That doesn’t mean that we’re all experts at innovative thinking. Not everyone is as practiced as they might be. Indeed, many of us have spent major portions of our lives honing skills and traits that place a premium on process, predictability, stability, repeatability, and all the other “ilities” that seem antithetical to innovation.

At least as significantly, most of us work in organizations that, despite the rhetoric, are mostly uninterested in innovation. The understandable desire for predictable financial returns, the need for a rational resource allocation process, and the imperative to satisfy known demands from known customers all lead us towards known solutions and incremental thinking. Innovation, when it does show up, often flickers and then dies a premature death because the mechanisms that support organizational health are the very antibodies that tend to choke off orthogonal thinking, wild hairs, crazy ideas, whacky notions, kooky applications of existing technologies, or whatever innovation feels like in your organization.