Why Innovation Requires Giving Up: A Creative Leadership Principle

By Tucker Bryant, Innovation Keynote Speaker | Former Google Product Marketing Manager | Stanford University

Leonardo da Vinci never finished the Adoration of the Magi. He abandoned it in 1481, halfway through. For centuries, art historians debated whether this was a failure of discipline or a limitation of circumstance. Then infrared imaging revealed something remarkable: beneath the unfinished surface lay an entirely different composition — a first draft, sketched with extraordinary confidence, that da Vinci had abandoned in favor of a bolder, more innovative approach.

Da Vinci did not leave the Adoration unfinished because he ran out of time. He left it because he recognized, with the clarity of a master, that the opportunity cost of completing one version was missing the breakthrough in the next.

This is the principle I teach in innovation keynotes to leaders at some of the world's largest organizations: the most creative and innovative people and teams are not the ones who hold on longest. They are the ones who know when to let go — and they let go on purpose.

The Sunk Cost Trap in Innovation

Every organization I work with has at least one 'sacred cow' — a product, strategy, process, or approach that everybody knows is underperforming but nobody is willing to abandon. 70% of failed innovation projects are characterized by 'escalation of commitment' — continuing to invest in an approach that is not working because of sunk costs. (Harvard Business School, 2018) The reasons are always the same: we have invested too much, we have made too many public commitments, too many people have staked their reputations on it.

Economists call this the sunk cost fallacy. Behavioral psychologists call it loss aversion. I call it the innovation killer. Because while your team is protecting the sacred cow, they are not building what comes next. And in fast-moving markets, what you are not building is almost certainly being built by someone else.

The research on this is sobering. Studies from the London Business School found that organizations that practice what researchers call 'deliberate abandonment' — systematically identifying and discontinuing underperforming strategies — grow 30–40% faster than those that do not. Yet fewer than 20% of Fortune 500 companies have a formal process for deciding when to quit a strategic initiative.

What Years of Creating — and Discarding — Revealed About Strategic Leadership

As an artist who has spent years at the experimental edge of what poetry can be, I have built a practice out of creative abandonment — not as a philosophical concept, but as a lived discipline. Every immersive experience I have designed, every new format I have invented for a poem, every boundary I have pushed on the art form has required the same act: committing fully to something, extracting everything it can teach, and then letting it go in favor of the next unexplored possibility.

I have written hundreds of poems for every one that has been performed or published. I have started creative projects I never finished — not because I failed them, but because I recognized, at the right moment, that they had already given me what I needed to move to something more interesting. The artists who break new ground are not the ones who are the most persistent — they are the ones who are the most discerning about which work deserves continued investment and which work has already revealed everything it can.

The most innovative leaders operate this way too. Jeff Bezos, in his 2019 shareholder letter, wrote explicitly about the importance of 'wandering' and following dead ends, describing failed experiments as 'inseparable from invention.' Apple's legendary design process under Jony Ive involved far more rejection and abandonment than it did completion. The willingness to abandon is not a failure of commitment — it is the mechanism of innovation. I know this not because I read it in a business book, but because I have lived it in a creative practice.

Three Signals That It's Time to Abandon

In my workshops with leadership teams, I teach three diagnostic questions that help organizations identify when a strategy, product, or initiative deserves abandonment rather than continuation:

1. Are you defending it or developing it?

When team discussions shift from 'How do we make this better?' to 'How do we justify this?', the initiative has moved from development mode to defense mode. Defense mode is where innovation goes to die. If the primary energy around a project is protective rather than generative, that is a clear signal that the project is no longer serving the organization's future.

2. Is it your best use of limited experimental capacity?

Every organization has a finite capacity for innovation — limited budget, limited talent, limited bandwidth for change management. The real cost of continuing any initiative is not just its direct investment; it is all the other initiatives you are not pursuing because this one is consuming resources. Ask: if this initiative did not already exist, would we choose to start it today?

3. Has it already taught you what it can teach you?

Every experiment, even a failing one, generates learnings. The question is whether the next iteration of the experiment will generate meaningfully new learnings or simply produce more data confirming what you already know. When the learning curve flattens, it is time to transfer those learnings and move on.

Giving Up as a Leadership Discipline

The cultural shift required here is significant. Most organizational cultures treat persistence as a virtue and abandonment as a weakness. Leaders are rewarded for following through, for delivering on commitments, for staying the course. This is appropriate for execution contexts — but it is actively harmful in innovation contexts.

The innovation keynotes I deliver to leadership teams consistently address this tension: how do you build a culture where strategic abandonment is recognized as a leadership strength rather than a character flaw? The answer, in my experience, is to make it systematic. Not just culturally acceptable, but actively built into the organization's planning cadences through formal 'stop-doing' reviews alongside 'start-doing' planning.

The boldest move you can make for your organization's innovation capacity is sometimes to quit — and go build something entirely new. Because every masterpiece, as da Vinci understood better than anyone, is never finished. It is only abandoned — usually at exactly the right moment.