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Make Room for Innovation: “Little Bigs”, with Lisa Bodell, Founder and CEO, FutureThink, and author of Kill The Company
I could list a ton of tools that people could use to get them started with change, but if you don’t know where to start let me give you something that we call little bigs. And what little bigs are these are little things that could make a big difference in everyday behavior. Meaning at your desk, while you’re doing email, in a meeting, in correspondence with people. They’re new ways to stretch thinking. And I’ll give you an example of some little bigs.
“Ideas That Get You Fired”
Often when we’re in brainstorms people will be up at a flip chart and they’ll be coming up with a whole bunch of ideas and we will surprise them and stop them and say now that you’ve gotten all of your regular ideas out, now I want you to give me the ideas that will get you fired. So ideas that get you fired that all of a sudden takes the guardrails or even the handcuffs off and people are free to say oh my God, what are the things that I would really love to do or have never thought I should speak in terms of ideas. And you’d be amazed at what people come up with. The idea around that is you’re giving people stretch. Just to kind of stretch the thinking and be more disruptive.
“People that Scare You”
Another one is called outside in or we also call it people that scare you. So sometimes people will talk about what holds them back from change. And often it’s another group that they want to blame inside a company or another person or something and we encourage leaders to actually invite those people to a meeting and surprise the group and have a conversation about what is holding them back and actually come up with ideas for how they can better work together. You come up with better solutions to problems, so people that scare you.
“Empowerment Rules”
Another one is called empowerment, empowerment rules specifically. And I’ll tell you how this works. People often say they want to be empowered but then they don’t know what to do when they are. So we’ve seen leaders, we’ve done this with them who will sit with her group at a status meeting and say listen, I want you to make two decisions this next week that you normally would’ve asked me to do and I want you to make them without me. And at the next status meeting, a week later, I want you to tell me what they are. So if you have a team of 20 people, they each make two decisions without you, the next week you have 40 decisions that were made without you being involved and people feel more empowered. Getting that kind of a thing into the everyday cadence of what you do can be very freeing and very productive.