Connecting Dots is a monthly newsletter about innovation leadership by Brett Macfarlane.

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The Innovation Leader’s Quiet Role: Mentor

When were you last tested on your ability to not know?

It certainly wasn’t at school or university. Their model is to teach you what to know, from people who already know it.

Yet people inclined toward innovation generally can not know the complete or certain answer—and still make progress. In fact, it’s a requirement.

Rarely is this formally taught. Almost universally, it is either an intrinsic capability or something acquired through trial and error.

The problem is that innovating requires tolerating not knowing whether, or how, the end solution will work. More commonly, we call this operating in ambiguity or dealing with uncertainty.

Innovation leaders often master this capability without realizing it. They may also fail to sense how threatening it can be to others.

That is why they often hit walls of resistance, no matter how well they sell their ideas, formalize evidence or push them forward.

Helping Others Get to Knowing

What many miss is this: even if they are certain they know the answer, others do not yet know that it is true for them. They need time to work through their own process of knowing—for themselves—that a novel approach, solution, or product should move forward.

An under-recognized and under-appreciated role for experienced innovation leaders is mentoring key colleagues and stakeholders.

The mentor’s job is not to give answers or provide solutions—that is the job of a consultant. Nor is it traditional non-directional-based coaching.

For executives, mentoring helps contain someone else’s anxiety about not knowing the answer or solution, so they do not rush to false conclusions. Nor fall victim to fleeting courage or festering fears buried in their subconscious that work against their real and good aspirations.

For you, mentoring is about sharing your own experience and supporting a smart colleague to think out loud about how and what they think about a situation or challenge. A space free of judgement to surface yet contain their anxieties so they can be explored, understood, and metabolized constructively.

Modern Mentoring for Executives

Recently, I helped design and run a global mentoring program for INSEAD alums built around these aims for busy senior executives facing significant change mandates. The program’s premise was simple: leaders often do not need someone to tell them what to do. They need a trusted space to explore complex challenges without prematurely jumping to simplified solutions.

This program was inspired by successful situations we’ve seen and experienced where a company has a bold mandate and explicit mentoring relationships help senior executives better understand technologies that are new to them—whether they are adopting or developing them.

This audience is rarely comfortable with not knowing, let alone knowing how to know. It can be brutally hard for any skilled, competent professional to acknowledge that they do not know something.

After all, as noted above, it is not taught or trained in school, society, or work.

As you lock in your plans for 2027, consider a beleaguered stakeholder, peer executive-team member, or board director who would benefit from your experience—and from having space to better understand what innovation means and what it can do for your organisation, and your careers.

The most valuable thing you may offer is not certainty. It is the capacity to sit with uncertainty alongside them, without taking over, so their own knowledge can form with clarity and confidence.

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Questions, reflections and feedback to info@brettmacfarlane.com