Original Post: http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/27/innovation-change-strategy-leadership-managing-ccl.html

Center for Creative Leadership

How To Be An Innovative, Not Just Business, Leader

David Magellan Horth, 01.27.10, 06:00 PM EST

Three keys to making the essential leap.

Today's managers are full of ideas, theories and information. They have extraordinary knowledge and expertise. They are highly skilled at traditional business thinking. Yet many feel uncertain and unmoored. They find planning for next quarter a tough challenge, never mind committing to decisions that will play out over one to five years. They continually ask themselves what is the new process, the innovative product, the game-changing service, the compelling vision. One senior executive recently told me, "We've lost our crystal ball."

I can't give you a new crystal ball. But I will tell you that being an innovative leader holds the key to discovering what's new, what's better and what's next.

Truly innovative leadership means fostering new thinking and collaboration that produces new business opportunities. It means building a capacity for innovative thinking and using it in concert with business thinking.

Business thinking is based on deep research, formulas and logical facts. Business thinkers value proof and precedent and are often quick to make decisions, looking for the one right answer among the wrong answers. Business thinking is about removing ambiguity and driving results. But ambiguity can't be managed away. As problems and circumstances become more complex, they don't fit previous patterns. What worked before doesn't work today. The cost of failing to come up with new thinking for new results was colorfully expressed by one executive: "The more you drive over a dead cat, the flatter it gets!"

The traditional push for results can go nowhere when the situation is unstable, the challenge is complex or the direction is unclear. No matter how great the urgency, you need to be reflective and approach the situation in new ways. That's where innovative leadership and innovative thinking comes in.

Innovative thinking doesn't rely on past experience or known facts. It imagines a desired future state and figures out how to get there. It is intuitive and open to possibility. Rather than identify right answers or wrong answers, the goal is to find a better way and to explore multiple possibilities. Ambiguity is therefore an advantage, not a problem. It allows us to ask, what if? Business thinking comes into its own after we discover new opportunities through innovative thinking, when we then seek to implement and commercialize those opportunities.