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

by Beth Comstock

Every change-maker learns to give herself permission to push outside expectations and limitations.

How do we navigate the relentless pace of change? How can we open up our culture and innovate more quickly? How do we stay relevant in a world that is being constantly disrupted?

Sometimes I play the spark, an instigator to seed new ideas and directions for change. Sometimes I’m brought in to play the explorer, teaching others the process I use to truffle-hunt for new ideas. Other times I’m the champion, preaching the need for leaders to support the lonely voices at the edge that are calling on their organizations to change. And sometimes my role is to coach a team to create the prototypes that will serve as the “proof points” that justify a leap into the new.

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.” What we are witnessing is the battle for the future of many of our businesses.

One of the defining characteristics of our new age of rapid-fire change is that leaders, managers, and employees have to be able to move forward without having all the answers.

our ability to evolve, to defy convention, to embrace emerging change. And to do that requires imagination: infusing our work with a disciplined capacity to go beyond what we know and can conceive is possible. And that starts with a shift in mind-set. You must give yourself permission to imagine a new future and act on it.

imaginative thinking is a universal human talent, an evolutionary gift handed down to us that has made us who we are,

Our institutions became less imaginative and, in so doing, increasingly lost their ability to collaborate, improvise, and respond to change. That is, to adapt.

“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.”

I call this approach 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.

Coming up with new ideas is rarely the problem. What holds all of us back, really, is fear: the attachment to the old, to What We Know.

change is a never-ending journey. It doesn’t stop at the end of a quarter, or a fiscal year. And it is filled with hard work, triumph, surprise, struggle, and heartbreak.

Section I: Self-Permission. Every change-maker is forced to learn to give herself permission to push outside expectations and limitations. I was no exception.

Section II: Discovery. This is the change-making step that makes all the other steps possible. Discovery is about exploring—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.

Section III: Agitated Inquiry. Innovation is the result of seeking out tension, not avoiding it. Innovation is not about reassurance or consensus; in...

Section IV: Storycraft. Strategy is a story well told. To innovate successfully, you have to adapt your narrative to help the people in an organization understand their world. That, in turn, will change how...

Section V: Creating a New OS. Changing an organization’s operating system requires adopting a new mind-set—often in an uncertain or difficult environment. That means spreading ideas bottom-up and outside-in, finding dedicated agents of change within the company to make the story their own. It means developing...

We are hardwired to flee ambiguity, chaos, and the unknown.

charging into the unknown, optimistically and courageously, with all flags flying, is a skill, one that needs to be developed and nurtured,

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.

It’s natural to think, “That’s the work of ‘leaders,’ and I’m not that.” But once you accept that you’re a change-maker, you give yourself the right to confront the unasked questions about whatever work you do—even PR kits. Embracing such a mentality is crucial for anyone who wants to effect change:

My own success is a testament not to an improbable succession of good decisions—I’ve had plenty of failures—but to a bias for action.

I’ve realized you can’t worry so much about making the right decision. What is more important is to develop a habit of acting decisively.

Ignoring the gatekeepers and giving yourself permission to advance your ideas is almost more frightening than the path-clearing that follows.

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.

As a vast array of research has shown, success correlates as closely with confidence as it does competence. This is particularly true for someone who intends to be a change agent.

What I was learning was the skill called social courage, a concept that originated in the literature of “Positive Psychology,”

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

I often use the term “fog flyer” to describe the excitement and fear I feel navigating ambiguity.

Job Crafting I often tell people looking for career advice, “Take the job that no one else wants.” Or the job where you see potential beyond what others see. This has been a key to my career—crafting additional projects and responsibilities that help the company while giving me room to grow and find joy. With lower expectations about the role from others,

Here is what I say to the teams I work with: “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.”

I don’t embrace a confrontational mentality, but a drumbeat of indignation was growing inside me at that time. Anger can be a useful provocation for action, but you can’t live there. Tenacity is a better long-term game plan. At opportune moments, you must relentlessly push yourself forward, demanding that your achievements be acknowledged.

Managers aren’t mind readers. They won’t know what you aspire to do unless you tell them. It doesn’t mean you will necessarily get the opportunity, but at least you will both know where you stand.

as an agent of change, it is not just your job but your duty to push change forward—whether

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

Habits of behavior precede habits of the mind.

“No = Not Yet,”

I’ve learned that everything is feedback. It’s all data to plug into the process. Try, fail, iterate, try again.

I’m reminded of the importance of communicating early and often as change is happening.

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

Living deep on the inside is too dark—“what might be” is incapacitated by what’s already worked. Living on the outside, however, you have no influence. It is on the edge between inside and outside where you can get things done.

Tear down the walls, pave over the moats and connect the castle to the flow of ideas and people

one of the greatest enemies of change is what I call incapacitated learning, a phrase I borrowed from the futurist Edie Weiner. She describes it as a condition of “knowing so much about what we already know that we are the last to see the future for it differently.”

Sometimes just having a permission slip at your desk or on your phone is a good reminder to take action.

THE DRAGON SLAYER CHALLENGE Whenever you feel a negative emotion related to work bubble up, take note. Get a notebook and start keeping a log. Include entries for moments of fear and negativity voiced by your colleagues and friends about their industries and jobs. Your entries don’t need to be long or detailed. A sentence or a phrase will do. At the end of the week, take a look at what you’ve written down. Do the observations and comments add up to a larger problem or trend? What are you going to do about it?

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I am a worrier. In part my runaway imagination is a way to prepare for every possible outcome. And partly it’s just my anxiety going unchecked. I’ve since learned to channel this anxiety into scenario-planning;

occasions require bold action—leaning into, and not away from, the unknown for the right reasons.

I believe in heeding the wisdom of 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.” My “Imagine it Forward” version of this is “Change seems impossible—until it happens. At which point it seems to have always been inevitable.”