Why I Created the Innovation Operating Principles and the Innovation Navigation Styles Inventory

By Frances Cairns

I didn’t set out to create a framework or a product.

I was trying to understand myself.

After years of working across very different innovation environments—Fortune 500 companies, Silicon Valley startups, and nonprofits seeking growth through earned revenue—I found myself circling the same questions:

• Why do some leaders succeed at innovation and business transformation while others fail, even when they appear equally capable? 

• What did I actually learn about making decisions under pressure, when the risks were high and the information incomplete? 

• When I made the calls that mattered most, what was really driving me—ego, instinct, ambition, fear, or something quieter and harder to name?

I wanted deeper self-knowledge. Not personality insight. Not labels. I wanted language for the patterns I could feel but hadn’t yet named—the forces shaping how decisions were made when certainty disappeared.

That search became the beginning of the Innovation Operating Principles.

Decisions, Not Ideas, Determine Outcomes

What I saw first—in myself and then repeatedly in others—was that innovation doesn’t rise or fall on ideas. It rises or falls on decisions.

In innovation environments, leaders are constantly putting decisions into motion. They are deciding how to see the strategy, how to create new products, programs, and services; how to act when conditions are constrained; and how fast to learn and course-correct to create business value. These decisions are not occasional. They are continuous.

Over time, I noticed that beneath these decisions were consistent drivers—forces that leaders engaged, whether they were conscious of them or not, in how they narrowed or expanded focus, how they framed risk, how they moved from imagination to execution, how they responded when something failed, how they interpreted feedback.

These weren’t random behaviors. They followed patterns.

The Innovation Operating Principles emerged from recognizing that these patterns were not personal quirks, but immutable principles of innovation in change environments. They show up anywhere something new must be created, nurtured, and adopted because it delivers business value.

The principles are always at play. Leaders don’t choose whether they exist. They choose how they apply them.

And that choice determines growth outcomes.

The Intangibles Beneath the Tangibles

Most organizations talk about growth as the goal. Revenue. Scale. Market share. But growth is a lagging indicator. It shows up after the work has already succeeded—or failed.

Unlike innovation outcomes, innovation processes are crucial leading indicators. They are what signal the essential fit between the problem, the customer's need, and the timing of the solution. To focus on growth and outcomes without understanding the innovation processes that produced them is like trying to explain a result without understanding the actions that led to it, especially if those critical signals were misunderstood or ignored.

This is where the intangibles live.

The intangibles are the invisible operating forces that shape how leaders interpret reality, prioritize action, and make tradeoffs under pressure. Much like gravity, they are timeless. But unlike gravity, their effects are deeply shaped by context. The same principle applied in different environments can drive very different outcomes. What creates momentum in one context can stall progress in another. This is the power—and the danger—of the intangibles.

What finally made the principles intelligible to me wasn’t just naming them. It was seeing them in motion.

The Principles in Motion: The INSI 

The principles don’t operate in isolation. They are not a checklist. They are not sequential steps. They are in motion—constantly appearing as leaders navigate change. That insight led to the development of the Innovation Navigation Styles Inventory (INSI).

The INSI reflects how leaders actually move through innovation environments. In every effort, leaders are simultaneously seeing, creating, acting, and learning. What changes is which principles dominate, and how consciously they are engaged.

The INSI is powered by four decision drivers that leaders put into motion every day.

Strategy: How You See

Strategy, in innovation, is not a plan. It is perception.

It is how leaders see the landscape in front of them—what they notice, what they filter out, and how they frame risk. The principles at play here shape reality before any action is taken.

One of the most revealing principles is Focus; are you Driven or Opportunistic? I’ve watched leaders confronted with the same opportunity reach entirely different conclusions. One narrows quickly, protecting momentum and clarity. Another stays open, scanning for signals that others might miss. Neither is inherently right or wrong, but each instinct sets a very different future in motion.

Presence shows up next: Convincer or Listener. Some leaders move a room toward closure through declaration and framing. Others hold space, listening deeply before deciding. When a team leans too far into listening, decisions drift. When it leans too far into convincing, alignment becomes fragile.

Then there is Risk: Cautious or Experimental. Cautious leaders manage exposure stepwise. Experimental leaders learn by acting. In innovation, the wrong risk posture at the wrong moment either burns resources or kills momentum.

And finally, Vision: Insight or Instinct. Some leaders wait for evidence and external validation. Others make conviction calls when evidence is incomplete. The future rarely arrives with proof attached. Strategy is the discipline of knowing when to seek more insight—and when to trust instinct.

This is what I mean when I say strategy is how you see.

Creation: How You Create Valuable Intellectual Property

Creation is where insight becomes tangible.

This is where ideas turn into products, services, programs, and capabilities others can actually use. Creation principles determine whether creativity remains abstract or becomes valuable intellectual property.

Ideas are evaluated through Exploration or Scalability. Exploration widens the field and uncovers unmet needs. Scalability forces the question early: can this live in the real world? Teams that over-index on exploration never ship. Teams obsessed with scalability too early rarely discover anything new.

Speed appears as Deliberate or Rapid. Deliberate leaders protect quality and system integrity. Rapid leaders compress cycles to accelerate learning. Innovation requires both deliberate, where trust matters, and rapid, where learning is the point.

Imagination shows up as Pragmatic or Originator. Pragmatic imagination improves what exists. The originator's imagination reframes what’s possible. Organizations often reward pragmatism and quietly exhaust their originators—then wonder why everything feels incremental.

And then there is IP, valued either through Profitability or Traction. Some leaders define value through economics. Others define it through adoption. Innovation collapses when one approach is chosen too early. Profitability without traction is fantasy. Traction without a path to profitability is a hobby.

Creation, then, is not about ideas; it’s about making value durable.

Scrappiness: How You Act

Scrappiness is leadership under constraint.

This is where innovation stops being theoretical and becomes behavioral.

Failure shows up as Reflective or Reframing. Reflective leaders extract learning. Reframing leaders change the question and move forward. Reflection without movement becomes analysis paralysis. Reframing without learning becomes churn.

Resilience appears as Rebound or Persistent. Some leaders recover quickly. Others endure relentlessly. Both are needed. Persistence without reflection becomes stubbornness. Rebound without accountability becomes avoidance.

Adaptability can be Reactive or Proactive. Reactive leaders respond brilliantly. Proactive leaders shape conditions in advance. Innovation stalls when teams are busy reacting but never repositioning.

And Intuition emerges as Analysis or Synthesis. Analysis breaks problems down. Synthesis integrates signals—data, people, timing, emotion—into a whole. Innovation decisions rarely live in one dataset. Without synthesis, leadership fragments.

Scrappiness is not hustle. It is principled action when certainty is unavailable.

Growth: How You Learn

Growth is often mistaken for the outcome. It’s not. Growth is the learning engine.

Motivation shows up as Purpose or Achievement. Purpose anchors meaning. Achievement drives momentum. Purpose without achievement drifts. Achievement without purpose burns out.

Feedback Acceptance can be Self-Reflective or Responsive. Some leaders internalize feedback deeply. Others adjust quickly in public. Self-reflection without action delays learning. Responsiveness without reflection creates whiplash.

Advisory shows up as Internal or External. Some leaders rely on institutional knowledge. Others pull in an outside perspective. Innovation collapses when leaders stay only inside or chase every external signal.

And Empathy emerges as Product Impact or Customer-Centric. One orients toward outcomes delivered. The other toward lived experience. Innovation requires building something that is adopted and valued.

This is what I mean by growth, as in how you learn.

From Self-Awareness to System Awareness

Understanding these principles changed how I understood leadership.

Self-awareness became foundational, but insufficient on its own. Leaders don’t operate in isolation. Teams and organizations have patterns, too.

That’s why the work expanded to three levels:

• Individual: How you apply the principles

• Team: whether your collective capabilities fit the challenge

• Organization: whether the principles stack into scalable capacity

This is not an abstract diagnosis. It is a practical orientation.

Leaders Are Not Archetypes

You are not Steve Jobs. You are not Elon Musk. You are a unique expression of your experience, context, and DNA. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?

INSI exists to reflect that uniqueness back to you.

Using AI to analyze over four billion possible combinations, INSI reveals how leaders prefer to apply the principles under pressure. INSI doesn’t assess personality or ability. It inventories preferred competencies in use.

It acts as a mirror. You decide what to respond to. But the mirror shows you what you focus on.

The principles are timeless. Context gives them power.

AI can amplify pattern recognition and scenario prediction. But only humans bring judgment, meaning, and responsibility.

In a world of superintelligence, leaders who understand and consciously recognize and apply their intangibles—across individuals, teams, and systems—will have the advantage.

Frances Cairns is the founder and CEO of C\R Strategy Partners. She leveraged decades of experience building successful products and innovation programs to develop the Innovation Operating Principles and the INSI assessment.