We recommend our clients go through the process of ideation to identify the various personas of the key innovators working within their organization.

This is a custom process. It’s not one-size-fits-all. In all their myriad behaviors, dreams, and expectations, humans defy facile categorization. While it would be easy for me to play the role of expensive consultant and provide you a range of generic personas, tied up with neat little labels, this would be a tremendous disservice to you. Each organization, culture, marketplace, and enterprise has its own unique and special environment that deserves the customization of thoughtful personification.

Having said that, I would be equally remiss if I didn’t provide some samples, just to illustrate what we’re talking about. Here are just a few examples of innovation personas that have emerged during ideation sessions with some of my valued clients. In your organization, you may have some, all, or none of them.

The Warrior

The warrior persona is on a success track. They’re all about winning, earning, and growing their career. The warrior persona is matrix-driven; everything they do is measured, and often the yardsticks are career pathway, income, and the prestige of the title.

The warrior sees their career as a battle they want to win. They’re pragmatic, smart, and even aggressive. They view innovation as a necessary part of a winning strategy.

There are of course good warriors and bad warriors. Good warriors are missiles with an ethical guidance system, whereas bad warriors have no internal guidance system and often waste time pursuing far-fetched ideas that are clearly hopeless. You can’t fix a bad warrior, so you should neither hire one nor retain one that you have.

Good warriors are incredibly effective, but they need to be incentivized by leveraging the right messaging, career pathway design, and opportunities. Chances are you have warriors on your team today. Do you understand what success looks like to them, and have you created linkage between what’s right for them and what’s right for your enterprise?

Warriors Love…

• Challenges and playing games they can win.
• Moving quickly and having well-defined innovation targets.
• Having robust resources to achieve their innovations.
• Winning!

Warriors Hate…

• Playing games that they can’t win.
• Obstacles and bureaucracy.
• Being resource-starved or left unsupported.
• Losing!

The Analyst

The analyst is all about the cause-and-effect relationship between what they do and its meaning to them. The analyst is incredibly thoughtful about the linkage between the activities they do each day, the innovations they produce, and a clear and crisp view of a path moving forward.

The analyst is about data. They are typically pragmatic, introspective, and value careful thinking. They ask you, “Why are we doing this?” They pay attention and they tend to hate inefficiencies and waste.

Just like with warriors, there are good and bad analysts.

The good analyst believes in the message and they are committed to the mission and their job. The good analyst uses their analytical skills to serve the organization and their teams. They look for messaging and systems and tools that create intelligent connections between their reverence for data and facts and the overarching good of the organization. They see analysis as a necessary prelude to action. Without action, all the analysis in the world is pointless.

The bad analyst is constantly using their analytical senses to find what is wrong. They’re good at identifying new ideas that will probably fail, but are rarely able to offer thoughtful and effective solutions. In fact, they’re not really interested in actionable innovation. For a bad analyst, “analysis paralysis” is a comfortable place to be. Theory is much more important than action.

Innovation leaders don’t hire bad analysts, and it’s hard to fix a bad analyst—they need to be let go. Innovation leaders are eager to hire good analysts and they incentivize them by being very thoughtful about connecting their analytical minds with the overarching good of the organization, its mission, and the analyst’s career pathway.

Analysts Love…

• Data.
• Proof of an innovation’s viability.
• The safety and security of data.
• Well-defined processes and structure.

Analysts Hate…

• Meaningless theories and speculation.
• Unsubstantiated facts and figures.
• Reckless leaders who operate by instinct, only to go down in flames.
• Amorphous or poorly structured processes and policies.

The Pragmatist

As the name suggests, the pragmatist is down to earth. They are good at performing for leaders who connect with their innate sense of practicality. Innovation leaders will give them clear, crisp instructions with goals and measurements, and the pragmatist will take them and run with them.

There are good and bad pragmatists.

The good pragmatist can be adaptive and flexible, and is able to work outside the margins of what’s familiar. For the good pragmatist, winning leaders create messaging, tools, and resources to support them, and seek to provide an equilibrium between what’s good for the pragmatist and their expectations and what’s good for the enterprise.

Conversely, the bad pragmatist is very rigid and resentful of disruption, and as a result they deliver limited value to the organization. Innovation leaders don’t hire rigid bad pragmatists, and they don’t tolerate them for long if they happen to be grandfathered in from a previous administration.

The Pragmatist Loves…

• Common sense approaches towards processes and management.
• Doing things that have been proven to work.
• Incremental, controlled change.
• Clear direction from leadership.

The Pragmatist Hates…

• Theories unsupported by evidence.
• Taking the risk of trying something unproven.
• Rapid, uncontrolled change.
• Fuzzy direction and poorly described requirements.

I could list thousands of different personas, but you can do a much better job than I of identifying what your employees love and hate. Remember, this is not about pigeonholing someone; this is about understanding somebody so well that you can deliver thoughtful, customized, and beautiful experiences for them, and drive unprecedented levels of innovation and productivity while concurrently providing beautiful quality of work life.