The Leadership Habit That Fuels Innovation

When managers ask me how to become more innovative, I don’t see a lack of talent. I often simply see limited contact with the new.

It’s something I’ve observed across industries and leadership levels: We stay inside what we already know - processes, people, metrics, sectors - and then we’re surprised when fresh ideas don’t arrive.

At a recent conference, a simple drawing revealed just how structural this pattern is.

Innovation Happens One Step Beyond the Familiar

Biologist Stuart Kauffman calls it the “adjacent possible”: the set of opportunities that become available only when you move slightly beyond your current knowledge. Not far away. Not in the unknown wilderness. Just one step past your present frontier.

Innovation doesn’t emerge from complete novelty - that’s too distant to be usable. And it doesn’t emerge from total familiarity - that’s too closed to spark anything new.

It emerges at the boundary, where what you know meets what you could discover.

A Simple Visual: The Two Circles

During the conference, the speaker drew two circles on the board to illustrate a simple but powerful idea.

The crucial insight wasn’t the area inside the circles. It was the perimeter: the line where the circle touches the outside world. A small circle has a short perimeter - which means fewer contact points with the new. A large circle has a long perimeter - which means more opportunities for fresh ideas, signals, technologies, and perspectives to connect. In innovation, the size of your circle determines the richness of your border.

Why This Matters for Leaders

Organizations often optimize themselves into intellectual narrowness. They become so efficient, so specialized, so focused on delivering today’s results that they shrink their own contact surface with tomorrow. The consequences are familiar: ideas that repeat themselves; strategies that feel safe but stagnant; creativity that narrows instead of expanding; and an inability to sense weak signals until it’s too late.

Leaders who innovate consistently are not necessarily the most brilliant. They are the ones who systematically expand their borders, usually through small, intentional habits of curiosity.

This expansion isn’t about accumulating more expertise. It’s about creating a wider perimeter where new ideas, signals and insights can meet what you already know.

Leaders who do this well build lives - not just careers - that expose them to more of the world.

And because they see more, they imagine more. And because they imagine more, they innovate more.

How to Expand the Adjacent Possible in Your Organization

1. Cultivate individual curiosity as a strategic asset
Organizations cannot expand their adjacent possible unless the people inside them do. Encourage leaders (and teams) to read outside their discipline, attend unusual events, explore different cultures, follow personal passions that have nothing to do with their role.

These are not distractions. They are how individuals expand their cognitive borders, and those borders become the organization’s frontier. A curious leader widens the circle for everyone.

2. Reward learning, exploration and intellectual play - not only efficiency
If every KPI points inward, your ideas will too. Make room for learning rituals that nourish curiosity: reading circles, exploratory workshops, field immersions, research lunches, internal “show & tell” sessions.

These activities should not feel like obligations. They should feel like oxygen - a chance to think, wonder, and connect. Exploration is not the opposite of productivity; it is what keeps productivity from becoming narrow.

3. Create meaningful encounters between distant worlds
Innovation is often the child of two ideas that never expected to meet. Such as finance with design; HR with data science; operations with psychology; legal with anthropology. Don’t force alignment; create encounters. Let people bring their questions, their frameworks, their passions.

4. Bring in voices that spark curiosity, not just expertise
Expanding the adjacent possible starts with exposing people to ideas that feel unfamiliar.
Not only domain experts or consultants, but designers, behavioral scientists, anthropologists, architects, cultural critics, artists, historians, technologists. People who see the world differently. When curiosity enters the room, the perimeter of the organization grows.

The adjacent possible reminds us that the frontier of our knowledge is not a boundary - it is a platform.

Innovation emerges precisely where what we already know touches what we have not yet explored.

Expanding that frontier - individually and collectively - is not an abstract aspiration.

It is a leadership practice built on curiosity, exposure, and the willingness to engage with ideas and experiences beyond the familiar.

The larger the circle, the richer the edge. And the richer the edge, the stronger the organization’s capacity to imagine - and shape - what comes next.

Reference: 

Johnson, Steven. Where good ideas come from: The natural history of innovation. Penguin, 2011.