Connecting Dots 35 ◎⁃◎ The Smell of Innovation

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 Hello,

Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on the psychology of innovation leadership by Brett Macfarlane. 

What does innovation smell like?

In this edition of Connecting Dots I answer this question through a recent visit to an innovative design studio in Girona, Spain.

Settle in with a ☕️ and have a think about what “the smell of the place” says about your innovation culture.

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The Smell of Innovation

You can learn a lot about a company and how they innovate in a short visit to their space. 

Three weeks ago I buzzed an unmarked door in the Spanish town of Girona. It was six in the evening and people were coming off work. At a cafe to our right, a group of office workers clanked their glasses of vermouth as the door clicked open.

We walked down a narrow nondescript hall and up worn wooden stairs. Nothing indicated it was home to the design studio of high performance and high fashion cycling brand CHPT3 (pronounced chapter three.) The founder and figurehead of CHPT3 is the thoughtful and philosophical champion Scottish cyclist, David Millar.

I was excited because I love visiting design and innovation facilities. Only by being in the space can you see and sense how the work takes shape, or what might be amiss.

A studio or lab is a living artifact of space and people interacting. Interactions that result in new products, services and processes. Some aspects are explicit but much of the work is implicit—hidden out of conscious sight despite its continuous presence.

The experience of CHPT3’s design studio told me a lot about the brand, the company, the people and how they operate. The assessment technique I used is called socioanalytic observation. It seeks to discover the hidden in organizations and social systems. It’s a parallel observation process, meaning at the same time I observe how I respond to the space and I observe how others around me relate to the space. 

OK, let me walk you through my experience.

Visiting the CHPT3 Design Studio

The studio is a collection of inter-connected rooms. The physical layout is unique to the timeless medieval walls cocooning the contemporary decor and work implements.

The closely connected rooms link with inconsistent door frames to duck under or pirouette around. Each room contains a discreet aspect of the company. As a brand, CHPT3 to me was a constellation of ideas, aesthetics, campaigns and use cases. Inconsistent yet somehow coherent. The space physically represents this tension.

As an example:

—> I walked past a museum of sporting accomplishments in one room

—> To a business affairs working table in another

—> Above, is an artistic installation of David’s custom race shoes

—> Then I entered a fashion closet upstairs away from the money talk

—> A rest area with soft white furnishing was hidden off to to the side

—> I returned downstairs to discover the most organized and tidy room—a workout space

I found this last room most fascinating. It featured two high spec bikes and computer simulation equipment.  It placed sport physically at the heart of the brand, the business and the lifestyle the space represented. Spiritually, I imagined it as a furnace of passion that whirred as staff pushed the limits of new product designs. I wondered if cycling is the means of business, or is the business a means to cycle?

Behind the workout-lab, was a chill-out space with a custom bike-mounted as though art. This highly engineered object seemed to hold desperately onto its mud and dirt from the road. Just as a Jackson Pollack holds onto its paint, defying gravity and the passage of time.

Depending on your perspective, the dirt as an art installation represents taming the chaos outside so it feels close yet safe. Or symbolizes the importance of ensuring the inside doesn’t get too removed from the chaos of competition and real life outside the studio.

Either way, it represented the uncertainty and mess of exploration yet the space was like an oven mitt - you feel the heat but don’t burn.

Interestingly, The entire studio hung over the streets of Girona like a VIP hospitality marquee or broadcast booth. Given Girona’s role as a global hub and home for professional cycling, it was as if they want wanted to be in the middle of the action but from a distance. In it but not of it.

I could peer down at cyclists passing by, freewheels buzzing, as if I was a researcher or police interrogator observing and studying from behind a one-way mirror.

 Reflections

This distance I noticed is a common feature of studios trying to create safety amidst the chaos of innovation. The distance can quell fears of getting too involved with and consumed by the outside world in ways that might annihilate their independence or identity. In this case, there seemed just enough distance to be safe enough yet close enough to and open to the outside world.

It’s a healthy and sophisticated tension to negotiate. This distance was an association that came to mind. It could just have been cheap property acquired at an opportune moment or space loaned by a friend. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe, and nothing more, but more often than not there is more than meets the eye... if only I had more time and could observe David working with his team.

Functionally, I liked the experience of transitioning between the spaces. I’ve always found that everything on one big open floor makes it hard to create boundaries and transitions between functional, cognitive and relational tasks.

The walls gave demarcations between the spaces, roles and functions. The open doors and flowing air enabled integration. Each space gave different representations triggering different responses—in an inspiring and uplifting way. 

In many companies, demarcation lines often become fault lines—in perception or in physical representation through closed-off spaces, gatekeepers and formal processes. It can be intentional to activate and unfreeze an organization. Though, if one isn’t careful it can become a front line consumed by battles for control, power and resources. 

At the moment of my visit, it felt like the lives of employees flowed between business affairs, design work, sales, company archive, R&D flagships, hospitality zone and chill-out space. Where one spends their time likely reflects their level of formal or informal authority in the company—generalized or specialized roles.

I must confess to envying the space. I wish one day for my practice to have a physical space and experience. I can visualize it and imagine what it feels like to sit down under the morning light with an open window. 

Seasonal photography rotates with key themes in our work and injects people’s worldviews (physically and philosophically) into the room. The aroma of fresh coffee is in the air as we chatter away while putting our hands on the wooden work table to start the day. It smells great, like innovation…

I digress, but that’s what a great innovation space does, you dream and make it real.

Learn my about my programs training, coaching and transforming innovators over at www.innovator-coach.com

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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