CHAPTER 9

Stretch Imagination Chi

True success is achieved by stretching oneself, learning to feel comfortable being uncomfortable.

—KEN POIROT

Every time our cat, Gypsy, wakes from one of her many long naps, her first action is to stretch. “As a cat stretches,” says Andrew Cuff, a researcher at the Royal Veterinary College in London, “it activates all of their muscles and increases their blood pressure, which increases the amount of blood flowing to the muscles and also to the brain. This helps wake cats up and makes them more alert.”¹ Since her stretches look a lot like Tai Chi movements, we wonder if she is balancing her chi!

Wide awake and alert (be all … there) is a crucial part of an effective co-creation partnership. It creates an animation or vivaciousness that stirs ideas to a boil, making them hot for application. Half-baked becomes ready to serve. Think of this chapter as your recipe for relationship exercises aimed at getting the creative juices going while invigorating the relationship with your customer. It is an appetizer for discovery.

The imagination door your customer controls is a lot like the lid to a jack-in-the-box. Decorated to entertain, the toy plays music as the crank is turned. The timing of the emergence of the creative, happy-go-lucky jack is a surprise, making its owner laugh. You can influence the turning of the crank by the enthusiasm of your attitude, the sincerity of your gratitude, and the aroma of your rabbit food. (I added that third rhyme just to make you smile.)

Stretch with Generosity

A student at Morehouse College was unable to find a babysitter for his five-month-old daughter. His wife had necessary chores, and he was studying for a midterm algebra exam. The class was to be a critical review. So he brought his child to the class at this all-male college in Atlanta. But it created a new problem—how to hold his baby and take notes. Professor Nathan Alexander volunteered to carry the child in his arms while he lectured and periodically wrote on the chalkboard.

“Stretch” and “generosity” can give the expression of abundance unexpected applications. Generosity elevates, ennobles, and enriches, causing the relationship to blossom and grow. Following the “holding the baby” incident, Morehouse College president David Thomas tweeted, “This is about love and commitment. Loving our students and being committed to removing any barrier to their pursuit of excellence.”² The same could be said for attracting your customer’s imagination.

“Innovation is guts plus generosity,” wrote marketing guru Seth Godin. “Guts because it might not work. And, generosity because guts without seeking to make things better is merely hustle. The innovator shows up with something she knows might not work. Everyone else has been trained to show up with a proven, verified, approved, answer that will get them an A on the test. If failure is not an option, most of the time, neither is success. Allow generosity to take the lead and you’ll probably discover that it’s easier to find the guts.”³

A high-tech distributor and one of their major transportation vendors held a problem-solving meeting. The goal was to figure out a new way to accommodate large- and small-batch loads on the same route. The distributor was concerned about turn time for shipments to customers; the vendor was concerned about the cost created by additional stops for small batches with a lower ROI. When the facilitator learned the vendor and distributor were headquartered in the same area, he suggested a novel start to their meeting. “Let’s begin by brainstorming how together we can help provide kids with more well-lit play zones other than the limited parks we have in the Muddywater area.” It changed the tone of the gathering from “what about me?” to “what about us?” It also hastened the breakthrough both parties sought.

Be willing to assist your customer with a chore that might normally be theirs to do. It sounds like, “I’ll help you set up.” Bring or send something that might be of interest to your customer: “I read this article about a new program at Duke, and I remembered your daughter is going to college there next year.” Remember important milestones and red-letter days. Look for any reason to make a big deal out of the week, the day, or the hour. A friend told me he turned a customer into a partner when his customer inquired about a book on the credenza behind his desk. My friend told his customer, “Take it with you. I’ve already read it!” Make random acts of kindness frequent acts and notice their impact on the quality of the relationship.

Stretch with an Imagination Appetizer

Stretching your body does not start with a ground-pounding strenuous workout, it begins with low impact stretches and evolves to stronger ones. Imagination needs an appetizer. And the best kinds of appetizers follow the rules of an effective climate-setting exercise in a training class. They need three features: guarantee success (never use it to show what one doesn’t know), make it relate to the subject of your customer’s need, and make its form fit the nature of the innovation workout you plan with your customer.

Walk into a theatre for a Broadway play in New York and the appetizer you are given between the ticket counter and your seat is the Playbill. It not only is a tool to tell you about the plot and characters, it sets the mood for what you are about to see and hear. Walk into an upscale restaurant and you are likely to get something “compliments of the chef,” a tasty appetizer preparing you for the meal you have just ordered. My car dealership makes sure there are a couple of hazelnut (my favorite) K-Cups at their Keurig machine when I go for maintenance or service and spend time in their waiting area.

McLane is a large wholesale supply company headquartered in Temple, Texas, that distributes grocery and nonfood items to convenience stores. They are currently owned by Berkshire Hathaway. When I worked with their leadership group in 2000, the meeting was led by Terry McElroy, then head of operations. He opened their meeting with prayer, they did a fun creativity exercise (“Turn a bad idea like blue jeans for garbage cans or egg-flavored toothpaste into a benefit and make a quick sales pitch”), and then they all stood and gave the company cheer. I remember it as one of the most animated leadership meetings I had ever attended. I learned it was a climate-setting pattern they used for every leadership meeting. Appetizers get you ready for the innovation entrée.

Stretch with Storyboarding

The storyboard of the customer’s experience or use of a product is a detailed plan of the structure of the experience—frame by frame, so to speak. Storyboarding is the process of experience choreography. It considers every tiny angle, from curb appeal to first impressions to the management of all the elements (tone and style, sight and sound) that impact the customer’s experience and memory of the story. The intent is to alter or enhance the customer’s sense of reality. It enables all elements—space, time, and physical objects—to be a cohesive, integrated whole. The Greeks called it scenography, having everything in the composition of a play working together to create a seamless, congruent experience for everyone in the theatre.

Airbnb is the largest lodging company in the world, with over seven million lodging sites in over one hundred thousand cities. In his book Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, Clay Christensen and his coauthors describe how Airbnb founders storyboarded forty-five different emotional moments for Airbnb hosts (people willing to rent out a spare bedroom or their entire house) and their guests. Together, these storyboards made up a mini-documentary of the experiences. CEO Brian Chesky told Fast Company, “Are these hosts men or women? Are they young or old? Where do they live, the city or countryside? Why are they hosting? Are they nervous? Are their guests arriving tired? At that point you start designing for stuff for a very particular use case.”⁴

Part of imagination chi is seeking new angles for stretching the imagination. Like all innovation, it is seeing what everyone else is seeing but thinking what no one else is thinking. Edward de Bono in his book Lateral Thinking describes how the pneumatic jack that telescopes up from the middle was imagined when its inventor carefully watched the back end of a cow in the process of defecating!⁵

Stretch with More Answers

It was a typical weekly staff meeting at the Harvey Hotel in Plano, Texas. At one point in the second half of the meeting, hotel general manager John Longstreet announced that two guests had been invited to join the staff meeting for the “What’s Stupid” portion.

Once they were introduced, Longstreet shared with the two guests instructions his staff already knew. “Every week we devote time in our staff meeting to hearing what’s stupid around here. It teaches us a lot about how to get better. It also is a way to find new answers to old questions. We need your help. My job is to take notes and listen! After the meeting we all go to work making this hotel the very best it can be. We believe the answers to all our challenges and opportunities are always in the room.”

What followed was a lively, no-holds-barred session about the little things that got in the way of delivering world-class guest service. Reserved initially, the two guests were soon chiming in with their observations and suggestions. The meeting was upbeat, not negative; it was supportive, not derisive. And there was not an inkling of fear in the room. The popular mantra that peppered the meeting was “two more ideas.” Regardless of the topic or success of the discussion, there was constant team encouragement for “two more ideas.” Many of the most creative insights came from the “two mores.”

“There is hidden brilliance in every staff,” Longstreet told me in an interview later. “The key is to create an environment that allows that brilliance to surface and shine.” Innovation unleashed can come only from a partner unleashed. Brilliant answers are always in the room, often found on the other side of “two more ideas.”

Stretch Imagination Chi: The Partnering Crib Notes

Imagination chi is all about juicing up the process with many versions of “what if.” What if you had two more ideas, added special comfort, provided more generosity, created more flourishes, or invented more stories? What would your customer challenge or issue be like if you had a magic wand and could change one important aspect about it? What if you had unlimited resources or were a superhero with supernatural powers? What if you approached the situation with the goal of making it completely different from any other on the planet? What if the solution were going to carry the name of your child, your parents, your customer’s child? What if it is a “let’s pretend” game that summons your customer’s imagination to join in? It works because it is an imagination-stretching exercise by definition. Let your imagination chi run wild like a kid getting off the school bus on the last day of school.

A Look Ahead: Trust

Our last two secrets for getting inside your customer’s imagination have focused on attraction, amplifying the draw power of their features. The secrets Grounding and Discovery are like enticements so compelling that the imagination in your customer cannot wait to come out and play. The next secret returns to an invitation-like appeal. Trust is a manifestation of who you are more than what you do. In this section we will explore the importance of telling the truth, the value of clear work agreements, and how to plan for times when hiccups occur.

Breakthroughs come from an instinctive judgment of what customers might want if they knew to think about it.

—ANDREW GROVE, FORMER CEO OF INTEL