Courageous leadership and innovation inside government

Executive overview

Large public institutions are full of capable people who systematically block innovation — not from malice but because the system rewards answers, not questions. Shifting that requires more than training; it requires sustained coaching at the leadership level.

Susie Braam spent 20+ years in UK national security, built two government innovation units, and led a major digital transformation programme. Her core finding: culture change happens through early adopters and one-on-one coaching, not org-wide training drives.

What innovation actually means

• Anything new that adds value — from a faster procurement process to a groundbreaking capability shift.
• Creativity is not a prerequisite for leading innovation; curiosity and openness to learning are.
• "Innovation" itself can be a barrier word — if it has a bad reputation inside an organisation, drop it and talk about solving problems and seizing opportunities instead.

Finding early adopters first

• Spending the first 2–3 years convincing sceptics is wasted energy; identify who already sees the problem and wants help.
• The ideal early adopter has a real problem, knows they have it, and is actively looking for a solution.
• Early wins become case studies; peer advocacy from a credible internal leader spreads adoption faster than any top-down mandate.
• A portfolio mapping exercise in one early engagement revealed large R&D spend the business owner didn't know existed — immediate, concrete proof of value.

Why training alone fails

• Leaders nod along in workshops then revert in the context of daily organisational culture.
• The culture rewards a different set of behaviours than the training promotes — protecting innovation teams, resisting premature solutions, tolerating uncertainty.
• Coaching in the moment — when a leader is facing a real pressure from above — is where the shift actually happens.
• The "car crash" moment: an innovation team that had done six weeks of excellent discovery work was put in front of an uncoached leadership panel; half the team quit afterwards.

The leadership courage gap

• Senior leaders got there by knowing the answers; asking them to hold questions and receive evidence from their teams is genuinely hard.
• There are two types of leader: those who do the right thing for their people, and those who do the right thing for how they're perceived upward.
• Protecting innovation teams from being absorbed into core business operations requires courage that feels countercultural even when it's logically obvious.
• Not everyone should lead innovation — some people are better suited to delivery, and that's fine.

Mindset vs. culture

• Mindset is internal: can I tolerate uncertainty, stay curious, resist rushing to a solution?
• Culture is external: the behaviours that are actually rewarded and incentivised.
• Coaching works by surfacing the internal narrative — identifying why a behaviour feels hard — then helping leaders act counter to the prevailing culture when it matters.

Turning blockers into enablers

• Compliance, legal, security, and commercial teams are traditionally seen as innovation blockers.
• Assigning an innovation objective to the head of each blocking function — making innovation enablement part of their job — shifts them from gatekeepers to collaborators.
• The goal is shared outcome alignment; most friction comes from people optimising for different objectives, not genuine incompatibility.

Language and context adaptation

• The only thing genuinely worth adapting between sectors is language, not process.
• "Customer" triggers resistance in national security contexts; "beneficiary" or "end user" achieves the same cognitive effect without the wall going up.
• Every organisation thinks it's uniquely constrained. It isn't. The process is the same; the vocabulary may need adjusting.

Where innovation practice is heading

• Economic pressure is causing organisations to close down innovation budgets — the classic mistake of doubling down on the known when things feel tight.
• The answer is tighter alignment between innovation activity and stated strategic priorities, so innovation spending is visibly connected to outcomes leadership already cares about.
• Portfolio approaches with varied risk profiles, combined with clear storytelling on progress and impact, are the way to keep innovation alive through lean periods.
• When headcount and budget are finite, innovation is the only structural way out of doing more with less.