Nature is eternally restless. It doesn’t sit still, it doesn’t wait for a catastrophe, it doesn’t ask permission, it doesn’t plan—it just tries stuff. The same needs to be true of your organization. That means letting people be as experimental at work as they are in the rest of their lives. In the words of the great management thinker, Elvis Presley, it’s time for “a little less conversation and a little more action.” So just go try something.

CONTRARIAN THINKING. If a problem’s been around for a while, it probably can’t be cracked with conventional thinking. Seek out the positive deviants, like Nucor and Haier. Borrow ideas from other domains, like biology, startups, and crowdsourcing. Rigorously challenge your deepest assumptions. Do all this, and you’ll increase the odds of finding a novel solution.

COMPASSION. People aren’t merely skeptical; they’re cynical—and with good reason. Everyone’s fighting their own corner and looking out for their own interests. When asked to help, most people will ask, “What’s in it for me?” To jump this hurdle, you have to put others first. When colleagues see you working to understand their needs, when you help them craft their experiments, and ensure they get the credit, they’ll start to trust you. When your compassion shines through, people will take risks with you and pick you up when you fall.

CONNECTIONS. Building a community is the most important thing an activist can do. This is the ultimate multiplier of individual effort. Employees eager to try something new often make the mistake of asking their boss for permission. Usually they get shot down, or win only grudging support. This isn’t entirely the manager’s fault. A priori, it’s hard to know whether an underdeveloped idea is brilliant or batty. Since great ideas are rare, the default setting for most managers is to say no. So don’t go up, go out. Talk to your peers. Find a few colleagues who will help you build and run an experiment. It’s easy for a manager to say no to a lone supplicant, but much harder to turn aside a small band of partisans who are passionate about making things better and have already made a start.

“INNOVATION CYCLE STEP 1: FARM FOR DISSENT . . . Finally, one VP said to me, “You’re so intense when you believe in something, Reed, that I felt you wouldn’t hear me. I should have laid down on the tracks screaming that I thought it would fail. But I didn’t.”

The culture at Netflix had been sending the message to our people that, despite all our talk about candor, differences of opinion were not always welcome. That’s when we added a new element to our culture. We now say that it is disloyal to Netflix when you disagree with an idea and do not express that disagreement. By withholding your opinion, you are implicitly choosing to not help the company.

I can’t make the best decisions unless I have input from a lot of people. That’s why I and everyone else at Netflix now actively seek out different perspectives before making any major decision. We call it farming for dissent. Normally, we try to avoid establishing a lot of processes at Netflix, but this specific principle is so important that we have developed multiple systems to make sure dissent gets heard.

The more you actively farm for dissent, and the more you encourage a culture of expressing disagreement openly, the better the decisions that will be made in your company. This is true for any company of any size in any industry.