In 2015 when I read Traction by Gino Wickman, I awakened to a reality that would change my career trajectory: I am a visionary. This awakening unleashed a new freedom to do what I was created to do. It permitted me to delegate the details to competent people. It freed me to dream, discover, and build.

I love being a visionary. In the book, Rocket Fuel, Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters say, “A key value you bring as a Visionary is this ability to discover and figure out new ways to make things work.” This perfectly describes what makes me come alive.

In today’s market with sea-level technology change, massive customer expectation evolution, and tectonic generational shifts, businesses cannot have their heads in the sand. As Jim Collins says, we must “stimulate progress.” We must disrupt or we risk being disrupted.

Here’s the problem: it takes more than visionary inspiration to drive a business forward. Businesses also need intentional innovation.

Why Visionary Inspiration By Itself Fails to Deliver Results

Inspiration happens when the visionary gets an idea. A visionary might get one idea for the business this year. More likely, she’ll get two dozen ideas. Some of these ideas are game changers. Some are duds.

There must be a way to discern which ideas are great and which aren’t. Then, there needs to be a process to validate the great ideas. They need to be piloted and optimized. If they are truly good, they need to be packaged for rollout.

Absent a process to validate ideas, visionary inspirations get dropped on the management team. Focused on running the business, this team typically ignores the new idea, meaning it never gets implemented. In some cases, the team grabs onto the new idea, running headlong into a new direction that has not been tested.

While the visionary inspiration may have led to a good idea, there may be other areas of the business that desperately need new ideas. Since the visionary didn’t get inspired in these areas, they get neglected.

Ultimately this hurts the culture of the business. Managers get frustrated. New ideas flounder. Team members with Working Geniuses of Innovation like Wonder, Invention, and Discernment wonder why nobody asks them for their ideas as they scroll through Indeed looking for more fulfilling work.

What Intentional Innovation Looks Like

There comes a time when a company needs to graduate from being visionary-dependent for every new idea. As Jim Collins Says in Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, “The business needs to shift from having a creative founder to becoming an innovative business.”

In his book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker says that innovation based on bright ideas “cannot be organized, cannot be systematized, and fails in the overwhelming majority of cases.”

Instead, Drucker believes innovation must be intentional: “The purposeful innovation resulting from analysis, system, and hard work is all that can be discussed and presented as the practice of innovation.” He goes on to say, “The extraordinary performer in innovation, as in every other area, will be effective only if grounded in the discipline and master of it.

1. Innovation must be intentional. As the famous line in Lovers in a Dangerous Time by Bruck Cockburn says, “Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.” Innovation doesn’t happen by accident.

2. Innovation must be strategic. We don’t need self-driving hovercrafts. We need practical ideas brought to market. Innovation needs to be based on the needs of your current and future customers–especially those you call Ideal Customers.

3. Innovation needs to be a team sport. This takes more than one person. Imagine a team of employees who have Working Geniuses of Wonder and Invention who are close to the customer working together to invent the future.

4. Innovation requires processes and tools. There needs to be a cadence. The team needs to be aware of the processes of innovation. They need tools. (Learn more in A Visionary’s Guide To Unleashing Strategic Innovation.)

5. Innovation must be measurable. A company should work to calculate its Return on Innovation. There needs to be a scorecard. There also needs to be a wall of fame showcasing ideas that have been brought to market.

I love visionaries. However, we need to realize that to move our business forward we need to shift from being a company with a great visionary to being a company with an innovative culture.

Originally Published on Darrell Amy's LinkedIn.