Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation

Citation

Hong, J. (2020), "Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation", The Learning Organization, Vol. 27 No. 5, pp. 473-474. https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-07-2020-257

Toolkits, handbooks and manuals on innovation management are plentiful in the market. However, our understanding about the leadership challenge of managing innovations with complex and interacting elements is very limited, which prompts Professor Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School and Susan Reynolds, an award-winning journalist, to work on a multi-year project for studying a startup tasked with the goal of building a smart city in Portugal. They coin this type of innovation with “many things that have to change in a coordinated manner” (p. 10) as audacious innovation.

The book is divided into nine chapters. Chapter 1 provides an overview, company background and recent development of built environment in the world’s mega cities. Chapter 2 traces the origin of the startup under study, Living PlanIT and the relationships among key actors. From Chapter 3 to 7, each chapter serves to explore the idiosyncrasies of five major constituent industries involved in the development of a smart city, namely, information technology, real estate, government, architecture and high-tech corporations, followed by the teaming process and subsequent cultural clashes during their encountering in Chapter 8. The final chapter summarizes and recommends some exemplary practices for “any visionary leader trying to sell the future and build it at the same time” (p. 112).

There are several advantages of the book. First, it is rare to see studies on innovation of an entire new system and thanks to the authors’ great story-telling techniques, I was able to comprehend the sheer complexities and socio-political challenges incurred when engaging in audacious innovation. For example, each chapter focuses on the major protagonist(s) and by tracking how their specific involvements in this smart-city startup project evolved, the range of ideas, values, skills and business models required for cross-industry collaborations were made explicit.

Second, coupling with the use of some secondary data sources, such as The Economist, the Financial Times and Fast Company, it went beyond the protagonists’ perspective by generating a multi-faceted and balanced understanding about the collaborative challenges for spanning across industry boundaries during the smart city innovation project.

Third, it is not just the nuanced life-changing stories that serve to convey the five leadership lessons for building the future. Some relevant social psychological constructs were introduced sporadically throughout the book, such as boundary objects, psychological safety and hubris. With the additional illustration of these well-established constructs, it can connect better with the academic readers and facilitate their interpretations. After all, this is not a business novel.

Nevertheless, there are two issues that demand some attention from the authors. One is about the relationship between serendipity and future building innovation. With a hindsight, it appeared fortuitous for Living PlanIT to gather all those mavericks equipped with the capability of creating big teaming across industry boundaries. How many companies can afford to have such a confluence of visionaries at the same time? Is it a matter of luck? Can it be orchestrated?

Another issue is related to power and politics. As big teaming requires collaboration across industry domains, it will be natural for some people to conceive their own disciplinary knowledge as the core while alluding others to the periphery. So it is not just the cultural clash that the leader needs to resolve but also the power relations while crossing boundaries (Hong et al., 2009).

Albeit the minor voids discussed above, I read the book with great interests and fun. To me, this is not just a research monograph, but a vivid portrayal of a new form of future-building leadership navigating in a challenging journey of audacious innovation! Both academics and policy makers should benefit from reading this book. As for the researchers of learning organization, the book demonstrates how a meticulous analysis of conflicting mindsets and diverse landscapes of practice among multiple communities of practice (Pyrko et al., 2019) can be uncovered at a societal level. But the government officials in charge of future-building mega-projects should be mindful of the hidden conflicts and evolving expectations among multiple stakeholders in big teaming processes.