Legacy companies often need to adapt in order to continue thriving, but that shouldn’t come at the cost of their founding values. Businesses should neither preserve legacy values so rigidly that they can’t ever adapt, nor should they chase innovation to the point that they lose the weight of the company culture that brought them success for decades. In this article, we discuss 10 methods for promoting innovation without sacrificing legacy values.

1. Run a Values Audit

Before introducing any significant innovation, legacy companies should first run an audit on their founding values. Figure out which current business practices directly embody a core commitment and identify any business practices that exist simply because the acts became habitual.

Meet with leaders across every department of the organization and ask which parts of the current structure are unquestionable and which could be changed without betraying founding principles. A properly run values audit should separate the business into a protected zone that innovation must respect and a free zone where experimentation is welcome.

2. Document Legacy Values

Once you’ve run a values audit, it’s important to formally document all relevant legacy values. Without proper documentation, there will be too much ambiguity to ensure that your company’s founding beliefs are preserved. Two staff members might interpret a core value differently and act accordingly.

Documenting legacy values before transformation begins forces a productive conversation about what each founding belief actually means. Once on paper, they are no longer abstract values but operational standards.

3. Appoint Legacy Translators

Your legacy business will likely be divided into two categories: veteran staff members who want to maintain core values and newer staff members who want to fully embrace innovation. Appoint trusted people within your organization that can act as cultural translators between the two groups.

Identify people who can act as legacy translators and incorporate them into any planning meetings around innovation. Give them a prominent voice in how change is communicated so that necessary changes go seamlessly.

4. Frame Innovation around Legacy Commitment

To reduce resistance to incoming changes, it is important to frame all innovation in terms of commitments to legacy values. The objective here is to portray new structures and directives as simply new methods for achieving the same goals the company has always sought.

Veteran employees are more likely to push against innovation if it is marketed as their past work being discarded for better methods. As a result, board members and their legacy translators should do their best to frame new practices as a continuation of old ones.

5. Start with Pilot Programs

Significant innovation will meet less resistance if you start with pilot programs. Choose a single product line, team, or market segment where the stakes are manageable. Run an innovative experiment and document what works, what doesn’t work, and how the team navigates any tension with legacy values.

Starting small and collecting information on the outcomes provides you with data that you can use to convince hesitant staff that new ways are worth embracing. Pilot programs also reveal unforeseen conflicts so that they can be addressed before innovation becomes company-wide.

6. Archive Legacy Knowledge

As bigger changes start to take shape, you should also create an archive of legacy knowledge. Institutional knowledge is one of the biggest reasons that large organizations remain successful for so many years. Innovation should never come at the expense of the strategies that initially made the company great.

Before any longstanding business practice is retired, your company should document what was done previously and the full rationale behind it. As with legacy values, having documentation and thorough conversations enables the company to embrace innovation while maintaining core values.

7. Build Innovation into the Current Culture

After pilot programs have proven the benefits of innovation, it needs to be incorporated into the existing company culture. There should not be a siloed team or department dedicated to experimentation while the rest of the business runs as usual. This structure suggests that change is someone else’s responsibility.

Innovation should be embedded into typical workflows so that trying new things becomes foundational to how your whole business works. Internal pitch meetings, informal problem-solving sessions, and other organizational habits will help achieve this goal.

8. Give Roles to Veteran Staff

Resistance to innovation will also be reduced if roles surrounding it are given to veteran staff members. Newer and younger employees are more likely to embrace new ways of doing things, but giving veterans a meaningful role in shaping change will create a stronger and more effective shift.

Veteran employees also tend to have a much deeper knowledge of how a legacy business runs, which makes them some of the best advisors and problem-framers. Giving them substantial roles strengthens your overall innovation plan while converting your biggest potential blockers into advocates.

9. Tie Initiatives to Origin Stories

Although it might seem superficial at first, innovation will be more readily embraced if new initiatives are tied to the company’s origin stories. Many legacy businesses had a founder who took a risk and disrupted their industries through boldness, resourcefulness, and/or reinvention. In other words, innovation was part of their origin story.

Founding stories are cultural assets that should be utilized during times of significant transformation. Instead of saying that the company is going in a new direction, explicitly frame new initiatives as extensions of the spirit with which your legacy business was started.

10. Focus on Continuity Instead of Progress

Finally, any messaging around necessary innovation should focus on continuity rather than progress. It is popular but ineffective to sell major company changes around the frame of new markets, new systems, and new capabilities. Instead, you should celebrate what has not changed about the company.

For example, your team could celebrate the customer relationships that have survived every transition or the quality standards that remain non-negotiable despite major periods of change. Name what your organization is not willing to trade away, and call it continuity so that innovation feels like a natural step forward.

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He has led growth, advocacy, and change-management campaigns while helping organizations improve public health outcomes through strategic, creative communications.