Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change

by Beth Comstock

The future is not in our stars but in our imaginations, and our actions.

It’s easier to keep your nose to the grindstone, do what you are doing and do it well, than it is to lift your head up and figure out where you or your organization is going and what the future may bring.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that “we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress.”

They know they need to be more inventive to succeed, but they admit to being uncomfortable with creative people and their rule-breaking ways. They realize they need to partner more with other companies, but are afraid of reaching beyond their own insular communities.

The most important failure, it said, was “one of imagination.”

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We must become “change ready”—that is, fearless, perpetually ready to reenvision, rethink, and redesign, whatever we do and wherever we are.

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You must give yourself permission to imagine a new future and act on it.

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“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent…” Charles Darwin wrote. “It is the one that is most adaptable to change. Those who have learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

We’ve created legions of managers afraid to absorb new perspectives, unable to work without a script or respond quickly by letting go of strategies that no longer work

We took a 130-year-old corporation, with more than 300,000 employees, and transformed it from a risk-averse, perfection-seeking organization to one that increasingly encouraged speed, adaptability, iteration, and discovery.

imagining it forward. At heart, it’s an orientation to the world based on adaptive problem-solving that makes real a future few can see.

What holds all of us back, really, is fear: the attachment to the old, to What We Know.

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So don’t look for a simple victory here; when it comes to transforming a culture, everything does not get neatly wrapped in a

bow.

infusing yourself and your culture with a spirit of inquiry and curiosity, turning the world into a classroom for learning and for unearthing ideas that can make change possible.

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Change is a messy, collaborative, inspiring, difficult, and ongoing process, like everything meaningful that leads to human progress.

the myth that rewards are reserved for those who say “I know,” instead of reveling in “I don’t know” and learning to ask the probing questions.

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Gatekeepers are those looking to keep hold of the little power they have. They see divergent thinking and action as threatening. They bank on our desire for approval. The worst thing they do is to create and police the standards that the rest of us accept and internalize.

people who effect radical change have to exhibit an uncompromising faith in experimentation, a radical impatience with the default, a bias for novelty and action, and a sense that disruption is something you engage, not observe.

I would push myself outside of my comfort zone and do what scared me most: connect with other people.

The point, I realized, was just to get out of my own head, out of my own way, and engage.

we’re stuck in our own heads, trying to come across as smart or clever, rather than revealing ourselves to be the awkward, insecure beings we are.

natural curiosity as my guide. It’s the camouflage that covers the insecurity of not knowing. It means constantly looking outward, constantly pushing myself to ask the next question.

People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations, but introverted in conversation—willing to listen 70% of the time.”

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Window on the World became a statement of openness and transparency, of community—the kinds of things we take for granted now.

Job crafting offers people a way to actively shape their jobs to fit their needs, values, and preferences. With job crafting, they found, you shape your job to give your work additional meaning.

use your skills—especially your imagination—to make work something special. And uniquely yours.

“I don’t know how long we will be working together—I hope for a long time. But my commitment to you is that you should be able to do the best work of your career here. You need to find time and capacity to do the things you love within the goals of our team.” Seed this idea. See what happens.

We created our own energy. We had a mission and a charismatic leader, and we created our story and made it happen.

Successful agitators for change are like prize-fighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down.

Put yourself out there, with passion. And persevere. No skill in the world can overcome a lack of perseverance.

Through persistence I became persistent. Habits of behavior precede habits of the mind.

No matter how worthy an idea, you are not entitled to blind trust. There will be weaknesses in your arguments. And others will rightfully use them as a rationale for their obstinacy. The good news is they will push you to be better. I’ve learned that everything is feedback. It’s all data to plug into the process. Try, fail, iterate, try again.

The point is, we weren’t perfect, but we did all right and we made room for curiosity and imagination.

These guys weren’t change-makers, they were gatekeepers, cheerleaders for the status quo.

I approached every day, every project—even small ones—as a wide-eyed explorer, unsure of the final destination at times but certain that there was something amazing just around the bend. And that sense of exploration and adventure always begins with asking “What if?” or “Why not?”

the GE process was all about chemistry, blood, sweat, family, and feelings. No detail was too small:

channel Jack’s raw directness, making my leadership style as transparent and straightforward as possible. That meant getting over my small-town ideas about “niceness”

being direct is actually being nice: Clarity, telling people where they stand, is a form of kindness. It is fair.

A society that glorifies numbers—and fears mistakes—leaves little room for human imperfections.

you’ve got to act using the other side’s language and values. You’ve got to act from the inside, knowing their arguments better than they do.

learning to balance myself on an organizational fault line between uniqueness and belonging, between being someone who is not blinded by cultural assumptions and has the independence to question and provoke, and someone whose sight is credible because of her loyalty to (and performance in) that same culture.

outsider inside. Someone who can translate the outside for the inside in terms it can understand. Someone who builds “bridges, not walls.” Someone who is enough of an insider not to be rejected by the corporation’s natural antibodies.

When your North Star is always the work and how to make it better, it keeps you from engaging in petty politics or hand-to-hand combat over personality issues.

John Gardner once wrote, “All too often, on the long road up, young leaders become servants of what is rather than shapers of what might be.”

Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast.

You have to resist the urge to think it’s up to others; you have to take initiative.

Bill Gates: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.”

That would require a new kind of leadership, one that expects judgment calls to be made in the face of incomplete data, that encourages original thinking, that values speed over perfection, that embraces change.