This year’s Peter Drucker Forum poses a defining question: “Next Gen Innovation – When Everything Depends on Ingenuity.” I want to put an uncomfortable thesis on the table: the greatest barrier to innovation in most organizations is not a lack of technology. It is a lack of leadership.[…]
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I encounter the same pattern regularly in executive work. Under real pressure — the kind that threatens identity as much as outcomes — most high-performing people do not become more creative. They become more rigid.
They return to what worked before. They narrow their field of attention, tighten decision-making, and apply yesterday’s solutions with increasing force to problems those solutions were never designed to solve.[…]
A CFO presents the plan. One hundred AI agents will take over the routine work of the accounting and finance function, the reconciliations, the first-draft reports, the month-end close. The headcount math is clean, the savings are real, and several capable people will be made redundant. Others will be reskilled for more advanced work. Around the table everyone agrees the firm should keep people at the center. No one can say what that means for the decision in front of them. The phrase is true, comfortable, and useless.[…]
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Peter Drucker spent much of his life helping organizations understand profound societal shifts. Among his most influential insights was recognizing that knowledge had become the defining economic resource and that the knowledge worker would emerge as the central agent of value creation. That insight reshaped enterprise thinking for decades.[…]
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Throughout my career I have relied on Peter Drucker’s ideas and principles as a starting point for thinking about innovation. So, the theme of this year’s Forum resonates with me.
But as someone who has been working on innovation with more than 400 leading companies and organisations around the world, I want to challenge the notion that innovation — especially in the uncertain and fast-changing world we share — is “systematic” and requires “methodical analysis” rather than being a spark of genius.
In fact, I am not certain it has ever been as systematic or methodical as we would like it to be. Innovation has, throughout history, found its flame in exactly that: a spark.[…]
In 2026, as AI reshapes management and volatility defines markets, innovation demands more than data or disruption – it’s about perceiving possibilities and acting on them amid chaos. Four concepts – sensemaking, predictive processing, affordances, and emergence – offer managers a practical framework to navigate this reality.[…]
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Most large organizations have launched innovation initiatives in the last five years. They have built dedicated labs, appointed chief innovation officers, trained cohorts in design thinking, and run internal hackathons with genuine enthusiasm. The ideas that emerged were often promising. And then they derailed. Someone asked for strategic alignment of the business case, another for ownership clarity, a third for cross-functional sign-off before any resources could be committed. Approvals, handoffs, and procedural questions suffocated momentum.[…]
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When leaders talk about innovation, they usually talk about talent, technology, and speed.
They look for creative people, better tools, faster decisions, and stronger execution. They invest in AI, digital platforms, new ventures, and redesign efforts. All of that matters.
But one question usually remains underexamined: what kind of organization makes ingenuity usable?[…]
