In conversation with Kristen Cruzata, Chief of Staff at The Athletic
Ask most people in the media what’s driving innovation and you’ll hear the same list: AI, algorithms, platforms, whatever disrupts us next.
Kristen Cruzata, Chief of Staff at The Athletic, spent her time with our Managing Innovation in Media class to dive deeper into the subject. Her career began in international policy before moving to the New York Times Opinion section managing a global group of writers and editors. Now with her work leading the next iteration of The Athletic, she shared with us a guiding principle she’s carried throughout her career: innovation happens through the relationships you build. Understanding people, giving their ideas room to grow, and moving those ideas through a large organization all comes down to how you treat the humans involved.
Are the right people in the room?
Cruzata kept coming back to one question: “Do we have the right people in the room at the right time?” It sounds simple. It isn’t. Every organization is wired differently, and knowing the org chart won’t get you across the finish line. To get people moving towards a greater goal you need to know what motivates each person, how they relate to one another, and why they show up to the table.
Your biggest advantage is your ability to tap into your network of people and understanding the group dynamics that come out of it. Dirk Hoke, the CEO of Volocopter, discussed the need for understanding group dynamics in The Art of Asking Smarter Questions stating, “When we fail, it’s often because we haven’t considered the emotional part.” British Airways’ 1997 rebrand shows what happens when leaders skip the emotional questions. Hoping to shed its stagnant image, the airline replaced the British colors on its tail fins with artwork from around the world. The team never asked how people would feel about it. Employees resented a £60 million expense during a round of cost-cutting, and the core British business travelers the airline depended on felt their national identity had been erased. BA withdrew the designs within two years, and the misstep contributed to CEO Robert Ayling’s ousting. If you fail to consider all affected parties and create spaces for discussion, your actions are doomed to fail regardless of how sound the plan feels.
This same idea, Cruzata calls a “balance between efficiency and delicacy.” Ideas need to move, but how you introduce them matters. Leaders need to consider the larger picture of the organization and create safe spaces where those involved can express their motivations. Her example was one small swap in language. Instead of “Let’s do it this way,” try “Have we thought about doing it this way?” The second version invites people in. Now they’re helping build the idea instead of being handed them.
Trust comes first
More than 500 people work in The Athletic’s newsroom, but Cruzata still talked about thinking of people at an “atomic level.” When she moved over from The Times, she learned employees’ names and faces before she met many of them. It was a seemingly small gesture that had a large effect of strengthening her connections across the organization. “Vulnerability begets vulnerability,” she told us.
Psychological safety and celebrating people’s wins are integral to constructing a foundation for innovation. It builds an environment that fosters better brainstorming through helping others speak up, question assumptions, and try things that might fail. Harvard Business Review’s investigation into ‘The Art of Asking Great Questions’ cites how this interpersonal connection can lead to greater collaboration with projects. The effect of openness through vulnerability builds an environment that fosters collective intelligence through more dialogue, increases empathy and overall increases the quality of the decision making process. This benefit requires a mutual exchange or as Senior Advisor at Samhound Tijs Besieux puts it, “A good conversation requires both parties to get a chance to speak and understand each other.”
Cruzata also pushed hard on communication. If you want people to take part in change, they need to understand the bigger picture, not just hear the decision after it’s made. And when the direction has to change, the work isn’t over once you decide to pivot, “You have to be able to quickly pivot and then effectively communicate to those people who are going to be affected by the pivot.” Bringing people along is part of the pivot.
Listen before you build
The same habit applies to audiences. The Athletic tests ideas through consumer research, focus groups, an Audience Insights group, and A/B tests on headlines. The home feed is even personalized by algorithm around individual reader taste. That level of curation requires a high level of empathy and the ability to understand audiences desires deeply.
Innovation requires a system free of our own assumptions in search of better need finding for our audience. The Design Thinking Playbook, a guide focusing on using human-centric systems thinking to lead digital transformation, argues that the innovation can only work when we release ourselves from our own personal relationship and internalize the needs of users. Listening before building is achieved when, “we are where they are, especially when we witness the part of their life we want to improve.” That takes a deep level of empathy and understanding.
One lesson from FIFA coverage stayed with us. Seeing the excitement build amongst US audiences displayed an opportunity for The Athletic. A fan’s experience doesn’t end when the match does. They also want to know what the result means and what comes next. Understanding this need changes the original question the team had for coverage. It’s no longer “how do we cover the game?” but “what is the fan experience we can build around the game?” Answering this question required discussion with the fans themselves. Live coverage, streams, discussion feeds, and analysis can turn an audience into a community by giving people a place to gather and a reason to come back tomorrow. Cruzata also raised the “second screen” problem: what should we offer someone who’s already watching live?
So innovation doesn’t always mean inventing something new. Sometimes it starts with understanding what audiences already do and finding a better way to serve it.
Speed runs on preparation
Sports moments burn fast. A story can own the conversation and vanish within hours, so newsrooms have to react and experiment quickly. Cruzata’s FIFA example showed how much prep sits underneath speed. The Athletic started planning well ahead, including relocating a prominent journalist to the US 18 months before the tournament. Coverage that looks instant to the audience was months in the making.
Diverging and connecting more information to a project is often the easiest part of process. The challenge comes afterward when teams must synthesize all the ideas they gathered into a singular direction. The Design Thinking process calls this pivotal moment ‘The Groan Zone’, the difficulty of cutting down information and agreeing on a solution. It’s uncomfortable, but shrinking the decision window pushes teams to choose faster and connect ideas sooner. The more you practice these quick turnarounds, the easier the cycle of collecting, creating, and delivering becomes.
The Athletic’s World Cup coverage shows this thinking system at full strength. Early divergence gave Cruzata and her team a wide network of sources to draw on. Then their reporters synthesized that information quickly and chose a direction the moment a story broke. By converging fast on the events that mattered, they could run with stories while others were still deliberating. That’s the tension at the center of innovation: prepare deeply, then build a process that lets you change course the moment it counts.
Stay willing to learn
AI, search shifts, algorithmic distribution, changing audience habits, and constant movement in sports itself are all landing at once. Cruzata pointed out that economics, politics, and culture all feed into sports journalism, so the ground will always be moving.
Nobody can predict every change. She didn’t seem to think that was the goal.
“You always have to be willing to learn.”
That’s what we’re taking with us. Innovation runs on people, understanding, and process. The trust to bring everyone in, the empathy to hear what they need, and the preparation to move fast when it counts. Technology will keep changing and audiences will keep shifting. The organizations that handle it best probably won’t be the ones who saw it coming. They’ll be the ones who built a culture that knows how to learn when it arrives.
Thank you Kristen for your time discussing how to foster innovation.