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

by Beth Comstock

Dalai Lama said to us, “Your enemy is your best teacher. I lose my temper, yes, but deep anger, no. I’ve learned to look first at the human level. I’m just like you.”

to trust my doubts, and express them candidly to others.

Innovation is a social activity. One person’s ideas build on another’s. Someone else reframes it through the eyes of the customer. It’s never clean or linear.

“wallow” more in the informality of office life.

the more time team members spend together, the more social capital, trust, and honesty they build. And the more innovative, risk-taking, and productive they are.

Change is not a single act or initiative. It is an ever-evolving dynamic in which you prod and seed the environment with a range of friction-causing catalysts.

To Jeff Bezos, workplace harmony is overrated; conflict is the spice that leads inexorably to innovation.

Have Backbone; Disagree, and Commit. “Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting.

Constructive dissent and debate encourage people to reexamine assumptions and make room for creative thinking.

The key is to learn how to push the limits without being seen as unacceptably subversive.

It serves as a vital reminder that it is the outsiders, the rule-breakers, who possess the kind of disruptive intelligence that cultures have always relied on to catalyze reinvention and renewal.

He took a discovery-based mode of inquiry that starts with questions that look beyond the current reality:

I had jumped down from the balcony into the mosh pit, losing my perspective.

Ask a lot of questions. By asking team members questions, you force them to formulate and own their ideas. Never dismiss or mock an idea, no matter how ridiculous it may seem. Patients die and planes crash when team members sit on problems because they are afraid of being belittled.

Remember, failure prepares you for future success. Even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment.

“In the words of the immortal philosopher, Mike Tyson, ‘Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.’ ” Or my version of his sentiment: it works until it doesn’t. Too many times people assume their models will work…forever (aka “Trees will grow to the sky!”).

We can’t make uncertainty go away. But we can change the way we react to it. Every uncertainty is a new potential future. Seen in this light, uncertainty doesn’t need to be a source of anxiety; it can be a signal that it’s time to change.

strategy is a story well told. And if your story doesn’t hang together, perhaps your strategy isn’t sound.

With OSOW—our story our way—top of mind, I strode into my weekly communications meeting, and asked three simple questions: Who are we now? And what is our value? Then, How do we tell that story louder and faster, and more often?

Campaigns, he reminded us, aren’t won by the candidate or the company with the best character, or product, but by the one with the simplest and most clearly told story.

Don’t fall back on the frameworks and worldviews you’ve used in the past. Be open to new interpretations. And try to avoid sweeping generalizations, or oversimplicity, like good versus bad or science versus art.

The next time you find yourself scheduling a meeting that has lost its purpose, or you find yourself writing another report that will never get read, ask yourself, Have I joined an island cargo cult?

it’s about finding a central truth and sharing it. Manufactured myths just don’t stand up these days.

For hours, we had been shouting, laughing, suggesting, demanding, writing, editing. They are among my favorite memories at work, when the team becomes one, when idea builds on idea. We were finishing one another’s sentences even as we interrupted ourselves with a new thought or inspiration. Grabbing markers off the table, out of one another’s hands, we were pure energy, in a frenzy to find the words that would unlock the story.

“There’s nothing more valuable than a human being talking to a human being,”

“GE Voices” outreach effort, enlisting nearly 100,000 GE employees and suppliers to share messages—in person and digitally—about innovation and the economic value of jobs.

digital innovator’s motto is that everything’s “always in beta.” You’re also never done improving. There’s always more time to get better.

Story can’t be what you do afterward. We struggled with this over GE Capital. The ability to harness story is what differentiates a good leader from a great one. It takes courage to connect to the broader trajectory of a business, not just be reduced to what you can see.

This is also a good way to summarize an idea—to imagine it forward—for your boss, or for a customer, to sell your vision and strategy. When you make it announceable, it becomes more real.

Seeding challengers tests your resolve—it’s much easier when things aren’t changed, especially deliberately.

They aren’t just interested in GE in a transactional way; they want to connect with GE where they are.

Marketing is a conversation. Invite others in, and give them opportunities to talk back,

not enough companies are doing it even now, because they are sometimes afraid of risking any of their spend on new methods.

great content + the right time, right place, right audience + amplification through conversation + shout louder than we spend = massive brand ROI.

You have to grab shares of people’s hearts and minds before you can hope to grab shares of their wallets or loyalty.

Edison saw what many people miss—that getting people to adopt a new way of doing things, mobilizing them around a new story, is the hard stuff of innovation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.”

You have to respect the data but love imagination more. As a change-maker, you need to engage in what author Amy Whitaker calls “art thinking.” That is, not getting from point A to point B but inventing a point B and then determining if it is possible to get there.

Like Ecomagination, this was about profit and purpose; it was a story about our relevance in the world, told via actions and measurable impact.

functional fixedness as a “mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem.”

Growth Days, which I set up with Jeff, grew out of the Imagination Breakthrough reviews we held, in which we would spend one Friday a month looking at growth ideas and new technologies.

Challenge yourself to truly engage others: First, don’t assume everyone has the same level of understanding that you have. Ask questions. I’ll often start a meeting in which we’re introducing a new concept by asking questions to engage the room. What do you know about this subject? What kinds of questions do you have? Don’t get lost in translation. We may use the same words but interpret them differently. I’ve learned to focus on a few words, stating something like “Here’s what I mean by this,” and then ask, “Does this mesh with your interpretation?”

“rolling thunder”—the gradual announcement of the arrival of something new, until it is too loud to ignore—there

The next time a result that isn’t supposed to be there pops up on a report, don’t dismiss it. Take a close look at it. It might be the first bit of evidence, the first drop of rain in a coming storm you need to weather—or the first sign of a trend you can take advantage of.

require GE to understand a radically different mind-set based on informal decision-making and self-organization, open-source collaboration, transparency, do-it-yourself “maker” culture, and tolerance for risk-taking and variability.

Dean Simonton argues, the difference between Bach and his mediocre colleagues is not that he struck out less often, but that he had many more ideas.

was in search of the innovation magic that happens when you leave your castle and engage with the broader system.

As our planet-wide digital nervous system grows, it is causing a mass reorganization of people, money, information, and things.

Emergence describes how, when individual cells, or birds, or elements interact en masse according to a set of simple rules, highly complex structures and behaviors emerge.

As more and more human activities flow through digital systems, those activities also take on the properties of adaptive emergent systems. We are collectively and spontaneously reorganizing around the flow of our digital information.