and Started Asking our team for Bottlenecks Instead!

Most companies say they want an innovation mindset across all their employees. Few actually get it.
And almost none get ownership and buy-in across the organisation when they ask their people to “be more innovative.”

I recently tried a different approach.

Instead, via a survey, we asked every member of staff — from the reception teams to senior leadership — a simple question:

“Where do bottlenecks occur in your day-to-day work?”

For example:
what slows you down?
what frustrates you?
what gets in the way of the work actually happening?

The result?
The most honest, engaged, and high-quality strategic insight we’ve ever gathered from the company.

Here’s why this approach works — and why more organisations should adopt it.

1. A bottleneck survey is psychologically safer than an “innovation survey”

When you ask people for “innovative ideas,” you implicitly ask them to be visionary.
Many won’t offer ideas because they fear:

sounding naive,

proposing something “already tried,”

or stepping on someone’s toes.

But everyone knows their own pain points.

People are far more confident saying:

“This step always slows me down.”

“This system creates confusion.”

“We duplicate this task across three teams.”

And because the ask feels safe and inquisitive, participation skyrockets.

2. Bottlenecks are where innovation naturally hides

Innovation is often romanticised as a flash of inspiration.
In reality, it emerges from friction.

Every repeated pain point is an opportunity:

A workflow that feels clunky → automation candidate.

A handover that’s unclear → needs ownership redesign.

A system that relies on a single person → training and scalability issue.

A repetitive manual step → scripting or AI potential.

Too many meetings → combine some, check if some are still fit for purpose.

By mapping bottlenecks across departments, we ended up with a heatmap of innovation opportunities, some surprisingly connected, grounded in actual operational pain.

3. Staff feel genuinely heard — because you’re starting with their world

One of the biggest cultural wins came from the tone of the survey.

We weren’t asking people to “help us innovate!”

We signalled respect for operational expertise.
It frames our teams as co-architects of the company’s future — not just recipients of top-down change.

What surprised us most:
People openly admitted to pain points in their own workflows because they finally felt it was safe, constructive, and actionable.

4. Bottleneck surveys create clarity for leadership

Rather than 200 disconnected “innovation ideas,” leadership now had a structured list of:

recurring issues,

their frequency,

their severity,

the systems or departments involved,

by using AI data analysis of the survey, we also had the downstream cost of each.

Innovation stops being abstract — it becomes a pipeline of solvable problems.

5. Bottleneck surveys build buy-in for change before change even begins

When the time comes to introduce new systems, automation, or processes, something remarkable happens:

People already feel invested so implementation feels collaborative, not imposed – everyone now wants to drive the innovations to support eachother.

The bottleneck survey revealed a simple truth:

Your people already know what needs to change.
They just need a structured way to tell you.

Article written by an Innovation Partnership CEO member