"My team has no urgency to innovate."

​I'm hearing this constantly right now — almost always from leaders who feel AI breathing down their neck. The pressure is real. The diagnosis is usually wrong.

I spent years in corporate strategy consulting helping Fortune 500s innovate. One of the most valuable lessons I took from it was the opposite of what you'd expect:

Don't innovate. Solve problems.

The companies that actually broke through weren't chasing novelty. They were obsessed with a specific customer pain — and innovation was just what it looked like once they removed it. The novelty was a byproduct. Never the goal.

Here's why that matters for your urgency problem:

"Innovate" is an abstraction. Nobody feels urgency for an abstraction. You can't rally a team around "be more innovative" any more than around "be more interesting." But point them at a customer who's losing time, money, or sleep to a problem you could fix — and the urgency shows up on its own. It was never missing. It just never had a target.

So for middle-market leadership teams feeling the AI pressure, flip the question:

→ Stop asking "How do we use AI?" or "How do we innovate?"

→ Start asking "What's the most expensive, painful problem our customer lives with every day?"

→ Then ask "Can we solve that better than anyone — with AI, without it, however it takes?"

AI doesn't change this rule. It reinforces it. AI made novelty cheap — everyone can ship a clever feature now. So "new" stops being a differentiator, and the problem you choose to solve becomes the only edge you have left.

Your team isn't missing urgency.

They're missing a problem worth their urgency. Give them one, hand them real ownership of it, and you won't have to manufacture the rest.