The painting I almost threw away — and what it taught me about innovation

​

Click to watch (12:05) or scroll down to read more

​
Hey there, innovation champions!
​

Today I want to talk about something that is quietly killing innovation on your team.
​

It's not a lack of ideas. It's not the wrong tools or the wrong people.
​

It's the unspoken rule that everything has to be good before anyone sees it.
​

Why Your Next Innovation Should Be Terrible (On Purpose)

Here's what I know about analytical, high-performing teams: they don't lack ideas. They lack permission to have bad ones.
​

And that distinction is everything.
​

The Canvas I Almost Threw Away

Years ago, back when I was a professional visual artist, I had a daily studio practice: create something, then post it to Instagram — finished piece or not.
​

It was uncomfortable. Deeply uncomfortable. But it was useful, because it forced me to stop waiting for "ready" and start doing the work.
​

One day I painted something I genuinely hated. I looked at it, cringed, and reminded myself: the goal is to create, not to be brilliant. So I snapped a photo, posted it with a mental note that I'd be painting over it the next day, and moved on.
​

Within hours, someone sent me a DM asking how much it would cost to buy it.
​

The piece I wanted to trash. The one I'd already mentally consigned to the garbage heap.
​

They wanted to buy it.
​

It was a genuine paradigm shift for me — a visceral reminder that "crappy" is often in the eye of the beholder. And that the voice telling me this is terrible, you should quit wasn't a quality-control mechanism.
​

It was fear wearing a very convincing disguise.
​

What the Inner Critic Is Actually Saying

Here's the reframe I've carried with me ever since:

​
When the inner critic says "this is terrible, you should quit" — that's the signal to keep going.
​

Same with "it's been done before." Same with "who are you to do this thing?"
​

Those voices aren't protecting quality. They're protecting comfort. They're trying to keep you exactly where you are, inside a familiar boundary where nothing new — and nothing risky — can happen.
​

I proved this to myself again when I wrote my first book, The Creative Sandbox Way™. Every chapter I wrote, those voices showed up. Every chapter, I had to make the same choice: listen to them, or ignore them and keep going.
​

I kept going. The book got written. (And I’ve lost track of the number of readers who have told me that book changed their lives!)
​

The voices didn't stop. I just stopped obeying them.
​

This Isn't Just an Artist Problem

When I shifted from my studio practice into working with corporate teams, I expected to find a different dynamic.
​

I didn't.
​

What I found — at Meta, at PMI, at organizations full of engineers, researchers, and project managers — was the exact same pattern, just dressed in business casual.
​

Ideas that never made it out of someone's head because they weren't "ready."
​

Decks that got polished for three weeks instead of tested in three days.
​

Brainstorming sessions where people offered only the safest, most defensible version of their thinking.
​

It's perfectionism. And in analytical environments, it's especially insidious — because it doesn't feel like fear. It feels like discernment. Like rigor. Like exactly what you'd expect from smart, conscientious professionals.
​

But the result is the same: nothing moves.

What Actually Unlocks Teams

In my work with one research team — a group of people who were, by their own description, deeply skeptical that any "creativity workshop" could be relevant to them — I ran an exercise from my Communicating for Influence™ program.
​

Each participant practiced sharing a distilled version of their research with a room full of people playing wildly different roles: a kindergartner, a Fortune 500 CEO, a dentist. The audience was encouraged to really inhabit those personas — to ask the questions that person would ask, in the way they'd ask them.
​

The volunteer had to respond in real time. Iterate in real time. Try something, notice it wasn't landing, adjust, try again.
​

Not every attempt worked. That was the whole point.
​

What I watched happen in that room was exactly what Make Crap is designed to produce: people discovering, through direct experience, that the first attempt doesn't have to be the right one. It just has to be the first one.
​

The learning happened in the iteration. The confidence grew through the doing. And the team that walked out was visibly different from the one that walked in.
​

The Leader's Role in All of This

Here's what I want every senior leader reading this to understand:
​

You can talk about psychological safety all you want. You can put "we celebrate failure" on the wall and in the all-hands deck.
​

But if your team doesn't actually believe there will be no consequences for making something bad — if they don't see real, tangible benefits for taking creative risks — they won't do it. Not really. They'll play it safe and nod along.
​

The culture you want isn't built through declarations. It's built through demonstrated, repeated evidence that imperfection is genuinely okay here.
​

That means going first. Sharing your own half-formed thinking. Publicly naming when something you tried didn't work. Rewarding the attempt, not just the outcome.
​

It means making Make Crap safe — not just in theory, but in practice.
​

The Make Crap Experiment to Try This Week

This is Experiment #1 from Innovation at Work — the Crappy First Draft Showcase.
​

Here's how it works:
​

Set a 10-minute timer. Have each person on your team create a deliberately terrible first draft of a current work deliverable — a slide, a brief, a prototype, a wireframe. The goal is to make it intentionally bad: incomplete thoughts, rough sketches, placeholder text.
​

Then celebrate the crappiness in a brief show-and-tell.
​

That's it.
​

What you'll find: when the goal is to make something bad, the pressure to be perfect evaporates. People start. They generate. They iterate. And often — not always, but often — something genuinely useful surfaces from the mess.
​

Just like a painting someone wanted to buy that I almost painted over.
​

If this resonates, try the Crappy First Draft Showcase with your team this week — and hit reply to let me know what happened. I read everything.
​

And if you want 51 more experiments just like it, Innovation at Work is waiting for you: innovationatworkbook.com/preview​
​

If you lead a team that's been handed an innovation mandate but isn't sure where to start, let's have a real conversation. No pitch — just 30 minutes to talk through what's actually getting in the way.
​

👉 Book a complimentary Innovation Strategy Session
​

Creatively yours,
Melissa

​P.S. When you’re ready to build a culture of thriving innovation, so your team can Create the Impossible™, here are three ways I can help:
​
1) Download my FREE Innovation Culture Assessment to evaluate where your team stands
​
2) Download a free preview of my latest book, Innovation at Work
​​
3) Click here to schedule a complimentary Innovation Strategy Session
​
​Did someone forward this email to you? If you'd like more articles like this right in your own inbox,click here to subscribe!​​