# How Innovation Happens — Lesson #4: Run a Regular Attitude Inventory
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I've been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I've discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next. "In a world of rapid and constant change, many people still manage to think that they can get away with routine." Years ago, in a piece I wrote for the Globe & Mail, I suggested something simple: undertake an "attitude inventory" during your next staff, board, or executive meeting. Not a strategy review. Not a SWOT analysis. An honest look at the attitudes actually running the room. The reason it matters is that innovation killers rarely announce themselves. Nobody stands up in a meeting and says "I'm choosing tradition over the future today." Instead it shows up as: we've always done it this way, that's too risky right now, let's wait and see, the mission statement already covers that. Left unchecked, those attitudes calcify into culture, and culture is a lot harder to fix than a bad decision. An attitude inventory is just the discipline of naming those excuses out loud, on a schedule, before they've had time to become invisible. Here's how you can begin to run an attitude inventory and turn what you hear into action. Action Items: Once a quarter, ask your leadership team to list every "we can't because..." they've said out loud in the last month. Read the list back to them. Pick the single most common excuse on that list and assign someone to actively dismantle it before the next quarter's inventory. Watch for phrases like "let's wait and see" or "it's not the right time" in meetings. Flag them in real time. Explore the full How Innovation Happens series. Real-World Examples These researched examples show the lesson at work in the real world. OTTO: The staff pulse that exposed a damaging training freeze The German retailer OTTO had a sensible-looking response to an economic slowdown: cut spending, restrict travel, pause hiring and freeze training. From the finance department, reducing training costs could be defended. From the workforce, it sent a different signal. OTTO had implemented a recurring feedback process called Digital Heartbeat, gathering employee responses on conditions such as leadership, learning and innovation. Within weeks of the training freeze, scores connected to development and managerial support deteriorated. Employees also explained the contradiction in free-text comments: the company wanted flexibility while cancelling the very learning needed to achieve it. Researchers described how the evidence helped management reverse course and develop new learning-oriented initiatives. The details matter because the system did not ask vaguely whether people were happy. It gave leaders a rapid view into the consequences of a particular management decision. A 2026 peer-reviewed case study presented this as an example of turning employee feedback into organizational change. A leadership team could have waited a year for turnover to rise and then commissioned another study. Instead, an ongoing attitude inventory showed that the leadership response to difficulty was creating its own long-term problem. Why it matters: An attitude inventory has value only when management is prepared to discover that its own decisions are part of the problem. Sources: Alcoa: A safety obsession that exposed how the whole company worked When Paul O'Neill took charge of aluminum producer Alcoa in 1987, investors expected a conventional turnaround agenda: profits, costs and production. He made worker safety the organizing priority instead. The logic was more demanding than a public promise to prevent injuries. To understand an incident, managers had to examine how information travelled, how quickly teams responded, what conditions actually existed on the shop floor and whether workers could identify problems without fear. An accident became evidence that the operating system required investigation rather than merely an occasion to blame an employee. In a retrospective case study published by the American Society of Safety Professionals, the transformation is described as a shift in reporting and systemic problem-solving, not simply a poster campaign. The result was a much stronger safety record over O'Neill's tenure, alongside a broader transformation in how Alcoa operated. The significance for innovation is not that safety and innovation are identical. It is that a company's underlying attitudes become observable when a leader chooses a concrete behaviour and tracks whether people really practice it. O'Neill discovered that what employees tolerated, reported and acted upon revealed more about organizational capability than aspirational culture statements. Why it matters: If you want to audit a culture, pick a behaviour with real consequences and study what happens when someone reports bad news. Sources:

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/10/how-innovation-happens-lesson-004/