When an executive at HAVAS, the French advertising company, launched innovative approaches to content development, doors literally started slamming shut. Colleagues who had built their careers on traditional methods suddenly felt threatened, and hostility toward the new technology rippled through the organization. The innovation was sound. The structure was solid. But something crucial was missing: an honest reckoning with how people actually feel when their world shifts beneath their feet.
A 15-year study from Aalto University and Harvard University has finally documented what countless failed corporate renewals have suggested: that emotion-blind structural reforms, no matter how well-designed, often sabotage the very innovation they're meant to unlock. Researchers examined how companies balance short-term performance with long-term innovation—what they call "ambidextrous" structures—across more than a dozen organizations, including Deloitte, Nokia, and ENEL, the Italian energy company. What they found is that the tension between a firm's established core business and its exploratory units creates profound emotional friction within senior leadership and across the organization.
"We consistently found that ambidextrous designs create major emotional tensions within and between senior management, board of directors, traditional core business and the innovation unit. These tensions then undermine innovation efforts," explains Timo Vuori, Associate Professor at Aalto University and lead author of the study. Without active engagement from senior leaders to manage these emotions, the established business actively impedes the exploratory efforts meant to secure the company's future. The problem isn't structural; it's human.
The timing of this research feels urgent. In a world convulsing with artificial intelligence breakthroughs, geopolitical turbulence, and trade wars, emotions are running higher than ever. Digital platforms and AI tools amplify the velocity at which emotional impulses can spread—what Vuori calls "snap judgment" that can cascade across entire organizations in minutes. Leaders accustomed to viewing emotions as peripheral to strategy now face a reckoning: feelings aren't a soft-skills issue; they're a business-critical variable.
What makes the study particularly valuable is that it moves beyond diagnosis to offer concrete solutions. The researchers propose five practices that leaders can implement to address these emotional challenges: making the future concrete and emotionally resonant for employees, expanding what it means to belong to the firm, establishing clearer rules around innovative work, building leaders' self-awareness, and institutionalizing empathy in how the organization communicates. The vision Vuori and his co-author, Harvard Business School Professor Michael Tushman, propose isn't about eliminating tension—renewal always creates friction. Rather, it's about ensuring that people feel genuinely heard, so that tensions become constructive rather than corrosive.
"A skilled approach is about maintaining pride for past achievements, but also building enthusiasm towards a shared future vision, so that innovation is respected rather than seen as a threat," Vuori says. This reframing matters enormously. When employees understand that innovation honors rather than erases their contributions, they stop defending the old guard. The work of transformation becomes collective rather than adversarial.
The research emerges from an environment where emotional decision-making permeates everything from boardrooms to geopolitics. In such a landscape, leaders who can navigate both strategy and psychology aren't simply better managers—they're essential to organizational survival.