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

by Beth Comstock

The collective micromotives of connected humans are growing new macrostructures.

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Technology and the digital flow were allowing unimaginably large numbers of interactions around common goals and shared purposes, where serendipity flourished and human energy (without top-down human control) drove all kinds of activities, making the kind of innovative and imaginative leaps that were once the sole province of well-financed corporate and government laboratories. Emergence to me is a way to make sense of the new dynamics of change in a digital world.

“I love Thomas Edison, Beth. If he were around today, he’d have founded Quirky,” Ben said.

With innovation, we race to be first, but being early is not always a good thing, especially if you’re not ready or if you oversell the future. Timing is the difference between being successful and being close.

This is American enterprise at a crossroads. Having for too long replaced innovation with optimization, tighter financial targets, and efficiencies, this is what it looks like when business dangerously loses touch with the process—and joy—of imagination and discovery.

I could see the team having their aha moment: they’d spent all their time focused on technical risks (i.e., “Can this product be built?”) and zero on commercial risks (i.e., “Should this product be built?”).

Who is the customer and what is the need that you are trying to solve for them? What is our strength—i.e., What do we do better than most; our unfair advantage? And if we don’t have one, why do we have a shot at winning? What did we learn from the experiments we ran? What is the business model—i.e., How will we get paid? Would you bet your career on this idea/solution/business? Why now? Where have you failed? What will you do differently because of it? What can I do to help? (This question forces humility as opposed to assuming you already have the answer.)

Eric Ries often said, you have to “nail it, then scale it.”

A founder has a different view of the world, which is ‘How big is the problem?’ not ‘How big is the market?’ Total addressable problem (TAP), not total addressable market (TAM).

Elon Musk means when he says that wishful thinking is the enemy.”

Success theater, the fear of being wrong, is why big companies like GE are afraid, at some level, to name things as they are.

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every ninety days, new projects would be judged by a growth board on whether they were meeting their goals, and whether they should be killed, pivoted to a new direction, or given another ninety days to move forward as they were.

remove what I call entitlement funding

Growth boards are funnels. In the start-up world, only one in fifty ideas makes it; the growth board process makes sure you kill the other forty-nine quickly. If not, they become “zombies”—(another Kidderism)—the walking dead.

formal growth board serves to deliver discipline around key decisions in funding, testing, allocating resources for projects, and new businesses.

Here is the framework for organizing a growth board: Convene a cross-functional group of decision-makers with enough different perspectives to add value; the smaller the group, the better. All decisions are made here; there are no backroom deals. Leverage your core set of questions as projects move through the various stages. Ideas/projects are greenlighted only as they move through each stage, meaning they pass the test for should versus can; gaining traction is moving from one to many customers; scale means that the products work as described and the commercial model is sound and growing. Beware that growth boards don’t become overly bureaucratic or that you start adding growth boards beyond where they are useful. In venture capital, Mondays are set aside to convene partners, make funding decisions, and send pitches back for more work or decline them completely. VCs are pitched thousands of ideas a year; only a few dozen are funded. I use this approach for funding any project with my teams, not just for new businesses.

Several simple tenets of innovation became clear: First, to build trust you need to stop viewing business units and project teams in terms of hierarchy and more in terms of local guilds or tribes—as communities of practice. Second, the emphasis isn’t on providing an answer so much as asking penetrating and probing questions that get people to reflect on the old assumptions and cultural habits that are influencing their thinking.

Culture needs to be first in mind, not the last thing you do.

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The Culture Club identified fear of failure as a key issue to tackle. Our employees were good at their jobs, they cared, and they didn’t want to let their managers or their teammates down when something went wrong. They were failing at failing forward. So to get over that fear, they created FailCon, a failure convention to celebrate mistakes. Andy Goldberg, our creative director, led the way. We picked one day when everyone, in all of our teams, would share their failures in brown-bag discussions around the globe.

We imagine, we act, we emerge.

to adopt a discovery mind-set that seeks to imagine what’s next and go see for yourself.

To be human today means living in a world in which almost every day brings some sort of massive disturbance.

Unknown unknowns lurking everywhere. Competitors arise out of nowhere. Customers suddenly demand new solutions. The pace of change is never going to be slower than today.

Change happens but our responsibility is to shape it, adapt to it, an...

There are challenges out there that threaten our survival, and you can respond in one of two ways: either you’ll open yourself up and respond to the challenges creatively, using your imagination to conjure something that doesn’t exist today; or, you’ll arrogantly assume the sufficiency of your competence—that is, the reliable processes you’ve always used to solve the problems you’ve always had.

The old metrics and new algorithms can’t help us here. What we need is to imagine different, be different, do different.

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Let me tell you, it’s hard to explain to investors that if failure is not an option, then neither is success.

The expiration date on blaming others for anything comes the moment you realize blame robs you of your agency.

You have to optimize today and plant the seeds for tomorrow.

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It is about the ability to imagine it forward. 1. Explore. Discovery needs to be a continuous part of your routine.

2. Have a vision and a mission. Tell stories about the new future you can make together with others.

3. Experiment. Ask better questions. Create hypotheses inspired by your discoveries and test them.

4. Share. Open up. Be transparent. Learning to work out loud in a generous, trusting, connected way will facilitate the creation of robust feedback loops that allow you to learn and pivot with greater and greater speed and confidence. 5. Be an emergent leader. We’re not there yet, but I can see the day in my mind’s eye when nearly everyone at every level of this organization is experimenting daily, asking provocative “What if?” questions, unafraid of failure, ambidextrously attending to the company’s core as they invent its future—emergent leaders running an adaptive organization that is in a constant state of reinvention.

You just have to believe two things: (1) tomorrow can be better than today, and (2) you have the power to make it so. You are not a robot. You’re a change-maker.

Company management, boards—even investors (I’m an optimist!)—must honestly evaluate their leaders’ imagination gaps, ability to move forward without all the answers, and communicate a vision, not just march on with precision.

The world will never be slower or simpler than it is today. Wishing it so will not make it so. Change is part of everyone’s job. Transformation is a never-ending journey, for your company, for your team, for you. The future is made by those who can go forth with courage, with adaptable, open minds, learning to discover, to agitate and instigate, and to collaborate and build, always with a bias for action. Story is the glue that binds us. We need stories to give our work and our lives meaning. Strategy is a story well told. Vision and courageous leadership never go out of style. Believe in possibility. Get comfortable with not knowing, with living in the in-between of what was and what will be. It’s hard.