Is it a paradox for leadership to protect the innovators?

… the leader has always to be doing two apparently incompatible things. He has to encourage his administrators to promote order, to maintain established routines. At the same time, he has to protect from their wrath the originals, the inventors, the crazy people to whom order is anathema and an established routine a challenge to change it, because it is from this lunatic fringe that he is most likely to derive something original…

 

This conflict is one of the great paradoxes of leadership — the source of some of its great difficulties and the reason why we cannot do without it.

That was from Lyndall F Urwick’s Leadership in the 20^th Century, found in Borklund, C. W. “Cost-Effectiveness’ vs. Creativity: Part 1, Is Indecision Stifling Innovation?” Armed Forces Management, August 1967, pp 51 – 53.

In effect the paradox is resolved through the ambiguity of a relational contract, or its military counterpart mission command, which can only be developed over a period of time in which reputation and trust can be built within a community of professionals.