V. Three Principles for Taking Action Tomorrow, in Your Organization

This article (6/7) is part of the series Principle of Action No. 2: Thinking with Your Hands, from the collection “The Other Path.”

Principle 1: Embody Before You Communicate

There’s a question I regularly ask the managers and executives we work with: when was the last time you translated an abstract idea into something your team could hold in their hands? Most fall silent for a moment, then realize the answer is: never.

The question applies to you too. What object could you bring into your next important meeting to physically anchor the central idea you want to convey? Not necessarily anything sophisticated. A postcard, a cardboard prototype, or an object that metaphorically represents the issue at hand. The effect on the quality of attention and memory will surprise you.

This principle isn’t new.

Jeff Bezos famously had an empty chair placed in every important meeting at Amazon, to represent the customer, the person never in the room, but affected by every decision made there. A simple object: a chair. Nothing more. Its physical presence in the room was enough to reframe debates, short-circuit ego battles, and bring participants back to what actually mattered. The physical object anchors presence where the abstract word slips away without a trace.

The Object That Holds a Team Together

Some objects become, over time, the totems of a team or an organization.

The first prototype cobbled together in a garage, the battered model of a product that never saw the light of day but whose project changed everything, the whiteboard covered in multicolored markers from a founding session. These objects have no market value, but they carry considerable identity value, sometimes without anyone ever deliberately intending it.

The totem-object encodes, in its materiality, what no document can store: a team’s living memory, its moments of doubt and turning points, what it’s been through. Anthropologist Émile Durkheim understood this in his own way: a totem isn’t venerated for what it is, but for what it holds together.

What are your team’s totems? Do they exist? Have you identified them, preserved them, told their story? The next step isn’t to manufacture one from scratch, that would feel artificial, but rather to spot what already exists and make it visible.

Three questions to get started:

1. What’s the oldest object your team still keeps, for no obvious reason?

2. What’s been sitting in a hallway or on a shelf that no one throws away, without quite knowing why?

3. What if you asked the question at your next meeting: which object best represents what we’ve built together?

Once you’ve identified that object, give it a place. Put it where the team meets. Tell its story to anyone discovering it for the first time. New hires will understand in thirty seconds what a three-day onboarding might never have managed to convey.

Principle 2: Prototype Early, Prototype Badly, Prototype Often

There’s a phrase circulating in design agencies that I wish I’d heard much earlier in my career: “Never go to a meeting without a prototype.”

The word “prototype” can be intimidating because it conjures up factories and engineering departments. But in reality, almost anything can be prototyped, often simply: a service as much as an object, a customer experience as much as a product, a communication message as much as a marketing plan. A phone script tested on five customers is a prototype. A pitch deck shown to ten prospects before being finalized is a prototype. A dry-run meeting is a prototype. It doesn’t need to be sophisticated: sometimes something downright rough, cardboard, tape, three Post-its hastily stuck together. But something physical, tangible, that you can put on a table, turn over in your hands, point at.

I have to admit something: for a long time, I resisted the idea of prototyping our presentation sequences.

Delivering something potentially unfinished felt almost disrespectful to the client. I felt the need to polish things to the extreme. That logic was flawed: what I called “polishing” was mostly an elegant way of postponing the moment of truth, without ever confronting my assumptions against the one thing that actually matters , a real room, with real people, who ultimately always react unpredictably. The first performances we decided to film, giving ourselves permission to learn from them, produced more improvements in two months than two years of solitary preparation ever had.

This isn’t the first time I’ve run into this pattern: wanting to understand before doing, theorizing before acting. I started at music conservatory at age 10. Four years later, I’d managed to hate both music theory and my instrument. Not because the teachers were bad, but simply because I wasn’t ready to receive such abstract, theoretical instruction.

Learning music is, in every way, like learning a language: before writing, a child speaks. Before reading sheet music, they need to play their first melodies. Imposing music theory before the physical gesture means engaging the wrong cognitive system at the wrong time. The work of Damasio and LeDoux converge on the same conclusion: we remember what has moved us emotionally. Playing a recognizable melody produces an immediate emotional response. Deciphering eighth notes on a staff does not. Emotion is a powerful vector of memory.

Bill Buxton, in Sketching User Experiences, is unequivocal: you don’t prototype to show what you’ve already thought, you prototype in order to think.

One important point: a prototype’s value is inversely proportional to the time spent building it. A prototype that took you three weeks to build is a bad prototype: you can no longer abandon it without pain, you’ll end up defending its flaws and building around its mistakes. Worse still, the longer you carry it, the more it stops being something you can evaluate coldly. You end up defending the idea not because it’s good, but because it’s become part of you. A prototype built in twenty minutes can be thrown away without regret and remade five times in a single day. Rapid prototyping protects your clarity of judgment.

At the design firm IDEO, teams deliberately work with low-tech materials, cardboard, foam, modeling clay, not out of artisanal nostalgia, but because the crudeness of the material prevents premature attachment. No one defends a cardboard model as if it were their child.

There’s a direct consequence of this principle for how you use AI. The best moment to bring it into a creative process isn’t at the beginning, when it can generate options faster than you can sketch them. It’s afterward, once you’ve done the physical work of prototyping. Using AI to replace the prototyping phase eliminates exactly the one phase where your thinking is irreplaceable: the phase where you negotiate with reality’s resistance. Used afterward, it can accelerate, enrich, and challenge. Used beforehand, it short-circuits the one part of the process only you can do.

We experienced this principle firsthand at Paradoxa by investing in a 3D printer and a laser cutter: the number of use cases that emerged within a few months surprised even us — not because these machines are magic, but because they reduce the cost of failure to almost zero. When turning an idea into something physical costs you only twenty minutes and a few grams of filament, you dare to try ideas you’d never have risked if testing them meant three weeks of development. We also invested in enormous two-meter-tall whiteboards that can stand vertically or lie flat on a table. The sheer size of the object radically changes the quality of the result: these oversized formats give us a richness of ideation that an on-screen mind map could never match.

Building Together Rather Than Debating Together

Beyond the quality of ideas produced, which we discussed earlier, building something together also changes the nature of relationships. Richard Sennett, in his book Together, observes that teams who build something tangible together develop a quality of connection that those who merely debate don’t reach as naturally.

Watch what happens in a room when you ask senior executives to build something with their hands, even clumsily, even with cardboard and tape. Hierarchies flatten, and participants look at each other differently. One clarification is in order, because you might be picturing team-building with modeling clay, trust falls into a colleague’s arms, or the forest cohesion retreat everyone would rather forget by Monday morning. That’s not what this is about. What produces this effect is building a shared object with its real constraints: its dead ends, its micro-negotiations, and the concrete need to make something hold together. A problem that can’t be solved with a good PowerPoint presentation demands a different quality of presence.

This is precisely what we aim to produce at Paradoxa.

If you want to improve cooperation in your team, start by giving them a shared physical experience, because that’s a neurological and social precondition for authentic cooperation.

The real question isn’t whether you, personally, know how to prototype. It’s whether your organization has created the conditions for “doing” to be legitimate at every level — not just within product or R&D teams.

Principle 3: Start With What’s Already at Hand

In 2001, American researcher Saras Sarasvathy published the results of a study that would upend part of what we thought we knew about entrepreneurship. After observing expert entrepreneurs, she discovered something unexpected: they don’t think like managers.

Classic managerial logic is what Sarasvathy calls causation: you start from a defined goal, identify the resources needed to reach it, then build a plan. Expert entrepreneurs reason according to a radically different logic, which she calls effectuation: they don’t start from a goal and work out the means. They start from the means available and let possible goals emerge from there. Their first principle is stated simply: “Start with what you have.”

It means recognizing that action precedes vision, and that you don’t really know what you want until you’ve started doing something. The goal, then, isn’t a starting point, it’s often an ending point, and not always the one you’d imagined.

For managers and executives, this principle has concrete, often counterintuitive implications. Effectuation doesn’t say to abandon all planning, it says: start by doing something concrete with what you have, observe what it produces, and adjust. The plan comes after the first move, not before.

Three questions to test this principle in your own practice:

• When you face a complex problem, how much time do you spend thinking before doing anything physical? If the answer is “a long time,” you’re depriving yourself of the only feedback that matters: reality’s.

• What’s the smallest, most concrete, fastest thing you could do today to move forward, with no extra resources and no complete plan?

• What do you already have at hand, a skill, a relationship, a tool, that you’re not using because it doesn’t quite match what your plan says you should be using?

Effectuation begins exactly there: in an honest inventory of what exists, not in an idealized list of what’s missing. On this topic, I recommend the excellent book L’effectuation by my friend Philippe Silberzahn.