Linda A. Hill

You have found that in a business environment that demands innovation, it is no longer enough to be a value creator. Please explain.

The fact is, much more is expected from all of us today, because it takes more than ever to build a successful organization and sustain that success. The leaders we spoke to told us that it is not enough to be a value creator: you now have to be both a value creator and a ‘game changer’. Value creators know how to identify and close ‘performance gaps’ — the gaps between where you are now and where you should be; while game changers are able to close ‘opportunity gaps’ — gaps between where you are now and where you could be.

We define innovation as ‘creating something that is both new and useful’, and we found that sometimes you need to innovate in order to close a performance gap. But you definitely need to innovate to close an opportunity gap — and unless you have enough people who know how to do that, opportunity gaps will eventually become performance gaps. That’s because some of your competitors will close the gap, and your stakeholders will expect the same from you. That is why organizations need more people who know how to lead innovation.

In Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, you challenge the traditional concept of leadership as an individual, ‘heroic’ activity, describing scenarios where people innovate collectively. What is the role of the leader in this environment?

My colleagues and I became obsessed with the question, What do exceptional leaders of innovation do? Over a 10-year period, we studied 16 leaders in seven countries whose organizations have innovated repeatedly, and we observed their day-to-day behaviour. After spending hundreds of hours literally watching them work — at places like Google, Pixar and Pfizer — we found that leading innovation is really about one thing: creating a context in which others are both willing and able to do the hard work of innovation.

Although these leaders had vision, they didn’t define their role as that of a visionary — someone who creates a vision, communicates it and inspires others to follow it. In fact, several of them told us they don’t read books about leadership, because that is not what they ‘do’. One leader summed up what he thinks he does as follows: “My job is to set the stage, not to perform on it.”

When a leader succeeds at creating this context, she enables what you call ‘collective genius’. Please define this term.

As indicated, leaders of innovation face two key challenges: creating a place where people are willing to do the hard work of innovation — with all of its stresses and paradoxes; and creating an environment in which they are able to do this work. We found that the latter involves building your organization’s capacity for three things: collaboration, discovery-driven learning, and integrative decision making. Together, these elements constitute what we call Collective Genius. The most effective leaders build core capabilities in each of these areas: creative abrasion for collaboration; creative agility for learning through discovery; and creative resolution for integrative decision making.

Tell us a bit more about the core capabilities for Collective Genius.

‘Creative abrasion’ occurs when a leader succeeds in developing a marketplace of diverse ideas, often through discourse and debate. Rather than seeking a single flash of insight, these leaders know that possible solutions will emerge from a series of ‘sparks’, as group members play off of one another. We use the word ‘abrasion’ because, by its very nature, this involves a certain level of conflict and disagreement — and that’s why it works best when practiced by a diverse community whose members are bound by a common purpose.

‘Creative agility’ involves developing and testing different options by conducting rapid experiments, learning from the outcome — whether it be positive or negative — and making adjustments. An adjustment might entail a modification of the action just taken, but it could also involve determining that the experiment succeeded and should be scaled up, or that the idea just won’t work and should be abandoned. Along the way, people learn ‘what works’ and are able to evolve better options.

The third capability, ‘creative resolution’, is far from simple, because it concerns decision-making. The most innovative solutions are often a combination of ideas — including opposable ideas that were once considered to be mutually-exclusive. Even if you have mastered the first two capabilities, without an ability to make integrative decisions, innovative solutions will remain elusive.

Together, these three capabilities constitute a group’s ability to innovate, but they depend upon the group’s sense of community, based on common and compelling purpose and shared values — the key components of the willingness to innovate. The leader’s role here is to ensure that all of these elements are alive and well within his or her group.

You touched on the ability to work with ‘opposable ideas’. How does this play out?

With innovation comes a paradox: on one hand, you have to unleash ideas, talents and passions; and on the other, you have to harness these things, so they can be leveraged for the collective good. The leaders we studied told us that most innovations are not born as fully-formed ideas. More often, they are a combination of old ideas — or a reconfiguration of old ideas to deal with new problems and opportunities. And importantly, these are often ‘opposable’ ideas, in that they require putting things together that most people would never think of combining.

Here’s an example. Pixar ran into a critical problem when it needed to render two films simultaneously; but its ‘Renderfarm’ computer system was designed to handle only one at a time. They considered many solutions, but in the end, it seemed the only viable options were to buy or borrow more computing power. Cloud solutions at the time were inadequate, and buying all-new equipment was inordinately expensive, but Pixar knew this wouldn’t be the last time they ran into this problem. Borrowing the computing power (say, from Disney) wasn’t optimal either: Disney had its own network, file servers, software and operating systems, and they were incompatible with Pixar’s.

To solve the immediate problem, Pixar borrowed 250 of Disney’s servers, trucking four-to-five tons of equipment to its campus. Meanwhile, Pixar’s engineers focused on perfecting an automated installation process that, going forward, would allow the studio to borrow the computing capacity it needed from other organizations and get it up and running in a matter of one or two days. By combining the best elements of ideas that once seemed mutually exclusive, Pixar was able to

reach an innovative solution to its immediate rendering problem, while also developing a critical technical capability that would serve the studio in the future.

When you work with opposable ideas and try to combine them, it often leads you to re-frame your problem in a new way, and to take advantage of the best aspects of opposable alternatives to come up with a third — far better — solution. The tricky part is, once you unleash people and they create a marketplace of solutions, unless you have a decision process that allows for opposable ideas — or aspects of them — to be incorporated, you’re not going to get to the innovation. In most cases, one idea is selected and the other is discarded. But at places like Google, even when they pick one solution over another, they take what they have learned (and not used) and share it with other groups. They make sure to use all of the knowledge, and that often leads to combining ideas.

This ability to keep multiple options open requires what [former Rotman Dean] Roger Martin calls an ‘opposable mind’. As Roger explains in The Opposable Mind, people with this ability are able to hold two opposing ideas in their mind at once; then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they create a new idea that combines the two, but is superior to both. This explains why creative integration is so rare: for individuals and groups alike, working through complexity creates anxiety, and most people react to that tension by simplifying the problem into, stark alternatives, dealing with them separately, and eliminating all but one. Asking people to forgo this approach entails asking them to willingly live with ambiguity — which most of us avoid.

You have noted that innovation can be very emotionally taxing. Why is that?

My Harvard colleague Amy Edmondson’s work on ‘psychological safety’ explains a good part of it. In a psychologically-safe environment, people feel comfortable speaking up, disagreeing with others and sharing their ideas without fear of repercussions. But the fact is, most workplaces do not provide enough psychological safety.

Even in a psychologically-safe environment, innovation is emotionally taxing, because the process entails really giving of yourself. For instance, Kit Hinrichs, an innovation leader we studied at the design partnership Pentagram, told us that he still gets nervous whenever he presents at partner meetings. At- tendance at these meetings is mandatory, and the partners — renowned designers with international reputations — give each other blunt feedback on their work. As he told us: “You bare a piece of your soul, and you want the partners to say, ‘Wow, that was a knockout!’ And sometimes you get that; but sometimes you don’t.” When people are allowed to play out their passions, it puts pressure on them to do their best work.

Can Collective Genius be characterized as a form of ‘shared leadership’?

If you’re asking whether you can ‘get there’ without a leader— with more of a distributed leadership model — I think you can. But even distributed leadership involves people at the top focusing on proactively building a context. In that sense, leadership is distributed in most of the organizations we studied. For example, at Pixar, not one, but three people ran the organization: founder Ed Catmull worked very closely with John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. They always felt that it was the combination of the arts, technology and business that made them successful. They knew that they had to be able to work across those three areas, and together they built a context that enabled collaborative effort.

How does diversity fit into the Collective Genius scenario?

Bill is an exceptionally talented individual, and he certainly had vision, but he never saw it as his role to be a visionary. His belief was that talented people don’t want to follow you into the future; they want to co-create it with you. Not surprisingly, Bill and his colleagues tried to keep conventional management to a minimum. In the words of then-ceo Eric Schmidt, managers

One thing we found in these organizations is that they have lots of talented ‘cooks in the kitchen’ — and the cooks are all very different. What you have to do is get those cooks to collaborate, to get to that creative abrasion we discussed earlier. This is why unleashing diversity is one of the key challenges for today’s leaders. Of course, when you do that, you are bound to encounter conflict, and as a result, many leaders instinctively try to minimize diverse thinking — and to focus instead on what everyone has in common. But if you want to spark innovation, you need to create a marketplace of competitive ideas, and that means amplifying diversity — not covering it up.

One of the exemplars you focused on is Bill Coughran of Google. Can you describe his approach?

at Google were intended to be ‘aggregators of viewpoints, not dictators of decisions’. But that didn’t mean Bill exercised little influence: on the contrary, in his regular review meetings with each team throughout one major project we followed, he always asked difficult and probing questions, raised points of view that needed more attention, shared information about what the other teams were doing, and required each team to demonstrate that its ideas could work in a real-world setting via prototypes — then ‘bumping’ them up against the operations team, who shed critical light on the limitations of each ‘solution’. Throughout this process, Bill gave the teams autonomy and responsibility. He told us that one way to preserve a ‘bottom up’ culture where people take risks is to let them make choices — and even mistakes. These were some of the key ways he created an environment for innovation.

Google employees were, at the time, encouraged to pursue an exploratory project that interested them for up to 20 per cent of their time at work. But once these ideas required further investment, Bill and others had to figure out which ones to nurture. This exemplifies a fine balance between top-down direction and bottom-up initiative. So, while Google lacked many of the control mechanisms typical of a traditional organization, it did institute a number of management practices that fostered innovation, illustrating the importance of finding a balance between improvisation and structure.

You have described the leaders you met as holistic thinkers, yet action-oriented. Discuss this apparent paradox.

These people were definitely holistic or integrative thinkers: they embraced problems in all of their complexity, and truly enjoyed the process of unraveling them. Yet they could take action, too: they were highly inclined to try things out and experiment, again and again. They knew that solutions emerge from trial and error, not from thinking alone.

We also noted some other paradoxes about them. For one, they were generous, yet demanding. Leading for innovation is hard, never-ending work, much of it behind the scenes. If they’d wanted, most of these people could have been a star in their own right; yet they believed in fostering other peoples’ ‘slices of genius’, and letting them take the spotlight. That takes generosity and a willingness to share power, control and credit. Many of them were reluctant to be singled out when we talked about what their organization had accomplished; instead, they consistently pointed to the individual and collective talents of their colleagues. But at the same time, they held people accountable and expected results; they didn’t hesitate to change what wasn’t working or terminate people who couldn’t perform.

If you could change one characteristic of today’s leaders-intraining, to enable them to foster Collective Genius—what would you change?

I really wish we could help the leaders of tomorrow understand — and deeply believe — that everybody has a slice of genius. If you don’t believe that everyone possesses a slice—albeit, very different slices, of different widths and shapes—it is impossible to embrace Collective Genius, because you won’t recognize that everyone contributes to it.

In educational programs, we tend to teach people to focus on what makes them special, as opposed to fostering the notion that everybody is special, and that you have to appreciate the talents of others. The most innovative organizations out there are able to elicit and combine their members’ individual slices of genius.

Through your research, you got a preview of what lies ahead for leaders of innovation. Tell us about that.

A handful of the leaders we met were conducting experiments to learn how to address a rapidly-changing world. The problems they aspired to solve required reaching outside of their firm to locate collaborators — in some cases, across sectors. These leaders had recognized what research confirms: business problems no longer fit neatly into the ways companies and institutions — and even knowledge — have been typically organized. Finding solutions increasingly depends on the ability to combine organizations and categories of expertise that have previously been separate — and in some cases, have been in competition. These ‘futuristic’ leaders were building ecosystems that break down traditional boundaries between organizations and sectors.

In the end, you can’t plan for innovation or tell people to innovate. But here’s the good news: you can organize for it. Leading in an innovative context is about building an organization where individual slices of genius can come together to create a single work of Collective Genius. As indicated, this happens through collaboration, discovery-driven learning and integrative decision making. My co-authors and I firmly believe that organizations won’t be able to innovate consistently until they revisit their assumptions around what it means to lead innovation.