Innovation & Agile Leadership                                                                                  
                                                               October 2020 
                   
                    A White Paper by Tanguy Deglise (Make it Simple Consulting®) and Mark Brown (Clarity Professional Development) 
                   
                  ‘Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did 
                  yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.’ 
                           -    William Pollard, English clergyman 
                   
                  Summary 
                  Agile leaders find ways to adapt when they encounter uncertainty and complexity. This paper 
                  examines innovation as a core principle of agile leadership, and offers insights into several practical 
                  aspects of leading with agility in the Covid-19 era. 
                   
                  Adaptation, Agility and The Unknown  
                  As we begin to look beyond a troubled 2020, we are still coming to terms with three profound shocks 
                  that have affected nearly every person on the planet: a disruptive pandemic, widespread economic 
                  damage, and drastic changes in the ways we work and live. We are living a stressful, uncertain 
                  moment.  
                  This fog of uncertainty did not descend suddenly with Covid-19, but it is compounded by the novelty 
                  of the virus: it has been 100 years since we last dealt with a pandemic of this magnitude. We find 
                  ourselves in a bewildering crisis with very little to work with in terms of precedent, experience or 
                  relevant data. How should leaders adapt in these baffling times?  
                  In a nutshell, they need to be more agile. But what do agile leaders actually do? 
                   
                  Giving ourselves permission to innovate 
                  We need innovators in this uncertain world: yesterday’s assumptions and solutions do not address 
                  today’s unique challenges, let alone the surprises tomorrow will bring. Agile leaders foster innovation 
                  by subtly challenging how we think about risk-taking, mistakes and failure. 
                  An important early step is to encourage an experimentation mindset in their teams and 
                  organizations, the belief that no step forward is too small if it is moving toward the solution. If we are 
                  going to be genuinely innovative, we need to take chances: some ideas may lead to success, others 
                  may not. But we’ll never know unless we try them out. If we fail, we will have failed fast, we will have 
                  learned something, and we will have the chance to turn surprises into opportunities. 
                  Because innovation is not a smooth process: it demands time, patience, energy, rigor and 
                  persistence. This calls to mind a quotation from one of history’s great innovators, the inventor 
                  Thomas Edison: ‘Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is to try 
                  just one more time.’  
                  Experimentation and determination have important roles to play in innovation. We need to challenge 
                  our certainties and allow ourselves to bring wild ideas, without judging ourselves or others. 
                   
                  Learn from everything and everyone 
                  Agile leaders also recognize the vital importance of learning continuously, particularly from 
                  constructive feedback, mistakes and failure. This requires the courage to dare from everyone  
      Make it Simple Consulting® - a TDC Company                                                                                   1 
                                  Innovation & Agile Leadership                                                                                
                                                              October 2020 
                   
                   
                  involved, because sometimes those constructive comments can be difficult to hear, and no one 
                  relishes making a mistake or failing at a task. 
                  Yet treating those challenging moments as opportunities for learning, personal growth and moving a 
                  step closer to a long-sought solution can put a different spin on the situation. That is why agile 
                  leaders and their teams will always look to ask questions like ‘What can we learn from this?’ and 
                  ‘How does this help us going forward?’ They are actively looking for opportunities to learn.  
                  This is why agile leaders and their teams always build on others’ ideas and give their ideas to the 
                  group. Innovative solutions often come from combining several ideas.  
                  So there is often some re-framing of assumptions when an agile leader is around: experimentation 
                  and risk-taking become ‘part of the game’ with innovation, and feedback, mistakes and failure can 
                  become stepping stones to insight and eventual success. Our attitude about innovation is key, and 
                  agile leaders model the aforementioned approaches to encourage their adoption. 
                   
                  ‘Let’s try this!’ 
                  Building on the foundation of an experimentation mindset, and bolstered by the willingness to learn 
                  from mistakes and failure, the agile leader and their team can turn to prototyping and rapid iteration, 
                  concepts that have crystallized in the world of lean start-ups. 
                  The idea is that rather than spend time and money fully developing a product or service, it could 
                  make sense to first offer the market a prototype – sometimes called a ‘minimum viable product’ – in 
                  order to gather early feedback and customer reaction.  
                  These valuable insights are then used to modify the product or service, leading to the introduction of 
                  a ‘new and improved’ second prototype. The process could stop there, or continue with multiple 
                  iterations. This helps explain a start-up paradox: a new firm on a shoestring budget presents a rapid 
                  series of prototypes, gathering important feedback and constantly improving the product. By ‘failing 
                  quickly’ on the earlier iterations the start-up arrives much sooner at what the customer wants. 
                  Agile leaders understand that prototyping with rapid iterations is an effective way to learn about 
                  customers’ interest in a product or service, without investing in full development.  
                  Agile leaders and teams have a clear purpose in mind: creating value with every step. 
                   
                  Providing sparks 
                  Beyond experimentation, learning from mistakes and offering rapid prototypes, agile leaders also 
                  look to create a stimulating, enterprising energy in their teams, ones that inspires teamwork, 
                  stimulates curiosity and facilitates collaborative problem-solving. They have a powerful set of 
                  techniques they use to launch and monitor the innovation process and keep it moving: problem 
                  definition, challenge mapping, reframing difficult problems, and co-creating a solution intent building 
                  on the ideas of the entire team. 
                  In an uncertain environment the agile leader recognizes that we need to invest time and energy in 
                  understanding a given problem from the beginning, in all its nuance and complexity. Defining 
                  problems clearly, dissecting potential challenges, and reframing all contribute to this deeper initial 
                  understanding and lay the groundwork for greater efficiency and teamwork down the line. 
      Make it Simple Consulting® - a TDC Company                                                                                  2 
                                   Innovation & Agile Leadership                                                                                  
                                                               October 2020 
                    
                    
                   Agile leaders understand the practical wisdom in Albert Einstein’s famous quote: ‘We cannot solve 
                   our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’ We need to force ourselves to 
                   think about problems in a different way.  
                   The aforementioned agile processes drive us to state problems or challenges differently, to find 
                   formulations that open up new perspectives and possibilities for investigation. This re-stating and re-
                   framing help push us from the comfort of the ‘classic’ solution toward the path of innovation. 
                   Once the challenges are clearly defined and understood, stimulating techniques like co-creation, co-
                   development, and co-decision come into play. Collective intelligence, curiosity, experimentation and 
                   teamwork converge as agile teams work together to accelerate innovation and delivery. 
                   Summary 
                   Agile leaders find impactful ways to adapt in an uncertain world. Fostering the alchemy of innovation 
                   is one of the most powerful things they do. 
                    
                   ‘A problem without a solution is a poorly stated problem.’ - Albert Einstein 
                     
                   A White Paper by Tanguy Deglise (Make it Simple Consulting®) and Mark Brown (Clarity Professional Development) 
                    
                   Call to action 
                   To learn more about how your business or organization can face today’s challenges with Agile 
                   Leadership, please go to our website and find more articles and videos. 
                   www.time4clarity.com 
                   www.Make-it-simple.fr 
                    
                   Contact us to start your agile leadership journey: 
                    -   Mark Brown _ mark.brown@sapo.pt  
                   Tanguy Deglise _ tanguy.deglise@make-it-simple.fr 
      Make it Simple Consulting® - a TDC Company                                                                                    3