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Hello,

Welcome to Connecting Dots the innovation leadership newsletter.

This month we are metaphorical. You learn how using the leadership danger zone helps manage the tension between stability and instability. The metaphor ties together the topics of the past three editions; Emotional Capital, Empowerment and Innovator Archetypes.

~ Brett

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Managing Instability

Steve Jobs did not invent the iPhone.

Steve Jobs managed the stability of 1,000+ skilled professionals collaborating to combine hundreds of inventions and launch an innovative product that disrupted the mobile, telco, media and camera industries.

The leadership lesson is not the technology story but the challenge for a leader like Jobs to reconcile the tension between novelty and stability. The task is similar no matter the scale or complexity of an organization.

The task of leading innovation is to destabilize an organization enough to create something new and then stabilize it to generate value through use.

Too much instability and nothing ever lands staying lost in the clouds. Not enough instability and it never gets off the ground. As an innovation leader, you need to help everyone take off somewhere new and land somewhere firm. It’s pretty risky as you don’t know exactly where or how you’ll land when you depart.

Running the Performance Ridge

A better metaphor for leading innovation is imagining guiding a long-distance running team along a ridge. You are working hard towards the goal ahead. Rows of trees overhead protect you from the elements.

The team is motivated but sometimes you recognize they get a bit overheated. So you guide them to the right where a glacial stream gives a cooling and refreshing refocus. You jump into the bracing waters.

Later you are back on the ridge but enter a tricky technical section and you notice everyone is getting tense. They’ve lost their flexibility and creativity causing the team to slow and become less reactive to challenges. This time you veer to the left, out from under the trees and into a hot desert plane. The hot sun energizes your limbs and loosens up movements to restore pace.

In both these scenarios, the innovation leader has destabilized the course by changing the energy dynamic to be more extreme. This dynamic leadership practice is how an innovation leader adds or removes energy to drive change over time.

Using the Danger Zone

Jobs was a master of this art. Sometimes, he would energize the team such as when he flew a pirate flag to destabilize and elevate expectations in a team starting an ambitious new project. Other times his blunt and objective feedback cooled irrational exuberance to bring a team back to earth.

The leadership task is to care for the group working towards the goal. To ensure they do not get stuck in these “danger zones”. The danger zone can be helpful and help achieve great things but you can only operate there for a limited amount of time.

It is just like mountaineers approaching the summit of Mount Everest. They need to watch summit fever causing them to push too far too long. As bad weather moves in or resources run out catastrophic outcomes occur annually-often, avoidable tragedies.

The leadership trap is staying in those high or low-energy states too long. It is easy to get stuck and never return to the ridge for balance and sustainable progress. Eventually, the glacial river leads to hypothermia and desert dehydration. The beneficial turns lethal.

Is Now a Time for Strategic Instability?

The metaphor of running the ridge and entering the danger zone is frequently coming up in conversations with CEOs and executive teams this year. After a few years of operational focus, there is a shift to reconnecting with the longer-term vision and mission.

Leaders are working through frustration and trepidation to address 10-year vision questions. For many, it’s about deciding when and where to enter the danger zone to create suitable space and time to destabilize leadership effectively and safely for an intentional but contained period.

To conclude it may be helpful to remember that the iPhone story isn't just one of a single product. It was a primary outcome of Jobs destabilizing the entire company and then stabilizing it as part of a long-term vision and mission. He took them into the hot plane to reenergize innovation after years of excess stability. After a period of instability, they restabilized to scale and commercialize dramatically disruptive products. He was a master of the art of switching between the two leadership modes.

How might you use the danger zone this year, to what aim and for how long?

Learn how Brett brings the best out of leaders to achieve huge impact, healthy teams and happy careers - learn more .

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