Connecting Dots 24 ◎⁃◎ Innovation Leader, a Vexing Identity

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Hello,

Welcome to Connecting Dots, a monthly newsletter that explores the inter-relations between innovation leaders and organizations. If new you can subscribe here.

This is the first newsletter unpacking a single experience scale of the Innovation Leadership Map to better understand the “inner-world” of innovation leaders. Today, I am trying a new format to explain the concept and how to incorporate it into your work. Feedback on the structure welcome.

I’d also love to hear any reflections or personal stories of how you felt identity helped or hindered your work. After the article, I’ve added a short update on what I’ve been up to this month.

Okay, grab a coffee, settle in and on with innovation leader as identity...

The Innovation Leader Identity

“You’ll be hated.”

This strong statement came from an impressive professional when I asked if being known as an innovation leader is helpful. She was currently leading the digital transformation of an industry-leading firm after having built from scratch the most progressive cybersecurity department of any top-tier European bank.

While she was a practical and humble leader, she found that as others labelled her an innovator due to accomplishments brutal reactions to the identity emerged. It was confusing as she was doing what the firm wanted but was perceived as subverting others. She learned that to succeed at leading innovation she needed to actively disassociate herself from the identity of being an innovation leader to engender collaboration and cooperation from peers. This story reminds us that behind the objectification and lionization of innovation leaders in media the lived reality is very different.

A Leader’s Identity

All leaders have an identity. Comprised of how they see themselves, how others see them as a person and how others see the role they inhabit regardless of the person. The identity of an innovation leader is especially fraught. Like all leaders, they are trying to drive change rather than stabilize the status quo. However, the type of change they are driving is more uncertain, unpredictable and chaotic than routine change. It’s the terrifying experience of breaking new ground without the new state yet clear as you’re busy making it real.

As seen in the opening vignette, innovation leaders trigger strong emotions from others. High or low-energy emotional responses are not related to what the innovation itself is, it’s to what people think it means. In general people love change, it makes life interesting. What they hate is loss. Sometimes what people think change means is linked to some kind of perceived intangible loss. It could be something like status, sense of relative competence or self-perception of being innovative themselves. Additionally, it could be a loss of their idea for what the company was or their vision of what it will become. 

The experience of how others respond to the identity of an innovation leader is represented by three positions.

Idealized
These responses to the innovation leader's identity can be cloaked in something that seems good. When someone is anointed an innovation leader, whether formally or informally titled, great expectations are placed on them. In the idealized state, there is a delusion that this person will bring magical solutions or can reduce the pain of doing something new for the first time. Many leaders fall into this trap of delusional idealization fueled by the hope expressed around them. Only to find hope becomes disappointment over time.

Despised

The real work of innovation leadership is gaining the engagement and support of others outside your boundary of authority. In positions where those with the identity of being an innovator are actively seen as a threat, they find themselves in a very depressive low energy state of being despised. It may not be overtly hostile, though one leader found a pattern of being told to “get the f*** out” of meetings, but the real violence is a lack of collaboration. Often, this has little to do with who is in the role, it is merely the person carrying the innovator identity.

Tolerated

The optimal identity for an innovation leader is to be tolerated. This acknowledges the tension that while they may still pose a threat, others are willing to collaborate and form a working alliance. In this position, the leaders are sensitive to the responses of others and empathetic to the human needs in parallel to the technical needs of the project or program. It may seem a low bar to aspire merely to be tolerated but this is the identity position leaders report drives progress. Sliding to the idealized or despised positions was strongly associated with unrealized potential and often traumatic outcomes.

The Identity Experience Scale maps out these positions. Most leaders learned the tolerated position through trial and error. They also frequently link achieving this productive state through practicing humility. Humility is harder to unpack than the unproductive positions full of practices like arrogance, condescension, stubbornness, heartlessness, etc.

I understand humility as practicing vulnerability. Practicing vulnerability means to be capable of being wounded; liable to injury or criticism; subject to being affected injuriously or attacked. In other words be willing to learn you might be wrong but still try. After all, an innovation leader believes something might or should be possible yet only when they do it will it be known for certain. There is an acceptance and ownership of risk that the leader tames.

As the old saying goes “only a fool marches in blindly without hesitation.” Risk doesn’t require recklessness. Successful innovation leaders are very thoughtful about how they will work with others. Both their needs as a person and the needs of the business. Too often leaders only develop the technical capabilities and not their interpersonal capabilities.

Tooling

To be effective, and resilient, as an innovation leader, it is helpful to assess the building blocks of your identity. A way to do so is to draw four circles on a page. In each circle answer one of the following questions in this order:

• How do I see myself as a leader?

• How do others see me as a person?

• How do others see my role regardless of the person?

• How do I wish to be seen as a leader?

Typically, you will find some distance or dissonance between each perspective. This will be evident in your wish. The intent of this question is to practically identify how you might engender the identity of being tolerated. This question will link to the type of innovation and culture you are working with.

Based upon this wish your final task is to note what practices or behaviours will help you develop this position or avoid the despised and idealized states. Revisit this exercise as you go through key stages of an innovation development journey. Identity changes as there are shifts in aspects such as team size, budget, geography or exposure. Identity is not static. It is dynamic based on what you do, how you behave and what others wish for from you. Self-awareness is your greatest asset to maintain a productive identity amongst peers.

Next month I’ll explore the Outlook scale and the positions of being cynical, hopeful or euphoric.

Brett’s Movements

Since we last met I’ve run another fantastic three-day innovation capability development workshop for a global consultancy in partnership with the D&AD. Also with the D&AD, I contributed a module on empathy to a course they created with Future Learn. How to Enhance Your Creative Empathy is a great course and an interesting example of online learning increasing access and providing practical training backed by deep rigour (I’ve done all the reading so others don’t have to 😃).

On the personal R&D front, I’ve started testing the methodology of the individual Innovation Leadership Mirror development model. As well, amazingly, I’ve started to contribute to a G20 communiqué for the Rome 2021 summit on digital solidarity principles. Policy is out of my comfort zone, but hopefully, we can help reinsert human-centric outcomes to global digitization discussions.

Stay curious and courageous,

~ Brett

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

Connecting Dots 23 ◎⁃◎ The Innovator’s Inner World

The Innovator’s Inner World

Understanding the mindset of innovation leaders.

Hello,

Welcome to Connecting Dots, a monthly newsletter that explores the space between innovation and leadership. If new you can subscribe here.

In this second article in a series unpacking my research that mapped the experience of innovation leadership, I will outline what innovation leadership looks like through the eyes of our protagonist; the innovation leader. Then I’ll introduce you to the first of the Innovation Leadership Map (ILM) experience scales; Identity. 

Stay curious and courageous friends,

~ Brett

PS. I will shortly announce April dates for webinar previews of a new talk called The Quest, An Innovation Leader’s Mindset. Stay tuned for the email or just reply to this one with “Yes please.”

The Innovator’s Inner World

Innovation stirs strong emotions. Not just when doing the work but especially when getting started. Maybe you’ve felt how deeply emotive innovation can be. This truth quickly became evident to me when interviewing seasoned innovation leaders. It was a relief to learn I wasn’t alone.

Unfortunately, we overlook the individual experiences of the millions of leaders who take up the call to lead innovation in their organizations. The experience of leading innovation is simply not understood. It is a desert of knowledge. It turns out this blindspot of lived experiences and practices afflicts all leadership scholarship. By scholarship, I mean the documented evidence, theory and practices of leadership in general. While the literature agrees that leadership is the act of driving change in a group towards a goal, there is little documentation of the lived experience and practices.

What are we afraid of? We can’t develop innovation leadership performance if we don’t know what the experience is in the first place. Why do we stop at all the excellent yet sterile analysis of innovation as though we’re merely moving resources like Lego blocks? Where’s the real work and world of innovation? The peer-to-peer discussions, the risk-taking, activating of ambition, accepting real-world events, creative collaboration, resilience, courage and problem-solving. 

When you get into it, leading innovation looks less like a process and more like a phenomenon. That is because it is a phenomenon. One that can be hard to define. In fact, it was only in 2019 that the OECD was able to convene and facilitate 175 global innovation experts to agree on a singular definition. 

“An innovation is a new or improved product or process (or combination thereof) that differs significantly from the unit’s previous products or processes and that has been made available to potential users (product) or bought into use by the unit (process). (OECD, 2019, p. 20) 

A bit wordy. Though clear. I prefer to just define innovation as “applied invention.” Regardless, it’s wonderful that after 30+ years of concerted efforts they finally landed on a common definition for this beautiful human phenomenon. 

That said, I’m not interested in definitions. I am interested in how repeat innovation leaders perform when leading a group to do something new for the first time. This is what the Innovation Leadership Map shows us. It is a synthesis of the emotional, cognitive and behavioural experiences of a leader. Someone who is on the ground leading innovation in the here and now. 

Unlike an inventor who is focused on a technical task, innovation leadership is a multi-part task. The leader’s primary role is to negotiate complexity, uncertainty and paradoxical choices to drive a group of people to do something new for the first time. No one person can deliver innovation alone, yet every party can frustrate its progress. It is emergent and can be derailed by small unpredictable events. Each event triggers strong emotional responses in people that the leader must work with. 

Digging down we can see the layers of complexity an innovation leader faces:

• Strategic complexity

• Informational complexity

• Procedural complexity

• Social/emotional complexity

Navigating this complexity is the real role of the innovation leader. There is much outside the leader’s authority, control and influence regardless of the process or domain of innovation. Because leadership is driving change, each layer of complexity activates disequilibrium as change occurs. In practice, this looks like anxieties, defensive positions and emotional outbursts. All influenced but not controlled by the innovation leader.

The inner context (aka the inner world) is the one thing that an innovation leader can control, or at least learn to control. Tragically, in my research, many innovation leaders didn’t see the personal toll of working through the disequilibrium.  Operating with blinders on is a great risk because it’s a fine line between activating, containing and working with these emotional surges productively or becoming consumed by them.

Here is a visualization of what the innovation leadership situation looks like.

A Leader’s Inner World, Brett Macfarlane (2021)

The internal context is what the ILM illuminates. As an example, one of the six experience scales is identity. The identity of an innovation leader is how others see you and how you see yourself at a given moment. Both the identity of you the person in the role and the identity of the role itself. Often the informal role of an innovation leader is a container for all sorts of hope and disappointment regardless of whom currently is carrying the role. “You’ll be hated” was the way one leader described the identity of an innovation leader and why she actively avoids identifying as an innovation leader or innovator. 

The experience of leading innovation can be understood through energy states. An absence of energy and progress is insufficient to drive the change innovation requires. Too much energy and the system moves into fantastical or delusion states. Innovation leaders succeed when they can trigger or activate sufficient energy for change and progress yet contain its surges to the extreme ends. 

You may have quickly connected the dots that the leader’s performance starts with their ability to contain the energy within their inner world. Only through their self-management can they lead the wider group over time.

What can now serve as an early warning system is if innovation leaders are feeling and seeing evidence of being idealized or despised. Idealization brings about fantastical expectations and a dependency on you for having magical solutions. A position that often follows grand launches, unrealistic timelines or hyperbolic press releases. Alternatively, leaders can find themselves despised and rejected like an unwanted organ transplant. They hole up in a physically or perceptively distant operation. 

In between these two low and high energy extremes is the balanced tolerated position. Here there is sufficient energy to drive change (and therefore disequilibrium.) People will tolerate their presence and engage with them. Thus if the identity of being an innovation leader is tolerated in an organization those who may consider you a threat feel it is a manageable or tolerable threat. It is in their interests to work with you and they feel sufficient control and safety to stay engaged.

In other words, the leader is able to contain the emotional experience and maintain a developmental state of cognitive processing as explored in Connecting Dots 22. If they all into the desired or idealized positions they risk losing containment and regress into delusional pessimism. What this introduction to the ILM experience scales establishes is that there is a golden space where effective performance occurs. Next month I’ll explore the identity scale in greater depth, along with how it links more deeply to cognitive processing.

~If this newsletter triggers any of your own experiences, observations or thoughts please do reply. Feedback welcome.

~Also, it’s very appreciated when you forward these newsletters to your colleagues. There is a lot we can learn from each other.

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TOP IMAGE: Looking up to the Aguille du Midi high above Chamonix, France January 2010.

Connecting Dots 22 ◎⁃◎ Research Introduction & Publication

The Innovation Leadership Map

How repeat innovation leaders work with

anxiety, authority and frustration.

Connecting Dots is a periodic newsletter about innovation leadership. It is published by innovation educator, advisor and scholar Brett Macfarlane. Subscribe here.

~5 minutes read

I have happy news. Two years of research and a rigorously reviewed paper into the inner world of repeat innovation leaders have been approved for publishing. Thank you for being curious and contributing participants along the journey.

The response has been positively overwhelming. For many leaders, it has provided insight and comfort for what can be an individual existence. That said, I’m still working out how to best share and apply the findings. The formal title is “Innovation’s Under-Explored Use of Emotions: How Innovation Leaders Work with Anxiety, Authority and Frustration.” Though I’ve also been referring to it as “The Call to Innovation” or “The Quest.”

At the heart of my research are the six “Experience of Innovation Scales.” The scales provide a map that visualizes how the feelings, thoughts and behaviours of innovation leaders affect their performance. Each month I will use this newsletter to introduce and expand one of the experience scales.

There is compassion behind the research. Leading innovation is hard and risky. There really are easier ways for one to build a career. Yet, many choose to take up the call for innovation. It is a rewarding call that also comes with great peril. My findings illuminate how it goes right, or wrong, and why in a practical way to make rational the seemingly irrational.

I hope you stay with me and continue to share this work with your peers and colleagues. Let’s get started with a bit of background below before I start expanding on the scales next month. Reactions and questions always welcome.

May you thrive,

~Brett

Why Innovation Needs Help

Despite the strong consensus on the importance of innovation, there is a significant performance gap and capability misunderstanding. While we know innovation-intensive firms outperform rivals by a factor of two we don’t know why innovation rates in the west are declining. Nor why only 6% of executives are happy with innovation in their firm. And why 96% of CEO’s lack sufficient capabilities for digital innovation in particular. These macro indicators from McKinsey tell us something is very wrong. 

My aim was to get into the minds of those who are leading innovation to understand what influences their performance. I’m not interested in reductive theories of what they do technically, superficial trait theories, pop-culture myth or one-dimensional hero-worshipping. I approach innovation leadership in the way sports psychologists do elite athlete performance. I am linking their interpsychic responses to real-world situations of innovation leadership to models of developmental (good) and regressive (bad) performances.

In other words, how are the feelings, thoughts and behaviours experienced and worked with by elite leaders when performing their best? And, what happens when it goes wrong?

Based on my research with high-performing board members, CEOs and managers in well-known firms, the hard data of their lived experience provides us with an innovation leadership experience map across six scales. In the coming months I will introduce and expand on each scale:

1. Outlook

2. Identity

3. Autonomy

4. Exposure

5. Risk

6. Autonomy

In each, we will identify specific positions on the scales and how they enable or inhibit progress. In addition to the primary data I gathered, the grounding of the theoretical model is based on decades of peer-reviewed psychoanalytical theory, leadership scholarship, innovation foundations and increasingly neuroscience.

Disarming the Innovator Caricature 

Today though, I want to share that evident in my research is how we get the popular image of the innovator so wrong. Often labelled mavericks, rebels or other subversive types we have a caricature of a colleague we aren’t keen to work with. Is an angry Jobs, impulsive Musk or brash Branson really the archetype of successful innovation leadership? Based on the evidence, I argue no. They may be great entrepreneurs and surround themselves with great innovation leaders but they don’t embody the psychological or behavioural composition of the repeat innovation leaders I had the privilege of evaluating.

What united the innovation leaders I worked with, often out of their conscious awareness, is an ability to trigger within themselves and others strong emotions. Though crucially they held the ability to contain, not deny or deflect, these emotions to use them for productive purposes. Containment enables the power of ambivalence which means they can hold multiple contradictory perspectives or dimensions in mind and still function. They could see the positives and negatives of a situation, and reconcile the paradox enough to move forward.

Simplistically this is balanced processing and the ability to engage with reality through courage. This means to have a morally worthy goal, take intentional action and progress despite visible risks and obstacles. Easier said than done. Even these repeat innovation leaders at times fell victim to losing containment and thus becoming overwhelmed by strong emotions and regressive behaviours. 

This performance variability of the same leader can be explained by the psychoanalytic discipline, or you may be familiar with DSM patterns for how we think. Without containment, leaders fall into primitive defence mechanisms expressed as blaming, black/white thinking, denial of reality and other patterns. With containment, we deploy sophisticated defence mechanisms such as suppression, something you may have used when needing say to reduce workforce to invest in a new product range that enabled organizational survival. 

Positively Frustrating

These two positions, developmental or regressive, can be best explained by the dominant emotion expressed by most innovation leaders; frustration. Frustration can be expressed in ways that are both positive and negative. Study participants often described their frustration as a source of energy and intentional drive to pursue their aims. Therefore we can frame frustration as having two positions triggered by one’s emotional experience resulting in different behavioural responses.

In the months ahead, as we look at each experience scale we will elaborate on what triggers movement between positions. I hope to continue the therapeutic awareness the scales have proven to provide. As well, to further establish the developmental possibilities of the scales. For the first time, we have a performance perspective on innovation to explain situationally why leaders can drive initiatives forward (or not) through their behaviours, thoughts and feelings.

To apply the research, I have developed a leadership development program for innovation leaders called the Innovation Leadership Map. It is designed for those actively leading or aspiring to acquire the capabilities to lead innovation and thrive as an individual. We explore your motivations, leadership biography, loss valences and ambition through a behavioural performance lens. The outcome is a personal roadmap to create an impact in your work through innovation. Contact me if you are interested for yourself or your team.

As always feedback welcome. I’m always happy to hear what questions you have, experiences you’ve had or people with whom you’d gladly share this.

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TOP IMAGE: Overlooking the Jung Frau from the opposite side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley in August of 2020.

Connecting Dots 21 ◎⁃◎ The Under- Explored Emotions of Innovation

The Under-Explored Emotions of Innovation

Research that bridges the unconscious practices, motivations and cognitions to the behaviours of repeat innovation leaders.

Connecting Dots is a monthly newsletter published by innovation educator, advisor and scholar Brett Macfarlane. Subscribe here.

Hello,

It has been a while since I’ve written. Mostly because I’ve been invested in completing my innovation leadership research and submitting it to the good folks of INSEAD. This edition of Connecting Dots will be a short update and preview of the research along with what’s to come in the year ahead.

Firstly though, I’d like to thank all of you for being part of this newsletter over the past two years. Your comments and support have meant a lot to me. Thank you.

Secondly, I’m pleased to share that later this year (or maybe 2022 🤷‍♂️) INSEAD will publish:

“Innovation’s Under-Explored Use of Emotions: How Innovation Leaders Work with Anxiety, Authority, and Frustration”

It is a product of 18 months, a distillation of 400+ academic papers, 26 in-depth innovation leader interviews, a peer review panel and countless conversations. I thank you all for being part of the journey.

Over this year I will share findings, frameworks, automated tools and further research initiatives. There is a lot to unpack and translate into practical applications. Some highlights include the six experience scales of innovation, innovation’s two positions of frustration and identifying an organization’s boundary of innovation tolerance.

Overall the research creates a much more vivid picture of what’s going on within a leader enabling them to successfully work with the strong emotions triggered by innovation. As well, insight into what happens behaviourally when it all goes wrong, as innovation and change so often do. It is an integrative look at leadership, innovation and systems psychodynamics that aims to illuminate what’s really occurring beyond the conscious awareness of leaders, groups and organizations.

With this research, my goal is to develop more innovation capable leaders and better support the success and well-being of those already leading on the front lines. Possibly also dispelling the myth of innovation leaders as dangerous mavericks and rebels.

So stay tuned and please continue to share this newsletter with fellow innovation curious leaders. I’ll also be offering some subscriber-exclusive webinars and partner events that I hope you can join.

I wish you a good start to 2021. We are all full of unrealized potential and I hope to help expand and grasp your boundaries of possibility.

Best,

Brett

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PS. Feedback and questions welcome, in particular on what are your topics of interest. Also, please do share this newsletter with others so we can grow the team and our collective knowledge. 

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TOP IMAGE: San Francisco in late October of 2019 on a short jaunt out of the Rapha clubhouse.

Connecting Dots 20 ◎⁃◎ Positively Frustrating

Connecting Dots explores the psychology of digital innovation leadership. Published by digital innovation leader, educator and investor Brett Macfarlane. Subscribe.

Fontainebleau, FR I’m in a COVID bubble on the INSEAD campus in Fontainebleau. I am here to frame and interrogate the findings of my research into the emotional experience and behaviours of repeat innovation leaders. It was a curious realization last week that while leaders experience many different things they all experience frustration. Very strongly so. Universally so. Though while we might instinctively think frustration is a negative emotion it may actually be a positive precondition. Let me share why.

The Leader’s Chore

There is a simple difference between management and leadership. Management is about stability. Leadership is about change. Innovation by definition is about change and therefore requires leadership.

The problem with innovation leadership is too many think about it through the mindset of management. While tools, processes, resources and policy are important, the real task of innovation leadership is to find out how much change an organization can tolerate. The more change it can tolerate the more innovative it can be. (Note see Connecting Dots 18 ◎⁃◎ Tolerance for Change.)

Innovation is exceptionally frustrating for all involved. Instinctively frustration is a bad or unpleasant thing. Yet when trying to do something new for the first time it is necessary and inevitable. While innovation leaders often are frustrated with feeling frustrated my findings indicate it is in fact a signal and source of energy and vitality that enables progress.

Working With Frustration Positively

The amazing innovation leaders I’ve been researching, often unbeknownst to themselves, are masters at surfacing and containing frustration in ways that progress their team and organization. The frustration they generate is born from an intent. An intent to address something that could be better or an opportunity that hasn’t been harnessed - powerfully positive, visionary and value-creating.

The frustration comes from the leadership task of reconciling the paradoxes of the organization. How do we change yet retain our identity? How do we renew yet run our business? How do we invest yet return to shareholders? How do we experiment yet not fail? How do we learn without losing confidence in our expertise? Questions that appear absurd and irrational when presented simultaneously yet is the reality of what leaders face.

Repeat innovation leaders are able to hold onto the intent on one hand and tune it to reconcile the paradoxes on the other hand. True failure happens when the intent is uncompromised and stubbornly held like a rock. Or, the intent is compromised by appeasing all ends of the paradoxes dissipating to nothing like a splash of water. 

Humility, adaptability, restlessness and a compulsion to do the right thing are the traits I regularly identify in true innovation leaders. It is a thankless job with a propensity to hit walls or burn out. This I know from personal experience. For all its motivating benefits, frustration certainly has a powerful dark side.

To help, an instrument being developed looks at innovation leadership through three positions of frustration. The purpose of this instrument is illustrative to provide understanding for innovation leaders themselves or executives selecting leaders. As well, it can serve as a real-time diagnostic for how on-task and developmental a group is or isn’t when driving innovation programs.

Innovation Leadership Frustration as Positions:

Ref: Brett Macfarlnae

There are many great innovation leaders out there, you’re likely one. If we can raise comprehension of the true role and tasks of innovation leadership we may be able to improve the problematic state of Western organizational innovation. Hopefully, we can increase the success rate and improve the well-being of innovation leaders. 

Like great athletes, innovation leaders seek and thrive under the pressure and spotlight, but unlike elite athletes, the true cognitive capabilities are not well understood or practiced. If you have any reflections on your practice and your relationship with frustration please do share. The research continues.

“Without action, the world is still an idea.”

— Georges Doriot, founder of INSEAD and inventor of venture capital

Brett’s Movements

As noted, my research is in the sense-making stage and a first draft manuscript is in progress. I very much appreciate my EMC INSEAD peers for interrogating and validating the integrity of findings. A few final research interviews are lined up and I’ll be validating data synthesis with interviewees in November. Very rewarding to see it come together. There has been a lot of interest already and I’ve been fortunate to do a couple of company presentations of early findings. Helpful to gain further data and validate the findings are useful to leaders and their organizations.

My research was always intended to help real-world practice. I’m looking forward to next month to starting design an innovation capability development program for a global consultancy. As well there are initiatives starting on how we can increase board capability to support innovation and updating the governance model - because the current set up simply isn’t working.

I hope you are safe and finding purpose in your work as October unfolds. Your feedback on these newsletters is always appreciated. As well, please share it with peers or your social networks. It makes a big difference and I really appreciate your contributions.

Keep pushing boundaries. 

-Brett

Hits and Misses

Some new things that caught my eye this past month.

On Running- HIT 🤩

While subscriptions are growing in popularity, only if you go into the value chain is it meaningful innovation. The stylishly engineered Swiss brand On has developed as close to a closed-loop running shoe as possible. Cyclon is a shoe you’ll never own, made of beans, that is fully recyclable and replaced whenever you need. I really hope this succeeds. Also, that eco-warrior brands of choice are madly trying to copy. Looking at you Converse, Doc Martin and Veja. Nike, if you can look at subscription as more than removing some purchase friction to take full accountability and ownership of your product’s lifecycle then you might regain my loyalty. Till then I love my On’s. No, I’m not compensated in any way but open to offers :-)

Image Credit: The top image is from a lockdown discovery. Fortitude bakery in London. Previously a commercial bakery but with revenue disappearing overnight the entrepreneurial founder turned their Bloomsbury mews location into a virus-safe open-air cafe. A small taste of sanity.