Innovation Leadership Post COVID
Since the turn of the year the challenges set by the COVID pandemic for global, national, business, and public sector Leaders have become even bigger and more complex than they ever were before. We are living in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world and leaders at all levels are having to learn to adapt. Traditional leadership methods and styles are coming under intense pressure, especially where the subject of innovation and creativity is concerned, which is the topic of this conversation.
We are seeing and experiencing much innovation around us as we live through the COVID pandemic, whether it be companies adapting manufacturing capabilities to deliver ventilators or individuals learning to use collaborative toolsets and finding new ways of working through enforced remote working. As the old proverb goes,
“necessity is the mother of invention”
With the well-publicised challenges that the world is currently facing we can imagine that innovation and creativity along with leadership at all levels in society will be the biggest differentiator in our ability to resolve these challenges. Some research suggests a wide gap between the aspirations of Leaders in organisations to innovate and their ability to execute. How will we prepare ourselves to deal with the next global pandemic or challenge?
Rob Sheffield and Stuart Morris explore their thoughts based on ‘virtual water cooler’ conversations since the emergence of COVID-19.
What will the Leadership of Innovation look like in the post COVID world?
Stuart: Rob, you have written about leaders in organisations learning to develop the creative capabilities of their team members and themselves in leading innovation. I think it is fair to say that these leaders have come under increasing pressure over the last 20 years to enable more creativity and innovation within their scope of responsibility, whether it be at a global or local team level. The likelihood is that the post-COVID world will only accelerate and intensify this pressure. What are your thoughts on this?
Rob: Hi Stuart, at the time of writing we have been in ‘lockdown’ in the UK for around nine weeks. As an aside, not many of us have been in our usual sleepwalking, auto-pilot mode.
I think you’re right about the spread of need for creativity and innovation. Of course we’ve seen an extraordinary rush of need-led organising since the crisis hit. The collaboration in households, streets, communities, cities, across organisations, countries… Wow. And we can all list moments where more collaboration would have helped.
But, the shift happened long before COVID-19. In our work, we’ve noticed a gradual rise in the demand for and supply of creativity and innovation skills, over the last 15–20 years, and a much more sudden one since around 2015.
There are a few drivers behind this. Organisations now want their people to have these skills. They want people to be able to develop novel and useful ideas (creativity) and to turn them into value for someone (innovation) in the form of new products, services, experiences, markets, business models, strategies. They need ideas to come from everywhere, in order to survive. This does not mean they are good at turning ideas into action. Plenty are not.
And employees want these skills. Partly because they want to bring imagination into work; also because some people identify very personally with creativity and want it in their work lives. And there is the perceived threat of AI, in its broadest sense, raising questions of which work will remain for people. Well, it’s not easy to automate the generation and implementation of novel ideas. The skills of developing ideas and realising value from them are likely to be done by humans for some time.
I think there’s a more systemic factor, which has implications for ground-up innovation. In 2013, 38% of people in the UK had a degree — a doubling over the previous two decades. The same source said that around 60% of people in inner-London had a degree (Coughlan, S. BBC (2013). Available from: www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25002401).
We’ve seen a growth in better educated, idea-literate people who want to make their workplaces and living-places better. And they want more say in how to do that. We may learn these skills in universities and work, but they spill over into the rest of our lives. There’s a fragmented restlessness which, I think, is starting to find more common expression in community and city involvement.
COVID-19 is accelerating all the above, but it was there before it.
Stuart: You mention the gradual rise in the demand for and supply of creativity and innovation skills over the last 15–20 years. It is a shift I have noticed, where previously innovation or creativity development was a stand-alone training catalogue offering it has since become an integral part of any leadership development. What I have also witnessed is the struggle that many leaders then face in converting that development into reality in a large complex organisation. I believe that this struggle in part has its roots in the strength of the organisational culture that they then face in trying to change, and as the saying goes
“culture eats everything for breakfast”
The era of “scientific management” over the last 100 years, post Industrial Revolution, has created many embedded support systems (and even big businesses who supply these systems), such as reward & recognition, financial management, other business management processes and strong delivery focus. It is these strong embedded cultures I would suggest make it very difficult for leaders to enable the necessary innovation and creativity to happen.
Rob: There is certainly a gap between the need for innovation, and the satisfaction with its delivery. Pre-Covid, Accenture’s research has concluded that many organisations have been talking about breakthrough changes, but sticking with the safer, incremental sort.
I imagine this is for many reasons. As you suggest, if we (maybe unconsciously) hold the metaphor of organisations as machines, that brings with it the assumptions of control, predictability, power invested in top-down planning, and that unforeseen events are mistakes.
Whereas, for example, if we imagine organisations to be places where a multitude of conversations are happening simultaneously — some wither, some repeat, some transform into new avenues — this is a metaphor closer to a marketplace, or a network of organisms. There is very little top-down control, and ‘life’ emerges from interactions at local level, where the nature of interactions is key to whether conversations become interesting and manifest into novelty.
My experience is that it’s very easy for organisations to create Chief Innovation Officer, or Head of innovation Roles. It’s fairly easy to change structural units, and shake up reporting lines. But these are surface-level shifts and, by themselves, rarely shift behaviour over time.
What’s harder is to create a meaningful innovation strategy, so that people know the types of ideas that are needed. Most organisations don’t have an innovation strategy, nor a process for developing ideas. And even tougher than that is sustaining change around behaviour — culture change. But it’s do-able, with commitment and senior support, and some high-profile organisations do this well.
This segmenting of organisations into strategies, systems, processes, roles, cultures; all this is a way of compartmentalising something very complex, into a few neat, manageable silos. It doesn’t reflect people’s everyday lives in organisations.
Stuart: In my view we do appear to be stuck in a long-held paradigm of how we should lead and organise groups of people to deliver work in its broadest sense including innovation. You make a very good point that it does not necessarily reflect people’s everyday lives, maybe not just in organisations but in their lives in general. The work context may well feel like a very un-natural environment to function in because of the apparent neatness and illusion of control, whereas most of us realise that real life is often very messy.
Nick Obolensky in his book “More for Less: The Complex Adaptive Leader” illustrates how the assumptions about leadership, how it appears, the styles used, and work, have not really changed in thousands of years, i.e. there is usually a pyramid with one person at the top whether it be the leader of an ancient tribe, leaders of past empires, to the modern world of CEOs. He also illustrates how we are in unprecedented times where the rate of innovation and change in many aspects of life, especially where these aspects are technology-driven, has increased exponentially in recent times, but our assumptions about leadership have remained stuck, which presents a huge challenge to those with authority and power.
Traditional problem solving responses are still used in many cases when projects or activities encounter really serious challenges, whether it be running over budget, delivering late or not meeting customer expectations. It often results in some form of reductionist root cause analysis followed by the focusing of (often more) resources to the perceived problem areas with extra mechanisms of control and monitoring. I wonder how often this is counter-intuitive to what is really needed, where what is actually needed is a different approach to solving these problems because by their nature they are more complex than realised?
In a world of increasingly squeezed budgets and margins this inevitably has a knock on effect on any form of innovation strategies and activities. This Covid-19 situation will have only increased those pressures, with companies closely looking at their budgets not only at getting through the lockdown, but also starting to look at their world of business post-Covid.
Post-Covid many Leadership teams will probably try and carry on operating in the same way as pre-Covid, but as we have witnessed many things about their context will have changed, projects mothballed, budgets cut and refocused, increased reliance on remote working, supply chains disrupted, along with many other changes.
It is this leadership paradigm which I believe will be severely challenged by the new contexts presented post-Covid, all of which we cannot predict, which is a real problem for those whose assumptions are based on a deterministic view of the world. The world, businesses, organisations and problems are increasingly more complex than we would like to think.
The emergence of design-led agencies, and many more businesses and organisations adopting some form of design methodology, to lead innovation in our increasingly complex world has already been challenging traditional reductionist mindsets.
I believe we are witnessing the transitioning of those assumptions about leadership that Nick Obolensky talked about. The world and leadership have to now innovate more than ever to survive as lifespans of contexts get shorter and shorter. It has huge implications on our ability to lead innovation in large organisations, where leadership have to embrace fast experimentation, trusting to not knowing if things are going to succeed, continuous learning, being able to pivot with pace, measuring what counts (not counting what is easily measured), working often in a non-deterministic way.
Another perspective on this leadership challenge are the indicators of employee engagement surveys. How many times have the easy low-hanging fruit problems been solved with focus groups, but the difficult ones untouched? I believe this is because the leadership are often not equipped to undertake what are more complex challenges such as “lack of trust” and “too much bureaucracy” which tend to consistently appear, and desperately need creative thought applied to them.
Innovation & creativity, including the leadership of, in organisations actually needs less bureaucracy and more trust. I believe that it is leadership styles and mindsets that are fundamentally under pressure in this VUCA world.
Rob: As you say, life is messy, and we are prone to wishing for comforting notions of control and predictability. Certainly, senior leaders, and shareholders, often want to give this message. And sometimes, for good reasons.
There are very contrasting views of leadership around. For example, far from this default of the individual, heroic leader, there are other conceptions of shared, collective, and distributed leadership, all of which emphasise that leadership is more of a political process, owned between a range of people, and shifts with time, place and challenges.
But…when the proverbial hits the fan, with squeezed budgets and margin, and short-term reporting pressures, we tend to default and slide into the familiar and comforting. My experience of organisational life is that structure charts do reflect daily leadership in action to some extent, but so do the multitude of ground-up, unplanned, emergent initiatives where leadership springs out of energy, interests and a critical mass of people. Both happen, simultaneously, most of the time. The former is more formal and official; the latter is more in the ‘shadows’, or under-the-radar, exploratory, often under-resourced, and where many ideas develop.
A problem can emerge when ideas from this shadow become successful. Then they gain attention, and come into the scope of formal systems and politics. Their survival is often dependent on being re-shaped. But the potential payoff is for scaling and wider impact.
Underpinning a lot of the above is the maturity of individual leaders with regard to power. If someone thinks, (often unconsciously), of themselves as having most of the answers, they’ll monitor and control people and situations. If the leader sees themselves as being more of a conduit, to helping others feel stronger and more powerful, they’ll see the world as being more inter-dependent and encourage more of the experimentation you describe, and be more comfortable with messy realities and with not-knowing.
I agree with you that the Covid-19 pandemic is presenting us with a challenge of these views of leadership, and especially how leadership aids innovation. It might be an epochal, liberating moment when we re-evaluate how practical leadership is within the grasp of many of us.
So far, we’ve talked mainly about organisations, but we can also widen the implications.
We’re being given a sharp reminder of what society is. We see examples of our interdependence all around: food chains; how we help and care for each other; supporting key workers to continue their work, and the criticality of being able to connect with each other digitally.
The many examples of street, community, city and wider levels of collaboration, reflect initiatives where no-one has asked for permission, are based on shared purpose, are experimental — trial/learn/improve — and often supported by huge goodwill, kindness and forgiveness from people affected.
Most of us have not seen such mass collaboration. And I hope it will have at least two effects. First, we are remembering what makes a society: that we fundamentally need each other in order to live the way we want. And this realisation will encourage more positive collaboration. Second, that to have such a way of living requires a more nuanced way of framing leadership: one that is much more sensitive to how leadership can spring from anywhere, and connects and empowers people to act.
Stuart: I particularly like the idea that how we think about leadership, especially where innovation is concerned, post-Covid will by necessity evolve and be reframed in a more nuanced way to be more broadly representative of what we really see as the forefront of innovation in society as well as business.
I mentioned a couple of Covid related innovation examples right at the start of this conversation and there are many more happening as we speak. As you suggest these can and do spring up from anywhere, in society or organisations, by anyone where leadership springs out of energy, interests and a critical mass of people. The ability to collaborate at any level (global to local) to innovate exists with increasing ease due to the constantly improving collaborative platforms with the likes of Zoom, Miro, MS Teams and many other equivalent platforms leading the way.
Helping us innovate at different scales is the fact that problems and challenges are also much more visible via social media platforms, etc whether it be the current pandemic, climate change, or services in your local community. All of this suggests that the leadership of innovation, for the large part, has been democratised whether it be at a local or global level — individuals or groups/networks of people are now able to respond and mobilise much more rapidly and readily.
This reminds me of a great Ted Talk by Joi Ito (MIT Media Lab) in 2014 about the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. His wife and family were living in Japan, about 200km from Fukushima, when the Tsunami hit. The news channels, television, government, etc were not telling him anything he wanted to hear in terms of radiation levels — how much danger were his family in? He went on the internet and found others who were also trying to figure out what was going on. Due to their diversity of skillsets they loosely organised themselves to create the ability to measure and share the largest (at that time) open data-set on radiation anywhere in the world — a great citizen science project. In his summary Joi shared his new view of the world of innovation as “deploy or die” (get it into the real world immediately) as opposed to the previous “demo or die” (a step back from deploy) and the even older “publish or perish”. He calls this new view being a “now-ist” as opposed to being a “future-ist”. This is a great demonstration of the leadership of innovation in the modern world, as well as a recognition of the speed that it is happening.
Challenges are becoming more complex, the ability to innovate at pace is increasing, and the ability for more and more people to respond to challenges is enabled. This creates problems in organisations where people who want to innovate can hit the different varieties of blockers to progress, including leadership styles and the “rituals” of business management (e.g. the planning, monitoring, and reporting cycles). This can cause no end of frustration and demotivation in those people who want to lead, create and deliver impact whilst witnessing what is achievable in the real world.
Is this pandemic therefore the moment that accelerates Leaders in such organisations to “deploy or die” where innovation is concerned? Hence I think the reframing of what the leadership of innovation is as you say one of enabling rather than controlling, one that is much more sensitive to how leadership can spring from anywhere, and connects and empowers people to act. Yes, large organisations may well need an innovation strategy for the products and services that currently defines them, but how that is articulated and enacted should evolve very quickly for it to succeed in this VUCA world where SMEs can easily take advantage of the slower pace of larger organisations. We may be at a pivotal tipping point where the results of innovation strategies, whether positive or negative, are likely to be visible much more quickly than ever.
I would love to know what other people think the leadership of innovation will look like in the post-Covid world and welcome their thoughts and ideas.
I look forward to revisiting this particular conversation with you Rob, maybe a year from now, to see what has happened in that time and reflect on our own observations and learning.
Rob: Thanks Stuart. I love that story of Joi Ito, and the “deploy or die” ethos. I will have a look at the video.
A quick look at his work reminds me that much research on innovation doesn’t bring ethics into the conversation. It simply assumes all innovation is a good thing. Just because we can change something… should we?
For example, while we proceed with technology advancement at a rapid rate, we’ve been much slower to organise ourselves to consider the ethics and human implications of change. Over the last few years, a group of people in Bristol, UK have organised a conference to explore what might happen if we consider both anthropology and technology.
Those human implications have been running in the background of this conversation. Yes, let us come back to this in time!
