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CHAPTER 8

Connecting collective synapses

The idea of an intelligent team brings up the question of who owns intelligence, individually, collectively, corporately and in communities. Google have a different answer to the Chinese in this respect. Google is currently estimated to process 3.5 billion requests a day. The Guangzhou Southern Metropolis Daily reported that the Chinese state not only collects personal data about its citizens, but it also sells the data. It seems that one can gain access to data about people’s movements, borders crossed, who they met, driving offences, pictures, location, etc. for small sums of money without any questions. The Chinese Government also plans to give each citizen a ‘social credit’ score, which will rank people’s trustworthiness from their online behaviour. Of course, we are already used to such things on e-bay, Experian, but the difference here is that we opt-in to such things whereas the Chinese way assumes the state own the data. Might total transparency be such a bad thing? It is something that we explore in the epilogue and here is a preview:

Work is flexible. Julie works the hours as needed by a complex coordination of her client’s needs, her family and herself. Her personal digital assistant Rover looks after all the mechanics using a set of algorithms that Julie agreed about various priorities for her work/life balance. There are no more days when she makes a plan then to be let down by cancellations or conflicts as everyone decided to ‘choose life’ when they elected to receive a basic income in exchange for full employment, fewer hours worked and the opportunity to earn more by discretionary contribution to the collective net worth through the IGOK (International Grid of Knowledge). Julie has young children so she contributes with one-third of her time to IGOK in exchange for a set of family orientated benefits via her PSP. She has planned to store up some of her contribution for a life-changing trip to Mars in 2050 with Virgin Celestial, which offered its first commercial flights to habitable planets from 2040.

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In the context of teams, we need to reform the ways in which people are engaged, encouraged and rewarded if we are to see a genuine flow of knowledge between team members for the greater good of the enterprise. Gone are the days when Harry Beck received five guineas and a plaque on Finchley station for his groundbreaking design for the London Underground map. Harry’s design became an international standard for metro maps due to its resonant simplicity and rule breaking from the generally held principles of cartography.

Apart from the issues of who owns intelligence and how that is recognised and rewarded, there is the question of practice to reach peak performance. Great teams in any field do not just rely on natural abilities to reach high performance. They supplement natural talent with deliberate practice in areas of strength and, more importantly, weakness. At the same time as team cohesion we need also to look at disrupting groupthink in a VUCA world. Teams are great when they reach the high-performance stage of development and they provide huge benefits in terms of feeling part of something and the camaraderie that goes with belonging. Yet the downsides of groupthink are cults, cabals and cliques, which are unhelpful in a fluid and agile workplace. Aside from that, we expect the new world of teams to be populated by teams that form, perform and reform rapidly around need. How do we get teams to work in a world where team membership is often temporary? How do we reach high performance when freelancers and transient experts work alongside staffers?

Paradoxically some of the most effective strategies are the simplest to do. They are often overlooked due to busy-ness in business. A good beginning often leads to a happy ending with the middle then looking after itself. As with most things preparation is the mother of innovation.

Good beginnings

It seems almost pointless and mildly insulting to say this but, as a school governor, I watched in horror when the chair brought new people to the team and then did not give them an opportunity to find out the other people’s names, what they did and so on. It took me some months to find out all the names of governing body members! You might be forgiven for thinking this is just a feature of the education sector, but I have seen it happen in some great companies as well, so it really is worth repeating. It is all very well bringing cakes and so on to team meetings but all rather pointless if people do not know each other’s names! Then, of course, they need to know what they bring to the team, what they will be expected to contribute and so on. Although it seems strange to ask, I always make a point of asking people something about their hobbies when forming new teams, as this can be more revealing than their job description if you are to get discretionary effort from them.

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A good beginning to a team deals with questions of ‘us’ (the individual), ‘them’ (the team) and ‘the work’ as a bare minimum. Here is a specimen invitation covering the bare essentials as applied to a global innovation meeting where hardly anybody knew one another and there was a need to reach peak performance in a limited amount of time. The information we gathered was used systematically with the team over the two-day summit to great advantage. We also spent the entire first evening on team formation in a social setting via a combination of structured networking, games and what the professionals call ‘cross-functional social underlay’, more usually referred to as ‘food and drinks’.

The middle

While beginnings and endings are vital elements in terms of setting the tone for the work and whether more work will happen after the work is finished, the key point of work is . . . er . . . the work! Great songs have a great beginning and a supreme end but of course the song itself is the main point of the song. Brain Based Leaders can ensure that the work proceeds well by managing people’s differences and, of course, the progression of the task or the project, solving problems as they arise through structured divergent and convergent thinking and helping the team deal with the unpredictable. Ultimately the Brain Based Leader helps the team to help itself by installing the values, beliefs and behaviours needed to manage its journey, rather than acting as a rescue service, which builds in dependency within the team.

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Happy endings

In the art world, we know when a great piece of music or literature is about to end. Listen to a Mozart symphony, for example. There are clues within the movements, cadences and ornaments that let the listener know when they are expected to applaud and so on. So, the leader can be considered to be the conductor of a project, marking the start, keeping progress throughout and marking the end of the work in ways that provide closure and value to the team.

Open source teams

The Johari window is a classic model that helps us understand ourselves in concert with others. As such it can usefully be adapted to the world of data, information, knowledge and wisdom. Devised by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955 the Johari window took its name from their first two names Joe and Harry. Here we apply the model to the question of sharing knowledge within and between teams. As always, nobody does it better that Professor Charles Handy, who offers us an eminently simple way of understanding the Johari window as a house with four rooms. The first room is our open source, the things that we and others know about ourselves, for example, our height, approximate age, LinkedIn profile and so on. The second is our hidden area, the things we know about ourselves but others do not, for example medical history, relationships, etc. The third area is our blind area, things that others know about us but we are unaware of, for example, at a trivial level, whether someone has placed a sticker on our back, whether someone has said something bad about us in private to them and so on. Finally, there is our unknown or unconscious area, the things that neither we, nor others know about us, for example, our futures.

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Julie is able to communicate her thinking directly to others via an interface in her brain that allows people to access her thinking as and when needed. Access is on several levels: an open source region for work associates; a private region for friends and family and a personal region which contains Julie’s thoughts on love, life, etc. only accessible with express permission. She has a closed region of her mind, which is totally restricted even to her, although she may ask the interface questions about this area for the purposes of self-discovery and personal development.

The hallmark of intelligent teams will be that the open source area will be maximised for maximum shared value. We have become progressively used to people knowing personal details about us through social media. However, work is normally different as our professional knowledge is sometimes at the heart of our salary. Yet innovation arises from shared knowledge and wisdom. We must, therefore, find ways to encourage a gainsharing approach to team collaboration if we are to realise the open source dream. Sometimes enterprise structure can be an enabler of knowledge transfer.

Machinery, machine bureaucracies and enigma machines

We traditionally think about organisation structure and teams in terms of two-dimensional industrial metaphors such as machine bureaucracies, organograms, unitary management, vertical hierarchy and so on. However human beings and teams are flexible organisms capable of much more than purely digital responses (up-down, on-off, one-zero, one dimensional thinking, etc.) In the Man-Machine age, I argue that we need to reform the industrial machinery model toward one based on more intuitive and natural biological metaphors, if man and woman are to collaborate intelligently with machines rather than become enslaved by them. What has driven this need?

Master and servant

Over the last 30 or so years, teams and enterprises are no longer defined by the people that you own. Teams might comprise people who are transient members and ones that are not the ‘property’ of the enterprise, e.g. customers offering valuable knowledge and insights into your products and services, perhaps as participants of crowdsourcing innovation projects. This raises the question of how you gain commitment from people you do not ‘own’ via a pay cheque or some other ‘master and servant’ relationship that obliges obedience rather than ideas, initiative and intelligence. Control without ownership is a burgeoning problem for leaders and those people who have to gain results through people. There is much to learn from voluntary organisations and charities in this regard, although the learning might have to be adapted to fit enterprises where there is a less obvious relationship between its raison d’être and the employee’s psychological contract.

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Welcome to the jungle

Another change driven by globalisation and the advent of social media is the sheer number of connections that many of us have. This, together with modern global communications systems makes it possible for us to combine capabilities for innovation, independent of geolocation. Many of us now have many more connections than Dunbar’s magic number of 150, an estimate from anthropology of the maximum number of people that can effectively maintain stable relationships within ‘tribes’, yet many teams, cells or scrums operate with between four to six members at maximum efficiency. For teams to work effectively we know they must reach the performing stage of development. We discuss Bruce Tuckman’s model for team effectiveness shortly. Finnish game company Supercell uses autonomous ‘cells’ of four to six people and they find this enables them to be nimble and innovative. In such small teams it is possible to have autonomy and alignment, unlike in monolithic teams. To ensure they align on purpose they have an agile team coach. They set a lot of store by hiring correctly, especially around team behaviours. A good team member is both self-directed and collaborative (what Professor Charles Handy called a proper kind of selfishness). Supercell is more concerned with progress than the accumulation of power per se. Information is distributed so that people can get on with work without waiting for decisions in a self-service information culture. This is a good example of what we dubbed the open source Johari window approach to knowledge management.

I developed a system for qualitatively valuing and improving the value of team relationships at work based on some ideas from my chemistry lessons at school. To be effective at making a network work you need to know, like and trust the people in your network. By the way ‘like’ does not necessarily imply agreement with your peers’ views or values. To develop high-performance teams requires tolerance or even encouragement of difference and diversity. This simple empirical system allows you to ascribe values to the depth of your connections by considering the strength of the chemical bonds you have with each person, as follows.

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A single bond signifies someone you simply know something about. You might think of them as acquaintances in everyday terms. Many Facebook friends are merely acquaintances under this classification and some social media contacts might have virtually zero bonding using our model. In other words, you are connected but might know little more than 280 characters about the other person if they are a Twitter connection. This can help to account for the frequent misunderstandings that take place between ‘Facebook friends’. A double chemical bond is someone that you know and like. It is much more likely that you will have some kind of interactions with someone you are double bonded to in a business context. A triple chemical bond will likely be someone you have worked with or faced some challenge with, since trust usually emerges from some testing of a bond between people. Only at this point is it likely that mature collaboration will take place. Many business relationships and transactions taking place on the Internet cannot be considered to be mature under this classification, sometimes with disastrous consequences. It is important to note that the idea of ‘like’ and ‘trust’ does not imply that you agree with the values and behaviours of your network colleague. Smart people surround themselves with disagreeable people that they trust as well as inhabiting ‘echo chambers’ with ‘similars’.

When working in India some years back, I had wanted to travel to Agra to see the Taj Mahal before my return to the UK. I took advice from the Managing Director of the factory I was working at. He told me to simply arrive at Bombay (Mumbai) Victoria train station, hand all my worldly goods and my money to the first person that approached me and all would be well. I did as he said and 20 minutes later the man arrived with my ticket but no luggage, explaining that the luggage was on the train. I assumed he was telling the truth. He was. This is the meaning of trust. I seriously doubt that the experiment would work so well at London Victoria train station and my Indian friends tell me that, sadly, times have also changed in India. I like to remain optimistic, however. Much the same thing happened when I missed a flight to Nepal, due to the plane being overbooked on Indian Airlines. My MD friend had expected this might happen and instructed me to ask for the ‘airport captain’ and show him my tickets. Again, I did as he asked. The captain took my tickets and told me to come back here tomorrow at 10 a.m. and all would be well. I said, “Do I need any receipt or document?” He replied, “You have my word”. Sure enough, I arrived the following day to find myself booked on the flight to Kathmandu. This is the essence of trust, not a pre-nuptial agreement, a 360-page tender document or an affidavit. I am not saying that we should not write things down, just that extensive documentation is a symptom of a lack of trust and we might need to relearn some of the basics.

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One of the problems I notice time and time again in the current age is that people try to play together as a team when the team psychology is not ‘mature’ and the bonds between people are either at ‘zero’ or ‘one’. You cannot ‘cheat’ by attempting to short circuit Bruce Tuckman’s fundamental team development cycle from forming, storming, norming and performing as we discussed earlier. Sending a few e-mails and texts with a mission statement is not sufficient, as the human condition remains unchanged. Teams must have laughed (or perhaps cried in triumph and/or adversity) together to have the necessary cohesion to live through good and bad times, even if membership of the team is transient and part of a network rather than a geolocated business unit. This point is not well understood by busy leaders and managers, who want their teams to hit the ground running with little or no ‘foreplay’. Like all things in life, preparation is the mother of innovation.

What part can ‘knowledge farmers’ and ‘boundary crossers’ achieve in bringing people from different disciplines together then? In the following story of a voluntary activist group set up to improve democracy in the UK there were some significant opportunities missed and I have highlighted them.

Herding cats

As part of my personal contribution to Corporate Social Responsibility within my business I helped to organise a group that campaigns against the naked populism behind our bipolar referendum to leave the European Union. This culminated in my attendance at a conference inspired by Gina Miller, the woman who single-handedly took the UK Government to the Supreme Court to improve our democracy, facing threats of beheading and gang rape into the bargain for her attempt to preserve our sovereignty. The conference was organised rapidly but some significant opportunities were missed to extend the impact of a great event, featuring ‘talking heads’ such as former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Sir Bob Geldof, the philosopher A.C. Grayling, Michael Gove, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp and Gina Miller herself. Here are three crucial missed structural opportunities that limited the effectiveness of the event to network intelligence and collective action from teams:

As a consequence of this, a massive opportunity was lost to engage and network the heads, hearts and souls of around 2000 activists seeking to extend their influence and who could have turned the fortunes of this movement through grassroots activity. None of this was done wilfully. It was simply the product of people doing this for the first time, combined with a fair amount of pressure to deliver the event, which meant the urgent items outweighed those things that were more important. Nonetheless these are valuable structural lessons for anyone operating in the knowledge economy.

Structuring knowledge and relationships

We must think fundamentally about the real value of relationships and knowledge if we are to have workable strategies for leveraging knowledge in Brain Based Teams. If knowledge is a major currency of coopetive advantage in the modern age, then we need to incorporate that into our structural arrangements at work. Knowledge-management structures serve our need to incorporate greater levels of thinking into enterprises as products and services become more ‘intelligent’ and less labour intensive. A knowledge-management structure needs to provide the following outcomes:

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•    Who knows what? – allowing people to access islands of knowledge and wisdom.

•    Who knows who? – the passive network, which allows the soft relationships and networks to operate.

•    Who is doing what with whom? – the active network, which allows people to build on current collaborations and extend their value.

Most companies are able to reach the first ‘level’ of this list, often through ‘Yellow Pages’ type approaches, which codify knowledge, competence and experiences and the owners of these things. Subsequent levels are much more difficult to codify and are essentially the ‘underground map’ of the company, although modern business networking platforms such as LinkedIn clearly offer some views of your personal reach via your network, but not how well you know people and can access their time, etc. Here we have an arena where companies could gain advantage.

The ‘Yellow Pages’ type approaches to knowledge management are all about the conversion of tacit (unconscious, located within individuals) knowledge into explicit (conscious, decoded and shared) knowledge. Nonaka and Takeuchi have pointed out that there are other possibilities. These are summarised in this model, which I have adapted to look at different knowledge sharing strategies:

The obsession with tacit to explicit knowledge results in the production of instruction manuals, protocols, standard operating procedures, etc. and processes such as ISO 14001 and their international equivalents. In other words, to ‘download’ unconscious knowledge into a form that others can copy. There is nothing wrong with this as far as it goes. However, there are other strategies, some of which are more effective for teams trying to learn from each other rapidly.

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Source: Adapted from the work of Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi

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Data exchange can be a very simple and logical process, a ‘Slot A into Tab B’ environment where there are lots of logical rules to apply. However, to take this to another level of complexity two systems could describe identical things in very different ways, Turnover/Fees/Income being an example. One method of solving this issue of labelling was XBRL technology (Extensible Business Reporting Language), which sought through means of a common dictionary (‘Taxonomy’) to label similar things with the same name. It is tricky to apply the solution however, and despite technology companies’ success in getting this to work very well it was undermined entirely by one thing. Every accounting body and national standards group decided they would accept the concept of a common dictionary, but applied different national characteristics, words, terminology, etc. to their taxonomies, thus destroying the very commonality the technology set out to achieve.

So, machine learning could solve these issues by being able to ‘learn’ from the behaviour of users. If people manually link a certain item of information to the same destination regularly it could well be the case that the machine will offer this as an automatic data association on every subsequent occasion, and allow the user to make a correction if it goes wrong. This means that a given system could ‘learn’ about a huge number of links between numerous disparate systems, effectively building its own ‘taxonomy’. CaseWare is doing this with its core cloud platform, under the name of ‘Automapping’.

Simon Warren, MD CaseWare

When we examine knowledge management from the perspective of leading innovative enterprises, a number of different assumptions apply:

Improvisation also allows for tacit to tacit and explicit to explicit learning. This is why music is a robust model for learning about creativity and innovation. We focus in on transferable lessons from music in Dialogue III.

The dark side of knowledge management

Knowledge is easy to lose. Unlike many other resources we possess, some business knowledge has an incredibly short half-life. Just consider how short the half-life for information is within financial markets. In an enterprise, sometimes knowledge is stuck in a silo, people take it with them when they leave, there are no ‘prizes’ for sharing it, or, worse, there might be reprisals. The company might not have the skills to search the silo effectively or it might lack time or resources to conduct such exercises. A fundamental limitation of an intelligent society is the well-tested idea that knowledge sharing suffers if knowledge = power. The fundamental transformation dynamic we need to address here may be summed up by the following equation:

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The distribution of formal power is intimately connected with the dark side of leadership and leaders. Do leaders withhold information? Do they restrict access to their networks and so on? Leaders play a vital role in setting the tone for what others will do in terms of their own attitudes to sharing knowledge. For knowledge management to succeed there must be an alignment of these power sources in favour of sharing knowledge, skills and wisdom. There are things that leaders can do to set the culture. Then there are systemic things that help to oil the wheels of intelligent teams and enterprises:

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Pollinateurs, intrapreneurs and agitateurs

Every new idea in science, politics, art or any other field, evokes three stages of reaction:

“It’s impossible. Don’t waste my time.”

“It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing.”

“I said it was a good idea all along.”

Clark’s Law of Revolutionary Ideas

In leading across teams, across the enterprise and beyond, more than ever we need the kind of enterprise skills that exist in the small business sector within companies, or what are usually called intrapreneurs. Sometimes these people have the luxury of greater levels of funding than they might be able to access as an entrepreneur. However, depending on the company culture, they might not always be afforded the same freedoms as an entrepreneur. The intrapreneur must therefore be skilled in the art of navigating barriers to the conversion of an idea into a sustainable innovation. To do that they often need to draw on the skills of people who will cross-pollinate the idea across the enterprise and people who will agitate in a good way to secure the necessary resources to advance the idea and improve the ROI (Return on Iteration). What then are the typical barriers to getting your idea off the ground inside an enterprise?

Selling your idea

Novel concepts are, by their very nature, fragile and must be communicated clearly and potently to those who must sponsor them. If your concept is complex, it is of vital importance that you communicate the concept simply to those who will advance funds, people and time to develop the idea. We frequently see how complex concepts fail in the TV soapreneur programme Dragon’s Den. Of course, the show is not real life and you are normally given more time to pitch your idea at work. Nonetheless, simplicity, brevity and potency are key to capturing the interest of your sponsors. Try the seven words test. Can you explain the raw essence of your idea in seven words or less? If you can do that, then getting five minutes to explain your idea, its unique qualities and long-term benefits is going to be much easier.

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So many times I have encountered people with great ideas but without the emotional intelligence to communicate them in a way that engages their target sponsor. I did some work for an innovative company in California working in the surf suit business. Their ambition was to gain endorsements and sponsorship from Sir Richard Branson. After some enquiries it turned out that they actually did not know what type of wetsuits he used, among many other gaps in their intended communication strategy. It was not difficult for a small child to gather the required data from a quick Internet search. I was somewhat surprised that they did not already know Branson’s ‘inside leg measurement’ among other intelligence about his interests in surf wear necessary if they were to have had a chance of making an intelligent pitch. Aside from this, gaining an endorsement is quite different from gaining sponsorship and they needed to be much clearer on their goals to have a chance of success. Needless to say the project did not progress as well as they might have hoped, and, indeed hope is not a strategy when you have a limited window of opportunity to present an idea. To communicate an idea, as we have discussed, the bare minimum you need is:

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There are two schools of thought about how information should flow within companies. By far the most common way is chain of command, which means that you always flow communication through your manager. The problem with this approach is that, while it serves to enhance the power of the manager, it fails to serve the company.

Anyone at Tesla can and should e-mail/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept., you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission.

Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens. The point here is not random chitchat, but rather ensuring that we execute ultra-fast and well. We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility.

In any situation of selling an idea it is also wise to identify the different stakeholders who might be involved, from the gatekeeper, whose job it is to allow you into the situation of influence (or not), the influencer who will want to study your idea in detail and could be the person to ensure your idea is accepted, and the decision-maker who signs the cheque. Each of these different stakeholders requires different treatments from you in the idea selling process.

Never give up

Spence Silver took 15 years to convince 3M that his idea for ‘a glue that wouldn’t stick’ was a winner (the 3M Post-It Note). Ken Kutaragi nearly lost his job at Sony Corporation when he worked for Nintendo in his spare time developing what became the Sony PlayStation. Kutaragi found a product champion in the form of Norio Ohga, Sony’s CEO, who recognised his creativity, when most of the senior management team saw his project as a distraction rather than a serious piece of new product development. By 1998, the PlayStation provided 40% of Sony’s profits. The lesson here is to play the long game. Overnight success as an intrapreneur is the exception, not the rule. However, the type of persistence we are talking about here is not the ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again’ type. I call this head banging. In other words, ‘doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result’. I prefer the maxim ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try something different’. This is persistence plus creativity and it requires emotional resilience. In other words, this is your ability to bounce back from setbacks, having learned and incorporated this into your wisdom.

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Tight fit or misfit?

Many enterprises are stuck in the groove of using time-honoured MBA concepts of suitability, feasibility and acceptability, pioneered by Johnson and Scholes, to judge novel ideas. Suitability is about fit with the business environment, the opportunities and threats therein. Feasibility is about whether the enterprise has the resources and capabilities to realise the strategy. Acceptability is about the return on risk for stakeholders. By their very nature, novel ideas often appear to be ill-fitting and therefore fail the test of suitability. They might require resources and capabilities that are currently unavailable to the enterprise and therefore seem unfeasible. They might also, therefore, have a high risk profile and therefore be unappealing to shareholders and key decision-makers, thus failing on acceptability. Johnson and Scholes’ criteria are also often inappropriate for judging new ideas. The NAF criteria are often better (novelty, appropriateness and feasibility).

Much new product and service innovation succeeds because the product or service augments or is consonant in some way with existing approaches. We have already discussed consonance and dissonance earlier and these terms correspond to market pull and product push in the field of innovation. So, you can increase the probability of adoption of an idea that is somewhat dissonant by demonstrating how it fits in. When Akio Morita introduced the Sony Walkman, he considered the lifestyle compatibility issue by making shirts with a pocket designed to hold the device, thus solving the problem of ‘where to put it’. Always think about the way in which your idea will be used and ensure that it fits in with the social and technical systems, which will improve adoption. If you are attempting to diffuse a ‘misfit’ into the market, then it is essential to build a bridge between the known and the unknown lest cognitive dissonance sets in, which will undoubtedly kill your brilliant idea even if it does not deserve to die.

Timing and time

Timing in the innovation game is everything. Da Vinci ‘invented’ the helicopter several centuries too early! Newspapers were arguably two decades too early going online, Google + (too late?) and AskJeeves – “Ask who?” you might ask? In research on innovation across 200 companies, timing was the most important factor in terms of impact on innovation success (42%), then team/execution (32%), the idea itself (28%), the business model (24%) and finally access to funding (14%). Google and Facebook are good examples of companies that got the timing right.

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I was privileged to work for Sir Trevor Jones at The Wellcome Foundation in my early days, a philanthropic not-for-profit pharmaceutical company that was devoted to innovation. Trevor was a feisty and passionate scientist who unusually also understood the importance of advocacy and working across and outside the enterprise. He had a number of exceptional habits to help him keep his eye on the ball of long-term strategy while dealing with today’s priorities. One neat trick was his ‘too difficult’ in-tray, for ideas that people had submitted that could not be implemented due to various issues including timing. He systematically recycled the items in the ‘too difficult’ pile so that they could be launched when timing favoured their introduction.

The other vital issue is securing sufficient time to work on your idea, in order to convert it into an innovation. Pharmaceutical company Roche take the view that intrapreneurs must be allowed time to innovate, and have applied the ‘20% bootlegging principle’, originally developed by serial innovators 3M. Basically, this allows intrapreneurs to spend 20% of their time on non-job-related speculative projects.

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Synthesis

Leading intelligent individuals in teams requires a style of leadership that is more directive in terms of setting a direction and rather more facilitative in terms of engaging the team on that journey. This, of course, is a generalisation and on occasion it is important for leaders to consult those they lead in the creation of a direction for the enterprise. Brain Based Leaders also respect and celebrate the diversity within the team.

When facilitating intelligent teams, leaders need the full range of facilitation styles from directive to non-directive. The Brain Based Leader masters facilitation to get the best out of the people they lead in teams.

As opposites attract so there will be conflict among diverse teams. The Brain Based Leader is skilled at handling conflict, applying the full range of strategies from head on inter-team confrontation through to skilful accommodation to address short-term concerns while keeping an eye on the long-term wellbeing of the team and the enterprise.

Brain Based Teams use a range of strategies for the transfer of knowledge and intelligence, ranging from the more familiar conversion of tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge (essentially a download-upload approach) through to more nuanced methods such as modelling, internalisation and so on.

To make cross-functional teams work, cross-pollination is needed to oil the wheels of enterprise by dealing with interface management. Such people are fluent in the different business languages of the different divisions and especially able to deal with differences.