Innovation Leadership

 

Bringing Innovation to Your Organization

 

Not long ago, strategy was king. Forecasting, planning and placing smart bets created the power sources within organizations. The future of a business could fit into an established framework or system. If managed well, success would follow. Today, uncertainty is palpable. Planning for the next quarter is a challenge. Even more difficult is committing to decisions that will play out in one to five years. What is the new process, the innovative product, the game-changing service, or the compelling vision? In the words of one senior executive: “We’ve lost our crystal ball.”

What leaders need now is “Innovation Leadership”. They need it for themselves as they learn to operate in challenging, unpredictable circumstances. They also need to create a climate for innovation within organizations. Innovative systems, tools and thinking are essential for organizational health and future viability. We can’t give leaders a new crystal ball. But we can offer some insight.

Why Innovation Matters

CEOs and leaders throughout organizations know they need to change the way they work. As they seek to drive results at a tactical level, leaders are looking for new rules of the road to give them a competitive edge and fuel new industries, markets, products and services. Underlying the pressure to adapt – as individuals and organizations – is the need to innovate. But how?

When faced with confusion or a problem, our instinct is to repair it with order. We examine and analyze the situation, looking for logic. Unfortunately, the rapid analysis and rational decision making that most managers use to run their organizations has serious limitations. As problems and circumstances become more complex, they don’t fit previous patterns. We don’t recognize the situation. We can’t rapidly or automatically know what to do. What worked before doesn’t work today.

To make effective sense of unfamiliar situations and complex challenges, we must have a grasp of the whole situation, including its variables, unknowns and mysterious forces. This requires skills beyond everyday analysis. It requires innovation leadership. Innovation leadership has two components:

1. An innovative approach to leadership to bring new thinking and different actions to how you lead, manage and go about our work.
2. Leadership for innovation; leaders must learn how to create an organizational climate where others apply innovative thinking to solve problems and develop new products and services. It is about growing a culture of innovation, not just hiring a few creative outliners.

Business Thinking vs. Innovative Thinking

Today’s managers are not lacking ideas, theories or information. They have extraordinary knowledge and expertise. They are skilled practitioners of traditional business thinking. Business thinking is based on deep research, formulas and logical facts. Business thinkers are often quick to make decisions, looking for the right answer among the wrong answers. Business thinking is about removing ambiguity and driving results.

But ambiguity cannot be managed away. Driving results is impossible when the situation is unstable or the challenge is complex or the direction is unclear. Many of today’s leadership problems are critical and pressing; they demand quick and decisive actions. But at the same time, they are so complex we can’t just dive in. Because the organization, team or individual does not know how to act, there is a need to slow down, reflect and approach the situation in an unconventional way – using innovative thinking.

Innovative thinking is not reliant on past experience or known facts. It imagines a desired future state and figures out how to get there. It is intuitive and open to possibility. Rather than identifying right answers or wrong answers, the goal is to find a better way and explore multiple possibilities. Ambiguity is an advantage, not a problem. It allows us to ask “what if?”

Six Innovative Thinking Skills

CCL has identified six innovative thinking skills. Using these skills, organizations are able to create something that is useful and desirable – whether it’s a breakthrough technology, a valuable service or a fresh solution to an old problem:

• Paying attention: First impressions and assumptions are not the whole picture, so they don’t lead to an accurate assessment or best solution.
• Personalizing: At work we tend to undervalue individual, personal experience. For innovate thinking, personalizing is a twofold process – tapping into our own broad scope of knowledge and experience and understanding our customers in a deep, personal way.
• Imaging: Imaging is a tool to help you process information. Words by themselves are usually not enough for making sense of complexity or vast amounts of information. Pictures, stories, impressions and metaphors are powerful tools.
• Serious Play: Business thinking and routines work can become a rigid process. When you generate knowledge and insight through non-traditional ways – free exploration, improvisation, experimentation, levity and rapid prototyping, limit testing – work feels like play but the results are serious business.
• Collaborative Inquiry: Innovations are rarely made by a ‘lone genius’. Insights come through thoughtful, non-judgmental sharing of ideas. Collaborative inquiry is a process of sustained, effective dialogue with those who have a stake in the situation.
• Crafting: Innovation requires us to shed either-or thinking and see the whole as inclusive of opposition and be open to a third (or fourth, or fifth) solution. Through what is called abductive reasoning, we can make intuitive connections among seemingly unrelated information and begin to shape order out of chaos

Leadership for Innovation

Applying innovative thinking to your challenges as a leader is one step in creating an innovative organizational response to change and challenge. But developing a culture of innovation, where others throughout the organization apply innovative thinking to solve problems and develop new products and services, requires additional work.
 

If you want to know more about Innovative Leadership and what it can do for your organization's future, the Center for Creative Leadership launches its first two-day program in Belgium from 16 to 17 of March. www.ccl.org/innovationleadership