TL;DR: ”You are right, but this is not how we do things here” is not mainly an objection to an idea. It marks the boundary of what an organization considers legitimate, safe, and normal.
Organizations often give innovation teams a formal mandate to explore while leaving the core business’s incentives, authority, customer ownership, performance measures, and political protections unchanged. The team is allowed to deviate in theory but depends on people who are rewarded for preserving the current model. As the exploration becomes consequential, it is progressively reframed as inefficient, illegitimate, and finally disloyal. The innovator becomes the anomaly the operating system is designed to remove.
The free section provides the complete diagnosis. The paid section turns it into a License-to-Deviate Contract that a board or executive team can apply to one live initiative, with bounded permissions, conflict rules, evidence thresholds, scale/pivot/stop/defer decisions, and protection for the organization’s capacity to explore.
I have changed industries several times as an innovator. I have worked in telecommunications and ICT, energy, transportation and logistics, and defense. What surprised me was not how different these industries were, but how often I encountered the same sentence:
“You are right. But this is not how we do things here.”
The first half acknowledges the logic. The second half delivers the verdict.
For a long time, I treated this as an argument that had not yet been won. I assumed that stronger reasoning, better evidence, or another experiment might change the decision. Eventually, I understood that the sentence was not primarily evaluating the proposition. It was marking the boundary of what the organization considered normal, legitimate, and safe.
The person presenting the idea had not necessarily made a logical error. They had moved outside the organization’s accepted way of thinking and were now asking others to follow. That step carried social, political, and professional risks that logic could not remove on its own.
Hired to challenge the business—until the challenge became real
In one of my last corporate innovation roles, my team and I were hired to create new business for an organization that generated around 80 percent of its revenue from one primary public-sector customer.
The existing business was substantial and stable. It rested on long-standing relationships, specialized capabilities, and multi-year service agreements. Protecting it was not irrational. It financed the organization and fulfilled real obligations.
We proposed exploring dual-use applications in private markets first. Our hypothesis was that private-sector customers would provide more accessible users, clearer budgets, and shorter decision cycles. This would allow us to investigate operational problems and mature potential applications before navigating slower public procurement processes.
We were not proposing that the organization abandon its primary customer. We were proposing a faster environment in which to learn.
The response was that serving the primary customer was the company’s mission. Our work was also described as consuming resources that operations could use and as giving our team privileges unavailable to the core business.
Some of those objections were legitimate. Exploration consumes resources without guaranteeing a return. The missing element was a governance mechanism for determining whether the proposed path could create future value.
Instead of evaluating the hypothesis, the organization gradually removed the conditions required to investigate it. Access to stakeholders became difficult. Budgets were withheld. Internal distance grew. We nevertheless ran several proofs of concept, but promising signals created another problem: leaders from organizations in adjacent industries objected that we were entering their territory.
As the political and reputational pressure increased, the activities were stopped. The whole team, including me, was dismissed.
I do not offer this as proof that our proposal would have succeeded. It might have failed for market, technical, economic, or organizational reasons. That uncertainty was precisely why it needed to be tested.
The problem was not that the hypothesis failed. The organization withdrew the conditions required to find out.
Its existing norm protected itself from being tested.
Norms are not the enemy of innovation
It would be easy to turn this into a story about conservative managers who did not understand innovation. That explanation would be emotionally satisfying and analytically weak.
Norms preserve accumulated knowledge. They coordinate work, protect customers, reduce unwanted variation, and make reliable delivery possible. In defense, transportation, energy, and other safety-sensitive industries, exceptions can have serious consequences.
Routines do not inevitably prevent adaptation either. Research on model changeovers at Toyota’s NUMMI plant showed how structured routines, participation, training, and trust could support both efficiency and flexibility.[1] Standardization can make some forms of change easier because people do not have to renegotiate the whole system every time something changes.
The problem begins when the organization cannot distinguish between an operational anomaly and an exploratory signal.
In operations, an anomaly is often a defect. It threatens reliability and should be corrected. In innovation, an anomaly may reveal changing customer behavior, an unmet need, a technological possibility, or the early breakdown of the existing business model.
Removing it too quickly can eliminate exactly the information the organization needs.
James March distinguished the exploitation of existing knowledge from the exploration of new possibilities.[2] Exploitation favors refinement, efficiency, implementation, and scale. Exploration requires search, variation, experimentation, and tolerance for negative findings.
When both compete under the same metrics, time horizons, and resource-allocation rules, exploration begins at a structural disadvantage. The current business can point to revenue, contractual obligations, established customers, and measurable performance. The future is asked to prove itself with evidence only the present can provide.
The three layers of norm defense
Across my experiences, I have seen organizations defend their existing norms through three layers.
The first is operational defense. The initiative is treated as a resource problem. It consumes money, attention, customer access, and expertise that could support the established business. Its different working conditions are described as privileges.
The second is identity defense. Once the initiative touches unfamiliar markets, customers, technologies, or business models, the objection changes. It is no longer merely expensive. It is said to conflict with the mission or with what the company fundamentally is.
The third is social defense. When the team continues challenging the first two layers, its members become the anomaly. Access disappears, colleagues create distance, and supporting the initiative begins to carry professional risk.
The innovation is first treated as inefficient, then illegitimate, and finally disloyal.
The sequence matters because the discussion progressively moves away from the evidence. What began as a hypothesis about a market becomes a judgment about identity and belonging.
Some organizations do not kill innovations when they fail. They kill them when they begin to matter.
The existing business is locally rational
Protecting an established customer is often a rational decision. Christensen and Bower showed how the demands of existing customers shape the allocation of resources inside incumbent firms. Opportunities that do not initially serve those customers can struggle to receive investment even when they may later become strategically important.[3]
Each decision may make sense in isolation. Current customers are real, current revenue is measurable, and current commitments must be fulfilled. The alternative is uncertain and often initially smaller.
The problem lies in the cumulative result. Every decision protects the present while nobody remains accountable for constructing the future.
“Our main customer generates 80 percent of our revenue” is therefore both a legitimate explanation and a warning. It explains why the relationship must be protected. It also explains why the governance of future opportunities cannot depend entirely on the system built around that relationship.
The core business was not necessarily wrong. Its logic was incomplete for the work the innovation team had been hired to perform.
A mandate is not a license to deviate
Organizations frequently give an innovation team a mandate without giving the wider organization a corresponding license to tolerate deviation.
A mandate tells the team that it may explore something new.
A license to deviate tells everyone else:
Why the team may use different methods and performance measures
Which customers, users, capabilities, and markets it may approach
Which resources and access are protected
Where the permission ends
What evidence is required to continue
Who resolves conflicts with the core business
What happens when the exploration creates political discomfort
Without that second part, the team receives permission from above while remaining dependent on people whose incentives have not changed.
The result is conditional tolerance. The team may explore until its work competes for a meaningful resource, crosses an industry boundary, challenges an established customer relationship, or produces evidence that threatens the organization’s identity.
At that point, the formal mandate meets the informal veto.
This is why changing a norm cannot be delegated entirely to the people expected to violate it. The board and executive team control the resources, status, and consequences through which the organization learns what is legitimate.
If their behavior remains unchanged, the innovation mandate is an instruction to enter a conflict zone without protection.
Why reasonable people conform
People do not evaluate an innovation proposition in isolation. They evaluate it inside a network of dependencies involving colleagues, customers, authority, budgets, status, career prospects, and income.
An argument can be strategically convincing while remaining professionally dangerous to support.
Deutsch and Gerard distinguished informational influence—following a group because it appears correct—from normative influence, where people conform to remain accepted or avoid rejection.[4] This helps explain how colleagues can privately recognize an opportunity while refusing to defend it publicly.
Employee-voice research shows how unwritten rules reinforce that response. Detert and Edmondson found that employees hold implicit beliefs about when speaking up is risky or inappropriate.[5] Burris found that managers respond differently to voice that supports the current direction and voice that challenges it; challenging voice can affect how the employee is evaluated.[6]
The organization does not need an official rule against unconventional thinking. Delayed decisions, withheld introductions, inaccessible budgets, missing invitations, and visible career consequences can establish the same boundary.
Conformity is not always a lack of imagination. In a system where leadership retains the option to withdraw while employees carry the career risk, conformity can be a rational form of self-protection.
Presentations announce norms. Consequences establish them.
Social-norm research distinguishes between injunctive norms—what people are told they should do—and descriptive norms—what people observe others actually doing.[7]
This explains why transformation town halls often produce little transformation.
Leaders say that employees should challenge assumptions, act entrepreneurially, and pursue new opportunities. Daily decisions then demonstrate that existing revenue receives priority, current customers define strategic relevance, inconvenient experiments lose access, and political discomfort can overrule market evidence.
The presentation announces the desired norm. The consequences reveal the governing one.
Employees watch where the money goes, who receives protection, which objections can stop an experiment, who advances, and what happens to people who challenge the existing identity. When words and consequences conflict, consequences usually win.
Innovation becomes a credible norm only when people observe it surviving a difficult decision.
An experiment must be allowed to change the decision
An experiment is meaningful only when its possible results are allowed to change a decision.
If weak evidence can stop an initiative but strong evidence can also stop it because the result becomes politically uncomfortable, the organization has not established an evidence-led path. No possible result can earn the next commitment.
I call this self-sealing governance. The organization appears open to evidence, but every finding is interpreted in a way that preserves the existing course.
Teams conduct interviews, build proofs of concept, and present results, yet the evidence has no recognized authority to change resource allocation, customer strategy, or organizational identity. The experiment becomes a demonstration whose political consequences remain controlled.
Threat-rigidity research suggests that people and organizations may narrow information processing, centralize control, and return to familiar responses under perceived threat.[8] A recent review emphasizes that this response is conditional rather than universal, while confirming the importance of understanding when threat produces rigidity.[9]
Leaders may genuinely support innovation while it remains abstract. Their position becomes observable when the work threatens an important customer, political relationship, budget, or organizational identity.
The first serious conflict is not an interruption of the innovation process. It is the first valid test of the innovation governance.
The board kept the option. The team carried the risk.
Organizational identity directs attention and defines which opportunities appear legitimate. Tripsas showed how identity can filter how organizations notice and interpret technologies, while identity-challenging opportunities become difficult to capitalize on because identity is embedded in routines and relationships.[10]
That identity is also reinforced outside the organization. Conformity with other organizations can increase legitimacy, which helps explain why crossing an industry boundary may provoke resistance before it produces meaningful revenue.[11]
The board can commission exploration, observe what happens, and retreat when the political or reputational cost becomes uncomfortable. The innovator may lose income, status, relationships, and career continuity.
The organization retains the option. The individual absorbs the downside.
This does not mean innovation teams should receive permanent protection from evidence. Weak candidates should stop. But stopping a business candidate is different from dismantling the organization’s ability to explore.
Research on project termination shows that how organizations end work affects emotion, learning, and future career opportunities, and that redeployment and time for sense-making shape what can be retained.[12]
If evidence invalidates an opportunity, the team has generated useful knowledge. Its members can be redeployed with that learning. If leadership withdraws the mandate for political rather than evidential reasons and removes the entire team, it sends a different message: challenging the norm carries a downside the organization will not share.
The diagnosis is complete. The innovation team was not the underlying contradiction. It made the contradiction visible.
The organization asked people to create a different future while leaving the social, political, and professional consequences of deviation untouched.
Until those consequences change, most reasonable people will continue to protect the present.
The paid section provides the application: a License-to-Deviate Contract that makes the board’s authorization explicit before the first serious conflict arrives.
What sentence does your organization use when evidence collides with how things are done? Add one example in the comments.
Paid application: The License-to-Deviate Contract
Use this contract before launching an exploration that depends on access, customers, capabilities, or resources controlled by the core business. It is not a declaration of independence for the innovation team. It is a bounded governance agreement defining which deviations are legitimate, what accountability applies, and who carries the risk when conflict appears.
Apply it to one live initiative, not to “innovation” in general.
