Municipal politicians in the small town of Pelham, Ontario are investing in the development of internal creative leadership skills, as they work toward transforming the town’s creative culture. Beginning with the question ‘How Might We…?’, Pelham is looking to change how it approaches challenges and opportunities.
Steve Jobs once said that innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower, and he was right in many ways. But I’d add that while innovation may define a leader, a leader also creates innovation. In fact, today’s most effective leaders are those who have learned how to spur the growth of innovation across their organizations and throughout their teams.
In more stable business climates of decades past, chief executives could leverage efficiency to achieve success. Closely managed corporate routines could be made a little quicker, a little smoother and a little cheaper to maximize profit and improve the bottom line. While that skill still has its place in the boardroom, today’s chaotic and unpredictable business climate also demands that executive leaders learn an entirely new skill: how to be adaptable. Managing organizational routines tightly will produce efficiencies but adaptable CEOs have mastered a much more challenging process of deliberately changing routines.
In the February 2012 Academy of Management publication “Perspectives”, Jackson Nickerson and his associates suggest that that management’s problem finding and problem solving ability is vital for organizational performance and provides a platform for scientific organizational design. Our own research and experience agree completely. See for example :
Albert Vollmer, the chair of Work and Organizational Psychology at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, is leading an applied research project called “Constructive Controversy for Innovation”. The goal is to introduce the concept of Constructive Controversy for resolving conflicts in team innovation decision making. The core of the concept is the intellectual, or task conflict which arises when different people have to combine their different knowledge into a joint decision. Dr Vollmer suggests that the reality is that organizational people don’t employ methods for integrating different perspectives but act ad-hoc or intuitively and hope to avoid or mimimize conflicts. They either have no understanding of innovation as a process, or think of it as a linear model, or don’t recognize that in every phase of an innovation process there are opposing forces of differentiation and integration which must be managed.
Solving complex problems & building a roadmap for the future is hard work. You don’t need a “think tank,” but a “do tank.”
