy of innovation with our stage-gates and review boards, or are we funding the liberation of our most creative people?”
- “Is this next multi-million dollar project another sacrifice to the gods of ‘innovation theatre,’ or is it a calculated first strike in a revolution against our own obsolescence?”
- “Why are we not weaponizing the globally-recognized ISO 56001 framework as the blueprint to dismantle the orthodoxies that are holding our people and our future hostage?”
The choice is no longer between chaos and control; it is between architectural leadership and managed decline.
