Connecting Dots is the monthly newsletter for innovation leaders by Brett Macfarlane.

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Innovation Amidst the Unexpected

Successful innovators succeed less because of what they think and more because of how they respond. By successful, I mean as individuals, teams, and organizations.

I'll elaborate by first drawing a parallel with another field of high performance under pressure: Olympic sport.

It's generally well known that a common technique amongst Olympic athletes and teams is to develop the cognitive muscle and embodied practice to control the controllables. On any given day — especially under the extra-bright Olympic lights with global eyes on you — there are thousands of distractions which can easily overwhelm, resulting in underperformance.

As an athlete, Dr. Saul Miller was instrumental in training this practice into me in the 90's. I've since admired Dr. Bob Rotella, Gilbert Enoka, Professor Steve Peters, Dr. Michael Gervais, and countless others for lifting the taboo and deepening the science around performance management.

However, less well known is that winning athletes and teams go deeper still — learning not just to control the controllable but to expect the unexpected. That is, to train for events outside their control that they must confront to win.

Despite meticulous planning and well-tested playbooks, even the most heavily favoured Olympic athletes succumb to unexpected events — while others prevail. Success is determined by how they have learned, or haven't, to respond under pressure: in general, and based on the specific context and dynamics of their sport.

In organizations, and especially in innovation, the playbook and rules are exponentially more complex than in sport. There is, therefore, both the cognitive muscle of controlling the controllable and the even more important strategic muscle of expecting the unexpected.

Innovation leaders rarely expect — despite carefully laid plans — sudden CEO ousters, activist investor campaigns, rebellion or complacency from colleagues, catastrophic software updates, cyberattacks, fractured boards, sudden restrictive government policies, criminally charged competitors, spending bans, or viral customer misinformation outbreaks. Given the fragility of innovation, these events can and often have catastrophic second-order effects depending on how one responds. In the past 12 months, I've seen multiple instances of each — and in a handful of cases, all of these unexpected events within the same organization.

A common trap when facing uncertainty is the facade of certainty — the feeling that an instant response is always called for. Yet rarely in business is the situation like the 100m final, where you literally have only seconds to respond to a false start.

In a meeting with peers, superiors, and colleagues around you, it may feel as though you must always respond on the spot when learning of an unexpected event. But that's often the spotlight effect: the sense that you must respond immediately, which is a regressive instinct that overrides the ability to think. How you respond, therefore, supersedes what — and whether — you can think.

Insecure, fragile, over-confident, or unprepared leaders and teams cannot tolerate accepting that there may be a period of not knowing — where a.) the facts need to be collected, b.) the responses of others need to be observed, and c.) only then can you determine how you feel, think, and act in response.

The reality is that when an unexpected event happens, if you're not confused, you don't know what's going on. The goal isn't to stay confused — but it is to hold the anxiety of operating on the boundary of knowledge, and to reconcile that confusion while keeping the organization's main thing the main thing.

A related paradox worth naming: an increasingly validated working hypothesis for why technology adoption so often fails to generate promised value is that organizations don't build in the mechanisms, space, or peer practices to work and learn together through this confusion at a micro level. There may be no strategic risk to the business, but individuals who perceive their role, competency, or identity to be at risk are at high risk of letting their response override their thinking, resulting in poor or rejected technology adoption.

To return to high-performance sport — this time action sports — the muscles of controlling the controllable and expecting the unexpected allow you to become not a risk seeker, but a risk calculator.

The risk seekers, who act with impulsivity and false confidence, either meet catastrophic outcomes early in their careers, quit before doing great things, or sustain success only briefly before burning out. The risk calculators, by contrast, are acutely aware of the risks. They stand at the top of the mountain, create optionality in the event of unexpected events, and work through confusion to achieve their goals. They are the ones who succeed — and who sustain long careers.

Action sports, like innovation in business or government, have a primary task: pushing the boundary of what's possible. The evidence tells us we can develop how we respond to unexpected events — precisely, predictably, and proactively.

The greatest challenge, arguably, is getting over our delusion of perfect knowledge. To be ready for the unexpected rather than perfected.

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Author note: This article was handcrafted from personal experience by Brett and lightly copyedited for readability by Claude.

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Questions, reflections and feedback to info@brettmacfarlane.com