I've been in a number of meetings about the future. Visioning sessions, innovation workshops, blue-sky brainstorming…the kind of meetings where someone eventually says: "Let's assume there are no constraints."
Which is usually how you know there are quite a few constraints.
Not because anyone is trying to be deceptive. More because everyone in the room already knows certain things aren't changing.
The architecture isn't changing. The business model isn't changing. The delivery expectations aren't changing. Maybe the data model isn't changing.
Nobody says those things out loud.
If I'm being honest, I didn't notice this pattern right away. At first it just felt like a strange kind of sameness. A team would be asked to create a vision for the future and produce something thoughtful, creative, even inspiring. And yet somehow the future looked suspiciously familiar.
The interface changed. The visuals changed. The flow changed. But underneath it was the same product.
Most innovation conversations start too late
There are a lot of existing explanations for why innovation struggles. Organizations become risk-averse. Metrics drive incremental thinking. The Innovator's Dilemma. Exploration versus exploitation. I think some of those explanations are right. But they all seemed to start at roughly the same place: the idea.
Why wasn't it approved?
Why wasn't it funded?
Why wasn't it pursued?
The question I keep coming back to is slightly different: what if certain ideas never emerge in the first place?
The invisible boundaries
In design workshops, I’ve asked teams of product, UX, and technology partners to release the constraints of everyday delivery—think blue sky; the wilder the ideas, the better. Everyone nods, starts sketching, and generating concepts. And yet, somehow, most of the ideas stay remarkably close to what already exists.
I call this Idea Starvation.
Not because organizations run out of ideas. Most organizations have plenty of ideas. Roadmaps are full of them. Backlogs are full of them. Planning cycles are full of them.
Idea Starvation is something else.
It's what happens when successful systems gradually shape what people consider possible. When certain assumptions become so normal that they stop feeling like assumptions at all. They start feeling like reality.
What success leaves behind
A successful process becomes a best practice…
A successful decision becomes a precedent…
A successful product becomes the model for future products…
Which is mostly a good thing—that's how organizations learn. But it's also how organizations inherit assumptions without realizing it.
Over time, the path gets worn deeper and all the other paths become overgrown and wild—unpredictable.The known path becomes so familiar that we stop seeing it as a path. We start seeing it as the landscape.
The AI of it all
AI certainly didn’t create the problem, but it did make me notice it.
We've all seen AI-generated websites, posters, brand concepts, presentations, and product ideas that feel interchangeable—they could belong to any brand. The epidemic of design sameness has been amplified using this new technology.
They're built from patterns that already exist, which in and of itself isn’t a criticism—that allows an experience to immediately be understood and usable—but once we’ve optimized everything to the common denominator of understanding, then what?
What happens when more and more of our tools are trained on what has already been done?
The challenge
As the old saying goes,“if you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you always got.”
If we continue to optimize for known success AND our everyday tools and decision-making systems are trained on historic data, how do we give innovation a fighting chance?
We have to get great at calling out invisible assumptions and constraints
We have to have intentional conversations about optimization vs. innovation and the roles they play in a company that stands the test of time
We have to nurture and grow the skills of creativity and imagination, widening the viewport of possibilities
It’s a heck of a challenge, but I think we’re up for it. What do you think?