“Do you want to see our new Blue Sky Thinking Room?”
“I’d love to” I replied.
I was being shown around the new office of a large insurance company. I was shown to a room in the basement. She opened the door and “tada!”
Picture a room with no windows. Those harsh brown carpet tiles on the floor. It was painted blue, I looked up at the celling, and you guessed it, it had white fluffy clouds painted on it. Scattered across the brown carpet were beanbags. In the corner was a bright blue sofa on a patch of artificial grass.
“We take off our shoes and feel the grass between our toes before we start meetings” she proudly said.
“What do you think?” she asked.
At that moment, the aircon belched into life.
I was running an innovation workshop. I was trying to help the insurance company develop new innovative ideas.
Their biggest breakthrough to date was to include a fancy looking pen in their mailings to customers. That increased enquiries by 1%.
We were sat on the sofas, barefoot of course.
👋 Hi I'm Mr Joe Leech, Trusted Advisor to CEOs, you might know me from my background in behavioural psychology., |
“Perhaps we include two pens? One for a friend.”
“I know, let’s include some personalised stationery too”
“Let’s include a voucher for a free coffee”
They were getting increasingly excited. I was young and naive and was finding the experience frustrating. They simply were unable to generate novel ideas. They were stuck in a pattern.
So when it was my turn…
- Perhaps we replace the current product aimed at over 60s with one for the under 50s?
- Dramatically increasing our TAM.
- We could white label the product and partner with a cooler brand to co-market?
…and crickets.
The whole mood of the room changed. “Slow down Joe, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.” (That has to be worst saying in the English language)
Looking back on it now. My expectations of the team were too high. I didn’t have depth of experience to know how to help them.
The great Alan Weiss talks about the three types of innovation.
- Opportunistic: Think the myriad of companies who are suddenly AI companies
- Conformist: Uber is taxis. Just doing the same but better or cheaper
- Non-conformist: Amazon, creating tech infrastructure to power their ecom business and creating a new business and market from that.
Of the three, which do you think creates the most value? Of course it’s three.
My insurance friends were conformists. They could think outside the box but they were still held back by by the box. Conformists seek safety and social proof.
The reality is that non-conformist innovation requires two things:
1. Imagination, this gets weaker as we get older, it’s a muscle that needs to exercised.
2. A willingness to challenge the status quo. To stick your head out and say there is a better way. This takes courage.
I was expecting too much from the team. My job was to be innovative; so my imagination muscle was strong and I would loose nothing challenging the status quo.
If conformist innovation is thinking outside the box. Non-conformist innovation is crushing the box. And crushing anything, well, it’s dramatic.
Younger me has been fired by clients for doing exactly what I was hired to do but it made the organisation deeply uncomfortable. Age and experience hasn’t diminished my abilities but it has made me realise that bringing the organisation on the journey is a much of the job as generating the ideas in the first place.
So back to our blue sky thinking insurance company. They didn’t need blue sky thinking, they needed someone to help them build courage and imagination. That is exactly what I do in 2026.
Let me know your thoughts, do you want to follow up on how to build courage and imagination?
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Thank you and catch you next time,
PS: If this has resonated with you, please do reply or send this email on to someone else
PPS: proudly containing typos, no AI was used in the writing of this email.
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What kills trust faster than a crisis? Watch this.
