Connecting Dots 29 ◎⁃◎ Actualization

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Hello,

Welcome to Connecting Dots by Brett Macfarlane. A monthly newsletter for innovation leaders. We uncover hidden and hard-to-access innovation performance factors. 

This month we address the last of the six scales of innovation leadership from The Innovation Leadership Map. This scale can be very confronting because it illuminates what we really do. Not what we think we do or want to do.

After exploring actualization I’ll share an update on my experiment with the G20 on human-centred values and digitalization. Along with a new team tool born from the Innovation Leadership Map.

Enjoy ☕️

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Realization Actually

Actualization may sound grandiose but it actually is very simple. Actualization is to make real. To actualize something is to actually make it.

It’s not a hope, ambition or plan. It’s the act of making these statements of intention real. 

Like leadership itself, it’s not a position but an act. It’s the technical and social processes of driving forward the realization of something new with fellow collaborators (the willing, unwilling and indifferent.)

An invention, or the conception of a novel idea, requires the acts of innovation leadership to work with others in the organization to place it in the hands of real-life users. A perilous journey.

In practice, imagine a sensor that goes off when a team has done enough planning and strategy work but can’t move beyond it. They keep doing the planning and strategy as avoidance of doing the hard work of realizing something new or different.

This sensor came to me when I learned that psychoanalysts are trained to know that talking about psychoanalysis can be a defence against doing the work of psychoanalysis.

When we remind ourselves that:

- 94% of executives are dissatisfied with their innovation efforts

- 96% talk about how important innovation is

We may be trapped in the defence of talking about innovation as a way to avoid doing the hard work of actualizing innovation.

Or when we do something it’s so schizophrenic and distant from the reality of what the business does or needs it’s basically irrelevant. Even though it might feel good at the time just doing something.

Why these defensive patterns occur in a specific company is entirely situational. The actualization scale is your sensor to signal if you might be stuck.

What’s it Like to be Actualized?

It helps us see beyond our own good intentions and connect to the reality of what is being realized. Where the other five ILM experience scales illuminate our cognitive performance, this sixth-scale grounds our intentions in the reality of action we do or don’t take up.

Between action with no thought and locked in thought with no action is the productive zone of actualization. In the Humble position leaders, teams and organizations thoughtfully take action.

Actualization Definition - What best describes your acts of leadership to make the ambition real?

Futile - efforts that could be made are trivial, frivolous and unimportant

Humble - act with courtesy and respect for others with quiet belief and confidence

Delusional - proceed with false and even delusional beliefs

It may sound blindingly obvious, yet, the Humble position is a very challenging state to achieve and maintain even for successful repeat innovation leaders. This is why we often operate in an absence of actualization and drown in a glut of opportunity, wasted effort and under-utilised resources.

We don’t yet have representative data of how often a firm is trapped in Futile or Delusional positions. But maybe these characteristics sound familiar:

Futile - one-off hires are made without structural changes, never-ending strategy processes or only addressing “low hanging fruit”

Delusional -  a culture of one-off-sprints emerges, new concepts are continually developed without moving to realization or company-wide mandates to “innovate” and “future proof” without guidance or boundaries

When I see a company operating in a Humble position leaders can often point to sets of guiding principles in some form such as a charter, mission statement or desired outcome as guidance. These transitional guiding objects are not instructions. Rather they create the space for others to take up, internalize and act.

The process is more practice and behaviour-led than governance or policy-led. The balance between thinking and making is an active discussion with a “ship early and ship often” practice progressively developing the work.

What this looks like in practice is wholly specific to each organization. For example, this article does a really nice job showing what this looks like in different big tech companies. Many are surprised to learn these highly innovative firms and large firms lack formal innovation processes.

In fact, in the core business there often isn’t really an innovation process, compared to low innovation intensity firms. Instead, there is the wide and deep capability as demonstrated by lived practices to lead and deliver new products, services, improvements and business models. Innovation is business as usual

Employees are given and take up empowerment through thoughtful acts within the boundaries of their role and the space created by the firm’s mission and desired outcomes. Performing and innovative teams spend most of their time in the Humble state of actualization.

Acting Humbly

Think humble not as a static position or something you store up. It only exists through action, and one acts humbly or they don’t.

Following are some practical practices to develop humble performance states so you can observe yourself through action.

• Follow Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice and “do one thing every day that scares you”.

• Don’t lock yourself away in your office. Take time every day to circulate with colleagues and subordinates. Talk to people, not just about work but also about family life, current affairs, and other topics of mutual interest. Listen to people’s frustrations and ideas. Share good news; emphasize the positive.

• Look at the different sources of stress in your life and determine which are controllable and which are not. Try to change only the stressors under your control and work out a plan to manage the other stressors to the best of your ability.

• Look at the different sources of stress in your company and determine which are controllable and which are not. Try to change only the stressors under your control and work out a plan to manage the other stressors to the best of your ability.

• Keep an open-door policy; let people know you are accessible.

• Constantly prioritize your work to ensure that your output is always aligned with your objectives and that of the firm.

• Learn to set boundaries. Practice saying “no.”

• Know your capabilities and do not try to be Superwoman or Superman.

• For each task, allow yourself more time than you think you need. Don’t clutter up your agenda— delegate.

• Do things you are good at doing.

• Establish mutually supportive links with others.

• Share your problems with people you can really talk to.

• Avoid situations that cause annoyance.

• Try not to waste time on trivial matters.

Integrating the Six ILM Experience Scales

As this is the last of the six ILM experience scales, I want to reinforce the ILM' framework’s link to reality. Starting by being more realistic and truthful about what situations of innovation leadership entail. To acknowledge and work with the effect of innovation’s complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty.

As leaders, we can accept the technical challenges of our roles, it’s time we also address the pressures put on our position, the pressure we put on ourselves and the pressurized reactions of others around us.

This newsletter has been an exploration into how we develop these practices and capabilities amidst the pressure of innovation. In theory and in practice with an evidence based foundation. So that we can more successfully address the overwhelming challenges of our time with new ideas and new solutions made real.

The world and future economy are driven by collaboration. It is getting more, not less, fluid and it’s delusional to think this will reverse. So change makers have a responsibility to develop their capability to not just survive but thrive in this landscape.

As executives, it’s our requirement to take responsibility for supporting and enabling our innovation leaders to do the real work of innovation. Partly due to our obvious commercial and social obligations as firms. Mostly, due to our need to attract, develop, protect and partner with talent who bring the potential we need to unleash.

Fundamentally, it is even more basic than idealizing the mythical concept of innovation. Really, innovation leadership is simply the act of driving change regardless of how novel the change is. Innovation is simply an aftermarket label, but the experience of doing something new, for the first time, is the underlying experience captured by The Innovation Leadership Map.

Next month’s newsletter will look more systemically at how organizations use the Innovation Leadership Map to monitor and develop high-performance leaders in practice and in action. 😁

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Brett’s Diary

Firstly, I have developed the first iterations of what will be ILM self-service tools for individuals and teams. Team Radar in particular is getting amazing feedback. Get in touch if you want to trial in your teams to uncover hidden and hard to access innovation performance factors.

Secondly, on the 15th of October, I briefed participants of the Rome leader’s summit. My recommendation of co-developing “Digital Solidarity Principles” was accepted and we’re exploring how we might progress co-development with next year’s Indonesian presidency. If you’re interested in digitalization, design or policy you can find my briefing paper on page 17 of the official V20 communiqué. Get in touch if you’d like to join us

Lastly, I am venturing out into the world again. I am in Copenhagen this week, Paris the 18th-23rd of November and then Vancouver for December. Let’s meet for ☕️

As always your thoughts and feedback are appreciated. 

Till next time, keep pushing the boundary of possibility,

~Brett

PS Thanks to my friend Dan Moore the software developer and educator extraordinaire for pointing me towards the article on How Big Tech Run Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum.

Connecting Dots 28 ◎⁃◎ Risk

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Hello,

Welcome to Connecting Dots by Brett Macfarlane. A monthly newsletter for innovation leaders and change-makers. 

This month we unpack risk from The Innovation Leadership Map and how it influences our leadership performance. Risk is hard to quantify and rarely qualified. Let’s get a practical handle on how it derails us or enables us to perform.

After exploring risk I’ll share an update on my attempt to shift G20 policy discussions to human-centric outcomes through design principles. Plus, The Innovation Leadership Map at Innov8rs Connect.

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The Risk of Risk

My relationship with risk was formed by my experiences as an athlete. As an alpine ski racer, every time I slid into the start gate I was actively negotiating the risk ahead. Mentally, I’d have rehearsed the course and chosen the racing line. With thorough anticipation, I envisioned all the turns of the course, the contours of the ice-hard snow, the changes in light and the blind spots. 

As my skis pushed out onto the precipice, one or two cue words narrowed the focus. Last second course reports of dangers ahead as conditions changed were assimilated into real-time adjustment. All to inform the best approach for it all to go right. Which never happens.

The training prepared us for when it went wrong, with chilling awareness that it could go catastrophically wrong. Denying this reality was a reckless and dangerous denial of risk. Equally dangerous was paralysis from being obsessed and consumed by risk.

The space between risk denial and overwhelm is where performance happens. It’s the same for our work as innovation leaders and organisations aspiring to innovate. Anxiety and disequilibrium must be present, they create the vital energy of progress in the face of risk. 

I find that how a leader relates to risk in a specific situation is one of the most influential and insightful indicators of what is really going on. Either within themselves or with the wider team and firm.

Many assume it’s always the firm that’s risk-averse. Though just as often the firm is keen to accept reasonable risk the leader for individual dynamics doesn’t take up.

Now, as with all the scales, those reactions and their reasons are individual. The Innovation Leadership Map is a clinical intervention to illuminate what's really going on. Born from the medical philosophy that you treat the patient in the bed as an individual. Rather than the industrial philosophy where you treat all as one. 

That said, from individual lived experiences I have observed two common themes:

From the innovation leader —> “they” are so risk-adverse I can’t do anything

From the authorising executive —> “they” think innovation is the only thing that matters and don’t care about the consequences to the rest of us

While not universal each does mirror the regressive ends of the Risk scale. 

What’s a Tolerable Degree of Risk?

In the real world, how we perceive risk and respond to risk is entirely situational. Typically innovation leaders are more risk inclined than others, risk-seeking even, but just as risk unaware as anyone else.

Beyond some form of mathematically calculating risk leaders typically don’t engage with how risk is being experienced. They don’t look at how their relationship with risk is affecting their judgements, their analysis nor their behaviours. Causing miscalculation, wasted efforts and putting the program, their position or even the firm in jeopardy.

To tune into The Performance Zone of risk is to acknowledge the positives and negatives of the situation. An ambivalent relationship with risk means you’re able to hold in sight both the upside and downside of any innovation. The danger zones are either Omnipotentet denial of any downside in pursuit of the upside. Or the Impotent overwhelm by the downside regardless of the potential upside.

Ambivalent - able to reconcile the positives and negates sufficiently to act

Omnipotent - perceives infinite power acting primarily on positives

Impotent - helplessly consumed by fear lacking courage and strength to act

“Ambivalent” is a word a lot of leaders misunderstand. They instinctively relate it to indifference or indecision. Reality couldn’t be more different. It is a sophisticated position where the positives and negatives of the situation co-exist without one overwhelming the other so that intentional action can happen. 

It is delusional to think there is a 100% certain upside with no potential downside. A healthy leadership state is to equally make an objective assessment of risk and accept that it will never be wholly known with all risks neutralised in advance. Leadership is the act of taking action with sufficient yet inevitably incomplete data.

With innovation, Impotent leaders withhold or side-step action meaning no data and no data meaning no action. They remain stuck like a child at the edge of a diving board desperate to jump yet unable to do so. Equally, Omnipotent leaders bias only validation without accepting the spectrum of reality that validation is always flawed. They run blindly into darkness eventually hitting avoidable walls. As one leader put it, “I thought it was infinity, but then real life happened.”

Developing Risk Ambivalence

As a leader, risk Ambivalence enables you to reconcile the underlying needs of the organisation and your underlying ambition. Following are some practices that enable you to see and work with the good and bad of an innovation while keeping it whole.

• Do not be a perfectionist, strive for quality and know when to stop

• Expand Pros and Cons assessment to account for intuitive and emotional data by also assessing Hopes and Fears

• Spend as much time on ‘what could go right’ as ‘what could go wrong’

• Use a ‘premortem to identify risks and make space to creatively problem solve, mitigate and get a better picture of how risky the risks really are

• Rather than obsess over the fantasy of a perfect innovation or change, ask your team how much innovation or change can we as leaders and an organization tolerate between now and the launch target

• The more senior you are focus and worry more about the climate of risk discussion over the technicalities in the hand of the innovators to give them the confidence to exercise their authority

• Champion balanced debate with multiple perspectives such as the Six Thinking Hats (logic, emotion, caution, optimism, creativity, and control)

• Sleep on big decisions —> strike when the iron is cold rather than while it’s hot

Often we try to disassociate risk from ourselves. We make it a purely rational thing separate from us. Which of course is a defence against truly engaging with risk and leading through it. By learning to assess our responses to real or perceived risk we can better pick up on how it’s affecting our performance and develop practices to better lead through risk-full situations.

After all, there is always risk when doing something new for the first time. That’s the job.

Next month we will look at how leaders experience and perform in relation to Actualisation. The final of the six scales that unpacks how we really act and why no matter what we tell ourselves 😁

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Brett’s Diary

On the 15th of October, I’ll briefly introduce to the G20 Rome summit my V20 communiqué on the Digital Solidarity Principles. The Values20 (V20) is an engagement group that represents external and independent contributions related to values to the development of G20 policy. It’s an experiment to enhance collaboration and reflexivity on multi-lateral digital topics.

My contribution is to propose a tool and process to insert human centricity into the heart of multi-lateral discussions and policy related to digitization. There are a number of valuable topics being shared and you can join us by signing up here.

https://values20.org/

Last month I was kindly invited to share The Innovation Leadership Map at the Innov8rs Connect https://innov8rs.co/ series focused on leadership. It was a lot of fun and I’m very pleased with the format of my speech. Another session will be held in January for their people and culture summit.

The material I presented at Innov8rs works great for strategy summits and top management forums, so let me know if you’d like to explore for your end-of-2021 or next year's activities. I’m happy to do team talks or leader assessments.

As always your thoughts and feedback are appreciated. 

Till next time, keep pushing the boundary of possibility,

~Brett

Connecting Dots 27 ◎⁃◎ Leadership Exposure

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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

Connecting Dots 26 ◎⁃◎ The Innovator's Autonomy

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Hello,

Welcome to Connecting Dots, a monthly newsletter exploring innovation leadership.

This month we unpack the third of six tension scales on the Innovation Leadership Map; autonomy.

The Innovator’s Autonomy

On autonomy, I always think back to working with a debonaire CEO of an industry-leading insurer. It was a top management workshop and at a key decision point, he seemed trapped in his chair. He was no longer his normally decisive self. He fiddled with his Harvard Business School alumnus pen while staring off into the distance. I had the image of a child at the end of a diving board, wishing to jump but unable to bring himself to do so. 

Fortunately, while his sense of empowerment was lost his colleagues stepped into the void. Taking up their informal authority, they deconstructed the decisions, broke them down to assess strategic fit with risk acceptance thresholds. As the group continued to progress it re-energized the CEO. Eventually, we reached the point requiring documented formal executive sign-off and he deployed his formal authority with his usual enthusiasm. It was quite beautiful after his crisis of confidence and the trusting non-persecutory group performance.

This story highlights the dynamic nature of empowerment and how we lead. To lead with empowerment is to take up the authority you have been granted to pursue the primary task you have been assigned or that of the wider firm. People tend to practice empowerment when they feel they have a sufficient degree of autonomy to work on a challenge just outside their comfort zone with a relevant set of capabilities. 

I use autonomy as a diagnostic because it is a precursor and driver of whether we exercise enough, too much or too little empowerment to achieve our objectives. In many ways how we experience autonomy is shaped by the situation. Many companies talk of empowerment but undermine it in practice. Others fetishize formal processes and structure yet reward those autonomously achieving results by bending the system to their needs. 

Innovation Leadership Map - Autonomy Tension Scale

Autonomy can be one of the most paradoxical or confusing aspects of an organization to manage. Both for ourselves and for those we manage or collaborate with. It deeply relates to how we see our place in the world, assumptions about how the world works and the things we fear most that could be lost by taking up our authority to do something new for the first time. To understand autonomy in the real world I’ve identified three positions as follows. 

Disempowered

This is a low-energy state. When we are disempowered one can perceive little hope or capacity to act. The world can seem overwhelming and one’s authority too meagre for the task at hand. In a disempowered state there is little perceive authority that can be generated to muster the energy to progress. If you believe it can’t be done you’ll be right only because it won’t be done. Even if in practice it could be. 

Not surprisingly, repeat innovation leaders, even on their bad projects, rarely find themselves in this position. They tend to be quite resourceful at working within boundaries to generate informal authority in the absence of formal authority. 

Empowered

When we feel empowered there is fission between the challenge and our existing capabilities. One of these will be stretched. It’s difficult but doable and you learn along the way. Interestingly, to feel empowered is often a very thoughtful state. It is not action for action’s sake but a very considered use of authority. 

When empowered, the leader creates space to test the boundaries of what’s far enough, too far or far from enough. More than a technical challenge it’s a social challenge to surface how ambitious, capable and ready the team or firm is in practice. This is important because innovation isn’t the invention, it’s taking that idea and making it real. A long, collaborative and highly social process that is propelled by empowered leaders sensitive to the needs of others.

Overpowered

Unlike disempowered repeat innovation leaders almost universally have experienced this position themselves or observed it close up. The enthusiasm to do something new or create the future can cause some leaders to think their work is the most important thing going on in the company. In this high-energy state, the distress or human consequences of the new developments are repressed. 

Eventually, the overpowered may go beyond bending the boundaries and breaking them. Often with brutal personal consequences. One of my research subjects described such an experience. “I thought it was infinity. Yeah. But then real life happened.” In this case, real-life was broken relationships, shuttering of the business unit, departing the company and a career change to avoid repeat of such a painful personal loss. A tragic loss of talent and potential.

Developing Autonomy

Over a career, we will all find ourselves in different positions of autonomy. Sometimes it’s the climate of the organization and other times it’s us. How we respond to an organization is the aspect we have control over and can develop our practice of leading autonomously. Whatever the cultural climate and organizational health generating sufficient autonomy to act can only come from within a leader.

Our sense of autonomy at a given moment is driven or derailed by our deeper motivations and detractors that are mostly out of our conscious awareness. I’ll introduce these in a future post. These are the forces combining our innate self and what we have experienced in our lives and careers. Even without getting into these drivers and detractors most people intuitively know what empowerment looks and feels like for them.

Elevating Your Autonomy

 The challenge is when we get stuck in the low underpowered or high energy overpowered states. How do we rebalance to generate empowerment within ourselves and your team? Here are several ways:

• Ensure that all communication is two-way. Use individual 360° feedback to measure whether there is too much or too little change that can be tolerated.

• Agree with your staff, team or colleagues that taking risks and making mistakes is allowed as long as mistakes are acknowledged and lessons learned.

• Look for opportunities to invite contributions from your employees. Share with others the positive contributions you have received.

• In team meetings, refrain from always putting your point of view forward first. Allow others the opportunity to influence decisions.

• Create space as a group to gather primary data and hear weak signals of how people are feeling and thinking. Inquire about their hopes and fears, measure regularly on a scale of one to ten how they are feeling or get feedback in an I Like / I Wish survey format.

While driving to do something new is challenging and frustrating, feeling empowered is a powerful energy. It’s also fragile and painful to lose. Innovation leaders are very sensitive to empowerment threats. This is why for senior leaders we need to be very aware of the consequences of small actions to ensure our leaders can act autonomously because they feel empowered.

What are your experiences with autonomy?

Next month - the Exposure scale of feeling unexposed, composed and overexposed.

Brett’s Movements

August like July of this year is quite rooted in London. I’m in writing mode as I have a number of conferences in September.  I’m working on a special session for the Innov8rs’ three-day conference on Strategy, Leadership and Organization. The session will focus on the Innovation Leadership Mirror and how we can develop innovation leadership capabilities. It is the first time I’ve spoken publicly about my leadership development private practice. It should be quite fun and I think the talk content will be valuable for company meetings or top management forums. Get in touch if interested.

As always I appreciate you forwarding this newsletter to peers or colleagues. Also, your reflections or personal experiences are immensely valuable as my research and practice continue.

Higher, faster stronger,

~ Brett

Connecting Dots 25 ◎⁃◎ The Innovator's Outlook

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Hello,

Welcome to the July edition of Connecting Dots, a monthly newsletter by Brett Macfarlane exploring the psychology of innovation leadership.

A special welcome to new subscribers and listeners of leading futurist Nik Badminton’s Exponential Minds podcast.

This edition of Connecting Dots is dedicated to the Innovator’s Outlook, the second of the six scales I am unpacking from the Innovation Leadership Map. If you missed it here’s a link to the previous edition: Identity.

I suggest you clear five minutes, pour a coffee/kombucha and let’s get started...

The Innovator’s Outlook

“It’s really good fun to be able to do things, to make your mark, to improve things.”

This quote captures a pattern I find repeatedly where innovation leaders describe their best innovation experiences. They may be doing serious work dealing with serious problems with serious people, and yet when they are in the performance zone it’s fun. This is of course a bit funny given fun is a bit of a taboo word in business. It sounds frivolous, yet fun doesn’t mean silly, easy or wasteful. Paradoxically, despite the hard work and frustration surrounding innovation, when progress is made, there is often a warm optimism or confidence that bubbles through as fun. 

You can often tell how an innovation team is performing just by how it sounds. Regardless of what is being said or by whom, there is lightness, playfulness and purposefulness about the discussion no matter how serious or confounding the subject matter. There is anxious energy and jeopardy in the air, yet the workgroup contains the energy through a hopeful outlook for what can be done. Very much a contrast to times when a depressive cynicism dominates or frivolous fantastical energy consumes the leader and their team.

Outlook Represents Mindset

The opening quote was a lovely expression of a hopeful outlook. In the innovation leadership zone, I find a hopeful outlook to be strongly associated with progress and success.

• Your outlook is a reflection of your underlying mindset.

• Your mindset is a set of beliefs about yourself and what one thinks about how the world works (or doesn’t).

• Your behaviours and actions are strongly influenced by your mindset and your mindset can shift over time.

• Your mindset is typically outside one’s conscious awareness, even more so underlying assumptions.

If your “outlook” is the label on what time of mindset you have, how can we better understand the underlying beliefs? Unpacking where they come from allows us a deeper understanding of the unconscious factors that invisibly influence our visible behaviours.

At any given moment our mindset is a mix of innate and acquired beliefs. About 30% is currently believed to be hardcoded genetically while 70% is generated through our accumulated lived past experiences up to this moment in time. All this experience makes up our beliefs about how the world works. These beliefs are activated in the here and now based on the situations we find ourselves. There are three primary mechanisms that activate our beliefs in real-time:

Valences - Our intrinsic perceived attractiveness of something

Biases - Our subconscious reactions to something

Thoughts - Our conscious rationalization about something

To explain why decisions and actions can be messy, these processes operate in parallel. When cognitive energy levels are running really high or low, is when one or more of these processes run amok causing primitive coping mechanisms to take over. You may remember this as “Delusional Frustration” from Connecting Dots 22. As a leader driving the change of innovation, it is imperative we keep aware of how these activations are influencing our decisions and behaviours.

Don’t worry if you aren’t 100% following along. It takes deep work to decode our individual response patterns. As well as to connect them to the extremely high levels of complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and chaos innovation presents to leaders. My hope is you have an understanding of why extreme outlooks trigger regressive leadership behaviours and decisions - so that we can better understand the developmental hopeful outlook.

Innovation Leadership Map - Outlook

As with all the Innovation Leadership Scales, the performance zone is in the middle. In my private practice, outlook often is the most dynamic of all the scales. It can change a lot for people. For some, it changes by the minute let alone the hour, day, week, month or year. This dynamism is because not only is our outlook strongly influenced by outside events it is not constrained by formal structures like resources, governance or time. For many, it is a leadership aspect that can provide great insight to explain their decisions and behaviours. As well as how others react to how they show up and their actions.

Hopeful

When a leader’s outlook is hopeful they are in the leadership zone. In this position they see what could be better, done or fixed. They believe they have the capabilities and resources to address it. They won’t know for certain until it is done that it can be done. As well they are aware there may be some risks or surprises along the way that they will have to deal with. In other words, they have strong contact with reality.

This hopeful outlook signals highly developed thinking and coping mechanisms are activated. It’s what we labelled Positive Frustration in Connecting Dots 22. A hopeful leader has an ambivalent ability to tolerate the positive and negative tensions of a situation, reconcile them and move forward towards innovation goals. A hopeful leader works along the boundaries of technical possibility and organizational tolerance. Hopeful is a bounded reality where boundaries may be fuzzy but their existence is accepted. It’s ambitious, realistic and resilient.

Euphoric

When hope gets activated beyond reality euphoria kicks in. An unbounded state that gets stuck in an “anything is possible” fantasy where “nothing becomes real”. This overly high energy state can be a signal that a leader isn’t running towards something but away from something. Typically it’s an uncomfortable past or current reality.

In practice, this looks like leaders who repress difficult realities and create innovation vehicles as a saviour. Abstract thinking and unrealistic timelines are common symptoms. Excitement for an outcome without attention to what might get them there. Of course, one can dream, and must, but one also needs to be prepared for when morning comes and you work out what parts of the dream can inform a better new reality.

Cynical

When we become constricted by perceived limits of the situation we risk slipping into holding a cynical outlook. “We tried that before” or “it’ll never happen here” assertions carry heavy weight. Cynical is a position where possibilities and constructive energy devolves to persecution and pessimism. Unlike critical thinking, that is central to the hopeful position, the cynic holds a one-dimensional perspective with an us-versus-them mindset drowned by blame.

Often this outlook is a subconscious conspiracy to save one’s own self-image or avoid a perceived loss rather than addressing the emotional material present in the work. Doubts and concerns are natural to have in any innovation process. In fact, they are central to robust strategic planning and sensing the weak signals of threats or opportunities. But doubt like any nutrient can become toxic in excessive quantities. To critique and question, with the intent of exploring and learning, is necessary for a hopeful team with high psychological safety. In the cynical mindset, doubt becomes nuclear as one’s anxieties melt down to obliterate resilence.

Emotional Boundaries in Practice

I use these positions with individual leaders to better understand their leadership performance zone based on past lived experience. It’s also helpful to illuminate that it is natural for new leadership to activate a cynical or euphoric position in their team. Often unintentionally (“the new boss will save us “ or “the new boss is as incompetent as the last”) and savvy leaders sense the vital motivated energy it can stir. These energy extremes when identified can be metabolized to bring the team into the hopeful outlook back on the productive boundary of possibility.

The Leadership Zone

With identity in the last newsletter and outlook in this one, we are starting to illuminate the performance zone innovation leadership. It is to be expected when leading at the edge of possibility in an organization for a leader their experience may shift outside the leadership zone along one of the scales. By being aware of the scales one can name their experience and better diagnose where to self-correct. This is the practice of innovation leadership. Whatever happens, you have a practice for how to contain your response and lead through the situation.

If you are sensing your outlook is moving towards cynical or euphoric here are a few practical ideas of how to re-connect with reality and move back to a hopeful mindset. 

1. Do not make snap decisions but build some reflective space in which to consider what you are about to decide. Become a “reflective practitioner”.

2. Practice active listening – learn how to paraphrase what people say and seek regular validation that what you heard is what they meant (even if not what they said).

3. Learn to recognize the different manifestations of how you respond to resistance to change, from passive resistance to active hostility, and adapt your mindset accordingly.

4. In key interactions or when facing key decisions try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes.

5. Sketch the paradoxes (i.e. competing commitments) that are present in your task so you can find a path to reconciliation (not compromise).

Hopefully, this helps you have fun with a hopeful outlook. 😊

Next month I’ll explore the Autonomy scale and the positions of being empowered, disempowered or overpowered.

Brett’s Movements

As mentioned in the opening, futurist Nik Badminton hosted me on his Exponential Minds podcast. It was a fun whirlwind through the hidden dynamics of innovation. His next season will be coming out soon and I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast or his CEO Futures briefing.

In my private practice for innovation leadership development, there has been a surge of interest in the Innovation Leadership Mirror program. It’s too early to declare any trends but I’ve noticed a growing ambition and energy with high-performing leaders to drive innovative change.

To sense this change it helps that over the past two weeks, I stepped back from day-to-day work for a reset. A period of reflection and prioritization. Starting with a ceremonial iPhone erase and restart. I’m energized to build on my private practice for innovation leadership. As well as completing an outline for Innovation Leadership the book to be written in 2022. I am also kicking off some additional research for the book with ex-professional athletes who are now innovation leaders. Referrals and introductions to ex-athletes most appreciated.

Next month I may be able to share the draft G20 Rome communiqué on Unity Principles for Digital Solidarity. Thank you to all the contributors.

‘Til then, stay curious and courageous,

~ Brett

P.S. Please share this newsletter with a colleague who you think would appreciate the topic of innovation leadership.