-
1-3 DECEMBER 2015 | TURIN, ITALY
Leading for Innovation
This Website is dedicated to our first L4i_Lab in Turin.
Please, contact Giordana
if you need any additional information
and if you would like to receive future updates.
Up close and personal is the nature of the conversations we have had with individuals leading extraordinary teams and organizations to extraordinary results. For more than a decade we have researched leaders of innovation in some of the most remarkable organizations in the world, to gain deeper insights on what “leading for innovation” means.
After publishing the results of our research in the book Collective Genius, we have decided to transform these insights into a new kind of learning experience for those who are ready to increase their impact, change the way they approach innovation, mobilize their team towards “creating novelty,” and reshape the way of working in their organization, enterprise, and community.
If you are one of these people, L4i is for you—it will allow you to connect old and new dots in an innovative way.
DOTS
Leading for Innovation (L4i) is a three-day experience designed to shatter your assumptions about how innovation happens, strengthen your leadership mindset, and shake the way you work.
This is not a traditional leadership development program: it’s a Lab where you will reassemble your perspective and reconnect the “dots.” Your dots and our dots: the ones you have gathered through your experiences and the ones we have gathered through our research.
Leading for Innovation is not for the faint of heart. It’s an art. It’s a science. In the L4i_Lab, you will be stretched: you will explore, learn, debate, test, experiment, fail, and co-design in a collaborative, hands-on environment.
WAYS
You will join a community of like-minded people who want to experience a new way of working, collaborating, and leading. You will learn how to connect, engage, and amplify the talents and passions of others while working together towards a common goal: improving your ability to lead innovation in your team and organization. You will challenge yourself to grapple with complexity and ambiguity, expand the boundaries of your understanding of your own leadership, and practice how to fail “quick and small.” You will learn about and explore the connection between ways of working, leadership, and innovation in a high-impact, immersive experience that combines research-based theory with meaningful practice. The small number of participants will allow you to engage in an intimate dialogue with the rest of the group and the faculty.
The L4i_Lab will change the way you think about and approach innovation in your work and organization, and it will equip you to better embed innovation into your team’s DNA.
“The real art of leadership is creating a world that other people want to belong to.”
– Jim Morris, GM, Pixar (in Collective Genius)
ZOOM
Maybe you are a marketing executive who worries that your team doesn’t see innovation as their mandate. Maybe you are a product developer whose team had a major breakthrough and now can’t seem to win again. An HR director of a nonprofit struggling to understand why the smartest people you are hiring can’t deliver enough innovation. An entrepreneur wondering how to move from “new idea” to “new reality.” A CFO trying to transform an aging growth company into a global powerhouse. A CEO wondering about the challenge of creating a culture of innovation. An expert who is looking to reinvent your field and your practice.
Wherever you work in your organization, whomever you lead: you are someone who wants to have impact. You know who you are. We want to meet you.
“You don’t want an organization that just salutes and does what you say.
You want an organization that argues with you. And so you want to nurture the bottoms up, but you’ve got to be careful you don’t just degenerate into chaos.”
– Bill Coughran, former SVP Engineering, Google
(in Collective Genius)
SLICES
The L4i_Lab is the combination of three very different slices of experience, three people who have dealt with the life of organizations from three different perspectives: academia, management, consulting.
We are Linda A. Hill and Greg Brandeau: co-authors of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation. We have spent more than a decade researching—up close and personally—master innovation leaders in 26 companies and 15 countries around the world. From the co-founder of Pixar Animation, to a marketing exec at Volkswagen; from the President of Indian IT giant HCL Technologies, to a research director at Sanford C. Bernstein—we have spent hundreds of hours on the ground learning how leaders of innovation think and work.
We are Maurizio Travaglini and Architects of Group Genius: we have designed, led, and facilitated more than 250 collaborative and experiential Labs on five continents for companies like Audi, General Electric, Ferrero, Fiat-Chrysler, Unilever, and the World Economic Forum, where teams co-design innovative solutions to their most complex and pressing challenges. As consultants-designers-facilitators-producers, we do things in an unusual way, because we believe that unusual breeds unusual.
We have teamed up to create the L4i_Lab because we want people to experience and develop the skills, mindset, and bold ambition they need to lead for innovation—not just once, but time and again.
Greg Brandeau
Leading for innovation at some of the most advanced organizations in the world.Greg Brandeau spent over two decades leading teams at companies like NeXT, Pixar, and The Walt Disney Studios. He now advises startups on building cultures of innovation.
Read More
Linda Hill
How Collective Genius unfolds in the life of organizations.Professor Linda A. Hill is the Faculty Chair of the Leadership Initiative at the Harvard Business School and was named one of the top ten management thinkers in the world.
Read More
Maurizio Travaglini
Applying the principles of co-design to solve all sorts of wicked problems.Maurizio Travaglini is the Principal of Architects of Group Genius and is Research Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (Exec.Ed.).
Read More
A-HA!
We have shared our research, insights, and a-ha moments in our latest book Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation.
Our a-has have created some remarkable ripple effects:
- Linda A. Hill’s TEDx talk, “How to Manage for Collective Creativity” has over 1.5 million views and was named by Inc.com as one of the four “Must Watch Inspirational TED Talks on Creativity in Business”
- Collective Genius Awards and Recognition:
- Our article “Collective Genius” won the first ever Warren Bennis Prize, which recognizes the best article on leadership each year in the Harvard Business Review.
INVENT
The Space
Our work will take place inside the UniManagement Learning and Innovation Center in Turin.
The UniManagement Center was designed by world-class expert in innovation Matt Taylor (who has also designed innovation centers for the World Economic Forum, NASA, Vanderbilt University, and the US Air Force) and Architects of Group Genius (who helped create the Harvard Innovation Lab, the Harvard Business School ‘Hives’, and the Davos Workspace). Inaugurated in 2007, it has been recognized by the European Foundation for Management Development as one of the most advanced corporate laboratories in Europe.
Taylor describes the unique and flexible space that is needed for the hard work of innovation and collaboration: “A work environment should be capable of absorbing the variety necessitated by the mission and task of the users—the very opposite of what has become the default workplace in the modern world.”
This extraordinary space will change and morph over the three days of the L4i_Lab “to absorb the variety necessitated by our mission” and support your extraordinary learning experience. Are you ready to invent?
FLOW
Dec 1
-
9:00 - 11:00AM Leading for Innovation: The Hardest Work
-
11:00 - 1:00PM Understanding the Context
-
1:00 - 4:00PM The Work of Inventors
over lunch
-
4:00 - 6:00PM The Three Capabilities
-
6:00 - 8:30PM The Braintrust
over dinner
-
8:30 - 9:30PM The Difficult Questions
Dec 2
-
9:00 - 11:00AM The Future and the Pursuit of Progress
-
11:00 - 1:00PM Dealing with Paradoxes
-
1:00 - 4:00PM The Secret Life of Organizations
over lunch
-
4:00 - 6:00PM What Is a Community?
-
6:00 - 8:30PM Reframing Success in the 21st Century
over dinner
-
8:30 - 9:30PM The Hardest Dilemmas
Dec 3
-
9:00 - 11:00AM Collective and Individual Identity
-
11:00 - 1:00PM The Art of Co-Design
-
1:00 - 4:00PM Collaboration Across Boundaries
over lunch
-
4:00 - 5:00PM The Risky Answers
Rules of Engagement
FROM BEGINNING TO END
(nothing in between)
The L4i_Lab begins and ends at the same time for everyone: late arrivals and early departures would be highly disruptive to the group process.
UNDIVIDED ATTENTION
(uninterrupted thought and dialogue)
One hundred percent of everyone’s presence and concentration will be needed: the use of mobile devices will not be allowed during the Lab.
SNEAKERS?
(ready to work)
Yes. Sneakers or any other type of comfortable shoes are okay. The days will be long and only a small part of them will be spent in chairs. Casual clothing is okay too. No formalities: it’s a Lab.