Fostering Innovation-to-Adoption Cycles: Multimedia Case Studies to Build Leadership Tacit Knowledge

Abstract

This research aimed to test a novel methodology to help raise awareness amongst one target audience (women in the New Zealand dairy sector) about the importance of coming forward for leadership positions and being inspired to develop their leadership. In so doing, tacit knowledge gained by leaders involving their leadership achievements was mined and shared with followers. Learning to be a leader involves developing the tacit knowledge to give confidence in one's decision-making processes. Most of the knowledge required cannot be acquired from explicit documents—rather, it is built through action, experience and reflection. Leaders collated innovation stories in a multimedia format for appraisal amongst follower audiences. A narrative approach was used to analyze the quality of participants’ experiences, covering three dimensions: narrative, ‘unique outcomes’ and ‘re-authoring’. To appraise the impact of these stories, they were screened to relevant target audiences, followed by focus groups and a survey. Outcomes for the upcoming leaders having participated in the workshop were described in terms of impact on self, namely enhancing communicative ability and impact on others—i.e. the followers who are inspired into action (capacity building) by leaders. The re-authoring mechanisms underlying such changes were unpacked and described in the narrative framework as the uncovering of ‘unique outcomes’ to allow an ‘alternative story’ of innovation to emerge replacing the previous ‘dominant story’ of stagnation. The research that accompanied this work focused on the role of leadership as a driver of innovation—where learning potentially occurs through a variety of knowledge building processes. Managing people and building leadership capability through innovation uptake occurs when these future leaders take an intentional step that enhances their leadership capacity. Re-authoring processes are central to accelerating leadership development. An innovation uptake model is proposed that describes communication, impact and change from narratives of leadership which will form the foundations for an electronic archive of leadership tacit knowledge. Such endeavour has been made possible by contemporary advances in electronic encoding and distribution of multimedia material.