Credit union leaders love a clean story. A decisive Board. A visionary CEO. A bold strategic plan that launches something new and meaningful. It makes for great conference stages and annual reports. But that’s not how real innovation actually shows up.
In practice, innovation sneaks in sideways. It starts as a workaround. A curiosity. A “why is this member doing that?” moment. It’s rarely named innovation at the time, and almost never funded as such.
That’s uncomfortable for an industry built on governance, planning, and control. Yet it’s precisely where credit unions need to focus next.
The Innovation We Miss Is the One Already Happening
Front-line teams invent micro-solutions every day to remove friction, explain complexity, or help a member move forward. Digital teams quietly tweak flows. Lenders adapt language. Call center reps invent scripts that outperform policy. These aren’t innovation initiatives: they’re survival instincts.
The problem? We don’t notice them. Or worse, we standardize them out of existence.
Innovation rarely begins with a grand objective. It begins with attention. Leaders who spend time observing behavior—not just reviewing dashboards—see it first. The credit unions that grow faster aren’t more creative; they’re more observant.
Planning Can Kill the Very Thing It Seeks
Strategic discipline matters. But when applied too early or too rigidly, it suffocates experimentation.
Innovation doesn’t respond well to five-year roadmaps or perfectly articulated business cases. It needs space to evolve, to be wrong, to surprise us. Most meaningful breakthroughs weren’t obvious at inception, and wouldn’t have survived a traditional ROI screen.
The irony? Credit unions pride themselves on patience and long-term thinking. Yet many demand immediate clarity from new ideas. That mismatch quietly starves progress.
The more effective posture is iterative intent: a clear direction paired with permission to adapt. Leaders don’t need all the answers; but they must protect the search.
Innovation Is a Team Sport (Whether You Like It or Not)
The myth of the lone innovator persists because it’s tidy. Reality is messier.
Breakthroughs are layered: built by operators, skeptics, translators, and champions over time. The most valuable ideas often come from unexpected corners of the organization, then mature through collective refinement.
Credit unions that celebrate only polished success send the wrong signal. Innovation thrives where partial ideas are safe, where contribution matters more than authorship, and where learning beats ego. This requires humility at the top. Many of tomorrow’s answers won’t originate in the boardroom or even inside the organization at all.
A Focused 10XCU™ Example: Innovation Hidden in Plain Sight
In a recent 10XCU™ engagement, a credit union believed its next phase of growth would come from a major digital initiative. The strategy said so. The budget supported it. The Board expected it. But the data told a different story.
Through the 10XCU™ Balanced Scorecard, we identified an anomaly: members who experienced just one additional, higher-quality human interaction were adopting more products and deepening relationships faster than peers. This wasn’t tied to a campaign or technology. It was behavioral.
A small group of managers and front-line leaders had subtly changed how conversations happened: asking better questions, slowing the moment, and helping members connect a single decision to a broader financial outcome. No program. No playbook. No label.
Rather than forcing scale, leadership studied the pattern. Using this lens, they treated the behavior as a prototype; tracking it, protecting it, and reinforcing it through leadership expectations and incentives. What started as a quiet shift in behavior ultimately outperformed several larger, more expensive initiatives already in motion.
The Real Shift Is Mental, Not Technological
Technology will keep advancing. That’s a given. The differentiator won’t be tools; it will be mindset.
Credit unions that outperform will adopt a different logic:
- Curiosity over certainty.
- Patterns over plans.
- Learning over perfection.
- Stories alongside spreadsheets.
They’ll treat strategy as a living narrative, not a static document. They’ll look for anomalies instead of averages. They’ll ask better questions before demanding better answers. Most importantly, they’ll recognize that innovation isn’t a department; it’s a behavior.
And once you see it that way, you start noticing how much of it is already happening.
Jeff Rendel is a Certified Speaking Professional and widely recognized as a leading strategic advisor in the credit union industry. Through his 10XCU™ systems, Jeff works alongside CEOs and Boards to translate complexity into clarity, uncover hidden opportunities for growth, and help credit unions build relevance, resilience, and results. Learn more: jeffrendel.com; jeff@jeffrendel.com; 951.310.7275.