The Imagination Machine with Martin Reeves

Mar 2, 2022

Martin Reeves, MD and senior partner at BCG, discusses how organizations can revitalize imagination. He highlights the lack of creativity in large companies and shares insights from neuroscience about imagination as a process requiring cultural shifts. Reeves proposes a six-step method to foster innovation and stresses leadership's role in inspiring curiosity. He also examines how crises can spur transformative opportunities. By blending human creativity with technology, he advocates for a dynamic approach to navigating today’s fast-paced business challenges.

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INSIGHT

Size Impedes Corporate Imagination

Large companies' growth potential declines as they increase in size, creating a gravity against imagination.
This decline is not inevitable; companies can defy this trend and sustain imaginative capabilities.

INSIGHT

Brain as Surprise Minimizer

The brain functions as a surprise minimization machine updating mental models.
Organizations must expose themselves to external surprises to stimulate imaginative thinking.

ADVICE

Six-Step Imagination Process

Follow a six-step process to harness imagination: seduction, big idea, collision, epidemic, codification, and encore.
Each step moves from noticing surprise to scaling and sustaining new imaginative ideas.

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Kicking off season 4 of the Evolving Leader podcast is a discussion that co-hosts Scott Allender and Jean Gomes had with BCG Henderson Institute chairman and author Martin Reeves. The Henderson Institute is BCG’s think tank dedicated to exploring and developing new insights from business, technology, economics and science by embracing the powerful technology of ideas.

Sit back and listen as Martin unpacks how imagination works and how organisations can keep it alive and harness it in a systematic way.

‘The Imagination Machine – How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company’s Future’ (Jack Fuller and Martin Reeves, 2021, Harvard Business Review Press)

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0.00 Introduction

2.22 Can we start with your background, and what inspired you to write ‘The Imagination Machine’

4.01 Why do you think there appears to be an absence of imagination in so many large organisations?

5.55 It’s easy to think about imagination as being solely a psychological process, but your research has revealed something else. What have you found and what does it mean in terms of how that notion should be challenged?

8.23 Can we delve into some of the neuroscience and research that you have uncovered that underpins your thinking.

15.50 Are organisations set up (almost) as surprise mitigation machines, so repressing new mindsets that would potentially unlock new business models?

17.55 Can you outline the six step process that you describe in your book around harnessing and scaling imagination and creativity in a systemised way?

24.41 How can we get better at this? What could a listener do in their organisation to adopt some of these strategies?

30.43 You talk about play as being de-risked accelerated learning. Talk to us about the importance of play and where you are seeing it being adopted.

37.27 You have mentioned that crisis can be an inflection point for reimagination. What have you observed during the pandemic?

42.34 Is there a link between capacity for imagination and sense making?

45.56 What role will/does technology play in organisations that are reimagining themselves?

52.11 What should leaders be prioritising? What are the specific things that they should be doing more of that they’re not to imbue their organisations with a greater sense of imagination at both a cultural and capability level?

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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