The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company’s Future
Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller
Harvard Business Review Press (June 2021)
How to harness imagination systemically within the workplace to drive your company’s growth
According to Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller, “The aim of this book is to draw on the best knowledge we have about imagination and filter this through practitioners’ minds — our own experience and interviews with business leaders — to produce a practitioners’ guide to building and operating an imagination machine: a company that systematically harnesses imagination to drive growth.”
I was curious to know to what “machine” in the title refers. Reeves and Fuller explain: “We use the word ‘machine’ because imagination is a tool, and companies are tools to serve public needs. Although imagination is somewhat unruly, there is no reason we cannot develop a more systematic approach to cultivating and using it, just as business has in other domains that depend on quirky characteristics of the mind, like advertising and human resources. And although the word ‘machine’ may evoke images of factories from the last century, modern machines are increasingly flexible and intelligent. A company worthy of the name imagination machine is one that can consistently reinvent itself and what it offers to the world.”
Reeves and Fuller make brilliant use of several reader-friendly devices, notably “Good Questions to Ask” and “Organizational Diagnostic” sections that conclude Chapters Three to Eight as well as hundreds of illustrations throughout all ten chapters. I also want to congratulate them on the brief but substantialprofiles of organizations that have become “imagination machines.” For example, Apple, BCG (Boston Consulting Group), Four Seasons, Google, Pfizer, Pixar, and Zappos.
These are among the passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Reeves and Fuller’ coverage:
o Life cycle of ideas (Pages 11-19)
o Surprises that can trigger the imagination (12-14)
Note: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.'” Isaac Asimov
o Games to trigger the imagination (36-37 & 88-89)
o Charles Merrill and Merrill Lynch (39-41)
o Rethinking mental models (43-62)
o How to broaden scope of scale when rethinking models (53-57)
o Accelerating imagination through action (70-75)
o Probing to collide mental models with reality to provoke feedback and surprise (76-86)
o Collective imagination (91-116)
o Evolvable scripts (117-139)
o Corporate scripts (124-130)
o Sustaining imagination (141-160)
o Supporting mental ambidexterity (144-160)
o Human collaboration with artificial intelligence (166-172)
o Rekindling imagination for sustained growth (177-185)
This book is a magnificent achievement. Reeves and Fuller provide an abundance of information, insights, and counsel that will help to prepare those who read it to establish and then continuously strengthen a workplace culture within which — at all levels and in all areas — imagination is most likely to thrive. That culture will resemble a machine to the extent that it consistently sustains worker efficiency and effectiveness throughout the given enterprise. Some of the most valuable material focuses on how to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of human collaboration with artificial intelligence.
I agree with Reeves and Fuller: “AI can free us from more routine activities; it can carry out core tasks, to which humans bring a layer of empathy; or it can provide an ongoing stimulus for imagination.” Much of attention is directed to suggesting how different kinds of AI-human collaboration might play out across each of the areas examined in the book. I highly recommend checking out another book: Kai-Fu Lee’s AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2018).
It remains for those who read their book to absorb and digest the information, insights, and counsel it provides, then use their enriched imagination to set and then achieve BHAGs, what Jim Collins characterizes as “Big Hairy Audacious Goals.”
These are Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller’s final thoughts. “Leadership and management tend to be centered on performance maximization, but even high-performing enterprises need to be reimagined to retain vitality in the face of complex and unpredictable challenges. This requires a new discipline of harnessing imagination and new leadership behaviors to support it. We hope that this book provides some first pragmatic steps in that direction.”
In this context, I am again reminded of an insight of incalculable value, suggested by T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets, Chapter 2 (“Little Gidding”):
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all of our exploring
Will be to arrive at where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Eliot reminds us that one of the greatest benefits of exploration is to increase one’s knowledge, of course, but also to gain new perspectives on the knowledge we already possess. We must trust our curiosity to drive that relentless process of strategic inquiry…and also allow our imagination to inspire us (in Tennyson’s words) “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”