The regenerator’s dilemma
When I first started working in the area of innovation culture 15 years ago, The Innovator’s Dilemma was one of our bibles. It described how the focus, processes and reward mechanisms of managing the core business stymied companies’ ability to lean into the emerging markets and disruptive technologies that would ultimately make them irrelevant.
The same tensions continue to plague organisations and leadership teams today. At the organisational level, we see pressure for near-term performance competing with the need for longer term reinvention to thrive in the future. Meanwhile, at the individual and team levels, we see the skills that make us great managers fundamentally compete with the things that help us anticipate and respond to disruption. But now it’s clear that the stakes are higher. The cost of failing to innovate isn’t just losing market share to more nimble disruptors; it could mean slowing the whole system’s shift to healing people and planet. You might say that we’ve gone beyond the “innovator’s dilemma” to the “regenerator’s dilemma”.
Like the “innovator’s dilemma,” the “regenerator’s dilemma” requires that we build the capacity to become bifocal in our vision, able to hold multiple time horizons in our minds. But regenerators must also hold a vision of a better future in our hearts. We must use our imagination to consider what is desirable not only from the perspective of our business, but from the perspective of future generations and the more-than-human world. We must demonstrate “temporal elasticity”, stretching further into the future than we are used to, and snapping back to the present moment. And we must be willing to explore emerging tensions from this practice, in an authentic and courageous way.
One of the tools we use most often to exercise temporal elasticity with teams is Bill Sharpe's Three Horizons framework. Three Horizons is beloved in our field for a reason: not only does it help teams have powerful conversations about the future they hope to bring about, but it also helps surface the inner and interpersonal dynamics that might be getting in their way. Implicit in each horizon is a different way of relating to the future; Horizon Three, for example, is all about imagining a future based on things that have already been set in motion today, whereas Horizon One is about honouring what has worked so far and maintaining that current reality.
Teams that can integrate these different perspectives are better equipped to step into more sustainable (and commercially viable) futures, hold the tension of multiple time horizons, and experiment with ways to work towards them meaningfully and creatively. But often, we find that integration is not happening at the team level. Instead, the regenerator’s dilemma manifests in individual behaviours that are well-intentioned but prevent the team from realising its regenerative potential.
Here are two examples, anonymised to protect their privacy:
The stranded visionary
In this scenario, one person feels that they and they alone are carrying the responsibility of imagination for the team. This might be because they are the only one representing R&D or a speculative new business area. Or it might be because their personality naturally orients them towards the future, whereas the others on their team see themselves as more practical or opportunistic.
The disconnect may even be exacerbated if that person's mandate dates back to a leader or strategy that placed a premium on vision, whereas the organisation's new leadership or strategy is now placing a premium on near-term performance. Now they might feel like a "stranded asset" - something the business is no longer realising the full value of because of unanticipated changes. The team dynamics in such a situation are revealing. The "stranded visionary" feels increasingly frustrated by the disconnect between what they believe should be possible and desirable, and what they are supported to pursue.
In one team we worked with, a leader admitted to pretty much ignoring the opinions of the other members of his team; in his view, they simply didn't 'get' it and would only slow him down. He derived much more energy and inspiration from people outside his team, and consequently would skip team meetings in favour of spending time with external thinkers and entrepreneurs whose enthusiasm for the future better matched his own. His team members didn't fully understand what his motivations were, and the situation festered.
The result? They were losing out on the vision and imagination he could have been contributing to their collective work, and he was losing out on what should have been the main advantage of doing his work within a large, established organisation – leveraging its operational resources.
The watchful steward
In this scenario, one or two people in the team see themselves as the pragmatic guardians of the business. Often committed, seasoned experts tasked with managing the short-term performance of core business or assets, they contribute to conversations around emerging futures but aren’t necessarily ready to make more fundamental changes needed to transform.
This might be because they represent a function tasked with maintaining financial or operational resilience, or perhaps that they have spent most of their career building that part of the business. They often choose to focus on what has been proven effective previously over what could be effective in an uncertain future. These are no dinosaurs; they have the desire to contribute fully but have assigned the work of imagination to others on the team. Their comfort with a business model which may already be showing signs of decay creates an invisible drag on the team, stalling entrepreneurial efforts and making it less likely that the conversations taking place in leadership team meetings translate through to action.
In one team we worked with, a “watchful steward” found herself becoming an unwitting blocker in the team, persistently requesting detailed commercial analysis for longer term opportunities. We spent 1:1 coaching time with each team member, and through this we uncovered that her resistance to change was rooted in her struggle to connect meaningfully with the vision the team had described. In other words, her “temporal elasticity” muscle hadn’t had time and space to be developed.
These examples show how easy it can be to fall into unhelpful patterns and give rise to tensions which, if unresolved, cause teams to falter at a time the world needs their imagination and influence most: directed towards the hard but rewarding work of systemic change for people and the planet.
However, where there is friction there is heat, and the opportunity to spark new insights and ideas. Our role is to help teams to harness that friction and help a more regenerative way to emerge instead: building awareness of the systems and patterns shaping problems in the present, deploying imagination and ambition to envision a better future, and holding hands and taking the next bold step forward, on a path which isn’t certain, but is smart and sustainable.
The Innovator’s Dilemma defined a generation of business thinking, inspiring some of the greatest innovators to disrupt their own business models and successfully stay on top. But what are the new narratives that can spawn a new generation of leaders and teams that will be successful in transforming their entire sectors for the better? Let us know how your team are working across time horizons and the narratives that are inspiring your collective imagination.