If we want to build constantly innovating organisations, we need to rid ourselves of certain common ideas about leadership. Leading innovation is not about coming up with a vision and inspiring others to follow it. It is not a matter of an individual genius suddenly enlightened by a great idea.
The essence of innovation is collective genius. Innovation can only happen when entire groups of people work on it for long days, weeks, even years. This is the outcome of extensive research by Professor Linda Hill of the Harvard Business School, whose findings are discussed in a book entitled Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation and in a TED talk called How to manage for collective creativity.
What is collective genius?
Linda Hill is an ethnographer who focuses on research in the field of leadership. Along with three colleagues, she spent almost ten years monitoring the behaviour of exceptional leaders at work. The research focused on 16 leaders from seven different countries working in 12 different sectors.
They included the managers of Pixar or Google. Practical examples of the behaviour of these leaders are described in the aforementioned TED talk which was part of the 2014 TEDxCambridge conference in Boston. In her talk, Linda Hill explains, for example, that 250 Pixar studio people have to work for four to five years in order to produce an animated film.
"Innovation is a journey. It's a type of collaborative problem solving, usually among people who have different expertise and different points of view," explains Linda Hill. It is the result of much trial and error. Workers in innovative companies know how to ask questions, actively listen and promote their views. They know that innovation is not possible without disagreements and conflicts.
Innovative organisations don't make compromises. They don't let any individual or group dominate over others either. This is true even for bosses and experts. Instead, they create processes based on collective decision making.
TED talk
The full video of Linda Hill's speech is available here. The English interactive transcript is here.
Book
HILL, LINDA A. – BRANDEAU, GREG – TRUELOVE, EMILY – LINEBACK, KENT: Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014. 320 pp.
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