Part 5 of 5
In this five-part series, I'll share my perspective on what drives innovation in today's organizations. From asking better questions and embracing human-centered thinking to thoughtfully leveraging AI, we'll explore how leaders can unlock the creativity and ingenuity that already exists within their teams.
Continuing from:
- Blog 1: Discovering the Innovator in Us
- Blog 2: It Starts with a Simple Question – How might we?
- Blog 3: The Innovators are Already Here
- Blog 4: AI isn’t the Answer. It’s an Opportunity.
Leadership's Greatest Opportunity
If innovation begins with people, leadership's role becomes clear: to enable it.
Innovation can’t just be mandated – people need to be engaged. Great leaders create environments where people feel safe to:
- Ask questions
- Challenge assumptions
- Test ideas
- Share perspectives
- Experiment
- Learn
- Try again
That isn't always comfortable. Experimentation creates uncertainty, and progress is rarely linear. Not everything will be a success. If we’re being honest, this goes against much of our leadership mindset and the pressure we feel to deliver. Manage scope, schedule, cost; contain risks to stay on track and keep our status green. Even if you’re in an agile organization, it’s common for leaders to ask why an experiment is being added to a sprint and not another piece of valuable functionality.
Curiosity, creativity and experimentation are thinking activities, not delivering activities, and those are absolutely critical to solving problems effectively and in a way that positions the organization for ongoing success. This means leaders need to fundamentally shift their thinking and actions, for starters:
- Plan for and value time for thinking work – for your teams and yourself
- Create an environment for people to engage in innovation and feel safe trying new things
- Value curiosity over certainty and experimentation over perfection
- Invite perspectives from across the organization – business, tech, cybersecurity, legal, others
- Shift from seeing something as failure to celebrating it as progress and learning
- Move learnings from experiments into delivery work
When leaders do this, they create cultures propelled by the energy, creativity, passion, and ingenuity of their people who will deliver surprising and better results to drive the organization forward.
Because when leaders create space for exploration, they don't just generate better ideas.
They unleash the innovators who were already there all along.
Today’s Challenge: Review the list above and assess them against your leadership style and corporate environment. Where are you strong? Where are there organizational challenges? What is keeping you personally from tackling these or incorporating them immediately? Choose something to advance and see how much progress you can make. (Note: if something was a gut-punch, that’s probably where you should start.)
Join the conversation and add your thoughts on the LinkedIn article.
This series began with a simple belief: the innovator is in all of us. Five posts and daily challenges later, that belief hasn't changed for me, and hopefully it’s grown for you. Come back to this series whenever a new challenge lands on your desk, and ask: How might we? If you'd like a partner in exploring the answer, we'd love to hear from you. Contact us at FarWell to start the conversation.
