Harnessing Tension to Drive Innovation

A core part of my innovation model is this idea of tension. How do you harness tension?

How do you create tension? How do you use tension? How do you eliminate tension?

I use the metaphor of a bike to communicate some of these ideas. Bikes are tension systems, and different bikes use tension differently. A stationary bike uses tension to burn calories more efficiently. A mountain bike has knobby tires, a big frame and shock absorbers to deal with a risky environment. A hybrid bike is made for trails and roads. A road bike is made to go really, really fast. These four different bikes represent the four different phases of the innovation life cycle: the discovery phase, incubation phase, acceleration phase and scaling phase.

Innovation at its Core

If you really want to understand the core of innovation, you have to understand the mind. We are preprogrammed to turn every single innovative activity we ever do into a mindless activity. It’s like driving to work. The first time you do it, it’s a very mindful activity because you’re trying different routes and evaluating different traffic patterns. But after about a week, that activity becomes mindless. You turn on autopilot and think about things other than your commute, such as problems at work or problems with your kids.

The same thing happens within organizations. We try to make everything that we do mindless. We don’t want people to be creative when manufacturing a car; we just want them to come in every day and do their job. The problem is, when we turn everything into a mindless activity, we don’t use our excess capacity to be mindful. And we rob the organization of the resources necessary to be mindful.

If you’re not focused on mindful activities, you’ll never develop the innovations you need to be successful. Look at Nokia or Kodak. These companies, at one point, were very innovative. They died because they stopped being mindful and were no longer innovative.

Developing Ambidextrous Leadership

To help address this problem, executives need to develop “ambidextrous leadership.” Great leaders can hold two opposing ideas in their head at the same time and still maintain the ability to function. They can lead organizations that are mindless, lean and efficient, but they can also enable large parts of the organization to be very mindful and creative.

The Three Types of Innovative Tension

These leaders also view failure as the raw material for innovative success. They aren’t afraid to embrace maladaptive tensions (which cause you to fail) and transform them into adaptive tensions (which allow you to overcome failure and improve incrementally) and creative tensions (which enable you to lead transformative change and come up with disruptive innovations). Most organizations are pretty good at transforming maladaptive tension into adaptive tension, but pretty bad at the third one because of how they severely penalize failure.

In my executive education class on innovation, I work with executives to help them understand how to become an ambidextrous leader and how they can develop and deploy an innovation discipline in their organization. We explore the question, what is innovation discipline? What are the processes and the practices you put in place to enable an innovation discipline? Then we focus on the discovery, incubation and acceleration phases of the innovation life cycle.

• So, where do good ideas come from?
• How do you discover them?
• How do you create and lead a discovery activity?
• How do you take things that are discovered, evaluate them and determine what should be incubated?
• What are the incubation structures and processes?
• Who leads that, and how do they execute these incubation processes?
• Where does the money come from?
• How much time do you spend on it?
• How do you move those ideas, prototypes and pilots to acceleration?
• How do you bring them to market?
• What is the timing and process and funding for that?
• What are the milestones you’re trying to reach?

The Innovating For Growth Program

One of the exercises that I have participants do is write an “obituary” for their company. It’s a reflective paper on why their company is going to die in the next five years because their fiercest competitor enters the market with a more innovative solution. What they’re doing is they’re identifying the weaknesses in their company that are stopping them from being innovative. It’s really an eye-opening exercise for them. They can see how vulnerable they are, and how they could be just five years from going bankrupt if they don’t become a more innovative company. That’s the burning platform for change.

I also have them do a project where they break up into teams, share innovation challenges or failures in their organization, and then identify a specific problem that needs to be solved. And then they design an eight-week innovation campaign that they would run to help the organization harness the creativity of their people and come up with an innovative solution to the problem.

I want executives to come away from this program believing that their people are more creative and innovative than they thought. I want them to believe that there is a process for being innovative, and it’s a process that’s replicable—innovation is not just about catching lighting in a bottle. You can reliably do it again and again if you harness the tensions effectively. I want them to believe that they can take this process, apply it, and increase the innovative capability and capacity of their organization.