In boardrooms across Fortune 500 companies, "innovation" has been misused and abused so much that it risks meaning nothing at all.
The problem isn't a lack of ideas. It's that most leadership frameworks were built for execution, not exploration.
Traditional leaders use two primary tools: the telescope (to say "I think I know where we're going") and the microscope (to scrutinize execution details).
But according to Jayshree Seth, Chief Science Advocate and Corporate Scientist at 3M, innovation doesn't happen in direct line of sight. You need different tools entirely.
To check the full session recording, upgrade to Premium
Redefining Innovation: Ideas That Have Impact
Before discussing leadership frameworks, it's critical to strip innovation down to its core utility: "Innovation is ideas that have impact."
The word "value" is deliberately avoided in this definition because you cannot know if an idea provides value a priori. However, you can identify innovation by looking backward. Today, you'd point to your smartphone as innovative. But the non-smartphone was innovative. So was the rotary phone. So were smoke signals used to communicate between villages, with different colored smoke carrying different messages.
The innovation status of any object depends entirely on the context of its era. You need to be the 'Chief Lens Officer' to figure out how the lens has changed to impact innovation and provide value.
Your job as a leader isn't just to generate ideas, but also to monitor how context is shifting what counts as valuable.
The Five "Scopes": Expanding Your Leadership Toolkit
Since innovation occurs outside direct sight lines, a comprehensive framework is required. Leaders need five tools, not two:
The Telescope and Microscope (Baseline)
These remain necessary for setting direction and examining details, but they are the baseline, not the differentiator.
The Periscope (Strategic Foresight)
Since innovation occurs outside of direct sight, leaders need a tool to see around corners. Innovation leaders are the ones who have a very good idea about the periscope. Even when you're "down in the submarine" of daily execution, the periscope allows you to figure out what might be coming and what threats to watch out for.
Without the periscope, you're reacting to changes only after they've already happened and when it's often too late to respond effectively.
The Stethoscope (Empathy and Connection)
Beyond strategic vision, this tool represents the necessity of understanding people. "If you don't have a heart, you don't lead with heart... you're not going to be able to be an innovation leader." You must understand the people you are asking to do the difficult work of creation.
Innovation requires people to step out of neat little boxes and do more than what they thought they could do. It won't happen if you don't understand what motivates them, what scares them, and what they need to take those risks.
The Horoscope (Humility)
This dimension addresses the leader's ego. "A horoscope tells you you ain't that great." It's a reminder that success is rarely individual brilliance alone.
Humility is a functional requirement for innovation leadership. Without it, you can't learn. And if you can't learn, you can't innovate.
When a leader possesses all five, they can manage the kaleidoscope of what is true innovation.
Connecting Vision to Action: Why Communication Matters
Having the right strategic tools means nothing if you can't mobilize your organization. This is where most innovation leaders fail, not in vision, but in the emotional groundwork required before demanding results.
A breakdown occurs when leaders demand accountability without first establishing the necessary emotional and strategic foundation. The sequence matters: you cannot skip steps.
The Four-Phase Communication Model
Acceptance Before Excitement: Leaders often enter a room enthusiastic about a new strategy or divestiture, ignoring the disruption it causes. Leaders must accept the challenges and losses people face before asking for enthusiasm.
Acknowledgement Before Appreciation: Generic gratitude is redundant. "Do not say thank you unless you know what you are thanking people for." Effective leaders acknowledge specific sacrifices—such as doubling production during a crisis—before offering general appreciation.
Assurance Before Reassurance: People are smart. They don't need your reassurance. Empty comfort does not build trust. Leaders must first provide assurance that there is a proper plan in place. Only after the plan is visible does any reassurance have value.
Alignment Before Accountability: This is the most critical sequence. Too many organizations skip directly to holding people accountable. This sounds punitive, but when done right, accountability becomes a natural byproduct of true alignment. The stethoscope enables you to understand where people are emotionally, which is what allows you to follow this sequence properly. Without empathy (stethoscope) and humility (horoscope), you'll skip straight to accountability and wonder why nothing moves.
From Short-Term Plans to Long-Term Innovation: Using TNT to Bridge the Gap
One of the most common frustrations: How do you get leaders focused on quarterly deliverables to care about innovation that takes years?
The answer is to introduce variables that could disrupt their existing plans. This is where TNT comes in: Trends, Needs, and Threats.
When a stakeholder presents a rigid plan and says "nobody should bother them, they've got everything going," the first question to ask is: "Great, this is the plan. What are the assumptions that might blow this up?"
The job isn't to criticize the plan, but to introduce the variables that could disrupt it. This requires doing your homework to understand:
Trends: What technological changes are emerging? What regulatory shifts are on the horizon? What environmental factors are changing? What demographic shifts are underway? What social attitudes are evolving? These aren't abstract—they're specific, researched insights you bring to the conversation.
Needs: What requirements didn't exist when plans were set in motion? What customer pain points have emerged? What new expectations has the market developed? What internal capabilities are now required that weren't before?
Threats: What has changed in the competitive landscape? Who are the new entrants? What adjacent industries are converging with yours? Where are substitutes emerging?
This isn't about being right. It's about awakening curiosity. When you introduce a well-researched trend or emerging need, you're giving a reason to question assumptions. This can only happen if you awaken their curiosity... suddenly now they're on this journey to learn.
You're not asking stakeholders to abandon their plan. You're asking them to stress-test it. Most people would rather discover vulnerabilities now than fail later.
By positioning TNT as risk management rather than criticism, you make it psychologically safe for them to engage.
From Puzzle Thinking to Mosaic Thinking
Getting stakeholders to genuinely engage with these variables requires a fundamental shift. You have to make them think instead of a puzzle to a mosaic.
A puzzle implies every piece fits perfectly. That's the rigid plan. A mosaic, by contrast, has tiles of information. It's more organic, less orchestrated. The picture emerges rather than being pre-determined. After all, Innovation doesn't work like a puzzle where you know the final picture. It works like a mosaic where you discover the pattern as you go.
The periscope helps you see the trends, needs, and threats that others miss. Without it, you can't effectively use TNT to shift people from puzzle to mosaic thinking.
Making It Structural: The 15% Culture and Learning Organizations
Frameworks and communication sequences mean nothing without structural support. At 3M, this takes the form of the 15% Culture—a culture of empowerment where "every employee knows that 15% of their time, they can be working on anything that helps the company."
This is a structured opportunity supported by specific funding mechanisms designed to remove barriers at different stages:
Discover Grants - up to $20,000: These are for early-stage experiments where you need to prove a path exists. The purpose isn't to build a product—it's to test a hypothesis quickly. Can you demonstrate technical feasibility? Is there a market signal? Will the concept work at all? The relatively small amount forces focus: What's the one thing you need to learn to know if this is worth pursuing? The grant covers materials, equipment time, maybe a consultant—whatever you need to get that critical piece of evidence.
Genesis Grants - up to $100,000: These are for team-based projects where individual 15% time isn't enough. Multiple colleagues pool their allocated time to work on something bigger. This is where you move from "Can this work?" to "How would we actually build this?" The larger funding supports prototyping, customer testing, and early partnership development. It's the bridge between a promising discovery and something that might become a real project with dedicated resources.
Crucially, these grants are evaluated by a committee of peers, not managers. This serves multiple purposes. First, peers understand the technical challenges better than executives might. Second, it creates psychological safety.
The focus is on the learning, not the outcome. Did you learn something valuable? Did you prove or disprove something important? Success isn't defined as "it worked"—it's defined as "we know more now than we did before."
The Practical Mechanics: MORE, WWW, and Getting to Impact
To operationalize all of this, two frameworks provide the mechanics:
The MORE Model: Embedding Innovation in Incentives
Vague encouragement won't work. The MORE model addresses this:
Metrics: "If innovation is not part of that, it's very clear that it's not part of that." If no one has to deliver on innovation, they won't. This is about formal measurement systems—what gets measured in performance reviews, what's tracked in scorecards, what executives report to the board. If innovation doesn't appear in these metrics, the organization's true priorities are revealed.
Optics: How innovation is viewed and recognized within the organization. This isn't just formal recognition programs—it's about what gets celebrated in all-hands meetings, which projects get executive attention, whose work gets highlighted in internal communications. Optics shape what people believe is actually valued.
Rubrics: The structured criteria used to evaluate progress. These need to be explicit and agreed upon. What constitutes success at each stage? How do you evaluate a Horizon 4 initiative versus a Horizon 1 improvement? Without clear rubrics, evaluation becomes subjective and political.
Energetics: The energy of the organization. This is the hardest to measure but perhaps the most important. Are people excited or exhausted? Is there psychological safety to experiment? Do people feel empowered or constrained?
Metrics and rubrics don't operate in isolation but interact with organizational culture in unpredictable ways. For example, if you metric innovation solely on patents filed, people will optimize for patent quantity, not commercial impact. If you measure only successful launches, people will avoid risky projects. The "weird ways" these manifest means you need to constantly monitor whether your measurement system is driving the behavior you actually want, or just the behavior that's easiest to measure.
The MORE model only works when all four elements are in alignment. Metrics without the right optics means people game the system. Rubrics without energetics means people follow the rules but have no passion. You need all four working together.
The WWW: Answer Stakeholder Priorities
When moving from idea to impact, you must answer the "WWW":
Why this?
Why now?
What's in it for me?
The third question is crucial. The answer must speak not to leadership priorities, but to the stakeholders you need to move. The WWW helps you craft the alignment (step 4 of the communication model) that makes accountability natural rather than forced.
The Integration: Why Numbers Alone Won't Save You
A dichotomy exists in leadership: "There are leaders who run their business with Excel. And there are leaders who run their business with PowerPoint."
Excel leaders get lost in numbers and miss vision. PowerPoint leaders craft narratives but lose reality. "Too much Excel without the PowerPoint means nothing."
The deeper problem? Neither captures what innovation needs. "Numbers, facts, figures, they don't evoke the kind of soul that innovation requires."
This brings us full circle: The five "scopes" framework integrates both. The telescope and microscope provide the Excel—direction and detail. The periscope adds the PowerPoint—vision of what's coming. The stethoscope and horoscope bring the soul—empathy and humility that make people want to follow you into uncertainty.
Innovation requires people to step out of neat little boxes and do more than what they thought they could do. It won't happen if you don't inspire them with a sense of purpose.
Effective innovation leadership isn't about choosing between strategic tools and human understanding. It's about wielding all five scopes simultaneously to balance vision with execution, rigor with humanity, and short-term execution with long-term vision.
