THE LEADER’S JOB IS TO CREATE BETTER COLLISIONS

We give leaders too much credit for having ideas.

The image is usually the same: somebody at the top sees what everybody else missed, announces the brilliant solution, and the organization follows. That happens occasionally.

Most of the really interesting ideas I’ve seen happen differently.

One person knows something. Another person knows something completely different. They start talking, find an overlap neither of them was looking for, and suddenly there is a third idea in the room that did not exist before they walked into it.

I think one of the most useful things a leader can do is create more opportunities for that to happen.

Stop Trying to Be the Source of Every Good Idea

Being responsible for an organization does not mean being responsible for personally inventing its best ideas. In fact, the higher you move, the less likely you are to have the deepest knowledge of every problem in front of you.

The people doing the work know things you do not. The technical people know things the finance people do not. The customer-facing people see things the executive team may never encounter.

A leader who needs every important idea to originate with him is wasting a tremendous amount of intelligence.

I would rather ask a different question: Who needs to be talking to whom?

That question has become increasingly important to me through the work we do at the JKTG Foundation. We support researchers working in different areas of science, and sometimes the interesting part is not one project by itself. It is recognizing that something one researcher is seeing may matter to somebody working in an entirely different area.

The value comes from making the connection.

Leadership works the same way.

Silos Are Efficient Until They Aren’t

Organizations create departments for good reasons. Specialization works. People need clear responsibilities, and you cannot have everybody involved in everything.

But eventually those boundaries become walls.

Finance solves finance problems. Operations solves operations problems. Sales talks to sales. Research groups become increasingly specialized. Everybody gets very good at looking at the world through the same window.

Then an issue shows up that does not respect the organizational chart.

Those are usually the interesting ones.

A customer problem may actually be a process problem. A process problem may have started with an incentive nobody in operations designed. A technology issue may be exposing something completely different about how people behave.

The person capable of seeing the connection may not be sitting in the meeting where the problem is being discussed. That is where leadership has to intervene.

Sometimes your contribution is not solving the problem. It is realizing that two people who normally have no reason to talk should probably be in the same room.

The JKTG Symposium Taught Me Something About This

Our annual JKTG Foundation Symposium has evolved considerably over the years.

Initially, the event was more about sharing what was happening in metastatic breast cancer research. Over time, I realized something else was happening that may be even more valuable.

The researchers started coming because of each other. They planned conversations around dinner. They compared work between sessions. Somebody would hear a researcher from another specialty describe a problem and recognize something familiar. Conversations would continue after the formal presentations ended.

I have jokingly described it as “crêpes Suzette for the brain.”

There is a lot of intellectual energy bouncing around. Our job is not necessarily to control every conversation. It is to make sure the people worth colliding have an opportunity to collide.

I think leaders should be doing much more of that inside their organizations.

Diversity of Expertise Matters More Than Another Meeting

Creating collisions does not mean putting 25 people on every Zoom call. That usually accomplishes the opposite.

The goal is not more interaction. It is better interaction.

Bring together people with different information, different experiences, different specialties, and sometimes completely different ways of thinking.

A CFO and an engineer may describe the same problem differently. A salesperson may understand a customer's frustration that nobody building the product has ever heard directly. Someone who is new to the industry may ask the “stupid” question that exposes an assumption everybody else stopped noticing ten years ago.

Those differences are useful.

If everybody in the room has the same background, uses the same language, and approaches the problem the same way, you may get agreement very quickly.

I am not sure that is always something to celebrate.

Leaders Have to Remove the Friction Too

Putting people together is only half the job. You also have to make it safe and practical for them to do something with what they discover.

Sometimes organizations accidentally kill collaboration with their own processes. Somebody sees an opportunity, but it crosses departmental budgets. Two teams want to try something, but neither technically owns it. An idea does not fit the normal approval process, so it sits there until everybody loses interest.

Leaders are in a unique position to remove those barriers. That may mean giving people permission to work across departments. It may mean finding money for a small experiment. It may mean telling two people, “Go figure this out and come back to me.”

You do not need to manage every step. Sometimes you simply need to remove whatever is preventing capable people from moving.

Your Network Should Make the Organization Smarter

We often talk about networking as something individuals do for their careers. I think leaders should think about networks differently.

Your network should be useful to the people around you. Over a career, you accumulate relationships with people who know things you do not. Researchers. Operators. Attorneys. policymakers. Business owners. Technical experts. People from completely different industries.

One of the best uses of those relationships is connecting somebody with the person who can help them think differently.

I have done this enough times to know you cannot predict exactly what will come from the introduction.

That is fine.

You are increasing the odds that something useful happens.

You Don’t Have to Know What the Collision Will Produce

This may be the hardest part for leaders who like control.

You cannot always define the output before creating the interaction. If you already know exactly what two people are going to conclude, there probably is not much discovery happening.

Some conversations go nowhere. Some introductions produce nothing. Some ideas turn out to be wrong.

And every once in a while, two people see something neither one could have seen alone.

That is the point.

Leadership is not only about directing work toward known outcomes. Sometimes it is about creating the conditions where an outcome you could not have designed becomes possible.

You do not have to be the smartest person in every room. But you should get pretty good at knowing who needs to be in the room.