January 2002

Innovation Tips

…for thriving on collaborative innovation

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Any Road Could Take You There

“When you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.” We may have read that aphorism before and thought, “The absence of planning, what folly! A recipe for disaster.” Viewed from the traditionally masculine approach to organizational management, not knowing where you’re going is laughable. The traditional approach says we must have a plan; we must know what road to take to get to our destination. It must be budgeted and defined and well thought out in advance. The success of an organizational leader is defined by his ability to articulate a direction and then stick to it.

And there certainly is something to be said for planning and having a firm direction.

But balancing that approach is another one also alluded to in that aphorism: a more feminine, profoundly responsive approach to leadership. It is responsive to both opportunity and the ideas and insights from within the organization.

Such an approach leads us to this paradox: Organizations could arrive at a destination more successfully if the leadership didn’t know exactly how to get there, if the leadership was not exactly certain which road to be on.

This may sound improbable, but let’s think about it. Creative ideas can flourish amidst uncertainty. When people are not completely reliant upon a manager for their marching orders, they have a chance to take the initiative.

Strategies that are too well defined by leadership can stifle the creative ideas of the people doing the work. They can become too focused, like drones, on getting the work out, rather than on innovating to more effectively achieve the organization’s purposes. If people feel that a leader is unequivocally certain about process and strategy, they will be less likely to contribute ideas that are outside the norm. Yet that is precisely where the best ideas come from.

Uncertainty can generate greater egalitarianism. If a leader is uncertain and is willing to entertain the certainty of others—it opens the door for others to voice their ideas and their perspectives.

A rigid direction also has a way of canceling out dynamic opportunities. The organization that has a rigid, unyielding strategy can be too narrowly focused on fixing problems, rather than on capitalizing on the serendipitous and unexpected successes that may lie just outside that strategy—that may be on a different and even more successful road to its destination.

It is certainly important for everyone to understand the purpose of the organization—to understand its fundamental mission. But it is not so important to have rigidly defined strategies for attaining that mission.

Better to let that purpose serve as a guiding instrument that engenders many potential strategies and many ideas. When you engage the people doing the work in generating ideas, projects, and strategies to achieve the purposes of the organization, virtually any of their roads can take you there. They can take you to a fuller and more abundant achievement of the organizational mission.

Make the purpose of the organization clear, but ease up on controlling how that purpose is achieved.

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