Connecting Dots 65 ◎⁃◎ Closing Innovation’s Culture Gap

Oostende, Belgium. March, 2025.

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Closing Innovation’s Culture Gap

Organizations will often conclude they need to be more innovative—new products, better services, sharper commercial models, novel marketing or improved operations. Usually triggered by a forcing function like market dynamics, competitor adjustments or new technology possibilities. Yet rarely do they ask what in their culture hinders more novel, effective or ambitious responses to these forcing functions. 

All companies already have a culture of innovation as measured by their current innovation outcomes. Often, these outcomes are far from meeting their aspirations. Evidence from McKinsey suggests 94% of executives are not satisfied with their innovation achievements, so it seems even at the world's best companies, there’s a significant aspiration to satisfaction gap.

Many executives I work with appreciate the observation that an organization can only innovate as much as it can tolerate change. The lower the change tolerance, the lower the innovation output and outcomes. The higher the change tolerance, the more ambitious the innovation outputs and outcomes. 

The point of asking a question like “What is our innovation tolerance right now?” is to surface the current innovation culture. Every culture will have a boundary reflecting the types of innovation that can and can’t be tolerated right now.  It’s a helpful question to ask even in times of high innovation tolerance, as the boundary shifts over time.

Most often, there is frustration when a firm isn’t more innovation-tolerant. The antidote many call for is to add or adopt an innovation culture as if it’s a specific and singular type of culture. Yet when you look at a cohort of highly innovative companies like, say, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia, you find fiercely different cultures for how they innovate. 

A way to decode and recode the innovation culture is to look at any organization as neurotic. Neurotic in this context means to be anxious and obsessive about the current way of working. By decoding the dominant constellation of neurotics in an organization, you can identify patterns or behaviours that are getting in the way of faster, better or more ambitious innovation outcomes.

Here are five neurotic styles that I use, developed by Manfred Kets de Vries, that can be assessed and diagnosed in your organization to get under the skin of a culture and what’s going on in the here and now, hindering progress. Maybe you’ve seen one up close?

The Dramatic Organization

Characterized by over-centralization and primitive structures that obstruct the development of effective information systems between levels. Shows up as attention-seeking or excitement-based communications tending to the extremes, gaining more attention than pragmatic insight, findings or recommendations. Action for action's sake and relentless impulsiveness can be avoidance of dealing head-on with existential truths. 

The Suspicious Organization

Characterized by elaborate information processing, centralized control with a low decision-making pace as efforts prioritize excessive analysis of external trends. Shows up as over-involvement in rules and details to vigilantly prepare to counter any attacks fostering a fight or flight culture. Uniformity and fitting can be avoidance of standing out or being perceived to offend others even if in pursuit of the greater good.

The Detached Organization

Characterized by internal focus, self-imposed barriers to information sharing and insufficient scanning of the external environment. Shows up as lacking interest in the present or future and indifferent to praise or criticism. Lack of warmth and rampant insecurity can be avoidance to growing beyond parochial perspectives and taking up one's full potential due to an over-weighted perceived fear of failure.

The Depressed Organization

Characterized by ritualism bureaucracy, inflexibility and resistance to change. Shows of lack of initiative, motivation and awareness of successful comparisons resulting in ‘decideaphobia’ and lack of response to changing markets or society. Unwillingness to take a direction can be avoidance of deep doubts of not being good enough and insecurity despite obvious strengths. 

The Compulsive Organization

Characterized by rigid formal codes, elaborate information systems and hierarchical representation of status coming directly from specific positions within the company. Shows up as heavily top-down dominant with expectations to conform to tightly prescribed rules rather than external evidence or data. Shows up as rigid and inward decision processes with submissive and uncreative employees. Obsessed with a single aspect of strategy (e.g. cost cutting, quality, etc.) can be avoidance of accepting that not all can be controlled and that unexpected events are reality whether we like it or not. 

My central thesis is that every culture is unique and innovates in its own way. To improve or adjust the innovation outputs, one of the best mechanisms is to go beyond simply identifying your “to be” culture and way of working to also identify what in the existing culture is hindering its changeability. 

What I find helpful is to anticipate which of the five neurotics might show up so you can develop strategies to sense and anticipate. Or, if progress has stalled, do a deep dive qualitative analysis for which neurotic is showing up in the here and now to develop interventions alleviating the hindrances. In either, you can better address regular change resistance and ad hoc responses to unexpected or repressed blockers. That way, you can recalibrate your innovation tolerance and ambition to close the satisfaction gap.

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Connecting Dots 64 ◎⁃◎ Emotional Gearing

2024 Olympic Men’s Marathon

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How Emotional Gearing Influences Innovation Outcomes

I am writing this edition from my office in Vancouver. The morning sun illuminates a blank wall. My mind searches for a single aha moment that frames this introduction to Emotional Gearing.

Instead, what comes to mind is two years of research with over 500 innovation leaders across five continents. Rather than buzzwords, gimmicks or clickbait, what slowly emerged was a simple repeatable mechanism described with plain language.

Emotional Gearing didn't come from my aha moment. Instead, it comes from hundreds of research participants' aha moments.

Allow me to explain why this goes against the status quo of innovation, strategy and management literature.

Leadership Needs More Science

Let’s address an awkward truth: a lot of leadership behaviour theory doesn’t hold up to reality, especially if we look at innovation leadership more scientifically. 

There is no single profile of who makes an innovative leader in all situations. Nor is there a list of tasks or a single leadership mechanism that unlocks success, every time. 

Admittedly, we all love a heroic case study and their seductive hacks and acts. However, the reality is that each leadership situation is just too different. Heraclitus comes to mind: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

We need better leadership science that more realistically accounts for the tremendous behavioural and technical complexity, variability and uncertainty any professional faces when trying to drive change through a new idea of any size.

The Comparative Method Advantage

This mission for better behavioural science in a specific situation speaks to me. I was part of a similar paradigm shift in high-performance sports. Thirty years ago sport started to move beyond folk theories, gimmicks and gurus.

The goal was to scientifically understand and manage the cognitive pressures and mechanisms of performing under pressure when it matters most. 

Today, we deeply understand and apply evidence-based methods that better enable athletes to perform their best under pressure. These practices and mechanisms have become familiar to informed youth and recreational athletes (and their coaches) as much as Olympians representing your nation.

In my organizational leadership research, I borrowed a fundamental aspect of performance development from sports: the comparative method, where athletes religiously and rigorously study their performances between and within competition, as well as in training. 

Using the Innovation Leadership Map framework executives in my research compared multiple innovation leadership experiences good and bad. 

Comparison enabled individuals to see their response range when operating in emotionally charged environments of innovation. This response range operated at two levels, how they responded and the responses of others in their team and/or the organization. 

The aha moment came when they saw that their feelings, thoughts and actions when leading innovation are dynamic rather than a static good or bad binary.

That statement may seem obvious to you. Yet, these highly accomplished executives I was working with had almost universally not previously compared like-for-like leadership situations such as innovation processes let alone other routine work tasks. 

Sure there was ongoing ad hoc reflection, executive coaching, line manager feedback and annual performance reviews. However, a reliable, candid and experiential analysis method comparing multiple situations to illuminate the range of ways they operate as a leader was almost universally new.

The benefit of this personal performance insight was that while a leader of innovation will never know precisely what will happen as their work progresses, looking at their past through the comparative method insightfully illuminated how they might respond in the present through the inevitable ups and downs of innovation in their future.

The repetition of these individual aha moments led to a broader observation. 

Centred, Surging or Stuck

In 2023 a clear pattern emerged across participants suggesting a strong correlation between an emotionally balanced position and positive outcomes. 

Equally, extremely high or low emotional energy was often strongly correlated with negative professional or personal outcomes for individuals, teams and/or organizations. 

However, at times strong emotional surges were helpful and even necessary to drive progress for individuals, teams or entire organizations.

For example, surges could inject highly energized bursts of enthusiasm, idealization, optimism and motivation to break through setbacks, frustration or resistance.

Or, a surge could subtract energy to bring down to earth an unbounded ambition, misaligned vision or reckless risk-taking to reconnect with reality.

While these surges could be helpful, the more costly and regressive situations occurred when individuals became stuck in extreme highs or lows.

Like climbing 8,000+ meter mountains, one ventures into extreme conditions to accomplish great things. However, even expert mountaineers can’t stay in this “death zone”  for too long as the body can only be deprived of oxygen for so long and still function effectively. 

“Emotional gearing” is a practice for how innovation leaders can intentionally work with behavioural demands and dynamics by actively shifting when needed between centred, surging and stuck positions. It's a mechanism that can proactively interpret and influence the responses of individuals, teams and/or the organization.

What’s Next for Emotional Gearing

I hope to deploy and further test this mechanism with executives, coaches, advisors and L&D professionals like you supporting the innovators in your organization. 

The aim is to reduce the costs of people burning out while increasing the benefits of innovation to their organization, stakeholders and society.

If you have ideas for adopting Emotional Gearing or suggestions on who should hear about it please get in touch. 

Also, thanks to research participants and those who provided feedback to prior editions of this newsletter. Every act deepens our knowledge to reduce pain and increase gain.

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Connecting Dots 63 ◎⁃◎ Innovation Leadership, a Manifesto

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Making Innovation Leadership a Practice

That was then.

The big hard forester was crying small soft tears. We stood silently in remote Idaho surrounded by the thriving success of their innovative forest management techniques. 

I was a young economist studying the cause and effect of environmental policy and public relations. He was overwhelmed by frustration that their findings and methods weren’t adopted by industry, non-profits or government agencies. 

Paradoxically, these same smart, successful and sophisticated people continuously called on him for innovation and new solutions. Yet, the patient wouldn’t take their medicine.

In this Idaho fieldwork, we had expected legalese and technicalities. Instead, we were confronted by frustration and humanity.

It was a lesson that even the best organizations aren’t very good at innovation.

This is Now

Today in 2025, the trap of seeing innovation as a purely rational and emotionless technical exercise persists. Even the most innovative organizations aren’t very good at minimizing waste, burnout and harm. Consequently, great potential for good goes unrealized.

Innovation itself needs innovation to become more human(e). After all, innovation doesn’t come from spontaneous combustion or sophisticated software algorithms, it comes from people with the motivation and capabilities to make something new real by driving change with others.

Therefore, to start the year I give you an evidence-based manifesto to treat innovation leadership as a specific leadership practice. Just as some doctors are effective emergency room specialists through deliberate training, executives and managers can deliberately train to more effectively navigate innovation’s unique behavioural challenges and social processes.

~ Share this manifesto, tell me if you agree/disagree, and let’s innovate how we innovate to be more human(e).

Innovation Leadership, a Manifesto

Accept the Challenges and Opportunities of Innovation Leadership

Innovation leaders face many challenges in the contemporary business environment. They must navigate the emotional and political complexities of change within organizations, secure buy-in from stakeholders, and manage anxiety within their teams while pursuing often disruptive innovations. Yet, these challenges also present a unique opportunity to redefine how innovation is understood and practiced within the unique context of a company’s culture, history and current capabilities.

Recognize the Emotional Reality of Innovation: One of the key challenges is the widespread misconception that innovation is purely a rational, technical process. The evidence consistently highlights the need to acknowledge the emotional realities faced by innovation leaders and the strong emotions triggered by the pursuit of innovation. Innovation leaders need to recognize that their efforts inevitably cause distress and that they must be prepared to deal with anxiety both within themselves and their teams.

Navigate the Boundary of Innovation Tolerance: A related challenge is the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes innovation within an organization. Innovation leaders need to determine the organization's tolerance for change - how much innovation can the organization bear right now before pushing back?  This requires an understanding of the organization's culture and an ability to carefully navigate the often invisible boundaries that define what is acceptable and what is not, in the here and now. Pushing too far, too fast can trigger defensive responses that stifle innovation.

Create a Holding Environment for Innovation: A key task for innovation leaders is to create a holding environment that allows individuals and teams to safely explore new ideas, how to adopt them at scale, and work through the anxiety associated with change. This involves containing regressive responses to change and fostering an environment where individuals feel safe to challenge the status quo. Acknowledging the anxieties within the organization and providing reassurance and direction are crucial to creating such an environment. 

Exhibit Transformational Leadership that Embraces Authenticity:  Evidence reveals the importance of transformational leadership, where leaders inspire followers to move beyond transactional relationships and embrace change. This involves articulating a clear vision, providing intellectual stimulation, and demonstrating genuine care and concern for team members. Combining transformational leadership with authentic leadership, where leaders are self-aware and transparent about their motivations, builds trust, fosters collaboration and concretely empowers real work to progress.

Develop a Practice of Innovation Leadership: One of the most significant opportunities for innovation leaders is to move away from rigid frameworks and processes and towards a more adaptable and human-centred approach. This involves developing a practice of innovation leadership that recognizes the emotional complexities of change. This practice includes tools and techniques for surfacing and managing anxiety, fostering psychological safety, and developing self-awareness. By embracing the emotional reality of innovation and developing a practice that combines technical expertise with emotional intelligence, innovation leaders can unlock the full potential of their teams and organizations. 

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Learn more about Brett’s private leadership development practice.

Connecting Dots 62 ◎⁃◎ "Let's See What Happens" - The Innovation Flywheel

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“Let’s See What Happens”

It was Wednesday at 7:30 am. I was in a modern French-themed café preparing for the pilot of a slightly innovative event format that started in 30 minutes.  The last note I wrote down atop the printed agenda was “Let’s see what happens.”

It’s a reminder that I write or type before any planned event, training program, strategy offsite, or one-to-one session. No matter how big or small. The work could affect one person, a million customers or a billion humans. 

In these sessions, even with the best-laid plans, the outcomes are uncertain. While we can be confident we can’t be closed-minded. It’s essential to allow unexpected events and listen closely to what is or isn’t being said in the room. 

This morning, it was simply a friendly and fun first edition of a business book club. However, like any new idea, venture, or proposition, you don’t know if it will or won’t work until you try.  

While I was hopeful it would work out, I needed to be accepting of the fact it might not, be okay with that possibility and if so be appreciative we learned quickly. 

In my experience, most executives can understand this need to learn by doing in theory, however, in practice, most really struggle.

So I thought I’d share an example of how I launched with my co-conspirator Frank a small and innovative(ish) event through a nice framework from the book we discussed.

Firstly, what were we trying to do?

The hypothesis for the book club is that people and professionals love to socialize through ideas. Also, there is a yearning to convene again and rebuild such forums post-COVID and in the techno-anxiety era. 

For the first meeting, I selected a book relevant to any organization and grounded in evidence, not pop-management fluff. No Rules Rules is a research-based investigation of Netflix’s journey, culture, and learning over two decades. 

It was a biased selection as I was trained by Erin Meyer, the academic co-author. Erin deepened my training in cross-cultural communication development methods and is a teaching role model. 

I was also motivated to disseminate key principles of modern software ways of working to other industries as exemplified by the other co-author, Reed Hastings, CEO and co-founder of Netflix. 

If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. Thanks to 20 years of honing and refining, the practices revealed in the book are crisp and robust. Rather than a self-aggrandizing biography, it’s the true cut and thrust of working life in the constant pursuit of innovation, excellence, and results. 

How did we do it?

In hindsight, we followed Reed’s innovation flywheel. Now, this isn’t all unique to Netflix, but it nicely represented how we were working and what we were okay with success or failure. 

Reed’s innovation flywheel:

1. “Farm for dissent” or “socialize” the idea.

2. For a big idea, test it out.

3. As the informed captain, make your bet.

4. If it succeeds, celebrate. If it fails, sunshine it.

While our book club was “just” a book club, it was hosted within an organization where the format and focus were unprecedented. Just as any innovative idea starts as “just” an idea, until you test it out to see what happens, you don’t really know if it will work or if the organization can accept it.

We made our bet.

So, what happened? 

Well, of course, the contents of our discussion are confidential as we operated under Chatham House Rules and the in-person experience was the point. 

However, I can report that it was a super engaging, insightful and fun discussion over a fantastic breakfast. Participants loved socializing through ideas about the organizations in their lives and it was a super easy group to moderate as people listened intently while sharing meaningfully. 

Now, thanks to a super high NPS, over three times the number of attendees wish to participate in person in the future. 

Why did that happen?

Firstly, it was evident how ready people were to learn from and with others. Many alluded to big challenges they faced without forums to think, ideate and get feedback more broadly.

Secondly, one of the challenges to innovation or change through new ideas is that work has become more collaborative, distributed and workshop-based so that there is ever more to do. What can get crowded out is the thinking and learning and people LOVE to think and learn together.

Thirdly, I’m constantly heartened by how a light but clear structure empowers participation with high levels of interpersonal responsibility. We set the context and then watched what happened. 

Shall we try it again?

Yes, but we still need to see what happens the second time. I’m hopeful but we don’t know if interest and momentum will endure.

Let’s see what happens. 

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

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Connecting Dots 61 ◎⁃◎ Turning Innovation Adversaries into Allies

Best Friends Francis and Ruby, Primrose Hill 2018

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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.

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Connecting Dots 59 ◎⁃◎ On Running > Lightspray's Olympic Innovation Gold 🥇

R&D Prototypes of Lightspray on display during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games

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On Running > Lightspray’s Olympic Innovation Gold 🥇

For two weeks I was in Paris during the 2024 Olympics and studied up close innovation in sports, media and industry.

Events like the games are a helpful forum to see who is doing what and how well. Though it can be hard to identify what might stick after the games versus what was simply a nice “brand activation”.

However, spending two weeks up close with athletes and professionals pushing the boundaries of their domains reconnected me to a truth about how meaningful achievements and breakthroughs happen.

It’s not about skill

It’s not about effort

It’s not about mindset

There isn’t one thing that makes an effective innovation leader.

Just as there isn’t a single thing that gets an athlete to the Olympic games, let alone on the podium. Complex in execution and seemingly effortless in solution.

It’s about applying all three factors, in parallel, over time. 

To say innovation leadership is an integrated practice may not sound that surprising. But, in practice, it certainly is surprisingly rare.

Over two weeks I surveyed the world’s most innovative sportswear brands. I heard their pitches, spoke to their people and picked away at their culture.

They all excelled at one of the three. Only one excelled at all three factors.

On Running

I’ve followed On Running since 2018 when boarding a 5 pm flight out of Zurich. It seemed ever smartly dressed Swiss professional sported a pair of tastefully coloured On trainers. 

At the time, the world wasn’t asking for another billion-dollar running shoe brand and yet a few years later we have one. Out of Switzerland of all places.

Innovation in product design, materials, marketing and retail has been their driver. However, after a decade and billion-dollar growth, a culture typically plateaus unless a new s-curve can be developed.

Rather than succumb to the Innovator’s Dilemma they were able to birth a new product logic without detracting from their core business. 

Lightspray

One morning after a run, I found myself in a naturally lit atelier beside Canal St. Martin. The area serves as the current culture and fashion engine of Paris.

Before me was a pop-up manufacturing facility with two robots, a small display and of course excellent coffee.

Olivier Bernhard, one of On’s founders, described their 8-year journey to develop a new manufacturing process that changes the economics, llgistics and performance of running footwear. 

In front of us, a robotic arm precisely applied a continuous spray thermoplastic making the shoes’ upper. The proprietary technique and material were bonded to a soul featuring a carbon plate as is now common to elite running shoes. 

However, this shoe was anything but common. It debuted publicly a few months before at the Boston Marathon and won. 

Meanwhile, in Paris, athletes were picking up shoes straight off the robot and onto the track in Stade de France.

It was an impressive display but what stood out wasn’t the technology—it was the people. 

They knew Lightspray was great and while it was now out in the real world they were able to discuss what still needed to be done despite their pride in the achievement. 

Staff at every level I spoke to could identify moments of uncertainty where they stayed confident and took intelligent risks. As well as the trust of each other and belief that even if they weren’t included directly in all aspects of top secret R&D it was a collective achievement. 

It was candid, personal and authentic. Very different from all the other brands in Paris.

Emotional Capital

What I observed physically and culturally in the atelier was a rare complete portfolio of emotional capital. 

Emotional capital is a well-researched attitudinal and behavioural way to evaluate the vitality of an organization and levers for executives to evolve and mature a growing organization or pivot and revitalize a stagnant one.

What I saw, heard and felt were the levers that through actions express or generate:

RESPECTFUL AUTHENTICITY:

Alignment between actions, thoughts, and feelings. Feeling of being sincere and considerate to myself and others.

DESERVED PRIDE :

Feeling that we are appreciated for our differences and concrete contributions to others.

REALISTIC HOPE:

Feeling that today’s actions will improve our future.

THOUGHTFUL PASSION:

Feeling of deep personal engagement and high energy experiencing timelessness.

ASPIRATIONAL DISCONTENT:

Unhappy that we have not realized our full potential. We can if we want to.

I scored On Running ten points in all categories and award them my gold medal for innovation over the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.

One of my favourite things about the experience is that the shoes they were manufacturing really were being manufactured. It wasn’t a demo, it was real-world manufacturing in the middle of Paris.

They will be sold later this year in a direct-to-consumer drop with a Made in France label. It’s their next step in distributed, individualized and sustainable production.

Congratulations On Running, you’ve earned your gold.

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Learn more about Brett’s leadership development practice for global executives with innovation responsibilities.

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Connecting Dots 58 ◎⁃◎ Overcoming the Alignment Trap

Dan Flavin, Kunstmuseum Basel, May 2024

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Overcoming the Alignment Trap

“We need to get aligned!”

It’s a common refrain when people talk about their culture or strategy. It’s also a trap. 

For a group to function well, they need to have some shared understanding of its purpose and what they are setting out to do. Yet, every individual has a different understanding of and need for alignment.

We know that high-performing teams can work through different perspectives and intellectual conflict without it becoming divergent directions or interpersonal conflict.

We also know that underperforming teams often struggle to agree on anything or operate in pseudo-harmony. In either case, the unbounded wish for ever-greater alignment can signal a lack of commitment, trust or adaptability.

Teams struggling with the alignment trap often latch onto rigid processes as a saviour, argue over what two-by-two model is right as a power battle or engage in a continuous alignment dialogue of unending meetings, offsites, hallway conversations, group texts and research projects as “real-work” avoidance.

Therefore, rather than ask “How do we get aligned?”, a better question I pose to leadership teams is:

“What’s the least amount of alignment you need to function?”

This question reduces the alignment burden by demystifying and making tangible where you need to align your understanding and where you don’t. It also helps identify the optimum amount of difference that serves your collective and individual interests.

As per Edition 47 of Connecting Dots, alignment doesn’t mean you have to agree absolutely with each other but members have agency to accept and respect different perspectives while committing to a path of action. In my experience, practicing innovation tolerance rather than the alignment trap supercharges organizations to successfully increase their innovation pace, efficiency, impact or ambition.

If total alignment is required for decisions, something else is happening. Such as a form of anti-work collusion that surfaces in the form of non-decisions—typically a subconscious hidden competing commitment. Or, a subtler phenomenon where individual needs override shared needs—typically an unconscious defence against anxiety.

If your team or culture struggle to get aligned, flip the question. Work out how little alignment you need to achieve your goals and objectives.

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Here’s an example of how to get “good enough” or minimum viable alignment:

1. With a facilitator independent of your team, have each person identify all the items they see as important for alignment. 

2. Then, in pairs share and identify any gaps. 

3. As a group, visualize all the alignment areas and identify common themes. 

4. Lastly, dot vote on themes which might be most impactful on the group’s success.

5. Two people nominated by the group take the themes away to document and wordsmith the 3-5 most impactful items as alignment principles. 

Use the principles when making key decisions like strategy changes, identifying key projects, signing off annual plans or approving which innovations go to market. 

*An independent facilitator trained unconscious dynamics of groups is key to contained emotional or power dynamics which will always be present and can be helpful if channelled intentionally. 

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Learn more about Brett’s leadership development practice for global executives with innovation responsibilities.

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Connecting Dots 57 ◎⁃◎ Tips for an Innovation Tolerant Culture

Blackcomb Mountain, Whistler, January 2024

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Tips for an Innovation-Tolerant Culture

An impressive leader in a hugely respected tech innovator once confided that most of the frameworks and organizational structures they use are to quell anxiety. 

This creation of processes to quell anxiety is common and necessary—to a point—giving a common bounding of how work progresses in a complex organization. However, when overly elaborate or inflexible it can work against the work.

If creating and following frameworks is more effort than learning and validating assumptions there may be too much repressed anxiety in the system.  

It’s not that anxiety is a problem, as it’s to be expected when doing something new for the first time. Anxiety is the exhaust of innovation and change that is beneficial when it compels us to progress or signals an intuitive risk or opportunity to explore.

Logically, innovation and change trigger anxiety even in the most confident and optimistic professional. After all, your innovation program might not work or be accepted by stakeholders and customers. You won’t know for certain until you show it, share it or ship it. 

As a senior leader, whatever type of culture you have if you want innovation to make a commercial difference you need the culture to include a tolerance for innovation. Just because you invest and do a lot of innovation activities or frameworks doesn’t mean the organization is tolerant of innovation. 

By tolerant I don’t mean love or enjoy innovation and its associated anxiety. Some might but most don’t. To tolerate something means you don’t agree or like it but can respect or accept it. Tolerance is important for those around innovation not just those doing it as culture is collective.

To create an innovation-tolerant culture here are a few tips:

1. Acknowledge anxiety is normal - make reassurance and direction your primary leadership mission. Thus the technical and social processes of innovation are de-merged to be more practically navigated.

2. Hopes and fears - add experiential or qualitative data to evaluate how programs are structured or progressing. By asking emotional or experiential inputs you can more effectively surface hidden blockers or compassionately ease an individual overwhelmed by personal anxiety unrelated to the task at hand. 

3. Counter questions - asking contrary questions like "Why shouldn’t we do this?" rather than promotional questions of "Why should do this? can safely surface important viewpoints perceived as socially unacceptable or unformed. NASA used the counter-question approach up until the disastrous Columbia mission. 

These tips foster an enacted culture of innovation that fuels the designed processes and tools of innovation. These practices can be threatened when time, pressure or expectations work against you.

That’s why I appreciate Mark Sandys, the Chief Innovation Officer at Diageo, sharing these stories on how their culture supported the long turbulent journey to the blockbuster success of Guinness 0.0. 

Most leaders already think a lot about processes, frameworks and tools. Evidence tells us that investing equally in the cultural and behavioural aspects of innovation pays off.

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Learn more about Brett’s leadership development practice for global executives with innovation responsibilities.

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Connecting Dots 56 ◎⁃◎ Disruption is Disturbing

Tokyo Stadium, June 2009

Connecting Dots is the monthly newsletter for global professionals leading innovation.

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Disruption is Disturbing

Organizational Culture and Innovation

A Disruptive Discovery

In 2017, one of my teams pioneered an AI assistant for financial managers at a leading global bank. Powered by IBM’s AI platform Watson, the assistant multiplied the performance of high-performing managers while average or underperforming managers experienced marginal to nil improvements. 

The unexpected discovery was not the tangible performance variance but the intangible impact on the culture. Employees in this company were proud of how carefully they managed funds through collaborative practices and how thoroughly teams worked together to design business processes and client interactions. The investment managers loved to describe their confidence in the product development and operations teams they worked with daily.

The AI assistant was different as it wasn’t a carefully designed process but a self-service capability. The assistant sat in a corner absorbing conversations while behind the scenes continuously ingesting the masses of reports and analyses published daily by the bank's research department. The tool was a solitary and impersonal interaction that provided managers with recommendations and summaries after the meetings without any need to engage with colleagues. 

Empowering Effects

The benefit of the assistant came from how the individuals used it and adapted it to their real-world situations. What the assistant suggested to a manager was less important than how the manager interpreted, elaborated and applied the suggestions. Using the assistant was empowering and individualistic. Contrary to the team-centricity of the culture, which had served them well. 

High performers logically felt more confident deploying and adapting the assistant. A variance that could possibly be explained by their mindset, upbringing, training or breadth of professional exposure in various cultures over their career. Whatever the individual explanation, as a cohort, high performers were able to switch between different cultural modes within the same organization. Inward and collaborative in one mode, the classic way of working. Outward and individualistic, the AI-powered way.

Disturbing Implications

Surprisingly, a result of this new AI-powered capability, was that high performers started to question their place in the firm. They wondered if they needed the scale and gravitas of the firm to provide excellent service to their clients while generating good personal returns. Or, could they do it on their own?

The lower performers also started to question their place in the firm. They often were equally competent, well educated and generated above-industry average performers. However, they started to experience anxiety about being replaced by software, losing a sense of mastery over the craft and fearing negative performance reviews even though they were in the same relative rank in terms of performance.  

Thus, the assistant while technically beneficial was harming the culture. An implication of innovation that can be very hard to sense and interpret if you aren’t looking beneath the surface. It’s much easier to stay enamoured with the positive performance numbers. The greater threat and potential cost of ignoring the cultural implications of innovation in this situation were talent turnover, inefficiency and ultimately worse commercial outcomes after the initial sugar high of boosted performance.

Why Disruption is Disturbing

It’s worth an unpack of disruption. We aren’t talking capital “D” Clayton Christensen Disruption from a strategy perspective.  This AI assistant was lowercase “d” disruption, where aspects of business and life as you know it are knocked off course. However, the overall business model was stable. From the outside, it seemed a small bit of turbulence, but for those in the middle of disruption, the experience can be deeply unsettling.

It’s disturbing because in the moment we often don’t fully know what it means, why the results are happening, how to explain them or what to do next. Small signals can be over-amplified and loud signals downplayed. Everyone involved is at risk of projecting their idealization or demonization of the results into the soup of sense-making.

Most executives are very good at the technical aspects of navigating disruption. How to fix the thing, address legal policy or adjust resource levels for example. Few are very tuned into the cultural processes triggered by innovation’s disruptions nor how to work with culture to enable the fuller benefits of innovation while containing the costs for a net benefit.

Cultural Navigation

The good news is that there is a way to identify and map how a culture can adapt to disruptive new technology. A task that I believe has become even more important with the increasingly accessible and powerful AI platforms, in particular generative AI, machine learning, large language models and a decade of digitalization and cloud migration. 

Important because:

1. The assistants are already prevalent and causing disruption in how someone performs key tasks in their roles or how peers work together which can conflict with cultural values

2. The ever-expanding AI capabilities are ever closer and literally at the fingertips of entire organizations, which can have significant cultural implications for what is valued in how the work is done, how it’s rewarded and what we lose along the way. 

3. It’s easy to see that the tools can be hugely empowering and create more difference rather than similarity in organizations which often conflicts with process or collaboration-orientated cultures.

Each of these implications creates a loss of how things had been—pragmatically and perceptively. In the opening example, the AI assistant caused a loss of a collaborative culture and stability knowing who was behind what you recommended. In the AI assistant version of their culture, you interacted with a flat impersonal digital interface, not a colleague sacrificing the collective culture as you knew it. A disorienting experience.

The Competing Values Framework

I love using the Competing Values Framework in situations where culture is potentially disrupted as a result of innovation. The premise of the Competing Values Framework is that like people, companies can hold multiple and even contradictory values, but can only act on one value set at a given time. There are two axes—internal vs external focus and flexibility vs control, giving four quadrants. Over time companies intentionally or unbeknownst to themselves can shift between quadrants. For example, at different stages, Apple has succeeded in each quadrant. 

As a leader of innovation, your task is to work with the cultural aspects as much as the technical or commercial aspects of your innovation. Each is a parallel track of work for the team doing the tangible product, service or process development. The actual cultural response will depend on what’s being developed. It’s emergent but can be anticipated. Your innovation might be perfectly suited for the culture as it is, or is in conflict calling for a considered cultural shift.

It can also be overwhelming as it’s hard to sense the subtle signals of cultural shifts. or threats Sometimes it’s overt when conflict fires up, emotions run hot and disagreement is palpable. Often it’s silent as people withhold what they really think, withhold support without saying no and go about their work as if nothing has changed. The image of a smooth elegant duck comes to mind, with frantic feet fluttering underwater.

In addition to looking for cultural implications in project reviews and performance data, you can also sense your responses. The Innovation Leadership Map is a structured way to evaluate how you are responding to the work. Equally, your engagement with innovation politics can give you signals of emerging anxieties, resistance or momentum. All tangible data points measure intangible culture. 

Application of the Framework

There are three steps where the Competing Values Framework is particularly useful as an innovation leader. 

Envision

• As the scope or validation data defines the proposition, envision how might your culture change to realize the full potential of the innovation

Evaluation

• When a proposition is validated and heading to market the Organizational Culture Assessment Index (OCAI) gives an objective evaluation of the culture by people in your organization who score what is the culture today and what it needs to be in the future

Transition

• If there is a gap between current and future culture, offer learning and development support to add capabilities and enable talent to internalize the shift and co-create its implementation starting with top management and most impacted departments

Realize a Positive Future Through Culture

Too often innovation leaders overlook or disregard the cultural aspect and implications of their work. Yet, it directly influences the success of innovation or can catch leaders off guard with disastrous consequences. Not just failed projects.

For example, the tragic case UK’s Royal Mail “Horizon” management platform led to the suicide and unjust prosecution of 900 postmasters. As well, once-heralded executives are potentially facing criminal charges. There was a conflict in the culture of empowering the postmasters while head office management secretly centralized and used back door control. A cultural, strategic and leadership delusion of tragic personal and professional costs. 

Instead, to realize the full benefits of innovation, such as the paradigm-changing nature of AI, it’s good to be enthusiastic but also realistic about cultural implications. By using a structured (and evidence-based) approach to working with the culture you can create a better future that minimizes the costs to maximize the upside.

*Note: the introductory story is a proxy of multiple similar experiences with various teams and companies.

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Learn more about Brett’s leadership development practice for global executives with innovation responsibilities.

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