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Leading Innovation: Pursue a wealth of ideas with creative agility (Week 17)

Three snails with one on a skateboard

Pursuing creative agility means experimenting and testing many ideas.

Week 17: Pursue a wealth of ideas with creative agility

Traditional leadership:

Traditionally, “new” ideas are moved quickly to iteration and implementation following pilot programs.

A fresh approach:

New-era leaders need to experiment and test many ideas before proceeding, keeping multiple options open for as long as possible.

Bring it to life:

      • Routinely encourage employees to try new ways of doing things.
      • Support “both/and” thinking over “either/or” thinking.
      • Encourage a continuous learning environment where everyday operations and decisions are opportunities for new thinking and input.
      • Create the space for integration by keeping things simple, flexible, and open.
      • Encourage employees to take calculated risks.

Next week: Creative Agility – Reflect.

Leading innovation: Constructive Conflict & Debate (week 16)

Fish and a shark at a debate

Constructive conflict and debate requires many ideas as well as greater comfort with ambiguity.

Week 16: Constructive Conflict & Debate

Traditional leadership:

In the past, “innovative” ideas came from the top or from those who provided “favored” ideas. People tended to go along to get along. Ideas were evaluated based on who said them.

A fresh approach:

Today, A

Bring it to life:

      • Robust Discussion. Catalyze robust discussions about ideas with honest feedback and iteration in the interest of improving and expanding ideas.
      • Debate Ideas. Challenge yourself and others regularly to debate all sides of an idea or position.
      • Accept Ambiguity Around Ideas . Manage your own anxieties about conflict. Lean into ambiguity instead of avoiding it.
      • Focus on Ideas, Not the People Who Have Them. Point out when debates become about people instead of ideas.
      • Think Contrarian. Challenge employees to take a position opposite to their own and describe its merits.
      • Respect Each Other. Encourage respectful dialogue. It is okay to take breaks when a conversation becomes too heated.

Next week: Creative Agility.

Leading Innovation: Diversity of Thought (Week 15)

Diversity of thought concept (many thought bubbles of various sizes and color)

Diversity of thought requires fostering a range of viewpoints and highlighting differences.

Week 15: Diversity of Thought

Traditional leadership:

In the past, leaders conventionally placed a high value on subject-matter expertise.

A fresh approach:

To innovate in the new era, while subject-matter expertise is still important, you need to foster diverse perspectives and viewpoints. To do this, you must create teams and workgroups that highlight and represent many differences of disciplines, backgrounds, personalities, experiences, and perspectives.

Bring it to life:

    • Amplify vs minimize differences
    • Invite your group members to share minority and contrary viewpoints.
    • Allow for a variety of modes of participation to accommodate different learning and engagement styles in your meetings.
    • Ask questions to elicit different viewpoints.
    • Look for opinions outside of your usual circle.
    • Create a psychologically safe environment and actively encourage less vocal colleagues to share their ideas.

Come back next week for Leading Innovation: Constructive Conflict & Debate.

Leading Innovation: A Marketplace of Ideas (Week 14)

A colorful idea faucet with ideas flowing

Week 14: A Marketplace of Ideas

Traditional leadership:

Conventional leadership focused on finding only the “best idea.

A fresh approach:

To innovate in the new era, your focus needs to be on generating a marketplace of many ideas. For this to happen, groups must first generate lots of ideas and keep massaging them. As Thomas A. Edison reportedly said, “To have a great idea, have a lot of them.”

Bring it to life:

    • Create forums (physical and digital) for open, free-flowing exchange of ideas, not simply brainstorming.
    • Encourage your teams to generate many good options (not just one) when solving problems.
    • Challenge your employees to delay solutions or decisions until new/more ideas surface.
    • Push teams to maximize full participation in idea generation including going outside one’s team as well as encouraging input from less vocal people.
    • Promote a culture of psychological safety so every member of the community feels free and safe to offer ideas.

 

Next week: Diversity of Thought

Take your organization to the next level with our Culture and Innovation Assessments and our Innovation Leadership Coaching

Leading Innovation: Instill an Innovation Mindset (week 13)

A dolphin swims along with a goldfish in a fishbowl on its nose

To deal with accelerating change, effective leaders are modifying the ways they inspire innovation and transformation. This week we look at instilling an innovation mindset.

 

Week 13: Instill an Innovation Mindset

Traditional leadership:

Traditional leadership has approached the task of innovation as something restricted to certain individuals, such as innovation experts, creative people, or senior management. Or they have focused on specific areas, such as a special task force or an R&D department.

This approach no longer works.

 

A fresh approach:

In the new era, innovation is viewed as a part of everyone’s job. The challenge is to help their ideas get heard and applied.

 

Bring it to life:

    • Adopt a broad definition of innovation.
    • Recognize and celebrate incremental innovations, not just breakthroughs.
    • Dispel the myth that innovation = technology. Instead, adopt the definition that innovation is “anything new + useful.”
    • Encourage a climate of curiosity.

Next Week: Generate a marketplace of ideas

Take your organization to the next level with our Culture and Innovation Assessments and our Innovation Leadership Coaching

Leading innovation: Think holistically (week 12)

innovation leadership culture think holisticallyTo deal with accelerating change, effective leaders are modifying the ways they inspire innovation and transformation. This week we look at innovation and creating a culture that thinks holistically.

Week 12: Think holistically

Traditional leadership:

Traditional leadership traditionally has focused on the individual business unit you lead for framing problems, building a vision, and setting and implementing strategy.

A fresh approach:

In the new era, innovation requires leaders to move thinking from the unit to the “big picture” or enterprise perspective. This means that innovation leadership must ask all members of a group to consider the whole problem rather than focusing on or trying to optimize one part.This requires framing the problem from multiple stakeholder points of view. If you don’t do this, you risk missing possible solutions that at first may seem mutually exclusive. That’s because the best innovation solution is often one that combines disparate approaches which can only be uncovered by framing a problem through a multi-faceted lens.

Bring this approach to life:

  • Think of the whole. Instill a deep sense of purpose and shared values in the work of the enterprise that cascades throughout all units. This helps develop a sense of responsibility and accountability for the success of the enterprise.
  • Think cross-functional. Help your teams become enterprise-minded by reassigning employees to a variety of posts spanning boundaries, units, and functions, with stretch assignments that will expand their worldview and know-how into an integrated organizational capability. The earlier in one’s career the better.
    • Encourage people across disciplines and areas to work together on solving problems as a way to uncover dependencies and/or to mitigate risk or increase success.
  • Customer Focus. Recognize that your customers want integrated solutions not just products, so encourage your teams to share resources and collaborate efficiently across functions, geographies, and other boundaries leading to great customer solutions that bolster the enterprise.
  • Work in Groups. Help build a strong sense of community by developing peer-learning opportunities that take on business challenges as a group and formal leadership training on topics such as influencing without authority and managing global matrices.
  • Search for Patterns. Look for patterns and connections across organizations, industries, and sectors, and encourage others to do so.
  • Consider Impacts. Encourage evaluation of how key decisions or practices will reverberate throughout the organization and who will be impacted in what ways.

Next week:  Instill an innovation mindset

Take your organization to the next level with our Culture and Innovation Assessments and our Innovation Leadership Coaching

Leading innovation: Be data-Informed – (week 11)

innovative leadership culture data informed

Using data to inform your choices is key to leading innovation.

This is our 11th installment in the Leading Innovation series. See the rest of the series here.

Traditional leadership:

Fresh Leadership For A New Age: A Series On The Art And Practice Of Leading Innovation The award-winning book Collective Genius by our founding partners Dr. Linda Hill and team reveals the strategies behind some of the world’s most innovative organizations. Their research makes it clear that a fresh approach to leadership is critical for organizations needing to sustain innovation or create transformative change. This 22-week series features tips on when and how you can bring this new leadership style to life in your organization. - image shows a lightbulb made of fresh fruit

A conventional approach to problem-solving has been to focus on who is right and to provide data to support the direction they want to take. The conventional view of innovation attaches far too much importance to the initial idea, the flash of insight, as though answers appear fully formed and perfect.

A fresh approach:

In the new era, innovation requires discovery-driven learning, a process of trial and error, which can truly occur only in an environment of respect for results and data. The focus needs to be on what is right and to look to the data for insights to fuel new thinking. Innovation is evidence-based, even if the community doesn’t like what the data is telling them.

Bring it to life:

  • Expect and ask to see evidence when people advocate for a point of view. Passion and intuition are not substitutes for hard data.
  • Seek to provide evidence when explaining your own ideas or decisions.
  • Routinely use data to plan future actions.
  • Welcome all sources of data, including negative feedback.
  • Create platforms for collecting and leveraging data.
  • Use data to take calculated risks.

Next week: Think holistically

Innovation solutions from Paradox Strategies

Our Collective Genius simulation and learning journey is designed to help leaders inspire action, nourish creativity, and build a culture of innovation. We also offer keynotes and our proprietary innovation diagnostic assessments re:Mind™ and re:Route™ as first steps in developing the mindset, culture, and capabilities of innovative organizations. Contact us via the form below if you would like to know how to bring these great tools to your organization.

Leading innovation: Psychological safety (week 9)

psychological safety leadership culture innovation (illustration of a group of tomatoes, concept of a psychologically safe business culture)

 

Leading innovation: Psychological safety (week 9)

To lead innovation with psychological safety, nurture an agreed-upon setting that allows everyone to share their ideas without fear of retribution. 

Fresh Leadership For A New Age: A Series On The Art And Practice Of Leading Innovation The award-winning book Collective Genius by our founding partners Dr. Linda Hill and team reveals the strategies behind some of the world’s most innovative organizations. Their research makes it clear that a fresh approach to leadership is critical for organizations needing to sustain innovation or create transformative change. This 22-week series features tips on when and how you can bring this new leadership style to life in your organization. - image shows a lightbulb made of fresh fruit

Traditional leadership:

The conventional view has been that creating an environment where people feel psychologically safe is conveyed from the top down. Information is formal, corporate in tone, and tightly controlled, Employees are passive consumers of information.

A fresh approach:

In the new era, psychological safety is established through shared purpose, shared values, and agreed upon rules of engagement allowing everyone to share their ideas without fear of retribution. Leaders talk with employees not to them, and the culture fosters back-and-forth interaction. Leaders relinquish a measure of control over content, and employees actively participate in organizational messaging

Bring it to life:

  • Invite participation by showing you care and want to hear from others.
  • Respond to challenges, mistakes, or other issues in encouraging ways, such as by asking what is needed and offering to help vs. punishment, which discourages people from being honest or coming forward
  • Emphasize listening to your employees rather than just speaking to them.
  • Encourage employees to engage in a bottom-up exchange of ideas and to act as brand ambassadors and thought leaders
  • Establish a clear agenda to inform all communication and carefully explain the agenda to employees
  • Admit to mistakes and failures, and seek to learn from them
  • Show humility, with curiosity, interest and fallibility
  • Provide context for your team’s work—how complex, what they are trying to do, what’s needed from them, so they understand the journey
  • Create an environment where people can bring their whole selves to work

Next week: Question Everything.

Innovation solutions from Paradox Strategies

Our Collective Genius simulation and learning journey is designed to help leaders inspire action, nourish creativity, and build a culture of innovation. We also offer keynotes and our proprietary innovation diagnostic assessments re:Mind™ and re:Route™ as first steps in developing the mindset, culture, and capabilities of innovative organizations. Contact us via the form below if you would like to know how to bring these great tools to your organization.