Tying a PM's success to getting their project approved creates perverse incentives. Instead, frame discovery as a team effort to find the right opportunities. This encourages rigorous, unbiased investigation and celebrates killing bad ideas, not just launching new ones.

To accelerate organizational learning in AI, incentivize the sharing of failures. A Fortune 500 company gives employees redeemable points for sharing use cases, but offers *extra points* for detailing a failed experiment and the resulting lesson. This normalizes failure and prevents others from repeating the same mistakes.

To combat the natural reluctance to admit failure and to foster decisiveness, some innovative companies offer bonuses to employees who kill their own underperforming projects. This practice creates a culture of honesty and overcomes the personal attachment that often keeps bad ideas alive far too long.

Koch Industries encourages risk-taking by defining a "good experiment" not by its success, but by its learning outcome. A failure is considered valuable and is rewarded if what the company learns from it is worth more than the cost of the experiment itself, fostering a culture of true innovation.

To achieve breakthrough work, leaders must embrace spectacular failure. A mediocre "6 out of 10" idea is worse than a "1 out of 10" born from an ambitious attempt at a "10." Mediocrity signals a culture of playing it safe, which kills innovation.

In creative reviews, the easiest way to seem smart is to find a flaw in an idea. This kills innovation. Instead, force the team to first find all the reasons an idea *could* work, treating obstacles as problems to be solved, not reasons for rejection.

Jacobs's team uses the acronym WOTWOM—Waste Of Time, Waste Of Money—as a rapid check on new ideas. Any suggestion can be challenged with this label if it doesn't clearly contribute to organic revenue growth or margin expansion. This simple tool creates a culture focused on high-leverage activities.

Rewarding successful outcomes incentivizes employees to choose less risky, less innovative projects they know they can complete. To foster true moonshots, Alphabet's X rewards behaviors like humility and curiosity, trusting that these habits are the leading indicators of long-term breakthroughs.

To foster psychological safety for innovation, leaders must publicly celebrate the effort and learning from failed projects, not just successful outcomes. Putting a team on a pedestal for a six-month project that didn't ship sends a stronger signal than any monetary award.