Leadership challenges in empowered teams.
Connecting Dots 46 ◎⁃◎ Innovation Superheroes
Blue River / 2006
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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots.
The goal of this newsletter is to help develop society’s most innovative leaders.
This month we head to high alpine mountains to understand the archetypes that make a great innovation team.
Onwards,
BM
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Innovation Leadership Archetypes
What is your self-image as a leader?
Many innovation leaders see themselves as a superhero. Someone unafraid to take on dangerous challenges with a worthy goal—a saviour whose full powers are hidden and typically come with inconvenient side effects. It’s a role and archetype that attracts idealization and demonization in equal measures when their superpowers become known.
Yet, unlike fighting crime and evil mutants as a heroic loner; innovation is a team task. Therefore, the singular superhero image is limited in its real-world applications.
A better self-image is as a member of a mountain climbing expedition—a team comprised of multiple archetypes. To tackle highly risky, technically difficult and emotionally demanding tasks you need a team made up of mutually supportive and diverse capabilities, behaviours and motivations. As well as different forms of authority, resources and responsibilities. These differences are united by a common goal and a willingness to venture out into the unknown.
My ideal expedition team features five innovation leadership archetypes:
The Optimist
A dreamer who is driven by novelty and disinterested in formal rules or regulations. They see opportunities others don’t and tell great stories. A cultural catalyst, they inspire you and activate your curiosity to explore. They build enthusiasm to get started but tend to lose interest in organizing and thinking through consequences.
The Realist
A natural organizer who brings people together towards a common goal. They take someone’s vision and can break down how to make it real. Always thinking two steps ahead, they continually evaluate options and map out the best route as conditions change. You gain reassurance from their presence. While they are excellent at orchestrating, they rely on specialists to progress through demanding terrain.
The Survivalist
A generalist who works well in ambiguity and maintains superhuman resilience in extreme conditions. They’ve seen the best and worst of what’s possible. One might say they’re grizzled or hardened, but they never lose their spark for adventure. Resourceful, unflappable and excellent at reading situations quickly. They are a bit stuck in the past but help you from repeating avoidable mistakes.
The Specialist
A helicopter expert who flies in for specialized operations and then flies out as you carry on your way. Highly skilled with specific technologies they are here for you in the here and now. They don’t get emotionally attached, it’s the work that motivates them. Always have their number at hand but only call when it’s really necessary as their time and attention are sought after and given to those who need it most.
The Strategist
Your eyes and ears calling in from basecamp. They can’t see what you see but they give you a wider perspective. So you can see what you can’t. They love thinking two steps ahead and devising new options for you, especially as conditions change. They can be abstract or overly intellectualized, and get touchy if their recommendations aren’t taken up, however, at their best they help those in the field make great decisions by combining strategy and reality.
Leadership Gym
In practice, you may neatly fit into one archetype or see yourself as a blend. You’ll notice each archetype has clear strengths and also some traits that might derail them if they are not self-aware or supported by people whose strengths are your weaknesses.
Archetypes are a form of self-image and a way to see how others in a team might respond to your role and contributions. It’s a helpful way to emphasize one’s strengths and visualize development areas. As well as a way to see you and your colleagues as a team of superheroes on a shared innovation mission.
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Learn more about how to develop more innovative leaders through psychodynamic leadership development.
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Connecting Dots 45 ◎⁃◎ LDR-GPT
Andermatt, Switzerland / March, 2023
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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots the newsletter that helps you lead innovation more successfully.
This month I share a live example of how leaders work with fear activated by technology.
Onwards,
BM
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LDR-GPT
Two weeks ago I participated in a Listening Post day with over 100 organizational psychology peers at INSEAD the global business school in Fontainebleau France. The goal of a Listening Post is to share, hear and reflect upon what is in the collective mind. It starts with the simple question of what is confusing people or giving them enthusiasm in life.
As this event was at a business school it was of course about leadership and the interwoven experience of work and life. Participants came from a wide range of countries, industries and personal situations.
The goal of a Listening Post is to see what collective themes emerge intellectually and what reactions they trigger experientially. It starts by asking what is on people’s minds about work, life, society and beyond to identify themes.
As the day went on I was not surprised that next-generation artificial intelligence was on the minds of many people. Both from long-term practitioners working with artificial intelligence and those new to the topic with the popularization of ChatGPT or GPT4.
However, I was surprised by the intensity of the reactions. There was profound anxiety and distress evident in how people were thinking about, perceiving and experiencing these innovative technologies. The best word to summarize the reaction was annihilation.
An intense emotion, annihilation is the total destruction of something caused by an external force. The negative projections on the technology shook me. It was not the tech itself but the idealization and demonization of what it means and the fantasies of what it might cause at deeply personal levels:
Annihilation of job
Annihilation of competence
Annihilation of identity
Annihilation of control
Annihilation of safety
Annihilation of family
Annihilation of community
What struck me is that these people are the ones in charge. Many are advanced technical experts with deep applied experiences working with the technology. Yet the techno-anxiety was profound. Being responsible for the benefits and costs of new technology and its innovative applications was overwhelming.
I share this vignette as an illustration of the reactions activated by innovation. It’s what leaders need to negotiate and navigate within themselves and with others in their teams, their organizations and society at large.
Individually and collectively innovation activates fear. Often people blame fear as the reason for innovation underachievement. But that overlooks the reality that fear is a normal reaction to any potential perceived loss. This is a logical reaction given innovation’s creative destruction must destroy something for someone.
The sophisticated leader engages with fear, and the unsophisticated ignore fear or have delusional dreams of eliminating fear. Yet there is a big difference between being aware of fear to work with it and being consumed by fear to be disconnected from reality by it.
The goal isn’t to eliminate but separate hot emotions from cold reactions. A lot of innovation arguably moves too fast or is too pushy. It doesn’t allow people to see possibilities, process implications, integrate into programs and work through to make something new a reality.
Neurotic impatience is a defence against taking responsibility for the work and working through the emotional responses of others. Let’s look at someone exceptional at delivering innovative change in the face of fear—Raymond Loewy.
Loewy was one of America’s most innovative business leaders between the first and second world Wars. He coined the phrase MAYA—Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.
In that phrase, he accepted technical progress outstrips our capacity to make sense of it and that we need to respect it. The task of leadership is stress testing to discover what’s possible and what is the most advanced possibility society, an organization or a team can accept.
It is the innovation protagonist’s job to observe and sense what are the most advanced yet acceptable ideas you can progress. Also, to be very sensitive and respectful to how confronting technical progress can be, even for highly innovative and enthusiastic professionals.
During the day of the listening post, because there wasn’t a compression of time, as participants worked through their fears related to technology the benefits and creative mitigation of risk emerged. It became generative, optimistic and inspiring.
It was like a smouldering fireplace filling the air with smoke in the morning. By expelling the smoky fears we didn’t run from the room but rather opened windows to let them dissipate. As fresh air entered the space it vitalized the group and enabled the leaders to move from anxious fear to constructive optimism.
The point is, as a leader to expect and work with the fears that emerged from new possibilities brought about by innovation. The fear isn’t “bad” but part of the normal process of people working through what it means, what they can do and how they can drive constructive change.
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Leadership Gym
As a leader, receiving and working with other people's projections is challenging. Especially when they are negative and amplified by fear. To work with these hot reactions start by working with your own responses.
The feel-think-act triangle is a helpful tool to do so. If you just feel and act, you are just as consumed by fear as others. If you interject think between feel and act you can better process for yourself so you can act rather than react. It can happen in fractions of a second so you can deduce if what you feel and what you think are reconciled or if one is overwhelming the other.
Intellectually the feel-think-act triangle concept is easy to grasp. In practice, you “sharpen the blade” by applying the triangle in highly emotional situations where you sense and help the team work out what is Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.
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Learn more about how to develop more innovative leaders.
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Connecting Dots 44 ◎⁃◎ Go Off Piste and Innovate
Whistler Mountain, January, 2023
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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots the innovation newsletter read by over 15,000 innovators.
This month I’m unpacking innovation as the action sport of business. I hope that everyone in business will see that they too can be innovative.
Onwards,
BM
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Heading Off Piste
We need more innovators and after you read this month’s newsletter I hope you’ll convert someone you work with.
Unlike popular perception, innovation is not only the exclusive realm of a special breed of professionals. Every professional can choose to be an innovator. I’ve come to realize this belief comes from my personal and professional experiences in action sports.
In my first professional job, I managed sports sponsorships for General Motors. We sponsored all the big professional leagues and Olympic teams. Sports where rule books are detailed and tradition weighs heavily over everything one does. Where the boundaries are tightly defined.
My addition to the General Motors strategy was to venture into action sports. In 2003 we became the title sponsor of the freeskiing world tour and the sport's first Fortune 500 sponsor. We literally and figuratively went off-piste by sponsoring a sport where creating your routes in an unbounded mountain was the point of the freeski world tour.
Freeskiing, like other action sports, defined itself as being less rule-bound and restrictive than traditional sports. It was a world apart from the mathematically precise race courses and strict rules for every piece of equipment that is at the heart of alpine ski racing and nordic cross country competitions.
“Free-ride” competitions are minimalist. A start, a finish and infinite routes and possibilities in between. Everyone creates “their” line that is judged based on the degree of difficulty and quality of execution. It’s risky and rewarding.
Often great freeskiing champions cross over from different disciplines like racing or gymnastics. They weren’t “just” freeskiers. They were experts in another domain that applied their capabilities in the open boundaries of free skiing. They chose to go off-piste and be free skiers while holding onto their prior identity.
But for me, the key relevance to innovation to free skiing is that it’s not just for the elite highly trained athlete who loves double black diamond runs.
Any skier, or snowboarder, can veer off the smooth corduroy of a groomed run and become a free skier themselves. At any level of difficulty. You just need to find a bit of terrain that aligns with their skill level. An adventure that might be one run each season or every single day.
In the world of business, innovation is very similar to freeskiing. Its focus is going beyond the bounded rules and traditions of business as usual. Unlike a well-established business, product or process the boundaries and rules of innovation are blurry and looser.
You get to create the path by drawing your boundaries based on the terrain before you. It’s exhilarating and for some addictive. It can also be intimidating and scare people away, deterring them from the professional and personal rewards of helping drive change through new ideas.
Given most companies list innovation as a top three priority, surely you want most of your professional staff to think they are or can be innovators. After all, being an innovator is like being a free skier, you just need to go off-piste and call yourself one. Whatever your skill level, attempting it means you are one. Like a language, you get good at it by doing it, uncomfortably at first.
The bad news is that we don’t have enough innovators. I’ve reviewed the latest statistics and all measures of innovation continue to decline in the West. Patents, business formation, new ventures and productivity continue to show less and fewer innovation activities and outcomes despite consistent investment levels.
A curious trend I’ve noticed is people don’t like to see themselves or be called an innovator. This may be due to external pressure or the mythology of the heroic lone innovator. But it actually might be something even more fundamental: confidence. 65% of executives admit to lacking confidence when it comes to innovation. A stat with a high probability of under-reporting.
So how do professionals get more confident at leading innovation and progressively more capable?
It’s easy, you tell them they can do it. It’s a practice I learned before my first professional career when I was coaching an international alpine ski racing team. The best way to build an athlete’s confidence is to tell them they can do it—that they can win or achieve their goals.
They often resist this support at first, a normal defence mechanism, but with the right encouragement, it’s easy to get them moving in the right direction. The key is to not just tell them you genuinely believe in their ability to win but to then break down the tangible steps to reach the goal. Which they then practice.
In my work, some of my favourite workshops or programs are with professionals in HR, Finance and IT functions who regularly claim they aren’t at all innovative. I consistently disagree with them and they consistently prove me right.
All I do is tell them that they are innovative, giving them some know-how and step aside to watch them quickly prove it to themselves. In a day they turn their wish to improve something in their company into solutions worked out with colleagues to become something tangible they can go and test. They became innovators as a result of their actions.
They may never need to be double black diamond innovators or commit their careers to the calling of innovation. But there’s lots of room, impact and fun in the green circle and blue square innovation needs of every company. I encourage every employee to go off-piste at least once a year, more if they enjoy living on the edge of risk and reward.
The point of this article is that anyone can innovate. In your work, tell a colleague that they can be innovative too. If you read this newsletter you likely already see yourself as an innovator, now go and help three other people see themselves as one too. We all thank you.
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Leadership Gym
You already have an activity above. Something that can help you self-motivate someone to innovate is by tapping into their current capabilities and interests. Depending on their job role and function, professionals naturally will gravitate to and excel in certain types of innovation. Here’s an introduction to eight schools of innovation. For any individual, one may be a helpful and safe boundary to frame their path off-piste and do some tangible and real innovation work.
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Learn more about courageous innovation leadership with Brett Macfarlane.
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Connecting Dots 43 ◎⁃◎ Innovation—the Adrenaline Sport of Business
Blackcomb Mountain, January, 2023
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Hello,
Welcome to the first edition of Connecting Dots in 2023.
I’m starting the year with a story—how I’ve come to see innovation as the adrenaline sport of business.
Onwards,
Brett
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Innovation—the Adrenaline Sport of Business
Last January, I wrote the outline and first chapter of a book on innovation leadership. The goal was to decode and demystify the behavioural dynamics of leading innovation.
Months of work, years of experience and decades of research condensed into an 18-page draft. A group of ten impressive innovation leaders enthusiastically agreed to feedback.
It was a disaster.
It is extreme to say they hated it but they certainly did not love it.
They appreciated being the subject of the book and feeling seen, recognized and understood.
However, I felt deep resistance to the central premise of the book—that the emotional dynamics of innovation are overlooked and often unmanaged, resulting in more distress than success.
What my expert panel didn't do was disagree with the technical points. They took issue with themselves as the audience.
That response was unexpected and paradoxical.
It was a response that directly attacked my hope to inspire and empower more successful innovation leadership. The patient had rejected the medicine I was convinced they needed.
That truth was unpleasant and eventually helpful.
In my disappointed state, I gathered and set aside all the feedback and my reflections. It sat in a folder to the top right corner of my MacBook’s desktop titled “Feedback”.
I knew something valuable was in there but I needed to give it time—like a surfer keen to hit the water but who must be patient until clean waves break.
It would have been easy to discard the project and move on to something else. Instead, the feedback folder stayed on my desktop, periodically catching my eye.
Gradually, the disappointment faded revealing a question. What if my wish is right but my audience is wrong?
By now it was September and I cleared a day to revisit the project. I started by taking a walk. It was a hike actually, I ventured out before dawn up into the high alpine of Canada’s Coast Mountains.
Before setting out I reread all the feedback in one go and let it wash over me. As I hiked and processed the feedback I started to notice a buried theme.
A theme represented by this comment:
“Maybe you could change the title so that it appeals to people who don't think of themselves as an innovator, but who still want to affect change….”
Like any helpful insight, it seems obvious once know. This comment wasn't about the title but about the observation that there are people who yearn to drive change but don't see themselves as innovators. Their full potential is unrealized.
Whereas those who do think of themselves as innovators are already familiar with the challenges and rewards of trying to do new things. They don’t need help. They are already bringing new things to fruition.
I was energized by this audience shift, and yet it felt a bit dull. All of my material was far too rigorous and wonkish for this audience. They don’t think of themselves as innovators, nor do they need to do what’s a better way to engage and empower them
There was only one thing to do— I headed back to the mountains.
A few weeks ago, I hiked to the top of Blackcomb Mountain and around a rarely explored back ridge. It was a new ski season and I was testing new gear, creating visions of possibilities.
Atop that remote untracked couloir, I felt the same excitement as the kick-off of an innovation project where we looked ahead enthusiastically to the progression and exhilaration to come. With a sense of nervousness and risk in the air.
Then the dots connected.
The anticipation of creating a new path down an untracked piste on skis or in a professional challenge triggers the same feeling.
I pulled out my phone and wrote:
“Innovation is the adrenaline sport of business.”
This is because innovation is a high-risk, high reward and high-emotion endeavour.
Like an adrenaline sport, everyone can do it. Some do it full-time their entire life. While most do it periodically, some are happy to give it a pass yet enjoy supporting from the sidelines. Everyone plays a role.
Now, a year later I have the same goal to demystify the experience and capabilities of leading innovation so that we can increase success rates.
Only this time, it’s for a bigger audience that hopefully appreciates it more and can learn more through the adrenaline sports association.
So far the response has been very enthusiastic. Especially from professionals driving change in new ways who don’t think of themselves as innovators. How exciting.
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Leadership Gym
It’s time for an emotional checkup. After a holiday break, many professionals are eager to restart their ongoing innovation processes or kick off a new one. The intention is good but taking action is better.
So start your year with a quick check of your leadership fundamentals. How are you thinking, acting and feeling right now?
Run yourself through my short leadership x-ray to test yourself across the six fundamentals of innovation leadership.
It’s like a blood pressure test at the doctor's. It validates everything is good or can serve as an early warning signal to investigate.
CLICK HERE TO ASSESS YOUR LEADERSHIP
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Learn more about inspired and resilient innovation leadership with Brett Macfarlane.
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Connecting Dots 42 ◎⁃◎ Autonomous Leaders
Joffre Lakes, Canada, 31 August, 2022
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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on Innovation Leadership by Brett Macfarlane.
Read by over 15,000 innovative leaders in 101 countries.
This month, we look at how to foster a climate of leadership autonomy and empowerment.
Onward,
Brett
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Striking a Nerve
The response was heartening. Also unexpected. Last month’s newsletter on Leaderless Teams attracted tens of thousands of readers and a lively discussion.
To think I had been a bit worried that evangelists of buzzy trends like Holocracy or “the Spotify way” might shout at me. Instead, what delighted me was receiving waves of real-world stories of people working in teams and organizations with empowerment and autonomy.
“A leader is best when people barely know they exists, when the work is done, aims fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”
~Lao Tzu
Autonomous Leaders
If I summarize the buzz around the article, I distill the key theme as an interest in Autonomous Leaders. It represents a yearning to be in situations where you are empowered and also take up a leadership role by paying attention to the needs of others.
To me, that’s the key point to me of the leaderless teams experiment—that the high-performing leaders both took up the responsibility to lead and did so by paying attention to the needs of others. A two-way working alliance between leaders and followers.
It’s not about power and control of managing others. After all, leadership, unlike management, is an act, not a position. Leadership is the act of driving change and any team member can help to drive change. Some so do continuously and others periodically. In other words, leadership is shared.
Empowering someone to lead, either by following or supporting, is of course a form of leadership unto itself. If you are the primary leader you may note a technical colleague can in parallel solve a problem and satiate their need to feel competent. Leadership is giving space for others to lead as much as being the protagonist of change yourself.
This ability to switch between the leader and follower roles is essential in situations of innovation where uncertainty and ambiguity are high, often with a significant amount of anxiety. It’s logical and normal that innovation has an aspect of anxiety as uncertainty and ambiguity will always be present when trying to do something new for the first time.
Fostering Leaders
To work through uncertainty and ambiguity, people need to feel empowered and self-motivated. This enables them to contain group anxieties and to progress the work towards the certainty and clarity that emerges as new ideas are progressively validated.
What enables people to work autonomously isn’t the model but the climate they work in. As a senior leader, you create the climate. In some global roles working across multiple innovation programs or matrix organizations, the climate of autonomous leadership is your most important job after securing a mandate and resources.
Just like in nature, the climate itself doesn’t grow things, but it creates the conditions for life. While climate can’t create directly, it can destroy. Climate can feel fuzzy but just like a gale-force wind or refreshing spring breeze it’s clearly felt and directly influences our actions.
Climate is dynamic and ever-changing. It is a realistic representation of the conditions that foster innovation as sufficient energy needs to be activated but too much unleashed is destructive.
So the big questions you should be asking are:
If you are a senior executive how do you create a climate of innovation?
If you are in an innovation team, what climate do you request of your sponsoring executive?
To answer these questions, start by seeing freedom as the material of innovation. Four specific freedoms create the conditions that empower individuals to lead and motivate them to take up their authority to lead.
The Four Freedoms of Innovation are:
Freedom from PAST
Freedom to EXPLORE
Freedom from FAILURE
Freedom to LEARN
These freedoms are equally what you are freed from and what you are free to do in pursuit of the goal.
I find the Four Freedoms of Innovation to be a realistic and holistic way of thinking about how innovation grows. It helps you take a less dogmatic approach to innovation and reconciles multiple disciplines, processes and functions that come together for an organization to do something new.
If you are intrigued by the Four Freedoms of Innovation, let me know and I’ll share a little booklet in development. I hope that the Four Freedoms of Innovation demystifies how to create a culture of autonomous leaders.
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Leadership Gym
To be an autonomous leader, it’s helpful to know what motivates you in the first place. That way when engaging and meeting the needs of your teammate you can also contain your needs so you can create effective working alliances
What moves you, what compels you, what gives you that urge to make things better? You may be surprised to learn that anxiety is a window into our intrinsic motivation. Without overthinking it, which of these do you most relate to?
Validation anxiety - I want to know I’m good
Control anxiety - I want to know I’m safe
Legacy anxiety - I want to know I matter
Each of these is what I call motivating anxieties. They are the fire that compels you to do something in your professional life. We all have elements of each, but at one time we are primarily driven by one of the three.
By identifying this source of your motivation, you can harness its clarity, motivation and energy. You can also better understand why you might react, think or feel in ways that work against your goals.
Destructive behaviours, decisions and actions typically can be linked to an unmet need for validation, control or legacy. They become a gale-force wind that destroys value rather than a refreshing spring breeze that nourishes value creation.
As you set your goals for 2023, make sure you feed the need for what motivates you.
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Learn more about inspired and resilient innovation leadership with Brett Macfarlane.
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Connecting Dots 41 ◎⁃◎ Leaderless Teams
Hampstead, North London 14 April, 2020
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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on Innovation Leadership by Brett Macfarlane.
I’m back in London after recent visits to Spain, France, Netherlands and Canada. Everywhere I went, the need for leadership to do more was a theme I kept hearing. However, an 80-year-old experiment near where I live reminded me of just one behaviour needed to be an effective leader.
Best,
Brett
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Leaderless Teams
I recently learned that in 1943 the War Officers Selection Board headquarters was based near me in North London. In the bohemian neighbourhood of Hampstead, a group of psychiatrists set about to determine what makes a good leader—an existential question when deciding who to select, train and entrust with the lives of others during combat.
The few remaining pictures suggest a modest facility for a mission of such importance. Yet, this humble group reduced the failure rate of leader selection from 45% to 8%. Despite a decrease in the quality of army intakes at the time. A profound improvement in but a few weeks of experimentation.
The primary experiment that led to this success was “leaderless teams” pioneered by Isabel Menzies Lyth from St. Andrews University. Her innovation is used to this day for officer selection in most merit-based militaries globally.
In the research, groups of soldiers without an appointed leader were given a “set” problem. However, the “real” problem unbeknownst to participants was their ability to balance their desire to do well with the need to work with and support other members of the group. Observers assessed, documented and ultimately coached this capacity.
What emerged from this exercise is that social class, education, gender and athletic ability were less important for leadership than the capacity for an individual to attend to others in the group.
Coming across the 80-year-old findings surprised and also delighted me. We can see a direct line of evidence in Amy Edmonson’s work on Psychological Safety. Which has also been validated in modern organizational research such as Google’s Project Aristotle and a range of industrial firms in central Europe.
I asked myself if this truth is so sound then why isn’t it more widely practiced now?
Often overlooked in the findings is the real question of what gives an individual the capacity to practice psychological safety—or attend to the needs as described by Lyth. Many miss that this ability to attend to the needs of others is Lyth’s stated reframing of authority, away from the patriarchal notions of hierarchy and class standardization. In Lyth’s findings and theories, authority becomes a power within oneself to relate to others rather than to control them.
Often our relationship with authority is the hardest part of leadership for people to accept or take up. People who like to think they are “good” people unwittingly end up trying to control others. These behaviours are imprinted deep within a person, often only activated in positions of change and leadership.
To attend to others one first needs to attend to oneself— to understand their deeper imprint of the behavioural drivers and detractors that compel them forward. Revealing our underlying imprint is what enables true self-awareness and the ability to attend to the needs of others.
Like most learning, it’s found through action, not pontification. Most people feel there is widespread leadership failure throughout business and society. The good news is that we only need to develop one practice—the ability to attend to the needs of others.
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Leadership Gym
As you think about 2023, it’s a good time to start observing how you are relating to others in your teams. What situations draw you to control or compel you to withdraw? These may signal situations where your behavioural drivers or detractors are over-activating.
When this happens write a paragraph summarizing what happened. Don’t overthink it, just capture what happened and how you feel about it. Once you have five situational vignettes themes will emerge revealing the deeper imprints of your leadership behaviour. Rich material to discuss with your executive coach, a supportive colleague or a trusted companion. It may point to an opportunity for your 2023 development goals.
Learn more about inspired and resilient innovation leadership with Brett Macfarlane.
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Connecting Dots 40 ◎⁃◎ Systemic Leadership
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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on Innovation Leadership by Brett Macfarlane.
The point of this month’s article is that innovation is a result of systemic leadership—which we need more of and what it looks like in practice.
Onwards,
Brett
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Systemic Leadership
Why aren’t we innovating?
A frustrating question, that I hear more and more.
In a recent example, The Economist asked what happened to the promised Covid innovation boom that proved a bust.
People are often surprised when I tell them we are in an innovation bust, not a boom. Sure we have FANG and Fast Company but they represent a tiny fraction of the economy.
Despite all the hype and hope of emergent technology, the West is enduring a multi-decade innovation decline. Labour productivity, wage growth, GDP, new business formation and innovation intensity are measures of innovation that are all flat or declining.
Yet, patents and R&D investment continue to grow. That means knowledge or resources are not being constrained.
The issue is that inventions and ideas are not sufficiently turning into innovations. Innovation is the application of a novel idea—an invention— to the market. An invention is merely potential value and innovation is the generation of value.
It seems absurd that we have these powerful new working tools like Zoom, Slack and Salesforce, yet productivity benefits have not widely emerged.
Equally, we have powerful technology advancements, applications on demand and businesses in the cloud, yet quality, reliability and resilience benefits have not widely emerged.
Why do we have so much innovation potential but so few benefits?
Innovation is a Leadership Outcome
The problem is that behaviourally we are not innovating how we innovate.
For many, innovation is still stuck in the project management and industrial production paradigm.
People think of individual units of resources as investments, projects as plans and stage gates as the process. It’s fragmented, over-managed and under-humanized.
We need to see innovation as the result of systemic leadership. After all, innovation is a systemic outcome of an organization, thus leadership is the protagonist of innovation.
Innovation matters because it is a priority for 75% of businesses. Therefore, 100% of employees in a business with an innovation priority have a role they play. They already are, it just isn’t visible nor orientated to cooperative value creation.
Innovation is knowledge work, it comes from charge, is facilitated by leadership and results from diverse people, capabilities and skills working together.
Therefore to change the system, each member has a role as an individual contributor and as a member of the system. Both roles are taken up in tandem.
We can make the system roles more intentional, visible and tangible. A systemic model of leadership has three primary roles aligned with an individual’s authority, responsibilities and primary task. Let’s call it EMS.
Executive Role - The System Level
You are tasked with the climate of innovation.
Your role is to set the mission that establishes the goal but not the means to get there.
You empower and clear the way for those who work closely and deeply with the challenge.
Your responsibility is to create a governance model that facilitates progress and clears value-destroying obstacles when issues emerge as they will (given innovation inherently is change.)
Manager Role - The organization level
You are tasked with deconstructing the mission to establish, facilitate and support your team in concert with other managers and peers.
Your role is to guide the team to take up the empowerment granted to them and to generate autonomy within team members motivating them to address the mission.
You are the conduit to peers across the organization and the executive.
Your responsibility is to facilitate effective working in the team and across teams outside your authority by maintaining open communication channels, identifying obstacles before they become blockers and leading give-take negotiations on what is prioritized along the way.
Staff Role - The clinical team level
You are tasked with making the things that deliver the mission.
Your role is to bring your knowledge and know-how to address the mission.
You learn as you make something new for the first time, learn along the way and teach so collectively the team and organization build the shared pool of applied knowledge of what creates sustainable value.
Your responsibility is to your team, to the mission, to impacted colleagues and the end external customers you are working to help.
If innovation is a priority in your organization, it’s best to think of it as a bottom-up process. Like in nature, a productive ecosystem has nutrient-rich soil that harnesses energy to create growth when climate conditions are favourable.
Whereas stressed, over-extracted or under-nourished soil leads to crop failure.
The point of a systemic approach to innovation leadership is that everyone has a role to play. No one is an all-good hero and anyone can cause harm by opting out in victimhood.
Everyone directly or indirectly plays a vital role in working with others to make innovation happen. By looking at leadership systemically, you can more fully realize your innovation potential.
~ Share this article if you agree. If you disagree please tell me why.
Brett’s Movements
Last month I loved NASA smashing asteroids at 17,000 mph. I also loved the latest Ocean Cleanup developments in the 2km wide plastic vacuum getting ever more effective at cleaning up the Pacific Ocean garbage gyre.
Later this month I’ll be hosting a session at the V20 Summit in Bali on 21/22 of October (I’ll be flying in digitally.) This is a formal briefing of government ministers for the G20 Leader's Summit hosted by Indonesia. I am attempting to innovate the multilateral policy process to be more values-based, as is the goal of the V20.
I am also making a policy recommendation to adopt multinational “fair process” through the legal framework of Meaningful Engagement and a DDNH (Digital Do No Harm) treaty to increase responsibility and decrease instability caused by cross boarder digital organizations. Sign up to join the summit or to receive the communiqué when it’s published. Change happens from within, join us.
May you thrive,
Brett
PS. Need a boost? Revisit Panic or Prosper from edition 36 of Connecting Dots.
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Connecting Dots 39 ◎⁃◎ Systemic Innovation
~ Systems Mapping
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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on Innovation Leadership by Brett Macfarlane.
This month we address the systemic nature of innovation leadership.
Then I share a short but big update on my private practice.
Best,
Brett
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Systemic Innovation
A hard truth about innovation that many people get wrong is thinking that it’s only a task or a thing to manage. There is a big difference between managing an innovation project and being an innovation leader. The former is a task and the latter is a practice.
Innovation is a systemic outcome. It is how a leader works with their team within the culture around them. It sounds obvious to say but is greatly overlooked that the leader, the team and the culture are a system.
Seasoned innovation leaders often report relief when we start to illuminate the systemic aspects of their roles and career. Relief because we illuminate the “soft” factors like the culture that are the enabling lubricant or paralyzing glue of innovation’s “hard” factors like resources, inventions, prototypes and policies.
I’m working on finding a shortcut to explain the truth that innovation is a systemic outcome. For professionals, the key point is to see innovation not just as what you do but also as how your team works within itself and the wider organization.
All three spheres are part of a system that produces innovation outcomes which may or may not achieve the desired objectives. Let’s unpack the system a bit more:
Me:
The individual sphere is your imprinted mindset, capabilities and practice. This combines the theory and tools of how to do innovation with your behavioural practice of doing it. In other words, it’s the combination of "know-what" and "know-how."
My Team:
The group sphere is the team and collaboration involved in an innovation initiative. A combination of group dynamics, resources, policies and processes that the group buys into, adapts or resists.
Our Culture:
The culture sphere is the wider organization and the external ecosystems it operates within. Often this is overlooked or seen as soft or fuzzy. Yet, the always-present cultural currents and dynamics in an organization can be assessed, decoded and adjusted where needed.
We know from my research that innovation leaders do integrate all three levels. However, they rarely are conscious of this systemic picture. In particular the cultural sphere.
Once we connect all three and work with the specifics of their situation it’s like a fog lifts. We demystify why and how they perform as well as the tensions and frustrations they experience.
“That’s a relief! It’s not just me.”
It’s amazing the relief they feel. Partly to be able to diagnose their pain or understand the performance factors of their success. Relief also comes from not feeling alone. Their experiences are normalized, in a way unique to each individual.
I always feel great energy from innovation leaders when they start to take a systemic approach. It’s like dashboard lights turning on and they can see how the current system is helping or hindering performance.
Curiously, of late multiple exceptional innovation leaders have laser-focused on this systemic aspect of innovation. I have noticed a theme that they are anticipating heightened innovation complexity and opportunity in the next few years. You can be excited about the value unlocked with a systemic approach to innovation.
~
Hopefully this “inside out” view of systemic leadership has been insightful from a practitioner's point of view to connect the dots of your work. You may also be interested in this “outside in” working model of pathway components from an executive’s point of view when responsible for organization wide innovation capital. I’m keen to hear what could make the models better.
Brett’s Movements
I am in Canada this week. Up in the Coast Mountains for an end-of-summer break and writing retreat. Stunning. I return to London on Tuesday and then head to Amsterdam for an INSEAD reunion followed by a few days in Paris.
On this trip, I am publicly launching my organizational consultancy. Technically, my practice is a few years old. I have quietly been refining the core offering and validating my approach.
It has been humbling and fun to do so working with leaders at top tech firms, management consultancies, creative/design agencies and sportswear brands. Thank you to everyone who has given feedback and support.
It's not a loud launch and some language is still being crafted. However, the foundation is rock solid and I’m pleased to open up and say:
Brett’s organizational consultancy specializes in leadership development and innovation for tech and creative organizations.
Individuals Progress Together is his motto. It represents a systemic approach to leadership and organizational development. His practice unites organizational psychology, change-management and innovation methodologies. Through action learning, you practically develop knowledge and capabilities on the job doing real work.
Services:
Coaching leadership behaviours and practices
Assessing organizational culture and identity
Training innovation knowledge and skills
My goal is to help elevate 1 million innovation leaders in the next decade. So far I’ve developed 5,000 professionals in a range of programs with a 72 NPS.
Learn more at brettmacfarlane.com
Please keep me in mind and share my practice with your favourite innovation leader or your company’s head of organizational/talent development. I’m always open to having a chat to explore if my approach is a good fit for your challenges.
Have a great back-to-school September.
Best,
Brett
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The Innovation Pathway
This is a working model shared for peer review.
The model is an “outside-in” view of systemic components and enable innovation in an organization.
