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Turning Innovation Adversaries into Allies

Recently, the folks at Boldly interviewed me about the coaching aspect of my private leadership development practice. They focused on a particular challenge that many innovation leaders face: how to turn adversaries into allies.

It’s a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of innovation leadership. We’re captivated by ideas, launches, outcomes, and case studies. However, the often-overlooked reality of innovation leadership is that it’s predominantly relational work, with technical work playing a supporting role.

The word “adversaries” carries significant weight, representing conflict. It encompasses conflicting perspectives, experiences, understandings, or goals. If the relational work isn’t done effectively, it’s often due to a lack of sufficient alignment leading to adversarial dynamics when it comes to making commitments.

This isn’t a flaw but a fundamental aspect of human nature. We need to diligently sift through our diverse views, experiences, and needs to reconcile them into a coherent enough understanding of how to move forward together willingly.

A new idea, as any innovation is, logically disturbs the current good enough alignment of how an organization operates. After all, every organization is perfectly optimized for its current results. 

The evidence and research I rely on tells us driving change through innovation may be adversarial but that doesn’t mean it’s hostile, brutal or hurtful. In fact, the most effective leadership approaches take into account the varying needs, responses and emotions of other people. 

Surprisingly, this truth is often neglected in business schools, design colleges, and technical degrees. However, for individuals leading work with uncertainty or risk triggered by new or innovative ideas, it’s an essential skill to transform adversaries into allies.

Regrettably, many innovators fail to recognize that they’ve inadvertently created adversaries until it’s too late. A symptom of this oversight is when they resort to blaming abstract entities like politics, antibodies, permafrost, or dark forces. These leaders have neglected to engage, exchange, and empathize with their peers.

On a positive note, there are ways to create coalitions of the willing and to less painfully leverage expertise in the organization to realize your vision. The goal quite simply is to turn adversaries into allies.

Strategy 1: Fault Lines

Unspoken differences in groups act like fault lines, they are dormant under the surface until activated. These differences are repressed and sit unconsciously yet influence how people respond to events and each other. Common fault lines are education, sex, nationality, race and age. The adversarial effects of fault lines are moderated when made salient through real information, real dialogue, learning and trust/psychological safety. Curiostiy and pro-diversity beliefs are key drivers of this work enabled by Strategy 2.

Strategy 2: Inner and Outer Empathy

Look to generate the capability and techniques to generate inner and outer empathy. Inner empathy involves understanding what drives or detracts you in the present moment, while outer empathy focuses on what drives or detracts those around you in the present moment. The key phrase is “right now” to ensure focus on developing how you think and act in alignment with your role’s goals in the here and now. In practice not in theory. This strategy provides precision in understanding the source, response, and consequence of an emotional response, allowing you to guide its influence rather than having it guide you. Warning, this can be dangerous work so if you aren’t trained call in someone who is. Do so early not when the conflict starts due to Strategy 3.

Strategy 3: Change Tolerance

Most people start with what’s technically possible and not socially tolerable in an organization. Hence tremendous waste where even the best innovators aren’t very good at realising innovation. What if you started with the goal of surfacing how much innovation can be tolerated right now? Not in theory but in practice. This differs from the typical focus on the most technically advanced possibility, which is the trap. By developing a practice of surfacing what’s socially tolerable, leaders significantly increase their influence, effectiveness, resilience and satisfaction. You can also align the approach and enabling actions based on the company’s dominant culture (e.g., process, competition, peer, or exploration-centric) to increase tolerance of change and innovation.

While every situation is different, typically one or more of these strategies help engage potential adversaries so they might become allies.

I’ll wrap up with a final thought. Often, we assume at the beginning of an initiative that everyone is an ally. Please don’t.

It’s good to be optimistic and think the best of people but only mark them down as allies when you’ve seen tangible evidence they are thinking and acting in line with your desired outcomes, right now.

If you don’t know, engage and find out while you can do something to moderate adversarial undercurrents in even your most dependable peers as needs change over time and by situation. Engage early and often. It’s in everyone’s best interest.

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Learn more about Brett’s leadership development practice for global innovation and change professionals.