When was the last time your boss told you to think big, and you actually did?
Nearly everyone has been in that room. The one where the CEO sets up cross-functional teams, brings in a facilitator, and challenges the organization to completely reimagine the business. The energy is high. The expectations are higher. Millions of dollars in consulting fees, offsite budgets, and time are on the line. And what comes back? Suggestions like adding a feature to an existing product or tweaking a process that’s a bureaucratic nightmare but will never go anywhere.
Not exactly the breakthrough anyone had in mind.
The problem isn’t that you’re not smart. It’s that the smartest, most credentialed people in big companies are exceptionally good at thinking the way they’ve always thought. We fill the room with MBAs, subject matter experts, and seasoned executives. The people with the most impressive titles, the deepest institutional knowledge, and the longest track records of being right. We’re absolutely certain they have all the answers.
And then we wonder why nothing changes.
Researchers call it local search: the tendency to default to what we already know, what we have already seen, and what already feels familiar.
Local search is the quiet killer of breakthrough thinking, and it’s far more common than any of us want to admit. The more experienced your team, the more susceptible they are to it.
So what actually breaks the pattern? Curiosity. And more specifically, the kind of curiosity that comes from deliberately borrowing the perspective of someone you would never think to put in that room.
Someone like a nerd.
The Lowe’s experiment that changed everything
In 2012, Kyle Nel was leading innovation at Lowe’s, the Fortune 50 home improvement retailer. He faced the same challenge most senior innovation leaders face: how do you get an organization that’s very good at what it does to imagine something it’s never done before?
His answer made a lot of people squirm in their seats and side-eye everyone sitting next to them. He hired science fiction writers.
Not MBAs. Not strategy consultants with polished frameworks and competitive benchmarks. Science fiction writers. The kind of people most boardrooms would never take seriously. The nerds. The ones who had spent their careers imagining worlds that didn’t exist yet, with no concern for what the market would bear or what Lowe’s had already tried.
The Lowe’s team shared customer data and technology insights with the writers and asked them one question: What could Lowe’s look like in five to 10 years?
The writers did what they do best. They imagined without limits, without the weight of institutional history, and without any fear of looking impractical. As they gathered ideas, patterns emerged, and they refined their stories into what the team called speculative fiction. Eventually Kyle shared those ideas with the Lowe’s executive team. And not in a 62-page PPT deck. Kyle & company shared them in the form of a comic book.
A comic book. Presented to the leadership of a Fortune 50 company.
This was 2012, before most people had ever experienced augmented reality outside of a video game, and years before any retailer had seriously considered autonomous in-store robotics.
What followed wasn’t incremental. Lowe’s became the first retailer to deploy fully autonomous robots for customer service and inventory management. They launched some of the first consumer-facing 3D printing services. They developed exosuits, external robotic skeletons, for employees unloading trucks and moving goods across the floor. They built the first augmented-reality phone application for remodeling planning, and it sold out in four days.
And then they did something nobody saw coming from a hardware store.
Space: The final frontier
Consider what Lowe’s sells. Paint. Lumber. Plumbing fixtures. Power tools. The kind of inventory that goes into houses, not into orbit.
And yet, in 2016, a Lowe’s-branded 3D printer arrived at the International Space Station, 200 miles above Earth.
The nerds saw it coming. The MBAs didn’t.
Here’s how it happened…
Lowe’s Innovation Labs partnered with Made In Space (acquired by Redwire in 2020), an aerospace company that had been working with NASA since 2014 to pioneer additive manufacturing in zero gravity. The problem they wanted to solve was a practical one that any operations leader would go “uh-huh” to immediately. Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) depend entirely on supply shipments from Earth. When a component fails, and components fail, they wait. They improvise. Or they go without. As Kyle put it, “It’s hard to know what you’re going to need and when you’re going to need it, but when you need it, you need it right away.”
The answer was to put a permanent manufacturing facility on the station itself. The Additive Manufacturing Facility became the first commercial 3D printer to operate as a permanent fixture on the ISS. Engineers on the ground could design a part, transmit the file to the station, and astronauts could produce it on demand. A broken wrench. A sensor adapter. A hose fitting. Components that once required a cargo mission could be produced within hours from a compact unit operating in microgravity.
Lowe’s didn’t just fund the technology. They helped engineer the tools. The team designed a space-optimized wrench specifically for ISS crew members to clip to their belts during repairs, along with ratchets and other hardware built for the unique physical constraints of microgravity. The facility was made available not just to NASA, but to researchers, educational institutions, and commercial customers seeking access to off-world manufacturing capability for the first time in history.
Kyle framed the partnership this way: “Whether you have a home in Topeka, Kansas, or your home is the International Space Station, you have a lot of the same problems and a lot of the same needs. When something breaks, you have to fix it. The problem is just more acute on the space station.”
That’s a remarkable reframe. A Fortune 50 home improvement company looked at the most remote, isolated, and technologically demanding environment human beings have ever inhabited and recognized a familiar problem. Not because their strategy team had modeled the market. Because they had spent years asking “what if” with people who had no institutional reason to limit their answers.
By 2018, the results were measurable and decisive. Lowe’s ranked number one in retail innovation in Fortune’s Most Admired Companies and number one in augmented reality on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list. Three-D imaging capabilities had increased their online sales by up to 50%.
The nerds ate the MBAs’ lunch. And then they went to space.
The competitive advantage hiding in plain sight
Here’s what makes the Lowe’s story more than just an interesting case study. The science fiction writers weren’t brought in because they knew anything about retail operations, supply chain logistics, or enterprise technology.
They were brought in because they didn’t.
Large companies operate on the assumption that the most valuable person in the room is the one with the deepest expertise, the longest tenure, and the most relevant credentials. That assumption is precisely what makes breakthrough thinking so hard to do at scale. Expertise has a shadow side that rarely gets talked about in the boardroom. The more you know about how something works, the harder it becomes to imagine how it could work entirely differently. Experience narrows the aperture. It tells you what’s realistic, what’s been tried, what the organization can absorb, and what the market will bear.
Imagination has no such limits.
The science fiction writers looked at the same customer data and technology trends as every other stakeholder and saw completely different possibilities. Their lack of industry expertise wasn’t a liability. It was the entire point. They weren’t constrained by what Lowe’s had always done, so they could freely explore what Lowe’s could become.
This is why deliberately swapping hats with a different person, job title, industry works as a competitive strategy no matter where you are in your organization. When you spend time thinking like someone from a radically different industry, function, or discipline, you temporarily step outside the assumptions that expertise has built around you. In that space, problems that looked impossible start to look solvable. Opportunities that were invisible become obvious.
The question isn’t whether your organization is innovative enough. The question is whether you have designed the conditions that make innovation possible.
How to build those conditions
You don’t need to commission a comic book to make this work. Here are four ways you can bring genuinely different perspectives into strategic thinking starting now.
Bring in an outsider
Disney’s former head of Creativity & Innovation Duncan Wardle is big on bringing in the naïve expert. Someone who lacks specific, formal, or industry experience about a subject, but is brought in to offer a fresh perspective, challenge the established norms, and foster a fresh perspective. You can easily Invite someone from a completely different industry into a strategy session. Not as a novelty, but as a deliberate contributor. Ask them what they notice, what confuses them, and what they would do if this were their organization to reimagine. The more distant their world is from yours, the more valuable their perspective is likely to be.
Run the reverse role exercise
Identify a discipline that seems entirely unrelated to your challenge: urban planning, military logistics, industrial design, documentary filmmaking, culinary anthropology. Ask how a senior practitioner in that field would approach your problem. What assumptions would they question? What constraints would they ignore entirely?
Read outside your industry
The late novelist Ursula Le Guin described science fiction as a way to shake the mind loose from the habit of assuming that the way things are is the only way things can be. The same principle applies to reading deeply in fields adjacent to or entirely separate from your own. The goal is not information. It is a different mental model. Entrepreneur Jeff Hoffman says he spends at least 15 minutes a day reading something completely random and outside the industries he’s working in.
Protect the question that has no precedent
Breakthrough thinking stalls because experienced people are reluctant to ask questions that might make them sound dumb, out of the loop, or impractical. Create protected space in your culture where the only rule is that no one is permitted to say “that’s not how we do it here.” The naïve question is frequently the most important one in the room.
Curiosity is a competitive strategy
Most organizations treat curiosity the way they treat nerds. Interesting to have around, maybe. But not the people you put in charge of the future. Not the perspective you bring into the room when you’re making real decisions.
Lowe’s proved that wrong. Decisively.
Curiosity isn’t a personality trait. It is an organizational capability. And like every other capability that drives competitive advantage, it can be designed for, built deliberately, and scaled across a any team. The companies pulling ahead right now aren’t doing it because they have smarter MBAs or bigger strategy budgets. They’re doing it because they figured out how to consistently import perspective from places their competitors aren’t looking.
Sometimes the person who changes everything is the one you almost didn’t invite into the room.
Lowe’s put a hardware store in space because someone decided the answer wasn’t going to come from the usual suspects. They opened the door, welcomed an unconventional perspective, and let the imagination in.
