INSI in Action: What It Takes to Move a Cohort of People

Changing a single leader is hard. Changing a culture requires a different theory entirely.

Most organizations get this wrong. They run a leadership program for the people at the top, and then wait for the change to cascade. It doesn't. Or it does, slowly and unevenly, in the parts of the organization where individual leaders happen to carry it. The rest stays exactly as it was.

We've seen this pattern too many times to count. And we've spent considerable effort building a different model.

The Threshold Problem

Research into organizational behavior is clear on one thing: you don't need universal buy-in to shift a culture. You need a committed minority, only roughly 25%, distributed across the organization, operating from a shared framework, building new behaviors in real work rather than in training rooms. Hit that threshold and the culture starts to move. Stay below it, and even the best individual development work dissipates.

The implication is both freeing and demanding. You don't have to change everyone. But you do have to be deliberate about who you change; how you develop, encourage, and support them, and how you measure that the change is actually happening.

This is the logic at the center of a program we are currently running with 31 healthcare professionals working across 20 regional health plans. It began, as most of our work does, at the individual leader level with two distinct cohorts. Each one took our Innovation Navigation Styles Inventory  (INSI) multiple times and received coaching throughout the program. The insights from that work were substantive: strong customer-centricity across the team, high resilience under pressure, meaningful growth edges around speed and bold experimentation.

Still, organizational ambitions often outpaced the sphere of influence perceived by the participants. The question became: how do you propagate new capabilities across companies without diluting them?

Innovation Accelerator

The answer was a new program designed not as a scaled version of business as usual, but as a distinct model suited to the dynamics of scale.

Seventy-two emerging leaders, still in their day jobs. Selected for growth: adaptability, resilience, instinct, collaboration. The focus included specific preferences for individuals seeking fast, small wins over large-project thinking. People who could build new behaviors without needing a major initiative to justify them.

We designed each program session around specific principles that the organizations identified as core innovation needs. Common themes were: 

• Focus: capacity to hold strategic priorities even as demands multiply

• Risk: the ability to run safe experiments without waiting for perfect conditions

• Ideas: generating bold, cross-functional thinking that wouldn't otherwise surface

• Speed: making decisions and moving forward without full certainty.

Sessions ran monthly through 2025 and into 2026, and three cohorts have now moved through the program. Each cohort takes INSI two to four times during the year, paired with individual coaching sessions. A change-over-time assessment at the end of the program creates a structured moment for each participant to see what's actually shifted – not based on feeling, but on data.

This continuous feedback loop is critical. Insights from INSI and cohort feedback directly informed program modifications, such as the addition of confidence scoring and a shift toward more experimental, hands-on work. 

The measurement architecture is deliberate. You can't build innovation capability if you are flying blind. INSI serves as a continuous read on individual and cohort development, informing coaching, feeding back into program design, and generating the organizational intelligence that makes this kind of investment accountable.

From One Team to Many

What makes scale genuinely hard isn't logistics. It's specificity. Large programs tend to trade precision for reach. They deliver content calibrated to an average participant rather than to the actual diagnostic picture of the people in the room. The development work feels real, but doesn't produce durable behavior change because it isn't responding to what the individual actually needs.

INSI refuses that tradeoff. The assessment reveals not only where each participant's defaults live, but also where they are adaptable and can call upon a range of behaviors available to them without effort. And, where they have to consciously shift their thinking to build their range. With this approach in mind, coaching can work precisely: not encouraging risk-taking in general, but supporting a specific leader whose INSI profile shows strong insight-driven decision-making and a cautious experimentation anchor to introduce deliberate low-stakes experiments in their actual work.

That specificity, multiplied across more than 70 people and sustained for a year, is what moved the entire organization, not just the program cohort.

We've seen what happens when this works. At another client, a Fortune 500 innovation team operating at significant scale, quarterly INSI check-ins over sustained time produced a 35% increase in cross-functional alignment and a 45% improvement in velocity. Those numbers aren't magic. They are the outcome of sustained visibility into how leadership was actually functioning, with enough specificity to act on what the data showed.

What Scaling Requires

Scaling an innovation capability program requires three things that most organizations underinvest in.

1. The selection model is grounded in honest criteria. Consider a skill-and-will framework to map participants on a continuum from aspiring to excelling, and prioritize participants who already demonstrate a growth orientation. This isn't elitism. It's efficient. Development resources compound fastest for people who are ready to move.

2. Measurement architecture that runs throughout, not just at the start or finish. Most programs assess at intake and celebrate at completion. What happens in between, where the actual development happens, is largely invisible. INSI's quarterly cadence surfaces the in-between change. The organization builds a longitudinal dataset on its own innovation leadership capability; leadership develops in response to data, not just encouragement.

3. Peer accountability is built into the structure. The cohort model is well-suited because peer relationships are among the most powerful drivers of sustained behavior change. When a colleague you respect is also building innovation behaviors in their real work, the social proof is immediate, and the accountability is mutual. You don't just hold yourself to a new standard; you hold each other to it.

A dedicated coordination structure runs alongside. Think of a shared space for the cohort, an internal coordinator aligned to the programs, and defined coaching touchpoints. The infrastructure isn't a nice-to-have. It's helping to reinforce change.

The Long Game

Building innovation capability at scale is not a one-and-done initiative. It's a commitment to changing how an organization navigates uncertainty, one leader at a time, in real work, measured continuously.

The organizations that do this well don't treat innovation as a project to be completed. They treat it as a practice to be developed. They invest in the infrastructure that makes development visible and accountable. They identify the committed minority and build the conditions for that minority to hold and spread what they've learned.

“Innovation isn't a project to be completed. It is a practice to be developed.”

The starting point, in every case, is the same: you have to know what you're actually working with. Before you can change how 70+ people lead, you need to understand where their anchors are, where they can adapt, and what strengths they are likely to overuse under pressure.

That's what INSI surfaces and helps you to put into practice, enabling the cycle of change across your organization. 

To learn more about INSI, get started here.