Managers are bottlenecks and there is no way around it. That's what management roles are designed to be.

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There will always be more tasks, more ideas and more potential options than resources. Evaluating, prioritizing and decision-making are the symptoms of that. Once a founder can't keep up with these tasks by themselves, any organization starts to establish management positions. They promote or hire people to take care of selection and alignment. Therefore, managers are strongly incentivized to be bottlenecks. Certainly, well-working bottlenecks are what make organizations successful.

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Looking at managers as simple input-output-systems, they receive information as input and make decisions as output. People rail against bottlenecks when their managers can't cope with the many decisions in a timely or considerate manner. Friction emerges as the manager fails to get ahead of all received input or struggles to make all the decisions that are expected (or needed) by their team.

This nurtures dynamics that run contrary to what people need to be innovative. Slow feedback signals a lack of interest. It drags motivation for upcoming innovative actions. People start to emphasize more urgent and vital topics when adressing their manager. They begin to prefer finished, elaborate and polished work when inquiring their manager. Novel ideas are not pressing, bear uncertain impact and seldom reach expectations of perfection or stability. They get downprioritized or held back. In worst case, innovation management boils down to being an emergency service for a stagnating organization.

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Indeed, every manager experiences this conflict with being a good bottleneck without straining the organizations flow too much. As managers we can do different things to better balance a firm grip on decisions, actions and priorities within an environment that fosters innovation and encourages the team to actually come with solutions (not just problems).

In this collection I write about techniques innovation managers can use to ease the amount of input they get, reduce the number of decisions they participate in, and increase the capability to respond to new thoughts in a way that creates momentum and motivation.