Flowchart

To draw the route an idea actually takes through your organisation, including the bits nobody designed. Most innovation processes exist on a slide. The real one is a series of conversations, and it is the real one that decides what gets built.

It earns its place when people say the organisation is bad at innovation. That is almost never a shortage of ideas. It is that nobody can say where an idea goes after it is had, so ideas go nowhere in particular and everybody concludes the culture is at fault.

Draw it from a real example, not from the ideal. Take one idea from the last year, one that made it and one that did not, and trace where each actually went, who saw it, and who stopped it.

Mark every point where a decision was made and write the name of whoever made it. Unowned gates are where ideas go to wait, and they will be the longest stretches on your chart. Then mark the exits. A route with no way to kill an idea is not a process, it is a queue, and it will fill up until nothing moves.

The chart gets drawn as it should be rather than as it is, which produces a diagram everyone nods at and nobody recognises. The useful version has the awkward loop in it where things go back for a third review.

The other failure is stages without criteria. A gate that says "review" tells you nothing about what would pass. Write what has to be true to move on, and what happens to an idea that does not clear it, because "we will revisit" is how a portfolio quietly turns into a graveyard.