The Challenge
Despite securing Series B funding, a technology company with 85 employees faced declining creative output and innovation metrics. Their product development pipeline showed concerning decreases in new feature ideas and transformative concepts, creating anxiety about market position and future funding rounds.
Employee surveys revealed a pervasive fear culture where team members avoided proposing novel ideas due to anxiety about criticism. Engineering and product teams reported “innovative paralysis” where emotional avoidance was actively stifling creativity and psychological safety.
Our Approach
We developed targeted emotion education workshops focusing specifically on identifying and processing anxiety around failure and judgment:
Anxiety Mapping: Teams collaboratively identified situations triggering inhibitory emotions during ideation and development processes.
Defensive Behavior Recognition: Workshops helped participants recognize when they entered defensive states (people-pleasing, perfectionism, procrastination) instead of accessing core emotions.
Feedback Protocol Development: New communication frameworks ensured feedback addressed ideas rather than triggering personal defenses.
Implementation Timeline
The emotion education program was integrated directly into their product development cycle:
Weeks 1-4: Leadership training in recognizing defensive states versus core emotions, particularly focusing on how anxiety manifests in innovation contexts.
Weeks 5-8: Department-wide workshops introducing the Change Triangle methodology with specialized “emotional risk profiles” for different project types.
Weeks 9-16: Integration of emotion check-ins into sprint planning, retrospectives, and product reviews.
Weeks 17-36: Implementation of “core emotion checks” before dismissing new ideas and structured protocols for addressing anxiety in high-stakes decisions.
Measurable Results
After nine months, the company documented:
- 56% increase in new product ideas submitted
- 32% reduction in development cycle time
- 41% improvement in psychological safety scores
- 28% increase in successful feature launches
- 37% reduction in reported work-related anxiety
Their CTO observed: “Before implementing the Change Triangle, our team meetings featured superficial agreement followed by private dissent. By helping teams recognize when they operated from anxiety rather than genuine excitement or concern, we’ve created space for authentic collaboration. The most surprising outcome has been how addressing emotions actually made our development process more efficient rather than creating delays.”
The company subsequently integrated emotional awareness competencies into their hiring and promotion criteria, recognizing the direct connection to innovation outcomes.