This week marks the midpoint of an innovation program and I repeated to the teams Rosabeth Moss Kanter‘s “law” that every innovation will look like a failure at some point in the middle. The difference between success and failure is how long people persist before they give up. One of the reasons she cites is that people get tired and discouraged in the middle. This can be especially true when people are asked to work on innovation projects in addition to their full-time day jobs. And one team in the current program was suffering from this badly.

They had pursued several opportunities to dead ends and were just getting started in another direction by interviewing a client/expert on a conference call. The questions came slowly with long stretches of dead air while each team member hoped someone else would speak up. As the idea was way down on their list, no one on the team had strong ownership and the questions stayed at the 60,000 foot level. The call ended with a perfunctory thank-you even though the interviewee was quite willing to remain engaged.

This was the time for the Shaper to step up and fortunately this team had one.* The Belbin Team Roles Shaper likes to lead and drive others to action. She’s the person who gets frustrated when things slow down and creates direction and shape for the team’s activity. True to form, shortly after the desultory call she sent a long email to the team. Here are some excerpts:

We are behind and need to make significant process THIS WEEK.

I spoke with ______ today about… efforts in _____ (see notes below). In summary, the opportunity has already been identified and resources deployed. Therefore, I think we should focus on _____.

Here’s where I’m at in terms of knowledge/holes (please add bullets)…
– key lessons…
– general strategy…
– current solutions…
– plans for expansion…
– applying successful strategies from other areas…
– our proposal…

At a minimum, we should aim to answer…by Friday. Based on expertise and time zones, I suggest the following division of labor…

This is classic Shaper behavior.

*In fact the team had two Shapers but one of them had assumed the Resource Investigator role. He was the one who set up the meeting with the client/expert and his focus was outside the team.