Idea Summit

No one needs a visa to read Jeff Leppla, 37, the idea man behind a breakthrough technology for one of P&G's innovative (and still highly secret) beauty-care products. Leppla has enough energy to power a locomotive -- and to run his own horse-breeding and -racing operation in Lexington, Kentucky on the side. His enthusiasm is infectious. At dinner the night before, he rallied the people at his table like an indefatigable football coach. Referring to Smith, Leppla boasted, "Guys, we're going to break this dude in!" But even he recognizes the scale of the mess that he and his colleagues face. "There has to be a crisis to push us to take a risk. But often we lack a sense of urgency. And in a company as big as ours, urgency can be a difficult thing to feel."

Indeed, generating a sense of urgency is one of the main design principles behind Thinking Expeditions. That's why Smith had advised Cathy Pagliaro to begin creating -- through a flurry of cryptic emails to her team -- a sense of mystery and anticipation weeks before the expedition. "I didn't tell anyone what we were doing, where we were going, or what to expect," she admits. "All I told them was to block off several days to go off-site. It was a huge risk to keep people in the dark. A lot of them couldn't handle not knowing. But you want to nudge people out of their comfort zone, because that's when real growth happens." She then adds, with obvious satisfaction, "I sure pissed off a lot of people!"

Smith plays his part like a master puppeteer. From the moment you walk into his staging room, you are imprinted with a sense of both urgency and difference. Contact with work or home is not prohibited, but it's strongly discouraged. Days run far into the night, and nights run into the early morning. And throughout the expedition, Smith and his team rely on an ongoing stream of multimedia props to spark and energize the flow and ideation -- and to maintain the feel of a real expedition.

For instance, film clips from "Mountains of the Moon," about Captain Sir Richard Burton's search for the source of the Nile in the 1850s, are used to show the orchestration of expeditions -- how teams are formed and how they prepare for the leap into the mapless unknown. The scene from the movie Apollo 13 in which panicked scientists avert disaster by making a lifesaving fix from whatever is on hand is shown to illustrate Smith's Level Seven, doing-the-impossible thinking. Slides, photographs, and music -- from Mozart to the Gypsy Kings -- are used to shift mood and thinking direction.

And then there is the staple of any Thinking Expedition: blue slips -- Smith's tried-and-true tool for capturing ideas. A blue slip is a piece of light-blue paper measuring two and three-quarter inches by four and one-quarter inches (deliberately not three by five) that expeditioners carry with them at all times. Smith is adamant, almost to the point of obsession, that a fresh supply of blue slips always be on hand. The key to capturing an idea, he stresses, is to write it down: "Ideas can come from anywhere and at any time. The problem with making mental notes is that the ink fades very rapidly." To hammer this point home, Smith cues one of his trusty visual clips -- an old advertisement for Canon copiers that conveniently asks, "Where is a thought if it isn't written down?"

In fact, Smith believes that in both work and life, the only things that get done are those that get written down. So the hundreds of blue-slip ideas that the Face 2005 Team will generate over its five days are gathered to create the "Trail Ahead Travel Log." The log is divided into sections that list the team's discoveries, results, vision, and concepts of operations, as well as what to do to keep the sense of the expedition alive when people return to P&G. "I wanted to make sure that we not only had a different experience but also discovered and created a tangible output," says Pagliaro.

Smith also knows that it takes smart, thought-provoking questions to inspire the kind of thinking that generates breakthrough ideas. So a slide appears on the screen at the front of the room: "The average child asks 125 probing questions a day. The average adult asks a mere 6." So during an expedition, Smith asks a lot of questions. Some are focused on specific problems; others are intentionally vague, open-ended -- and even, on the surface, a bit silly. One of his favorites: "What's a thought that you've never thought before?"

Smith recalls that during one of the first Thinking Expeditions that he led -- this one for Exxon Corp. in 1994 -- one of his obtuse questions ended up saving the company millions of dollars. A team of engineers assembled to focus on several of Exxon's offshore oil-production sites. "Most engineers live in a world where projects are done efficiently, effectively, and with slight improvements," says Smith. But he had a different agenda. "Several sites were in the ice, in the middle of nowhere. At that time, building roads to the sites would cost roughly $1 million a mile. I wanted to push those engineers into a higher level of thinking. We asked team members to think of a completely crazy idea -- something that they believed couldn't be done or wouldn't work. You know, one of those stupid ideas."

One engineer came up with a stupid idea with radical implications. "Let's stop building roads to the sites altogether!" he declared. It was a complete mind shift for the team. After elaborating on the idea, the group discovered a more innovative (and cost-effective) way of reaching offshore locations -- a "stupid" idea that had the potential to save Exxon $50 million per production site.