What are we afraid of?

Fear is a complex and personal topic—what intimidates or paralyzes some can motivate others to act boldly. In aggregate, however, our research shows that three fears hold back corporate innovation more than others: fear of criticism, fear of uncertainty, and fear of negative impact on one’s career. Individuals working at average or below-average innovators are two to four times more likely than those working at leading innovators to cite these fears as barriers to innovation.

We were intrigued to find that the fear of career impact emerged as the biggest differentiator between those who work at top innovation companies and others, being 3.6 times more prevalent. Such worries have predictable consequences. When we believe our decisions can put our advancement or compensation at risk, loss aversion takes the steering wheel and drives us to hedge our bets. This results in employees being reluctant to fully invest (or gamble) their careers on innovation, let alone on a single innovation project.

Leading innovators are much more successful at alleviating these career concerns by making innovation an explicit requirement of professional success. For example, these companies are 2.9 times more likely than average and lagging innovators to expect executives to demonstrate innovation initiative in order to advance.

The second-biggest human barrier to innovation is difficulty dealing with uncertainty and loss of control. Such fears trigger the ambiguity effect, a cognitive bias that leads us to avoid options with uncertain outcomes. Management executives seeking more control over outcomes often prioritize incremental innovations they perceive as less risky or push teams for assurances that their projects will pay off, producing the counterproductive result of less experimentation, less-ambitious ideas, and less creativity. To allay their fear of uncertainty, some leaders treat past market dynamics as predictors of future performance—a risky assumption, particularly in dynamic times.

This fear plagues average or below-average innovators almost three times as much as it does leading innovators. Employees of top innovators are 11 times more likely than those at other organizations to say that their organizations incentivize risk taking and five times more likely to report encouragement of experimentation. Leading innovators also have a more nuanced understanding of which experiments can be reversed (as most can) and which ones are commitments to scale.

Fear of criticism, the third big hurdle to innovation, is something we all feel to some degree. Group conformity and tribalism are basic survival instincts, but these tendencies can imperil companies’ innovation success. Industry norms shape employees’ sense of what is possible, discouraging them from bringing forward ideas that sharply break with convention. When ideas do materialize, people water them down to fit those norms. This conformity bias leads us to follow the crowd, even if it is to our organization’s detriment.

As with the other two fears, leading innovators are much better at easing these trepidations, with 1.5 times fewer executives reporting them than those at other organizations. Employees of successful innovators are also three times more likely to say that their organizations make it easy to critique ideas openly.

Left unchecked, these and other fears can compound into large cultural barriers, transforming initial enthusiasm for innovation into apathy. Indeed, executives at innovation outperformers describe work environments filled with positive energy and enthusiasm, and identify creativity and excitement as the top feelings associated with innovation (see sidebar, “Five ways to move past fear”).