The Weaver
This week, I'm delivering a keynote on transforming tension into lasting impact. Reflecting on my own journey—how and when I’ve made a difference and how those experiences now shape my work helping organizations boost their leadership and innovation—I’m reminded of the qualities of a great rope. Think about it: a good rope boasts strength, flexibility, and wear resistance, all thanks to how its individual threads are expertly woven together.
Making a real impact, whether in your team or across your organization, relies on the same principles: strength, flexibility, and resilience—the very weave of traits within a person or group. So, this week, let’s unravel three essential threads for weaving a truly sustainable impact at work.
The Agitator: Stirring the Pot with Purpose
The first thread in our impact weave is the agitator. This is the individual or team that knows how to shake things up, or the organizational processes designed to challenge the status quo. For me, the agitator role always felt natural. I've always had a strong non-conformist streak, constantly asking "why?" and "why not differently?" I thrive on trying new approaches, especially in uncharted territory where norms need to be created. My last five full-time roles were all brand new, never existing before I stepped in. In such undefined environments, agitation is inherent, and I excelled.
But as those roles matured, I had to evolve my approach to successful agitation. Stirring things up can seem easy: ask tough questions, challenge norms, resist conformity, deconstruct processes. Yet, simply pushing, confronting, or challenging isn't enough to be a successful agitator. True agitators shake things up with a clear purpose: to find cohesion. Breaking things apart without building new unity and focusing on an agreed-upon problem leads only to destruction, not sustainable impact. It’s not enough to just point out flaws.
Great agitators challenge the status quo to uncover the real problem, then relentlessly try and build consensus. They dissect work into its core components, re-evaluating elements in light of current and future challenges. Then, they reassemble, adding new elements to construct a fresh solution for a well-defined problem. Successful agitation, whether personal or team-based, demands leading while acknowledging a certain but weak past, all while forging an uncertain but stronger future. It requires working towards a new future state without sacrificing present performance. Agitators can hold these seemingly opposing views because they understand that today’s success provides the launchpad for tomorrow’s impact.
The Innovator: From Ideas to Action
Next, we have the innovator, the second thread in our impact weave. Innovators are masters of creation, brimming with creative ideas to solve problems, especially other people’s problems. Throughout my career, I've seen countless times when organizations solicit input for challenges, and people readily offer suggestions: "more marketing," "better internal communication," "external partnerships." These are often viable ideas, but they frequently falter because they're generated as suggestions for others to implement, usually by those not directly responsible for the work. It’s easy to innovate for someone else’s problem when you have little stake in its execution.
True innovators, first and foremost, look inward. They scrutinize their own work or their team’s work for problems to solve. They seek internal solutions, internal resources to begin fixing, and internal talent to execute. Second, great innovators take a focused problem and relentlessly experiment with solutions, aiming for quick, realistic progress towards a future direction. They spend enough time on solution building to get things moving, but not so much that nothing happens.
Innovators are more than just idea generators; they are action-oriented. They and their teams identify what's within their control to change, and they change it. For what’s beyond their control, they initiate the relational work to bring others to a "yes." Innovators understand that the greatest value in making an impact isn't just the solution, but the credibility built in the process of solving problems. Credibility stems from courage, trust, accomplishment, and legitimacy. (as inspired by Ujwal Arkalgud)
The Orchestrator: Weaving Solutions into the Fabric
Finally, the third thread in our impact weave is the orchestrator. This role demands that you and your team expertly combine distinct, yet interdependent, components in a precise order to build and sustain a complete solution for a specific problem. The orchestrator scales up experiments, expanding their reach and impact to a long term solution.
Good orchestrators maintain an unwavering focus on the desired outcome, meticulously concentrating on the incremental tasks that will resolve complex problems. Sustainable solution adoption is their ultimate goal. It's not just about implementation; orchestrators want people to embrace and champion the solution. They are part technical wizard, part people alchemist—understanding intricate systems and workflow interconnectivity while also recognizing the nuanced complexity of changing human behaviour.
Orchestrators excel at soliciting feedback, owning errors, and collaborating to fix the inevitable mistakes. Some aspects of being a good orchestrator don't come naturally to me. I often expend significant energy on the technical details needed for a sustainable work process and sometimes miss crucial details for timely success, which impacts adoption. Luckily, I've always been strong with the human side of adopting new approaches, possessing the patience and willingness to understand opposition.
Individuals and teams that make significant impacts skillfully weave together the threads of agitator, innovator, and orchestrator. As individuals, we can embody all these roles—some effortlessly, others requiring considerable effort. As teams, we likely already have members who naturally, competently, and collectively perform these functions. Strong leaders understand their own strengths and, crucially, how to weave together the strengths of their group to achieve a significant and lasting impact.
Throughout my career, I've excelled at each of these individual threads at times. But it was only when I realized that becoming a great weaver truly led to significant and sustainable impact. Great leaders are great weavers. They build strong, flexible teams that can coalesce around a problem, experiment to forge solutions, and focus intensely to ensure widespread adoption. What are you doing to become a better weaver, and are those efforts making the impact you envision?
