Anyone who has tried to bring a new idea to life inside an established organization has probably learned that brainstorming is the fun part. It’s getting to launch — or internal deployment — that’s hard.
That journey from concept to reality is a big focus of the new book Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation, by Linda Hill, Emily Tedards, and Jason Wild.
In a recent interview with Hill, she said that in the course of writing the book, the co-authors found that “leading innovation was actually becoming more complicated, particularly given the speed at which the world is changing and technologies are changing.” The book builds on the ideas introduced in an earlier book she co-wrote, Collective Genius.
Here are three ideas Hill touched on in our conversation:
1. Innovation leadership is not about lone visionaries; it’s about creating the conditions for collective creativity.
“Innovation is not about some individual having an individual genius having an ‘a-ha’ moment,” Hill says. “Innovation is usually the result of diverse people with diverse talents and points of view, being able to collaborate and experiment and learn together. …Leading innovation is not about saying, ‘I have a vision. Follow me to the future.’ It’s about saying, ‘Let me create the conditions that will allow others, inside and outside the organization, to be willing and able to collaborate, experiment, and learn.’ It’s very basic, very hard stuff to do.”
2. Innovation at scale requires three different leadership roles: architect, bridger, and catalyst.
Architects create innovative organizations. Bridgers connect people across boundaries in the organization. Catalysts help shepherd ideas along, within organizations and across ecosystems of partners.
Hill says, “I’ve been doing a series of roundtables…of C-suite executives, and one of the things they’re telling us is they actually need more leaders in the middle who know how to be bridgers. …If you want to create GenAI solutions or agentic AI solutions, you need people who are bridgers between tech and business. And what we’re hearing is many, many organizations don’t have enough of those [people] who can do that bridging between tech and business. That is really a talent need they are desperate for.”
3. Innovation requires trust.
Because innovation typically involves experimentation, disagreement, and risk, people will only collaborate across teams or organizations when they trust one another. “We know how emotionally and intellectually challenging innovation is,” Hill says. So “why am I going to try to do collaboration, experimentation, and learning with you if I don’t trust you?”
“We’re human, right? And none of us like to work with people…that we don’t trust, or we don’t think are taking into account our interests. We’ve actually found that that that makes a huge difference,” she says.
(Featured image by kyler trautner on Unsplash.)
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