This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

When you're trying to invent a new product,

or write a screenplay, or come up with a new way

to do something at work, it's fun to focus on the possibilities. It's enjoyable to focus on the possibilities. It's enjoyable to have brainstorming

sessions, throw ideas up on a whiteboard, daydream. Very often, however, these brainstorming sessions don't lead to anything tangible.

Teams fill up walls with sticky notes about creative possibilities and suggestions for

improvement, but none of them are actually implemented.

If you've been part of an organization that does this, you might get the sneaking suspicion that you are not engaged in innovation, but in what some researchers call innovation theater.

This is not to say that ideas are unimportant,

but it is to underscore that when it comes to building something new,

what really matters is execution.

For the last few weeks, we've been exploring the science of innovation. We've examined how

successful entrepreneurs are great at something called effectuation. We've

looked at our attitudes about the role of genius in success and how cultures of genius can undermine our growth.

If you miss those episodes, I strongly recommend you listen to them in this podcast feed. Today in the latest installment of our innovation 2.0 series we

explore the science of execution. How to actual innovation

innovation theater to actual innovation, this week on Hidden Brain. you're going to. We all have them, small frustrations that make our lives just a little bit more difficult,

like standing in a long line at the grocery

store or getting too many emails, not being able to reach a customer service

rep when you have a problem. At Stanford University, psychologist Bob Sutton

studies these frustrations.

The annoying bureaucracies we encounter

...