# How Innovation Happens — Lesson #5: Treat Organizational Sclerosis as a Disease, Not a Metaphor
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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. "Organizational sclerosis is clogging up your innovation arteries!" I didn't coin "organizational sclerosis" to be clever. I use it because it's medically accurate: it's what happens when the arteries that used to carry new ideas through an organization slowly clog with process, precedent, and fear, until nothing moves, even when everyone inside still believes they're agile. The dangerous part is that sclerosis is painless until it isn't. Things still run. Meetings still happen. Reports still get filed. And then a StarKist comes along and makes $200 million by simply switching from a tin can to a resealable pouch, a move a sclerotic competitor could have made years earlier, if anything could have actually moved through their system fast enough to try it. The fix isn't a single bold initiative. It's treating the clogging itself as the disease, actively testing whether ideas can still move through your organization at all, not just whether you have any. If the problem is organizational sclerosis, the treatment starts by restoring movement. Here are three ways to test whether ideas can still flow. Action Items: Time how long it actually took your last new idea to go from "suggested" to "shipped." If you don't know the number, that's your first symptom. Identify one process, approval layer, or sign-off that exists purely because "that's how it's always been done" and remove it this month. Ask two people at different levels of the organization how hard it is to get a new idea heard. Compare the answers. Explore the full How Innovation Happens series.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/10/how-innovation-happens-lesson-005/