Roses and Sushi — A Tale
There is a particular kind of stubbornness that lives inside organisations. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t show up in the risk register or get flagged in the retrospective. It wears the face of experience, speaks in the language of trust, and calls itself knowledge.
This is a story about how I demolished it. Not with arguments. Not with data. But with a plant nursery, raw fish, and six hours of carefully designed chaos.
Before the Story: A Problem Worth Naming
In my practice, I have often encountered the resilience and power of existing ideas getting in the way of the new ideas that are ready to be developed — by the individual, the team, or the organisation looking for a change. Solutions, the more they are ingrained in the minds of stakeholders and users, become obstacles. Energies form to preserve them and keep them intact, and rightly so: many old and tested methods and systems work, and will continue to work for decades, even millennia. Think social norms, societal and religious beliefs, the load-bearing walls of civilisations. These deserve their staying power.
But some ideas — the ones tied not to enduring human truths but to yesterday’s product landscape — need to be uprooted. Not reformed. Not extended. Uprooted. And in organisations, that is precisely where the trouble begins.
You hear it in the corridors, in the standups, in the well-meaning steering committee review: “We have always done it like this.” Or: “This is how we have approached the situation from the beginning.” These phrases are not laziness. They are the sound of a foundation holding on — gripping, actually — at the very moment when the ground beneath it has shifted.
The context in the marketplace changes. The user base evolves. And what were once trusted methods and mindsets become the very obstacles to a better future. The old map no longer matches the terrain. And yet people keep consulting the old map, because the old map is what they were trained on, built on, promoted for knowing.
This is the situation you walk into as an innovation leader.
The Trap of Forcing Reality
Here is the most common mistake I see innovation leaders make — including the one I used to be.
We arrive with the new idea fully formed. We have the rational arguments, the numbers and the data, the compelling story of adoption curves and market shifts. We set up the slide deck. We run the workshop. We make the case. And when our sponsors, stakeholders, and peers don’t buy it — when they lean back, cross their arms, and say some version of “we’re not convinced” — we push harder. We add more data. We bring in another external voice. We escalate.
This is the trap.
Because the more we push, the more they entrench. And something else happens too, something subtler and more damaging: they begin to mistake our reality for their conclusion. They don’t experience the insight — they receive it, packaged and delivered, from us. And anything delivered from us can be argued with, dismissed, ignored, or simply waited out.
What they cannot argue with is what they have lived through themselves.
The goal of idea demolition is not to convince. It is not to enlighten. It is to create the conditions in which people discover, on their own terms, that the ground has shifted. The innovation leader’s job in these moments is not to be the author of the new reality. It is to be the architect of the experience that lets reality speak for itself.
You design the encounter. You set the stage. You get out of the way.
This distinction matters enormously. When someone arrives at a new insight through their own experience — when they feel the friction, they notice the gap, they name the problem — that insight belongs to them. It is not your idea that they are now obliged to support. It is their own discovery that they are now motivated to pursue. That is an entirely different energy. And it is the only energy that actually moves things forward inside an organisation.
The Architecture of Demolition
Just like when you want to build a new structure where an old building once stood, you need to do your land and site development. In construction, this means demolishing the old structure, clearing the debris, installing new plumbing and power, and getting the ground properly ready before a single new wall goes up. As a metaphor, this is precisely what is needed inside organisations with an established set of practices, products, and identities. Your colleagues are driven — rightly, professionally — to preserve and build on what exists. It is their craft. Their track record. Part of who they are.
So when you show up with vague, wild, different blueprints of how the new world should look, they get overwhelmed. And they resist.
I have encountered this many times. I have also seen how pushing the new idea harder, before the old one has been removed, never works. An established idea — one linked to a significant portion of your existing business and your colleagues’ professional pride — is like a stubborn foundation on a construction site. Tough, well-hidden, with roots running deep into the ground.
To remove an idea so ingrained, I have found it necessary to perform a conscious act of idea demolition.
It is not about convincing people that the new idea is better. It is not about proving logic. It is about making them experience for themselves that there could be another truth — another way of looking at things entirely. The red pill moment. The shift that, once made, cannot be unmade.
A short film on why innovation stalls, what it means to design the conditions for discovery, and how to clear the ground before you build.
A Day in Southern Germany
It is early summer in Southern Germany. The day has just started. Insects are buzzing. A group of highly professional engineers and product managers board a bus with me, kicking off a new product development project — the making of a robust communication product suited for use in the home. The team is heavily set in one direction: extraordinary waterproofing. They are engineers. Waterproofing is something they understand, can specify, can optimise. It is, for them, the task.
I think they are not wrong about the waterproofing. But I think the main innovation may lie somewhere else entirely. My hunch is to explore the situations and worlds of the user — in depth, in person, in their full uncomfortable reality — before coming to any decision or conclusion.
But I don’t tell them this. That is the whole point.
I accepted the task some weeks before — a call from one of our German engineering sites, who had been asked to build this tough, home-utility phone. They wanted me to help them figure out just how waterproof and which qualities of toughness would sell best. Instead of setting up a specification workshop, I told them to come with me on a journey. Not to visit customers in a traditional research sense. Something different.
We had a full day. Ten to four. Twenty people — product manager, engineering team, marketing manager, and more. And I had set the story in three acts.
We had designed small, playful games with specific goals: participants messaging each other, finding things on the internet, sharing content across devices — all structured to simulate how ordinary users would interact with this product, but in a researcher-like, slightly staged way that would prompt reflection. We split into pairs — one user, one observer — and each observer received a small notebook and a short script. The users were instructed to be themselves. To go into the tasks. But to think out loud: not as a conversation with their observer, but as a conversation with themselves. It felt awkward at first. Before long, they had the hang of it.
We were ready.
Act One: The Nursery
Setting: A large-scale plant nursery in a field outside Ulm.
The colleagues had been asked to arrive in appropriate everyday clothing — what they would wear for gardening or working in the garage. As we stepped off the bus, the sun had already climbed high. Rows upon rows of beautiful rose plants stretched out in all directions. The smell of damp soil from the morning irrigation rose to meet us as we gathered around the gardener.
She showed them how to cut at the correct angle, at the correct distance. Within minutes, everyone was deeply embedded in the work. Most of them had never had professional instruction in pruning before. They were enjoying it.
The simulation game started. Teams distributed themselves along the rows of roses. Phone calls came in mid-pruning, and people scrambled to answer while keeping an eye on the plants — exactly as in the real world. The damp soil quickly found its way onto hands, arms, feet, and screens. People wiped their devices on skirts, shirts, trousers. As the work intensified, phones were set down on the ground to free up both hands — and then forgotten. When participants moved to a new row, the phone stayed behind in the old one. Teams began scrambling, hunting for ringing devices buried somewhere in the foliage. The note-takers were so absorbed in the roses that they frequently forgot their own notebooks.
Something was already loosening — quietly, in the background, without anyone being told it was supposed to.
I didn’t intervene. I watched.
Around midday, I called time. I asked everyone to collect their phones. We boarded the bus into Ulm.
Act Two: The Sushi Restaurant
Setting: A prestigious sushi restaurant in downtown Ulm.
As we arrived, people took their seats. The conversation was loud, full of laughter — stories from the roses, the scramble for ringing phones, the mud, the awkwardness. Fun, easy, alive with the particular energy of a team that has been through something together.
Then they realised this was not a lunch.
This sushi workshop was where they would roll and make their own sushi. I had taken them to the other side of the use case their product was going to fit into: the kitchen. Bowls of raw fish appeared. Wet sushi rice. Pressed seaweed sheets. A Japanese chef arrived and began instructing the engineers, who listened carefully, determined to do well at this delicate, rather pungent activity.
They had not tried this before. It showed.
I sounded the call: “Grab your phones and start the game.”
A sigh ran through the whole room.
“But Michael — the phones are covered in dirt and mud from the roses.”
“Do you think your customers would not walk from the garden into their kitchens and expect to use their phones?”
And so the game started.
Colleagues tried to shout into devices while lying on the floor, attempting to activate speakerphone with their elbows because fish gunk covered both hands and wrists. Some tried their chins. Their noses. Anything — to avoid adding fish scent to already-muddy screens. It was a spectacular, chaotic, utterly authentic mess.
I enjoyed every second of it.
But I want to be precise about what I was watching and why it mattered. I was not staging a comedy. I was not engineering a punchline. I was watching twenty highly educated, highly opinionated product professionals experience the actual world of their future users — without a single word of interpretation from me. Every scramble, every grimace, every failed attempt to answer a call without contaminating a screen — that was reality landing. Not landing through a slide, or a user quote, or a design researcher’s synthesis. Landing directly, physically, indelibly.
The distinction is everything.
If I had walked into that meeting room in the morning and said “Your users cook and garden with the same hands they hold the phone with — this creates serious interaction problems beyond waterproofing” — they would have nodded, noted it down, and returned to their waterproofing spec. Because that insight would have been mine. A claim I was making. Something to evaluate, to weigh against their existing knowledge, to accept or reject.
But this? This was theirs. They had lived it. Nobody had told them it would be difficult. Nobody had framed it as a problem. The difficulty simply arrived, as it does for real people in real kitchens every day. And that arrival cannot be argued with.
The pre-conceived idea — the settled conclusion that had walked through the doors that morning — quietly dissolved. Not because someone convinced them it was wrong. But because reality had introduced itself.
Act Three: The Return
Setting: The meeting room back at the hotel.
We returned to where we had started. The participants had already washed their hands twice in the restaurant — before the sushi workshop and after. The phones came back in plastic bags. Nobody was in a hurry to open them.
I asked the note-takers to walk through their observations. I asked everyone to write down the emotions they had experienced — not the design insights, not the product requirements. The emotions. The ups and the frustrations. The small moments of helplessness. The unexpected delight when something had worked against the odds.
I asked them to discuss why they had experienced such peaks and troughs with their devices across the day.
The pain points came quickly, and they came in the first person. I didn’t know where I’d left it. I couldn’t pick it up with dirty hands. I had no way to know someone was calling without seeing the screen. I had to choose between the roses and the call. These were not abstract user stories. They were personal confessions, each one a window into the world of every person who would ever use this product. And because they had felt them — because the participants themselves were the users in that moment — the insights carried a weight that no amount of research synthesis could replicate.
Alongside the pain points, the needs began to surface. Knowing where your device was in the near field, without having to see it. Being able to locate a colleague nearby without touching the screen. Hands-free interaction that didn’t feel like a disability accommodation, but felt designed for a real way of living. Small, surprising, human things — things that no competitor was building for, because no competitor had thought to visit a rose nursery and a sushi kitchen in the same afternoon.
Before long, we could see the contours of an entirely new product category emerging from the cleared ground. The waterproofing was still there — confirmed now by experience rather than assumption, and now understood in far greater nuance. But around it, and perhaps eclipsing it, were ideas of a different order. More surprising. More original. Closer to the actual texture of people’s lives.
The old building had been demolished. The debris had been cleared. The ground was ready.
Now they could build.
What I Learned from the Roses
There is a version of this story where I am the clever facilitator who designed a memorable day. That version is easier to tell, and much less useful.
The more honest version is this: I learned that my job as an innovation leader is not to deliver insight. It is to remove the barriers to insight arriving on its own. There is a profound difference between a team that has been told the world has changed and a team that has felt it. One of those teams needs to be managed and persuaded for the rest of the project. The other has a fire under them.
The roses and the sushi were not tricks. They were not manipulation. They were an honest invitation to step out of the office — out of the clean, abstracted, presentation-formatted version of the world — and into the messy, demanding, surprisingly funny reality of how people actually live. I designed the encounter. I held the frame. I got out of the way.
Reality did the rest.
And that, I have come to believe, is the highest form of innovation leadership: not to be the loudest voice in the room, but to be the architect of the experience that makes the room go quiet — because everyone in it has just seen something they cannot unsee.
Principles for Designing Your Own Demolition
If you are facing a team, a leadership group, or a set of stakeholders locked inside a pre-conceived idea, here are the principles I return to:
Let the experience do the convincing — not you. The moment you start interpreting what they are experiencing, you steal the ownership of the insight. Stay curious. Stay quiet. Let them name what they have seen.
Choose reality, not simulation. A prototype can test a hypothesis. A real environment tests the person. There is a difference between roleplaying a user and being one. When possible, put people into genuine contact with the world they are designing for.
Design the container, not the conclusion. Your job is to structure an encounter that is safe enough to participate in and real enough to land. The conclusion is theirs to draw. If you’ve drawn it for them in advance, you’ve already failed.
Expect discomfort — and welcome it. Idea demolition is not comfortable. It shouldn’t be. The discomfort is the sensation of a foundation giving way, which is exactly what needs to happen. Your job is not to relieve the discomfort, but to make it productive.
The pre-conceived idea is not the enemy. The people holding it built something real. Treat the old idea with respect — it earned its place. You are not arguing that they were wrong. You are creating the conditions for them to discover that the context has moved on.
A Note on Courage
I want to end on something that rarely gets discussed in the innovation playbooks.
Designing and running an idea demolition experience requires a particular kind of courage. Not the courage to challenge authority — though that is often required too. The deeper courage is the willingness to trust the process enough to not intervene. To hold back the explanation. To resist the urge to make sure everyone is getting the point. To let the silence in a room stretch out just long enough for people to sit inside what they have just discovered.
That silence is where the new idea is born.
The roses will get your hands dirty. The sushi will be messy. The phones will come back in plastic bags. And somewhere in that mess — in the gap between the tidy boardroom and the raw, demanding world outside it — a team of engineers, product managers and business owners will quietly begin to imagine something they never would have found behind a desk.
That is the work. And it is, without question, worth doing.
Leave a Reply