Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

by Liz Wiseman

With John’s encouragement, his team and I decided to define a space for experimentation. We rapidly laid out their various work scenarios into two buckets: in one, failure was okay; in the other, success had to be assured. The group debated each until they agreed on every scenario. Within an hour, they had created a playground—a safe space for their teams to struggle and potentially fail without harming their stakeholders or their business. With the boundaries clearly defined, John’s team didn’t require optimism from above; hopeful energy radiated from within. This thinking rippled across Nike’s design community and sparked leaders such as Casey Lehner, senior director of global design operations, to introduce the “risk and iterate” performance goal that encouraged each design operations director to identify something they would take a risk with and then iterate solutions throughout the year.