Book excerpts - Ch1(E9): Managing dramas and innovations at scale.
Embracing innovators' dramas: A path to transformative mastery
Dramatic aspects of innovation explain why most innovation operations fail or deliver less than their potential.
Dramas occur When tensions and conflicts aggregate until they significantly impact their surroundings - and/or turn into overwhelming wicked problems. Innovators’ dramas evolve when personal and social affluences and scarcities mix during transformations until you either have skills or desires that you can't use or don't have when you need them.
If you're experiencing any form of innovator’s drama, don't ignore it - these feelings you have are the gateway towards an inner journey into the intrinsic and hyper-contextual obstacles of innovation operations - and your ticket to real transformative mastery through mindfulness.
But as long as innovation dramas and their entangled innovators’ dramas obscure our awareness and accelerate and escalate messes - strategizing, executing, learning, and developing innovation will remain limited to chance in most cases.
Developing robust and high-impact innovation systems requires accounting for dramas and developing more accountabilities. Innovators need to deal with overwhelming complications and complexities in conditions of scarcity and uncertainty. And they need to do it quickly and effectively.
Discussions, story-based explanations, and brainstormings have a limited capacity to sustain complexities. And they consume too much energy in the making.
We need a better approach in order to observe, process, and guide attention around multiple and often unpredicted dilemmas at scale.
Innovation becomes complicated and messy when the amount of dilemmas overwhelms emotional, intellectual, and mechanical intelligence, and we get stuck. So to support and guide creativities into where they matter most - we need to nurture open-mindedness, mindfulness, and agility.
Yet to innovate more, transform faster than the pace of change, nurture enlightenment, and create prosperity in conditions of scarcity - we need to see the big picture and fine details simultaneously. And we need to acknowledge dramas upstream; instead of paying for them downstream.
This way, we can assess Innovation intensities more accurately and manage our attention portfolios better by accounting more immediately to the three factors of innovation impact:
Breadth of acknowledgments
Stakeholders' accountabilities and creative characteristics
Intensity of innovation
In the next chapter, I will introduce a method for observing more with less. Using the Things To Be Done approach, we will quickly see if we acknowledge the necessary Jobs To Be Done. How well we evaluate our capacity to Get Things Done. And what intensities we should expect when things change, and we need to transform.
We will use a particular form of graph to mind the gaps between objective and subjective considerations.
We will look for particular types of issues that determine the PRICE of innovation.
We will clarify lacunas quickly to elevate awareness, direct attention, and evaluate efforts more accurately - ultimately improving how we assess the intensities of innovation, pacing our creative efforts more consciously, and nurturing the ability to never get stuck.
And most important, we will increase our individual and collaborative abilities to process and engage with dramas instead of surrendering to overwhelmedness and avoidance.
This publication is an excerpt from my book, The Innovators Drama. You can buy it at theinnovatorsdrama.com, or subscribe to read weekly excerpts here on Substack