Melissa Dinwiddie

Click to watch (17:31) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! A few weeks ago, in “The Math Nobody Explains When You’re Handed an Innovation Mandate,” I named something I call Innovation Debt: the quiet buildup that happens every time someone takes a smart risk and gets punished for it anyway. I ended that piece with three hard questions. If you asked them, you might not have loved the answers. So let’s talk about the next part. Okay, you asked. Now what do you actually...

Click to watch (17:32) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! I used to lie to my piano teacher. Not about anything dramatic. Just about practice. I remember one particular week with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata — I'd barely touched the piano in seven days, and it showed the second I sat down. Fumbling through the same four measures. Losing the thread. That tight, sinking feeling in my stomach as my teacher waited. Desperate for an excuse, I told her I didn't like the...

Click to watch (08:46) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Last week I wrote about why routines go stale — the "Binder Problem,” if you caught that one. New initiative, new binder, all potential. Then autopilot sets in and nobody notices the wear until it's falling apart. That's a real problem. But it's not the only reason 90-day pushes lose steam. There's a second failure mode, and it shows up right around the same time — week 9, 10, 11 — for a completely different...

Click to watch (12:40) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Quick heads-up before we get into it: this week's newsletter looks a little different. I'm heads-down building something I'm excited about, so instead of the usual full article, you're getting show notes for this week's video — plus a peek at what I'm building. The Podcast Is Coming Here's the news: I've been producing weekly videos for a while now. Soon, I'll be turning those into a full podcast — audio and...

Click to watch (10:30) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Not long ago, I got on a call with a VP at a SaaS company. He hadn't reached out about a keynote. He'd reached out because his CEO had handed him a job with no map attached: make this company more innovative. The CEO wasn't wrong to want it. She's a natural innovator herself — the kind of leader who sees a problem and instinctively starts experimenting with it. And like a lot of natural innovators, she had a...

Click to watch (10:16) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! The Mandate Lands on a Tuesday Nobody hands you an innovation mandate with a start date that makes sense. It lands mid-quarter, in a meeting that was supposed to be about something else, usually as a single sentence: "We need your team to be more innovative." Then everyone moves on to the next agenda item, and you're left holding it. No budget line. No template. No week one. There's a predictable mistake that...

Click to watch (11:05) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! A year ago, I got a call from the then-president of the PMI San Francisco Bay Area Chapter. She wasn't calling about a keynote. She was calling because she'd been searching for a LEGO® Serious Play® facilitator, and my name had come up. Her chapter's Professional Development Day usually followed a familiar shape: keynote, breakouts, networking, a panel, a closing keynote. This year, she wanted to open the day...

Click to watch (09:27) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! For about fifteen years, I made my living as a professional calligrapher and ketubah artist — for the first half of that time specialized in hand-illuminating hand-illuminating Jewish marriage contracts for couples who wanted something one-of-a-kind. Every one of those projects came with a hard deadline. The wedding date doesn't move because the artist is "still finding the right concept." One couple wanted a...

Click to watch (08:41) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Loud Enough for Earplugs I just spent four days in Austin at my third Influence — the National Speakers Association's annual conference. Eight hundred speakers in one hotel. An introvert's nightmare, honestly. The noise in the grand ballroom got so loud from overlapping conversations that I pulled out the concert earplugs I keep in my handbag for loud music venues — just so I could hear myself talk at my own...