11/1/2026 ☼ uncertainty ☼ organisation design ☼ work ☼ discomfort

tl;dr: Innovation requires uncomfortable unfamiliar work, but people instinctively resist discomfort. Incentives and motivation programmes don’t work. Successful organisations use productive desperation: deliberately committing to projects beyond current capabilities, with real failure risk and no escape route. This forces learning, role flexibility, and new work patterns, but requires careful and intentional design in the form of team consultative calibration and rhythmic cycles of desperation and recovery.

Your R&D team is doing technically solid work. There is a year-long development plan, team members show up, complete tasks, hit milestones. But the energy of two years ago—when they were building something genuinely new and trying to get product-market fit—has faded away. Your best engineer just gave notice. She’s leaving for an excitingly stealthy startup.

This malaise is a symptom of a problem most organisations fundamentally misunderstand: how to keep teams motivated to do innovation work. Conventional wisdom gets it wrong. The right approach to motivating innovation organisations is carefully designed discomfort, but understanding why and how discomfort does a better job requires some context.

Two kinds of work

All organisations do two fundamentally different types of work.

The first kind is regular work. The desired outcomes of regular work are well-understood in advance, and the actions the organisation must take to achieve those outcomes have been validated and refined. Regular work is optimising a cellphone manufacturing line to increase its output, or ensuring that a claims processing team reliably enters paper submissions into the claims management system. The essence of regular work is its predictability and programmability, and uncertainty should be eliminated from it to the maximum extent possible.

The second type of work is uncertainty work. The desired outcomes of uncertainty work can’t be defined in advance, and the actions that must be taken to achieve it are often not yet known. Leading an interdependent team of unpredictable humans is uncertainty work, as is sensing the opportunities and pitfalls in an unpredictable and rapidly changing business environment. So is building new technologies, products, services, and business models. Innovation is clearly a part of uncertainty work. This applies equally to individuals developing new capabilities and to organisations building new products or business models. For innovation, uncertainty is an essential feature to be preserved and worked with, not a bug to be eliminated.

Most organisations I’ve worked with default to motivating all work the same way they motivate regular work: with incentives tied to clearly specified outcomes and by increasing resourcing. Unfortunately, the two kinds of work need different approaches to motivation. For inherently uncertain innovation work, discomfort is the key to effective motivation.

Two kinds of discomfort

During service, a high-end restaurant kitchen is fast-paced and physically demanding, the pace relentless. When orders pile up, the kitchen team must push hard to focus on reliably executing hundreds of complex dishes without making mistakes or falling behind.

This kind of discomfort comes from pressure to execute a well-understood set of actions to achieve a clearly specified set of outcomes. The fear of failure is balanced against the exhilaration of pulling off a flawless service. This discomfort has an immediate payoff: the adrenaline rush when everything works perfectly, the satisfaction of stealing victory from potential disaster.

Innovation work involves a fundamentally different kind of discomfort. When developing something genuinely new, simply working harder and focusing more doesn’t help. This other kind of discomfort comes from not knowing how to do what you’re trying to do. Responding to this discomfort with curiosity rather than fear or avoidance is what makes it productive. Unlike service work, there’s no immediate gratification, no adrenaline rush minutes later. The payoff—if it comes at all—arrives weeks or months down the line.

People and organisations know that innovation requires working in this discomfort zone. They know that staying in the comfort zone leads inevitably to stagnation, boredom, and eventual decline. But knowing this intellectually doesn’t override visceral resistance to doing uncomfortable things. So nearly everyone stays in the comfort zone once they get there. Eventually, key members leave for more challenging work. The organisation hollows out and enters a slow but accelerating decline that feels comfortable until it becomes fatal.

The only way to overcome this visceral resistance is to make uncomfortable work unavoidable.

Desperation that is productive

Some organisations have found a solution to this problem.

The solution looks crazy: Instead of making innovation work more comfortable or finding better incentives, they make it deliberately and systematically more uncomfortable. They commit themselves to projects that are clearly beyond their current capabilities, where failure is a real possibility, and where they cannot walk away once committed. They fight fire with fire.

In 2011, Noma was at the peak of its game. The previous year they’d completely redesigned their kitchen—a disruptive undertaking that had just paid off with the restaurant reaching number one on the World’s 50 Best list. Bookings were insane. It was time to consolidate, to enjoy success.

Instead, having never organised a conference before, they decided to create MAD—an entirely new kind of symposium for cutting-edge chefs. Not a cooking demonstration event, but something focused on ideas and provocations. This was desperation by design. The scope expanded rapidly. Nearly 300 speakers and attendees, all in a circus tent in an industrial wasteland with no conference infrastructure. Power, water, toilets, catering, and shelter all had to be brought in. The night before the symposium opened, a rainstorm nearly collapsed the tent. Team members who hadn’t slept for days worked through the night re-driving tent stakes, laying plywood to making muddy fields useable, breaking apart hay bales to create walkways.

Seen through the lens of conventional management, this was terrible planning. The team was desperate, exhausted, terrified the whole thing might be a disaster. But from the perspective of creating a context to force teams to learn new ways of working, this desperation was highly functional. It was productive desperation—desperation that breaks down the barriers to doing the uncomfortable things innovation requires.

What desperation unlocks

Productive desperation forces specific behaviours by making the familiar approaches obviously inadequate and providing no escape route.

First, it forces teams to search for new knowledge and perspectives. When Noma committed to MAD, they immediately realised their existing expertise wasn’t enough. They needed different ways of thinking. They brought in a philosopher, a food writer, people with completely different backgrounds. This wasn’t about filling skill gaps—it was about fundamentally expanding how the team thought about problems.

Second, it forces role flexibility. Team members take on responsibilities radically different from their usual work. R&D chefs become conference producers. Service kitchen staff coordinate logistics for hundreds of people. Front of house staff develop transportation plans. There’s barely discussion about whether roles should change—desperation makes it obvious they must. People get thrust into situations that force individual growth and learning.

Third, it breaks existing patterns of work. When everything is unfamiliar and stakes are high, teams can’t fall back on habitual ways of working together. They must figure out new ways to collaborate in real time. Each unanticipated problem becomes an opportunity to develop new working patterns.

These behaviours—searching for new knowledge, role flexibility, breaking old patterns—are required for doing new things. But they’re also behaviours people naturally resist. Well-designed desperation overrides that resistance.

These same patterns apply to individuals: the newsletter writer who commits publicly learns to share imperfect work, the researcher who announces a project deadline learns unfamiliar methods, the manager who takes an unfamiliar role learns to lead differently.

Designing for productive desperation

Productive desperation isn’t chaos or negligent planning. It has three requirements:

1. Real commitment with genuine possibility of failure. The project must truly be beyond the team’s current capability. There must be real possibility of failure. And the commitment must be irrevocable—no psychological escape route. Without genuine emotional stakes, the project won’t break teams out of established patterns. This requires unusual maturity in leaders. They must genuinely accept that failure is possible. They must resist the urge to add safety nets or escape hatches. As one chef put it: “There is no option to quit.”

2. Emotional calibration through consultation. Leaders can’t just pick ambitious projects arbitrarily. They must develop sensitivity to their team’s emotional state through extended consultation before committing. The signal isn’t whether team members think the project is possible. It’s the degree of agitation when discussing ramifications. The sweet spot is when the team seems only moderately worried despite the project clearly being beyond their ability. Too little worry and the project won’t create productive desperation. Too much and the team might snap instead of stretch. This is fundamentally an emotional judgment, not a rational calculation of resources and timelines.

3. Rhythmic and progressive escalation. Teams can’t sustain desperation continuously. They need cycles: take on a challenging project with a defined endpoint, work through to completion, allow time for recovery—when the learning gets consolidated and the team’s baseline tolerance for discomfort expands—then move to the next challenge. Noma moved from organising one symposium to a bigger one the next year, then to temporary restaurant popups in Japan, Australia, and Mexico—each more ambitious than the last. The rhythm serves multiple functions. It allows teams to muster willpower because they know approximately when the end comes. It prevents teams from settling into comfort that would make the next stretch psychologically too difficult. And each cycle builds capacity—teams become progressively more comfortable with discomfort, their collective sense of what’s possible expands.

Desperation by design requires capabilities most organisations don’t develop (or even actively suppress) because they run counter to conventional management wisdom:

Tolerance for messiness. Projects will appear chaotic from the outside. Team members will visibly struggle. There will be no pretence that everything is under control. Leaders must resist the urge to impose order or reduce uncertainty.

Comfort with process ambiguity. Leaders can’t provide detailed instructions about how to achieve outcomes. Team members must figure out their own paths. This feels irresponsible by conventional standards—like abandoning the team to flounder. But that floundering is where the learning happens.

Willingness to accept genuine failure risk. This is perhaps the hardest requirement. Leaders must truly accept that the project might fail, that the organisation’s reputation might suffer, that resources might be wasted. If they secretly have a backup plan or safety net, the team will sense it and the desperation won’t be productive.

Emotional rather than analytical judgment. Deciding which projects to commit to is more about reading the team’s emotional state than analysing spreadsheets.

An alternative to comfortable decline

Most organisations choose comfortable decline without realising it or wanting it. They keep writing better incentive schemes, running more innovation workshops, wondering why their best people leave. The alternative—deliberately creating productive desperation—appears uncomfortable, risky, reckless. It violates conventional wisdom and “best practices.”

But organisations that are productively uncomfortable sustain high performance over years, actively seek bigger challenges, and develop increasing capacity to handle disruption.

Implementing desperation by design isn’t about restructuring your entire organisation or launching a grand transformation programme. It starts small. One team committing to a project slightly beyond their current capability. One leader learning to read emotional signals during project consultation. One cycle of stretch, completion, recovery, repeat.

Done repeatedly, these cycles build organisational capacity to handle progressively greater uncertainty and disruption—the defining challenge of operating in genuinely uncertain times.

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I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating how organisations can succeed in uncertain times. The Uncertainty Mindset is my book about how to design organisations that thrive in uncertainty and can clearly distinguish it from risk. Part 6 of my book contains detailed descriptions and case studies of how organisations can use desperation by design to build capacity for sustained innovation.

I’ve also been working on tools for learning how to be productively uncomfortable. idk is the first of these tools for productive discomfort.