Wherever you go, there you are – crossing the thin red line
Contributed by: David Thomas, European Innovation Manager,
Masterfoods, UK
At the beginning of my career, I had a strong desire to travel, something that has never left me. One of my earliest trips, I found myself trekking through rainforest in northern Thailand, and as part of our small group, I got to know Bob, a Canadian who had explored more countries than years lived, an impressive feat for someone not too far away from retirement. Whilst trekking one morning Bob remarked, ‘Well David, wherever you go, there you are!’. In the intervening 15 years, I find myself revisiting this phrase, it’s a lot deeper than it first appears.
A few years later, I took part on a training course that involved crossing a red line, I still have the 15cm piece of red plastic today to serve as a reminder. The red line makes visible those times in our life when we need to lead the way and cross over into a space where life is not as comfortable or relaxed.
In January of this year, I was co-training Masterfoods’ ‘Consumer Driven Design’ course with a large group of associates - something that I had done a number of times over before. However this year instead of the comfortable interviewing of each other, we arranged for real interviews with real consumers to take place during the evening of the first day.
The training started well, but as the deadline drew ever closer, the tension in the group grew, to such an extent that I could clearly see the ‘red line’ that my group needed to cross. Now this was not a dramatic, “do or die” red line, but there was real tension that needed discussion before the crossing could be made.
The following morning in the review, there was a buzz, generated from the previous nights interactions which added greatly to the experience of all.
Working in the front end of innovation, as opposed to further downstream, there are more places that you can go to seek fresh new perspectives on the challenges that our businesses face - such as talking directly with our customers. But with this freedom, comes ‘a not so obvious’ responsibility to lead and cross those red lines such that the new perspectives we talk about can be experienced in reality.
So the next time you are tackling an often-familiar challenge, where do you need to go, and more importantly will you choose to cross that red line, stepping into the less known, and actually go there?