Introduction
Collective genius
Leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Linda A. Hill
A culture to drive innovation …
Innovation
An innovation can be defined as an idea, practice, or material artifact perceived to be new by the relevant unit of adoption and offers worthwhile benefits (Dewar and Dutton 1986).
Innovations can be differentiated according to the degree of deviation from existing technologies and practices: incremental innovation and radical innovation (McDermott and O’connor 2002).
- Radical innovations are fundamental changes that represent revolutionary changes in technology (Dewar and Dutton 1986). They represent clear departures from existing practices and require new skills, levels of market understanding, leaps in new processing abilities, and systems throughout the organization (McDermott and O’connor 2002).
- Incremental innovations are minor improvements or simple adjustments in current technology (Munson and Pelz 1979
The main difference that characterizes the two dipoles is the degree of new knowledge contained in the innovation (Dewar and Dutton 1986), which implies technological uncertainty, technical inexperience, business inexperience, and technology cost.
Significance
Competitiveness depends to a large extent on the ability to innovate.
So the ongoing challenge is to build an organisation that is able to innovate all the time.
The rhetoric of innovation is often about fun and creativity, but the reality is that innovation can be very taxing and uncomfortable, both emotionally and intellectually. Linda A. Hill et al. (2014b, p. 5)
This requires leadership—a different kind of leadership?
Leading innovation
The role of a leader of innovation is not to set a vision and motivate others to follow it. It’s to create a community that is willing and able to generate new ideas. Linda A. Hill et al. (2014b, p. 4)
Genius collective
Linda A. Hill et al. (2014b) has done in-depth research on many exceptional innovation leaders in different organisations and at different levels (e.g. Pixar, VW, Pentagram, Google, Pfizer, IBM). They asked what role the leader plays in creating a more innovative organisation. They concluded that directive leadership can work well when the solution to a problem is known and clear. But when the problem requires a truly original answer, no one can decide in advance what that answer should be. Therefore, leading innovation cannot be about creating a vision, persuading people and then somehow inspiring them to implement it.
So the question is not How do I make innovation happen? but rather, How do I set the stage for it to happen?
Paradoxes of innovation
The paradox at the heart of innovation is the need to unleash the talents of individuals and to harness those talents in the form of collective innovation (Linda A. Hill et al. 2014a).
Linda A. Hill et al. (2014b) identified six innovation paradoxes. The challenge for leaders is to help the organization continually re-calibrate between:
- affirming the individual … and the group
- supporting … and confronting (i.e., collaborative disagreement)
- fostering experimentation and learning … and performance
- promoting improvisation … and and structure
- showing patience 1 … and and urgency 2
- encouraging bottom-up initiative … and and intervening top-down
Leaders who stay on the right side of this paradox will never be able to unleash the full genius of their staff; they will have few or no ideas to use. Those who stay on the left side will have many ideas and possibilities to work with, but they will not be able to turn them into new and useful solutions; instead, conflict and chaos will reign. The correct position at any given time will depend on the circumstances. However, the goal will always be to take the position that enables the collaboration, experimentation and integration that are necessary for innovation.
Hard work of innovation
The role of an innovation leader is to create a community that is willing and able to innovate over time (Linda A. Hill et al. 2014b).
Community culture
To build willingness, leaders must must nurture a sense of community, which rests on three elements—a sense of purpose, values, and rules of engagement (Linda A. Hill et al. 2014b).
- Purpose
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Purpose is not what a group does but who is in it or why it exists. It is about a collective identity.
- Shared values
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To form a community, members have to agree on what is important. By shaping the group’s priorities and choices, values influence individual and collective thought and action (e.g., bold ambition, collaboration, responsibility, learning)
- Rules of engagement
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Those keep members focused on what is imperative, discourage unproductive behaviors, and encourage activities that foster innovation (e.g., respect, trust, influence, see the whole, question everything, be data driven.
Organizational capabilities
Willingness is necessary but not sufficient for innovation to flourish. Companies also need the ability to innovate.
- Creative abrasion
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The ability to develop a marketplace where rich diverse ideas compete through discourse and debate.
- Creative agility
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The ability to develop and test different options, learn from outcomes and try again and again till the optimal option is evolved.
- Creative resolution
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The ability to to make decisions that combine disparate and sometimes even opposing ideas.
Creative abrasion
Art challenges technology. Technology challenges art.
Part of the magic of Pixar is that these two disciplines bump up against each other and create something better than either could create by itself. Greg Brandeau, Pixar Animation Studios
Paradoxes
- Individual vs. group identity
- Support vs. confrontation
Ingredients
- Diversity (i.e., people who think differently)
- Cognitive conflict over ideas and appraches (i.e., aimed at learning and improving not winning/losing/dominating) — doing experiments
Leader’s role
- Espouse, encourage, expect and practice communal norms that value and even amplified diversity.
- Push people together and create situation in which diverse thinkers where put in close proximity
- Create organizational bridges
Creative agility
Pursue. Reject. Adjust.
We used to launch products in an “all or nothing” mode to all of our users. Now we had the capability to test multiple different live versions of new products on 1 percent samples of our users. This yielded huge data sets and brought with it a change in mind-set for approaching innovation. We began to avoid projects that only allowed for “zero or one” decisions, instead choosing projects that could be rolled out and evaluated in small slices. Philipp Justus, eBay Germany
Creative agility is about discovery based learning. It involves quickly pursuing multiple experiments, learning from the outcomes, and then adjusting plans. Linda A. Hill et al. (2014b, p. 9)
Paradoxes
- Learning and development vs. performance
- Improvisation vs. structure
Ingredients
- Nimble mind
Leader’s role
- Pursue new ideas vigorously, proactively again and again
- Reflect to harvest knowledge (consciously, collaboratively and openly)
- Adjust and identify next steps in seeking a solution
Creative agility requires a community. Common purpose and shared values provide a framework for creating and assessing experiments.
Creative resolution
From either or
to both-and thinking
We hired innovators and if I were to forbid a passionate team to do something, it really would have missused their talents. I wanted people with a vision, and the ambition to build the next great thing. We needed to let teams go far enough so they could in fact discover this great new thing. Or, in another scenario, they had to recognize it was not quite right, then decide to work on something else, in the best-case scenario integrating their knowledge to another solution. Bill Coughranm, Google
Paradoxes
- Patience vs. urgency
- Bottom-up vs. top-down initatives
Ingredients
- “Either-or” to “Both-and” thinking
Leader’s role
- Guide their organizations to keep multiple options open
- Create the space for integration by keeping things simple, flexible and open
- Lead differently by aggregating view points not directing decisions
Innovation leaders
The leaders Linda A. Hill et al. (2014a) studied had some things in common — they call it the right stuff
They are found to be
Are You an innovation leader? Start by asking yourself these questions about your organization (Linda A. Hill et al. 2014b, 10):
- Do members of my organization feel part of a community?
- Does my organization have a shared purpose—one that binds us together and compels us all to do the hard work of innovation?
- Does it live by rules of engagement supportive of a set of core values: bold ambition, responsibility to the community, collaboration, and learning?
- Do we have the ability to generate ideas through candid discourse and debate?
- Do we have the ability to test ideas through quick pursuit, reflection, and adaptation?
- Do we have the ability to make integrative decisions, rather than compromising or letting some groups dominate?
Ask yourself some questions about your own leadership mind-set and practices: - Do I think my primary job as a leader is to create a context in which my team can innovate? - Am I comfortable serving as the “stage setter” as opposed to the visionary leading from the front? - Do I have the courage and patience required to amplify differences, even when discussion becomes heated and when ambiguity and complexity loom?
If your answer to any of these questions is “no” or even “I don’t know,” it’s probably time to look again at your own leadership role and at the leadership potential that may be hiding in your organization.
Q&A
Literature
Footnotes
Leaders must be patient enought to allow great ideas to emerge↩︎
Leaders must ensure a sense of urgency and clear parameters actually enable integrative decision-making↩︎
Generosity here means the willingness, based on their own sense of personal security, to share power, control and credit↩︎
This includes the willingness to admit imperpections and asking for help↩︎