There’s been a lot of interest in innovation.  Businesses and societies have come to recognize innovation’s strategic importance for ongoing prosperity.

Today’s companies will even incorporate innovation in their core values and mission statements, but, despite this recognition, and subsequent investment in innovation initiatives, the results are often disappointing.  Of course there are many reasons for this—such as difficulty in generating compelling new directions at scale, inopportune timing and market conditions, execution challenges in development and deployment, and others.

However I contend that an oft-unrecognized under-exploited success factor for innovation is simply leadership.

Every organization has leaders—be they C-level executives, product or engineering managers, etc.  And it’s not that those responsible for running successful business operations aren’t excellent leaders—they clearly are.  It’s just that the special disruptive nature of innovation requires leadership of a unique quality.  Leadership particularly impacts innovation because processes don’t innovate—people do.

What then might leaders contribute to the arc of innovation?

Of course there are indeed many exemplary leaders of innovation—the late Steve Jobs comes to mind for one.  Natural talent and experience surely are keys to their notable success, and such individuals are valuable to study.

But innate gifts at this level are rare, and the rest of us responsible for innovation can benefit from supplementing our intuitions and practices with a framework to structure our efforts—one that suggests ways we can personally help the innovation process in our roles, adding strategic value.

Curiously, while there’s a lot of good management material about many other aspects of innovation—invention, delivery, and the larger “innovation life cycle”—there doesn’t seem to be much advice on this readily available.

So I began to review my own experience to see if I could extract any useful patterns.  Fortunately I have some good personal background to draw on.  I have run advanced development departments for leading software corporations such as Autodesk and Adobe, and participated in innovative endeavors elsewhere (including Apple, Xerox, Symbolics and others)—from large enterprises to start-ups.

What emerged is one favored metaphor for leading innovation, along with a sequence of five simple but apparently key imperatives for leaders.

Naturally this is just a distillation of my personal experience and evolved practice.  I won’t make any extraordinary claims for its completeness, validity or value.  On the other hand this analysis seems to explain many frustrating ineffectual attempts at innovation I’ve observed in industry, as being due to unintended and unnoticed breakdowns in the unifying metaphor, or one or more of the five key imperatives.

Conversely, I’ve observed that leaders who get their organizations to successfully innovate always seem to deliver on all these fronts.  Thus I offer the brief description below hoping that it will prove beneficial in fostering more innovation with higher impact.

A Storyteller’s EASEL

The metaphor I like is a twist on the familiar concept of a Storyteller.

The five imperatives are Envision, Articulate, Script, Empower and Lead.

These keywords were casually chosen simply to try to form a mnemonic acronym—which turned out to be EASEL.  (If you’re metaphorically inclined you may imagine the five imperatives form a sort of scaffold via which a leader communicates a desired innovative outcome.)

 Leaders are Storytellers. 

That’s not all they are, but their key value-add is to inspire and motivate people to accomplish goals—this is what defines a leader.

Effective leaders tell appealing stories that people internalize and then appropriately act on.  This creates a lot of valuable leverage.

A boss that specified everything, leaving nothing to the imagination or discretion of those being led, wouldn’t actually be leading, they would simply be controlling.  This tactic doesn’t scale.

Instead a leader entrusts those led to engage their abilities in alignment with the goal, and that trust is repaid as a “force multiplier” effect benefitting the organization.  This applies particularly to leading innovation.

Texts on story-writing recommend using either the voice of the first-person or third-person and, usually, the past tense—”I did X” or “They did Y”.  In contrast the stories a leader tells are calls-to-action, and therefore are ultimately in the second-person future voice—”you will” implicitly.  And the happy miracle is: when people buy into the vision and goal they will work to make the dream come true.

The leader’s role is then to refresh and elaborate the innovation story, and facilitate its evolution from conceptual invention to concrete delivery.

 The EASEL Imperatives.

The five imperatives address critical passages in innovation, as follows:

Envision!

To properly tell the story for an effective innovation it’s vital for leaders to visualize the new world that will arise from its delivery.  Too often executives will promote innovation, but by their actions seem to have no deeper dream than a basic desire for more customers or higher profits.

It’s not necessary or possible to imagine every detail, but it is important to be able to see the goal clearly enough yourself to convey the vision.  What will the world look like, post-innovation?  What will it be like to live in after the innovation has been delivered?  How will it feel to be a customer of this new product or service?  Transformative innovations are driven by someone concretely imagining “a computer on every desk” or “a phone in your pocket“—and then elaborating the story that follows from that premise.

There’s no such thing as “generic innovation”, nor will customers be attracted by badges that say “New!  Now with Innovation Inside!”  Just as use-case scenarios explicate new product features, significant innovations need supporting stories.

Since by definition an innovation is a new thing that doesn’t yet exist, the only way to answer practical questions about it is by introspection of our mental models.  The more detailed these models, the sharper the questions we can answer.  Therefore it’s good practice, once the initial envisioning has been sketched, to recursively drill down into the story, in effect asking”…and then what happens?“  This is how a driving “story idea” is conceived and fleshed out.

Articulate!

A leader needs to communicate their innovation story in a way that allows their team to plan and refine their implementation efforts.  But all too often this starts and ends with just a vaguely stated direction to run towards.  Crispness pays off.

A great start is to come up with what Guy Kawasaki calls a “mantra“—a short phrase that captures the entire focus of the innovation.  For movies and other forms of story telling these often take the form of taglines.  As one example, I’ve recently been advocating an effort to “Improve the computing experience by making computers more helpful.“  This kind of short statement is the opening line of the leaders “elevator pitch”, and also a slogan that will reinforce the guiding principle during the innovation effort.

Good articulation is a powerful tool that empowers participants to evaluate options and align actions.  For example in deciding between engineering alternatives my “helpful computing” mantra counsels choosing to invest more in those developments that deliver the most support to the end-user, rather than, say, technology that might be attractive for other reasons.

Further, a leader needs to deliver more than just a one-liner or sound bite, however clever and pithy.  Starting with the mantra a more robust, more specific, articulation should then be developed, based around a skeleton consisting of a small number of key conceptual components—such as “our 3 vectors of corporate innovation” or “the 4 pillars of our division’s strategy” (heh, or “our 5 leadership imperatives”).

In traditional storytelling this is sometimes called a treatment.  A treatment doesn’t tell the actual story but rather conveys the “meta story”.  In a straightforward way it simply spells out the main themes, settings, characters and other key ingredients.  Stories are pitched as treatments.

Similarly, the better an innovation effort is articulated by a leader, the more it empowers the participants to analyze and visualize concretely what they need to do, and to effectively communicate with other stakeholders.

Script!

Moreover, the plotline for implementing an innovation must be well-worked out.  Again it’s surprising how often a well-articulated well-envisioned initiative gets presented, only to then misfire from not being clearly actionable, or somehow wander off-road midway to full delivery.  To address this a leader needs to provide some initial concrete outline or roadmap that acts as an effective guide to the process and sequences its major stages.  This asset is then detailed out and revised along the way.

The more innovative the objective and the more exploratory and contingent the implementation process will be, the more powerful and vital scripting is.  Just as the plotline for a story might be staged in three acts, the innovation script needs to indicate what the key passages will be—such as initial smoke test, core engine integration, end-user review, etc.

At any time it should be possible, drawing from the living script, to form a picture of what things will be like when the initiative is partially completed, is half-completed, and also what it will be like midway between those points, and so on.

Note the script shouldn’t be confused with a project schedule.  Well-planned execution against objective milestones such as ship-dates or sprint goals is also vital, of course.  But to make these plans meaningful a good innovation script also conveys the nature of the internal evolution against that background—the analog of character development in story telling.  Leaders should work out and communicate intermediate as well as final expectations.

Empower!

It would seem obvious that leaders of innovation should ensure that everything necessary and sufficient is at hand to enable the implementers to get the job done.  However innovations are, by definition, new things.  Consequently existing frameworks, infrastructure, processes, resources, responsibilities, authorities and so on are often unadapted to the critical needs of a new initiative.

For example a not-uncommon mistake is to define programmer’s assignments in terms of new innovative features for an upcoming release, but forget to budget for the fact that QA will not only have to test these new features, but will also have to regression-test the entire combined product.  One way I’ve increased resourcing and ensured better technology transfer between a lab and a development team is to temporarily reassign the originators onto the team for the duration of the relevant product cycle.

Conversely, with an existing team, if you assign them additional new delivery responsibilities it’s important to augment their authority as well as their resources appropriately.  The fewer new resources they are given the more new authority they will need—among other things so they can realistically fit their goals to their capacity by saying “no” to less important objectives.

Similarly, dumping new innovative products into existing marketing channels and sales quotas without further empowerment necessarily creates non-productive conflicts at the delivery end.  Leaders therefore need to ensure that all the required empowerments for innovation have been systematically addressed.

Lead!

Finally, the first and last job of a leader is to lead.  John Walker, the innovative founder of Autodesk, likened high-tech product development to a theatrical production.  FCS is akin to when the curtain goes up and the show must go on.  However before then much cat-herding is required of the “wild talents” driving the innovation.  Even very experienced senior people need extra attention and support throughout the initiative—because, again, by definition an innovation is something new that’s never been done before.  Moreover it’s also by definition disruptive, which stresses existing systems and their people.

Unfortunately not every seasoned professional manager, executive or successful businessperson is equally suited to the demands innovation leadership entails.  While many well-run organizations are managed by-objectives in a responsibly detached style, innovation requires more deeply engaged leaders.  Simply measuring outcomes against goals at widely-spaced review points is great to avoid micromanaging established operations, but when leading innovation it is like trying to produce a play where the director never attends rehearsals.  Would the Mac have been as “insanely great” had Steve Jobs instead adopted a hands-off MBO style?

So to achieve effective innovation a leader must not only do a lot of groundwork envisioning, articulating and scripting the story, and empowering their performers, they need to allocate significant bandwidth throughout the initiative to continually revise and improve these contributions.  Moreover a leader’s degree of ongoing presence, involvement and support is a critical success factor for innovating teams.  Because (I’ll say it again) processes don’t innovate—people do.

 —Marc LeBrun,   December 27, 2011

References

Gardner, Howard,  Leading Minds: An Anatomy Of Leadership  ISBN 978-0465027736

Kawasaki, Guy,  Mantras versus Missions  http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/mantras_versus_.html

McKee, Robert,  Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting  ISBN 978-0060391683

Walker, John,  The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience  http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/