RIYADH: Interactive investment workshops were featured on the second day of LEAP’s second edition, with the spotlight falling on David Gram-Hanssen, co-founder of Diplomatic Rebels.
His workshop utilized Lego building blocks to help participants focus on the changes they can create in the future as they become diplomatic rebels in their respective industries.
He said: “Future success depends on the ability to explore and experiment. We all need to become even better at adapting to change.
“There’s a perfect storm of change happening right now geopolitically, environmentally, business-wise. Everything seems to be sort of moving, and over time that speed is only going to pick up.”
Diplomatic Rebels was a concept created out of the work of Lego’s radical innovation department, Future Lab.
It turned into a system and a way of thought that helped people navigate the bureaucracy of companies, sparking change in their offices and communities.
Gram-Hanssen, who previously worked at Lego Ventures, said companies needed to adopt this entrepreneurial culture.
He added: “At Lego we started saying as a mantra, radical is normal. It means that radical change and radical innovation is the new normal.
“We constantly have to move along and experiment and explore what is happening out there.”
He discussed what it means to be a diplomatic rebel, sparking innovation and positive change while anticipating resistance.
He said: “One of the things at Lego that we understood over time was when you’re working with radical innovation and trying to change things, it’s really hard work.
“One aspect to be mindful of is creating the necessary resilience in the teams you are working with.”
He explained that most entrepreneurs feel like they are constantly fighting the immune system of that existing environment.
He added: “They are trying to do something that doesn’t compute in the existing system.”
Gram-Hanssen gave his audience the task of building a Lego model to represent their work today and their vision for the future.
He also explained the concept of a “pretotype,” a predecessor of a prototype, which aims to gather data to aid faster testing, encouraging participants at the session to implement the concept in their daily lives.
He said: “The right question is not so much what is going to change and when, because it’s hard to foresee.
“Maybe the right question to ask is how do we take a lead on this change? What is it? What do we want to see in the world, and how do we put ourselves in front of this change?”
