Four Paradoxes for Leaders of Innovation

Leaders who want their organizations to be successful innovators face a number of difficult challenges- both in culture and in processes. The key dilemma is the tension between freedom and control. You want people to be free to challenge orthodoxies, run experiments and try fresh ideas. But if you let everyone do whatever they want the result will likely be chaos. You need some measure of control and procedure so that teams can work together effectively. How can you have freedom to experiment running alongside efficient high-quality business processes? That is the first big paradox.

Here is the second. You need to balance alignment with company goals with the liberty to challenge every assumption underpinning the business. People need to be encouraged to speak up and voice radical ideas but then you want a constructive debate to test those ideas. It can seem like mixing a improvising jazz band with a concert orchestra.

The next contention is between top down and bottom up ideas. The leadership team is there to set strategy and direction but many people closer to the customers have divergent and disruptive ideas; some brilliant, some terrible. We do not want all the innovation ideas coming from the executive suite. We need to encourage the best ideas from all sources and select them on merit, not on the seniority of their parents.

The fourth paradox is the contention between patience and urgency. We need to give fresh ideas time to develop and adapt to each round of feedback as we go through prototyping cycles. But our resources are limited and we need to make urgent decisions. Do we kill the innovation projects which we like but are not getting test customer traction? When do we rework and when do we curtail our projects?

Skillful leaders know that they have to be somewhat schizophrenic. Sometimes they favour more freedom, sometimes they exercise more control. They constantly review what is working and what is slowing things down. They do not adhere to a fixed method but oscillate between approaches as they see fit.

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This post was previously published on Destination Innovation.

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