Sometimes, thinking outside the box isn’t ambitious enough to get real innovation flowing. In her new book, Rosabeth Moss Kanter encourages organization leaders to think much more broadly at what restricts creativity and how to overcome it.
Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time is to be published today. Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
In addition to her many years of teaching and research at HBS, Kanter cofounded the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University, where senior and retired executives learn to develop leadership skills in the service of solving large social problems. Many of the examples in the book come from her experience leading that program.
Sean Silverthorne: We’re all familiar with the idea of thinking outside the box to spark innovation, but you argue that just as important is “thinking outside the building.” What’s the difference between the two?
Rosabeth Moss Kanter: One difference is in scope, and thus the power of the resulting innovation. Thinking outside the box is a good start but a bit small. Going just a little beyond conventional wisdom isn’t enough to produce significant innovation; we must go further. Our thinking can too easily get confined by silos and structures that limit us to what is familiar, what we see every day, what the people around us think and believe.
The other consideration lies in what a building means. It is a concrete (literally) manifestation of a fixed structure and thus hard to change from inside it. Buildings are metaphors for institutions, which are hard-and-fast conventions and establishments that have become fixated on preservation and maintenance rather than innovation and change. Look at how we personify buildings: “Headquarters wants .…” “The Pentagon says ....” In today’s fast-paced world, fixed structures can weigh you down, can make agility and resilience very difficult, and can stifle the entrepreneurial spirit, which is just as important for legacy companies as for startups. So it is important to go outside for a little fresh air and exploration of new modes that might already be springing up around you.
Going just a little beyond conventional wisdom isn’t enough to produce significant innovation; we must go further.
Silverthorne: You argue that an essential skill to master for creating an edge in the innovation economy is the ability to tell stories, to motivate others to join you on an unknown journey. What are the key ideas behind learning to be a storyteller?
Kanter: Effective leaders are storytellers. While certainly conversant in data and PowerPoint slides, they inspire others to join them on a quest for change by weaving compelling narratives that connect past, present, and future. Sometimes that involves showing that history can be interpreted in a different way, so that people don’t see the status quo as an inevitable result of past actions. Change is possible! A new view of the past helps pave the way toward a belief in a different version of the future.
Telling a great story builds hope. It should also show other people what’s in it for them. So a great leadership story is about how the venture that the leader is proposing will help people achieve their own goals. It can’t be about the leader alone. And the more there are some specific demonstrations to point to, the more a leader awakens hope and ensures belief. Change requires a belief in possibility. Innovation is always inherently uncertain, and without the right story, people would rather stick with the known, which seems safe even if it is inadequate. The ultimate art of leadership is encouraging people to let go of their fear of the unknown and plunge into the work of innovation.
It’s always amazing to me to see how ubiquitous resistance to change is, even change that seems perfectly benign. I tell the story of Carol Hallquist, a talented corporate executive with an interest in accelerating improvement in public education so that every school is great. She came to see principals or heads of schools as vital but often ignored links. So she began a venture to connect principals with resources they needed—and was immediately greeted with suspicion and virtually ignored. She realized she needed a better and deeper story, plus some specific demonstrations.
Silverthorne: You mention that another key skill to learn is team- or coalition-building—no one person can do it all. What do your discussions with leaders teach us about putting together a coalition?
Kanter: I urge leaders to live by the Change Agent Rule of Three. In every situation, leaders must deal with three groups of stakeholders and resource-holders: essentially, friends, foes, and fence-sitters. It’s important to know who’s who.
First, determine who holds the power tools you need—the resources, information or expertise, and support or legitimacy, and then persuade them to invest in the effort. They will also be very helpful in neutralizing opponents and answering the critics. Skills in persuasion are vital, because for problems requiring advanced leadership, such as climate change, with so many stakeholders and sectors involved, no single leader can order anyone to do anything. It’s all a matter of lining up the parties, listening to their goals, learning from their expertise, and then gathering them in the quest for a common goal—the way Torsten Thiele, a European banker, helped get insurance companies together with NGOs to look at projects to improve the health of the oceans, which would certainly reduce insurance risks while also doing good for the planet.
One mistake some leaders make is lining up investors, advisers, and champions for their venture and then neglecting them in favor of spending their time trying to wrestle with opponents. Those initial allies can start to lose interest, or they each move in different directions, and the coalition frays. By the way, these skills, and the common mistakes, are just as useful when trying to work across departments and disciplines inside an established organization too.
Silverthorne: Tell us about Kanter’s Law regarding the “miserable middles.”
Kanter: Kanter’s Law—so named because it’s a principle I frequently invoke—is that everything can look like a failure in the middle. Leaders can’t just launch a project or a venture and assume it will all go according to plan. Especially if it’s new and different, which is true of every innovation. But even more so when the goal is to do something no one has ever seen before that challenges conventional wisdom and poses new approaches to big social or environmental issues.
Leaders must continuously make adjustments, review premises, bring the flexibility to pivot if necessary, and find the strength to persist if the story is still the right one. Give up, and by definition it’s a failure. This is where the sense of purpose and the power of the narrative makes a difference, and where allies can help bolster the determination of the leader and the working team.
I think of truly innovative change as wandering in the desert in search of the next oasis. There can be long dry spells when nothing seems to go right, and bumpy paths whether unexpected obstacles loom. But advanced leaders get through it and thereby product new models for the world. Richard Fahey wanted to bring affordable alternative energy to West Africa, where he had been a Peace Corps volunteer before becoming a successful corporate leader. He and his work partner, Robert Saudek, had to deal with defective solar cells, embezzlement, and an Ebola outbreak before finding a smooth path to lighting and power sources for thousands of people with no access to electricity and attracting corporate customers who trusted them more than the traditional power company. They also found new applications of their solar cells along the way.
It’s always amazing to me to see how ubiquitous resistance to change is, even change that seems perfectly benign.
Silverthorne: The book uses examples and stories from dozens of high-performing managers and entrepreneurs. Is there one person, one quote, that you think most brilliantly captures the spirit of Think Outside the Building?
Kanter: Doug Rauch, former president of Trader Joe’s, who founded Daily Table as a new food retail model for inner cities, helped me see that leaders must get over themselves to be effective at path-breaking innovation. In the early stages of formulating his venture, which solves environmental and health problems in a way affordable for lower-income people, he kept running into skeptics who thought he was crazy to risk his reputation on something so novel. But he told himself, “It’s not about me.” It’s about the mission and the people and communities to be served. So he took the risk and is now getting ready to scale his model, which has received widespread positive attention.
That’s good advice when thinking about making a difference in the world. There’s a purpose larger than oneself. Of course, a leader can feel successful in conventional terms, but for advanced leaders, the main focus is on the bigger goal of impact. Moreover, a dose of humility that comes with putting the cause first helps leaders take ideas from anywhere if those ideas are useful. Including getting ideas from well outside the usual building.
Silverthorne: You use the term “advanced leadership” often in the book. What does it mean and how does it relate to the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, which you cofounded?
Kanter: “Advanced leadership” gives great leaders something to aspire to. The leadership journey is not over when your venture has a high valuation or you’ve achieved a high position and title. There’s still more to do! “Advanced” leadership involves more than developing great teams or great organizations; it is aimed at tackling messy, recalcitrant problems that surround teams and organizations. The kinds of problems that leaders don’t fully control but that can get in the way of business as usual. And the kinds of problems that urgently need solutions, whether in the form of innovative new products and services, new commercial ventures, or new approaches that create social impact.
These are also the kinds of problems rising leaders care about: climate change, race and gender inequities, education shortfalls, gun violence, health disparities. Such issues require fresh thinking and innovative approaches, and they certainly require enhanced leadership skills. They could be enormous business opportunities, but they are hard to pursue without convincing multiple independent stakeholders to climb on board—and that’s a leadership skill notoriously lacking in cowboy-style entrepreneurs who think they can defy the rules and trample on communities and also lacking in command-and-control hierarchical types of officials.
Like companies, universities can get stuck inside their buildings, too. My cofounders Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria, and I stepped outside of conventional constraints to envision a new role for higher education as a developer of change-makers for the world, who could become part of a new stage of higher education. We wanted to deploy a new leadership force for the world who could bring innovative thinking to big problems. We felt that the frontiers for innovation lie in moving outside the walls of disciplines and departments to help leaders gain the creativity of multiple perspectives so they could create high-impact social ventures, whether for-profit or not-for-profit. The issue isn’t the organizational form; it is the social impact aspiration—the fact that lives will be improved as a result of the effort.
Silverthorne: What common characteristics do advanced leaders share?
Kanter: One common characteristic is their motivation. They are driven by purpose and meaning. They set big goals that involve significant social impact. They care deeply about taking their team, company, community, or country to a different and better place. You could call this long-term thinking, but it’s more than that. There’s often a big dream, which sometimes seems impossibly grand, even grandiose.
So they also must have a second characteristic: to be practical as well as visionary—to know how to pin down a big dream into actionable first steps. But advanced leaders don’t confuse the details of their prototype or pilot project with achieving the goal. They continue to be purpose-driven.
I like the example of the Brazilian multiplatform digital venture that helped level social divides by providing equal access to useful skills and cultural or educational opportunities to everyone in a city. The leader who envisioned and built this into a leading site with 50 million regular users turned down several lucrative offers from prominent global investors to buy stakes in the venture, because he felt that the potential buyers were interested only in the number of users they could sell to rather than the bigger dream of reducing class distinctions. In essence, no dream, no deal. (Of course, on the practical side, the successful growth of the venture gave him the luxury of being choosy about investors.)
Book Excerpt## Telling the Right Story
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter
I thought the facts would speak for themselves. I thought the logic would do it. I forgot I needed buy-in. I thought people knew me and would rush to help. I forgot that they didn’t see what I did
Carol Hallquist could have fallen into that trap. She was taken by surprise by all the ways that her idea did not speak for itself. It was hard to fathom. Her dream was big, her motivation was pure, and her credibility was high. Her reading of the community mood said that there was consensus about the importance of the issue, and she knew she could contribute a valuable innovation. So why was there resistance from the people she was trying to serve?
Hallquist was a well-known civic leader and a former corporate executive at Hallmark in Kansas City, Missouri, where, among other things, she had helped fund many local service organizations. An energetic leader who made friends easily, she hoped to invest her stash of capabilities, connections, and cash to spark innovation in public school districts, first locally and then throughout the United States. She wanted to make sure that all schools, regardless of their location, funding, or the family circumstances of their student populations, had access to resources that supported learning. After going on the road and visiting a wide range of schools, she uncovered a gap in school improvement efforts—that most initiatives addressed students and teachers, but there seemed to be little or nothing for principals, whose leadership of schools could be unleashed to make giant strides in excellence. She called her idea Principals Connect. She would match principals who were seeking help finding resources or solving problems with accomplished people across sectors who could get them what they needed. The narrative was simple and straightforward, and there were no strings, she thought, only benefits.
Surprise, surprise. Despite the benign intent and potential value of the idea, suspicion and skepticism soon surfaced on many fronts. There were questions about her motives. Was she doing it to have something to talk about at cocktail parties? There was paranoia about her role in going to schools to sign up principals. Was she a spy? (She understood that a recent appointment to the state board of education might hamper her local efforts.) There was passive resistance; some principals didn’t return phone calls. There was suspicion by nonprofit leaders with similar-sounding missions. Was she poaching from their territories? Would she siphon off their donors? There was a refusal to budge, even on the part of some school constituencies that could get direct, immediate benefits from Principals Connect; they seemed to feel that something was being imposed on them from outside. Outside? Hallquist was starting in her home community where everyone knew her.
She had to hone her message and tell the right story. Hallquist had to patiently repeat her rationale and goal, saying over and over, “We believe in you.” Repetition helped overcome the negativity bias—that it takes five positives to overcome one negative. She reinforced her optimistic message in actions as well as words; showing up face-to-face in a principal’s office was one indication (never mind that her phone calls hadn’t been returned). It took specific demonstrations of intentions and opportunities to make her story credible: a $1,000 donation for bows for a school’s string orchestra. It maybe wasn’t the best use of her money, but it showed that Principals Connect was there to do what principals themselves defined as important. The fledgling project took school leaders on a field trip to see innovative schools. Teachers’ lounges were renovated to turn them into havens for teachers to refuel.
Accumulating evidence of benefits won support for Hallquist’s story. Testimonials and referrals were woven into the Principals Connect narrative, which eased access for her project. Her local pilot program was soon gaining momentum, and she was thinking about ways to take it national, where the story had to reach people she couldn’t see face-to-face. To get underway, telling the right story is essential.
Excerpted from Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time. Copyright © 2020. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
