It takes a great deal of humility to recognize you have made a wrong turn on the road to successful innovation, but better to stop and try a radically different approach then to continue down the wrong route for too long.

Good innovators are careful observers, network extensively, run experiments, ask lots of questions, and find ways to bring diverse ideas together. Overarching all of this is an intrinsic interest in working through puzzles.

Document, evaluate, focus, test.

In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer. The decision-making systems here are meant to deal with the reality that decisions about innovative ideas will rely on patterns and intuitions. The best venture capital organizations deal with this challenge by staging investment, actively participating in startups they fund, tying decisions to learning as opposed to artificial dates on the calendar, and assembling a diverse team of decision-makers.

Teams working on disruptive ideas need to be small enough that they can be fed by no more than two pizzas.

Seeking chaos is at least one way to develop the skills and mindsets to tackle ambiguity.

If you work on a new product launch, spent time in a new geography, or work to develop a completely new skill, you have no choice but to figure out new ways to solve problems.