Mindset before tools: How to Win Innovation

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer.

A few years ago, an art teacher made me understand that creativity is nothing like a flash of genius. It is a rigorous, methodical process that you follow step by step to reach the result you imagined. Later, sitting in my entrepreneurial innovation classes, the professor kept telling us that innovation is a muscle you have to train continuously in order to deliver useful solutions.

Those two ideas have never left me, because I see their absence almost everywhere. I have been fortunate to work in large organizations on three continents, and I always hear the same record playing. On one side, employees frustrated by the lack of innovation in their team. On the other, senior leadership reaffirming its desire to shake things up, break down walls and do things differently.

So if senior leadership is asking for it and employees want it, why does innovation fail to find its way into traditional organizations?

The easy answer is that the problem comes from the middle. If the top and the bottom are in sync, then the middle layer must be what’s blocking, right? If you stop reading here, you will walk away with a conclusion that is as comfortable as it is unfair.

The middle of an organization carries years of fine-tuned operational processes. Over time, those processes fossilize and become a burden that people execute without asking whether they are still relevant, on autopilot. Middle managers did not choose that autopilot: they are stuck in business plans and operational targets, and that is what they are evaluated on. Between the talk about innovation and what is actually measured, there is a disconnect. So innovation gets forgotten, because in the short term, it doesn’t show up in the numbers.

Asking people to innovate without defining what it means, without providing the necessary tools and without tackling the organization’s beliefs is stating a dream rather than an ambition. But this is not a lack of goodwill from leadership. The problem was never one side or the other: it is a matter of conditions, environment and approach.

Innovation is a Culture. Culture shows in behaviors, not on jerseys

An organization’s culture is the sum of the beliefs and behaviors of the people who make it up. You can post values on the walls; if no one embodies them, they end up like dusty graffiti and fade into the background. Innovation follows the same paradigm: people have to breathe it every day. Innovation become the Culture.

What soccer can teach those seeking innovation

Beyond its mathematical aspects, the geometry of the game, speed, passing angles, soccer is first and foremost a matter of mindset.

When you watch championship teams, you always find the same pillars, and each one says something about innovation.

• Focus. One game, one moment. A team thinking about ten things at once succeeds at none of them; neither does a team expected to innovate between two emergencies.
• The right to fail. Fail fast, fail often, and that’s okay. Life is not a flat, stable Euclidean plane: it is a Lobachevskian one, full of curves, highs and lows. Innovating means accepting that you’ll miss some shots.
• Preparation. Luck is what happens when opportunity meets effort. Good ideas rarely come to a team that hasn’t trained to look for them.
• Taking on challenges. Focus on what you control rather than what you endure, and face challenges instead of commenting on them.
• Routine. Consistency, discipline and good habits build a winning mindset. That is exactly the muscle to train.
• The team. None of these pillars holds if only one player embodies it. The mindset has to be shared.

What stands out is that none of these pillars is a tool. They are conditions. And conditions can be built.

The same process applies to innovation. Innovation is a process that requires a framework, direction, the courage to experiment, preparation, structure, routing, and the right team.

The team before the idea

You don’t win a cup with players who meet once a month, for a hackathon or a two-day event. Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman’s work on effective teams puts it differently: they identified six conditions that foster a team’s success.

In practice, the manager has to build a real team, diverse in its ways of thinking and stable over time, with a clear and inspiring mission. It needs the organization’s support, but also training, so that everyone shares the same definition of innovation. Without that, everyone trains a different muscle.

Size matters too. Innovation teams work best with fewer than ten people: no more than you can feed with two pizzas (depending on whether anyone’s on a diet). And above all, their members must feel safe: that is the condition for the right to fail not to remain a slogan.

The manager, behind the bench

This is where the middle, which we blamed at the start, becomes the key. In Football, the coach doesn’t score the goals, but decides almost everything that makes scoring possible. The middle manager plays that role.

They prepare the game plan and guide their team. They support, enlighten and encourage the team, without doing the work in its place. They also track the right indicators to measure the process and the achievement of innovation targets.

The manager is the only one who can translate leadership’s ambition into concrete conditions for the team. Provided they are also evaluated on it.

I love Ted Lasso, not least because of his coaching style, which is based on servant leadership. He listens, makes you feel secure enough to express yourself and to fail (red fish), and helps you to learn from your mistakes. When employees are not afraid of failing, their minds open up and they discover new frontiers. Have you noticed that countries where freedom of expression is not permitted tend to lack innovation and create art? A free spirit sees opportunities, while a closed one sees obstacles.

Ted Lasso also has no ego. He listens, delegates and creates an idea box where everyone can submit an idea, each of which is considered and evaluated. Ted also believes that innovation comes from the bottom up and not the other way around. Innovation can come from the clerk preparing the room for the players, the cook, the security guard and the fans, and he brings these ideas (the voice of the people) to the executives, ideas that no one in a senior position has imagined yet.
Ted delegates and trusts his team. He doesn’t micromanage and is optimistic and a firm believer in “all or nothing”.

BELIEVE

Sharing time

A team that never practices never develops a routine. For innovation, I recommend the 70–20–10 model.

• 70% of time goes to day-to-day operational processes, what the team is paid for.
• 20% goes to continuously improving that 70%, to stay competitive and work differently.
• 10% goes to disruptive innovation, free of any constraint.

The golden rule is simple as the 30% for innovation must never be eaten up by the routine of the 70%. That effort protection is what turns a one-off effort into a habit, and a habit into a muscle.

The Football boots doesn’t make the player

The best football boots have never turned a player into a star. What transforms a player is everything that came before, as discussed earlier. Innovation is the same: it’s not the tool that matters, it’s the process. It has to be clear, agile and centered on end users, backed by performance management and a real sharing of knowledge and lessons learned.

This process isn’t played alone. Co-learning, co-creation, co-design, co-innovation: every “co-” reduces the risk of the approach and makes everyone accountable for the result. Above all, it builds a culture of mutual support and collective intelligence, the kind that leads to solutions that meet everyone’s expectations. It’s the contagion effect.

The value equation

I like to sum all this up in an equation, where the value generated by innovation is a weighted sum of five dimensions:

Value = α × Human + β × Process + γ × Proposition + δ × Context + ε × Tools

People use tools and follow a process, in a given context, to deliver a proposition. The coefficients alpha, beta, gamma, delta and epsilon reflect the quality of each dimension. A high coefficient drives value up; a low or negative one drags it down.

The manager prepares the context, the processes and the tools, and is accountable for the quality of the team. Their job is to watch these coefficients the way a coach reads the game stats: to know when to step in and keep the focus on value.

Mindset before tools

Organisations that struggle to innovate do not lack ideas, will or means. They lack the focus, time protection, well-known and stable teams, and the sense of security that comes with the right to fail that we describe above, as well as the middle manager to hold it all together.
A winning team isn’t created through a speech. It’s developed through practice, one step at a time. So is innovation.

References:

6 Designable Team Conditions© (https://6teamconditions.com/teams-reimagined/framework)

What is Servant Leadership? (https://greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/)

https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en

Why Less Is More in Teams by Mark de Rond, août 2012, HBR (https://hbr.org/2012/08/why-less-is-more-in-teams)

Managing Your Innovation Portfolio, by Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff, may 2012 HBR (https://hbr.org/2012/05/managing-your-innovation-portfolio)