Melissa Dinwiddie

Hey there, innovation champions! I want to tell you how I actually want you to use my new book. But first, a confession. A Canvas That Sat in Plastic Wrap for Years Back when I was making my living as a professional artist, I spent close to a decade almost never making art for myself. I was trapped in a story that everything I created had to bring in money, had to be "amazing," had to justify itself. The result? Total paralysis. I couldn't start anything that didn't have a client's name on...

Hey there, innovation champions! I want to tell you how I actually want you to use my new book. But first, a confession. A Canvas That Sat in Plastic Wrap for Years Back when I was making my living as a professional artist, I spent close to a decade almost never making art for myself. I was trapped in a story that everything I created had to bring in money, had to be "amazing," had to justify itself. The result? Total paralysis. I couldn't start anything that didn't have a client's name on...

Hey there, innovation champions! Here's the thing nobody tells you about innovation initiatives: most of them don't fail because the idea was bad. They fail because everyone expected them to be perfect before they started. Sound familiar? I've been inside enough tech teams (heck, teams in general!) to know that this is one of the quietest innovation killers out there. Not the lack of smart people. Not the lack of good ideas. The insistence that every new approach needs to be bulletproof...

Hey there, innovation champions! These are trying times. I wrote the other day on LinkedIn about the cognitive dissonance of logging in to talk about business-as-usual while communities are being terrorized and traumatized by an armed force of untrained, violent men, and citizens are being executed in the streets while exercising their Constitutional rights. Writing this newsletter feels like cognitive dissonance. I sang at a vigil for Renee Good just a few weeks ago, which the civic...

Hey there, innovation champions! Most leaders can tell you when innovation has stalled. What they struggle to see is when it's about to stall—when the very systems that created breakthrough thinking have quietly calcified into comfortable routines that feel productive but have stopped producing anything new. I discovered this pattern not in a boardroom, but in my art studio. When the Spark Stops Sparking For years as a professional artist, creative block paralyzed me. I could meet client...

Hey there, innovation champions! Most innovation efforts don’t fail because teams lack ideas. They fail because smart, capable people are waiting for permission to be perfect—and by the time they feel ready, the moment has passed. I’ve watched this pattern stall product launches, kill momentum after conferences, and quietly drain the energy out of teams that leaders genuinely believed were “high potential.” I know it well, because perfectionism once stopped me cold too. The Wedding Document I...

Hey there, innovation champions! Before I head to Alabama and Arizona to spend the holidays with family, I wanted to share something that could save your Q1 innovation initiative before it even launches. Because here's the pattern I see every single year: In January, leaders roll out ambitious innovation programs. By February, they've quietly fizzled out. By March, everyone's back to business as usual, and the expensive consultant's slide deck is gathering digital dust. Sound familiar? The...

Hey there, innovation champions! Your smartest people are sitting on half-brilliant ideas. They're waiting to make them bulletproof before sharing. Meanwhile, your competitors are testing rough prototypes and learning what actually works. I see this constantly when I work with high-achieving teams—researchers at Meta, leadership teams at healthcare companies, high-potentials at national creative agencies, audiences at my Creating the Impossible keynote. Brilliant people who've trained...

Hey there, innovation champions! "We need to innovate, but we can't pull people away from their desks." If you're a VP of L&D, a chapter president planning your annual conference, or a research director managing tight project timelines, you've said some version of this. Your team needs breakthrough thinking capabilities, but you can't pause operations for elaborate training programs. Here's what I've learned working with teams at Google, Meta, Salesforce, and most recently with 125 project...