Appreciating The Role Of The Executive Director in Productive Risk Taking

As I traverse into many projects internally and externally whilst concurrently looking out for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to my own business model – I appreciate the role of the Executive Director (a title I am vested with) in context of the learning organisation. Expanding on the role types portrayed in IDEOS book 10 Faces of Innovation, it’s important that we comprehend that at its very core, the role of the director is to keep production moving forward and being in charge of not just today but taking responsibility in making sure there is a tomorrow!

Essentially, the director juggles the balls to make new projects happen and to spawn a creative culture that nurtures input to drive what is termed as ‘innovation momentum‘. Remember, without innovation there is NO growth and there is NO future! We need to develop chemistry in teams and inspire a working state of creating something out of essentially nothing! You will need to delve deep into intra and cross company resources with a view towards leveraging collaboration. Referring to an anecdotal account from the book, IDEO’s David Haygood creates his own energy when he involved in a project and believes that the catalyst for innovation project is actually getting some ‘facetime’ with the key players. This means getting in front of top executives of major corporations and ensuring that everyone is on the same page. Whilst this is no simple endeavour and it’s often hard to setup such meetings, it’s the role of the director here to make things happen. It’s a universal truth that directing is 90% casting plus building an autonomous team whom can lead by example themselves. By creating a project team and motivating its members without formal authority, we are enabling emergent order and creating radical levels of innovation uptake in an enterprise. IDEO prolifically assert that the first toolset in the directors arsenal is the ability to conduct regular brainstorming activities in the organisation so as to allow diverse inputs and ideas to flourish. Nurturing serendipitous ideas at the embryonic stage allows for ultimately vastly superior team intelligence. This is distributed intelligence at play as you are tapping into explicit and tacit knowledge that would otherwise be siloed without the brainstorming approach. These efforts reinforce an attitude of wisdom and the director is therefore ensconcing a distributed intelligence model whereby the team is using its intellectual capabilities in a collective, collaborative and cooperative fashion. It’s important here to create this ‘zone’ as team members are able to self-select when to utilise personal ‘intelligence’ and critical thinking and when to rely on team intelligence before acting. Therefore, collectively, there are five traits outlined by IDEO that encapsulate the role of the director in context of innovation frameworks:

1. The Director gives centre stage to others: content to let others take spotlight, confident in the knowledge that behind the scenes come together never saw a Frank Capera on scene (except at the oscars)

2. Love finding new projects (step up and lead when the need arises, team chemistry as intrinsic part of project success, find and afford, delay or restructure project to accommodate right players)

3. Rise to tough challenges and expect hardships and up to task

4. Shoot for the moon , pursue bold strokes and layout goals that seem difficult or impossible to achieve, work back to make dreams a reality

5. Wield a large toolbox as solving problems in real time, improvise with whatever techniques and resources at the disposal, embrace the unexpected

With all of this said, I am rather inspired to continue in the execution of my own prescribed duties as the Executive Director. Retrospectively appreciating all that I have learnt through IDEO’s book, it’s often a case of vuja de for me as these are things that I have already conducted before instinctively through my own commercial and personal pursuits of happiness.