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 Hello,

Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on Innovation Leadership by Brett Macfarlane. 

This 30th edition is an integrative look at how the six experience scales of the Innovation Leadership Map are used in practice. It's a bumper edition to save for your end-of-year reflections and 2022 planning. 

After the article, I’ll wrap 2021 with my own reflection and a preview of 2022 including “The Future of Innovation Leadership”. 

~BM

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The Experience of Leading Innovation

Each of the past 6 editions of Connecting Dots has focused on one of the six experience scales of the Innovation Leadership Map (ILM). Before I explain how the six experience scales of the ILM work I want you to ask yourselves a few questions:

• What does it feel like trying to do the unprecedented?

• When do you get anxious or euphoric?

• How does it affect your decisions, your resilience and your reactions?

• Why does this happen?

As a leader myself, I avoided these questions for a very long time. I was fearful of what it might uncover and worried it might stop me from ever delivering a new idea to the world again.

It turns out most innovation leaders avoid these questions. I learned this firsthand when interviewing repeat innovation leaders over the past three years. High performers at the top of their game rarely stop to understand why or how they lead, let alone what it means for them as people.

It makes sense why innovation leaders might avoid these questions. They can also be quite protective or defensive about their practice. They rarely feel seen or represented given most innovation literature is projective of what you should do. It’s written more for the beginner than the high performer.

The job of the ILM is to provide an x-ray into the experiential drivers of innovation for repeat innovation leaders. Typically high performers in their firms. It is a compassionate and insightful tool to make sense of how a leader is performing and why.

I’ve yet to meet an innovation leader who isn’t conflicted, frustrated or confused about their experiences leading innovation. The outcome may be exceptional but the journey is full of questions. 

The six experience scales of ILM names and explains the situation of innovation leadership. Every innovation leadership situation is unique but these six universal experiences directly illuminate and explain the quality of leadership and life for the protagonists.

The Pressure of Innovation

The reality is innovation goes wrong more than it goes right. Sometimes it goes wrong due to technical realities, it just didn’t work. Often it’s due to human realities, we just didn't work as a group or organization. 

ILM is laser-focused on these human realities. I assume leaders and organizations are highly competent from a technical perspective. What interests me and ILM is the human performance perspective. Not abstractly, but directly with the most important question of “how can innovation leaders perform their best under pressure?” 

To answer the question we must first acknowledge that as innovation leaders there are three parallel pressures continuously at play:

• The pressure put on our positions from outside us

• The pressure we put ourselves from inside us

• The pressurized reactions from others on all sides around us

These pressures are the energy source of our responses as leaders. Everyone is unique and responds to a situation uniquely. That is why the six experience scales are a map, not a recipe. They accommodate the widest possible array of diverse responses.

When one or more of these scales hits a high or low energy state is when regressive responses occur. The goal is to spend as much time in the performance zone of balanced energy. A point readers of Connecting Dots will be familiar with from prior editions of this newsletter addressing each individual ILM experience scale.

ILM in Action

The most potent use of the ILM is when a leader maps a good and bad leadership experience on top of each other. The value is in reflecting on past experiences in a structured way. This process surfaces specific derailing triggers or common regressive patterns present in both the good and bad experiences. 

On its own, the process of mapping two experiences is an immensely valuable exercise for an individual leader. It’s often a profound starting point to make sense of what happened to inform a holistic development process through four dimensions:

A. Ideally it’s the first step of a development process using the raw data of lived experience by looking back. 

B. The value of the experience data is amplified by also looking inside to one’s deeper motivations and fears to make sense of why one might fall into regressive positions.

C. This internal reflection informs the analysis of looking around to one's current role, organization and goals to self-author a personal leadership archetype of how you might show up.  

D. Finally, by looking ahead this work informs a concrete and practical development program of experiments, actions or interventions to elevate one's leadership practice.

In summary, ILM integrates how we experience innovation and leadership by making sense of how we feel, think and behave. It was created as a developmental tool to practically integrate our performance as a leader with the goals of our teams, organizations or society.

The Innovation Leadership Map is a process, framework and language to pull apart an individual’s lived experience of innovation. It gives us a way to access relevant aspects of how we experience innovation and a way to articulate it for reflection, intervention or education.

Innovation is complex, uncertain, unpredictable and paradoxical. ILM acknowledges and addresses this reality so we can better thrive and drive progress.

The Call to Lead

I confess this newsletter feels a bit evangelical whereas others felt more descriptive or narrative. Though I don’t apologize :-) for I deeply believe we are on the cusp of a behavioural revolution in how we see, support and develop leaders in general. The stakes are too high and the challenges too big to not address head-on the hard question and realities of how we lead. 

So many wonderful executives face the call to lead innovation. They may reach for the call or one day the call is handed to them. As they rise to the challenge, around them are colleagues pushing, pulling or paralyzed in need of leadership to guide them forward.

Almost universally, leaders face this situation unprepared. If they are lucky they rose in a culture of apprenticeship where observation and guided performance have developed their practice. However, most leaders operate in a state of blind survival.

The Innovation Leadership Map wasn’t the objective of my research but has become an output of great value. For myself, it helps to make sense of what I was experiencing in the first place to answer the opening questions. Which then proved to be a gateway to understanding why and how it influenced my leadership practice so I could purposefully develop as an innovation leader. 

The six scales of the ILM challenge the caricatures we all hold of an innovation leader. The ILM more realistically surfaces the character of those millions of leaders out there who do it for real and often with little fanfare. Also, without the support of an evidence-based theory, framework and practice specific to innovation leadership. 

The good news is that we have a powerful precedent that can guide how to develop a leader's ability to perform when it matters most - elite sports psychology. As Michael Johnson highlights in this clip, unlike twenty years ago, it is no longer taboo to acknowledge and develop practices for how to perform under pressure.

Innovation leaders - we can do similar for our practice and change how we drive change through innovation of our own practice. I hope you'll continue to follow and contribute to this mission. Feedback and stories are always appreciated. I also invite you to use and test ILM as a tool to illuminate and develop your innovation leadership practice. 

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Brett’s Diary

Looking back on the year I’m exhilarated by the acceptance of ILM and the very premise of innovation leadership as a thing. While I have received extensive support this year it landed hard for me recently after a session with the medical teams at a world-leading cancer research, training and treatment hospital. These are high-performing professionals with lives in their hands every day. Both at the bedside and in the field they are working to progress. 

It was very profound to hear of animated hallway conversations and new insights quickly evolving their own work. It has been my vision to support such high performers and give them new insight and tools to further the hard, frustrating and confusing part of the work, the social processes of innovation. As my last speech of 2021 it reaffirmed my hypothesis that high performers are ready to develop their innovation leadership practices and there’s much motivation to do the work.

As I look to 2022, I’m excited to elevate my practice of innovation leadership development. Practically, the new work for me is to develop self-service tools for individuals and teams based on the innovation leadership map. I will also be consolidating my work and thinking about what is innovation leadership and how to develop one's practice in the form of a book outline over the next two months. Lastly, the individual and team processes developed this year will continue to form the foundation of my work.

To start the year, my next edition of Connecting Dots will be loosely titled The Future of Innovation Leadership. I’m not sure the exact form but I aspire to create a different picture for what innovation leadership could look like in 2030. A speculative vision for the world I hope we can create and occupy. Thoughts and ideas are welcome.

I conclude 2021 with a thank you to everyone who has supported my research, writing and work. Most notably the other exceptional peers and partners at INSEAD, the D&AD, the G20’s V20 and Innov8rs amongst others. Equally my private practice clients for their conviction and commitment to the process from which they have self-authored phenomenal results.

As well thanks to each reader of this newsletter. I know they have become more than a quick read as I meaningfully try to tackle a complex reality. It’s in pursuit of new and better leadership. While I don’t expect you to read every word do know your continued subscriptions are hugely appreciated and give me the confidence to stay the course. Thank you and please do keep sharing your thoughts.

I wish you an enriching and revitalizing end to 2021.

Best,

~Brett