MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Imaginary Time Travel as a Leadership Tool

The first time I noticed a leader who used imaginary time travel was back in the 1990s, when a colleague and I did an 18-month ethnography research project at IDEO. Today, IDEO is a renowned innovation consulting firm, but in those days, it was a small product design company with about 100 employees.

IDEO’s founder (and then-CEO) David Kelley used this intriguing tool when designers complained about things that upset them, like difficult clients or tough technical problems. Kelley would acknowledge their immediate pain. But he would soon shift the conversation away from the present and focus on either the past or the future.

About the Author

Robert Sutton (@work_matters) is an organizational psychologist and professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University, where he also codirects the Designing Organizational Change initiative. Links to his work are online at www.bobsutton.net.

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