Treat Organizational Sclerosis as a Disease, Not a Metaphor

“Organizational sclerosis is clogging up your innovation arteries!”

I didn’t coin “organizational sclerosis” to be clever. I use it because it’s medically accurate: it’s what happens when the arteries that used to carry new ideas through an organization slowly clog with process, precedent, and fear, until nothing moves, even when everyone inside still believes they’re agile.

The dangerous part is that sclerosis is painless until it isn’t. Things still run. Meetings still happen. Reports still get filed. And then a StarKist comes along and makes $200 million by simply switching from a tin can to a resealable pouch, a move a sclerotic competitor could have made years earlier, if anything could have actually moved through their system fast enough to try it.

The fix isn’t a single bold initiative. It’s treating the clogging itself as the disease, actively testing whether ideas can still move through your organization at all, not just whether you have any.

If the problem is organizational sclerosis, the treatment starts by restoring movement. Here are three ways to test whether ideas can still flow.