What do you do when the worst financial crisis in generations lands on your doorstep? In the fall of 2008, the subprime crisis was sweeping across global markets, and it had reached Hong Kong, where anxious customers had queued outside bank branches. On November 5, 2008, the day after Barack Obama’s first election, Thinkergy’s founder Dr. D gave a keynote at the Hong Kong Management Association’s annual conference. He energized an audience of 700 with a talk on creativity in turbulent times, plus a few live creativity exercises, including an exciting Idea Plane activity that got every audience member out of their seats to launch a paper plane they had built and amplified with an idea. One listener took particular note: Sir David Li, Chairman and Chief Executive of The Bank of East Asia, Hong Kong’s largest independent local bank. He decided his executive team needed a different kind of meeting.

On Saturday morning, January 17, 2009, more than 20 of BEA’s top and second-level executives gathered in the executive boardroom at the bank’s Hong Kong head office for an X-IDEA mini workshop titled “Turning Crisis into Opportunity.” We set a different tempo, too. Instead of the house music beats that usually power our ideation, a Thinkergy Classic Ideation Mix filled the boardroom, with Mozart setting the pace. Then came three crisis questions, each framed as a “What if…?”:

• What if you started doing now what you should have been doing a long time ago?
• What if you stopped doing now what you should have discontinued a long time ago?
• What if you took counterintuitive actions now to stand out from the herd, and did what no one in your industry has dared to do so far?

Not everyone was ready for the third one. One senior executive pushed back: asking such a question in the middle of a crisis made no sense. Dr. D replied that Steve Jobs had asked very similar questions when he returned to Apple in 1997, at the start of one of the great turnarounds in business history. After a moment, the executive settled in, and the post-its began to fill up. In other words, in a crisis, the question that sounds the most out of place is often the one that matters most. Sir David himself, who had led the bank since 1981, joined in eagerly and clearly enjoyed the morning.

Is your organization facing turbulent times, with your leadership team stuck in defensive mode? Contact us to find out how X-IDEA may help your executives step back from the storm, ask the questions everyone has been avoiding, and turn the crisis into fresh opportunities.