Mastercard just spent real research money to confirm something most innovation leaders don’t want to hear: their idea problem isn’t an idea problem.
The company commissioned Forrester Consulting to study how large organizations actually manage innovation risk. The resulting report, The Experimentation Advantage: Research on Derisking Innovation, found that 87% of senior leaders struggle to balance innovation with risk management. Eighty percent believe small-scale testing would accelerate their innovation efforts, if only they had the capability to run it. Nearly 70% can’t standardize their experimentation practices across the organization.
Rupert Naylor, Mastercard’s SVP for Test & Learn, put the underlying problem in one sentence: organizations need “a consistent process, so you’re not changing how you evaluate ideas every time.” Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Boris Evelson framed the fix the same way — not fewer risks, but guardrails that make smart risk possible.
Read between the numbers and a simple pattern emerges: ideas are abundant. Follow-through is scarce. Every one of those statistics is really describing the same failure — a broken decision-making process wearing an innovation costume.
That’s exactly the argument in Chapter 10 of How Leaders F-Up Innovation. The research didn’t surprise me. It confirmed something I’ve watched play out across two decades of innovation work: the hardest part of innovation leadership has never been finding the next big idea. It’s making good decisions about the ideas you already have. And most leaders are making them the wrong way.
The Real Failure Mode: Advocacy Dressed Up as Collaboration
Traditional organizational decision-making was built for stability, not discovery. It’s top-down, decisive, and rarely revisited — which works fine for a function like finance or operations, where the goal is consistent execution against a known target.
Innovation isn’t a stable environment. It’s a discovery environment. And most companies are running their discovery function on a decision-making operating system designed for the opposite job.
There are two broad approaches to how decisions actually get made inside an organization: advocacy and inquiry. They can look identical from the outside — same meeting, same slide deck, same room full of smart people. The results they produce are not identical at all.
In advocacy, participants compete to win. Each person builds the most compelling case for their preferred option. Objectivity is the first casualty, because the incentive isn’t to find the right answer — it’s to be the one who’s right.
In inquiry, participants collaborate to discover. Multiple options get evaluated simultaneously, on their merits, not on who’s presenting them. Identifying a flaw in your own proposal is treated as a contribution to the process, not a personal failure.
Matias Faret, a marketing and analytics leader at Restaurant Brands International, described the advocacy failure mode perfectly in the same Mastercard research, without naming it: “I see tests fail because they don’t answer the question, or answer 20 at once.” That’s not a testing problem. That’s what happens when a test gets designed to defend a conclusion someone already reached, instead of designed to find out what’s actually true. Advocacy doesn’t just corrupt debates. It corrupts the experiments meant to replace them.
Why Nearly Every Organization Defaults to Advocacy
Almost every business organization runs on advocacy, and it’s not because leaders are bad at their jobs. It’s because advocacy is the path of least resistance. It rewards exactly the behaviors most organizations hire for, promote, and celebrate: decisiveness, conviction, and the ability to build a compelling case under pressure.
Inquiry asks people to do the opposite. Surface your own weaknesses. Update your position in front of your peers. Treat uncertainty as the starting point instead of something to argue away as fast as possible. None of that reads as “leadership material” in a typical performance review.
This is as much a personal mindset challenge as an organizational culture problem. Most CEOs already sense that innovation is different — they don’t hold innovation teams to the same quarterly metrics or delivery timelines as the rest of the business. But every leader in the building, regardless of function, was trained on the same decision-making approach: advocacy. Formally, in business school. Informally, through years of watching what gets rewarded. Innovation leaders may sense their function needs a different approach. Having never been taught inquiry, they default to what they know.
That’s why Mastercard’s own prescription — standardized testing, small-scale experimentation, structured guardrails — is necessary but not sufficient on its own. You can hand an advocacy-trained team a perfect testing framework, and they will use it to build a more sophisticated case for the answer they already wanted. The infrastructure doesn’t fix the mindset underneath it. It just gives the mindset better tools.
How to Tell If Your Team Is Actually in Inquiry
The good news: shifting from advocacy to inquiry doesn’t require a company-wide cultural transformation or a mandate from the CEO’s office. It requires an innovation leader who understands the difference between the two approaches and is deliberate about building inquiry into how their own team operates.
Here’s what I look for when I’m assessing whether an innovation team is actually running on inquiry, or just running advocacy with better manners:
- Are decisions framed as problems to solve, or as recommendations to react to? A recommendation already has a preferred answer baked in. A problem doesn’t.
- Are people rewarded for updating their position when new information shows up? Or does changing your mind read as weakness?
- Are success criteria defined before options are evaluated — or does the debate quietly default to whoever makes the most compelling case in the room?
- Are people asking questions or making assertions? “What would have to be true for this to work?” is inquiry. “That won’t work” is advocacy, wearing the costume of feedback.
None of these require new software, a bigger testing budget, or a reorg. They require a leader who notices which game is actually being played in their own meetings.
What This Means for How You Test, Not Just How You Decide
Mastercard’s research is right that experimentation is undervalued and under-built in most large organizations. Where the research stops short is naming what actually determines whether that experimentation infrastructure produces honest answers or just better-produced confirmation of what leadership already believed.
A test designed under advocacy asks: how do I prove this idea works? A test designed under inquiry asks: what would prove this idea doesn’t work, and have we actually looked? Same budget. Same testing capability. Completely different value of the result.
This is also where AI enters the picture, and where Faret’s caution in the same research is worth repeating directly: AI is not a crystal ball. The strongest outcomes happen when humans and AI work together — which means AI accelerates whichever decision-making culture you already have. Feed it into an advocacy-driven process and it becomes a faster way to generate confident-sounding justification. Feed it into an inquiry-driven process and it becomes a faster way to surface the disconfirming evidence a team might otherwise take months to find.
The tool isn’t the variable. The decision-making culture wrapped around the tool is.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do most innovation initiatives fail?
Most innovation initiatives don’t fail for lack of good ideas. They fail because the organization’s decision-making process is built on advocacy — competing to win an argument — rather than inquiry, which is built to discover the best answer regardless of who proposed it. Ideas are rarely the scarce resource. Honest follow-through is.
What’s the difference between advocacy and inquiry in decision-making?
Advocacy is a decision-making mode where participants build the most compelling case for a preferred option and treat winning the argument as the goal. Inquiry is a decision-making mode where participants collaborate to find the best answer, treat identifying flaws in their own position as a contribution, and evaluate multiple options on their merits simultaneously.
Why is it so hard for organizations to shift from advocacy to inquiry?
Because advocacy is what most professional environments actually reward. Decisiveness, conviction, and the ability to make a strong case are the traits that get people hired and promoted. Inquiry asks people to do the opposite — surface uncertainty and update their own position in public — which rarely shows up as a rewarded behavior, even in companies that say they value innovation.
Does better testing and experimentation infrastructure fix bad innovation decisions?
Not on its own. Testing and experimentation infrastructure — the kind Mastercard’s research recommends — only produces honest answers if the underlying decision-making culture is built on inquiry. An advocacy-driven team will use the same testing framework to build a more convincing case for the answer they already wanted, rather than to find out what’s actually true.
How can an innovation leader start building an inquiry-based culture without a company-wide mandate?
Start by changing how your own team frames decisions: as problems to solve rather than recommendations to react to. Reward people for updating their position when new information appears. Set success criteria before evaluating options, not after. And notice whether the questions in the room are “what would have to be true for this to work?” (inquiry) or “that won’t work” (advocacy in disguise).
The Takeaway
Leaders F-Up innovation when they mistake a decision-making problem for an idea problem, a testing problem, or a risk-tolerance problem.
Mastercard’s research is a useful, well-funded confirmation of something already true: the gap between the innovation people want and the innovation they get isn’t a gap in creativity. It’s a gap in how the room decides what’s real. Effective innovation leaders don’t just make better decisions. They build the mindset and the process that make better decisions possible in the first place — before a single test gets designed, and long before an idea ever reaches a pitch deck.
This post is based on Chapter 10 of How Leaders F-Up Innovation by Marc Drucker, and on Mastercard’s 2026 research with Forrester Consulting, “The Experimentation Advantage: Research on Derisking Innovation.”
If this resonated:
- Subscribe to the newsletter for a new chapter insight every week
- Follow the series on LinkedIn and X
Sources: