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

by Beth Comstock

Pivot or persevere. You continually use the feedback from the build-measure-learn cycle to assess if your efforts are working.

Beware vanity metrics.

Embrace innovation accounting. This concept pushes you to think about measuring what matters most for each stage of development.

Here are some of my favorite questions that we worked hard to get our leaders to ask. 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.)

We need someone whose first impulse is seeing and proving an opportunity, not executing to scale,” I said.

As 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). When you shift a mind-set from TAM to TAP, you’re not looking for 5 percent of the marketplace anymore; you want all of it.

are the batteries vitamins or painkillers?” David added. “Because if you have to explain why something might help them in the future, it’s just a vitamin. Vitamins are nice to have: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if our customer read our business plan and behaved the way we want them to?’ It doesn’t happen. But if it stops a pain, if it’s a painkiller, that’s hugely powerful. That’s what they need. And that’s what they’ll buy.”

Increasingly, innovation and disruption comes in the form of new business models, not just as a result of new technology.

With the early days of FastWorks, our plan was simple: 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. It was classic VC metered, or milestone-based, funding, in which you fund based on progress.

Innovation without constraints is no blessing.

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 ...

Ideas/projects are greenlighted only as they move through each stage, meaning they pass the ...

Beware that growth boards don’t become overly bureaucratic or that you start adding growth boards beyond where they are useful.

I use this approach for funding any project with my teams, not just for new businesses.

Consultants tell you what to do and leave; coaches lean over a business leader’s shoulders and advise them: “Good. Good, bad. Right move. Now faster.” The coach’s role is the essence of emergence—it’s about setting a good “mission objective”—giving the teams the freedom to iterate and learn forward.

Pretty soon, “mission-based teams” became pervasive across the organizations, with teams shedding hierarchy in pursuit of the outcome.

Managers now give ongoing feedback to their employees—and vice versa—in a process that holds both accountable to each other and responsible for constant communication and coach-based behavior.

they created FailCon, a failure convention to celebrate mistakes.

The pace of change is never going to be slower than today. Think about that. The pace of change is never going to be slower than today.

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 first move is messy, human, chaotic, forcing you to imagine a new way forward, try things, admit mistakes, fail, learn, iterate, try again. Down that path, with no guarantees, is the possibility of renewal. The second option offers only eventual irrelevance.

You don’t just live a life; you blunder your way toward creating one you love. You don’t just submissively work in a company you tolerate; you agitate, sometimes rebelliously, to craft it into something great.

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.

1. Explore. Discovery needs to be a continuous part of your routine. Replace an obsession with competence for curiosity. Give yourself permission to leave the familiar and seek out variation: hang out with strange people, learn provocative ideas, play with crazy tools, and visit unexpected places.

2. Have a vision and a mission. Tell stories about the new future you can make together with others. Get it out of your imagination and into reality. Sell it. Take action.

3. Experiment. Ask better questions. Create hypotheses inspired by your discoveries and test them. You won’t get it right the first time. Or even the fifth time. Trial and error is the way we learn. Embrace failure, but make it fast, cheap, and survivable.

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,

I can’t promise you a meaningful career unblemished by failure (actually, the opposite). You will struggle. What I can promise is that this kind of life, this kind of approach to leadership, will give you a more creative, a more impactful, a more purposeful career. This is business at its best.

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. You can do this.

How to Be an Emergent Leader

Summary of essential consideratiobs

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.