Reframing innovation by the book
Two months ago I swallowed a bitter pill. It was: There is no seat for me at the table.
I expressed my distress in a bit of a rant on LinkedIn:
I came across a list of “influential readings” for a master program on innovation and entrepreneurship — and it made me really, really angry. Why?
It’s a list over 5 pages, with 71 books on startups, leadership etc. Only 1 has a female single author, and only 4 have women as co-authors alongside male co-authors. That’s 7% of books on that list. Or: crazily skewed.
Somewhere along the journey from girls to women interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, to developing cool ideas for the field, to publishing books, to being evaluated as “good” and randomly put on lists of this kind, we lose women.
What happened then was blowing my socks off. Within 48 hours, so many people recommended books under the post that we evened the reading list out with 70 additional books. What is more, it sparked conversations between authors, researchers, and practitioners about their experiences, frustrations, and hopes. I had hit a nerve.
Book clubbing
I started chatting with some of the ladies who engaged in the discussion, and reconnected with my old friend Kristina Medow. It became clear that to me that I wanted to do something with the energy that was leveraged. The lowest hanging fruit: a book club.
We got an initial group of inspiring women together, picked Siobhan McHale’s “The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change” as our first book, and hit it off. On a long train ride in April, I sat down to develop a name for this book club. Who were we as a group? Where did each of us want to go? Inspired by McHale’s idea of “reframing roles”, I landed on Re:Frame Innovation.
Applying another lens to innovation
McHale describes reframing like this: “Leaders who work with and change how people frame their roles can accelerate organizational change. Rather than trying to change people’s personalities, they work to reframe the way people think about and take up their roles in the change effort.” I realized that this is exactly what we wanted to do with innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. We are not trying to change the core of the field, but we are changing how and through whose glasses we are looking at it.
We are and read books by powerful female leaders and aspirational innovators. We learn about innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership, and life. We are inspired by what we read and discuss. We make connections between wild ideas. We celebrate creativity and diverse perspectives. We speak, write, and converse about what matters to us. We are a circle that reframes innovation. And, at the end of the day, this is how we innovate.
Conversations and other takeaways
So far, our global conversations on McHale’s book “The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change” have sparked two major a-has for me:
1. Reframing roles is an eye-opening concept. In practice, perspectives on what should be someone’s role vary — which sometimes include gender-based expectations. I want to try to be in the role that I choose to inhabit and not to flip back to the “good girl” when faced with conflicting expectations.
2. I want to have more conversations about assumptions — including with myself on my own assumptions. What do I really see and what do I assume?
But my biggest a-ha is probably even more profound. It is that while there might be no seat for me at the table that I looked at two months ago, there is another one around the corner that emanates joy, inspiring conversations, buzzing energy, and more diverse ideas for the future. I don’t even want a seat at the old table anymore. I want to help expand the other one that I found.
Next steps
The next book on our Re:Frame Innovation list is Rita McGrath’s “Seeing Around Corners” — I am very excited for her perspective on strategy under uncertainty and how it connects to my own research.
I would like to thank Kristina Medow, Jenny Trang, Johana Forero Rondón, Niven Postma and Malin Fagerlund for jumping on this ride with me. I can’t wait to see what else we are going to learn and create. If you want to know more or feel the urge to join us, please reach out to me. I’m happy to connect!
