“Should I be doing this?”, I asked my manager one day. It was a time when our work was taking too long to deliver. I was unsure of the decisions we were taking and unsure of its overall value to the business. “You tell me”, he replied honestly.

That one encounter has shaped my understanding of Innovation in the modern workplace. Nurturing innovation or even innovating is fucking hard. A lot of us—me included—have been focused on instant gratification. Our phones going off in the ever-increasing continuum of notifications and dopamine induced micro-doses of gratification, we are forever trapped in the search for the easiest release to live in the moment. The modern workplace too is based on improving annual turnover. Employees are taught to achieve their annual targets and KPIs. Innovation on the other hand, lives in a very different time and place.

Innovation can be of two types—Evolutionary and Revolutionary. Innovation does not live in the moment. It comes about from several years of improvement. Several years for which you might have nothing to show in return. Also, (and here is the kicker) innovation can only be discovered looking back. There is no way to tell where your current journey will lead you or what it will eventually end up looking like. For a company to find Revolutionary innovation, it needs to not only have strong leadership, but these leaders need to allow their junior colleagues to pursue ideas and not let them be bogged down by their ‘traditional thinking’.

There are many modern examples of how perseverance is one of the chief causes of Innovation. Henry Ford, Charles Darwin, Mahatma Gandhi, the Wright brothers, etc. have all showed us that all one needs to innovate in any area is dogged perseverance and strong leaders to shield the team for an extended period. However, this is just one aspect of nurturing innovation.

Another factor that plays a big part is the ability to work in a fast-moving, fluid and high-pressure environment, where incremental updates are delivered at break-neck speed. This concept is harder for me to explain. In my (rather limited) experience, the innovation teams that do well apply pressure on themselves to solve problems quickly without using shortcuts or band-aids to fix their problems. This results in high quality output that has other applications in different areas or can have a positive cascading effect on the business.

Employees that work on revolutionary problems for an extended period find the most elegant solutions. Unshackled by annual performance reviews and pushed on by strong leaders, these employees are best poised to deliver ‘revolutionary innovation’. No one said this was easy. Nurturing innovation is fucking hard!