Good Team, Bad Team: And Why it Matters in Innovation

Why Team Dynamics Matter in Innovation

“Innovation is a team sport,” Sarah says. “It requires collaboration, co-creation, and cross-functional cooperation.”

While organizations often invest in training innovation teams to use tools and methodologies, success hinges on broader organizational alignment. “If R&D, finance, sales, IT, and marketing don’t work together, your innovation won’t succeed, no matter how good the idea or research is,” Sarah explains.

Some innovators describe this struggle vividly:

• “We had an amazing idea, but finance wouldn’t fund it.”
• “Engineering didn’t get it, and they wouldn’t build it.”
• “Sales said they couldn’t sell it.”

These frustrations are all too common. Innovation relies on the collective action of other teams who will finance, build, and sell ideas. “They’re the people who are going to finance your idea. They’re going to code it, they’re going to build it, and they’re going to sell it. And that’s a problem because if they fundamentally have some concern about how you’re bringing the solution to light, they’re not going to help you deliver it,” Sarah warns.

Yet different departments bring varied mindsets, priorities, and decision-making styles, often resulting in misunderstandings or resistance. Recognizing and addressing these challenges within teams and across functions is critical to scaling innovation successfully.

This challenge drove Sarah and her team to expand beyond innovation-specific training and develop problem-solving tools that help teams be more creative, collaborative, and effective at solving problems together.

First, it’s essential to identify what makes a bad team bad in order to discover what makes a good team excel.

Why Innovation Teams Typically Fail

A staggering 90% of corporate innovation labs fail, according to one expert cited by Harvard Business Review. While misalignment with business goals and a lack of measurable metrics are key culprits, much of the problem boils down to team dynamics.

So, why do so many innovation teams fail? Some common reasons include misalignment with business goals, lack of measurable metrics, and an imbalance in team dynamics.

Sarah explains that teams struggle due to the way people think. “Welcome to problem-solving on a bad team. Actually, on a typical team because people have thinking preferences.” Different people solve problems differently, and these various approaches can cause tension and misunderstandings. “The team ends up with a thinking problem. Instead of wrestling the problem, they start to wrestle each other.” Even well-intentioned teams falter when they fail to navigate cognitive diversity.

To get to the bottom of this mystery, Sarah and her team performed comprehensive research to understand how and why people solve challenges so differently.

But the challenge doesn’t stop at the team level. Even when innovation teams begin to understand and navigate their internal differences, they still have to operate within a larger organizational system that can often work against them.

To understand why so many promising ideas still fail to gain traction, we must look beyond team dynamics and examine the cultural and structural forces surrounding them.

The Broader Challenge Innovation Teams Face

It’s tempting to believe that the rest will fall into place if an innovation team has a strong idea, a solid process, and good intentions. But in reality, innovation teams are rarely defeated by a lack of creativity. More often, they are held back by the systems and structures around them.

Even strong, cohesive teams must operate within systems that often resist change. Large organizations are designed for predictability, not disruption, which creates tension between short-term efficiency and long-term experimentation.

Corporate reward systems tend to value efficiency over experimentation. At many levels of leadership, especially middle and senior management, avoiding risk becomes the default. People are rarely promoted for bold ideas. They advance by maintaining stability and avoiding mistakes.

Consider some of these common obstacles:

• Risk aversion: Many corporate leaders are rewarded for maintaining stability, not for taking bold risks. This mindset can stifle promising initiatives.
• Cultural silos: Departments often work in isolation, creating a lack of understanding and shared language between functions.
• Conflicting priorities: Functions like finance, sales, and engineering have distinct goals and incentives, which may clash with innovation’s exploratory nature.

Even when executive leaders champion innovation, cultural resistance at middle management or operational levels often brings progress to a halt. Sarah notes, “You’ve reached your current position by thinking a certain way, so the notion of having to change that, or be aware of someone else’s way of thinking, seems like an add-on.”

In other words, innovation often requires people to question the thinking that helped them succeed in the first place. Success in organizations is often tied to maintaining the status quo, so shifting the mindset becomes deeply personal and procedural.

There is also a fundamental paradox at play. Innovation depends on collaboration across departments, yet most organizations operate in silos. Each function uses a different “thinking language.” Finance focuses on feasibility. Engineering values precision. Sales prioritizes speed. Meanwhile, innovation teams often present ideas using their natural preferences, usually geared toward ideation. The result is a mismatch that leads to misunderstanding or resistance.

To succeed in these environments, innovation teams must develop new solutions whilst navigating a complex web of organizational habits, competing incentives, and deeply ingrained mental models. Recognizing and addressing this reality is central to making innovation work. It starts with a deeper understanding of how people think and leveraging different cognitive approaches to problem-solving. That’s where Sarah’s research provides a practical framework.

Building Better Teams with Cognitive Diversity

The foundation of Sarah’s approach lies in understanding cognitive diversity and how people prefer to solve problems. Sarah and her team identified four key thinking preferences that shape how individuals solve problems:

1. Clarify: Defining the right problem to solve.
2. Ideate: Generating creative, bold ideas.
3. Develop: Turning ideas into actionable plans.
4. Implement: Executing solutions and achieving results.

While every individual can perform each of these tasks, we all have natural preferences that give us energy (or drain it) during specific problem-solving phases. The “energy wave” represents a person’s preference for specific types of thinking. For example, a person with a high preference for ideation may become excited and engaged during a brainstorming session but feel drained when required to focus on clarifying the problem or developing an implementation plan.

Individuals and teams often unconsciously favor certain phases, leading to an imbalance. For example, finance teams tend to excel at clarifying and analyzing metrics but may struggle with ideation or developing creative solutions. Engineers are great at creating detailed, feasible solutions but may struggle with ideation or implementation at speed.

Balanced teams account for these differences by ensuring representation across all four thinking styles. Equally important, they recognize and manage the fluctuating “energy waves” that impact everyone’s focus and enthusiasm.

Sarah emphasizes, “A home run solution requires all four types of thinking,” recognizing the energy wave is crucial in building balanced, effective teams.

If team members are unaware of each other’s energy profiles, they may misinterpret low enthusiasm as disinterest or resistance, when, in fact, it reflects a natural thinking preference. To understand how these energy patterns play out in real innovation teams, Sarah and her team analyzed the thinking preferences of hundreds of innovators.

Sarah’s method to determine an individual’s thinking preferences takes 10 minutes to measure and provides a simple graph visually representing a person’s energy levels across the four stages. “It’s not a measure of your capacity to do the types of thinking required for innovation; it’s a measure of your preference for each of those things,” Sarah explains. Armed with this knowledge, innovators and companies can better understand the specifics of their team’s composition and take steps to address the imbalances.

The Typical Thinking Profile of an Innovator

Based on the research, a distinctive pattern emerges when examining the cognitive preferences of innovators. “Innovators have a huge preference to ideate and a very low preference to clarify and develop. They have more energy to implement, but nothing like the level of energy to ideate,” Sarah outlines. In stark contrast, staff profiles from other departments, such as finance or sales, clearly show that certain types of thinkers are attracted to specific functions.

“Different jobs really do attract different types of thinkers,” she highlights.

This mismatch between a strong tendency for ideation and a low tolerance to clarify is a problem for innovation. “Ideators love to talk about big ideas. What they don’t like to talk about turns out to be things like alignment with business and clarifying metrics. It’s a built-in ‘hole in the bucket’ when trying to move an idea all the way through an organization,” she explains.

Sarah stresses the importance of addressing this in an organization.

“Creativity is not enough. You need innovation, and for innovation, you need scale. And for scale, you don’t just need your team. You need every team.”

Building Balanced Teams

By understanding thinking preferences, teams can avoid common pitfalls, such as the echo chambers created by like-minded members. “We like to think with people who think like we do, people who share our thinking preferences because they’re so smart. But, when that happens, we get this echo chamber of how we should be thinking about an idea or an innovation.” Successful teams, therefore, must cultivate cognitive diversity and foster mutual respect for differing approaches.

IBM conducted a study back in 2008 to answer why their innovation teams were struggling. They found that each team profile they tested ended up with some kind of problem they couldn’t fit, except for the “foresight” team. “That team had the unique combination of teaching people self-awareness and process awareness,” Sarah notes. Therefore, teams that thrive have that “secret sauce” of the two combined.

Selling Your Big Idea

Sarah acknowledges the cultural barriers to innovation, particularly in large organizations. Resistance often stems from entrenched processes, risk aversion, and internal politics. However, she remains optimistic, highlighting the importance of involving other teams early in the innovation process and involving them in a way that plays to their thinking strengths.

Rather than presenting a polished, final idea, she advocates inviting others to contribute through their distinct thinking preferences. But beyond just involving other teams, it matters how and when you involve them.

“When you present a finished idea, you’re asking for a yes or no. But if you involve others early, seeking their clarifying or developing input, they become invested and are more likely to champion the idea,” she explains. This approach improves buy-in and ensures the solution aligns with broader organizational needs.

You can tailor your communication accordingly when you understand how diverse teams think. It turns out that all those who don’t like to ideate work in finance, operations, engineering, and IT. They are the people innovators need to work closely with to get buy-in for their projects.

“Implementers” found in a finance team want to know the bottom line. “What needs to be done? By when? What results can we expect? What will you do? How can we try it fast?”. “Clarifiers” from operations want to know if an idea is on target. “How does it align with the business strategy and priorities? Where does it fit in the market? What problems does it solve for our users? How do we know it will work?”

This powerful knowledge can help innovators navigate communication more successfully with these distinct thinkers.

Practical Steps to Drive Cross-Functional Innovation

Bringing your innovation to life requires broad support across functions, not just internal alignment within the innovation team. Here are actionable strategies to engage stakeholders effectively:

• Speak their language: Tailor your pitch to the priorities of different departments. For example:
  • With finance, focus on ROI and cost-effectiveness.
  • With sales, highlight how the idea meets customer needs and drives revenue.
  • For engineering, emphasize feasibility and technical clarity.
• Align incentives: Make sure the benefits of success (and the risks of failure) are distributed fairly across teams. Collaboration improves when the stakes are shared.
• Build early buy-in: Identify and engage key advocates from each department from the start. Co-creating solutions strengthens ownership and commitment.
• Demonstrate small wins: Use quick wins to build credibility and momentum, helping skeptical stakeholders see the value without overwhelming them.

Combining these practical steps with an understanding of cognitive diversity allows your team to turn breakthroughs from “great on paper” to implemented solutions that drive real results.

The Key to Innovation Success? Teamwork, Not Just Tools

Innovation doesn’t just depend on great ideas but also on great teams. Organizations can unlock their full potential by recognizing the dynamics that make or break collaboration. The key to creativity lies in balancing the strengths of each thinking profile, “Creativity comes from a profound mix of clarifying, ideating, developing, and implementing energies. The idea is to have a more balanced innovation team or at least an innovation team supported by all those other types of energies,” Sarah suggests.

When individuals acknowledge their own preferences and limitations, they can strategically bring in others to fill the gaps. This approach ensures that the whole creative process is addressed and creates a culture of respect and shared purpose. As Sarah reminds us, “Innovation is not a solo endeavor; it is the collective effort of a balanced and collaborative team.” Organizations can consistently turn creative ideas into scalable, impactful solutions by understanding and leveraging diverse thinking preferences.

Start small by understanding how your team’s thinking preferences shape its process. Then address systemic barriers through alignment, stakeholder engagement, and inclusivity. Your team can turn a brilliant idea into a lasting impact with the right mix of creativity, strategy, and collaboration.