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

by Beth Comstock

I had to remind them: if you want to stay relevant—reinvention is a continual act.

Changing our mental models requires much more than a single lecture, no matter how convincing the evidence; it requires an ongoing presentation of experiences, discussions, provocations.

To change how people think, you need to go at people in full surround sound. They need to see how new models work in specific contexts. The really revolutionary innovations—the ones that change the world—need to be explained before they can be accepted. They need to be experienced before they can be believed. And they need to be communicated repeatedly. Just when you think, “Surely they are sick of me saying this,” you find you need to explain it again. Shifts in how we think don’t happen overnight, any more than eating a single lettuce leaf will make you thin.

But my experience at GE and NBC has taught me that people can’t just be told change is coming and be expected to spring into action. They have to work through it. Your job is to create the environment, actions, and coaching to shape opportunity before others even see it.

Finding champions at work—true allies—is necessary for anyone who wants to transform an organization. You need a network of people who take up new ideas critically but honestly (and with passion). Change and innovation are team sports. They require internal allies against the relentless and inevitable nay-saying that will take place.

This lack of clarity at this early stage is a typical obstacle for the change-maker. You have to act boldly on instinct and not wait for the data to tell you what to do, rather than the other way around. 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.

The good news is that this bias can be overcome. Repeated exposure to different views and novel experiences can prime us to question our assumptions and consider alternatives—that is, to see the box holding the tacks as a candleholder. The repeated exposure does something else that’s critical: it creates discomfort—the discomfort that comes from being stuck on a problem. Studies in creativity show that it is an important early stage in the process of people generating an insight, creating those aha moments. It’s a subconscious signal to the brain that a problem exists and a solution must be found. Our brain tends to grasp for easy answers to solve the problem and end the tension. And organizations behave similarly. At first, they deny a problem exists. Then they admit that a problem exists—but it’s not theirs. Then they say that it’s their problem, but it can be solved by the tried and tested pathways.

A good story sells—always has and always will. That is its power. Perhaps good stories are the only things that ever sell—with the great product or experience required to make the story stick.

As our planet-wide digital nervous system grows, it is causing a mass reorganization of people, money, information, and things. That digital information flow has become the main driver of change. And we need new frameworks to understand and anticipate what comes next. One of those frameworks is known as emergence, a term that until recently has been used primarily to explain natural systems—what biologists call complex adaptive systems, systems that can adapt and evolve within a changing environment. Colonies of insects such as ants and bees, for example, use simple rules and networks to produce adaptive behavior. Ben Kaufman and his ant army of inventors seemed like emergence incarnate, and exactly what GE needed.

You need the passion to try new things and take great risks, enabling others to do the same. But you also need the humility to realize failure is part of your job and you will be unable to know the answer or predict the outcome. You need, most of all, a kind of faith that amidst all this uncertainty and ambiguity, the next new thing will emerge, eventually.

learned what happens in companies—small or big—when you throw too much money at something before it has the capacity and capability to use it well. It’s something we now call premature scaling, something we determined to fix. My colleagues hate when I say this, but companies often throw too much money at ideas too early. And teams ask for everything for fear they won’t get funding later.

It was becoming clear to me that GE needed to redefine and articulate that it was safe for our employees to think and act differently—to iterate, to have hypotheses, to move faster. The focus had to be on how to create the culture that would support this new way of working. We had to rediscover our original entrepreneur’s mentality. We were once a start-up. Was it possible to turn GE once again into a 120-plus-year-old start-up? Until then, the corporate machinery would continue killing ideas—and itself.

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.)

“But that’s the wrong goal,” David argued. “The idea isn’t to say here’s the battery market; we’ll take 5 percent of 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 any-more; you want all of it. That’s why Uber does so well: They didn’t say, ‘Can we grab 10 percent of the taxi market?’ They said, ‘People want an easy way to get things done while they get around.’ They saw a mobility and time problem and solved it. Does anyone here actually know what problem the Durathon is supposed to solve?” David Kidder has a talent for coining catchy terminology. Total addressable problem is a powerful way to describe the customer-centric viewpoint I was trying to inculcate inside GE. This was the work of new marketing that I had been pushing for years. Thinking of the problem that needs solving inherently means thinking from the customer’s point of view. “I know the tech is better than anything out there, but do people need these batteries?” I said. “I mean, companies are made of people—and they buy based on what they need.” “Like, 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 busi...

It was becoming clear as we talked: Success theater, the fear of being wrong, is why big companies like GE are afraid, at some level, to name things as they are. GE saw Durathon as a big business that could only get bigger, but in truth, it was an experimental start-up with significant risks. It was a very GE mentality: we made this commitment, so we have to do it, and if we build it they will come.

formal growth board serves to deliver discipline around key decisions in funding, testing, allocating resources for projects, and new businesses. I believe growth boards are fundamental to driving innovation in an organization. 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 back-room 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. For example, when digitizing workflows or our sales teams across GE, I convened a group of commercial leaders; we agreed to jointly pool our resources—budget, people, capabilities—in a way that would scale the best ideas fastest. E...

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. As

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

I needed our teams to hear directly from me that it was okay to test and learn, and they needed me to hear from them why it wasn’t so simple. We met quarterly. I challenged the team to bring me one thing I didn’t want to hear—something I or other leaders were doing that stood in the way of meaningful speed and change. I discovered a lot of time and energy was going into keeping reports, meetings, expectations alive that I had long forgotten about. We used these discussions as a way to reset expectations, drive candor, and hold one another accountable for change. Honestly, I wish I had done this much earlier.

But then 2016 would prove to be a tough year. Tough times always come. These are when you are sorry that you announced an idea to great fanfare—you get customers you desperately need, but you also raise expectations.

Here’s the thing: people say they want to behave like a start-up, but the old behaviors often return, especially in moments of stress.

He brought a relentless drive to segment customers and hone value propositions. He led the test company and scale company approach—first assigning a small team to test and validate new commercial models, and once greenlighted, moving projects to the scale team, which was incentivized to sell and make bigger, faster. But people kept going back to what made them comfortable. Current’s new MO demanded open communication, but many people, when asked about their worries, would say, “I got it.” They never asked for help, never let anyone see them sweat. This phrase “We’ve got this” requires special attention—and a good “BS” detector. If it means “We’re making progress, give us time to figure it out” or “We’ll ask for help when we need it,” then encourage the team to keep going. In my experience, “We’ve got this” can also come laden with arrogance, a way of saying “We don’t need help because we know the answers.” If that is what is meant, watch out. Worse,

“One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to be awed by the scale and success of early-20th-century efforts to transform strong-willed human beings into docile employees.” And now that real robots have entered the picture, they can do all the things we did as cogs, just much better and much faster. And they don’t complain.

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. Think about that. The pace of change is never going to be slower than today. Change happens but our responsibility is to shape it, adapt to it, and make it work for us. There is no robot, no algorithm, capable of such adaptation. Yet.

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.

The old metrics and new algorithms can’t help us here. What we need is to imagine different, be different, do different. This is what I know as a marketer: being different gets a better price and more loyalty. This is what I know from my early studies in biology: being different paves the way for adaptation. This is what I know from my experience: taking the jobs and assignments that were unexpected or undervalued, showing up in unexpected places and getting to know people who at face value were too different—these do lead to success. It takes courage to act on instinct and not wait for ever more data to tell you what to do. It takes courage to see patterns and then use the data to validate, rather than the other way around.

Don’t tell me you’re not empowered. There is power that is yours. Use it. Grab your own permission. No one is going to give it to you.

discovered something then that opened life and work up for me—the mistakes you rectify and learn from will give you more freedom and progress and ultimately even wealth than the mediocrity you can be certain of by living and working mistake-free.

I could tell you it’s damn near impossible to start something like Current in an environment driven by the next quarterly report. The possibility of some innovative new business model making money is just that—a mere possibility whose chances for success are imperiled by a system that demands the certainty of short-term gains. Let me tell you, it’s hard to explain to investors that if failure is not an option, then neither is success. These are the same people who scoffed at Ecomagination a dozen years ago and now demand to know why we’re not even bigger in renewable energy, now that solar is growing three times faster than even the optimists projected.

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 ...

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. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel Kahne-man said (on Krista Tippett’s On Being): “It’s a very difficult principle to grasp, this idea that actually what I don’t know matters enormously, and what I can’t see matters enormously. The interpretation of the world imposes itself on us. We have too much confidence in our beliefs, and it really is associated with a failure of imagination.”