If you’re like most innovation teams, you’re obsessed with speed. You manage by principles, values, four adjectives (RACI), and an infinite number of verbs in your project plan. You drive your team with meetings and email. Documentation is mostly a CYA and you will soon delegate a lot of documentation to AI. Your idea of agility is the frequency of go-live events. Your culture is a communication traffic jam, you surrender to VUCA and leave behind a vague library of meeting minutes. It’s a culture of low discipline and low empathy.

What if you changed ALL of that?

Imagine if you were obsessed with synchronization. You manage by metaphors - avoiding traffic jams, bumper cars, and whiplash. Instead, you resemble a symphony, an improv team, and a dance couple. Instead of governing with Four Adjectives, you manage an “elegant expectation factory” of Five Verbs (Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute). You know meetings and email are wonderful servants but horrible masters. You define agility as the “ease to pivot.” Your Five Verbs govern ruthless discipline and graceful empathy. You leave behind an elegant, highly trusted portfolio of institutional knowledge, ready to pivot and innovate more. You’ve replaced VUCA with Elegance.

Robert Snyder is the founder and president of Innovation Elegance, LLC. His thirty-year career spans roles such as developer, project management, change management, sales enablement, and the