This is a working model shared for peer review.
The model is an “outside-in” view of systemic components and enable innovation in an organization.
Connecting Dots 38 ◎⁃◎ The Offsite
~ The Stockholm Offsite
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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on Innovation Leadership by Brett Macfarlane.
It’s that time of year. Our minds shift from anticipating another swim on vacation to strategic planning at work.
Let’s dive into an intervention used by most leaders—the offsite.
Best,
Brett
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The Strategic Offsite
August means the offsite season is approaching. Companies are starting to plan for 2023. For innovation leaders, it’s time to gain or retain space for your vision. A key planning intervention at your disposal is the offsite.
I love an offsite—the heightened ambition, edge of uncertainty and hope that things will become better.
Yet often, an offsite is seen as conflictual, confusing and chaotic. Though, isn’t that the point—to get all the tensions and different perspectives on the table, to clear the air and embrace a path ahead?
An Example of a Good Offsite
One of my best offsites was in Stockholm at the stunning waterfront museum Photografiska. I designed the action learning afternoon of the two-day summit for the “top 120” executives of a leading tech company.
The organization's culture was the focus. The goal was for leaders to learn and decide how to adapt and strengthen the culture to realize the company’s strategy.
Learning sounds fun and soft, but in the workplace, it can be hard and threatening. To truly learn means challenging what we know as individuals and elaborating what we can do as a team.
In a group environment, it means addressing the diversity of knowledge, experience and perspectives while building cohesion. Good offsites work with and contain these paradoxes rather than deny them.
That means you are designing for tension. A good offsite creates and works with tensions of competing needs—such as the need for planning while acting, thinking expansively while realistically or adding while removing resources.
Yes, creating tension may seem taboo but constructive tension is a sign of healthy leadership. Where you can share, scrutinize and integrate opposing perspectives, evidence and experiences.
The Experience of a Good Offsite
Constructive tension was at the centre of the Stockholm session. Managers had experienced small doses in prior offsites. Given culture was the topic, for this offsite constructive tension was the core objective to tangibly evolve the culture.
Of course, we designed tension carefully and compassionately. We provided the materials for learning and strategy implementation—goals, knowledge, language, tools, space and coaching.
The experience was planned like an orchestra. With different movements, builds, peaks, lulls and interludes. In practice, this looked like rounds of reflection, discussion and action. Each round building on the last.
We also used the building to enhance cognitive switches and engagement. We all get stale sitting in the same room all day, even if the views are stunning.
After the initial exec briefing and a personal reflection activity in the main plenary room, we moved to the group working space. This transition was intentional and primed individuals for group work.
Staying With the Conflict
At the start of the afternoon, there was resistance—to the challenge, the strategic question and of course me and my co-facilitators. All normal warm-up conflict. This conflict is a healthy elaboration of the task while processing and internalizing knowledge.
As we contained the tension and kept the mission on-task their conflict moved to the discussion. And from that discussion came different perspectives, experiences and facts that were shared within their groups. Individuals disagreed, agreed and elaborated.
I observed and sensed group dynamics to assess if the conflict was constructive and focused “on-task.” Were they addressing the strategic questions of their work?
Or did they drift “off-task” to a new “as if” topic? It’s normal for a group to become overwhelmed. Emotional responses may trigger regressive responses towards each other; fight/flight, dependency or pairing.
These responses might need escalation if it emerges they are caused by serious issues. Or typically, they just need a reassuring or clarifying guide to get them back on “on-task.”
When Participants Take Ownership
In this session, there was a lot for us to keep track of, assess, contain and guide. After about two hours the questions dwindled, and a steady buzz of collaboration filled the air with the odd burst of laughter, “ah ha!” or “Oooh, we could also!”
At this point, I started to feel unnecessary. Our guidance was no longer sought. The teams busied themselves with deepening their work. It’s always off-putting to not feel needed, but that is the point. It’s about them not us.
The point of an offsite is as a catalyst or accelerant of change. So that plans are more understood, better informed and personally invested empowering individuals to progress and learn from each other after the offsite.
The best offsites are learning interventions. They are an experience that develops connectedness, understanding and interpersonal commitment between colleagues. It’s where strategy becomes real.
The Strategic Offsite
A great offsite is an art of designing constructive conflict.
Here is a summary of a guide I use to design every aspect of an offsite. It enables us to address the past, present and future realities of a team.
There are 7 phases of constructive conflict :
1. Prepare (before the offsite)
2. Start by establishing ground rules
3. Get views on the table
4. Orchestrate conflict by highlighting differences
5. Encourage accepting and maintaining losses
6. Generate and commit to experiments (may require follow-up sessions or BAU integration)
7. Peer leadership consulting (mostly after offsite)
Each phase has its actions and is rarely linear.
For the full guide get in touch and I’m always happy to help with feedback on your plans.
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Connecting Dots 37 ◎⁃◎ Empowering Innovation - An Executive Guide
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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly Innovation Leadership newsletter by Brett Macfarlane.
June's edition, Panic or Prosper, generated record feedback and enthusiasm.
This month, let’s address a secret question executives have about innovation. "What do I do?"
Best,
Brett
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Empowering Innovation - Executive Guidance
“As a company, innovation is a strategic priority, but as board members, what do we do?”
What do we do?
I used to be surprised by this question from board members and senior executives. These are people passionately committed to innovation and often have a track record of leading highly innovative teams and organizations.
There is a lot of great evidence and support for innovation teams themselves, but not so much at the organizational level for those who sponsor or govern innovation. What do we expect of people overseeing multiple innovation teams, programs and departments that likely each have varied processes, sub-cultures and capabilities?
As an innovation team leader, it can be hard to understand or empathize with your sponsoring and governing executives. Even harder for you to say what it is you want them to do other than to say yes or give you resources.
At the most senior level, the question of what to do is often very fear-based. As in how do I not unintentionally derail innovation. Or how do I protect teams from going down a path of failure? How can I derisk embarrassment or harm to the interests of our firm and our shareholders? What if my expertise isn’t relevant?
There are some nice research and theories about the idea of leaders creating a “climate” of innovation. Though I still find it fuzzy and theoretical. It’s like driving forward by looking in a review mirror. After reading it, I still have the question of “what do I do?” as a senior leader,
I see this stuckness even with leaders who strongly believe in psychological safety, empowerment, autonomy and contemporary theories of servant, authentic or transformational leadership. Yet, for all the theories the question remains “what do I do?”.
Procedural Fairness is What You Do.
Procedural justice is a field I’m deep in work at the moment. It comes from the legal profession and is the premise that if the process is deemed fair, people are more trusting and are more satisfied with the outcome. Even if the outcome is not to their benefit or what they wished for. In other words, it feels fair. This is especially important for complex, emergent and emotional topics such as innovation.
The evidence tells us that innovation teams are highly sensitive to perceived fairness. Within the same company, the initiatives with procedural fairness deliver better outcomes than those without. Fairness matters.
Therefore, as a senior executive, to empower teams to take risks, make new things and launch value-creating changes to the status quo you can enact procedural fairness in management decision-making. The journey determines the outcome.
In practice, there are six practices of procedural fairness that I’ve paraphrased from research by Harry Korine.
Consult team members in the management decision-making process.
Create forums where team members can refute management opinions.
Familiarize yourself with team concerns.
Maintain consistent procedures over time.
Provide a full explanation for decisions.
Respect the team’s autonomy.
I regularly see that these six practices empower innovation team leaders and sole contributors to take up their roles and operate in the ILM Leadership Performance Zone. These leaders know innovation is not just the team or the wider organization in isolation. Innovation comes from teams and the system working together.
Empowering how they work or don’t, is what board members and senior executives do.
Procedural fairness allows senior executives to be “hands-on, fingers out.” Meaning they are close enough to make informed decisions While avoiding the traps of micromanagement or disengagement.
Procedural fairness dear executive is what you do.
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Connecting Dots 36 ◎⁃◎ Panic or Prosper
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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on Innovation Leadership by Brett Macfarlane.
This month, I’m a contrarian optimist. I’m going to address how, in a stormy business climate, some innovators prosper when others panic.
Grab your economic raincoat and let's get to work.
Best,
Brett
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Panic or Prosper
Panic or Prosper
Sonia was developing the official e-currency of her nation, a world first, when parliament was frozen by currency devaluation and 300-year-old legislation. Yet she prospered.
Jim was launching the first-ever watch app that could control a car when partner Apple wouldn’t provide access to the yet-to-be public Apple Watch 1. Yet he prospered.
Sam was developing a progressive financial literacy service when the banking sector was hit with criminal investigations and a threatened regulated breakup consuming executive attention. Yet she prospered.
In each of these stories, the innovator faced peril yet held their nerve. They kept their eye on the light at the end of the tunnel while others panicked.
I was thinking about each of them lately as dark storms cloud the economic outlook. I know their stories because I was there with them—in the middle of their storms.
It’s during these stormy times when a dangerous sense of panic can enter the air of a company threatening innovation projects. It’s easy to lose one’s nerve, individually and collectively.
One of the unrecognized challenges of tech innovation in these periods is its intangibility. It’s not like a grand bridge, train line or wind turbine that gives confidence through its physicality. A protected asset on the balance sheet.
The hard material of tech innovation is not its software code but its results - revenue, NPS, adoption, patents and other KPIs. Yet those come later. Until then the prototypes, experiments and business cases are an intangible future potential. An easy-to-cut variable cost on the P&L.
It’s time to hold your nerve.
Especially if you are in a firm that has yet to experience a stormy economic climate. We’re all jittery the first time we go through any experience.
Whatever your situation, now is not time to panic, you can continue to prosper.
“You cannot overtake 15 cars in sunny weather… but you can in the rain.”
In my work with innovation leaders, I most enjoy supporting those putting on their rain tyres for the unknown events ahead.
We can say there is uncertainty and that we can’t predict the future. But that was true before today’s storm. And the next one.
It’s just that at the moment, the climate has changed and rain spooks some people. It’s a moment to seize with smart risk-taking and continued self-regulation.
It’s natural to be anxious. It’s healthy. Provided we channel the energy and activity towards constructive efforts.
A big part of the innovator’s task is to contain the anxieties of others.
Prosperous innovators stay shrewdly ambivalent in the face of uncertainty. They see risk and opportunity, yet hold them in both hands to work out what is of true relevance and value.
So when the rain is blowing horizontally and thunder booms in the distance it’s extra important to tune into how you are relating to others—your team, your peers and your board.
Sniff out and snuff out the panic before it consumes people. It’s your duty of care to do so—with compassion and humility. You are used to extreme risk, uncertainty and unpredictability.
You are the reassurance they need and want, no matter how challenging their questions.
As the innovation leader, it’s your role to continually adjust and maintain the climate of possibility for your team and organization. To maintain progress while others do too much or too little.
Holding your nerve is contagious. It builds confidence in others amidst uncertainty. The military call it command presence. In the private sector, I call it the innovator’s aura.
The aura isn’t for you, it’s in service of others—for their confidence and self-motivation to hold their nerve. It activates their autonomy to press on piercing through the clouds of doom.
It’s true in all companies—whether their culture is renowned for innovation or stigmatized as where innovation goes to die. In both, innovation happens only as a result of innovators leading through clouds of uncertainty that appear even when the skies are blue.
Every one of the projects I listed at the beginning was a leader I worked closely with. They held their nerve and were able to support their team and organization to hold theirs.
Each of them, overtook the metaphorical 15 cars ahead to deliver while others crashed out or sought false comfort by sitting on their hands in pit lane.
These three leaders prospered in the rain, benefitting their users, their company and their career.
All it took was holding their nerve and seizing the moment to prosper.
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Learn about the Innovator.Coach program to train, coach and empower tech innovators at www.innovator-coach.com
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Connecting Dots 35 ◎⁃◎ The Smell of Innovation
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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on the psychology of innovation leadership by Brett Macfarlane.
What does innovation smell like?
In this edition of Connecting Dots I answer this question through a recent visit to an innovative design studio in Girona, Spain.
Settle in with a ☕️ and have a think about what “the smell of the place” says about your innovation culture.
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The Smell of Innovation
You can learn a lot about a company and how they innovate in a short visit to their space.
Three weeks ago I buzzed an unmarked door in the Spanish town of Girona. It was six in the evening and people were coming off work. At a cafe to our right, a group of office workers clanked their glasses of vermouth as the door clicked open.
We walked down a narrow nondescript hall and up worn wooden stairs. Nothing indicated it was home to the design studio of high performance and high fashion cycling brand CHPT3 (pronounced chapter three.) The founder and figurehead of CHPT3 is the thoughtful and philosophical champion Scottish cyclist, David Millar.
I was excited because I love visiting design and innovation facilities. Only by being in the space can you see and sense how the work takes shape, or what might be amiss.
A studio or lab is a living artifact of space and people interacting. Interactions that result in new products, services and processes. Some aspects are explicit but much of the work is implicit—hidden out of conscious sight despite its continuous presence.
The experience of CHPT3’s design studio told me a lot about the brand, the company, the people and how they operate. The assessment technique I used is called socioanalytic observation. It seeks to discover the hidden in organizations and social systems. It’s a parallel observation process, meaning at the same time I observe how I respond to the space and I observe how others around me relate to the space.
OK, let me walk you through my experience.
Visiting the CHPT3 Design Studio
The studio is a collection of inter-connected rooms. The physical layout is unique to the timeless medieval walls cocooning the contemporary decor and work implements.
The closely connected rooms link with inconsistent door frames to duck under or pirouette around. Each room contains a discreet aspect of the company. As a brand, CHPT3 to me was a constellation of ideas, aesthetics, campaigns and use cases. Inconsistent yet somehow coherent. The space physically represents this tension.
As an example:
—> I walked past a museum of sporting accomplishments in one room
—> To a business affairs working table in another
—> Above, is an artistic installation of David’s custom race shoes
—> Then I entered a fashion closet upstairs away from the money talk
—> A rest area with soft white furnishing was hidden off to to the side
—> I returned downstairs to discover the most organized and tidy room—a workout space
I found this last room most fascinating. It featured two high spec bikes and computer simulation equipment. It placed sport physically at the heart of the brand, the business and the lifestyle the space represented. Spiritually, I imagined it as a furnace of passion that whirred as staff pushed the limits of new product designs. I wondered if cycling is the means of business, or is the business a means to cycle?
Behind the workout-lab, was a chill-out space with a custom bike-mounted as though art. This highly engineered object seemed to hold desperately onto its mud and dirt from the road. Just as a Jackson Pollack holds onto its paint, defying gravity and the passage of time.
Depending on your perspective, the dirt as an art installation represents taming the chaos outside so it feels close yet safe. Or symbolizes the importance of ensuring the inside doesn’t get too removed from the chaos of competition and real life outside the studio.
Either way, it represented the uncertainty and mess of exploration yet the space was like an oven mitt - you feel the heat but don’t burn.
Interestingly, The entire studio hung over the streets of Girona like a VIP hospitality marquee or broadcast booth. Given Girona’s role as a global hub and home for professional cycling, it was as if they want wanted to be in the middle of the action but from a distance. In it but not of it.
I could peer down at cyclists passing by, freewheels buzzing, as if I was a researcher or police interrogator observing and studying from behind a one-way mirror.
Reflections
This distance I noticed is a common feature of studios trying to create safety amidst the chaos of innovation. The distance can quell fears of getting too involved with and consumed by the outside world in ways that might annihilate their independence or identity. In this case, there seemed just enough distance to be safe enough yet close enough to and open to the outside world.
It’s a healthy and sophisticated tension to negotiate. This distance was an association that came to mind. It could just have been cheap property acquired at an opportune moment or space loaned by a friend. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe, and nothing more, but more often than not there is more than meets the eye... if only I had more time and could observe David working with his team.
Functionally, I liked the experience of transitioning between the spaces. I’ve always found that everything on one big open floor makes it hard to create boundaries and transitions between functional, cognitive and relational tasks.
The walls gave demarcations between the spaces, roles and functions. The open doors and flowing air enabled integration. Each space gave different representations triggering different responses—in an inspiring and uplifting way.
In many companies, demarcation lines often become fault lines—in perception or in physical representation through closed-off spaces, gatekeepers and formal processes. It can be intentional to activate and unfreeze an organization. Though, if one isn’t careful it can become a front line consumed by battles for control, power and resources.
At the moment of my visit, it felt like the lives of employees flowed between business affairs, design work, sales, company archive, R&D flagships, hospitality zone and chill-out space. Where one spends their time likely reflects their level of formal or informal authority in the company—generalized or specialized roles.
I must confess to envying the space. I wish one day for my practice to have a physical space and experience. I can visualize it and imagine what it feels like to sit down under the morning light with an open window.
Seasonal photography rotates with key themes in our work and injects people’s worldviews (physically and philosophically) into the room. The aroma of fresh coffee is in the air as we chatter away while putting our hands on the wooden work table to start the day. It smells great, like innovation…
I digress, but that’s what a great innovation space does, you dream and make it real.
Learn my about my programs training, coaching and transforming innovators over at www.innovator-coach.com
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