You're in a role that asks you to innovate. To disrupt, experiment, take risks, push boundaries. But you keep defaulting to proven methods. You finish projects on time because that matters more than pushing into uncertain territory. You get frustrated with yourself for not being bolder, yet you can't seem to shake the impulse to do things the safe way. The contradiction feels like weakness. It might actually be something else.
What Everyone Gets Wrong About Innovation
Most people believe innovation is a personality trait, a kind of cognitive boldness or creative risk-taking that some people have and others lack. If you're not naturally entrepreneurial, if you prefer systems and stability, the thinking goes, then innovation is not your strength. You should probably let the bold people do it. This belief feels true because we see innovation and risk-taking paired so often: startup founders who quit secure jobs, designers who reject convention, scientists who challenge established models. They look like the same kind of person.
The myth persists because it captures something real about how innovation sometimes happens. But it mistakes one pathway for the only one. It treats innovation as synonymous with disruption, revolution, breaking everything down and starting fresh. That's one form of innovation. It's also one form of suicide if you're running a production system, managing patient care, or responsible for other people's livelihoods. The real work isn't figuring out if you're bold enough. It's figuring out what kind of problems you actually want to solve.
The Manager Who Couldn't Stop Optimizing
A operations manager in her mid-forties ran a supply chain for a 200-person manufacturing firm. She had been told her whole career that she was analytical, detail-oriented, reliable. She could spot inefficiency like a radar. She had automated three separate workflows, saved the company hundreds of thousands annually, and been promoted twice. Her boss called her steady. Her team called her the person who got things done right.
Then the company hired a new VP who wanted innovation. Not incremental improvement, but breakthrough solutions. The VP put her in charge of a skunkworks project, expecting her to imagine a completely different way of operating. She felt immediately fraudulent. She began the project by mapping current state, identifying failure points, designing safeguards. The VP became frustrated. "You're just optimizing," he said. "I need you to question the whole model." She tried. She sketched out radical restructurings. But each one made her anxious. She could see every way it could fail, every person it could affect. She sabotaged her own thinking by planning contingencies. Within months, she was off the project.
What she didn't know was that she had been innovating the entire time. Automated workflows are innovations. Spotting hidden failure points is innovation. Making systems reliable is innovation. The form looked different from what the VP expected, so both she and he mistook her contribution for its opposite. She spent the next five years believing she wasn't good at innovation. She was just good at a kind of innovation that requires restraint.
What Is Actually Going On
Schwartz's theory of basic human values, tested across 80+ countries and one of the most replicated frameworks in cross-cultural psychology, shows that people are driven by fundamentally different value types. Schwartz identified 10 universal values, and critically, he mapped them into a circumplex structure, a circle where adjacent values are compatible and opposite values create tension. Openness to Change sits across from Conservation. Self-Transcendence sits across from Self-Enhancement. Someone high in Conservation values stability, conformity, and security. Someone high in Openness values novelty, risk-taking, and autonomy. Both create value. They just create it in different ways.
Innovation isn't a trait. It's a response to a problem. The form of innovation depends on what problem exists and what values the person brings to solving it. In a chaotic system, an innovator with high Conservation values creates innovation through structure and reliability. In an ossified system, an innovator with high Openness values creates innovation through disruption and recombination. The person in the operations role wasn't lacking innovation. She was solving the wrong problem for her value structure. She was asked to innovate through disruption when her actual strength was innovation through optimization.
This is why people commonly feel like failures at innovation while actually being quite good at it. They've internalized the myth that innovation means one thing, and that thing doesn't match the way their mind works. Schwartz's framework doesn't fix this. But it makes it visible. When you can see that your values are structured differently from the person across the table, you can stop mistaking difference for deficiency. You can choose the problems you actually want to solve. The clarity matters more than the boldness.
What Changes When You See It Clearly
When you stop treating innovation as a single variable and start seeing it as a values question, several things become possible. First, you can stop performing boldness and start practicing actual innovation in the form that matches how you think. Second, you can have honest conversations with the people around you. If your boss needs disruption and you're built for optimization, that's a design problem, not a character problem. It can be solved by putting you on work that needs optimization and finding someone else for the disruption. Or it can be solved by understanding that the same project might need both. Most do.
Third, you stop wasting energy on the wrong kind of courage. The manager in the supply chain needed courage to say no, to claim her actual strength, to stop performing the role of someone she wasn't. That courage freed her to do work that mattered to her. Within a year of understanding her values, she moved into a role running quality assurance for a manufacturing client. She was asked to build a system from scratch where none existed. She did. The innovation looked like process design, measurement frameworks, and predictive failure analysis. It was exactly as innovative as the VP's disruption fantasy. It was also actually useful.
The My Values assessment surfaces your core values, ranks them, and shows you where you're living them and where you're not. That clarity is the baseline for any honest conversation about what kind of innovation you're built for.
Is optimization really innovation?
Yes, but only if it solves a real problem. Optimizing a process that shouldn't exist isn't innovation, it's waste. But making an inefficient system efficient, adding reliability to a chaotic one, or designing safeguards into a risky process are all innovations. They're just not disruptive innovations. The difference matters for how you work and which problems you choose.
What if my role requires disruption but I'm built for optimization?
Then you have three options: ask to move to work that matches your values, advocate for hiring someone else for the disruption piece, or have an honest conversation about what you can actually contribute. Trying to force yourself into the wrong value profile doesn't produce better innovation. It produces burnout and mediocre work from someone fighting their own thinking.
How does Schwartz's research apply to innovation specifically?
Schwartz mapped how values relate to each other. People high in Openness values naturally innovate through novelty and risk. People high in Conservation innovate through reliability and refinement. Neither is better. But they create value in opposite ways, which means they're often at odds in the same organization. Understanding this removes the idea that someone just isn't innovative and replaces it with a clearer question: what kind of innovation does this problem actually need?
Can I learn to be innovative if it doesn't come naturally?
You can learn the practices and frameworks. But you'll find it exhausting if it's fighting your core values. The better question is whether the role you're in is the right match for the kind of innovator you are. Most people can operate outside their values when they have to. But they do their best work when they don't.