Episode 138: How Leaders Can Drive Innovation with Professor Linda Hill

Speaker A: Welcome to the Workplace Podcast in association with Dynamic Partners. We've got an incredible guest today and we're really excited for the insights and ideas they'll be sharing. There are so many practical learnings from this conversation that will make a difference to you, your team or your organization. Whether you're navigating leadership challenges, building high performing teams, or driving organizational changes, today's episode has something valuable for you. If your organization is interested in exploring this topic further or would benefit from a workshop, feel free to get in touch via our website dynamicpartners.ie. now let's start the conversation. Today's guest is Professor Linda Hill. Linda is the Wallace Brett Donham professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Faculty Chair of the Leadership Initiative and one of the world's leading experts on leadership and innovation. A two time Thinkers50 top 10 management thinker and recipient of the Thinkers50 Innovation Award, Lynda has spent more than 25 years researching how organizations innovate at scale. She is the co author of the best selling books Collective Genius and Genius at Scale and has advised global organizations including Google, Microsoft, NASA, Novartis and um, Salesforce on leadership, innovation and digital transformation.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Workplace podcast. Our topic today is how leaders can drive innovation. And joining me today to discuss her book Genius at Scale is Professor Linda Hill of Harvard Business School. Linda, welcome to the Workplace podcast.

Speaker C: Really a pleasure to be here with you and your audience.

Speaker B: So Linda, we met@ uh, Thinkers50 and I promised I would give your book my full attention. And I really enjoyed this book, Genius at Scale. How greatly leaders drive innovation. And what I liked about the book is the real life examples where innovation theory meets workplace practices and leadership at its best. So Irish listeners will particularly enjoy examples from Irishman Gary Lines and his work with MasterCard. There's also an Irish connection with Procter and Gamble and their mini entrepreneurial, uh, system. Um, we also talked about Michael Khudair and his point about personal transformation for cultural transformation. And then there's some key points and concepts which you spoke about in your excellent presentation I think is 50 and those powerful points about creative abrasion, creative agility and creative resolution. So we'll be discussing all of these concepts, uh, including wayfinding and the innovation roles of the architect, Bridger and Catalyst. Linda, what a great book.

Speaker C: Well, thank you very much. And I know there are lots of concepts in the book, but I must confess I've been studying this topic for about 25 years now. And because I use the methods of anthropology to do my work And I get to observe leaders as they work with their colleagues, as they, they work to innovate. I have too many ideas in my head, but we will, we will make them simple and usable. Thanks to you.

Speaker B: So thanks to you as well for your time in this podcast. One other person that we had on the podcast recently was Scott Anthony, who I, um, helped out on this book. And when I asked Scott about innovation, he just defined innovation as something that creates value. How do you define innovation?

Speaker C: Well, I end up defining innovation the way the leaders we study define innovation. One of the leaders I first got to study and, uh, perhaps I studied the longest, was Ed Catmull, one of the co founders of Pixar. And what I learned from Ed is when you are trying to build an organization that can innovate time and again at scale, you must make sure that everyone in the organization understands that they are an innovator. Too often we say that these people over there are the innovators and these people over here are the executors. That doesn't work, particularly when it comes to scaling. So the definition that our leaders have about innovation is an innovation is anything that is new and useful to the organization. New and useful, very simple. And they understand the difference between incremental innovation and obviously breakthrough. But an innovation can be a service, a product, um, um, a business model. It can be a way of organizing, it can be a way of figuring out how to cut costs. Really it's a way of doing problem solving. And when you think about innovation that way as new and useful, what we find is people will suddenly say, oh, I didn't know I was supposed to be, or I am an innovator. And what they do then is have that very simple definition. So useful may be sort of like value, creating value because it is useful. But it's really so extreme in a way that even if another organization already had that idea, um, and you know, it was useful that if they, if you didn't have it in yours, you tell people anyway, guess what? It's new and useful to us. And so when you do that, it really opens up the door for everyone to feel like they should be working not just on what they should be doing for our customer, but what they could be doing for our customer. And it frees them and really empowers them to know that they can make a difference.

Speaker B: Some people, when they hear innovation go, I'm not an innovator there. And a great point you make in the book is innovation is a voluntary act. Can you tell us A little bit more about that.

Speaker C: Yes. So this idea that innovation is a voluntary act, also something that I learned from talking to these great leaders of innovation, one of the leaders we studied to include ED actually and all the leaders in the book that you're holding in your hand right now, they all understood that you cannot force someone to innovate, you cannot tell someone you will give me your new and useful ideas. They have to volunteer to share that with you. Because really innovation is about inviting people to share what we refer to as their slice of genius, or what is your slice of genius. And your slice of genius is your talent and your passions. And if you want people to share those with you, you have to create an environment in which they'll be willing and able to do that work with you. Because the other thing we know about innovation is even incremental innovation is hard work. It's emotionally and intellectually challenging work because we're taking risks and we're having often to collaborate with people who think very differently from. So by definition what we find is leading innovation is not so much. It's not about followership. I have a vision, Follow me to the future. It's really about saying, let me create an environment in which you're willing to do the hard work with others to co create the future. We're going to do this together. And co creation really has three parts to it. Can we collaborate across difference? Can we experiment and learn together? And experimenting and learning together is harder than uh, we often think. And, and when you, to do all of that, to collaborate, experiment and learn, you gotta be able to do decision, decision making properly, which is, you know, goes back to one of those capabilities that you refer to, creative resolution.

Speaker B: Mhm. And then you talk about the roles then or the ABCs of leading innovation. The architect, the Bridger and the catalyst. So can we just do an overview of those? Because this is what the book does so well. It, it describes the profile or the companies that have done well.

Speaker C: Yes. So what I want to say, and I'm just not to uh, not to correct you, but to be real clear, we have studied specific leaders in these organizations. Sometimes we have studied CEOs, sometimes we've studied middle managers, and sometimes we've studied individual contributors. So when we write about a leader, you know, if that leader is not the CEO or uh, very, very senior, we're really talking about what's the, what's the environment that leader created. So with these individual contributors, they obviously don't have the same scope and scale as maybe a CEO would have. So I just want to that make that clear and I think I also want to make it clear because it goes back to new and useful. Anybody can be an innovator, an individual contributor all the way to the CEO. So what we saw when we first began to study innovation, we saw the architect and how you architect this environment in which people will co create the future with you. When we went back to do some more research and looked at what was happening, particularly in today's environment where emerging technologies, they're just becoming available, it uh, seems like every day we have something new where the speed or the pace of having to innovate has gone up to be competitive. What we found is it wasn't enough to simply architect your own organization to be able to innovate. What we saw is that many companies were recognizing we don't actually have the talent and capabilities inside the organization to do what we want to do. So we're going to have to build partnerships, really robust partnerships with other organizations to get access to the talent and capabilities we need. So one of the organizations you mentioned was MasterCard. So MasterCard set up a couple of labs and they really, the main lab was set up in Dublin and the leaders there who ran that innovation lab, they understood that they needed to create relationships or partnerships with startups all around the world to get access to the capabilities that M MasterCard needed to move from being a credit card company to being um, a tech company in the e commerce space. So they began to identify these are the capabilities we don't have inside MasterCard. You know what, let's go out, scan and scope and find out where we can get those capabilities to bring them inside. But you know, that's easier said than done. A big company like a MasterCard working with a startup, not easy. So to build the, to get the Bridgers, that's the architect. The Bridgers that actually know how to work across boundaries and get that co creation happening across boundaries, not simply inside a company. Those are the bridgers, the catalysts. And actually we also saw that at MasterCard. Interestingly enough, the catalysts are people who understand or leaders who understand. It's not just one partnership appear, they are everywhere. It's actually we have to figure out who are the stakeholders in our ecosystem if you will, that we are really dependent on to do the kind of innovative work we want to do. So it turns out for instance if you're really going to become a uh, do what they wanted to do, they had to be able to work with government. So you're really trying to figure out who are the key stakeholders, what are the barriers and the facilitators of innovation in this particular country. We want to work in or maybe this industry like we see with um, electric vehicles, another industry where in fact you just because you have the best uh, EV car, you know, electric vehicle, if you don't, there are not enough charging stations, you can't get it done. So you need to think about as a company, how do I get the government to build enough charging stations? You know what, we don't have enough talent to actually really manufacture a ev. So we need to work maybe with government and uh, NGOs to make sure we upscale talent so we actually have the talent we need that can make this kind of car. So the ABCs are you cannot drive a alone. I don't know that you ever could as a leader trying to lead innovation, but you really can't these days if you're going to really innovate at the pace required and with uh, what's going on with the emerging technologies. The last thing I'll say about that and why you need the Bridgers. Because the Bridgers are really critical, it turns out for gen AI and agentic AI to work. What we keep hearing in companies is we don't have enough people who know how to bridge. If you even think about Microsoft, right? Microsoft obviously is developing its own capabilities for AI inside, but they also partnered with OpenAI to really get a leg up to get access. So they needed Bridgers not just at the top of the organization who sort of doing the deals to figure out ip. But if you're going to really build and co create all the way down through the whole embed AI and all the different products in Microsoft, you need Bridgers all the way down the line, right? Who can do that work. And we're being told the real shortage right now for driving uh, agentic AI and gen AI and robotics is the lack of people who know how to bridge, as they put it, between tech and business. There's a real shortage there. We're hearing it from everyone. We've done um, about nine roundtables around the world with C suite executives. They don't have Bridgers. And they also need more of these catalysts because again a lot of the work that needs to be done is cross sector being able to work not only with business, but with government or even business and business. But it's not just one partner like at MasterCard they ended up building a whole sort of ecosystem of organizations. They needed to work with across the three sectors to fulfill their purpose. And I don't know if you remember, um, their purpose was financial inclusion. So if we are going to be able to include more people in the economy, people who have been left out, then we need to build, lay the groundwork for that. And that means we got to figure out, you know, what, what can MasterCard do to convene and build an infrastructure that allow um, governments to work differently. With telecom for instance, because it turns out mobile phones are very important in India for instance. But you got to get these partners to learn how to. These sort of, I don't know, I guess you'd almost call them coalitions of parties across um, often across sectors to work together so you actually can do what you want to do in your company.

Speaker B: As you mentioned earlier, this book is bursting with concepts and ideas and I have it with a talent development coaching, team development, organization development hat on. And I'm just thinking of future generations and how we need to really expose them to different environments, cross pollination of ideas. But really to get that um, in person experience to see how people work or what are the challenges people face there. And I think that might be a little bit lacking uh, today. And also what I remember in the book then is you talk about that the world needs a new kind of leaders. So it's that navigate like the inevitable tensions, um, I think you mentioned about pragmatism and about short term and long term thinking and about um, structure and agility, all these different concepts there. And it's really about how do we uh, prepare ourselves as uh, this generation, about the type of leaders we need to be but also future generations, isn't it?

Speaker C: Yeah. You know it's funny obviously I'm a professor of business administration here at Harvard Business School and I chair the Leadership Initiative. And one of the programs we've had for 20 plus years is a program for so called, what we call high potentials. The company defines who the high potentials are. These are executives that they think are going to make a difference. And one of the things we found out very early on is that they want executives to who actually are m. Many of them are upper middle managers, I don't know are middle managers when they come to the program. And they want leaders who again who know how to deal with shoulds and coulds, what we call value creators, the shoulds and game changers, the coulds. And our whole effort has been on how do we develop leaders who think that way. Now I want to be real clear vision really does matter. And you know, my mentor, I'm his protege is John Kotter, who taught us about the difference between leadership and management and how many companies are, if you will, over managed and underled. So I, I believe deeply in what needs to happen. If you have the vision, then communicate and inspire people to fulfill. It. Turns out that one of the leaders we studied said, in some ways you don't have the vision anymore. What does it feel like? And he is a visionary. I mean, I just want to say. But he said, I feel often like I'm leading through a fog. These are, uh, very uncertain times. How do we navigate? You know what he said? How do you lead, Linda, when you can't see, when you have no vision? And he understood that the idea that you're going to take charge, make the organization go in some direction when it's foggy doesn't make any sense. So what was his role? First to convince people that there's nothing called business as usual. There's nothing called business as usual. We need to be agile, innovative problem solvers so that we can adapt to whatever. When the fog clears a bit and we get some vision, then we go. But he realized that his role was not what he sort of thought it would be about. Leadership. I'm the visionary leader, et cetera. Because a lot of the times it was just too foggy to know what to do. And he needed instead to create an organization that could collaborate, experiment, and learn their way to the future. And the learning part turns out, you know, years ago we talked about learning organizations and Peter Senge told us how hard it is to build them. It is really hard to build them. But what we need, uh, we need leaders who understand that they're kind of navigating through a fog a lot of the time. And you do not want to do that by yourself. We have better tools to do that now because we do have all of these technologies. We don't have to rely, as the explorers did, on the stars and the moon and the currents. But you know what? You still need to build an organization that you kind of know. You don't know where you're going to end up. Because that's the whole thing about innovation. You don't really know what the answer is, particularly if it's breakthrough. But you need to be clear about the purpose. What is the problem we're trying to solve? For whom? Why does it matter? Financial inclusion. Michael Koo at Pfizer. You know, hope for patients. And the faster we can bring them hope, then the better. For them, we'll improve their lives and livelihoods. And Michael Koo's group, as you know, was the group that ended up running at Pfizer the clinical trials in 266 days to come up with, um, a vaccine that say, according to the Economist, millions of lives. And so I think that what we need is a kind of leadership now that understands, you know, I can't do it alone. No one ever could. But you really can't now. You have to architect. You gotta have your architects, your bridgers and your catalysts and you're not necessarily gonna be the best at all of that. And even if you were, you need to really figure out who will join you to help get done what you wanna get done in the organization. Which is again why you want everyone to know they're an innovator. Because the thing that often happens in companies, which is why this book is focused on scaling, is okay, we generate some innovative ideas or whatever uh, it is, products, services, whatever, but they never turn into reality. Because when we pass them to the group that, the so called executors, the only way that's going to get to be a reality, that solution is if they do their work differently, if they innovate, they've got to come up with new and useful ways of doing things differently to manufacture that thing you've come up with or to sell it or whatever it might be. So that is why we do think it's important a new kind of leader who understands innovation is imperative. And guess what? We all need to be able to be innovative problem solvers. So what do I do? It's not so much me saying I got the answer, follow me, because I don't.

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Speaker C: By definition, you don't. If it's really working on something breakthrough, what you do have is the purpose. So I'm not at all surprised that we see so many books on purpose because why should we take on this hard work if it's not meaningful, if it doesn't mean anything to us, if it's not going to make a difference to someone else's life, that we care about our uh, lives or livelihoods? So I think that the next generation of leadership needs to be much more Attuned with their own slice of genius. I don't think it's accidental that the man who was the CEO of MasterCard and said financial inclusion was the purpose is now the head of the World Bank. You see the alignment between what drives him and both in business and what he's doing now in government. So I think we need to tap into what's meaningful to people, and that's become important for that next generation. Because, frankly, leadership's getting harder. It's harder to build competitive businesses. The kinds of intractable social challenges we're facing require, um, you know, I require a lot of imagination, new thinking. What we refer to as leaders who can be wayfinders, who understand. And the path. We don't know what the path is. It's not about following the path. It's like finding our way to the path, navigating through. And then the path will become clearer as you get closer, maybe as you experiment and learn. And then you state it, here it is. This is where we are. This is the change we're making. But as you know, because you're coaching people, we all need to learn to work differently. And I mean, it's scary to me. And I have a, you know, I have a job, I have tenure, so I'm not going to lose my job. Probably many of the people who are trying to tackle this, this stuff, they're not sure they're going to have a job. Now. My job's going to be different, too. It has been from everything I can see, and I have a lot of learning to do. But as leaders, we have to appreciate, um, the anxiety, the legitimate anxieties that people have. And we do need to help them, uh, really open up their imagination, not just our own imagination about how together we're going to do the best we can to create a world we all want to live in. And so, again, there will be people who are going to lose their job. I don't like to say losers and winners, but for us to act like this is a, uh, completely intellectual task. Leadership has always been about an emotional connection. And when you connect with people emotionally and you got tough decisions to make about them, that's not easy. So I'm sure your coaching business is on the rise. I see many, many more people looking for coaches to help them navigate. Um, actually, one of our leaders, Dr. Rakesh Suri, found a sparring partner, someone internally who was very different from him in their outlook to test out, you know, help him think about what not only his intention, but what his real Impact was. And he also then got coaches and to outside coaches to help him and his senior team be as good as they could be, because the challenges they faced at Cleveland Clinic, Abu Dhabi were tremendous. Um, and the opportunities. But one of the things that I think the coaching needs be about, and I just want to go back to a concept you mentioned, if that's all right, creative abrasion, which is something we've always known. We've always known that innovation requires collaboration across difference. You rarely get innovation unless you have diversity of thought. And once you have diversity of thought, you have the potential for conflict. But I gotta tell you, so many of our leaders tell us they're not really comfortable with navigating conflict, particularly when the differences get big. So when you are being a bridger and a catalyst and you're actually trying to navigate conflict, um, across, you know, with people in different organizations who have different priorities and constraints, et cetera, developing that capacity to embrace that diversity and work through the conflict. I think that is one of the most important skills that our future leaders need to develop, and it's not one from our own data collection. We have a way of assessing this that many leaders are comfortable with within their own little siloed part of the organization. Nonetheless, across the silos and then outside the boundaries of the organization, I think we're going to need a lot more of that. And I think you're going to be busy helping people, uh, learn how to do that.

Speaker B: And that's a point that you made in the book, I have to say, Lynn, I'm just going to pause here for a second, right, Because I feel like you have read all my notes that I wanted you to cover in the podcast. I feel like we're in sync, just building on the points that you just said. Because every time you were, you, uh, might have seen me smiling. You covered every point that I wanted you to cover this podcast. It's brilliant. That trust is sparring partner specifically, I think is great in that creative abrasion. But also, you were talking about navigating there with risk there. And that's where sometimes we need the help of a facilitator then, especially when there's different ways of working or competing ideas, like how do we work together, how do we collaborate? You know, when you're talking about breaking down silos and there because a lot of people might be resistant, and you talk about this in the book because there's such a focus on results that, that you talk about different ways of leadership then is like, how do I really want to change my style of leadership the way I work, because there's a fear of failure here, there's a real risk at here, there. And if that bridger is there, that catalyst there, that's able to facilitate that conversation, there's a bit of architecture here to do that. Isn't that right, Linda?

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: Like the role of the facilitator is so important.

Speaker C: Yes. And uh, you know, one of the other pieces to it that I went across, be very specific about what you're talking about. But not only the role of the facilitator, but a lot of the facilitation is happening virtually.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: And I just want to raise that as a real challenge. So one of the things we're seeing is it's not easy to build culture ever. But to build it when you're working in a hybrid kind of setting where people really aren't physically together, when we are fundamentally social animals and when there's not a lot of social happening because of the way our organizations work today, we are seeing that that actually erodes culture and makes it harder to build culture. And culture is partly what allows us to work through difference. So going back to the importance of purpose, why should I bother working through this conflict? Why is it worth it? Well, if we're not aligned about the purpose and the importance of the work, I'm not so sure, particularly when they're going to be career risks to me maybe of trying to do this thing. So that purpose, what pulls us together and leaders trying to figure out how to do that is really tough. So when I talk about how do you manage the difference, one thing going back to the context you're creating, um, if we do feel like we have some shared purpose or when we're working, when we talk about working as a bridger and catalyst, we don't assume that you necessarily have a shared purpose, but you do have a shared intention. There's something you're committed to doing together. So that need to align us around that commitment to do it together still becomes quite important, particularly in a world where we're short term oriented. Right. And if it's something that's a little more long term, um, then you need to make sure as a leader that you've built that. But the capacity to work across difference is. There's a lot of pieces to that. One part of it is that you obviously need to be pretty comfortable with yourself and you need to be able to help bridge those emotions. As I said, leadership is always about an emotional connection. And as we say here in our leadership course for the MBAs, the two questions you always have to ask yourself as a leader is, how do people experience you? And how do people experience themselves when they're with you? What's the experience they're having, uh, of themselves and with you? And if that experience is not one that says to them, you know what? I know you. You're capable. I trust. So this one leader who said he was leading through a fog, he also said to the team, and this was during COVID So he said to them, you know, I'm scared, but I trust you. Now, they were shocked to hear him say, I'm scared. What? The CEO is scared. But he said, you know what? I decided I needed to be human. They needed to know that I was scared, and they needed to know that I trusted them. And he had an extremely diverse workforce. I think there were a hundred and some nationalities in his workforce, but one of the ways he had actually built their capacity to work together and collaborate across difference is he didn't say, I mean, Cleveland Clinic is an American, you know, started in the US but when they went over to Abu Dhabi and they had all these different nationalities, they didn't make the mistake of saying, we know best, and Cleveland Clinic's one of the best hospitals in the world. Um, they didn't say that. They said instead, well, how should we do it now that we're all together? So even think in the hospital about a crash cart. You know, what they use when you have a heart attack. So they had the crash card, and they put it together the way they would do it in Cleveland Clinic. And a number of the people from other parts of the world said, oh, that's where you put that. Well, we put it here. And instead of saying, well, this has got to be standardized. You don't want. Right. And there's got to be consensus about this is the way this thing is. But instead of just saying, no, we don't have time. We got so many things to do, let's just do it this way we know it works. They literally said, uh, let's start from scratch. Let's build the crash cart the way it should be built. Now, that exercise of thinking through all the differences, if you will, that were there because they'd worked in different hospital settings and putting together what was this is innovative problem solving. They practiced on small, if you would say, and is that an innovation, new and useful? You know what? They think it was a much better crash cart than any of them had ever had before. So what I think we need to think about when we're trying to learn how to develop these skills. One is, is, you know, obviously we get the coaching we need as leaders, but can you create opportunities for your team to practice, to have the mindset of, you know what, Let me be open to why they did it that way in Croatia or wherever it is, instead of saying, well, my hospital, I come from the best system in the world. You don't know how that mind shift to say, let's listen to what each of us is saying about why we did it the way we did it. Because there was a logic where there wasn't one.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: And they'd all say, I don't know why we did it this way.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: But practicing, if you will, on small things, although the crash cart is a big thing in some ways, then prepared them to take on bigger, you know, I don't know, bigger problems, bigger challenges together as well, because they had been practicing all along the way. Instead of someone saying, you know, I'm the head nurse, I've done this X team, and, you know, we accidentally fall into those roles. We accidentally can say, you know, I, uh, know I can sometimes. I'm the professor, you're the student. Well, I've learned long ago that the student often knows a lot more about a topic than I do, or as certainly as much, or looks at it in a different way that I could benefit from. So learning to be open to other perspectives and saying I may or may not be right, um, is not an easy shift in mindset. Because, frankly, when you're the boss, people kind of like for you to have the answers, or at least they think so. Right. So you have to hold them accountable. But it. We have a lot of patterns to break if we're going to be able to take advantage of, um, really people's talents and passions in a way that is. Is really hard to, you know, to build a business or to build a successful government agency or whatever it might be. But it does require us to have some new mental models about how leadership is supposed to work. And, um, I feel like I'm saying, um, it's not, I think, to let go of followership as fundamentally how we think about what we're doing as leaders. Um, I know, it's just tricky. People are like, well, how are we going to stay aligned? Or how are we going to make sure we're doing things with enough urgency, et cetera. I've seen many stories, and you see them in our book, where basically the employees are telling the Boss, you're not being urgent enough about this. We need to get this done now. Right. So I think that our roles, it's always uncomfortable when our roles are shifting. And even when I hear I've been going to all of these presentations and watching people working on agentic AI, etc. And I'm like, oh my goodness, what does this mean for me as a professor? Let me stay open minded. Yes, my heart beats fast sometimes, but I'm going to have an agent that helps me do what or my students can, you know, they can cheat. Now, Linda, you can't tell you know what? Well, why don't I try to create a situation where they don't want to cheat because they're so eager to learn what they need to learn. So that means I need to raise my game about, you know, this is a tool they have. They're going to use the tool. Am I going to fight with them about using the tool? No, I'm going to say the tool is there. Let's talk about when you want to use it, why you want to use it, et cetera, and not sort of say, let me um, clamp down on and try to keep people from cheating. I think that's not a very productive way of trying to deal with these technologies. And related to that, if there's one other idea, I can add Architect, Bridger and Catalyst. One of the things that we see is very senior executives understanding that they need to model bridging behavior with people who are very junior. And we have an article, um, we've written on how companies, how senior executives are leveraging their Gen Z digital natives to drive transformation in their companies. And it's not about letting them go wild or something. In fact, you need to explain to them why it's important. They also already have ideas about using AI responsibly, et cetera. But there's a whole context setting that needs to be done there for them to understand they might be willing to take the risk but not appreciate the risk. So you need to explain to them why on earth, um, this is important. Why do we have these compliance rules? And if you can't explain them, then why do you have them? Right. They don't like bureaucracy. But I do see that this bridging across generations is becoming an important thing. And all senior people, I mean some of them, I'm using age a little bit as a proxy here because sometimes the senior people are the younger people. But what we see is that, but we need to be open to many more perspectives, not that Each perspective is right, but it's just a different perspective. So there are two kinds of intelligence that we really work on and we see in the book and talk about. One is emotional intelligence. And we all know, can you empathize, et cetera, can you work across difference and those kinds of, uh, capabilities or skills? But the other is what is referred to as contextual intelligence. And that's your capacity to go into a situation of another person or whatever situation, and really read what's really salient and what matters and that being able to do that relatively quickly, but you can't. You actually. Contextual intelligence, you can plan and plan, but until you go work in that setting or work in that country or wherever it is, you really have to verify what your assumptions are about, uh, how that that space is going to work, what's going on in that context. My strategy colleagues and leadership colleagues both write a lot about how so many of us lack the contextual intelligence we need. And one of the things you saw in the book, I think, is that a lot of our leaders have what is referred to and other people refer to as zigzag careers. They actually have had a variety of different experiences, worked in different contexts with different people, and to flourish in those contexts, they've had to step back, ask questions about their assumptions, engage with people who are different, learn to translate across worlds, and that's kind of what prepared them. So I think we're going to see many more of these. Our future leaders are. It's already been happening. You see it more than I do. It's not straight. You know, my MBAs used to go to one company, too. Now it's like this, right?

Speaker A: If this conversation has you thinking about getting better at, uh, conflict in your team, now is a good time to act on it. Resolution intelligence helps leaders bend the arc of conflict toward healthy resolution, navigating challenges with confidence and saving time, money, and relationships. Visit resolution-intelligence.com to get your personal Resolution Intelligence report and take the first step.

Speaker B: Step I, I might add, resolution intelligence. For people to see me writing articles on that, especially when it comes to resolving conflict. So we talked about this before the, the podcast, but there's one thing just you, uh, talked about the zigzag and, and I originally studied electronic engineering, and then I went into supply chain management. Um, and then, would you believe I studied therapy for a while? I wasn't cut out for that, but I went into coaching. But that's something. Amy Edmondson was an engineer. She then went into her, uh, field and Became uh, great at that and could really see the insights there. Especially with psychological, uh, safety.

Speaker C: Yes. Which is very related to the kind of environment where you have to be able to make people be willing to work together. And so I think Amy's office is downstairs, is actually, it's upstairs from me, um, and one almost directly upstairs. So I benefit greatly from her work. So fundamentally what makes people willing is that they do feel safe enough to share their talents and passions. And one of the leaders we studied talked about so many of us try to minimize difference in our organization if we really look. But leaders who lead innovation try to amplify those differences because they know that's the resource that they need to leverage for the collective good. So if you don't, if you never. What we see is that because we minimize, because we don't want to have conflict so quickly, we don't even know. And there's lots of studies that show this. You don't even know what people are capable of. You have decided that these are your high potential people and these aren't. But then when you go and find out what those non high potential people, how they're leading community organizations, et cetera. Often leaders are shocked to discover, oh my goodness, why didn't you bring these capabilities to work? Well, you know, you never asked me to. There's never been an opportunity to uh, or whatever it might be. So I think that a lot of Amy's work on psychological safety is completely what going on in our um, one thing that the most overlap comes. Well, it comes in a number of places. One, it comes in the experiment and learning. So to build an organization that can actually experiment and learn when you know that you're going to have the missteps and the failures associated with that experimenting, you know, that psychological safety. And she talks about blameworthy failures versus um, praiseworthy failures if you will. Something you had to do to learn. And so I think our work is completely aligned. You know, I read everything she writes and I hope she reads what I write as well.

Speaker B: Yeah. And uh, if listeners are interested in that, we have a podcast with Amy Edmondson, the right kind of wrong. Now, speaking of that conflict that happens then, and you talked about power in organizations then. And that leads me to think of the crab mentality where there's secrecy or people withdraw or ultra competitive might happen. Did I get that right? When it comes to crab mentality and then.

Speaker C: Well, the crab mentality. Right. Well that the crab mentality you read about in the story about uh, Indidi, um, in winnelli who set up something called the African Food Change Makers. Basically what she found is in Africa because there's so much scarcity for resources. And one of the things she's created is a whole ecosystem. So that's, um, SME can get access to what they need to really grow their businesses and create sort of food security and also change the narrative about Africa. One of the things she found is what was happening is that the grant money, whatever money is available, everybody is, uh, after it because they just don't have much resource. And so she talks about the crab mentality there as if you win, I lose. And she has been working over time when she realized that really was what was, was sort of interfering with the ecosystem she wanted to create or hope to help create. Um, and what she does is she said, how do I get them to see that the pie can get bigger, that the pie is not one size and we're all trying to take our piece. But how do I begin slowly but surely to build trust across SMEs, really across the continent to understand that we can grow this pie. And often it turns out another Nicole, uh, Jones at Delta. When she was trying to figure out why didn't the IT department department want to work with the startups, what she discovered was she, some people thought, oh, they're just resisting new, um, technology or whatever, right? And no, they weren't. What the problem was is that Delta had had some outages. And when Delta has an outage, given how big an out, a big an airline it is, we all suffer, you know, the, the effects of an outage. So it was more a fear of if we plug, even if it's an API, uh, if we plug in clear, which is the organization on the outside, they were working into our system and it causes a disruption. It disrupts the whole, uh, airline system in the US and perhaps in the world, given how Delta is such an important airline. So it was fear that kept them from wanting to do legitimate fear and concern about the customer. So sometimes, again, going to the level of the emotion that people are having with why they don't want to try to work across this difference, um, that is where you need to sort of, that's what you need to tackle. So how do you help them mitigate risks that they really are worried about? And if you can begin to mitigate those and you really understand, oh, they're not just resistors or they're old, whatever it is, this is a legitimate risk that they're worried about. And can you help problem solve around those risks and figure out what's legitimate, what's the level of risk we will all tolerate? And how do you make sure that the clear understands this is legitimate? What they're concerned about in the IT department, what are we going to do together to try to mitigate and figure out the risk? The other thing I wanted to say about risk, there's one of the leaders, and I know you read the book, um, I don't remember if we really focused on this a whole lot in the book, but many companies and years ago I wrote an article on boards, I co authored an article on boards with a partner at Egon Zinder. It turns out that discussions of risk, real discussions of risk, are hard even for boards to have because we all have different risk appetites.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: We have different risk appetites. And even on boards, they don't necessarily talk about the risk appetites. But one of the leaders in our book, he realized that his team was not going to say, my project is risk. Nobody wants to say their project is risky, because who's going to want to do a risky project? So he had to come up with new language because rhetoric matters in leadership. And what he came up with instead was complexity. They wouldn't talk about risk, but maybe they would talk about complexity because the more complex something is, usually the more risk associated with that. So he had them develop what, uh, he said, red, yellow, green, complexity score. And no one unfortunately reduced red. Uh, complex was red, real complex was red. Green was not so complex. Nobody really wanted to be red. So that ended up being a little bit of a problem. But once they all got comfortable with red, yellow, green, what they began to do is when you said, you know, you said, I think we should do this, you had to say, was it red, yellow, green? And they developed their own case law about complexity and that became their proxy for risk. So what it meant was pay attention. So if something was red, everybody needed to pay more attention because, because it's more complex or riskier. So they would spend more time on that. So it actually helped them figure out how to prioritize how they were spending their time and resources based on red, yellow, green, complexity or risk. They actually took that idea. Um, we were doing some work with NASA and they took the idea of red, yellow, green to NASA. NASA also was having trouble. Imagine at NASA they have trouble with risk. And talking about risk, they also adopted this red, yellow, green in this part of NASA to talk about complexity, because people were willing to say that. And that allowed them to then have the discussion they had needed to have about how are we going to mitigate or deal with this complexity or can we simplify it so it's not so complex. So you as a leader figuring out again, what are people's emotions? Their emotions are their emotions. You can't say they're legitimate or not. They're worrying about risk. Even people who send people to the moon are worrying about it. And what's some language that will allow us to have a constructive conversation and some people will have more tolerance and some people won't. But we got uh, working together we might really figure out what's the right amount of risk that we can tolerate and how do we mitigate it. So you know, I jump Elon Musk, um, with SpaceX, they do lose. You know sometimes we see that these, these um, rockets blow up, knock on wood or wherever. They don't blow up when they have people in them. Right. They haven't thus far. It's a very different thing to take a risk when there's no one in, when it's, you know, unmanned or unwoman or whatever, um, there's no people in it versus when in fact there is. So I think that often at the root of what's keeping someone from taking on trying to do an innovated task, you need to go back to both the positive emotion of what's the pull because the purpose matters or they trust the people because you've built a culture in which they know people well enough and they know the group knows how to do deal with conflict or deal with what we all have some fear of and discomfort with ambiguity and changes that uh, frankly we're not sure what they're going to be.

Speaker B: One thing that I really liked, and I'm not sure if it came from MasterCard, the um, innovation as a service, but they talked about the dfv, the risk assessment framework. There's the funnel, the desirability, feasibility and viability. Just when you mentioned that I was like that, that popped into my head.

Speaker C: Yeah. So one of the, one of the other questions or one of the other challenges, I think when you're trying to build an organization that can innovate is how you're going to prioritize what you're going to work on. And given how expensive Gen AI and Agenda AI are, I mean it is expensive. And so uh, one of the leaders we were studying said we forgot when we sort of help people understand about these things, we didn't tell them about how much it cost. So that they really understand is that use case worth it, right? That's a whole other sort of education. But one of the companies, what they had to agree on so that they could work across the difference was really about what are the criteria we're going to rely on to make a decision about whether we go on with this project or we kill this project or we set it aside or whatever. And so they came up with desirability. Uh, will it really make a difference to the customer or whoever the stakeholder it is that you kind of deal with viability? How close are we to really being able to technically have a solution to that? Or, I mean, is it. Are we a little. Are we ahead of the technology? And, um, feasibility was actually how tied it was to what the corporate strategy was. You could label those different ways, but the idea is if it doesn't really fit the strategy and we're really outside the strategy M. If we really don't, it's going to be a while before there's a technical solution that actually is, you know, reliable enough, consistent enough, do we really want to do that? But. And the first one is, if it's not really going to solve a problem, a pain point for a customer or a needed desire, then why are we going down this path? But to agree on those criteria nonetheless, the evidence for them, once they did that, boy, that allowed for the kind of creative resolution and decision making needed at the speed needed to move forward. But getting to that's laying the social infrastructure, if you will, will for us to do the work together.

Speaker B: And there's a quote from the podcast, can't remember who said it is fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Oh, yes, we all fall in love with our own solutions, don't we? But it's really to understand the problem, isn't it? It's really to be focused, what is it going on? And then you're able to see the contributing factors to that to say, actually, how am I really solving the problem here?

Speaker C: Yes. So that was Kathy Fish, who was the head of innovation and R and D at Procter and Gamma. And what we got to write about with Kathy is this whole idea of it's time to innovate on how we innovate. And one of the first things they did is in terms of purpose, everything we do should be irresistibly superior. And, um, customers should have an emotional connection. So that was one of the things. And she said for them to have the customer experience they need to do, it's not just R and D that's going to solve it. It's not about the product. It's the whole experience a customer has has with Procter and Gamble. However they touch Procter and Gamble, it has to feel like an experience that's irresistibly superior. Well, the only way you can do that is if you really fall in love with the problem of the customer, not the solution that you have. We all got visions, we all got solutions. But is that desirable? Is that really meeting the need of the customer? So that's where they had to start. Irresistibly superior emotional connection with the customer. So you better know that customer, what we call customer intimacy really well. Because you're solving something that the customer wants you to solve, not something that you'd like to solve because that's what you have a solution for.

Speaker B: I could talk all day to you because we have lean innovation. We didn't talk about silo breaking, all that type of stuff. This book is absolutely fantastic, uh, Linda. And as you can see from my sticky notes, it is jam packed with ideas and concepts and leadership behaviors and actions. Uh, I genuinely loved it. And we're coming to the end of the podcast here. Linda, if people find out more about you, their book, uh, how might they do so.

Speaker C: Well, a couple of ways. One is if you put Linda Hill, Harvard Business School. I come up. So that's a very fast way to find me, I must say. We're going to put up the LinkedIn. I don't have all that. I also do have a LinkedIn, um, account and I also have uh, a number of colleagues. And this book was co authored with a very diverse team. A person who I always write with, someone who starts with me in their 20s because I want to have it be multi generational and I always write with an executive. So Emily and Jason, uh, also uh, um, the co authors also have websites, et cetera. We do have a Genius at Scale website and I. It's just genius at scale. I think if you put that in, it'll pop up and you would find me that way. So those are the ways I would suggest.

Speaker B: Linda, thank you so much for joining the Workplace podcast.

Speaker C: Thank you. It's really been a pleasure to speak with you.

Speaker B: Likewise.

Speaker A: Thanks so much for listening to the Workplace podcast in association with Dynamic Partners. We really appreciate you being part of the conversation. Want to start the conversation about leadership in your organization at, uh, Dynamic Partners? We help leaders and teams build a culture, uh, of performance that drives real results. Visit DynamicPartners IE to find out more about our workshops and coaching services. Or email infoynamicpartners, ie to start the conversation. We're ambitious for your leadership. Are you.