On innovation and leadership

Nina Simon over at the Museum 2.0 blog has a wonderful post on "Innovation, Chaos, and Leadership". You really must read the whole thing - the lady wields a mean pen! But she's basically talking about how we historically view innovation as a trait of leadership - the CEO as visionary. She describes the inherent problem at the heart of this cliche - where "many of the characteristics of innovation--flexibility, risk-taking, chaos, failure--are highly threatening to staff when they are embodied by top management". Which means that structures must be put in place where innovation is encouraged lower down in the ranks - "Managers and CEOs need to provide security and give staff confidence that risk-taking will not count against them." Associations, like museums, are not places where instability and innovation are welcomed - unlike, Nina says, tech startups, for example, where the element of risk is expected.

So, counterintuitively, a protective structure must be in place for innovation to happen - stability for chaos. But she says that's not the most important thing. Her final point is this:

"...managers and especially CEOs need to step back from being innovators themselves. I refer to these leaders in their ideal form as "benevolent visionaries"--people who want to encourage new ideas but are willing to create the conditions for staff to generate them rather than creating the ideas themselves. This is really hard. It means going to bat with funders and boards for ideas and experiments that are not your own. It means stepping back from the "thought leader" role and into a service role: service to staff, comparable to service to board and mission. But the potential benefits are enormous. When leaders' passion for their museums goes towards supporting structures for others to innovate, identifying and granting opportunities for limited chaos, hopefully institutions can grow more flexibly--and more confidently--than ones in which the CEO is the sole owner of new ideas.

Is it harder for a CEO to be an innovator or a service person? Is it harder for top management to risk the institution or to empower junior staff to risk small projects? A lot of this comes down to ego, not change or risk. And I don't have an answer for how to innovate that. Do you?"

Now I am looking at this from the point of view of a second-level association executive, but I think there is a pretty simple solution, embodied in the concept of beta-testing, which I talk about a lot. If small risks are encompassed in all projects, and outcomes adjusted accordingly, there can be a culture of innovation inherent throughout an organization. The trick is to not "risk the farm" on unproven ideas - but to encourage lots of small risks. Some may fail, but the concrete costs will hopefully be made up with those that succeed. Of course Nina thinks it's not about risk taking - in terms of the ego of the CEO, of course that depends on the individual, but the "CEO as broker of ideas" is not a new concept in the association industry and this would be one way to start.