Chapter Six

THE EPIDEMIC

Recruit Holdings, owner of Indeed and Glassdoor, has $23 billion of revenue across businesses in HR, education, and marketing. Yet even at this scale, the company is able to identify imaginative ideas from its employees and spread those ideas to inspire collective exploration by new teams, resulting in profitable new businesses. As Takanori Makiguchi, executive manager of Recruit’s Management Competence Research Institute, said to us: “Recruit needs to change constantly. This means changing minds.”1

An example of one person’s idea being amplified to inspire others is the story of Fumihiro Yamaguchi. In 2010, Yamaguchi was a middle manager in Recruit’s education division. While doing customer research, he noticed there were lots of one-on-one tutoring services and lectures to help students with exam preparation, but no scalable online service. He imagined something to fill this gap, and his manager encouraged him to share his idea at Recruit’s annual ideas contest, Ring. With no approval process, any employee can submit an idea to the contest. When Yamaguchi shared his idea, people came forward to form a team with him. Every year, Recruit staff form almost a thousand such ad hoc employee teams, an achievement highlighted in its annual report.2

Chapter Overview

The problem of intersubjectivity

How can we collectively imagine?

TALK TOGETHER

  • Name things
  • Train for storytelling
  • Train for listening
  • Support brokers

FOCUS TOGETHER

  • Use collective play
  • Run a festival

MOVE TOGETHER

  • Relocate and colocate

PROBE TOGETHER

  • Distribute autonomy
  • Suspend precision

Blocks to collective imagination

EXCESSIVE COMPLIANCE

CACOPHONY

SILOS

DEPERSONALIZATION

Games to play

THE MESSY FOUNDATIONS GAME

THE NAMING GAME

Good questions to ask

Organizational diagnostic

After passing an initial screening, Yamaguchi received a research budget. His team tried things out, reimagined, and received further funds. Eventually they received $18 million to launch the service as a subsidiary business within Recruit.3 The result, StudySapuri, now has 1.4 million paid subscribers and, together with other online service businesses, including others that grew out of Ring, generates $748 million revenue at 15 percent annual growth.4 Ring has also produced a beauty salon platform, Hot Pepper, and wedding planning platform, Zexy. All these businesses were once no more than ideas in the minds of employees, which in most companies would probably have gone nowhere as people put aside their speculations to get on with assigned work. (See figure 6-1.)

Figure 6-1  Employee sharing ideas at Recruit Holdings

Source: Courtesy of Recruit Holdings.


For an idea to move beyond being an individual’s pet project, it needs others to adopt it. Like a virus, it needs to spread from one person to many. So how does a new mental model spread from one brain to inspire and enlist the imaginations of others? How do we move from individual to collective imagination?

This chapter shifts focus from harnessing individual imagination to looking at things you can do at a collective level to harness imagination across your business. We examine the challenge of “intersubjectivity,” ways to create collective imagination, common blocks to achieving this, games to play, questions to ask, and an organizational diagnostic.

The Problem of Intersubjectivity

When we spread a developing mental model from one brain to others across a business, we amplify it in two ways. We accelerate its evolution, by driving collective reimagination. And we create social validation as people accept and engage with the idea until it becomes part of their work or lives.

A central challenge in spreading an idea, however, is the problem of intersubjectivity. How do you get multiple minds to work together on an intangible mental model of something that doesn’t yet exist? We spoke to Swiss philosopher Eduard Marbach, who described the problem:

From a Husserlian perspective, collective imagination is a really complex thing because it involves the challenge of intersubjectivity. How can two private mental worlds align to work together on the same mental “object”? This is less of a problem when you’re dealing with things that already exist. If you show something in the real world to your neighbor, you can point to it and say, “Let’s talk about that.” But if you are in the middle of imagining something, it doesn’t yet exist. Especially if you want to share imagination with someone while the idea is still nascent and amorphous. If you imagine something, and you want to have someone else with you, thinking about the same thing, you have to find some way to specify what you want to talk about.5

Figure 6-2  The Romantic movement emphasized the individual hero above the world: imagination as subjectivity rather than intersubjectivity

Source: Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, circa 1817. © bpk Bildagentur/Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany/Elke Walford/Art Resource, NY.

The Romantic movement, which greatly shaped the popular understanding of imagination, also emphasized the challenge of intersubjectivity. Yet Romantics usually took this as a reason not to work with others. They often depicted the artist or inventor as a lone hero, rather than a hero in a collective or corporate context. (See figure 6-2.)

If we can solve the intersubjectivity challenge, we create collective imagination: multiple minds working together on the same evolving mental model, creating momentum toward fully realizing an idea.

How Can We Collectively Imagine?

To overcome the intersubjectivity problem, we can’t simply plug our brains together. Our output needs to become the surprising input to someone else’s brain to prompt their imagination. The chief action to achieve this is obviously communication, but we can also use the actions explored in the previous chapter, but at the collective level: focus together, move together, and probe the world together (see figure 6-3).

Figure 6-3  Actions to create collective imagination

In what follows we explore each of these actions, looking at specific moves we can make to help ideas move from the individual to the collective level—to progress from an initial, subjective idea to synchronized exploration based on a shared mental model.

Talk Together

NAME THINGS

One way to communicate a new mental model is to give it a name. The importance of language, specifically naming, is easy to underestimate because we are so familiar with the named creations around us: fridge, restaurant, smartphone. It is easy to forget how strange these things were when they were just unlabeled thoughts.

Fundamentally, a name delimits something new, allowing us to refer to a shared object. A name makes an intersubjective thing out of what was once just an idea in one person’s mind. Shakespeare articulated this in memorable lines:

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

On top of the fundamental task of creating a label, there are three additional jobs a name can do, which may not be initially obvious: help people feel familiar with the unfamiliar, signal how something will be used, and draw attention to something (see figure 6-4).

Figure 6-4  Jobs done by a name

Even though an Apple Watch is actually a sensor and computer on your wrist, a watch is what people already know, so the name works by taking people to a familiar starting point. In contrast, in 1905, no one knew what a vacuum cleaner was. So we got Griffith’s Improved Vacuum Apparatus for Removing Dust from Carpets, a name that carefully explains the function.6 In contrast again, everyone knows what T-shirts and pants are, to the point that we may have no interest in looking at another instance. In this case the principal challenge is drawing attention, so you end up applying a name like the brand FCUK.

Businesses, however, often waste the power to create new language. Effort is focused on giving catchy names to ordinary things, aiming for differentiation through language alone. As well as outlandish product names, this bias can cause us to unnecessarily rename ordinary words, like “leverage” for “use,” or “learnings” for “lesson.” A better strategy would be to only coin names for genuinely new, imaginative ideas as they arise in the business, and to be clear about the job to be done by those names.

It may be tempting when thinking imaginatively to look for a “creative” name, in the sense of an unfamiliar one. But the job of naming imaginative ideas is mostly about showing where something unusual fits in relation to what is familiar to us and indicating how something works. The mental model is already unfamiliar enough; the name should be the bridge between the counterfactual and quotidian worlds. The name FCUK only works because no one is confused about what a T-shirt is. When you have something revolutionary, an unrevolutionary name like Apple Watch or the Wright Flyer (which the Wright brothers called their flying machine) is best. This is held up by research in linguistics, which shows the primary factor driving the adoption of neologisms is the familiarity of the linguistic parts.7

A bad name for a vacuum cleaner in 1905, when no one had ever seen one before

For example, let’s say you are reforming the business to introduce more time for reflection. You could crystallize this idea, making it powerful and communicable, by giving it a function-oriented name: “The 10% Thinking Rule” or “The Reflective Company.” Or suppose an employee suggests the idea of bringing cafés into retail banks. A manager could help spread this idea by naming it the “Café Bank,” a name that’s useful because it draws on two familiar mental models.

Looking at early mentions of now-familiar things, successful names for imaginative creations often start out as basic words trying simply to capture what the newfangled concept is about:8

Apple said that new applications for the iPhone could be purchased through the App Store, a new application that will let users download the applications directly to their devices.

Network World, 2008

Depositors seal their deposits in envelopes which are provided and insert them in the “automatic teller,” which flashes a Thank You sign and issues a receipt.

American Banker, 1971

Postmaster General Summerfield plans split-second electronic mail.

—Appleton Post-Crescent, 1959

We were all photographed by the new cinematograph process, which makes moving pictures by winding off a reel of films.

Queen Victoria, in her journal, 1896

Associations with limited liability are of two kinds: in one, the liability of all partners is limited, in the other that of some of them only.

—John Stuart Mill, 1848

TRAIN FOR STORYTELLING

Many businesses train for communication skills but don’t often focus on the skills needed specifically to communicate ideas about not-yet-existent things. Because the counterfactual, imagined model doesn’t fully exist, it needs embodying in some other way to inspire others. This is where stories can be powerful.

Simply passing information to someone is not enough, since (1) if there is no interest nothing is achieved, (2) we are swimming in information and information alone doesn’t automatically create interest, and (3) we need to be selective because we can’t tell it all. As Nietzsche said, “It is not enough to prove something, one has to seduce or elevate people to it.”9

What’s actually going on when we share an idea? We are not, in fact, passing an object from one brain to another. We are provoking another brain, hoping the person becomes inspired enough to imagine something similar to what we are imagining. Often, this does not work. You try to explain your idea, and the other person imagines something different and uninteresting. In your subjective world, the mental model is an exciting and beautiful castle. When you talk to other people, they might create the equivalent of a dingy studio apartment in their mind’s eye.

Techniques for storytelling can help bridge this intersubjective gap because stories evoke and energize: they get people to see what you see as well as motivate them to care.

For example, in 1949, Charles Merrill had developed a mental model for the transformation of his bank. He now faced the social challenge of inducing the firm’s partners to share in the development and application of his vision. He did this effectively through storytelling. For example, he talked about stock-buying workshops they had run for women in San Francisco, framing these, in his final sentence, as part of a grand mission to realize the full potential of a new model of brokerage.

It has astonished us, I admit, to have so many women saying, “Information, Please,” on the subject of stocks and bonds There was another highly satisfying development, too. Some of the women asked if we would give courses for their husbands. This meant that our merchandise was beginning to be discussed in a few homes where it had never been discussed before. It is a small step, admittedly, when you consider that only about 7% of the 52,000,000 families in this country own any common or preferred stock at all.

We do not know accurately, of course, how many of the remaining 93% have available funds for investment in our country’s industries, but we do know that there are tens of millions who could buy our products but do not. That is why there is no more challenging and necessary mass merchandising project than that which faces investment houses today.10

Our imaginative mental model (top) vs. what this creates in someone else’s mind (bottom). Source: (left) tucko019/iStock by Getty Images and (right) Justin Masterson via Creative Commons.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a story is “an oral or written narrative account of events.” This contrasts with an argument or a set of data, although both of these can be incorporated into stories, as Merrill does. Stories are effective because they engage more of our minds than merely the capacity for explicit reasoning. A good story enables two brains to experience one thing, known in cognitive science as “brain coupling.” Neuroscientist Uri Hasson has studied this phenomenon, showing that both the receivers and tellers of a story share similar brain activity while the story is being told.11

We can identify some techniques of effective storytelling, which can be used in enlisting others to help evolve and amplify new ideas:

  • Use emotional content; for example, Merrill talks about being “astonished.”
  • Play to many senses; for example images, video, evocative description.
  • Use specific color and detail rather than generalizations or summaries.
  • Incorporate the structure of an archetypal narrative, if possible (see the sidebar “Archetypal Narratives”).

TRAIN FOR LISTENING

As well as being good storytellers, people need to be good receivers of early-stage ideas. Listening is a skill: how to be imaginatively generous as a listener, rather than impatient and dismissive.

Like the need for storytelling, the need for good listening comes from the fact that imaginative ideas often don’t communicate easily. New mental models go through stages of vagueness and incoherency where the value is not at all obvious. Jony Ive, the head designer at Apple for twenty-six years, describes the origins of the App Store:

And so, as the potential for a vast range of apps became clear, so did the idea for an App Store. But it’s important to remember the actual value of the idea, certainly at the beginning, was rather vague and it was nebulous and it was very difficult to articulate. We made some prototypes and the early prototypes really described more of the problems than the opportunities. The early prototypes and the actions of the resolving technology were exceptionally crude, but they were made to explore the idea, and not to justify it. Now, these ideas, they weren’t vulnerable or fragile for a couple of weeks or for a couple of months, these ideas were fragile for years.12

Ive’s design team solved the intersubjectivity problem: “fragile” and “rather vague” mental models could come to live in the imaginations of others. This was possible because the design team members were imaginative listeners; they could pick up on whatever starting point the other person was offering and run with it in their own imaginations. For example, the development of the iMac began with an unusual, half-formed mental model from designer Doug Satzger. He suggested the team make something “like an egg.”13

Archetypal Narratives

Anthropologists and psychologists have identified several archetypal patterns in stories across human cultures.a There are some core features of powerful stories:

  • A protagonist or group of protagonists
  • A trigger that sets the protagonist off on some kind of journey or struggle
  • A struggle, usually including confusion, failed attempts, antagonists, and mentors
  • A resolution, or vision of a resolution ahead

One lesson for business leaders is that protagonists are important. The originators and early developers of an imaginative mental model are a vital part of the story that helps that model spread. Often in business, an idea is divorced from its protagonists; it is passed on to managers, written up in a depersonalized way, and sent to people who have no connection with the original context. Recruit Holdings has a different approach: it encourages the originator to see themselves as an entrepreneurial hero by letting them build their own team and champion their own idea. The mental model thus stays linked to the personal story, which gives it more evocative power in the minds of others. In other words, Recruit deliberately creates heroes.

To become a great storyteller, you should gain familiarity with great stories, not necessarily to quote them directly, but to hone your instincts for description, language choice, and use of mental imagery. Great speech givers through history—Martin Luther King Jr., Charles de Gaulle, Sojourner Truth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Pericles—were all familiar with great stories, which seeped into their way of communicating.

For inspiration, here is a selection of works across art forms organized by the seven basic plots found throughout human storytelling:b

Voyage and return: The protagonist leaves the familiar and ventures into a geographically or socially distant place. They return with experience, although the insights they bring are often not accepted by their old friends. Examples: The Myth of Orpheus, The Time Machine, The Republic, Brideshead Revisited, Journey to the West (西遊記), Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

Escape from death: The protagonist sets out to defeat a dangerous or disruptive force that threatens themselves or their group, often transforming themselves or their group in the process. Examples: Popol Vuh, The Myth of Perseus, Star Wars: A New Hope, Ramayana (रामायणम्), Beowulf, The Táin (Táin Bó Cúailnge), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Rags to riches: The protagonist starts off marginalized or dejected before discovering and using their true strengths, gaining influence, wealth, or success in some other form. Examples: The Ugly Duckling, The Benny Goodman Story, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, The Red and the Black, Siddhartha

The quest: The protagonist has a clear task to accomplish or location to reach. They face setbacks and doubts, and must grow internally to accomplish the goal. Examples: The Myth of Bayajidda, Apocalypse Now, The Aeneid, The Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings, The Divine Comedy, Treasure Island

Comedy: The protagonist is lost in chaos through confusion of identities and misunderstandings. Everything gets tied in knots until, through genius or accident, the knot is untied and order is restored. Examples: The Clouds; A Night in Casablanca; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Three Men in a Boat; Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Tragedy: The protagonist is sucked into a downward spiral, resolved in destruction, although the destruction might be a necessary loss, in which case the story ends in solemn rejoicing. Examples: King Lear, Citizen Kane, To Have and Have Not, The Myth of Icarus, Anna Karenina, Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢), One Hundred Years of Solitude

Rebirth: The protagonist falls into a frozen condition; they are physically or spiritually stuck, trying to rediscover life and vigor. An act of redemption or unlocking occurs and their vitality is restored. Examples: Groundhog Day, The Myth of Osiris, Crime and Punishment, The Secret Garden

NOTES

a. Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (New York: Continuum, 2004).

b. Ibid.

In most business contexts, this suggestion would be too weird to lead anywhere. Imagine the conversation between the chief technology officer (CTO) and a vice president (VP) in your company:

CTO: What are you thinking for our next hit product?

VP: I’ve been considering eggs—how simple an egg is. I haven’t really got any further with this yet. But I am hopeful.

Happily, the Apple design team listened to Satzger’s egg suggestion and was inspired to head down the road that led to the iMac. As Ive describes the underlying dynamics: “We have so much trust as a team that we don’t censor our ideas because we are nervous and scared that they will sound absurd A lot of this process is about listening.”14

This ability to share an early-stage idea without being harshly judged is something that should not be limited to design teams. For ideas to spread in a business, we need to cultivate the skill of imaginative listening, the skill of finding triggers for inspiration, rather than targets for criticism, in what the other person is saying. When someone is listening with imaginative generosity, they might ask themselves: “What if what this person is saying could really be revolutionary?” “What might an egg-inspired computer be like?” “What does this odd fragment of a suggestion lead me to rethink?”

Finding inspiration in what the other person is saying is helped by a number of supporting skills: tolerance of ambiguity; openness to going in a direction you hadn’t thought about; suspension of judgment; and encouragement and patience as a default—based on hope that there are good things to be found together, even if they are not immediately obvious.

Across a business, some actions to train for and cultivate these skills are:

  • Edit hiring and promotion criteria to identify people who have proven themselves good at imaginative listening.
  • Include a focus on this skill in training programs, especially in relation to building and managing teams.
  • Advocate for the importance of imaginative listening via your own communications and at company events.

SUPPORT BROKERS

In supporting the spread of imaginative ideas, of key value are those employees who can talk to other people across the varied communities and tribes within a business. We can picture an organization like an archipelago. There are islands of strongly connected people, separated by gaps (see figure 6-5).

Within a network, we can roughly divide individuals into two kinds: brokers and insiders. Insiders stay on an island, with the team they know. Brokers connect the islands; they create bridges of intersubjectivity between groups.15

Tim O’Reilly, an influential thinker in Silicon Valley who coined the term “Web 2.0,” is a prime example of a broker, engaging with a diverse network. He describes one of his projects, which involved talking to former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt:

I was working on what we called the Gov 2.0 Summit, which brought together people from Silicon Valley with people from government, and led to my formulation of “government as a platform.” When I began working on the event, I talked to Eric Schmidt because I knew he’d been doing a bunch of work in Washington. And he said, “Tim, just go talk to a lot of people and then you’ll make sense of it. That’s what you do.”16

O’Reilly’s way of operating is the opposite of what usually happens in a business, where we are more likely to talk with our immediate team than to “go talk to a lot of people.” Insiders who know one island well and operate effectively on it are important. But a company needs brokers as well, who work across and beyond the firm. Sociologist Ron Burt refers to the “import-export nature of brokerage-based creativity.” That is, brokers help ideas spread and evolve by translating them from one group’s mental models into another, creating new possibilities for surprise and rethinking. “An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.”17

Figure 6-5  Map of relationships in a health-care company

Source: Ronald S. Burt, “Network Disadvantaged Entrepreneurs: Density, Hierarchy, and Success in China and the West,” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 2019, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 19–51, © 2018 by Ronald S. Burt. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Inc.

Brokers fulfill a crucial function, which is to help spread ideas through a diverse set of minds. This accelerates the mental model’s evolution, as it spreads through a value chain of personalities with different experience and stocks of mental models, each of which bring different mental construction materials to the developing model.

Focus Together

USE COLLECTIVE PLAY

In addition to talking, another area of action that spreads ideas is mutual refocusing of attention. If two or more people can orient their attention to the same thing, that is a way of developing a shared understanding, bridging the intersubjectivity gap. A key activity in which this happens is collective play.

A landmark investigation of play, the book Homo Ludens, notes that all cultures set aside special zones for play: “The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain.”18 Because play is set apart from normal goal-directed work, it can help to use physical space as a marker for different mental space. Media entrepreneur John Battelle describes a room he built to host musical improvising, which turned into a spot to play with business ideas (see figure 6-6):

The room has whiteboards everywhere and a big bar, and all these instruments. My friend came over after I built it and he was like, “Oh my god this is awesome, I’m never leaving.” So we started just very poorly playing music in that room. After about two months we had three others join us.

What happened that I didn’t expect, is that the whiteboards started filling up. Everybody in the band was a leader of some kind of business. My friend had a startup in health tech, one guy ran a physical storage company, another guy had an executive recruiting company. The band room became a place where we could jam not just on music but on ideas. The whiteboard would fill up with this crazy stuff. Then people started hearing about it and they asked if they could come do sessions in the band room. People with new ideas—tons of entrepreneurs came with new ideas, who just wanted to jam on them.19

Figure 6-6  John Battelle’s room for improvisation—with music and ideas

Source: Courtesy of John Battelle.

The room was a place for people to bring imaginative mental models and focus collective attention on them. We can create spaces with a similar underlying principle. We don’t have to use the clichéd setup of bean bags and colorful furniture. There are many ways to mark the space as different from the day-to-day: the lighting could be dimmer or there could be shelves of interesting books or a signal jammer to stop everyone’s phones working to focus them on each other and leave behind the demands of the day.

Once you have a good space, as Battelle notes, “You have to know how to have a really interesting, intelligent, agile conversation.”20 The philosopher Aristotle systematized some advice around this. He observed that there are two bad extremes in discussions: being too serious and dull, and being too frivolous—which is dull in its own way. In between these two lies a mental quality Aristotle called eutrapelia, or “good-turning”: being able to change direction playfully from serious to fun and back, engaging others in a rich but also light-hearted discussion.21 Somewhere between the tedium and buffoonery lies inspiration, where sparks of thought arise in ourselves, to surprise and inspire others and vice versa.

RUN A FESTIVAL

Festivals can be another great way of synchronizing attention, celebrating and recognizing idea development, and spreading ideas. This doesn’t happen often: most company meetings are taken up with reporting on goals, actions, and outcomes. In the BCG Henderson Institute’s cross-industry survey, 55 percent of leaders said their company had no effective mechanisms for sharing and inspiring others with new and stimulating ideas.22

Recruit Holdings has developed a successful model: running two annual events, Ring and FORUM, which host short presentations on new business ideas and imaginative improvements to ways of working, in front of over one thousand staff members (see figure 6-7). The ideas are not presented as signed-off ventures but as works in progress; Recruit suggests employees “share ‘story,’ ‘know-how,’ and ‘stance,’ not only ‘results.’ ”

Such in-person forums may be bad from the perspective of containing a viral pandemic, but they are powerful from the perspective of spreading ideas. Of course, we should only run in-person events when safe to do so (Recruit’s 2020 event was online). But our techniques for amplifying ideas are the inverse of the social distancing measures used to contain Covid-19. The Recruit festival is a deliberate super-spreader event, in a good way.

Figure 6-7  Annual ideas FORUM at Recruit Holdings

Source: Courtesy of Recruit Holdings.

Such events are effective in not just transmitting developing ideas but also motivating new journeys of imagination. Recruit surveyed a thousand employees across a range of companies about what affects intrinsic motivation, and having such festivals where employees gather to share ideas was one of the top five factors.* Festivals draw on people’s natural desire for status to amplify counterfactual ideas: the attention of a large crowd creates excitement and a heroic status that rubs off on presenters. Recruit emphasizes this, drawing on marketing tools to create companywide “entrepreneur heroes.”

Umwelts and Umgebungs

How do the people in a business collectively see the world? Early in the last century, Estonian biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll proposed the idea that organisms don’t perceive the environment, or Umgebung, directly as it is, but a skewed version of it, constrained by their sense organs. He called this subjective world an Umwelt.a For example, a tick, which doesn’t have eyes, sees the world by sensing butyric acid gradients given off by the sweat glands of mammals. When it senses high concentrations, it drops off its leaf tip, and if it is lucky enough to fall on a passing animal, which it can know by using its keen sense of temperature, it feels its way toward a hairless spot to attach and feed. This is the tick’s entire world: butyric acid gradients, temperature, hair or no hair. In a broader sense, the worldview of any organism is constrained by not only its sense organs but also its evolved capacities and limitations for action and communication.

At one level, humans are no different: our worldview is limited by our five senses, by the things we can and can’t do, and by the limits of our capacity for communication with others. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about navigating electrical gradients, flying, or reading the minds of animals, because we can’t—at least unaided.

Yet there are some differences between the Umwelten of humans and other animals, which are important for harnessing individual and collective imagination. As individuals, we can be aware that our worldview is not complete or objective; we can deliberately shape it by learning, moving, and focusing our senses or our thoughts; and we can extend it by using technology to enhance our senses and capabilities. We can think of GPS, social media, and airplanes as “Umwelt stretchers,” which extend our senses and capacities for socialization and action, and therefore our capacity for surprise and imagination.

At the collective level, we can understand and shape the Umwelten of others by using communication and by manipulating the organizational context, so that people in our business can share common experiences or be exposed to inspiring stimuli.

Each business has its own Umwelt. This might be narrow: one business might be obsessively focused on its price-earnings ratio or net promoter scores, like a tick, simply looking for the best place to extract value from its environment. Another business with a greater range of capacities and senses—things it measures and pays attention to—might be better at exploring the world, finding new niches, and reflecting on the limits of its own vision: wondering what is in the Umgebung that isn’t in its Umwelt.

We can do things to expand and enrich and our individual and collective worldviews, but we don’t necessarily do so sufficiently, consistently, deliberately, or skillfully. Choosing and learning to do so is a core idea of this book.

NOTE

a. J. von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1934/2010).

Move Together

RELOCATE AND COLOCATE

Another way we can accelerate collective imagination around an idea is to move together in the world: to immerse our team in new geographical or social environments. For example, Google-owned company Jigsaw develops tools to address global security challenges to the internet such as hacking attacks and censorship. Jigsaw regularly sends groups of staff to develop their ideas by immersing themselves in relevant environments with key users of their products. Founder and CEO Jared Cohen uses the military term “human intelligence” to describe intelligence gained from the experience of individuals, as opposed to aggregated intelligence from data:

[At this early stage] the bulk of the work is human intelligence and is deeply anthropological. This comes out of my background: I’ve done anthropological training and worked a lot in the intelligence community. We will come up with a set of hypotheses, sitting here. But then we will not pursue something or build something without forward deploying technical people into the field, to gut check our hypothesis You will go to a country—if you work in anti-censorship, you will go to a country where censorship is really active—and you will talk to people, you will experience, you will play around.23

Probe Together

DISTRIBUTE AUTONOMY

Another way of sharing and amplifying evolving mental models is by probing the world together, to synchronize exploration through experimentation. To enable this, businesses need to give employees some autonomy in terms of time and resources, so they can inspire others, bring together new teams, and try out new ideas.

Jared Cohen and the Jigsaw team getting out of the office and understanding how information flows work on the ground. Source: Courtesy of Jared Cohen.

Telecom company Swisscom has a system to support this: it gives people who have an imaginative suggestion a card to take to their manager, which starts a conversation about setting aside time over two months to develop the idea (see figure 6-8).

The online retail company Zappos is a pioneer in distributing autonomy. The company is composed of fifteen hundred employees in three hundred teams or “circles,” each given power to determine what work they do and how to allocate their own budget based on the revenue they bring in. Anyone can create a new circle or pitch an idea to the head of any existing circle. Lead organizational designer John Bunch describes the system: “In the old world it only took one ‘no’ to shut something down, but in this world, it only take one ‘yes’ to get something started. So even if five hundred people say ‘no, I’m not willing to fund that’, but you pitched Tyler [who runs the brand team] and Tyler says ‘that sounds like a crazy, amazing idea,’ then, you know, it only takes one ‘yes’ to get something off the ground.”24

Figure 6-8  Swisscom’s prompt to give employees autonomy to develop imaginative ideas

Source: Presentation from David Hengartner, Head of Intrapreneurship at Swisscom/Cofounder and CEO at Getkickbox, 2020. Courtesy of Swisscom Kickbox.

Prototypes are another way to overcome the challenge of intersubjectivity: physically manifesting an idea in the world enables multiple imaginations to work collectively on it. As Apple’s Ive noted: “When you make the very first physical manifestation of what the idea was, everything changes. It’s the most profound shift. Because it’s not exclusive anymore. It’s not so open to interpretation. It’s there, and it includes a lot of people.”25

The goal for an imaginative company should be to distribute autonomy to build a portfolio of not-too-structured projects testing out imaginative ideas. For example:

  • One employee researching a new approach to food in the café
  • One bank branch testing out a floor redesign
  • One team doing some ad hoc customer interviews around a new idea
  • One partner running an experiment in augmented reality, and so on

SUSPEND PRECISION

After an idea has spread to a small team and been tried out collectively, there comes a point when evaluative criteria need to be applied to determine if the idea warrants further support and amplification. This is tricky because of the intersubjectivity problem: How can you judge something when it is still a subjective model in someone’s mind and likely not clearly defined and testable?

For well-developed projects, companies commonly apply financial metrics supported with detailed evidence and analysis. However, this is entirely the wrong approach for early-stage ideas. What we should do is reduce the requirement for precision around outcomes and vary our evaluation schemes according to the maturity of the idea. Eventually we will ask, “Will this help us be profitable?” On the journey to this point, though, we should ask:

  1. Does someone love it? Roy Rosin, chief innovation officer at Penn Medicine, told us about this criterion. His first question about an early-stage idea is whether someone loves it and will push it to evolve. Does the idea have a champion? This rough measure helps guide what ideas should get an initial boost of support in terms of time or money.26
  2. What do other imaginative people think? Mikael Dolsten, chief scientific officer and president, worldwide research, development and medical, of Pfizer Inc., identifies talented “concept builders” who have a track record of successfully rethinking mental models. He then asks them to give tentative opinions on early-stage ideas from their colleagues.27
  3. Does it show some interesting or promising result? Determine whether efforts to act on the idea produce some interesting or promising effect. The result doesn’t have to (yet) be superior to the current way of doing things, just a good starting point. For example, say that someone in the sales team at an office supplies company has the idea to sell basic first-aid kits, alongside stationery, to business clients. If a few clients express interest, this might be worth trying with a few more salespeople. Determining superiority—whether a full-scale addition to the company’s offering would be profitable—can wait for a later stage.
  4. Is there a story you can tell about the path to success? As an idea matures, we can ask those involved about whether they can describe a plausible path to success. Dolsten says, “They need to tell me why I should get convinced that this is on an upward trajectory. The bar at this point is, ‘You need to be convinced that it’s not hype, so it’s not going to collapse.’ ”28
  5. Is it attracting followers? If an idea manages to generate enthusiasm beyond the initial core of champions, this is a sign that it may warrant further resources and time spent on imagining—a criterion for early-stage funding in Recruit Holdings.
  6. Are people paying for it? As experiments and prototypes develop, seeing people’s willingness to pay on a small scale (before a full rollout) is another useful indicator, as we saw in our Turo example.
  7. Is it better than what exists? This criterion perhaps comes to mind first when we assess counterfactual ideas. However, we should apply it only after an idea has satisfied all the previous criteria and has thus undergone an iterated process of reimagination and refinement and begun to achieve some of its technical potential.

Blocks to Collective Imagination

There are some common pathologies in corporations that prevent them collectively amplifying and evolving ideas.

Excessive Compliance

This is the pathology of following existing procedures and habits to the point of being closed to counterfactual ideas. It is what people often complain about as bureaucracy. Compliance often reduces the ability to listen imaginatively; the listener can’t free themselves from the thought that “this clashes with existing procedures” enough to allow themselves to entertain a new idea. Novelty is regarded as threatening, and the new, counterfactual mental model remains stuck in one person’s mind only. The solution: reinforce the thoughts that thinking is not doing and is thus low risk and that what is now the status quo was originally novel and unfamiliar.

Cacophony

This is the pathology of sharing too many ideas without criteria for identifying the promising ones, meaning that good imaginative efforts get lost in the noise. Too much early-stage imagination, with no effort to select and amplify, is a much less common problem in large companies than a lack of imagination but can be equally detrimental to finding and focusing on new paths to growth. Antidotes include stage gates with prefinancial criteria, a back-burner status to put some ideas on hold, or predetermined time frames for projects.

Silos

Companies use specialization to scale, and people will always be grouped or group themselves into teams that develop their own identity. The problem comes when there is no countervailing force to balkanization, leading to fixed silos of activity—the business equivalent to lots of regional principalities ignoring or fighting with each other. There will always be groups and tensions between groups, but what supports imagination is a federal system, with a clear common interest and with mobility of thoughts and people. To create this, showcase and reward collaboration, recognize and support brokers, and allow new teams and working alliances to form spontaneously.

Depersonalization

Ideas get divorced from their champions. In a pandemic, we do a range of things to stop a virus spreading, the main one being to isolate carriers of a disease. With ideas, we want to achieve the opposite: for the carriers of imaginative mental models to infect as many people as possible. We undermine this possibility when the people behind imaginative ideas are socially distanced and not exposed to the mainstream of the company.

Games to Play

The Messy Foundations Game

Retiring executives of successful companies sometimes half-jokingly remark in their farewell speeches that they are not sure if the firm would hire them today. It’s a self-deprecating joke; the implication is that the firm has gotten much better now. Yet the other possibility is that the firm is no longer hiring the sort of people who can help it grow.

This game is about remembering and appreciating the messiness at the foundational stage of the business and to recover that early mindset when the business was essentially a counterfactual model, before everything became factual, familiar, and respectable.

Dig into the early history of your company and its founders and investigate how the foundational idea came about and how it was developed. Focus particularly on the mental aspect: What were the dominant beliefs of the day, and what was it like to imaginatively explore this new possibility at a time when not many other people thought that way? Go beyond the dates and data points to reconstruct the detailed human story of the events.

Once you have evoked what the previous commonsense mindset was versus the emerging imaginative challenge, improvise a conversation in which one person takes the part of skeptical realist of the time, and another person takes the part of the founder, trying to share her imaginative mental model of how things could be. Identify the kinds of blocks and objections that arise.

Then try the same thing but with a current big idea. Note which mental and social blocks are present today that prevent new ideas from flourishing.

The value of this game is to explore how your business started with a stop-and-start imaginative process, probably forgotten in the current professionalized operations, and to import some of that early-stage mindset into your leadership now. Start speculating about and exploring the potential next big transformation.

The Naming Game

Pick a still-developing imaginative idea of yours and name it in different ways, picking the most extreme version of:

  • Functionality: equivalent to Griffiths Improved Vacuum Apparatus for Removing Dust from Carpets
  • Familiarity: equivalent of the Apple Watch (even though it’s not actually a watch)
  • Attracting attention: the FCUK challenge

Swap ideas with a colleague and do the same for their idea. Compare results and pick your favorites. If it makes sense, announce your idea using the new name in an email to your team or more widely.

Good Questions to Ask

Some useful questions to ask in the amplification and diffusion stage of imagination are:

  • How should we name the idea we’re pursuing in a way that makes it comprehensible?
  • What is the gripping story associated with the idea?
  • Who is the hero of the new idea?
  • What environments should the relevant team visit to further the idea?
  • Do we celebrate brokers of ideas?
  • Do we have appropriate criteria for assessing very early-stage ideas?
  • Can employees easily share good ideas?

Organizational Diagnostic

We can take these actions and blocks and use them to determine if we are creating an environment that supports collective imagination. Each question is linked to a related action in this chapter.

Never

Rarely or less than once a year

Sometimes or once a month to once a year

Usually or once a week to once a month

Always or more often than weekly

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

Related action

Our firm gives names to (i.e., creates labels for) new, imaginative ideas.

Name things

Employees use analogies, anecdotes, evocative descriptions, and other storytelling techniques, rather than just communicating information.

Train for storytelling

People share ideas when they are still at an early, unformed, tentative stage.

Train for listening

Employees make personal connections across different groups or business units in our company.

Support brokers

We host forums for employees to present new projects and ideas.

Run a festival

Our company makes decisions about new projects and funding in a decentralized way.

Distribute autonomy

Nonsenior people in our firm bring together new teams to run experiments and pilot projects.

Distribute autonomy

TOTAL

After you have added up your total, you can score your current situation: 31–35, excellent; 21–30, good; 11–20, moderate; 0–10, poor. To benchmark your score against other organizations, please visit www.theimaginationmachine.org.

  1. * The others were the idea that the company belongs to the employee; giving authority to employees as a chance to grow; feeling free to ask colleagues for advice; and top management being close to employees.

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