Innovation & Agility

Leading innovation: Learning (week 4)

November 10, 2023 by Taran Swan

Leading innovation: How to Use learning (week 4)

To lead innovation with learning, focus on developing broad skills through the flow of work.

Traditional leadership:

The conventional view has been that, as a leader, you see learning & development as an individual endeavor with the focus on improving technical skills.

A fresh approach:

Our research shows new-era leaders embrace learning as a collective activity with the focus on acquiring and developing broad skills through the flow of work with others.

Bring it to life:

Model life-long learning and share trends and insights with your team; keep apprised of happenings in other industries; live on the cutting-edge.
Be curious about your employees’ interests and their work. Connect them to people and knowledge (e.g. books, articles, resources) that can catalyze their interests and work.
Create stretch assignments and opportunities for employees to rotate or work in different areas.
Provide your employees with exposure to learning opportunities beyond the organization, sector, or geography
Create forums for intellectual exchange, to explore fresh ideas and share resources
Bring new knowledge into the organization. Be connected to other parts of the ecosystem (e.g. private sector, public sector, academia)
Encourage employees from across the organization to experiment and pilot projects together

Next week: Responsibility

Be personally invested in your team ‘s success and the organization’s success.

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: Collaboration (week 3)

November 3, 2023 by Taran Swan

Leading innovation: Collaboration (week 3)

To lead innovation using collaboration, focus on rewarding the team, not star performers.

Traditional leadership:

The conventional view has been that, as a leader, you reward star performers who get the job done well.

Here’s a fresh approach to leadership*:

Our research shows new-era leaders should reward teams who get the job done well together.

Bring it to life:

Model collaboration, Deomonstrate what collaboration looks like. e.g. with your senior team and other colleagues or groups; limit taking action in isolation and/or showing up with fully-formed thoughts.
Appoint diverse, cross-functional teams to work together on difficult problems.
Allow working groups the time, autonomy, and head cover to work on solutions to problems.
Allow yourself to be influenced by asking questions, presenting new data, and offering feedback, but refrain from directing a result.
Make space for employees at every level of the organization to give feedback on work in progress
Highlight teamwork in town halls, companywide emails, etc.

Next week: Learning

How to smoothly integrate continuous learning into your company’s ongoing operations.

*Fresh means up-to-date, modern, based on fresh research, ideas, real-world application.

Innovation solutions from Paradox Strategies

Leading innovation: Bold Ambition (week 2)

October 27, 2023 by Taran Swan

Leading innovation: Bold Ambition (week 2)

Challenge your team to think about what the organization could be doing to tackle a problem that has never been solved.

Traditional leadership:

The conventional view has been that, as a leader, you place the focus on what you think your organization should be doing.

A fresh approach:

Our research shows new-era leaders of innovation should focus not only on what the organization should be doing but also on what the organization could be doing. To innovate, challenge your team to look at problems that have never been solved.

Bring it to life:

Communicate aspirations for your organization that exceed current capabilities
Show your unyielding faith in others to achieve these aggressive goals and ideas
Ask employees to consider where they want the organization to be 5, 10, 20 years in the future, and what they need to do now to achieve that vision
Connect your organization’s business and mission to large-scale problems in need of solutions
Encourage employees to tackle problems that industry competitors can’t or won’t
Set goals and benchmarks that are tied to your organization’s purpose, as well as performance
Seek to generate excitement and commitment around tackling big problems

Next week: Collaboration.

Focus on the team, not star performers.

Innovation solutions from Paradox Strategies

Leading innovation: Shared Purpose (week 1)

October 20, 2023 by Taran Swan

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.

Leading innovation: Shared Purpose (week 1)

If you want to retain your best employees and attract strong talent, co-creating and committing to a shared purpose will help.

Traditional leadership:

The conventional view has been that, as a leader, you shape and articulate the purpose for your organization. You see yourself as the keeper of purpose, which can lead to the notion of purpose being amorphous since it is not clearly tied to a shared sense of how others’ work relates to the organization’s purpose.

A fresh approach:

As our research has shown, to be effective you must co-create meaningful shared purpose with your employees, then embody it so that it can inform strategic decisions. You must ask them, “How does what you are doing fit with our purpose?”

Bring it to life:

Ask your employees questions: “Why do we exist?” “Who are we? “Why do we do what we do?” “Why are we together?”
Invite your employees—especially those closest to your customers—to share what is meaningful about their work.
Celebrate and recognize examples of their work that embody the shared purpose.
Consistently translate and reinforce how the work your employees do every day ties to the shared purpose.
Make sure that the shared purpose also resonates with and has a direct link to your current and future customers.

Next week: Bold Ambition

Challenge your team to look at problems that have never been solved.

Innovation solutions from Paradox Strategies

One of HBR’s 10 must reads 2023: Drive innovation with better decision-making

October 20, 2021 by Julie Wolpers

***This article has been selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2023: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review – coming in October!***

Don’t let old habits undermine your organization’s creativity.
By Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Taran Swan
in Harvard Business Review

Despite their embrace of agile methods, many firms striving to innovate are struggling to produce breakthrough ideas. A key culprit is an outdated, inefficient approach to decision-making.

Today’s discovery-driven innovation processes involve an unprecedented number of choices, from which ideas to pursue to countless decisions about how to conduct experiments, what data to collect, and so on. But these choices are often made too slowly and informed by obsolete information and narrow perspectives.

To align their decision-making processes with agile approaches, businesses need to include diverse points of view, clarify decision rights, match the cadence of decisions to the pace of learning, and encourage candid conflict in service of a better experience for the end customer. Only then will all that rapid experimentation pay off.

In the November-December 2021 edition of Harvard Business Review, co-authors Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Taran Swan suggest best practices for these interventions, drawing on the story of the transformation at Pfizer’s Global Clinical Supply, which would go on to play a critical role supporting the rapid development of the pharma giant’s Covid vaccine.

About the authors

Linda A. Hill is a founding partner at Paradox Strategies and the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She is author of Becoming a Manager and coauthor of Being the Boss and Collective Genius.
Emily Tedards is a research associate at Harvard Business School.
Taran Swan is a managing partner at Paradox Strategies.

Innovation & Agility

Leading innovation: How to Use learning (week 4)

Traditional leadership:

A fresh approach:

Bring it to life:

Next week: Responsibility

Leading innovation: Collaboration (week 3)

Traditional leadership:

Here’s a fresh approach to leadership*:

Bring it to life:

Next week: Learning

Leading innovation: Bold Ambition (week 2)

Traditional leadership:

A fresh approach:

Bring it to life:

Next week: Collaboration.

Fresh leadership for a new age: A series on the art and practice of leading innovation

Leading innovation: Shared Purpose (week 1)

Traditional leadership:

A fresh approach:

Bring it to life:

Next week: Bold Ambition

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