In the weeds. Innovating. Funny how both start with I.

David Maister has a fine post here about the Leadership/Management conundrum.

Advocating that someone energize a professional firm or group through ‘leadership’ is like advising someone to be talented. You either have what it takes to get people to see you as a leader or you don’t. And by the way, if you’re not yet sure whether you have this ability – you don’t! You would have known whether you had it or not by the time you got out of high school.

For the rest of us who don’t have this innate ability, all is not lost. What we need to do is stop pursuing the mirage of leadership, and start learning the model of how to be an effective manager – helping other people, individually and in groups, truly accomplish their potential. This requires putting the people being helped at the center of the discussion, not the leader. Management can be learned, but not if you’re trying to be something you’re not supposed to be and are probably incapable of being.

I like this post for lots of reasons. Of course, we also like allegory around here, so today, I'd prefer to read it as a general statement about our ability to get caught in our knickers. In this case, while suiting up to climb into that hairball called "Innovation."

It's not news I'm sure, but "leading" innovation is somewhat akin to turning pottery with a bulldozer. It's not particularly a Type-Alpha endeavour. As Martin Agency CD Mike Hughes is once reputed to have said to an impatient client: "It only takes 20 minutes to come up with a great idea. You just don't know when that 20 minutes is gonna come." I'm sure he was only partly kidding. Advertising is all about thinking--innovating--on demand, with the meter running. That's why it attracts the kind of people it does: Gammas who have a strange obsession with cliffs and a weird validation/authority complex thingy. (Another post on that one.)

But what about regular, sane folk pressed into service as part-time Edisons? Yes, those who like to schedule their spontaneity. What happens when they're tasked to--uggh--"think outside the box"?

Bring on the knickers. And schedule 3 meetings for every 1 you think you'll need.

Or, set the context by creating an inviolable holy ground around your project's purpose. And play ruthless exclusionary on unsanctioned heretics; be the Hammurabi of Hope.

Any breakthrough effort must set the context—provide its overarching relevance—in such a way that tinkering and hedging with its intent are viewed as blasphemous to the core effort and ambition. There is a very simple reason that this requirement must be in place: people get in their own way; their best intentions have the unintended consequence of diluting the power and the definition of high ROI opportunities.

People try and find ways to make themselves relevant. It’s human nature, but it can tend to undermine the essential nature of breakthrough creative efforts. Imagine a group you’ve sat in during the embryonic planning stages. Did you witness people referencing their previous “similar” experiences on such and such, or perhaps, find them (or yourself) translating past work into future potential skill on the particular project under discussion? Were they analogizing links to stuff they’d done in the past? Did folks wheel out ideas and “tweaks” that seemed, at least to some ears, to be tone deaf to the declared mission and ambition?

That’s because their minds are tenaciously looking to make connections between the idea and themselves, not between the idea and its ultimate benefactors. In many cases, we set to ‘flesh out’ a concept and end up, not growing it, but rather binding its feet

So maybe here's where group identity overcomes--okay, tramples--adherence to the idea. Belonging to the project becomes just as important (truthfully, often more important) as the intent of the project itself. In this way, unknowingly, we often nibble away at the original idea, at its power and purity, in order to maintain our connection to it. Our fanatical adherence to a noble and aggrandizing principle suddenly wanes because its realization and the execution may not need us. And it sucks to learn the future can, and sometimes must, happen without us. In this way, our ideas “abandon” us. Like baby birds, they flee the nest and fly.

In many spheres--I'm dealing, for instance, with architecture and development today--we see adherents of organic growth and free-markets suddenly become central planners and strict, sterile orderers, denying the self-organizing nature of ideas—their essential randomness and “imperfection”—in an effort to maintain authorship and control. Yes--we're commies in capitalist togs. Which brings up the second bugaboo – control. In other words, metastatic self-esteem. Also known as “self-strangulation.”

More pondering self-centered asphyxiation and white knuckles later, if I can round up the neurons.

[The above is reposted from here -- I'll have the white knuckles post up later]