Your employees may have promising ideas for innovation, but bureaucracy and rigid hierarchies can keep those ideas from taking shape. Giving people complete freedom to experiment, however, can lead to scattered efforts. The solution is “disciplined chaos”: a system that encourages bottom-up innovation while keeping it aligned with your organization’s goals. Here’s how to put it into practice.

Give employees a shared purpose. Establish a compelling aspiration that helps people identify opportunities independently. Make it broad enough to inspire creativity but specific enough to guide decisions.

Encourage people to think like entrepreneurs. Empower employees to pursue ideas beyond their formal responsibilities. Make experimentation part of their identity.

Let ideas earn resources. Create opportunities for employees to pitch ideas, test assumptions, and secure funding as they demonstrate value.

Protect new ventures. Give promising projects dedicated teams and permission to challenge established processes without pressure to deliver immediate profits.

Build connections across teams. Help innovators access expertise and shared resources throughout the organization.

Reward risk-taking. Recognize employees who experiment—even when projects fail. Protect their careers while giving successful innovators opportunities to lead.

Adapted from How One Company Used Disciplined Chaos to Drive Innovation by Vijay Govindarajan, et al.

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