Expanding the Idea Surface and the Openness Test

Strategic Insights are everywhere, but they often go unnoticed by leaders. How can leaders of organizations harness the ideas around them by opening up their strategic planning process?

Christian Stadler is a Professor of Strategic Management at the Warwick Business School and the author of the books Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-Suite (Management on the Cutting Edge), Enduring Success: What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding Corporations, and the German book Krieg. 

Christian and Greg discuss the challenges of idea generation in established companies and champion mid-sized businesses for their ability to introduce fresh perspectives. Christian explains Open Strategy: promoting a culture of openness, reshuffling within an organization, and creating unexpected connections, all geared towards fostering an environment that thrives on change. They also take a look at how academia and organizations can build open environments that encourage lifelong learning and innovation.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How much of our business idea should we share with other people?

30:38: You can control what you share and what you do not share when you open up, and try to get input from people. If it comes to that lot of details of formulating a strategy, then you probably have to reveal more. But for this, you can have a much more controlled setting where you bring people in who sign non-disclosure agreements, and then it's much more similar to what the consultant typically would do in this space. So here, you can contain that. If you talk about idea generation, you don't need to tell people much in order to get their ideas, and you don't need to share that much afterwards what you do with that information either.

New ideas thrive even in stable environments

47:25: Even if you have a stable environment, it doesn't prevent you from bringing in ideas on some dimensions, be it new product ideas, new markets, or opportunities where you can still engage larger groups of people in this. There are more opportunities when there's more radical change on the horizon.

Who do you communicate ideas and problems in companies?

23:33: Some companies develop this online culture where people constantly comment on things. To keep it alive, the top leadership needs to be visible in this space as well. And you need to have strong moderation. So, the illusion that this is somehow making less work and you can almost outsource this to somebody else is an illusion. You need somebody who sits on top of this, who moderates, who filters out things. There's crowdsourcing tools as well that can help you with this.

Is it harder to generate new ideas in large companies?

16:32: The other big problem you have in large companies, in particular, is silo thinking, where you have departments duplicating work and not talking to each other, where just being able to connect different departments sometimes would lead to this recombination of knowledge, which is a main kind of mechanism to create new ideas. But it's hard to do in large organizations.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• VUCA
• Michael Porter
• How CEOs Manage Time
• Innovative Medical Products, Inc.
• Centre for European Reform
• Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates
• Adam M. Kleinbaum Articles
• The Rise of AI-Powered Companies

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Warwick Business School
• Professional Profile on Winthrop Group
• Christian Stadler's Website
• Christian Stadler on LinkedIn
• Christian Stadler on X
• Christian Stadler on Youtube

His Work:

• Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-Suite
• Enduring Success: What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding Corporations
• Google Scholar Articles
• Forbes Articles