What It Takes to Build the Future

Future-building is creative and iterative but not haphazard. It is interdisciplinary, and it takes leadership to bring it about. While few would advocate for rigid organizational hierarchies anymore, understanding and practicing the new forms of leadership that enable complex, team-based, whole-system innovation is—we'll say it again and again—challenging. In this book we describe two basic requirements that entrepreneurs and leaders of mature organizations alike must embrace to build a sustainable future.

The first is a new kind of collaboration that spans more (and more-diverse) groups than ever before. We call this Big Teaming. The second—essential to enabling the first—is leadership that blends big vision and small action to pursue audacious innovation. Big vision inspires, calling attention to what might be possible. But achieving big vision is never straightforward. It is essential to empower people to experiment with small action that might, with luck and skill, help bring the vision about. In the case study of a smart-city startup that runs throughout this book, the challenge of spanning industry boundaries looms large, while experimenting through small action proves both elusive and essential.

Big Teaming

Many organizations have shifted to a new way of working that makes teaming and learning part of the job. Prior work on teaming includes examples of people in crisis situations working together to surmount seemingly impossible, but finite, challenges. In such situations people often team up across geographical, social, and cultural boundaries to get the job done. Building the future takes teaming to the next level. The same fundamental principles apply, but the distances between players are greater than when we encourage cross-functional teamwork within a company. The boundaries are more difficult to cross. Goals are more often at odds. And clashing professional cultures are likely to inhibit meaningful communication.

In this book we highlight both the challenges and the opportunities that lie in teaming across the cultural divides that separate people in different industries. To do this we first must explore how industry cultures differ, taking a deep dive, chapter by chapter, into five domains—information technology (chapter 3), real estate development (chapter 4), city government (chapter 5), architecture and construction (chapter 6), and the modern corporation (chapter 7). As we do so, we follow the ups and downs of a startup's efforts to span these industry boundaries. In each chapter we supplement our field research with published sources to paint fuller portraits of the industry than our case study could provide on its own. We then take a look, in chapter 8, at why it's difficult to collaborate across these worlds and what leaders can do to facilitate it. Chapter 9 updates our case study and concludes with ideas about how leaders can integrate big vision with small smart action.

Leading Audacious Innovation

Future-building leadership starts with imagination that fuels vision: ambitious, bold, creative vision informed by deep expertise in a relevant field and yet paradoxically open enough to adapt when needed. Such vision thus has three essential components; it's bold, it's meaningful, and it's open to adaptation as more is learned.

Big vision must be followed—and dynamically realized—by small action: small, tentative action that is deliberately framed as an experiment and that builds knowledge quickly. This iterative process of action, feedback, and learning expects and tolerates failure on the way to success. It takes a particular leadership mind-set to cope with the contradictory demands of envisioning and advocating audacious new possibilities while engaging in small imperfect action, not to mention the contradictory demands of believing in one's own vision while enrolling a host of other experts to help transform that vision.

Balancing the competing goals of influencing and innovating is thus a new and essential leadership practice for future-building. When you're doing the new-new thing, it is easy to prioritize activities that build credibility in the external world, such as giving talks and building relationships with prestigious players in varied sectors. This can mean that the actual work of the organization—the day-to-day work of innovating and developing products and people—takes a backseat to selling a story and building a reputation. The charisma and excitement that swirl around a pioneer's vision are critical for drawing people into the orbit, building a solid team, generating funds, and building the ecosystem of players it takes to realize that vision. But a leader's focus must encompass the outside and the inside, influencing (vision) and innovating (action). Through our multicultural journey across the various industries with which we came into close contact during our study, we offer some ideas about how to manage this tension.

In sum this book proposes that building the future requires three crucial, ongoing activities: building a shared vision that evolves as more is learned, building meaningful cross-sector relationships, and building an iterative collaborative process. The diagram Leading Audacious Innovation through Big Teaming depicts these activities. To explain why they matter—and how to bring them about—we use a case study that highlights both the opportunities and the challenges of Big Teaming for audacious innovation.