New Directions For Defense, A Big Ideas Special Event: Innovation Leadership is a Craft, with Peter Denning and Col. Todd Lyons [video]

Abstract

The Department of Defense and military services have all expressed grave concern over our ability to lead military innovations in the face of increasingly innovative adversaries. Innovativeness will come from individual leadership through all ranks, not from top-down initiatives. Future promotions will give increasing weight to demonstrated innovation leadership. This course defines a framework for innovation leadership, identifies its skill sets, and teaches them. We envision a military in which every service member is an innovation leader. Our current common sense tells us that innovation is hard to achieve (about 4% of innovation projects succeed), requires prodigious effort (90% of the work is in achieving adoption), and takes a long time (often over 10 years). It tells us to focus on creativity to generate new ideas and careful planning to sell and implement our ideas within our fields of action. This story makes innovation leadership seem like hard, unsatisfying work performed by a few genius-hero leaders who were lucky enough to be in the right places a the right times. We offer a new “common sense” grounded in the ideas that innovation is the adoption of a practice within a community and that there are discrete, learnable skills or practices for leading the innovation process. The innovation skill set consists of eight essential practices through which the leader intentionally generates innovations. Innovation leaders become navigators who find paths from the current world state to a new desired state, and mobilizers of networks of many contributors. Innovation leaders foster the conversations in which the requests, promises, offers, declarations, assessments, and assertions that contribute to adoption take place. This leadership is satisfying and rewarding.