Book excerpts - 0.3: Introduction to The Innovators' Drama
The role of the innovation manager is to guide, evaluate and accelerate innovation operations and transformation efforts.
However, the observable and hidden complexities of innovating often turn the innovation experiences into a confusing mix of excitements and frustrations. As innovators experience sisyphic oscillations between moving forward with transformations or getting stuck along the way, innovation becomes more and more dramatic, intense, and difficult to adopt.
This book aims to direct a spotlight toward one of the most prevalent, noticed, and least explored experiences of innovating - drama.
In this book, I will claim that, unlike common interpretations of drama as an obstacle to progress, dramas are actually Levers of high-impact transformations and innovations when they are managed effectively.
Because the word drama appears almost 600 times in this book, Let's make sure to define drama in practical terms first.
Drama
The phenomenon of drama occurs when tensions and conflicts increase, aggregate, and become unbearable. Dramas can occur due to external changes or internal biases. Dramas can escalate quickly or evolve gradually and slowly over time until they reach their disruption point. Dramatic situations can highlight needs and spark new ambitions and thus act as a catalyst for mindfulness. But more often, dramas introduce overwhelming messiness that becomes a source of anxiety. When dramas overwhelm us, they stop being an interface of progress and become an instrument of decay. This means that when we can manage dramas better and more mindfully, they can help us guide innovations and accelerate transformations.
The managerial burden of innovation dramas is the main source of an exponentially larger amount of (consequential) innovators’ dramas - and a significant factor in the failure of innovation operations to deliver high-impact and cost-effective transformational outcomes.
To reduce the burden of innovation dramas, we need to improve our capacity to acknowledge, articulate and effectively respond to different dramas that affect different innovators. Only this way will we be able to reduce the cost of dramas and measure the intensities of innovation. And ultimately transform faster than the pace of change.
If we want to increase progress and prosperity in the age of accelerated change, we need to innovate ten times more than we do in a tenth of the time it currently takes us. Only then will innovation capabilities scale and mature to meet the overwhelming gaps that keep carrying the past into the future.
I organized this book into three parts: Part one is a practical primer to attend innovators' dramas using an approach called Things To Be Done. Part two is a theoretical background for understanding how drama was invented and misused as a social technology. And part three is a series of contemplations on the benefits of mastering attention to dramas.
First, we will understand, articulate, and overcome pushbacks that trigger interfering dramas during innovation operations. And to do so, we will introduce a sense-making approach called - Things To Be Done - that helps innovation leaders, entrepreneurs, and intrapreneurs identify and overcome constraints at a surprising Speed. Using simple thinking activities and without any tedious preparations, anyone can identify and communicate pushbacks more clearly and contribute to improving creative mindfulness and efficiency.
After that, once we are no longer afraid of dramas, I want to address several drama-related issues: How has drama developed as a (classic) social technology? How leaders used drama to promote or prevent changes? What makes dramas so disruptive nowadays? And, what professions might inspire our management of dramas?
And finally, I would like to contemplate the benefits of a world in which dramas are mindfully attended, creatively pursued, and skillfully mastered.
I believe that we are getting closer to a breakthrough point in our ability to attend dramas differently. When dramas cease to be an interruption along the way to progress, they will become a compass to an abundance of effective and efficient transformations and prosperities.
I wrote this book with innovation managers, transformation mentors, and impact coaches in mind. But in the age of accelerated change and transformations, everyone could find themselves in this role, willingly or reluctantly.
If you are an innovator, and if you are stuck in the transformational flow, You need to embrace the drama in order to push through pushbacks. This book will show you how to do it quickly and effectively.