Innovation Archives - Zahara Chetty

The wild work of discovery: Why good ideas die and six field notes for keeping them alive

zaharachettyJune 13, 2026InnovationNo Comments

We love to obsess over structures. It isn’t only Agile. Design Thinking, Lean, OKRs, SAFe, we reach for frameworks the way nervous people reach for a handrail, and then we forget they were ever optional. A method that started as one good answer to one specific problem slowly hardens into the way things are simply done. Agile is just the clearest example, because it’s the one we’ve canonised hardest. It was built to solve a real problem in enterprise software delivery.

However, it’s worth remembering the room it came from. Seventeen people, nearly all of them white, middle-aged, Western men, writing for enterprise software delivery as they knew it in 2001. That doesn’t make their thinking wrong. It makes it situated, and a situated snapshot is a strange thing to treat as universal law, decades later, across contexts those authors never had in front of them.

Genuinely new work, especially in AI, especially now, doesn’t behave like that. The roadmap is often unclear. The most valuable outcome is sometimes learning what not to build. Progress can look like disproving an assumption before it turns into an expensive mistake.

Where good ideas go to die

zaharachettyJune 6, 2026Humans and AI, InnovationNo Comments

The book is dedicated to “the brave ideas that arrived hopeful, attended 47 meetings, and quietly lost the will to live.”

That line is the closest thing the book has to a thesis. The ideas are not dying because they are bad. They are dying because the systems they are arriving in were never designed to absorb anything genuinely new. The systems were designed to look like they were absorbing something new, which is a different thing.

Innovation theatre is the performance of innovation in the absence of any actual change to budgets, reporting lines, power, risk, process, or strategy. The performance is the point. The change is the threat. Anyone who has worked inside a large organisation for more than two years has watched this happen, and most have eventually taken part in it because they could not see another way to keep the work moving.