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

by Beth Comstock

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. Get weird. Think of life as a scavenger hunt with unimaginable rewards. 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. 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. At GE, going big is all we’ve known. The trick here is to find the right Goldilocks scale for your experiments: big enough to learn from but not so big that your bets will kill you. 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. 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 ...