How to Prove Innovation Value Early (and Keep Stakeholders With You)
- Susie Braam
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
A practical approach to measuring progress and communicating impact before the big wins arrive.
You've done the hard work. You've clarified your innovation team's purpose, assessed your organisational readiness, chosen your orientation, and designed your operating model. Now the pressure is on to demonstrate progress and impact.
But there's an uncomfortable truth: innovation timelines don't neatly match quarterly reporting cycles. The big wins — new revenue streams, transformed customer experiences, cultural transformation — take months or years to materialise. But stakeholders want to see progress now.
If you can't demonstrate value early and consistently, you'll find yourself in a familiar trap: defending your team's existence instead of doing the work that justifies it.
This article introduces two connected disciplines: measuring progress in ways that capture early value, and communicating that progress to keep stakeholders committed to what you're building.
The Measurement Problem
Most organisations measure innovation the same way they measure everything else: by outcomes. Revenue generated. Costs saved. Products launched. Market share gained.
These metrics matter — they're the whole point. But they're lagging indicators. They tell you what has already happened.
For innovation work, where experiments often fail before they succeed and the path to impact is rarely linear, lagging indicators alone will make you look like you're achieving nothing for uncomfortably long stretches.
What you need alongside them are leading indicators — measures that predict future success and show you're on the right track before the results arrive.
Think of it like planting a tree. The lagging indicator is fruit. But if you only measure fruit, you'll think nothing is happening for years. Leading indicators are the signs of healthy growth along the way: roots establishing, new branches forming, leaves appearing, blossom. They tell you the tree is alive and progressing even when there's no fruit to show.
Leading vs Lagging: What to Measure
The right indicators depend on what kind of innovation team you're running. Here's how to think about it for each orientation (you can learn more about the different orientations here):
Notice that leading indicators are things you can influence directly through your activities. Lagging indicators are the outcomes those activities should eventually produce. Both matter, but in the early days, leading indicators are what keep you — and your stakeholders — confident that progress is happening.
A quick note on metrics: don't overthink this. Choose something good enough and go with it — you can adjust as you learn. Measuring something imperfect beats measuring nothing. And to know if you're improving, you need a baseline. If you don't have hard data yet, see if you can get it quickly. If not, ask a few informed people and make your best educated guess. Don't let perfection slow you down.
From Chaos to Focus: A Personal Story
In my second Head of Innovation role, I led a team full of action-oriented people who loved generating ideas and running with them. We had energy to spare. The problem was, we were going off in all different directions.
We'd made good progress on the cultural piece — running leadership training and engaging stakeholders, which had increased awareness and buy-in. But we'd become increasingly distracted by all the areas where we felt we could add value. The result was we weren't having the impact I knew we were capable of. From the outside, I suspect we were starting to look a little chaotic. I also saw some unhelpful team behaviours developing as people went off in their own directions with limited accountability.
It was time to rethink our strategy and get everyone focused on high-priority outcomes. I needed better ways to hold us all accountable to the priorities we'd committed to. We were in a mission-focused organisation — we were there to have impact, not do whatever we wanted.
That's when I discovered Christina Wodtke's book Radical Focus, and it transformed how we worked.
The Radical Focus Approach
Radical Focus introduced a set of principles that helped us move from scattered activity to purposeful progress:
The power of ONE. What's the one thing that we really need to move the needle on? It’s not that this is the ONLY thing you do, but it is the one thing you MUST do. This forced us to make real choices instead of trying to do everything at once.
Ruthless prioritisation. Good ideas that didn't serve our ONE priority went into a 'parking lot' — acknowledged but deliberately set aside. This stopped the drift that had been killing our focus.
OKR structure. One qualitative, inspiring, memorable objective paired with 2-3 measurable key results. The objective tells you where you're going; the key results tell you how you'll know you're getting there.
Weekly check-ins. Every week, we reviewed: What did we accomplish? What are we committing to next? How confident are we (on a scale of 1-10) that we'll hit our key results? What obstacles are in our way? These check-ins maintained momentum and surfaced problems early.
Transparency and alignment. Everyone could see what everyone else was working on and how it connected to our shared objective. No more going off in individual directions.
The impact was significant. We went from a team that was busy but unfocused to one that could clearly articulate what we were trying to achieve and demonstrate progress toward it.
I've created a simple one-page template that captures these elements — use it for your weekly or monthly check-ins.
Keeping Stakeholders With You
Here's where the internal discipline connects to external communication. Once we had focus and clear metrics, I could share monthly with senior stakeholders what we'd achieved and learned over the last month and what our priority was for the next month.
This gave them a clear sense of what we were working on and the progress we were making. No more vague updates about 'building innovation culture' or lists of activities that didn't add up to a coherent story. Instead: here's our objective, here's how we're tracking against it, here's what we learned, here's what's next.
Three principles made this communication effective:
Lead with outcomes, not activities. Don't tell stakeholders you ran three workshops and conducted twelve interviews. Tell them you validated (or invalidated) a key assumption about customer needs, and what that means for your next move. Activities are inputs; stakeholders care about outputs and outcomes.
Be honest about setbacks. Innovation involves failure. When experiments don't work, say so — but frame failures as learning. 'We tested X and discovered it won't work because of Y, which has redirected us toward Z' is a sign of progress, not a sign of incompetence. Stakeholders lose trust when they sense you're hiding problems, not when you acknowledge them.
Connect to what they care about. Frame your progress in terms of the business problems you're solving — the same problems that should be driving your work (see Article 1 in this series). If leadership created your team to address customer churn, your updates should consistently link back to that challenge. Don't make them work to see the relevance.
Tracking Organisational Progress Over Time
Remember the six dimensions of organisational readiness from Article 2? They're not just a one-time diagnostic. They're an ongoing scorecard.
I recommend reassessing your organisation's readiness approximately every six months. This does two things:
First, it shows you what's shifting. Perhaps leadership commitment has strengthened since you've been delivering quick wins and building credibility. Perhaps cultural safety has improved as more people see experimentation rewarded rather than punished. Perhaps operational readiness has declined as the organisation has gone through restructuring. These shifts matter — they should inform your strategy.
Second, it gives you evidence of impact beyond project-level metrics. If your team's job is to build innovation capability (an Enabler orientation), improvements in readiness scores are your outcome. They're proof that you're changing the organisation, not just running programmes.
Track these assessments over time. When you can show stakeholders that leadership commitment has moved from 'weak' to 'moderate', or that cultural safety scores have improved by 15%, you're demonstrating systemic change — the kind of change that makes innovation sustainable rather than dependent on heroic individual efforts.
The Role of Quick Wins and Storytelling
Metrics matter, but they're not the whole story. Two additional elements help keep stakeholders believing:
Quick wins build credibility fast. Even if your ultimate goal is transformational, find opportunities to demonstrate value early. A small prototype that solves a real problem. A process improvement that saves visible time. A customer insight that shapes a business decision. These wins give stakeholders evidence that your team can deliver, which buys you patience for the longer-term work.
Storytelling makes impact tangible. Numbers show progress; stories make people care about it. When you can describe a specific customer whose experience improved, or a specific team member who tried something new because of your coaching, or a specific decision that went differently because of your frameworks — that's memorable in a way that metrics alone aren't. Collect these stories deliberately. Share them strategically.
What To Do Next
1. Download the Radical Focus template and use it with your team at a regular cadence to align around a shared objective. Capture your team priorities (what each person is accountable for), your metrics (including both leading and lagging indicators), your parking log (good ideas you're deliberately setting aside), and your health (blockers, distractions, team dynamics to watch).
2. Establish your check-in rhythm. Weekly with your team on accomplishments, commitments, confidence, and obstacles. Monthly with your key stakeholders on progress, learnings, and priorities.
3. Schedule your next readiness reassessment. If you completed the Innovation Readiness Assessment when you started, put a date in the diary — roughly six months from now — to reassess and see what's shifted.
4. Identify one quick win. What small, visible value can you deliver in the next 30 days that will build credibility for your longer-term work?
In the next article, I'll cover how to build momentum with limited formal authority — the coalition-building and influence strategies that help innovation teams thrive even when they can't mandate change.
This is Article 5 in a series on building innovation functions that actually work. Subscribe for early access to tools and future articles.
Comments