Leadership

Modern leadership is another ingredient in Business Design that deserves real attention. Customer research projects and sprints are hands-on approaches, but they still need management support — first, to keep such projects running smoothly, and second, to act on results that don’t always fit the current organisation. Too often, innovation work — and the people driving it — sits too far from top management. That distance creates unnecessary friction and frustrated employees.

1. Mindsets for Leaders

The following mindsets work well for leaders — especially top management — in Business Design:

1. Think from the future: Business Design starts from a future vision and works backwards — a picture of where you want your customers and your company to be. We call this a Picture of the Future. From that picture, you ask: what can we do today to get there fastest? This takes a visionary leadership style, one not every leadership team has. Many companies are run from the status quo instead: they analyse what exists and plan incremental improvements with classic project management. That’s not wrong, but it serves a different ambition. Let’s say a bank’s leadership team pictures itself running a marketplace for financial products in five years, including offers from competitors. Only that picture — not last year’s roadmap — tells you which projects to start today.

2. Strategic clarity: Innovation work aimed at real change needs clarity about what “change” means. “We want to stay market leader” is a goal, not clarity. The real question is: “What kind of company do we need to become in the next few years to stay market leader?” That means clarity on future roles, future value creation, future technologies etc. “We’re number one”, “use AI” and “digitalisation” clearly aren’t enough guidance. Let’s say two teams both hear “become more digital”: one builds a chatbot nobody asked for, the other builds the online contract renewal customers have been requesting for years. Only a clear future vision — not the slogan — tells them which one to build.

3. Psychological safety: In some companies, employees don’t just respect their leaders — they fear them. Open exchange doesn’t happen: employees sell themselves internally and hide failures and anything that might hurt their career. That kind of behaviour kills successful innovation work. Business Design needs an environment of high psychological safety, where an innovation project isn’t just welcome but strategically critical. Let’s say a middle manager quietly blocks budget for a Project Team because its results would question his own department’s numbers. Defending the team means overruling that manager openly, in front of the people watching how the company really treats innovation — not smoothing it over in a private conversation once the risk has already passed.

4. Value innovation work: In many companies today, innovation work — no matter how successful — barely helps your career. Why? It challenges established structures and processes, and that unsettles the people who built them. As a result, innovators often get little appreciation and more resistance, sometimes subtle, sometimes direct. Leadership needs to recognise this pattern and respond to it in public, not just in a one-on-one. Let’s say a Project Team spends six months validating an idea, then kills it after a hypothesis is falsified — exactly as it should. If that team’s next assignment is a quiet transfer back to core-business tasks, everyone watching learns that innovation work is a career risk, and stops volunteering for it.

5. Enable, don’t control: A visionary leadership style helps employees become more self-sufficient by building a shared vision together. Leaders then spend less time defining tasks and checking work, and more time enabling people — giving them tools, the right environment and room to work towards the vision with as little friction as possible. Let’s say a Project Team wants to test its prototype with real customers a week earlier than planned. A controlling leader asks for a status update and a revised project plan first. An enabling leader asks what support the team needs and lets them go. Employees given that kind of freedom, backed by trust, tend to enjoy working for their leader — and don’t want to let them down.

6. Let the facts beat you — in public: The most powerful thing a leader can do for Business Design is to change their own mind in front of other people, on the basis of a customer result. Everybody in the room learns in that moment whether Facts Over Opinions is a principle or a poster. Let’s say you opened the sprint convinced that the premium segment was the opportunity, and twelve interviews later the Project Team shows you it isn’t. Saying “the data says I was wrong, we follow the data” costs you three minutes of discomfort and buys you a team that will bring you bad news for years. Quietly reframing the result so your original position still looks right costs you nothing today — and every honest report afterwards.

Most of these mindsets and behaviours matter just as much for middle management as for top management. But middle managers sit in a sandwich position, which makes some of them hard to put into practice. They usually need support so they don’t end up blocking innovation work — knowingly or not.

2. Supporting Middle Management

Middle managers rarely block innovation out of malice. They block it because the system pays them to. Before you ask them for support, give them three things.

• Adjusted targets: You can’t ask the same person for full capacity utilisation and for two people released into a sprint. Whoever sets the innovation mandate has to touch the unit’s targets in the same conversation — otherwise the mandate is a wish.

• Permission in writing: The release of people, with names, share of working time and a period — part of the budget decision, not a verbal agreement at the coffee machine (see Governance).

• Public credit: When a team from their unit produces a result — especially an uncomfortable one — the credit goes to the manager who let it happen, in front of their peers. Do that twice and you’ll have volunteers.

3. Questions to Ask

Leaders steer innovation work through their questions far more than through their decisions. A team prepares for the question it expects. Ask for status and you’ll get status theatre — polished slides, green traffic lights, no learning. Ask what was falsified and you’ll get facts.

The last one is worth more than the other four together. A leader who has sat through two customer interviews argues differently in the next portfolio discussion — and everybody notices.

4. Q & A

• I'm a middle manager, not on the board. Can I do any of this? Most of it, yes. Psychological safety, public credit and the questions in section 3 cost no budget and no mandate – they cost the willingness to hear something you'd rather not. What you can't do alone is change the targets you are measured on. Ask for that one in writing, the way section 2 describes it, and don't start releasing people until you have it.

• How much time does this cost me as a sponsor? Less than repairing a project you ignored. In practice: one decision at the end of each phase, one short conversation a month with the Team Coach and one customer interview you attend yourself per project. If you can't spend that, don't sponsor the project – an absent Project Sponsor is worse for a team than no sponsor at all, because the team keeps waiting for decisions that never come.

• Our leadership team says it backs innovation, but nothing changes. Where do I start? With one visible act, not a programme. Overrule one blocker in the open. Fund one project that questions an existing business. Take one leader to a customer interview. People read behaviour, not statements – that is the whole argument of Work Culture. One act of that kind teaches the organisation more than a year of town halls.