# Keeping geniuses aligned without stifling innovation - **Episode:** [213](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/213.md) (2025-07-10) - **Type:** interview - **Tags:** innovation, alignment, management - **Time:** 39:12–43:27 (start 2352s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/213?t=2352](https://truthliesandwork.com/213?t=2352) --- [39:12] Al Elliott: So imagine you've found and hired these brilliant people. You've screened for ego. You've identified they can work collaboratively. Now, how do you give them enough creative freedom to innovate without letting them disappear down rabbit holes that just don't serve the business? Someone could come up with something absolutely brilliant, and then you go, that's cool, Derek, but it's gonna take 3 years and we need to launch something in 9 months. How are you managing that without like curbing their enthusiasm or? [39:39] Steve Roest: Sort of pushing down. Yeah. So exactly. It's a great question. Like I said at the beginning of the show, I don't have all the answers. And one of the things that I try and I guess subsume myself to is that my job is to try and help us improve and win ultimately. And I'm open to the fact that I'm wrong and I might be wrong from day 1 to day 2. But what I will do is I will always focus on how I can get better. How I can help the group better. So to this point, absolutely, you don't want to stifle creativity. That's the last thing that you want because then why are we all here? It's not a battery farm. We want people to be alive and enjoy it coming in and passionate and feeling like they're breaking boundaries and all of that amazing stuff, which they are. Where I come back to it is that we have to have a plan. It has to be directional, i.e., We have agreed that we will be launching a healthy heart check. The customer needs for this roughly look like this. So therefore, the product and the design and the functionality roughly has to somehow align with those things. How you technical people, scientific people solve the AI engineers, how you solve those challenges, bring the creativity, completely fine. Open field, green field. But let's not spend our creative time solving problems that aren't on this agreed list of problems that we have to solve, because these problems are hard enough as it is without us going off and finding another problem that we might be able to solve elsewhere. And what I have found is that there's so much IP that we've generated, some that we've patented, some that's still secret in-house that we won't disclose because it's unbelievably valuable. That even within a predefined problem set, you still create groundbreaking technology. You don't have to necessarily have this sort of freewheeling R&D group that can ping off in all kinds of different places. Now, separate to that, I mean, there's all kinds of history around like, you know how they invented the Post-it note? You know that story where like the guy was messing around to try and make a super strong glue and then made a super weak glue and suddenly they're selling 3 billion Post-it notes. So we keep ourselves open to those type of things. But bear in mind, the products that we're building, so the Healthy Heart Check, the Diabetes Health Check, and our Kidney Health Check, the actual test and AI diagnostic pathway in those is completely new and groundbreaking. It's never existed before. So we are by definition doing new things in the launch of those products. So the individuals in those groups, have ample opportunity to break new scientific ground. But similarly, we don't exclude anyone from doing anything that they want to do themselves. And we've often discussed about, do we do what Google does, which is carve off half a day where people can do their own free sort of research? I think the reality is that if you have a very directional customer problem plan, which we do, which is also one of the reasons why I think we've been able to engage so successfully with the venture capital and private markets in the UK around investment is that your R&D is all geared around solving those problems, which means it's really applied and actually relevant. So, and I think what we try and talk to our teams about is that you can go off and create new ideas, but isn't it better to create ideas that solve massive global problems? That's the holy grail. That's where we want to get to [43:16] Al Elliott: Steve, thank you so much. You've been so open and honest, and it seems unusual for someone at your level to be so open and frank about the challenges and the opportunities. Thank you so much. If people want to learn more about PocDoc, I'm guessing it's PocDoc?