The reason this happens is because, for the last fifty-years, the MBA programs of the world have been busy teaching leaders all the skills required to administer and ‘continuously improve’ bureaucracies without realising that the better we get at deploying these skills, the worse our ability to innovate becomes.
Most leaders today know their expected to innovate, but they don’t know how. It’s often top of their priorities but bottom of their actions. Our strategic work with SLTs focuses on three main things:
Demonstrating that the future is much more predictable than we have been taught. Most black swans aren’t. This means innovation risk can be massively reduced.
Innovation is the other side of the same coin as resilience. Leaders can choose not to innovate, but no one today can sensibly choose to not be resilient. The skills required to build resilience are precisely the same as the skills required to innovate.
Innovating and building resilience is 1% IQ, 99% EQ.