harnessing tension to
drive INNOVATION From Eccles Executive Education
harnessing tension to
drive INNOVATION To fuel innovation in an organization, executives need to become mindful, ambidextrous leaders that aren’t afraid of failure.
BY CHRIS WASDEN (AS TOLD TO RACHEL FARRELL) 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. 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. To help address this problem, executives
The Four Phases of the Innovation Life Cycle
Stationary Bike Phase 1: Discovery
Mountain Bike Phase 2 : Incubation
Road Bike Phase 3: Acceleration
Hybrid Bike Phase 4: Scaling
need to develop “ambidextrous leadership.” an innovation discipline in their organization. Great leaders can hold two opposing ideas We explore the question, what is innovation in their head at the same time and still discipline? What are the processes and maintain the ability to function. They can lead the practices you put in place to enable an organizations that are mindless, lean and innovation discipline? Then we focus on the efficient, but they can also enable large parts discovery, incubation and acceleration phases of the organization to be very of the innovation life cycle. So, mindful and creative. where do good ideas come These leaders also view from? How do you discover failure as the raw material for them? How do you create innovative success. They aren’t and lead a discovery activity? afraid to embrace maladaptive How do you take things that I want executives to come tensions (which cause you to are discovered, evaluate them away from this program fail) and transform them into and determine what should adaptive tensions (which allow be incubated? What are the believing that their people you to overcome failure and incubation structures and improve incrementally) and processes? Who leads that, are more creative and creative tensions (which enable and how do they execute you to lead transformative these incubation processes? innovative than they change and come up with Where does the money come disruptive innovations). Most from? How much time do you thought. organizations are pretty good spend on it? How do you move at transforming maladaptive those ideas, prototypes and tension into adaptive tension, pilots to acceleration? How but pretty bad at the third one do you bring them to market? because of how they severely What is the timing and process penalize failure. and funding for that? What are the milestones In my executive education class on you‘re trying to reach? innovation, I work with executives to help them One of the exercises that I have participants understand how to become an ambidextrous do is write an “obituary” for their company. leader and how they can develop and deploy 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.
Meet Dr. Chris Wasden Dr. Chris Wasden is the Executive Director of the Sorenson Center for Discovery and Innovation at the University of Utah. Previously he was a Managing Director at PwC and the Global Healthcare Innovation Leader. As a global thought leader on Digital Health and the role that Social, Mobile, Analytic and Cloud technologies are transforming healthcare he has written and published over 40 articles and reports on the topic, and he speaks at over 30 events each year on how Digital Health is transforming the practice of medicine, the delivery of care, and the creation of an entirely new wellness paradigm based upon objective measures that lead to greater engagement and changes in human behavior. He advises leading companies on how mobile sensors and Digital Health innovations can create new markets and opportunities (AT&T, Telefonica, Vodafone, Swisscom, Sharp, HCSC, Nokia, RIM, Roche Diagnostics, Eisai Pharmaceuticals, Genentech, Partners Healthcare, just to name a few). He is a named inventor on 11 issued patents and has been a leader in 10 different startups where he developed many of his ideas around the innovation cycle and lifecycle and how fast, frequent, frugal, and failure accelerates innovation. Dr. Wasden has a doctorate in human and organizational learning from George Washington University in Washington, DC, an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School, and bachelor degrees in accounting (BS) and Asian studies (BA) from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
Dr. Chris Wasden Professor (Clinical), Entrepreneurship & Strategy Director, Sorenson Center for Discovery and Innovation David Eccles School of Business University of Utah
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