Every imaginative effort begins with a mental spark. Financial pioneer Omar Selim’s spark came from an unexpected source: his teenage children. Selim, who was Barclays head of global markets for institutional clients for the European time zone, was preparing for a trip the following day to Johannesburg. At dinner, he and his children talked about work and life, what matters and what doesn’t. “Okay, so you’re going to fly there tomorrow, stay in a five-star hotel, give a speech, which probably nobody really cares about,” they said. “And this is the path you’ve chosen to dedicate your life to?”
As Selim told us, this blunt challenge from his children actually triggered his imagination. It threw everything into question. And this trigger coincided with a situation at work that gave him a lot of time to think. Barclays had sold its investment management arm to BlackRock, with a noncompete agreement, which meant that Selim and his team, who remained at Barclays, “were not allowed to do any asset management.” Selim read and thought deeply about sustainability and how finance might be transformed by nonfinancial data and machine learning. Catalyzed by the conversation with his children, he rethought the institution he wanted to work for, putting together a mental model of a new kind of asset management business. Eventually, he negotiated with Barclays to buy out existing operations and used this to set up Arabesque, the world’s first asset management firm driven by AI analysis and environmental, social, and governance metrics.1
For imagination to be harnessed in business, it first needs to be triggered or inspired. Something needs to seduce us (se-ducere, to lead away) out of our routine way of looking at things into the realm of counterfactual thinking. This chapter will examine how surprise triggers imagination, actions we can take support this, and blocks to avoid. It will also describe some imagination-provoking games to play to enhance your capability, good questions to ask, and an organizational diagnostic for your business.
Chapter Overview
What inspires imagination?
How to foster inspiration
SEEING
COMPREHENDING
INTERPRETING
What blocks inspiration?
BUSY IS THE NEW STUPID
HAVING ONLY ANSWERS, NOT QUESTIONS
DEPRIORITIZING CURIOSITY
OVERENGINEERING THE ENVIRONMENT
FOCUSING ONLY ON AVERAGES AND AGGREGATES
Games to play
THE “WHAT DO YOU THINK I THINK YOU ARE GOING TO SAY?” GAME
THE BAD CUSTOMER GAME
THE WRONG MEETING GAME
Good questions to ask
Organizational diagnostic
Small surprises happen all the time, like receiving an unexpected email. But the surprises relevant to imagination are the ones that seduce us away from routine thinking and lead us to rethink deeply and inventively. These are the anomalous, challenging, unfamiliar, even incomprehensible encounters that inspire imagination.
Three types of surprise can inspire imagination: accidents—events or consequences incidental or irrelevant to what we are trying to achieve; anomalies—parts of a situation, story, or dataset that are out of the ordinary; and analogies—parallels we see between concepts or experiences, which suggest new possibilities.
For surprises to impact us, however, our minds need to be prepared. Plenty of things pass us by, but we need to notice them (the cognitive aspect) and we need to care (the emotional aspect) to spark imagination. If Selim had not cared about reforming finance, he wouldn’t have started Arabesque. Equally, if he had not noticed how machine learning was impacting other businesses, he would not have had a stock of mental models to draw on in rethinking how an asset management company could work.
The more we commit to caring and noticing, the more we create the mental context for encountering imagination-provoking surprise (see figure 3-1).
There are two ways of caring: aggravations and aspirations. Aggravations or frustrations drive us to change or escape from something. Aspirations drive us to bring something we want or believe into being. These are important because our brains do not simply register any and all sense impressions. As neuroscientist Walter Freeman described, “the pattern generated by the cortex is not a ‘representation’ of the stimulus but … constitutes the significance and value of the stimulus for the animal.”2 What impacts us is what matters to us. Aggravations and aspirations motivate and enable us to notice.
We can notice things more or less deeply: seeing, comprehending, and interpreting. Each of these is associated with a pathology of not noticing, which we might recognize from business or our own lives: forms of obliviousness.3
Seeing is taking in new information. If we don’t do this, we won’t encounter any kind of surprise. If we’re stuck doing only routine things every day, not having interesting conversations and not exposing ourselves to new social or geographical environments, we are stuck in “informational oblivion.”
Comprehending is processing something we see to understand it. We might be exposed to new information, but unless we say, “Wait, that is an interesting anomaly. Let’s think about that” or “Why do you think we got that accidental result? Isn’t that curious?” then we are not using our brains. If we don’t put in the time or effort to process what we see, we are in “computational oblivion.”
Interpreting is connecting—noticing the ramifications of one piece of information for others. Think of the difference between you and a trained biologist walking through a forest. Where you see simply a leaf, they notice the early appearance of a rare tree at an unusual elevation, implying a changing climate, which has implications for the forest as a whole. Their biological worldview allows them to interpret more: to make more connections. If we can’t draw on a rich conceptual inner world, made of deep and varied worldviews, we are in “conceptual oblivion.”
When we care and notice, we get inspired more; we encounter surprises—accidents, anomalies, and analogies—that prompt us to reimagine.
To harness imagination in business, one thing we must do is increase the frequency of productive surprise. We start where imagination starts, with a single brain: what actions can help you, as an individual, to more frequently use your imagination. As the book progresses, we move to the social level and actions you can take to reshape your company.
The most basic need is to make time for noticing. Given the amount of pressure on them, business leaders need to work hard to protect time for reflection.4
Inspiration for imagination often comes when we are reflecting: relaxing, with no pressure from urgent tasks. Archimedes of Syracuse was one of the most imaginative minds in history: he invented the block-and-tackle pulley system, the first odometer, a gigantic mirror-based weapon to focus the sun’s rays on incoming Roman ships, and the formula πr2. But he had his most famous idea while lying in a bath. Presumably relaxing after a long day, he thought about how water rises after you put something in, and if you measure that rise exactly, you can work out the volume of the object. After this realization, he allegedly ran down the street naked shouting, “Eureka!” (in Greek: εὕρηκα, heúrēka: “I have found it!”).
It may be no accident that people often get inspired in the bath or the shower, because these tend to dampen our fight-or-flight nervous system in favor of the rest-and-digest system (see the sidebar “The Parasympathetic Nervous System”). Omar Selim told us that inspiration often happens for him in this context: “I’m sure that it’s a purely individual thing. But I get most of my ideas when showering in the mornings. That’s why the shower is a really good place, or a steam room in a hotel, or whatever, but I feel inspired when the temperature around me is right. I just relax. I’m not bothered with anything.”5
In the early days of Merrill Lynch, founder Charles Merrill wrote to his business partner Winthrop Smith about the importance of taking time to reflect: “You and George Hyslop [a partner in the firm], and when I am there, me, too, should never be so busy that we cannot set aside at least one hour each day to quiet, thoughtful study and discussion of the basic principles, as contrasted with current operations.”6
For business leaders, especially during crises, it is easy to lose the already slim time that often exists for reflection. Imagination, however, requires blocks of time with low external demands. Warren Buffett famously schedules time for a haircut in his diary, which is actually time for him to sit in a room and reflect. We need time to think about our aspirations and aggravations and to see, comprehend, and interpret, following our curiosity rather than a deadline.
Like switching on airplane mode on our phones, we need a mental switch for ourselves for “rest mode,” disabling fight-or-flight functions, creating space for imagination. Some ways to do this include:
To encounter more surprise, another action you can take is to focus on your frustrations. Aggravations or frustrations, if they don’t emotionally overwhelm us, can help us care about what we notice. In 2008, MBA student Shelby Clark was cycling to a Zipcar he had rented. As he told us, “I ended up reserving the closest car to me, 2.5 miles away. And I got stuck in a snowstorm. I was biking through the snow for 2.5 miles to get to the closest car, just grumbling the whole way, when there are these cars that are covered in snow, thinking: ‘Why am I passing all these cars, to get to a car? Why can’t I get in that car? Wait … why can’t I get in that car?’ ”8
This was the imagination-triggering event for Clark. He noticed and cared about (was aggravated by) something other people would have just cycled past. A row of unused, parked cars would not surprise most of us. But driven by his frustration, it stood out for him, prompting him to challenge the existing mental model of private transportation, kicking off counterfactual thinking that led him to found Turo, the world’s first private-car-sharing company.
The idea for 23andMe, a genetic testing company, was also inspired by frustration. The founder, Anne Wojcicki, had spent ten years working in health-care investing. At a conference about insurance reimbursement, Wojcicki remembers thinking: “All these people were at this meeting just to figure out how to optimize billing … And I just realized, I’m done. It was that moment where I was like: ‘The system’s never going to change from within.’ ”9 This frustration was a potent emotional mixture, but it took a triggering event for Wojcicki to come up with a better alternative. “There was a very specific event where I was at a dinner with a scientist,” she recalled. “We said, theoretically if you have all the world’s data and you have all the genetic information, all the phenotypic information, could you solve a lot of questions? And the conclusion was yes, you would revolutionize health care.” This conversation inspired her to begin imagining a new business, a path that eventually led to a genetic testing company with a multibillion-dollar valuation.
The Parasympathetic Nervous System
In business we often rely on our sympathetic, or fight-or-flight system, that evolved to help us in high-pressure situations, like running from a predator. This system narrows our focus. Less emphasized is the parasympathetic, or rest-and-digest system, which evolved to manage mental and bodily operations when we are relaxed.a We can imagine, in hunter-gatherer days, the mental intensity of the hunt followed by time back at home, reflecting on the day’s stories, perhaps imagining how to hunt better. We need to create the equivalent rhythm of action and reflection in business to inspire imagination.
The sympathetic nervous system is not bad: it helps us block out irrelevant information and makes us anxious to succeed, which is great for well-known or automatic tasks. But as David Rock, director of the NeuroLeadership Institute, observes: “Threat makes you productive … if you don’t have to think broadly, widely or deeply. A threat response, which we might think of as stress, increases motor function, while it decreases perception, cognition and creativity.”b Neuroscience is still exploring the ways both nervous systems interact to influence cognition, but one review notes that “the parasympathetic nervous system is critical for higher-order behavior and cognition due to the high-degree of interconnectedness between neural and peripheral structures regulating behavior and physiological state.”c That is, our brain and body are interconnected; when our body is resting and digesting, it can help our brain with certain higher-order functions. Another study notes that “greater parasympathetic activity is a marker of increased cognitive capacity.”d
From another perspective, neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang has studied the experience of “wakeful rest,” or time apart from immediate demands. In a paper called “Rest Is Not Idleness,” she argues that this state of mind is essential for “making meaning of new information and for distilling creative, emotionally relevant connections between complex ideas,” in particular, “imagining the future.”e And as psychologist and writer Susan Blackmore commented when we interviewed her: “I’m balking at the idea that we need more stimulation for imagination when I suspect we need less.”f
To build businesses that support imagination, we should focus on balancing stress and deadline-driven work with supporting our rest-and-digest system. We can use any perks our company might offer: office gardens, wellness rooms, meditation and yoga, lunches, even at-work showers or a simple quiet space. These are often seen as luxuries; instead, we should see them as tools to support inspiration. We should advocate for and utilize such physiology-shaping tools to get ourselves regularly to a state of wakeful rest, free of urgent threats.
NOTES
a. Ryan J. Guiliano et al., “Parasympathetic and Sympathetic Activity Are Associated with Individual Differences in Neural Indices of Selective Attention in Adults,” Psychophysiology 55, no. 8 (2018).
b. Judy Martin and Kristi Hedges, “Employee Brain on Stress Can Quash Creativity and Competitive Edge,” Forbes, September 5, 2012, https://
c. Ryan Smith et al., “The Hierarchical Basis of Neurovisceral Integration,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 75 (2017): 274–296.
d. Giuliano et al. “Parasympathetic and Sympathetic Activity.”
e. M. H. Immordino-Yang, J. A. Christodoulou, and V. Singh, “Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7, no. 4 (2012): 352–364.
f. Susan Blackmore, video interview by BCG Henderson Institute, June 24, 2020.
Many pieces of information—conversations, observations on a bike—pass us by if we don’t care about them. By taking our aggravations seriously, we prepare our minds to be triggered, to imagine our way out of frustrations.
Holding on to aspirations is another way to increase your chance of getting productively surprised. We can see this in the case of investor Bill Janeway, special limited partner of Warburg Pincus and economist at Cambridge University. Janeway was one of the leading venture capitalists operating during the rise of mass market computing. In the 1980s, he was driven by the aspiration to upend the then-dominant market for IBM’s large, custom-made mainframes. As he told us, “By the late eighties, I was really convinced, distributed computing had the potential for disrupting the main commercial computing markets, which were a decimal order of magnitude larger.”10 This aspiration led Janeway to have conversations with distributed computing startups, leading to surprises that further challenged his mental models—starting points for imaginative and successful investments.
An initial aspiration is often unformed: merely the belief in the potential of something or a general desire. But the aspiration helps us notice surprises that prompt us to imagine something more specific—in Janeway’s case, ideas for particular investments and new business models he helped to shape.
It can be difficult to take our own aspirations seriously, often because we cannot see anything immediate to do with them. The key, however, is to hold them in mind, to tolerate the uncomfortableness of having a desire without yet having a way to act on it. The aspiration will at some point prompt us to explore new possibilities.
To encounter surprise, you not only have to care—you have to be in a position to notice imagination-provoking things. The most basic way to do this is to get out of the (metaphorical) house and seek the unfamiliar. Value contact with otherness.
As a company grows, more mental space becomes taken up with internal requirements: “What happens next in this HR process?” “What should I say to the board?” “How should I write this review?” Like a sphere, the volume of a growing corporation grows faster than the area exposed on the surface. On the inside, familiar processes and scripts come to dominate, shielding us from unexpected and potentially inspiring external interactions.
Sociologist Ronald Burt studied the origins of ideas within companies and found that people who had more exposure to the outside had better ideas. When his study asked inward-facing managers at an electronics company for their ideas, they often produced the “classic lament from bureaucrats—we need people to adhere more consistently to agreed-upon processes.” In contrast, what might seem to be the rather routine role of purchasing manager produced imaginative thinking: “Better ideas came from the purchasing managers, whose work brought them into contact with other companies.”11
To see how easy it is to default to an internal focus, compare two kinds of meetings:
Selim of Arabesque describes how he tries to break his team’s routines while traveling, to seek encounters that might prompt imagination:
We all go economy, or take public transport in different countries. Not really for saving money, but to get out there, to have some chance encounters—sitting next to a lady on the train in India who is going to talk to you about her kids, or whatever it may be. When I’m visiting a new city, I have a policy for myself: try to find a meal for under $10. It takes me to some fascinating places, and just gets my mind working—dealing with places, people, or ways of doing things that are not just what I see every day. It often sparks new thoughts.12
Another way to encounter surprising otherness is through customer research. Rather than getting analysts to summarize the results, business leaders should observe, or even participate in, the raw discussion with focus groups for the sake of prompting their own imaginations.
Further actions to increase contact with otherness include:
Another way to find surprises that prompt imagination is to reflect on accidents: the incidental results of our actions or things we bump into while trying to do something else. These are the surprises that come out of left field, unrelated to the mental model we are working with.
Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and a leading thinker in Silicon Valley, emphasized to us the importance of being open to what might arrive from outside your mental model: “Think of imagination as a process of letting go of what you know, experiencing life fresh. The world is infinite. We experience only part of what is out there. And then, we attach labels to our experience. And people get stuck in the labels. They don’t get to their experience without going back and seeing the world [without labels].”13
The classic example of this in business is the origin of Viagra. Originally developed as a heart medication by Pfizer, researchers noticed a side effect in a completely different area of the body. This would have been easy to dismiss as a useless side effect; their minds were focused on heart conditions. However, they thought about the accident and connected it with an aspiration from a different medical field: addressing erectile problems. They let themselves be led down this unexpected path, imagining a new therapeutic intervention, and Viagra eventually became one of Pfizer’s most successful products.14
Another example of productive letting go in business is the origin of the bra. In early 1900s New York, dressmakers Enid Bissett and Ida Rosenthal had an idea for a new kind of dress, one with built-in breast supports. Their aim was to free women from having to wear corsets. Yet when they started selling these dresses, some customers made an unusual request: they asked for just the breast supports, without the dress. This feedback would have been easy to dismiss. Bissett and Rosenthal had a new mental model that was getting traction: the all-in-one dress. It sounded as if the customers were just stuck in the old model—wanting something basically like a detachable corset. What made them great business leaders is that they could mentally let go of their commitments, and current labels, and think afresh based on this information from outside their model. They could ask themselves, “What if we did create a detachable brassiere?” “What if the interesting territory was in fact around the mental model we have been moving away from: recombinable, modular clothing, instead of the all-in-one?”
Entrepreneur magazine writes that Bissett and Rosenthal “didn’t set out to become bra manufacturers, and stumbled onto their fortune almost by accident.”15 There was a lot of work to get from their inspirational moment to forming the Maidenform Bra Company and founding today’s multibillion-dollar bra industry. But the initial trigger came from thinking about a little piece of information from left field—letting their minds be productively thrown off course by it.
Another route to surprise is to investigate anomalies. If an accident is something incidental to what you are trying to do, outside the mental model you are working with, an anomaly is a violation of the expectations that a familiar mental model is giving you.
It takes effort to notice this dissonance, to realize that the explanations your mental model suggests are misleading or wrong. As philosopher John Armstrong noted to us: “We’re actually quite slow to notice new pieces of information. We have internal resistance, of which we are probably unaware, but which has the effect of blocking things out that might surprise us. It’s because our imagined picture is playing a certain emotional role in our lives. We’re invested in the models we currently have—of a company, of another person, of how things work. And the emotional familiarity is something we can be very reluctant to give up.”16
One example of successful anomaly investigation comes from a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) project with a US company that makes diagnostic machines for hospitals. The prevailing mental model of this business was to invest in salespeople and save money on technicians. During the project, one executive noticed that the company was selling more machines in Manhattan. This was a crucial moment. It would have been possible to see this but resort to the explanation from the prevailing mental model: the sales team there must be better. However, the leaders pushed further to comprehend this thoroughly. In digging deeper, they discovered an additional anomaly: Manhattan was the only region that assigned on-site technicians. The reason for this was that managers didn’t want engineers wasting paid hours in New York traffic; it was more efficient to appoint on-site engineers.
The surprise came from connecting the two anomalies. As the team noted, “Constant contact with the technician bred close relationships with the users of the equipment, and the service engineers developed an in-depth understanding of customer needs. Technicians had become the company’s most productive salespeople.”17 This surprise kicked off much counterfactual thinking. The leaders imagined a new model for the business. Technicians, who had been marginal to the company’s thinking, became central in this model: the business invested in data gathering from technicians and lines of communication between sales and engineering. It assigned on-site engineers elsewhere. Their model was transformed and the result was an additional eight points of market share and a boost to its margins of 25 percent.18
We are used to pattern recognition, but the skill of anomaly (or pattern-break) recognition is just as important in business. For pattern recognition, we should think like statisticians. For anomaly recognition, we should think like novelists, who find surprise by looking deeply into the particular. For example, we could regularly pick one unusual sales transaction or customer feedback call and discuss it in depth. Or we could set up a weekly meeting to dig into an anomaly from anywhere in the business, exploring the mechanisms behind it. Such discussions are often fruitful sources of inspiration.
As well as seeing and comprehending, another way to encounter more surprise is by interpreting: exploring the ramifications of a piece of information. You can do this by drawing analogies: taking some element you have comprehended in one area and importing it into another.
Using analogies can be a powerful trigger for imagination in business. The inspiration for car-sharing company Turo came as Shelby Clark—cycling through the snowstorm asking, “Why can’t I get in that car?”—drew an analogy:
I had just come out of a really amazing experience at Kiva.org. It’s a peer-to-peer micro-finance lending platform. And I just saw the connection, it made sense: Kiva—a peer-to-peer marketplace—and Zipcar. It just came together right away in my head. The limitation of Zipcar was that there weren’t enough cars. Whereas in reality, especially in America, we have a lot of cars. There is no shortage of cars. The problem is that we don’t use them well. So a peer-to-peer marketplace would bring people together and solve that problem.19
Venture capitalist Bill Janeway also kick-started his imagination with an analogy during the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. As he said, “I wrote my PhD thesis on 1929 to 1931. So in 1999, I had in my mind that stock price chart of RCA between 1926 and ’32, and if you put that next to the stock price chart of Veritas between 1996 and ’02, they are identical.”20 He told us that seeing this analogy triggered him to adjust his mental model of what could lie ahead and to anticipate the burst of the dot-com bubble.
We don’t often search consciously for new analogies, but we could. At the BCG Henderson Institute, we built a library of concepts and mental models drawn from outside business to help with this.21
To mine an analogy, use the following process:
Drawing such connections can seem odd, because they are new. But going through this process can offer surprising suggestions that inspire us to start thinking imaginatively, exploring mental models of things that do not yet exist.
To increase surprise, you can also learn new worldviews: systems of concepts and mental models that provide different ways of interpreting the world. New worldviews can create surprise when brought up against familiar information. For example, if you hired a manager of a Formula 1 technical crew into the company’s logistics team, they might make interesting observations, seeing unexpected ways to rethink or improve the company’s logistics, as they notice things through the lens of a worldview developed in high-intensity racing.
Janeway argues for the value of humanities-based worldviews, from philosophy, history, and literature, to enrich the business mind. By living mentally in alternative worlds—scholastic debates in medieval Europe, the life of an aristocrat in nineteenth-century South America, or philosophical thought experiments—Janeway believes we can see with a deeper understanding, allowing us to notice more patterns and anomalies. As he told us:
We can learn a lot about the emotional elements of financial market behavior from the humanities. A prime example is Anthony Trollope’s classic novel, The Way We Live Now. It traces an extreme speculative bubble on the London Stock Exchange in the 1870s, promoted by a plausible con man and driven by waves of investors drawn into the fraud until—ultimately and necessarily—the bubble bursts. Our recent history replicates the phenomenon with extraordinary precision, from Enron through Theranos and on to Wirecard.22
Janeway reflected on his humanities education: “I think this background has given me a number of really unfair benefits and advantages as an investor: to be able to have useful, speculative conversations, assess unusual ideas, think about alternative futures.”23
Visual art also offers us worldviews that help us see surprises. Jane South, chair of the fine arts department at the Pratt Institute in New York, told us:
In art school we make observational drawings. This is not only to teach people how to draw, but how to look, to notice. I say to students: you will never be bored again, if you can learn to extract things from their enmeshed functionality, to see them as things, with formal, material, phenomenological properties. Everything that you then encounter, a lamp, a building, a piece of paper will reveal all of its properties. Most importantly you will see how you see. You will be able to de-enmesh your own experience and break it down into the multiple strata it actually is.24
Such lenses on the world must come on top of core business worldviews, of course. But the worldviews that drive business efficiency can sit alongside the worldviews that help with counterfactual thinking—combined in the mind of a leader who keeps the machine running, while also drawing on deep and broad learning to explore possibilities and new paths to growth.
Pick a few new worldviews to immerse yourself in. They could be from different disciplines, like engineering, logic, theology, or psychology; from writers with distinctive ways of seeing, like science fiction or heroic novels; or from distant places or times that had ways of interpreting that seem strange to us. The point is to enrich your stock of worldviews to draw upon when observing: to expand the range of what you can notice and thus the frequency of imagination-prompting surprises.
As well as actions to take, it is worth examining common blocks to noticing and caring about surprises at the individual level. Many of these are familiar habits that large organizations in particular inculcate in people. We need to be aware of these so we can work to avoid them.
This is the pathology of competing to be busy, which cuts time for reflection and thus the opportunity to encounter surprise. The solution: remember that filling up your calendar, with no room for reflection, is actually an inefficient way to use your brainpower. Your brain can do more valuable things than busywork, even though those valuable things might sometimes appear as merely wandering around or staring out the window. As Bill Gates noted, “It is not a proxy of your seriousness that you filled every minute in your schedule.… You control your time, and sitting and thinking may be a much higher priority.”25 It is precisely during the busy times that we should not forget to stare out the window.
Pressured perhaps by the social norm in business of appearing prepared and confident, we often want to be the person with the answers—or with questions we only ask because we already know the answers. This means we avoid being surprised. The solution is to sometimes ask questions to which there are no preexisting answers. Good questions take us into unknown or less-known territory, increasing the chance of noticing surprises.
Curiosity may seem like an indulgence, probably for two reasons: there is usually no immediately valuable outcome, and the eventual outcome cannot be predicted. Yet when we forget curiosity, we reduce our exposure to novelty and our opportunity to notice surprises. The solution: sometimes do things only for curiosity’s sake. In contrast to a business culture where people only steep themselves in familiar domains of knowledge to support goals set in advance, you might occasionally be found reading Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, or the Journal of Geology and Mining Research.
This is the mistake of being completely opposed to randomness and chaos. You have your normal routine, normal mode of transport, normal people you interact with, all of which promote efficiency but reduce accidents and anomalies. Too much disorder can undermine a business, which, after all, is an attempt to organize effort in valuable ways. But the solution to overengineering is to balance order with some unpredictability in your environment and inputs, for example, varying your routines, spending time with more distant connections in your network, or observing parts of the business you wouldn’t normally see, like a retail outlet or regional office. Remember there is a trade-off between standardization and surprise.
We often neglect to examine intriguing individual data points—a unique failed or successful sale, an idiosyncratic sales branch, a single interesting customer—in favor of looking at averages. This blocks exposure to anomalies. Averages are useful in trying to summarize the impact of a complex effort, but we should remember to give anomalous outliers, which may constitute change signals or sources of inspiration, enough attention, too.
Another way to generate triggers for counterfactual thinking is to play some thoughtfully designed games. A game sets an artificial frame, but through it we can discover genuine surprises that spark our imagination.
You can play this game to move yourself off familiar paths of thinking around some topic. The next time you have an important discussion with your team, throw in this question: “What do you think I think you are going to say? Now tell me something different.” In other words, “Say something that I don’t expect that extends the discussion.” This question can bump the conversation down new paths, some of which might provoke imagination.
The ultimate business anomaly and source of frustration is a bad customer. But how often does your business really learn from its bad customers? You can play this game with colleagues to turn a difficult customer into a source of inspiration.
Find some way to meet or hear from the customers who are unsatisfied with your products or services or who have major problems with your business model. You might meet them in person or listen to feedback from customer service calls. Try to understand their needs and motivations. Then articulate the aggravations these people have with your company. Address the question, “What would our business have to look like to be able to satisfy these customers?”
When reconsidering its business strategy, insurance broker and risk manager Willis Towers Watson (WTW) wanted to look at services in the insurance market that could become significant in the future. When it asked its current customers, “Are you happy with what WTW is selling you?,” it received mostly positive responses. Then it changed the question to, “What are the frustrations in your economic life and would you go to WTW for help with these?” The answers were less gratifying but more useful. By actively seeking out frustrations, WTW learned about areas of need no one in the market was addressing or ones where the company was not currently offering a solution—a precursor to imagining new products and services.
As a way to nudge yourself and colleagues to encounter new inputs, play a game of going to the “wrong” meetings on a particular project—ones you are not expected to go to, that you are only indirectly connected with. If you are involved in the steering group, skip that meeting for a week and join the technical team’s Monday briefing, the marketing group’s discussion, or the purchasing managers’ check-in. Enjoy turning up in some random places to see if you encounter any different mental models that spark your own rethinking.
Good Questions to Ask
Questions are often a great starting point for prompting your mind; having a pocket list of questions can help shift your attention in a more fruitful direction. In chapters 3 through 8, we distill the content down to list of guiding questions. These are questions that can cue receptivity to surprise:
Organizational Diagnostic
As a starting point for building a more imaginative company, we should assess our current organization to determine if we as leaders are creating an organizational environment conducive to getting inspired.
There are two utilities to this exercise: knowing where you stand and knowing what to focus on next. To benchmark your score against other organizations, please visit www
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 |
||||||
Employees at our firm regularly make time for quiet reflection. |
Make time for reflection |
|||||
People in our firm find inventive ways to address problems and frustrations. |
Pay attention to frustrations |
|||||
The business gives employees regular opportunities to encounter enriching, thought-provoking things outside the firm and its regular clients. |
Engage with otherness |
|||||
Employees notice, report, and discuss interesting accidental or unexpected outcomes of initiatives or analysis. |
Reflect on accidents |
|||||
If people in our firm find an unexpected opportunity, they explore how to act on it. |
Reflect on accidents |
|||||
Our business regularly looks for and analyzes anomalies in granular data. |
Investigate anomalies |
|||||
People in our firm use surprising analogies and perspectives in presentations. |
Draw on analogies |
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TOTAL |
After you have added up your total, score your current situation: 31–35, excellent; 21–30, good; 11–20, moderate; 0–10, poor.
3.145.163.58