How do great leaders drive innovation at scale?
By sharing the driver's seat.
The architect makes their organization collaborative-ready and is the foundation of the ABCs. Architects understand that they cannot mandate innovation; instead, they invite their colleagues to think and act differently by re-shaping the social environment in which they do their work.
Architects pay attention to the emotional, intellectual, and organizational barriers to innovation and are always on the lookout for resolutions.
· Are silos hindering collaboration?
· Are performance or talent-management systems deterring risk-taking?
· Are leaders trying to ‘tech’ their way to the future?
Leaders today recognize that they rely on external talent and tools to bring their organizations into the future. Bridgers have the unenviable job of facilitating co-creation between their internal colleagues and partners outside their organizational boundaries—a role that requires exercising influence without formal authority.
Bridgers build partnerships so organizations with vastly different priorities, constraints, capabilities, and work styles can innovate together. In doing so, they build relationships grounded in mutual trust, influence, and commitment. Bridgers carefully:
· Curate potential partners;
· Translate across those partners to build common understanding;
· Integrate their disparate intentions and actions so they can develop and scale new products, services, and processes.
If architects build innovative communities within organizations and bridgers build innovative partnerships at their boundaries, then catalysts galvanize innovative movements across ecosystems.
The ecosystem metaphor in business practice and research tends to evoke an extractive mentality: the idea of positioning one’s organization as the gatekeeper or central hub controlling information, resource flows, and the customer interface in a value chain.
The catalysts in our book adopt a different approach, managing key interdependencies by emphasizing synergies, sustainability, and long-term shared value creation. Catalysts:
· Map their ecosystem
· Seed opportunities for others to innovate
· Cultivate those seeds so that innovation takes root
