How Leaders Create the Conditions for Innovative Thinking

Adi Ignatius (0:01)

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Alison Beard (0:26)

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Adi Ignatius (1:01)

I'm Adi Ignatius.

Alison Beard (1:02)

I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

Adi Ignatius (1:13)

All right, Alison, so every organization wants to innovate, right? Not just once, but over and over again.

And judging from the conversations I have with CEOs, most feel they cannot accomplish this, right? They look inward, they wonder, am I smart enough? Am I clever enough? Can I compete with genius founders? When actually it's not so much about individual brilliance, but about creating an environment where good ideas can be surfaced and tested and ultimately put into action.

Alison Beard (1:39)

Yeah, I think we know from research that a lot of the best innovation comes from the front lines as well as R&D departments. But then how do you harness those ideas, create effective experiments and ultimately scale the ones that work?

If you're a leader, how are you overseeing all of these disparate efforts and then prioritizing the ones in which you really want to invest?

Adi Ignatius (1:59)

Today's guest has been drawing the playbook for innovation for much of her career. Linda Hill, professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book Collective Genius about a decade ago, and has just published a new one, Genius at Scale, How Great Leaders Drive Innovation. She's going to explain how to create a system and build a team that can innovate and then cascade the new thinking throughout the enterprise. Here's our conversation.

So, you've written a book about innovation. I would say this is a time when some leaders are in survival mode, a lot are uncertain about AI. How should leaders be thinking about innovation right now?

Linda Hill (2:39)

I think innovation is really an imperative and it is about survival. It is not about anything extra because nowadays, we have to be able to adapt and respond to whatever is happening out there in the world, and it's a very uncertain world.

Adi Ignatius (2:53)

Talk a little bit about the misconceptions surrounding innovation, because I feel you've been spending much of your career trying to deflate some myths about how innovation happens.

Linda Hill (3:03)

Well, this is the second book we've written about innovation. The first one was called Collective Genius, and there we tried to understand what do leaders do that create organizations that can innovate time and again. One of the things that surprised us is leading innovation is not about having a vision and telling people, follow me to the future. Instead, it's about creating the right culture and capabilities to get people to want to co-create that future with you. So leadership is not about followership when it's about innovation, it's about co-creation, and that requires a different mindset, different behaviors, and a different skill set. After we finished that work, we then began to understand and spend more time looking at organizations and what were they finding most difficult about really innovating.

Particularly now with emerging technologies, how do you get people to adopt these technologies to create value, as well as how do you create an organization that can innovate time and again? So we ended up focusing on what people told us was their problem.

Maybe we can come up with innovative solutions, but we can't scale them, they never become reality. We really focused in on how do you scale these innovations. That means really building not only organizations that can co-create, but also partnerships and sometimes whole ecosystems able to co-create.

Adi Ignatius (4:17)

So if Genius requires a collective approach, are most companies even set up to deliver on that?

Linda Hill (4:23)

Genius does require more collaborative approaches or collective approaches, and most organizations are not. There are three pieces to the puzzle of what you need to do to innovate. You have to be able to collaborate, which is really about dealing with difference. You have to be able to experiment and learn, and you want to be able to do that in a pretty efficient kind of way, because you cannot plan your way to an innovation, you can only act your way to one. So I think that's the other method. We can plan it all out, but no, that's not what you're trying to do. You are trying to create some discipline.