The Innovation Coach Knows That Most People Are Asking the Wrong Question About Why

There's a moment that happens in almost every organization that tries to do something new. Someone sits in a meeting and says, "You know what we need? We need to find our why."

And everyone nods. They've read the book. They know the TED talk. Your why is your purpose. Your north star. The thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. Find your why and everything else falls into place.

Except it doesn't.

I recently talked with Suzanne Vos, an innovation coach who works inside a massive financial institution (ING) helping people launch and scale new businesses. And one of the first things she said about her job is that it's kind of an ungrateful occupation. Most of the time you're fighting resistance. You're alone. You're pushing back against an organization that's built to say no.

And yet, she doesn't focus on helping people find their why. She focuses on something different. She focuses on listening.

The Problem With Motivation-Driven Innovation

Here's what most organizations get wrong about innovation. They think the bottleneck is motivation. They think if people just cared more, if they just understood the purpose, if they just felt connected to the vision, then innovation would happen naturally.

So they bring in speakers. They run workshops. They do trust falls. They try to inspire people into taking risks.

And most of it fails.

Suzanne told me something interesting. When people come to her feeling blocked, feeling like they can't push an idea through, the first thing she does is listen. Not inspire. Not motivate. Listen. She asks: "What's really blocking you here? Is it a bad experience you had before? Is it risk? Is it unclear value? Is it that nobody's explained why this matters?"

Because here's what she discovered: The resistance people feel isn't usually about motivation. It's about being heard.

"The key blocker for most people is if they don't feel heard or seen," she said. "Then they also won't feel that they can make an impact if they embrace change."

This is profound because it means that most of the time, the problem isn't the idea. The problem is that the person with the idea doesn't feel safe. They don't feel like the organization sees them. And when you don't feel seen, why would you stick your neck out?

The Stubborn Question

But Suzanne also talks about something she calls "stubborn about the goal, flexible about the method." And this is where it gets interesting because it's the opposite of what most coaches teach.

Most advice says: Be flexible about your goals. Adapt. Pivot. Don't get attached to the outcome. And sure, that's important. But what Suzanne discovered is that people also need to be stubborn about something. They need clarity about what they're actually trying to achieve.

When you walk into a room and you're fuzzy about your goal, every piece of pushback shakes you. You start doubting yourself. You start wondering if maybe the organization is right to say no.

But if you're crystal clear about what you're trying to achieve, then pushback becomes information. It becomes "Here's an obstacle. How do we get around it?"

The flexibility part—the method part—that's where listening comes in. Because you can't figure out the method alone. You have to involve the people who know how the organization actually works, what the constraints are, what's politically possible.

"When you challenge teams and leaders on whether they have evidence for this," Suzanne said, "that usually flicks a switch. Most teams understand the value of doing research and running experiments rather than just arguing about what they think is true."

You're not trying to convince them. You're inviting them to prove it together.

The Assumption That Kills Ideas

Here's where I think Suzanne hits on something that most organizations are completely blind to. She talks about identifying assumptions. Assumptions are things we believe are true but we have no evidence for. And in most organizations, we make decisions based on assumptions.

"Do we have evidence for this? Do we know this for a fact? Or is this a gut feeling? Is this an ego that says this is really what we need?"

This one question—Do we have evidence?—should be the death knell of about 80% of corporate decision-making. Because most corporate decisions are made by the person with the title or the person who speaks loudest, not by the person with the evidence.

And here's the brutal part: Once you introduce the idea that you need evidence, you can't go back. You've basically said, "We're not going to make decisions based on who has power. We're going to make them based on what we learn."

That changes everything. Because now the person with the idea has a fair shot. As long as they can run an experiment and gather evidence.

The Demystification Problem

Suzanne talks about something she calls "demystification." Most people in organizations have this idea that innovation is some mythical quest. You need a new-to-the-world idea. It has to disrupt three industries. It has to make a hundred million dollars in the first month.

And so most people think: "That's not for me. I'm not an innovator."

But Suzanne's approach is different. She runs one-day trainings where people learn basic innovation concepts in a hackathon style and by the end of the day they've built a prototype. And the feedback she gets is almost always the same: "Wow, I didn't know I could do innovation too."

That's the whole game right there. Innovation isn't something special. It's not something that only certain people can do. It's a skill. And like any skill, you can learn it.

The problem is that most organizations make it sound so complicated—so mystical, so special—that normal people feel excluded. So they never try.

Finding the Right Why (Which Usually Isn't About Purpose)

Here's the thing that stuck with me most from my conversation with Suzanne. When she talks about helping people move forward on their ideas, she doesn't focus on purpose or meaning or why. She focuses on relevance.

"Is what we're introducing still relevant for the team and the people? Do they still feel what is being done is relevant for their why?"

Notice the difference. She's not asking them to adopt your why. She's asking: "Is this relevant to what you care about?"

Because here's the uncomfortable truth: Most people in most organizations don't wake up thinking about changing the company. They think about keeping their job stable. They think about getting home on time. They think about not embarrassing themselves in front of their boss.

And if you can connect your idea to those things—if you can show how it makes their life easier, or more interesting, or less stressful—that's when they actually care.

The who question isn't abstract and philosophical. It's practical and personal. "Why should you care about this? Because it solves this problem you actually have."

Why This Matters (Even If You're Not a Coach)

You're probably not running an innovation program inside a huge corporation. But you've probably had an idea that you wanted to push through and you've probably felt that resistance. The sense that the system is designed to kill ideas before they even have a chance.

What Suzanne's approach teaches is that most of that resistance isn't personal. It's not that people are threatened by you. It's that they don't feel safe. They haven't heard anyone acknowledge what's real about the obstacles. They haven't been invited into the problem-solving.

So the question becomes: How do you invite people into the solution rather than trying to convince them to adopt your vision?

You listen first. You get evidence. You be clear about what you're trying to achieve. And you make it relevant to them, not to you.

That's not motivational. It's not about finding your why. It's about basic respect. It's about treating the people in the room like they have legitimate concerns and real constraints and minds of their own.

And it works better than any TED talk ever will.

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Want the Full Story?

Listen to Yaniv Corem's conversation with Suzanne Vos on The School of Innovation podcast. She goes deep into how to work with resistance in organizations, why assumptions are the silent killer of most innovation projects, and what it actually takes to change an organization's mind.

Because here's what I learned from Suzanne: The most powerful innovation coach isn't the one who inspires you. It's the one who listens long enough to understand what actually matters to you, and then helps you connect that to what the organization needs. That's when things start to move.