1. Set unreasonable expectations. The idea here is that creating seemingly impossible goals and demands will cause/force people to approach issues in dramatically new ways. The same idea appeared in Jim Collins’s big hairy audacious goals or BHAGs.¹⁵ Those who followed Collins’s advice often found that BHAGs didn’t work. Collins refined his idea later in the hedgehog concept, the notion that one could only set BHAGs at the intersection of Talent, Passion, and Marketability. Lacking passion, managers confronting BHAGs were more often than not, likely to fail. At the same time, I think we can agree that unreasonable goals can and often does force people to think in different ways.

2. Stretch your business definition. This concept invites executives to rethink what business they are in. Frequently, executives settle into an assumed business industry, segment, and model. This can limit their ability to respond to changes in the environment—technology, labor markets, consumer expectations, competition, and so forth. One might think, for example, one is in the steel cap liquid closure business—when competition in plastics attacks one’s markets. Unless you could stretch that view of the business to say vacuum sealed liquid closures, you might miss the revolution brought on by plastics. Coca-Cola held a less stretchy view of their business and missed the initial opportunities to enter the sports drink business created by Gatorade. They followed playing catch-up with Powerade.

3. Create a cause, not a business. I really like this one. It links to Collins’s passion and my own Level Three Leadership. People will give you so much more energy when they are working on something they believe in. Simply defining a business as “to make as much money as we can” is perhaps true from an investor’s point of view, but it ignores the impact on employees. Who wants to work hard—and innovatively—to make other people rich? Defining the societal contribution that an organization makes and inviting people to join in that contribution creates more energy and passion. Linking with employee’s sense of purpose in life unleashes energy and innovation.

4. Listen to new voices. Executives frequently settle into habits of information collection as they manage their businesses. Trusted sources, explicit and implicit, get regular attention while other sources are ignored. The problem here is that one might miss trends and revolutions that aren’t represented in one’s usual data channels. So, finding unusual sources, listening to different people, reading different reports, and seeking out uncomfortable opinions can lead one to see important changes that they might otherwise miss. This is hard to do. We like to listen to our familiar voices. We, as a matter of human nature, seek confirmatory information. The danger is that we miss key sea changes.

5. Design an open market for ideas. Most companies are not good at this. Consider, for example, Hewlett-Packard missing the personal computer idea, Coca-Cola the sports drink, and American automobile makers the electric hybrid revolution (at first). Again, most people don’t like to engage in ideas that are foreign to them. The discomfort, the disease, the fear that comes from recognizing contradictory ideas prevents us from seeking out alternative points of view. Closed-minded executives have difficulty creating open-minded cultures. This extends to all kinds of issues within an organization: how people speak, dress, communicate, work, and so on. Hanging a suggestion box on the wall doesn’t begin to address the need to create a culture in which people at all levels can get real hearings for their thoughts.

6. Offer an open market for capital. As you can tell, many of these suggestions relate to the central concept of opening up people’s views of the world. Another way to do that is to create competition for internal investment funds. This would require in many if not most organizations a change in the processes by which they decide where and how much to re-invest in the company. These investments are major strategic moves—investments here preclude investments there and often have a long-term impact. Creating a regular process by which new ideas that require up-front investments can get a full and rigorous hearing raises the probability that the company will be able to see and assess multiple opportunities carefully.

7. Open up the market for talent. There is a big balance to be observed between talent and organizational design. Too much emphasis on freedom for talented people can lead to chaos, while too much emphasis on conformity to organizational guidelines can squelch talent. Allowing non-traditional paths for talented individuals can seed an organization with fresh, revolutionary thinking and influence. Most organizations however stick to their old step-by-step, channeled pathways to increasing influence. Finding regular ways to consider unusual candidates from inside and outside can help an organization springboard to a new kind of responsiveness.

8. Lower the risks of experimentation. Most people and companies punish failure in ways personal, emotional, social, political, and financial. This leads to a fear of rejection (that, by the way, is the foundation for most of our outside-in self-censoring behavior), which stifles experimenting. Most experiments fail. Edison famously failed more than a thousand times trying to find a workable light bulb. He argued that he didn’t fail, rather the light bulb was invented with a thousand steps, each one narrowing and clarifying the way forward. Organizational cultures that severely punish experiments dampen their own innovation. In fact, making small experiments is a key step in the modern process of design thinking developed by IDEO and Jeanne Liedtka at the Darden School, UVA.¹⁶

9. Make like a cell—divide and divide. If you try a small experiment and it works, then repeat it. Then repeat it. This kind of organic growth, properly fertilized will likely create a deeper and more substantial change than ordering/directing people to do it. Apply the successful experiment in location after location, function after function, department after department.

10. Pay your innovators well—really well. Pay is a big thing, the recognition that comes with it is perhaps even more important—but not sufficient. Rewarding innovation is the capstone to all the suggestions above—be public and serious about your commitment to revolutionary innovation.