Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation
241
Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation
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Overview
A case study of how an award-winning start-up used a large-scale collaboration to achieve a bold objective, and what it shows us about leadership.
Machiavelli famously wrote, “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
That’s what this book is about—innovation far more audacious than a new way to find a restaurant or a smart phone you can wear on your wrist. Amy C. Edmondson and Susan Salter Reynolds explore large-scale systemic innovation that calls for “big teaming”: intense collaboration between professions and industries with completely different mindsets. This demands leadership combining an expansive vision with deliberative incremental action—not an easy balance.
To explore the kind of leadership required to build the future we need, Edmondson and Reynolds tell the story of Living PlanIT. This award-winning “smart city” start-up was launched with a breathtakingly ambitious goal: creating a showcase high-tech city from scratch to pilot its software—quite literally setting out to build the future. This meant a joint effort spanning a truly disparate group of software entrepreneurs, real estate developers, city government officials, architects, construction companies, and technology corporations. By taking a close look at the work, norms, and values in each of these professional domains, we gain new insight into why teaming across fields is so challenging. And we get to know Living PlanIT’s leaders, following them and their partners through cycles of hope, exhaustion, disillusionment, pragmatism, and renewal. There are powerful lessons here for anyone, in any industry, seeking to drive audacious innovation.
“Building the Future provides a rare inside look at how a start-up company takes on the world and copes with numerous challenges along the way. Go it alone or partner? Keep the bold goal or go for small wins? Seize other opportunities in technology or stick with the smart-cities plan? Edmondson and Reynolds present thought-provoking lessons for those who want to dream big and need big teaming to get the work done.”—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and bestselling author of Confidence andMove
“This unique book by a brilliant researcher and a veteran journalist not only illuminates the problems of large-scale innovation for a sustainable future but, in the process, teaches us about industry cultures, leadership, and the massive problems of collaboration in an increasingly complex multicultural world.” —Edgar Schein, Professor Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of Helping, Humble Inquiry, and Humble Consulting
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626564213 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Berrett-Koehler Publishers |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 241 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Susan Salter Reynolds is a former Los Angeles Times features writer and columnist. For twenty-three years, she covered thought leaders, cultural trends, and controversial issues and continues to write for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including the Daily Beast, Newsday, Los Angeles Magazine, and others.
Read an Excerpt
Building the Future
Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation
By Amy C. Edmondson, Susan Salter Reynolds
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2016 Amy C. Edmondson and Susan Salter ReynoldsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62656-421-3
CHAPTER 1
Building the Future
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. — Machiavelli, The Prince
BUILDING THE FUTURE. TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND CONSIDER WHAT THIS means, living in the twenty-first century. It doesn't mean the next iPhone, the next electric car, or even the first molecular teletransporter (à la Star Trek). These could all certainly qualify as life-changing, history-shaping innovations, but building the future does not mean building isolated products. The lone innovator bathed in cathode-ray green lights in his garage late at night designing the next amazing thing is not the protagonist of our story.
We are interested instead in innovations that constitute a new order of things — interacting elements that must work together and simply aren't worth much alone. When we talk about building the future, we're talking about bringing new complex systems into being. This book explains why this is so hard and what leaders can do to make it easier.
The very phrase building the future has two critical parts, the verb and the noun. Building captures the process of constructing something, of putting pieces together into a new integrated whole. The noun, the future, is the target. Envisioning the future is only the first step toward building it. What's the next step? Read on.
You could say that with every step each of us takes, we are, in fact, building the future: each time we use resources carefully, each time we remember to turn out the lights, each time we choose a bicycle over a car. While it is certainly true that the future is always unfolding — arriving whether we actively pursue it or not — some pioneers glimpse technological or societal possibilities before the rest of us do, and they set out to make them happen. Building the future is about bringing a desired future into being on purpose.
Today we have the opportunity to build the future consciously and proactively. Building the future is by its nature audacious innovation. Inherently creative, building a desired future is fueled by vision and realized through experimentation. Our research focused on the built environment as a particularly timely and vital arena for future-building. We studied people from organizations in several industries that contribute to innovation in the built environment, and we learned that it requires intense collaboration and a particular kind of leadership. As we will see, future-building takes time — and failure is a necessary part of the journey.
A New Order of Things
Future-building is hard. When success requires introducing what Machiavelli, in the sixteenth century, called "a new order of things," success is likely to be elusive. This is because bringing together diverse elements (technologies, plans, people, or organizations) to create a functioning whole presents countless ways for integration to break down. Teaming across disciplinary and industry boundaries is needed to respond to the spectacular challenges the world faces today, but it requires a new way of working, a new way of thinking, and a new way of being.
Future-building challenges are not limited to the built environment. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was a terrifying example of a specific need for a novel systemic response, enacted by diverse organizations working together around the world. A response had to be designed on the fly under enormous pressure, while more and more people inside and outside Africa were diagnosed with the disease. Government, healthcare, university, and nonprofit organizations with varying priorities were forced to work together. President Barack Obama appointed Ron Klain as (the unfortunately titled) "Ebola czar" to help coordinate the diverse inputs of all of these groups. The idea, as reported (and hotly contested) at the time, was that the situation called for someone who could set priorities and get government agencies and private-sector organizations of all kinds to work together to innovate. Its success was also contested.
The 2010 rescue of 33 Chilean miners trapped beneath 2,000 feet of rock harder than granite was another such situation. Against all odds a magnificently coordinated and highly innovative rescue operation unfolded — knitting together the ideas and efforts of experts from multiple countries, industries, and sectors to produce a novel process and a remarkable outcome. The leadership practices that allowed this success are remarkably similar to those we develop in this book.
In these examples crisis-motivated innovation required cross-boundary collaboration. Other cases of future-building involve pioneers setting the forces of complex innovation in motion. Consider the emergence of the telecommunications system a century ago. It starts, of course, with the invention of a telephone, and before that its subcomponents — the mechanical acoustic devices for transmitting speech and music over a distance greater than that of normal human interaction. But to function in its intended way, the telephone required a complex infrastructure of components — wires, poles, monitors, switches, protocols, regulations, and more, extending over vast geographies — to be developed around it.
Sometimes future-building requires little in the way of technological innovation — just system building. When Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx, wrote a college term paper on the idea of an overnight-delivery service, he could not possibly have imagined — or single-handedly developed — all the moving parts that would be required to turn that vision into the $27 billion company it is today. What he did imagine was "a completely different logistics system."
Working as a charter pilot, Smith could see the extent to which air travel was used to fly packages around, primarily for big companies like IBM and Xerox. The logistics, as reported by fellow pilots, were a nightmare. Airfreight at the time, Smith noticed, relied on passenger planes. What was needed was a whole new infrastructure that would take the logistical burden off passenger airlines and centralize it. He envisioned a nationwide clearinghouse and an integrated system of cars, trucks, and planes. His system required sophisticated information technology (IT) to allow unprecedented precision and a new way of tracking items as they moved around the world. For the service to function as intended, the tracking system would need handheld computers and machine-readable, sequentially numbered bar codes. It required obtaining new radio frequencies and designing new equipment for trucks. Government deregulation of the airlines in 1978 was the final piece of the puzzle, clearing FedEx for takeoff. Smith, leading the innovation journey that put all of these parts together, thus created a whole new order of things.
What It Takes to Build the Future
Future-building is creative and iterative but not haphazard. It is interdisciplinary, and it takes leadership to bring it about. While few would advocate for rigid organizational hierarchies anymore, understanding and practicing the new forms of leadership that enable complex, team-based, whole-system innovation is — we'll say it again and again — challenging. In this book we describe two basic requirements that entrepreneurs and leaders of mature organizations alike must embrace to build a sustainable future.
The first is a new kind of collaboration that spans more (and more-diverse) groups than ever before. We call this Big Teaming. The second — essential to enabling the first — is leadership that blends big vision and small action to pursue audacious innovation. Big vision inspires, calling attention to what might be possible. But achieving big vision is never straightforward. It is essential to empower people to experiment with small action that might, with luck and skill, help bring the vision about. In the case study of a smart-city startup that runs throughout this book, the challenge of spanning industry boundaries looms large, while experimenting through small action proves both elusive and essential.
Big Teaming
Many organizations have shifted to a new way of working that makes teaming and learning part of the job. Prior work on teaming includes examples of people in crisis situations working together to surmount seemingly impossible, but finite, challenges. In such situations people often team up across geographical, social, and cultural boundaries to get the job done. Building the future takes teaming to the next level. The same fundamental principles apply, but the distances between players are greater than when we encourage cross-functional teamwork within a company. The boundaries are more difficult to cross. Goals are more often at odds. And clashing professional cultures are likely to inhibit meaningful communication.
In this book we highlight both the challenges and the opportunities that lie in teaming across the cultural divides that separate people in different industries. To do this we first must explore how industry cultures differ, taking a deep dive, chapter by chapter, into five domains — information technology (chapter 3), real estate development (chapter 4), city government (chapter 5), architecture and construction (chapter 6), and the modern corporation (chapter 7). As we do so, we follow the ups and downs of a startup's efforts to span these industry boundaries. In each chapter we supplement our field research with published sources to paint fuller portraits of the industry than our case study could provide on its own. We then take a look, in chapter 8, at why it's difficult to collaborate across these worlds and what leaders can do to facilitate it. Chapter 9 updates our case study and concludes with ideas about how leaders can integrate big vision with small smart action.
Leading Audacious Innovation
Future-building leadership starts with imagination that fuels vision: ambitious, bold, creative vision informed by deep expertise in a relevant field and yet paradoxically open enough to adapt when needed. Such vision thus has three essential components; it's bold, it's meaningful, and it's open to adaptation as more is learned.
Big vision must be followed — and dynamically realized — by small action: small, tentative action that is deliberately framed as an experiment and that builds knowledge quickly. This iterative process of action, feedback, and learning expects and tolerates failure on the way to success. It takes a particular leadership mind-set to cope with the contradictory demands of envisioning and advocating audacious new possibilities while engaging in small imperfect action, not to mention the contradictory demands of believing in one's own vision while enrolling a host of other experts to help transform that vision.
Balancing the competing goals of influencing and innovating is thus a new and essential leadership practice for future-building. When you're doing the new-new thing, it is easy to prioritize activities that build credibility in the external world, such as giving talks and building relationships with prestigious players in varied sectors. This can mean that the actual work of the organization — the day-to-day work of innovating and developing products and people — takes a backseat to selling a story and building a reputation. The charisma and excitement that swirl around a pioneer's vision are critical for drawing people into the orbit, building a solid team, generating funds, and building the ecosystem of players it takes to realize that vision. But a leader's focus must encompass the outside and the inside, influencing (vision) and innovating (action). Through our multicultural journey across the various industries with which we came into close contact during our study, we offer some ideas about how to manage this tension.
In sum this book proposes that building the future requires three crucial, ongoing activities: building a shared vision that evolves as more is learned, building meaningful cross-sector relationships, and building an iterative collaborative process. The diagram Leading Audacious Innovation through Big Teaming depicts these activities. To explain why they matter — and how to bring them about — we use a case study that highlights both the opportunities and the challenges of Big Teaming for audacious innovation.
A Case Study of Future-Building
This book is our way of wrapping our minds around these enormous challenges by studying people who, one brick, one dollar, one sensor at a time, sit in meetings and in front of computer screens and occasionally get out to see a physical landscape in their efforts to create a new order of things. In fact, so much is new about these efforts that it can be hard for observers (and even for those involved) to know what to make of the promises, the expectations, and the progress along the way.
Our ideas are conveyed with the help of a longitudinal case study — a human story that reveals certain truths about managing complex innovations — supplemented by archival research on smart-city projects carried out by other organizations and by interviews with leading thinkers and practitioners in related fields. These additional sources help us set the context that gave rise to the founding of the small company at the center of our research: Living PlanIT. We watched the company grow and change, stumble and get back up, and reinvent itself. Sometimes we thought we could see the future of Living PlanIT alongside the Apples and Googles and Facebooks of the world. Other times we wondered whether Living PlanIT could navigate the seemingly insurmountable challenges ahead.
Living PlanIT was pursuing a bold vision. When we encountered the company, its scope — building a brand-new sustainable high-tech city from scratch to lead the way to building more such cities around the world — was breathtaking. The company struggled with doing anything small, anything partway. We learned of the team's conviction that being big was integral to their strategy. It seemed, sometimes, that it had to be all or nothing. But what might the company do to test its vision, develop its strategies, and make steady progress toward the ultimate prize of building the future?
Whatever the long-term fate of Living PlanIT, we could not have chosen a better opportunity to learn what building the future truly involves. The company gave us a rare opportunity to glimpse a group of creative, hardworking people pursuing a dream. Intrigued by the promise of smart-city innovation, at times we suspended disbelief. To set the stage for our research, we start with some background on the urban built environment, drawing from the chorus of voices that has considered its challenges and opportunities.
The Built Environment
To study how pioneers introduce a new order of things, we chose to focus on the built environment because of the opportunity it affords for audacious innovation. Long a laggard in the innovation landscape, the built environment today is suddenly again a target for change. Just as Renaissance visionaries like Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Wren combined applied mathematics and philosophy to introduce revolutionary advances that transformed the size, span, and strength of buildings, modern-day visionaries are recognizing the potential to transform what we build — and how we build it — by leveraging advances in materials and information technologies. Buildings and cities, they argue, can be smarter, greener, more efficient, and more livable. And many have begun to believe that there are business opportunities to be exploited in making them that way. Today, as we explain in chapter 2, these activities are called the smart-city industry.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Building the Future by Amy C. Edmondson, Susan Salter Reynolds. Copyright © 2016 Amy C. Edmondson and Susan Salter Reynolds. Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc..
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Table of Contents
1. Building the Future2. Glimpsing the Future
3. Bits and Bytes
4. Location, Location, Innovation
5. Rethinking City Hall
6. Grounded Visionaries
7. The Organization Man Revisited
8. Confronting Culture Clash
9. The Future Stalls; the Future Begins