Most Companies Don't Lack Ideas. They Suffer From Idea Isolation.

The dominant narrative about innovation in large organizations is that there are not enough good ideas — that the corporate environment suppresses creativity, that bureaucracy extinguishes initiative, that talented people eventually stop trying. This narrative is wrong in an important way, and the misdiagnosis leads to the wrong interventions.

Most organizations have abundant ideas. What they lack is the infrastructure to connect them.

What Idea Isolation Looks Like

Motivated people generate ideas constantly. When they care about their work — and most people at good companies do care — they think about the problems in their domain and they start developing responses. Sometimes quietly, with a document they have been updating for months. Sometimes more actively, building a prototype in the margins of their regular work. Sometimes by finding one like-minded colleague and beginning to develop something together.

The problem is that this development happens in isolation. Nobody else knows about it. No adjacent team is aware of similar work underway on the other side of the building. No leader has visibility into the emerging solution until it reaches a level of development where the creator feels ready to share it.

"Motivated people generate ideas constantly, and because they care, they often start developing them alone — with glue, scissors, and quiet determination. But isolation leads to silos, protectiveness, and duplication."

And then, at some point, someone discovers that another team was working on almost the same thing for the past eight months. Suddenly there are two frustrated idea owners, two competing solutions, and a leadership team trying to decide which one to back — without a clear basis for the decision, because both were developed independently rather than in dialogue.

The Structural Cost of Silos

The consequences of idea isolation are not just inefficient — they are actively corrosive.

Duplication means the organization spent twice the effort to produce solutions that could have been developed jointly, with better outcomes, in less time. The resources invested in the losing solution are not just wasted — they represent a team whose work was invisible, not valued, and ultimately discarded.

Protectiveness means that teams who have invested in isolated solutions become defensive rather than collaborative when they discover each other. The response to "we're working on something similar" is not "great, let's combine" — it is "our approach is better" and a competition begins that benefits nobody.

Missed synthesis means that the best solution — which would have drawn on the strengths of both independent approaches — never gets made. The organization's resources are split between two weaker alternatives rather than unified behind one stronger one.

What Journey Management Does About It

The Creation phase of journey management is specifically designed to prevent idea isolation from producing these outcomes.

By the time teams begin developing Big Solutions, the alignment workshop has made all emerging solutions visible on the shared map. Every team with work underway in a relevant area has seen their effort placed on the map, acknowledged, and connected to the customer pains and opportunities it addresses. The landscape of what is already in progress is known.

When teams now begin developing Big Solutions, they start from a complete inventory. They know who is working on adjacent problems. They can reach out, compare approaches, and decide whether their efforts should merge, specialize, or sequence rather than duplicate.

The result is what the book describes simply: it is better to have ten percent of one thousand than one hundred percent of one hundred. The solution that draws on the combined capabilities of two teams is not just twice as good — it is often qualitatively different, addressing dimensions of the problem that neither team would have reached independently.