We know most innovations fail- but more often than not, that has nothing to do with consumer needs and market feedback.
Even before being tested in anything resembling a commercial context, ideas stumble because of organizational politics. Indeed: innovation often fails to happen because of obstructions from stakeholders inside the company, rather than because of the actual merits of the idea itself.
While it’s difficult to get objective measurements as to how many innovative projects and products are killed because of corporate politics, many of us who work around corporate innovation are all too familiar with the problem.
That’s why we invited Rob Haines, partner, and co-founder of Founders Intelligence, to address the politics of innovation at a recent Innov8rs Connect event. In his talk, Rob framed how we should see corporate politics, examined the different types of actors who may oppose innovation in the boardroom and shared tips on how CEOs, CDO's and corporate innovators can navigate political challenges.
Here’s a summary of the conversation we’ve had (or check the full session recording here, if you are a member of Innov8rs Community).
Framing “Politics” Properly
With many of us having been burned by corporate politics in the past, it can be quite easy to succumb to rage and resentment. Rob certainly had felt this way in the past when executives killed projects he and his team had worked on.
After a particularly frustrating case, though, Rob realized that there was a question to ask; why do political blockers arise? While it was corporate politics that killed the project, Rob was curious as to what that meant. He ended up considering the relevant definition of “politics” in the Oxford English dictionary: “matters concerned with getting or using power within a particular group or organization.”
Ultimately, “politics” often means individual actors acting in their own logical self-interest.
There’s something reassuring about this fact, since self-interest is often very understandable and predictable. Rather than being indignant, Rob realized there was a good lesson to learn - maybe through characterizing people’s interests, he could make a plan to navigate political issues in the boardroom.
The Five Types of Blockers
Drawing on his background in consultancy, Rob profiled the sorts of stakeholders who may serve as blockers on corporate innovation. As a result, he came up with five archetypes of anti-innovation stakeholders: the Alpha, the Defensive, the Complacent, the Risk-Averse, and the Unimaginative.
The Alpha
Most of us can probably recognize this sort of character, owing to how common they are in the boardroom. Alphas typically have aspirations to be the CEO, and in today’s corporate culture, they know that being seen as the organization’s leading innovator is often instrumental to making their case to become the chief executive to the board.
This is a good thing in that Alphas are generally supportive of growth and innovation. But there’s a big proviso to this - they usually insist on a given innovation being done in their business unit, allowing them to claim prestige.
If an Alpha can’t get what they want, they’ll often be willing to kill or undermine a project to deny that prestige to another executive.
The Defensive
The Defensive, unlike the Alpha, isn’t drawn to innovation. They just want to deliver what they need to deliver in the near term, keep their bosses happy, and avoid doing anything to avoid being caught in the crosshairs. Additionally, the Defensive shares with the Alpha the desire to deny other executives prestige - except while the Alpha does this to secure relative prestige from themselves, the Defensive does this to avoid them being seen as a low performer.
Usually, the Defensive will justify their aversion to innovation by making an ambiguous argument, or through framing minor or transitory issues that may arise through the innovation as existential risks to core business functions.
The Complacent
The Complacent often seems very similar to Defensives, in that they usually argue that a business needs to focus on its core business functions. They will often overplay minor or passing challenges and focus on tradition and continuity.
But as suggested in their name, the Complacent is doing this from a place of instinctive conservatism and passivity rather than any desire to maintain their relative status. They’ll often focus on the positives of a business doing what it has always been good at and minimizing exposure to risk.
The Risk Averse
In turn, the Risk Averse can often seem awfully similar to the Complacent. The Risk Averse will typically focus on the relative risks of a course of innovation as a reason to avoid pursuing it.
Compared to the Complacent, though, the Risk Averse’s main problem is difficulty with processing uncertainty. Typically they will focus on a perceived lack of data to justify a course of action, with the Risk Averse placing an incredibly onerous burden of evidence on innovators to persuade them. Given that innovation often requires risk-taking and uncertainty, the Risk Averse’s approach is often at odds with many attempts at corporate innovation.
The Literal
Finally, the Literal suffers from a lack of imagination. The Literal will often have trouble appreciating subtle differences between different projects and have real problems with being able to imagine what innovation would look like.
The Literal will often object to a proposed innovation by mistakenly conflating it with another existing project or product, arguing that it’s too lacking in concrete details, or they may outright fail to understand the need that an innovation could fulfill.
Needless to say, none of the categories above are mutually exclusive - it’s quite likely many blockers will present characteristics from across multiple categories. Additionally, while you could probably also categorize and profile the supporters of innovation in your organization, it goes without saying that since those people are on board, they won’t need as much managing as your blockers.
How To Strategize Around Political Roadblocks
While the profiles above may seem quite negative characterizations, they shouldn’t be taken as character assassinations.
Instead, the best way to make sense of them is as ways to identify how exactly you should proactively manage the stakeholder in question. When Rob gets to the planning phase of the project, the above profiles often can serve as good ways to find out who should sit on the governance board and who should be responsible for the funding of it.
Rather than use phrases like “politics” when hitting roadblocks for innovative projects, Rob encourages you to instead look at them through the lens of the logical self-interests of opposing parties.
Once that’s set up, start laying the groundwork ahead of time to facilitate a project and ensure that relevant self-interests are either appeased or aligned. It's your job to constantly ask yourself during a project if it remains bold enough to meet your state ambitions. This step is crucial to avoid proposals or innovations being watered down or killed by a thousand cuts or compromises.
So, in short, overcoming political blocks to innovation takes three general steps:
- Know your enemy: Use a framework to work out what kind of self-interests you need to manage
- Do the groundwork: Structure things to encourage innovation as opposed to self-interest from the get-go
- Be bold: Regularly ask yourself if your current plans and actions will be bold enough to meet your overarching ambitions.
But what does this process look like this in practice? To help, Rob sketched out the strategy of three players to ensure innovation succeeds against political interests - that of the CEO, the Chief Digital Officer or Head of Strategy, and finally the Innovation Manager.
The CEO’s strategy
If you’re a CEO who wants to boost innovation, but you know that your board has executives who will always be blockers to your ambitions, you have two options.
- Create a different governance structure for approving investments in innovation
- Replace individuals that serve as blockers to innovation
Once that’s done, you should do the groundwork. For example, if you want to hire a Chief Digital Officer or someone who is responsible for handling technology-led growth, you need to deliberately plan to ensure that on joining such a person has immediate access to budget and power to pursue ambitious growth initiative that will connect with the core business. A classic failure is hiring a person without having prepared a home for them - usually, this means lots of wasted time, energy, and money.
Finally, a CEO also needs to remember that innovation is, by its very nature, disruptive. Even in the most collegiate and selfless team, you’ll likely run into difficulties. Innovation will likely force uncomfortable changes in the established way of doing things in at least one business unit, meaning that there’ll almost certainly be resistance that you will need to manage.
Politics, sadly, is inevitable. Part of the role of CEO has to be in being bold and forceful and making tough decisions that can go against the interest of other executives. When things heat up, a CEO has to make a call.
The CDO’s strategy
If you’re a CDO or a Head of Strategy, on the other hand, you’ll need to from the get-go work out the supporters that you need and those that don’t. You can waste a lot of effort by trying to make everyone happy. Instead, you should target the stakeholders you’ll need because they will have a say in if your proposal is approved and is given room to succeed.
Then, you should keep an open line of communication with the CEO and help prepare and brief them for political concerns that may rear their head. Ultimately, when a dispute happens, the CEO will both benefit and appreciate having access to good information to help make a call, as opposed to being surprised by political disputes as they do arise.
Then, finally, you need to be able to go all-in when it does come to tussles and competitions with other executives and to stand up for your innovation against their interests. You need to be able to stand by your innovation and make it clear that your ability to do your job and continue with the team is contingent on it being supported by the leadership team.
The Innovation Manager’s strategy
The final actor Rob set the innovation strategy out for was the innovation manager - that is, the person in the organization who’s down in the trenches and putting an idea to market.
The innovation manager has a rather brilliant opportunity to ignore the politics to some extent and build bridges with other stakeholders who are also interested in putting a new product and service to market and don’t have anything to lose by supporting them. In this way, innovation managers can largely diffuse the politics by pretending they haven’t heard of these concerns, getting on with what needs to be done, and guaranteeing that it’s implemented well.
In terms of groundwork, the innovation manager should be incredibly rigorous in developing material to present their case for further investment or approval. This helps get blockers like the Risk Averse aboard while also providing good supporting material for the CDO and CEO to help make their case when political disputes arise.
Finally, it’s worth being bold and not being afraid to report your observations from developing and delivering an innovation up the chain. Don’t be afraid to correct factual errors from up above, emphasize your stance when you feel there’s an issue, and offer your counsel if it could help encourage positive change.
Regardless of your role, when it comes to overcoming corporate politics that may be impeding innovation, Rob advises sticking to the three general steps: develop a framework to make sense of people’s interests, do the groundwork ahead of time to arm yourself in disputes, and be bold when you feel it’s necessary. Through this, you should be in a good position to elevate innovation over self-interest (and increase your success rate overall).