Building Systems to Innovate

What the UAE taught us about designing for adaptation, and what leaders must unlearn to make it real.

Innovation is a system. That was the through-line of our conversation with Wissam Adib, Executive Coach and Advisor. Wissam’s work at the UAE Prime Minister’s Office helped shape a national approach to innovation that traveled far beyond slogans and pilots. As he put it:

“Innovation is the system’s capacity to generate, test, and embed new patterns of thinking and acting that create value and enable adaptation.” —Wissam Adib

Organizations and governments that succeed early tend to harden around that success. They add controls, rituals, and rules that keep the engine humming until the terrain changes. This is Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma in practice: the very conditions that create performance sow the seeds of rigidity. We’ve seen it before (Nokia ignored signs of the rising iPhone). We’re watching it unfold in real time (Google’s search-ads model in an answer-engine age). We see it clearly in the public sector: because institutions are designed never to fail, they’re often designed never to try.

A national lesson: build the “other world,” then bring the learning home

The UAE’s innovation story is bold moves followed by institutional maturity, and the challenge of keeping agility alive within complexity. In response, the government codified an approach that mirrors Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey: leave the known world, learn, return with a gift.

Intelligence: sweep the horizon; seek out ideas everywhere. (One team even studied slime mold to inform transport networks.) 

Possibilities: prototype in a protected space outside day-to-day governance. In practice, that meant relaxing HR and procurement rules so teams could legally do what the “ordinary world” would block. 

Multipliers: translate what works back into policy, services, and communications so the core system can absorb it at scale.

The point isn’t the labels. It’s the design principle: innovation must live on the margins to start, and then re-enter through the front door.

“If you’re waiting until you have to have innovation to start innovating, it’s too late.” —Wissam Adib

In 2025, the UAE ranked 30th globally and 3rd regionally in the Global Innovation Index. While rankings aren’t the destination, they signal a system that keeps choosing renewal.

Governance doesn’t kill innovation, blurred boundaries do

Leaders sometimes fear that adding governance will stifle creativity. The deeper risk is a lack of clarity. Precision and experimentation are both essential, but they require different rules, signals, and consequences.

Think of it as organizational ambidexterity: a “core” where failure is not an option (delivery, compliance, the brand promise) and an “edge” where failure is expected and affordable (search, prototyping, reframing the problem). The wall between them must be real and porous.

“Draw the wall between precision and experimentation—then poke holes in it.” —Wissam Adib

Move people across. Create rituals that make the shift visible. Signal with language (“This is an experiment.” “This is production.”). Hold teams to different standards in each space and be explicit about which hat you’re wearing as a leader. Do this well and excellence stops strangling speed. Speed stops eroding excellence.

Leaders, step onto the balcony

The hardest part isn’t the framework; it’s the psychology. Many leaders fuse their identity with their system. When results slip, they read it as personal failure and overcorrect with control: another approval gate, another process, another metric. It feels like leadership. It often kills learning.

Two moves help:

1. Separate the subject from the object. “Get to the balcony” and look at the system, not through it. Map flows, decisions, handoffs, and incentives. Ask: What is this system perfectly designed to produce? If the outcome isn’t what you want, redesign the system, don’t double down on willpower.

2. Practice negative capability. Borrowing John Keats’s language, Adib names the critical mindset: the ability to remain in “uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts” without grabbing premature order. For systems leaders, that means resisting the reflex to impose process when what’s needed is pattern-finding, small bets, and sense-making.

Rewatch our Webinar

To go into more depth, watch the full conference “Building Systems to Innovate” with Wissam Adib.

From workshop to workplace: making integration real

Pilots are the easy part; re-entry is the work. In the UAE innovation context Wissam shared, nothing stuck until teams learned the leverage points of the “ordinary world”: the policy that must change, the cabinet decision that unlocks budget, and the form that channels resources. It may sound bureaucratic, but it’s actually systems thinking. Translation is a leadership muscle. The experiment succeeds when the core can integrate it.

This is where our Leaders Circle has been most revealing. In a game-based format, executives trace where their anxieties show up as organizational design, what they over control, what they ignore, what they inadvertently reward. The pattern is humbling and liberating: what you worry about is what breaks in your system. Once seen, it can be redesigned.

What to keep in your handrails

• Define innovation as capacity, not projects.

• Design the edge: a legal, financial, and symbolic home for experiments.

• Codify re-entry so pilots don’t die on contact.

• Lead by signal: be explicit about which world you’re in.

• Hold ambiguity long enough to discover the right constraint.

  
  

In the end, systems that innovate are systems that learn on purpose. They don’t outsource curiosity to a lab or a season. They build it into the way work works at the margins, in translation, and back in the core. The work of leadership is to design for the outcomes you want and to keep redesigning as the world moves. Stay curious.

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