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Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter by Brett Macfarlane exploring innovation leadership.

This month we unpack the fourth of the six tension scales on the Innovation Leadership Map; exposure.

But first, I have a few complimentary passes for readers to attend the Innov8rs Connect series on strategy and leadership 21-23 September. In addition to my session on the practice of Innovation Leadership there is a lineup of fantastic speakers. Reply if interested and I’ll set you up dear reader.  First come first served…

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Leadership Exposure

I first came across the term exposure when insourcing five of my product teams into Barclays. This included the flagship core mobile banking product (BMB) that was the EU market leader and a global exemplar at the time. While continuing product excellence was a given, these new teams would have to do so with a step-change in exposure. 

The BMB product team would no longer be working at arm’s length. The ~250 people who touched every software release were now colleagues rather than stakeholders to an external team of “hired guns” working through a hyper-disciplined governance model. The new teams would be part of the family and all that entails rather than just a good friend. The new team would be much more “exposed” to the organization. 

We needed team leaders able to operate effectively as colleagues within this elevated level of complexity and organisational dynamics. Being highly exposed and maintaining a stable rate of incremental innovation was the job. They needed the capabilities and behaviours to maintain composure in a high level of exposure. 

This was very different from one of the other product teams I was also insourcing that was a black ops program, aka a stealth unit. This team was exploring a fundamentally different banking paradigm with emerging technology, speculative market demand and unknown commercial viability. This team had very little exposure, only one intermediary directly into the CEO and no wider awareness outside the board.  This isolation was as much for the team to work effectively, as it was for the wider organization to avoid unnecessary distraction. 

Given the early and experimental stage of development, it was unknown what parts of the organization, if any, would be impacted by whatever the validated product became. They had minuscule exposure compared to the BMB team. They were isolated and needed to function on their own with limited support, no collaboration and only thin external data. Disruptive innovation was the job requiring great comfort with ambiguity, uncertainty and volatility to maintain composure operating in a void. 

Each of these two scenarios was a dream for some leaders and a nightmare for others.

I start with these examples because many people get trapped into thinking there is only one model of Innovation. For example, it needs company-wide participation with everyone involved or it needs to be totally separate with nobody outside the core team involved. This binary thinking is a trap. 

A better approach is to assess what’s the right level of exposure for a given primary task of innovation. After all, many firms have sustaining and disruptive innovation initiatives operating on parallel, plus many other programs, labs, units and corporate development activities. 

What’s the Right Degree of Exposure

When determining the appropriate level of exposure you also need to align the performance capability of yourself or your leader in the position. The performance zone with exposure is just enough so the leader and team feel, think and behave Composed. The danger zones are the highly energized Overexposed position or the low energy Underexposed position. 

Composed - able to work amongst ourselves or collaborate with peers when needed

Overexposed - minimal boundaries and consumed into the agendas of other workgroups

Unexposed - kept distant without meaningful connections to peers

Negotiating the structural and perceptual exposure of your situation can greatly impact your leadership. Of all the experience scales in the Innovation Leadership Map this one is particularly vexing as the procedural collides with the primal. 

Images of pioneers and explorers in harsh environments come to mind. Situations where planning, training, equipment and teamwork come together with effective leadership to accomplish the goal in real-time situations that may be hostile as much as dangerous, unpredictable or volatile.

Some leaders perform best moving fast at high elevations with little oxygen and few people around. Others prefer being in the lush green valleys working through the dense maturity of the organization full of plentiful though not always easy to access resources. 

The starting point to understand exposure is to look around you. 

• Organization: What is the environment you’re operating in and how might it affect your leadership?

• Process: What are the visible procedures of how, when, where and with whom the innovation initiative is bounded by?

• Culture: What social processes indicate in practice if the working group is sufficiently or insufficiently exposed?

• Collaboration: What’s enough contact with the wider firm and what’s too much or little for the objective?

• Capability: Is the level of exposure of the procedural challenge matched by the exposure capabilities of yourself and the team?

These five questions can help you assess whether your team is in the composed performance zone or if it requires renegotiation. As with each of the six experience scales, there is an associated set of practices to address regressive positions. As I’ve shared with the Outlook, Identity and Autonomy scales.  For this newsletter, I focused on sharing a real-world example of the different positions. I hope it has been insightful.

Next month we will look at how leaders experience and perform in relation to risk.

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Brett’s Movements

August was a sad month with our beloved Francis the French bulldog passing. After a mourning period, my wife and I started a mini-world tour as we establish the next life chapter.  While sad we have much to look forward to.

Following our current Seattle visit of family and friends, we head directly to Fontainebleau, France. It’s a delayed graduation celebration at INSEAD for waves 30 and 32 of the Executive Master of Change program. My pride to be part of this group is immense. It’s inspiring to see how the breakthroughs in our research are already progressing answers to the pressing challenges of our times. 

The mini-world tour ends with a week in rural Bordeaux with relaxation and writing before returning to London. 2022 planning is in the air and some great initiatives are taking shape. I hope for you as well. 

Till next time, keep pushing the boundary of possibility,

~Brett