Do people come up with better ideas when they can challenge assumptions, disagree and contribute without worrying about status or consequences? Research suggests they do. Amy Edmondson’s landmark research into psychological safety found that teams where people felt safe taking interpersonal risks were more likely to seek feedback, discuss mistakes and experiment. More recent research with R&D teams has also linked psychological safety and knowledge sharing with team creativity.
This is highly relevant for innovation, where progress depends on people being willing to ask difficult questions. But creating an environment where everyone can speak up is only part of the answer. Teams also need a way to work out which ideas are worth listening to.
Most organisations need some hierarchy. Someone has to set direction, make decisions and decide where to invest. Problems arise when that hierarchy starts to shape the innovation itself, so that a senior stakeholder’s opinion carries more weight than the evidence, or expertise from one function drowns out another.
So how can teams work differently?
Put the user at the centre
For us, this is the most important starting point. The most successful innovation keeps the user at the centre, giving teams an external point of reference that sits outside organisational hierarchy.
Product development brings together many perspectives. R&D may be excited about a new technology. Marketing may have identified a new trend. A senior leader may be concerned that a competitor has a feature their product doesn’t. All are valid perspectives, but they don’t necessarily tell us what matters most to the person who will eventually buy and use the product.
More recent research describes successful teams as ‘hierarchically adaptable’.
Staying close to users changes that conversation. Deep qualitative research, including observation and projective techniques, can uncover what people actually do, what frustrates them and what they value. This enables teams to define target user journeys, ideal product models and prototypes, ready to test. We often see teams surprised by what they learn, particularly when real behaviour challenges assumptions that have quietly become accepted as fact.
When everyone has watched the same user struggle or heard the same unmet need, it becomes much easier for someone, whatever their level, to say: “Should we rethink this?”
Give teams something they can rally around
Innovation can also have its own functional hierarchies, with R&D, marketing, insights, manufacturing and other teams bringing different expertise and different ideas about what makes an innovation exciting or important.
One helpful tool in this context is Product Story – something we developed at Untapped Innovation to connect technical R&D breakthroughs to clear consumer problems enabling commercial teams to easily explain, remember, and sell new products. We’ve found it can prove particularly useful in helping to rally teams because it keeps everything firmly focused on the user while giving all functions something they can contribute to. It captures the story of the experience the user has with the product, the transformation it enables, and the product and technology that make this possible.
That common story gives teams something more useful to debate than whose idea should win. Does the technology genuinely answer the user need? Is the benefit compelling? Can we prove it? Different functions can challenge and strengthen the thinking while staying connected to the same end goal.
Shared tools like this can reduce the influence of hierarchy without removing the need for leadership.
Make evidence and trade-offs visible
People are naturally susceptible to confirmation bias, sunk-cost thinking and becoming attached to ideas they have spent months developing. Seniority doesn’t make any of us immune.
Agreeing success criteria and making evidence visible helps teams recognise these biases. Tools such as Stakeholder Scorecards for product propositions can bring user evidence together with the realities of finance, regulatory, supply chain, marketing and technical feasibility.
There may still be difficult decisions to make, but the conversation becomes more transparent. Leaders can see why one solution delights users but creates a manufacturing challenge, while another is easy to deliver but offers little meaningful differentiation.
Know when to diverge and when to converge
Research suggests that hierarchy can play different roles at different stages of innovation. One study found that hierarchy hindered idea generation but helped when teams needed to screen and select ideas. More recent research describes successful teams as “hierarchically adaptable”, able to shift between flatter and more structured ways of working depending on the task.
This mirrors what we see in practice. During divergent phases, teams need space to question, challenge and explore, without the most senior voice closing down promising avenues too early. As ideas move towards development and execution, greater structure helps teams make choices, manage trade-offs and move forward.
The user should be the constant throughout. Whether teams are opening up possibilities or narrowing them down, staying anchored to what matters to the target user helps prevent both hierarchy and consensus-by-committee from pulling innovation off course. Innovation teams don’t need to choose between being permanently hierarchical or permanently flat. The best teams know when to open things up and when to narrow them down. Throughout both, putting the user at the centre, making evidence visible and giving different experts a shared story to work from gives good ideas the best chance of winning in market.
__
Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest innovation news and more sent to your inbox.
Sally Kemkers is a founding partner at Untapped Innovation, a global agency helping R&D teams at companies including PepsiCo, P&G, Unilever, and Reckitt create breakthrough products and compelling product stories. Product Story is one of the tools available from Untapped Innovation’s Innovation Gym.
