How to clear innovation roadblocks & BREAK THE MOLD™

On the path to inspiring your team to dream up and implement innovative solutions, you've likely had the experience of being overwhelmed by roadblocks.

Maybe you took your team through a "what will it take?" exercise and came up with some great ideas only to get frozen by all of the "yeah buts"...

Now you're stuck.

I mean, what's the point of going through the work to come up with innovative solutions just to have them feel impossible to implement?

I’ve warned against band-aid fixes before—and I stand by that.

Too often, they’re just a way to settle.

But when the alternative is doing nothing, a strategic stop-gap solution can be the spark that leads to real change.

When to Accept Compromise

If you and your team have come up with new solutions or ideas that go against traditional thinking, that's a great signal you're on the right track.

Naturally, those solutions will also come with a lot of roadblocks to implement them successfully.

Those roadblocks can easily become overwhelming.

When you've gotten to a place where you feel overwhelmed by roadblocks, you have two options:

1. Drop the idea and continue with the way things already are.

2. Come up with a more temporary, stop-gap solution that gets you moving in the right direction.

Option 1 will produce a guaranteed result: what you've already gotten—which you're actively trying to move away from.

Option 2 may not get you to the ideal solution, but it gets you moving in the right direction. That's worth something.

Yes, stop-gap solutions aren't great long-term fixes.

When the other option is doing nothing differently, it's a compromise worth accepting.

How to Come Up With Stop-Gap Solutions

Once people's brains get clouded by roadblocks, they often lose the ability to think creatively.

As a leader, it's your job to facilitate the conversation in a way that keeps people from getting too weighed down by all the reasons they can't get something done.

When people want to get too far into the weeds, bring them back up to the balcony to see the bigger picture.

If you find you are getting stuck, the simplest question to ask your team is this:

"What's one step we could take today that moves us in the right direction?"

Something exists. I guarantee it. Is it exactly what you ultimately hoped to accomplish? Likely not.

But it's progress—and progress leads to results.

Using a Stop-Gap Solution: An Example

Let's say you want to move your organization away from the chargeable hour and embrace outcome-based (value) pricing.

It's 2025 for God's sake, it's about time...

Lots of possible roadblocks here:

• How are you going to account for this?

• How will you price projects accurately?

• How will you track progress on those projects?

• How do we know people are doing the work needed?

• How do we know we’re not losing money on people???

Once the roadblocks are introduced, it's easy to fall back to the way you already do things because the thought of overcoming them is too much.

Enter the stop-gap solution.

In this case, you might identify a stop-gap solution of rolling out value-based pricing in one practice—maybe for one quarter.

Hell, you could even roll it out as a test on one client project.

Is it achieving the vision of moving the whole organization away from the chargeable hour? No.

Is it a step in the right direction? Yes.

So run a pilot in one practice. See what happens. Learn from it.

Then you're likely better armed to take the next step toward rolling this change out to other parts of the company.

Eventually, you'll achieve what you set out to accomplish in the first place.

The Bottom Line

Progress beats perfection ten times out of ten.

Progressive leaders know how to orchestrate their team toward finding creative stop-gap solutions.

Progress in the right direction compounds over time and the next thing you know, you look back and realize you've reached your desired destination.

It never would have happened if you didn't find a way to get started.

What's a stop-gap solution that could help you and your team move forward this week?

Identify it and implement it.

If you find yourself stuck, I help CEOs, founders, and firm leaders scale faster by thinking differently to overcome roadblocks.

If having a trusted advisor who's successfully navigated the journey you're on seems helpful, let’s talk.

With intention,
Alan D Whitman