Bridgers Are the Answer.

Hill, Tedards, and Wild get something important right in their recent Harvard Business Review piece on why great innovations fail to scale. The problem isn’t bad ideas. The problem is broken collaboration across organizational boundaries—and structural fixes like cross-functional teams, project managers, and innovation labs don’t solve it. People don’t take risks with those they don’t trust, and org charts don’t create trust.

We agree. Completely.

Their concept of “bridgers”—leaders with the emotional and contextual intelligence to curate partners, translate across differences, and integrate disparate efforts—is one of the stronger frameworks we’ve seen for naming what actually makes cross-boundary innovation work. The case studies land, too. Al Mazrouei spent months learning what kept each stakeholder up at night before launching DIFC’s Fintech Hive. Lyons is bringing physical prototypes to Mastercard board meetings because abstract concepts don’t move nontechnical leaders. Jones reframed Delta’s IT team from a service organization to an active partner when they were dragging their feet out of legitimate fear. The article is at its best when it makes explicit what most organizations leave implicit: innovation is voluntary. You cannot force people to take risks. You can only create the conditions where they choose to.

The article clearly identifies what bridgers do. Where it gets thinner is on how organizations develop these capabilities in ways that hold up under pressure.

The development section recommends placing potential bridgers in cross-functional roles, encouraging zigzag career paths, and providing executive backing. All reasonable. But this is essentially “give them experiences and hope they learn,” which is the same development model that produces the 70% failure rate in organizational change initiatives that McKinsey has documented for years. If exposure alone built capability, every executive who’d rotated through three business units would be a natural bridger. We know that’s not the case.

What’s missing is the reality of how these skills actually form.

The emotional regulation that allows a bridger to navigate ambiguity without defaulting to control doesn’t emerge from a role rotation. It requires deliberate practice under progressively increasing stress. Lally’s research at University College London found that even simple habits take an average of 66 days to become automatic, while complex behavioral patterns require 6 months or more. The bridging behaviors Hill and her colleagues describe—deep listening under conflict, translating across hostile boundaries, maintaining commitment through setbacks—are among the most complex interpersonal skills in organizational life.

Consider Jones facing the Delta IT team’s resistance. The article describes her response well: she investigated root causes, reframed IT’s role, and connected their priorities to the shared goal. What it doesn’t address is how she developed the capacity to do that in the moment. Under stress, the prefrontal cortex—responsible for exactly the kind of flexible, empathetic thinking bridgers need—degrades. Arnsten’s research in Nature Reviews Neuroscience showed that stress can cause a return to habitual, rigid patterns. Without deliberate practice under pressure, leaders who understand bridging intellectually will default to command-and-control when things get difficult. That’s the knowing-doing gap, and it applies directly to bridger development.

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Developing bridgers requires the same systematic approach we’d apply to any complex behavior change. Start with micro-habits—specific, observable behaviors small enough that they don’t require willpower. A three-second pause before responding in a cross-functional meeting. One genuine inquiry per week into a partner’s constraints before proposing solutions. These aren’t impressive on paper. They’re designed not to be. They’re designed to actually happen. Then layer in progressive stress exposure: practice listening and translating behaviors first in low-stakes contexts, then in simulated scenarios with increasing intensity, then in real situations with coaching support, and finally in high-stakes moments with follow-up review only. That sequence builds capability that persists when budgets get cut, timelines compress, and partners pull back—exactly the conditions where bridging matters most.

The article also underidentifies a structural problem. The theory-in-use gaps we track—where organizations say they value collaboration while rewarding individual performance, or claim to support innovation while punishing failed experiments—actively undermine bridging behavior. When Al Mazrouei’s financial institution partners were openly sharing competitive strategy at the same table, that didn’t happen because one leader had strong emotional intelligence. It happened because the structural conditions made vulnerability rational rather than reckless. Organizations that want more bridgers need to audit whether their systems actually support bridging or quietly punish it. Who gets promoted—the leader who builds cross-boundary trust over 18 months, or the one who delivers quarterly results by hoarding resources? If the answer is the latter, no amount of bridger development will stick.

Hill, Tedards, and Wild have given us a clear diagnosis and a compelling portrait of effective cross-boundary leadership. The next step is building the development infrastructure that makes bridging a repeatable organizational capability rather than a trait we hope the right leaders happen to possess. The simple fact is that identifying bridgers isn’t enough. We have to build them. And that means 18 to 24 months of deliberate development, not a role rotation and good intentions.

Hill, L. A., Tedards, E., & Wild, J. (2026). Why great innovations fail to scale. Harvard Business Review, March–April 2026. https://hbr.org/2026/03/why-great-innovations-fail-to-scale

The article is adapted from their book Genius at Scale (Harvard Business Review Press, March 2026).