# How Innovation Happens — Lesson #4: Run a Regular Attitude Inventory
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## Article Content
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.

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