The mindsets leaders need when innovating is every day
By: Johnny Rogers
Tags: Management, Innovation, Leadership, Design, Future Of Work

The majority of organisations are well along the way with the design adoption journey. Organisations have moved towards more human-centred processes, and design thinking is commonplace along with new ways of working such as agile. As designers who’ve long advocated for this change, we now have our seat at the table in our respective organisations.

As design leaders how should we behave to unlock our teams’ potential to make positive change?

The separation of strategy from action

All innovation, including how organisations adapt and evolve their business, services and teams, lives on a scale from Strategy to Action. Pure strategy is building strategic visions and communication — and pure action is building, creating, and implementing.

Strategy without action is innovation for innovation’s sake, and action without strategy is just a task. The edges make people sad, are de-motivating, and no actual progress is made.

Even more challenging is that traditionally organisations’ structures cause this gap to grow over time. On one end, you have the pull of hierarchy, which moves people towards promotions, getting paid more, and having more influence. On the other side, you have the push of doing — people who are too busy to plan. People who have millions of tasks to get through.

And this push and pull separates strategy and action further and further apart. Powerpoint presentations that won’t get seen, and Jira tickets that aren’t properly understood. The worst case scenario is that the talent that can see this will eventually leave and those who remain become institutionalised to these ways of working.

Design leadership has traditionally lived at the Strategy end of this line and had been closely associated with vision setting and advocacy. Design management has lived at the Action end of the line and has been closely associated with ensuring process and quality of final output.

The new demand on leaders to close the gap

True innovation asks more from our people than ever and is imbued with uncertainty. We know from a wide range of cross-sector experience that ‘the good place’, where true innovation sits is in the middle of that scale. These new types of teams require a new kind of leadership.

‘The Good Place’ — Where empowered teams combine strategy with action.

Mindsets for moving forward

As important as the following mindsets are for us as leaders it is just as important for our teams to behave similarly. None of these mindset are top-down mandates, they’re mindsets and behaviours we all need to share in the modern team environment.

Tangible system change over advocacy

Innovation can be tricky to define, irrespective of your experience it remains fluffy and hard to explain. As leaders we have to strike the balance between guiding vision and practical design management. If we want to change culture it’s not enough to repeatedly talk about it. We need to take action to change that system. We need to combine strategy with action to ensure that what we design will actually deliver tangible benefits for our teams on the coal-face.

Put people and not process first

For all of us our roles are broadening and the traditional career ladders we once climbed are falling away. It’s a big ask, combine your hard skills with emotional intelligence, empathy, intuition, social awareness and layer on top of this a rigorous and scientific data-driven decision-making process to project the commercial risks being taken.

It’s disorientating at the best of times and we need to be sensitive to that burden and have the sense making skills to help people navigate that in project work and in their personal progression.

Have the wherewithal for the tough side of innovation

As exciting as innovation can look on Ideo’s Instagram there is a messier and more deeply challenging side. For example, innovation requires a candid feedback culture which is not something that can be switched on overnight. These are marathon distance challenges where we are iterating people’s lives.

What’s next?

If we as leaders can adapt to provide the servant leadership our teams necessarily require to operate in the middle of the Strategy-Action scale then we unlock a point of more fulfilling work and tangible change.

This is the point where people in empowered teams drive the process and not the other way around. Teams that operate in an environment where they can work cohesively, bring together diverse skills and knowledge to make for a greater whole, have the autonomy to make decisions for themselves and the freedom to fail and at times deliver bad news along-with the good.

In a time when numerous research has identified that the vast majority of people are unhappy at work there has never been a greater time to start actively combining strategy and action so we can help our organisations to work better together, raise the impact design has on the world and ultimately make work more fulfilling.