Tag Archives: managing the flow

Drive Out Fear for Innovation to Flow

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Drive Out Fear for Innovation to Flow

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

The primary impediment to innovation is fear, and the prime directive of any innovation system should be to drive out fear.

A culture of accountability, implemented poorly, can inject fear and deter innovation. When the team is accountable to deliver on a project but are constrained to a fixed scope, a fixed launch date and resources, they will be afraid. Because they know that innovation requires new work and new work is inherently unpredictable, they rightly recognize the triple accountability – time, scope and resources – cannot be met. From the very first day of the project, they know they cannot be successful and are afraid of the consequences.

A culture of accountability can be adapted to innovation to reduce fear. Here’s one way. Keep the team small and keep them dedicated to a single innovation project. No resource sharing, no swapping and no double counting. Create tight time blocks with clear work objectives, where the team reports back on a fixed pitch (weekly, monthly). But make it clear that they can flex on scope and level of completeness. They should try to do all the work within the time constraints but they must know that it’s expected the scope will narrow or shift and the level of completeness will be governed by the time constraint. Tell them you believe in them and you trust them to do their best, then praise their good judgement at the review meeting at the end of the time block.

Innovation is about solving new problems, yet fear blocks teams from trying new things. Teams like to solve problems that are familiar because they have seen previous teams judged negatively for missing deadlines. Here’s the logic – we’d rather add too little novelty than be late. The team would love to solve new problems but their afraid, based on past projects, that they’ll be chastised for missing a completion date that’s disrespectful of the work content and level of novelty. If you want the team to solve new problems, give them the tools, time, training and a teacher so they can select different problems and solve them differently. Simply put – create the causes and conditions for fear to quietly slink away so innovation will flow.

Fear is the most powerful inhibitor. But before we can lessen the team’s fear we’ve got to recognize the causes and conditions that create it. Fear’s job is to keep us safe, to keep us away from situations that have been risky or dangerous. To do this, our bodies create deep memories of those dangerous or scary situations and creates fear when it recognizes similarities between the current situation and past dangerous situations. In that way, less fear is created if the current situation feels differently from situations of the past where people were judged negatively.

To understand the causes and conditions that create fear, look back at previous projects. Make a list of the projects where project members were judged negatively for things outside their control such as: arbitrary launch dates not bound by the work content, high risk levels driven by unjustifiable specifications, insufficient resources, inadequate tools, poor training and no teacher. And make a list of projects where team members were praised. For the projects that praised, write down attributes of those projects (e.g., high reuse, low technical risk) and their outcomes (e.g., on time, on cost). To reduce fear, the project team will bend new projects toward those attributes and outcomes. Do the same for projects that judged negatively for things outside the project teams’ control. To reduce fear, the future project teams will bend away from those attributes and outcomes.

Now the difficult parts. As a leader, it’s time to look inside. Make a list of your behaviors that set (or contributed to) causes and conditions that made it easy for the project team to be judged negatively for the wrong reasons. And then make a list of your new behaviors that will create future causes and conditions where people aren’t afraid to solve new problems in new ways.

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From Hero to Host – A New Metaphor for Innovation Leadership

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LAST UPDATED: November 25, 2025 at 3:05PM

From Hero to Host - A New Metaphor for Innovation Leadership

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In most organizational narratives, innovation is seen as an act of singular brilliance. We celebrate the Hero Leader: the visionary CEO, the charismatic product genius, or the lone fixer who descends into a crisis and saves the day. This model — the leader as the sole source of all good ideas and the ultimate risk-taker — is outdated, unsustainable, and actively stifles widespread, continuous innovation in a complex enterprise.

The Hero Leader creates an Innovation Bottleneck. When one person owns the vision and assumes all the career risk (Hero Risk), everyone else is waiting for permission to act. Teams revert to a compliance mindset, managing upward expectations instead of exploring market opportunities. This dependency fosters a culture of learned helplessness and eliminates the possibility of true, decentralized innovation.

The human-centered solution is to shift the leadership role from a performer to an enabler: Hero to Host. The Host Leader’s job is not to provide the content (the ideas or the answers) but to deliberately design the context — the structural, psychological, and resource environment — in which great ideas can emerge from anywhere in the organization. The Host manages the Organizational System Risk (Host Risk) so that innovators can take product risk.

The Five Core Shifts from Hero to Host

The transition from Hero to Host requires a behavioral and structural pivot:

  1. From Dictating the Answer to Curating the Talent: The Hero pitches their idea; the Host intentionally brings together diverse, cross-functional “guests” (experts from different silos) and aligns them on the right customer problem to solve.
  2. From Mitigating Risk to Providing Safety: The Hero tries to protect the organization from failure; the Host creates a Psychological Safety Net (a Safe Harbor or learning budget) that actively protects the innovator from the failure of the experiment.
  3. From Centralized Power to Distributed Ownership: The Hero is the final sign-off authority; the Host empowers small, autonomous teams with delegated decision rights for rapid prototyping and testing within established boundaries.
  4. From Short-Term Metrics to Long-Term Learning: The Hero demands quick ROI; the Host asks: “What definitive data did we learn from this test, and how cheaply did we learn it?”
  5. From Status to Service: The Hero maintains command and control; the Host actively seeks to remove organizational roadblocks (bureaucracy, slow procurement, siloed data) for their teams, viewing their authority as a tool for service.

The Three Primary Actions of the Host Leader

1. Setting the Stage (Designing the Safe Space)

A good host ensures the party space is safe and welcoming. The Host Leader’s first job is to establish the Innovation Charter. This includes defining the boundaries for exploration (what’s safe to fail?), allocating ring-fenced Learning Capital (not rigid P&L budgets), and establishing clear, non-punitive governance processes. This structural work signals to the organization that exploration is not only allowed but strategically funded.

2. Curating the Guests (Ensuring Systemic Diversity)

The Host ensures the right mix of people for creative collaboration. The Host Leader actively breaks down silos by mandating cross-functional teams (e.g., pairing a compliance officer with a designer, or a finance analyst with a field engineer) and providing them with a shared, human-centered framework, like Design Thinking. The Host knows that breakthrough ideas happen at the intersection of disciplines, where the friction of different perspectives generates unexpected solutions.

3. Managing the Flow (Governing the Process, Not the Outcome)

A host guides the energy of the event; they don’t perform every dance. The Host Leader manages the process rigor. They don’t dictate which product to build, but they ensure teams are rigorously applying the methodology — properly conducting empathy interviews, building quick MVPs, and rapidly validating hypotheses. The Host provides the guardrails (the process) but allows teams the autonomy to move within them.

Case Study 1: The Software Company’s CEO Transition

Challenge: Stagnant Portfolio Driven by Centralized Decision-Making

A mid-sized enterprise software company was built on the back of its charismatic founder/CEO (the Hero), who micromanaged product development. As the market sped up, the CEO became the bottleneck for every major decision, slowing launch cycles and causing high burnout among high-potential product managers.

The Host Transition: Delegation and Protection

The CEO publicly announced a shift: his new primary metric was the Volume of High-Value Experiments Run by Autonomous Teams. His intervention focused on becoming the Host:

  • Protection Charter: He established an internal Venture Fund with a public “Decoupling Failure” policy, ensuring teams that ran rigorous experiments were celebrated even if the results were negative.
  • Curated Teams: He mandated that every new product initiative must have representation from sales, engineering, and customer support, forcing co-creation and accountability for the customer journey.
  • Role Shift: The CEO stopped attending weekly product meetings. Instead, he held monthly Roadblock Removal Sessions, where teams brought him their three biggest bureaucratic hurdles. His job was exclusively to remove those hurdles.

The Human-Centered Lesson:

By consciously stepping out of the spotlight and designing a system of support, the CEO transformed his role from the source of the idea to the ultimate organizational shield. In the first year, the company’s experiment volume tripled, and one successful venture was launched, entirely conceived and executed without the CEO’s direct input, proving that the Host’s power lies in their ability to protect, not perform.

Case Study 2: The Healthcare Network and the Systemic Host

Challenge: Innovation Failure in Operational Process Due to Silo Warfare

A large healthcare network needed to improve patient intake efficiency, but every attempt failed because IT, Facilities, and Clinical Operations could never agree on the human-centered solution. The friction was a systemic failure of leadership, with departments acting as organizational silos (mini-Heroes) protecting their own turf.

The Host Structure: The Innovation Concierge

Instead of relying on a single Hero leader, the network established a systemic Host mechanism: the Innovation Concierge Team. This permanent, central team (Step 1: Setting the Stage) was given no ideas of its own, but was granted the authority to temporarily pull resources from any silo.

  • Curating the Guests: When a new intake challenge arose, the Concierge Team convened a diverse, time-boxed Innovation Task Force (Step 2: Curating). This force included a doctor, a data analyst, and a facilities manager.
  • Governing the Flow: The Concierge Team enforced a strict 4-week Design Sprint process, ensuring the teams moved past consensus and quickly prototyped a solution. The Concierge was responsible for managing the calendar and removing organizational friction (Step 3: Managing the Flow).

The Human-Centered Lesson:

The Host function was embedded into the system itself, rather than resting on one person. The Concierge Team successfully solved 12 complex operational challenges in two years, not by creating the solutions, but by acting as the neutral, authoritative Host that enforced collaboration and protected the teams from departmental pushback. Innovation became a predictable, repeatable service, not a dependency on a single charismatic figure.

The Human-Centered Call to Action

If your innovation strategy requires a Hero to succeed, your strategy is inherently fragile and dependent on an unsustainable source of energy. True, resilient, enterprise innovation requires a collective shift in leadership behavior. Stop viewing your role as the source of the brilliant idea. Instead, view your role as the architect of the environment — the ultimate Host who ensures the space is safe, the resources are flowing, and the process is rigorous.

Leadership is no longer about having the best ideas; it is about designing the best conditions for ideas to thrive.

“The Host Leader understands that their greatest power comes not from being the smartest person in the room, but from being the one who makes everyone else in the room feel safe and empowered to be brilliant.” — Braden Kelley

Frequently Asked Questions About Hero-to-Host Leadership

1. What is the fundamental difference between the Hero Leader and the Host Leader?

The Hero Leader is the performer who provides the solution, assumes all the risk, and acts as the central bottleneck for decisions. The Host Leader is the enabler who designs the systemic environment, curates the right diverse teams, and provides the psychological and structural safety for others to create and take risks.

2. How does the Host Leader approach risk and failure differently?

The Hero Leader typically avoids failure and manages risk by controlling the outcome. The Host Leader actively creates a “Safe Harbor” and allocates “Learning Capital,” understanding that early, cheap failure (a failure of hypothesis) is a necessary, strategically funded asset that accelerates organizational learning.

3. What is the role of the Host Leader in managing cross-functional teams?

The Host Leader serves as the “Curator.” They actively break down organizational silos by intentionally assembling diverse teams (IT, Finance, Design, Operations) to address a shared customer problem. The Host’s authority is used not to dictate the answer, but to enforce the methodology (e.g., Design Thinking process rigor) and remove bureaucratic roadblocks across organizational lines.

Your first step toward Host Leadership: Identify an innovation team currently struggling with bureaucracy (slow sign-offs, procurement delays, data access). Hold a 15-minute meeting where you, the leader, commit to serving as the team’s dedicated Roadblock Remover. Publicly state that your new job is not to approve their idea, but to shield them from the organizational immune system for one month. This small, consistent act of service immediately transforms your leadership metaphor and empowers the pioneer.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

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