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April 30 - May 6, 2019
To become an ambidextrous organization, we needed to become better explorers. We needed to engage the world as a classroom from which we could learn and extract the ideas that would create our future.
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Rapaille’s philosophy is driven by a belief that every culture imprints on its members a unique and distinct logic of emotion—an affective identity.
“Well, all those numbers you wrote on the board: What do people have to believe in for all those things to happen? People don’t get out of bed to work for ‘the numbers’…for
A spark is a person, usually an outsider, whose unique perspective—the more different, the better—challenges the team to think differently.
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Early on, I was nervous about bringing in sparks, because I thought I was supposed to have the answers. Or that their difference or the fact that they made my colleagues uncomfortable would reflect poorly on me. But what I came to realize is that while their difference can cause discomfort, it is often necessary. Because they don’t work in the company, sparks aren’t afraid of challenging the boss or office politics. And surprisingly, people pay attention to sparks, especially when they make them think or say the unexpected.
It’s not what we sell, it’s why we sell.
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The message: growing a company, as well as growing leadership, was a work in progress, and each one of us needed to evolve.
they opened up our thinking. It is one of the most important gifts of a discovery-based approach.
look through the eyes of the user to find gaps in the market, to look at what isn’t happening and imagine what could. To create something that didn’t exist before. To satisfy unmet—and sometimes unexpressed—needs.
The secret to successfully adopting a market mind was looking and doing and feeling things from other people’s points of view.
To get an edge on the future and graze on something new, you have to be willing to “go weird.”
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people have to be invested. They have to have “skin in the game.” When they do, mysteriously, better ideas are selected.
a “protected class of ideas,” fully funded business bets that could not have their budgets cut because of a tight quarter, giving them space to take risks and grow into something valuable.
We had to “get outside the jar,” as one designer described it to me. In other words, we needed an “outside-in” approach to generating insights to improve a product or process. You can’t see a jar’s label from inside the jar. You need a different perspective.
business leaders had to up their game with skills that were harder to measure: discovery, strategy, and customer psychology.
...customer psychology"
“Field Trip Fridays” once a month to take my marketing team to visit an emerging company or even an exhibit or art installation.
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Innovation is not just about generating, analyzing, selecting, and publicizing ideas. It’s about getting an entire community of “customers”—in this case, the company’s executives and employees—to adopt new behaviors and practices.
Looking at the world horizontally means considering ideas outside of our direct expertise. And because of that, we could see opportunities that deep domain experts cannot. Never underestimate the value of viewing things through a different, wider lens. You need to have both: ideas born in deep expertise and then a challenge by someone asking, Where else can this apply?
change is a conversation. The more vibrant, the more diverse, the more animated and sometimes agitated the conversations an organization is having, the more likely you’ll find an adaptive organization that’s gotten good at learning, creation, innovation, and change.
To be innovative, you have to learn to be comfortable with some level of “maybe.”
Trust, but verify.”
The best leaders exhibit humility in their strength, and vice versa.
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That’s what good leaders do; they absorb the shock waves and anxiety in moments of radical change.
there are many ways to engage employees and customers together to deliver a solution that has meaning and economics; our “gamification” of it added a twist, and with enough examples, made way for a simple application that sales teams could use with prospective customers.
could only impact so much despite that the potential to make the future was profound. This is the change-maker’s dilemma.
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only reach so far through the layers and layers of complexity and denials of change—across GE, across our customers, across the ecosystem, across financial markets.
new marketing does well—live in the market, create a new business strategy, meet change early, build a coalition of those willing to work for a new future, deliver new growth.
Because tomorrow always comes, change-makers can’t be afraid to share their vision and declare their aspirations for it loudly, even before they’ve built it, done it, won it.
rule is that one event is an occurrence, two similar events form a coincidence, and three are a trend.
scenario planning tactics I use to better “see” or anticipate the future.
Opposition: Assume the opposite of convention. Good is bad.
Worst-case scenario: What is the worst that could happen?
Parallelism: Put yourself in another’s position. You are the competition.
Time shift: What if it took no time to create a solution? What if it took five years?
Control shift: Imagine a shift in governance or technology or nature brings about a shift in power.
Roadblock-busting: How would you approach
the problem if the roadblock didn’t exist?
Phantom problem: What if it’s not really a problem at all? What if mo...
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“Ungranted”: What happens if something goes away that you’ve taken for granted?
Strange bedfellows: What interesting or unlikely things can be combined to create something new?
Wrong problem: What if the problem isn’t ...
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Constraints fuel creativity.
The next time you are tempted to say, “We don’t have enough money to do X,” or “My manager will never green-light the budget for this,” or “We’ll never get this done with such a short time frame,” STOP. Such thinking will only quiet your imagination. Let it sing.
turn budget and project requests into a challenge. Reward people who generate the best ideas with the most constraints.
Agitated inquiry is the practice of evolving an idea into action steps through heated exchanges and debate.
“conflict is the primary engine of creativity and innovation.”
innovation is a twelve-tone symphony of conflict and resolution. Lose control of the notes and the music will descend into chaos. Learn to conduct it and you can create something transcendent.
If everyone agrees on the same approach to an idea, perhaps you’re not pushing the boundaries hard enough. Perhaps you haven’t sought enough divergent views. Good leaders recognize that tension is inevitable, and they learn not just to navigate it but to use it to fuel creativity.
Leadership is not for those with weak kidneys. You can’t stay above the fray and still be an effective leader.
There are still people in my life who can irritate me. Instead of seeing them as adversaries, I have learned to change my mind-set, to think of them as potential teachers.
