Much is written about the importance of diversity in teams and also about the competitive advantage that high-performance teams can build for an organization. There is a lot to read about boosting creativity and forcefully injecting different perspectives into the ideation process.

People are encouraged to use tools like the six thinking hats or methodologies like SCAMPER to help their teams come up with more innovative ideas. But, we don’t talk enough about the roles that are necessary for innovation success.

People are not interchangeable commodities and they don’t possess the same characteristics and aptitudes. Because it is simpler for us to pretend that people are interchangeable, we often do so, but deep down we know that people have different passions, skills and abilities. Yet we delude ourselves into thinking that every employee in our organization:

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