Managing Innovation teams in complex environments

Simon Willis – Medium

Most people blog by collecting nuggets of experience and sharing them in short posts over time. After a while, the posts accumulate into a big enough corpus that you get some sense of an overall picture and approach. This essay takes a very different approach, distilling 25 years experience into 4000 words of powerful argument. In twenty crisply argued propositions, the insight which comes from having created and led innovation teams shines through – as does the level of challenge to host organisations whose systems and instincts will invariably be configured to undermine and enfeeble such teams.

Anybody with any aspiration to innovate in a large organisation will find much to recognise here. And pretty much anybody with such aspirations will find much to reflect on and learn from. Running through the whole piece is the idea that innovation is fundamentally about people and how they behave with each other, culminating in the two final points:

Treat all people with respect.

Understand that great innovations are rooted in relationships and that all real relationships are non-transactional relationships.

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