Your best people stopped bringing the risky ideas.
No one planned it. It happened by reward.
An interactive talk for organisations that want to sharpen their creative edge. The talent is there. The organisation rewarded the edge out of it.
The Domestication of Leaders
The best description of this problem I have heard came from a CEO. His leadership team were excellent. Competent, diligent, committed. Not one of them was a radical thinker, himself included.
A company that stops creating new things does not hold steady. It declines. He knew that, and he knew his people had stopped pushing for the new things. They had got too good at running the business well to risk changing it.
That is domestication. The organisation rewards the smoother version of its people. It stops rewarding the edge, the part of them that pushes and will not leave a thing alone. So the edge goes. Year by year the whole team settles at half its judgement, half its nerve, half the ideas it is capable of, and nobody chose it.
This is why an innovation programme does not touch it. It is built to add something, and nothing here is missing. The creativity is in the people already. They have learned to keep it to themselves. The talk does not try to put an edge back. It goes after what took the edge off.
Over thirty years putting creative thinking into business.
I have done it in corporates and in startups. Strategist in global advertising agencies. Managing director of a creative production company. CMO across several PE-backed businesses.
I have hosted London’s largest TEDx twice. Conference stages and industry events. PechaKuchas, offsites, more workshops than I could count. I have been doing this since the dot-com days, and spent as much time speaking as advising.
I know how the edge goes blunt in good organisations. Keeping it sharp has been the work.
“Clear, elegant writing about the need for leadership to be organic instead of mechanical.”
For teams that run well and have stopped taking risks.
Leadership teams that are excellent at the day to day, and know the appetite for the new has quietly gone.
Founders and CEOs watching the bold ideas slow to a trickle, who want to know why before it costs them.
Emerging leaders, before the organisation smooths their edge off. Keeping an edge costs far less than getting one back.
The edge comes back, and new ideas come with it.
Not a workshop forgotten by Friday. One change to what you reward. The behaviour follows.
It starts with the leaders. It does not stay with them. A team takes its cue from the top, which is how the caution spread in the first place.
Three things change.
People bring the risky idea.
They stop editing the bold option out before the meeting. You hear the idea that could move the business, not only the one that is safe to say.
The team challenges again.
The awkward question gets asked in the meeting, not afterwards in the corridor. Plans get tested while there is still time to change them.
The team gets better than any one of them.
Trust lets people build on each other’s ideas instead of guarding their own. The team reaches answers no one in it had alone.
None of this is about reckless bets. It is the opposite. It is a business that can back a bold idea on purpose, with its eyes open.
That is what we mean by becoming dangerous again. Not reckless. Grounded. Dangerous.
Forty-five minutes, or longer.
A forty-five minute talk with questions, or a longer working session with your leadership team. Built live on a flip chart, in front of you, not from slides. It works in three moves. For founder gatherings, leadership teams, offsites and executive education.
If this is the talk you’re after.
Tell me about it. The team, the occasion, and the edge you want back.
We take it from there.