Innovation at-scale is a team sport

History rarely records things that teams do.

History mostly records things that individuals do.

Think Edison, Einstein, Jobs, Berners-Lee, (and a personal wildcard favorite) von Bingen.

But these idea titans are not only gifted creative thinkers —and they are— they are also a product of their time. They are invariably influenced by many others.

Einstein, born another century, may (or may not) have had the alchemical alignment of opportunity, interest/talent, schooling, mentorship, scientific lineage and precedent to have the kind of impact he had in the 1930’s and 40’s.

Innovation is a product of combining good ideas from many people with the fresh flint strike of today’s original thought to solve a problem.

Innovation always stands on the shoulders of others.

Turns out, most innovation is not a product of blue flame thinkers alone. It’s more a team sport.

To get innovation at-scale (think of Apple churning out category-defining tech for the last 20 years), it took far more than Steve Jobs. One brilliant founder can instigate something but it takes a talented team to bring it to scale. And that scale has allowed Apple huge R&D and market advantage to keep creating more good things on the heels of good things.

Scaling innovation is what I focus on as a career and it’s the single most interesting topic to me in business. What makes some companies so good at solving today’s problems in a way that is both nonconsensus and right (innovation)? And even more importantly (for shareholders, investors and consumers) what makes even fewer companies so good at being able to repeat and deliver on innovation again and again?

Thanks to Marty Cagan and his colleagues at the Silicon Valley Product Group for helping shine light on this topic for the past many years and introducing me (and a lot of others) to some tangible ways of addressing these critical questions for product and innovation companies.

My coaching practice is about helping companies face their own peak evolutionary challenges in becoming at-scale innovators.

A lot of my work therefore focuses on the team.

In coaching, I don’t look for operational bottlenecks or implement some magical org chart, framework, process or tool. As coach, I approach each company as a unique organism.

Sure, there are patterns across companies and I work to objectively identify those patterns, sorting them into productive/non-productive patterns based on what I have seen work. But that is just the start of the job. Being an objective and knowledgeable observer of the unique company chemistry is way more useful to the company that hires me.

I look for latent pockets of talent, latent pockets of creativity, places fizzing with human conflict and natural collaboration (both are natural energy for a team and can be honed). I look for places where people yearn to be coached and mentored (everyone wishes they could have more true mentorship and coaching… just ask them). I look for places where deep domain knowledge and expertise can be fanned with the fresh oxygen of diverse — and possibly conflicting— knowledge sets. I work with company leadership on creating productive culture that fosters ideas rather than squelching them. I work with leadership on identifying and cultivating “seed crystal” people.

“Seed crystals are people who are so good and so well loved that they can almost single-handedly build large parts of your org. Once they are in, a tidal wave of other awesome people will typically follow.” (Tony Fadell, Build)

I coach companies in the craft of genuine product leadership and innovation at-scale.

My 20 years of building teams that build products has shown me that ‘leadership’ means collaborative. Leadership means being crystal clear communicators and vision setters. It means being great mentors and coaches of your team. And that top-down ‘do it my way’ or ‘…the board wants’ leadership doesn’t work when you are talking about fostering real innovation. It’s like suspending someone by the collar over a cliff edge and telling them to write an award winning novel. It doesn’t work and builds a materially different product company over time. One focused on release dates over positive impact of what you build.

If a company wants to take a great product idea at startup and scale it to maximum impact, adding other great products along the way, building an exceptional place to work, it means fully embracing the fact that innovation is a human capital venture (yes, even with AI). And humans need to feel respected, included, heard and mentored. And teams need to be given clear context to make great decisions and left to do precisely that.

One brilliant founder can instigate something but it takes a talented team to bring it to scale.

The power to grow is with a strong team.

While it is tempting (like the history scribes) to keep giving the visionary founder credit for the successful scale-up or next innovation juggernaut, the great founders will resist this and instead, humbly and sincerely refocus credit (and requisite responsibility) back on the team to the right and left of them.

Start-ups need visionary founders. Scale-ups need visionary teams with big problems to solve and room to do it.