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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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