Mont Garibaldi, British Columbia, Canada
Connecting Dots is the monthly newsletter for innovation leaders.
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Executive View: How to Start a New Innovation Mandate
Lately, I've been asked more frequently about how to respond to a new innovation mandate.
In particular, how an executive might best manage the specific change situation that is innovation and its associated behavioural challenges.
First, let's acknowledge that change has been a constant in business since the origin of business itself.
For executives, change comes in two forms:
a. Change you choose
b. Change that chooses you
In the first form, the organization has chosen to change the pace or purpose of innovation. Here, they proactively have a vision to realize in order to achieve more or fewer innovation activities and outcomes.
In the second form, innovation is seen as a way to respond to change being imposed upon them. In this case, they reactively have a technology or social problem to resolve.
In both cases, there is a mandate coming from stakeholders or shareholders to drive change through innovation.
Depending on the organization and its strategy, the innovation mandate will be to:
Originate and sell innovative solutions
Buy and adopt someone else's innovations
A combination of the above
In any of these situations, innovation is an extreme form of change.
As I've previously addressed, for all its idealization, in practice, innovation is disturbing for the employees under your watch.
Innovation also falls into predictable regressive patterns, like the alignment trap.
Because predictable cultural resistance and regressive responses are normal.
Yet rarely is there equal attention to the behavioural performance drivers as the technical processes.
Where to Start?
For an executive, a new mandate poses the question of where to start.
After all, a mandate is not a strategy or a plan.
A mandate is a wish or hope that, through innovation, improved outcomes can be achieved.
The end goal is typically clear. However, the means—let alone solutions—are paradoxically unbounded given that you start within the boundaries of the organization as it is today.
Thus, you must begin the dual task of unsettling and changing current boundaries, authority, roles, and tasks to identify the new boundaries, authority, roles, and tasks.
The existing or immediate recommendations are typically process-centric or pre-existing solutions. This jump to safety is a social defense and way to manage what feels unmanageable within those around you.
However, the emotional and behavioural needs run far deeper than the known knowns already circulating in the organization.
The Moving House Analogy
As a comparison, consider the equally emotional and practical experience of moving house. Your goal may be clear (another bedroom, a view of the sea, and a bigger yard), but every step of the way is uncertain: finding, buying, selling, moving out, moving in, and getting used to the new home.
It's a journey of having to reset boundaries, filled with emotional highs and lows experienced asynchronously and heterogeneously by all family members.
Three Key Phases
As an executive, your role is to be the head of the organizational family to guide them through three key phases of a new innovation mandate:
Unfreezing boundaries - permission and letting go of the current way
Moving boundaries - transitional space of determining where to set new boundaries and corresponding authority, roles, and tasks
Resetting boundaries - firming up the new ways of working and doing what you do
The solution will be emergent, but doesn't need to be chaotic (though it may benefit from some chaos or “Emotional Gearing” at times).
The larger the organization, the greater the number of parallel work streams. The impulse is to batten it down and get someone managing it.
However, this mandate is personal.
Your Innovation Legacy
The reality is that innovation under your watch is your legacy.
You don't have to solve it, but you will shape it—intentionally or unintentionally, for better or worse.
It starts with you and your relationship with innovation, which can be explored through four evidence-based lenses:
Look back - What has been your previous relationship and experience with innovation?
Look inside - What drives and constrains your personal motivations to want to innovate?
Look around - What characteristics, capabilities, and gaps will influence success?
Look ahead - What capabilities and tasks do you want to develop or delegate to achieve your legacy?
If an executive is not only able to devise a good approach, clear processes, and a great team but also articulate why the new innovation mandate is important for them, it builds trust and self-motivation within their peers.
It also helps you better manage and navigate your own response and those of others to the inevitable ups and downs of innovation.
As was recently highlighted by The Economist, true innovation is not a eureka moment. Rather, “Firms make advances through sustained effort, the passage of time and teamwork” to fulfill their innovation mandate and realize their legacy
That's why I think of innovation as the Olympic gold of business. To become an Olympian and earn that legacy takes working through the days and months of ups and downs that get you there.
It also requires that the executive protagonist of change sets their own goals and development plans in parallel with their team and organization.
Next month, the manager’s view.
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Learn more about how to develop impactful innovation leaders.