Welcome to Connecting Dots where interdisciplinary learning helps leaders innovate for the digital era. I’m Brett Macfarlane and this newsletter is a testbed for my INSEAD research into the behavioural and psychodynamic factors behind today’s innovation crisis and the coming revival.
KITZBUHEL, AT The warm electric synth tones of Euro-pop and Schlager music thumps through the valley. The Super Bowl of winter sports is preparing to welcome 100,000 enthusiasts of downhill ski racing and entertaining demonstrations of precision by Red Bull, Audi and the Austrian Army. After a morning skiing the high alpine, I’m down in the stands watching the first Hahnenkamm training run while starting to sketch my INSEAD research model.
Like the ski racers careening down the mountain, my research is a chance to dive into a challenge and take some calculated risk. The rules, rigour and relentless curiosity of academic research at this level is new to me. I love how business school research acknowledges and embraces complexity to open understanding rather than converge on brutal simplicity to drive alignment as does most business logic. Systems and complexity are especially important when innovation is the field of study and arguably the highest test of change any group may face.
The thing about change in work, life and society is when you’re in the middle of it you’re swarmed with questions and questioning of where it will end up. The discomfort of the liminal phase of having left the old state and yet to arrive at the new destination is a slow and steady swell of anxiety. Yet in that froth is where the richest learning emerges.
My training as an economist forged my interest in trying to enlighten fragments of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that guides us forward. Amidst our paradoxes, accidents and mysteries the one unique trait of humans is innovation; the drive to initiate evolution which improves our condition, even when we recognize the consequences.
A revelation came to me when excavating my past work comparing when things did or didn’t work no matter how badly people wanted to innovate. It’s no surprise there is no magic process or single hero in the successes. Nor did more or less raw ambition or talent determine failure. Same for time and resources. Afterall, innovation is an act, a performance sport if you will, where decisions and emotions must be effectively managed in the face of uncertainty.
A key observation was success came with balanced risk appetite and perceived risk. I was thinking about an experience when working with a rather large brand on the eve of the Olympics. Desperate to innovate they were with huge ambition and yet they couldn’t execute on the simplest of attempts. Like a child at the end of a diving board unable to bring themselves to jump. Every day their despair grew as they saw other Olympic sponsors do the very things we unsuccessfully attempted to do months earlier.
“Why can they but not us?” they asked.
“They did it because they did it” I replied (unhelpfully.)
I look back now and see that while they had an appetite for risk, the risk perceived in this specific initiative was wildly overestimated, irrational in fact. Their denied anxieties and fears distorted their thinking leaving them trapped in the no-man’s land between ambition and ability to perform. Truth was, they were terrified and paralysed by their own ambition. This imbalance manifest itself in the distorted risk perceptions.
The good news was we did innovate in other areas but each time is different, even with the same team. In this situation we should have addressed the ambition not the risk perception. One shouldn’t jump off a cliff if they aren’t willing to fly one might say, or maybe that’s just all the Red Bull talking.
“One of the most important gratifications of adult life in the ability to work well.”
Movements
It’s a week of fresh air in Kitzbuhel and Munich. Early February I’ll be in Zurich/Zug and then back to Fontainebleau to start setting up research at INSEAD. Late February I’ll be at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona so please do let me know if you’ll be there and we can try and meet up. As always feedback welcome and please do continue reading below for this edition’s Connecting Dots with Gerry.
May you thrive in 2020,
- Brett
PS Please forward this newsletter to someone you feel would be interested. Your forwards and shares go a long way and are appreciated! 🤟
Dot Makers
Gerry Haag is one of those sparks of life that helps lighten any work challenge before you. A well-travelled German based in Majorca he’s long worked at the front lines of Europe’s technology ecosystem. Most notably helping Amazon’s market entry amongst other unicorns.
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