Keynote Resources
The Trickster's Method
Your brainstorming room is a crime scene.
You just sat through the evidence. Here are the tools to do something about it.
The Three Moves
1. Cross
Leave the brainstorming room. Go to the factory floor, the call centre, the farmer's market — wherever your customer actually makes decisions. The gap between what you think is happening and what is actually happening is where every innovation lives. Boundary spanners produce disproportionate results. The research confirms it. The mythology already knew it.
2. Question
Not the easy question about the struggling product. The hard question: what are you too profitable to challenge? What meeting exists because someone got burned in 2017? What sacred assumption have you never tested? If nobody on your team is allowed to ask that question, you do not have an innovation problem. You have a permission problem.
3. Build
Make progress visible in fourteen days. Not a deck. Not a roadmap. A thing someone can touch. Teresa Amabile's research (~12,000 diary entries, 238 professionals) found the number one driver of creativity is making progress in meaningful work. A separate survey of 669 managers ranked it dead last. Now you know what they didn't.
The Trickster Score
Score your team. Each question 0–10. Be honest — nobody else sees the number.
1. Cross __/10
When did someone on this team last watch a customer face-to-face, in their environment — not yours?
2. Question __/10
What sacred assumption did you challenge this quarter — and what did you learn?
3. Build __/10
What shipped in the last 14 days that a real customer touched?
Total: __/30. Below 15 = innovation theatre.
(Observed coaching pattern — not a study. Nobody counted the fifteen. Use it as a mirror, not a verdict.)
Monday Morning — Pick Your Row
Three actions you can take tomorrow with zero budget. One row per role.
Cross
- Founder: Text 5 customers — “Can I watch you use this for 15 minutes?”
- Leader: One leadership meeting per month on a customer site. No slides.
- Team lead: One hour in the support queue. Bring back 3 verbatim quotes.
Question
- Founder: Run the cheapest possible test of the one assumption that kills you if it's false.
- Leader: Primary-source your deck's top 3 numbers — who counted? Then name a licensed fool (“the challenger chair”) — rotating, protected.
- Team lead: Ask: “What do we do because we've always done it — not because it works?”
Build
- Founder: Ship something a customer touches in 14 days.
- Leader: Turn 1 KPI from activity into outcome. Stage-gate funding on 14-day builds.
- Team lead: Brainstorm alone-then-together: 10 minutes of silent writing first (Girotra et al., Management Science, 2010).
The Trickster is a license, not a personality. Issue it. Protect it. Kill the theatre. Ship the work.
Sources
Every load-bearing claim in the talk, with its citation and its caveat. The talk opens by demonstrating how a fake statistic spreads — so this list carries the hedges, not just the headlines.
Diehl, M., & Stroebe, W. (1987). “Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: Toward the Solution of a Riddle.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(3), 497–509.
Groups generate fewer and lower-quality ideas than the same people working alone; production blocking is the mechanism. Among the most replicated findings in small-group research.
Mullen, B., Johnson, C., & Salas, E. (1991). “Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: A Meta-Analytic Integration.” Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 12(1), 3–23.
Twenty studies: bigger group, bigger loss. The finding has critics — like every finding worth having.
Girotra, K., Terwiesch, C., & Ulrich, K. T. (2010). “Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea.” Management Science, 56(4), 591–605. informs.org
Alone-then-together beats pure groups on volume, average quality, and the quality of the best idea. Lab setting with student teams.
Capgemini Digital Transformation Institute (2017). “The Discipline of Innovation.” capgemini.com
The provenance moment from the talk: the famous “80–90% of innovation labs fail” figure inside this report is the estimate of one anonymous interviewee — not a Capgemini measurement. What Capgemini did find: innovation centres opening at ~10/week (2017), the majority not making their organisations measurably more innovative.
Blank, S. (2019). “Why Companies Do 'Innovation Theater' Instead of Actual Innovation.” Harvard Business Review. hbr.org
The name. Blank names hackathons explicitly.
Shih, W. (2016). “The Real Lessons From Kodak's Decline.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 57(4). sloanreview.mit.edu
Kodak, inverted: Sasson's 1975 digital camera, Matteson's 1979 forecast, EasyShare's US #1 position by mid-decade (US market share, not global), and why the business model — not blindness — killed the film giant. Shih ran Kodak's consumer digital business before Harvard.
The Quartz Crisis: Trueb, L. (2005). The Beat Goes On — The Story of the Watch; Seiko corporate history. seikowatches.com
Swiss CEH quartz prototypes beat Seiko's at the 1967 Neuchâtel chronometry competition; the industry built a few thousand and went back to gears. Swiss watch firms: roughly 1,600 (1970) to roughly 600 (1983) — counts vary by source and definition.
Bilalić, M., McLeod, P., & Gobet, F. (2008). “Why good thoughts block better ones: The mechanism of the pernicious Einstellung (set) effect.” Cognition, 108(3), 652–661. doi.org
Chess experts reported searching for a better solution; eye-tracking showed their gaze kept returning to the familiar one. The transfer to strategy teams is an argued analogy, framed as such.
Jeppesen, L. B., & Lakhani, K. R. (2010). “Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search.” Organization Science, 21(5), 1016–1033. informs.org
166 InnoCentive challenges, 12,000+ scientists: the further the solver's expertise from the problem's field, the higher the solve probability. An edge in a distribution, not a guarantee — self-selected solvers on one platform.
Hyde, L. (1998). Trickster Makes This World. FSG. / Radin, P. (1956). The Trickster.
The archetype: consummate boundary-crossers, independently invented across cultures on every inhabited continent. Interpretive scholarship, presented as such — the organisational claims rest on the research above, not the mythology.
Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (1990). “The Organizational Fool: Balancing a Leader's Hubris.” Human Relations, 43(8), 751–770. doi.org
The court jester as a paid, protected, licensed role; the fool as structural counterweight restoring the leader's “capacity for reality testing” (his phrasing). See also Otto, B. K. (2001), Fools Are Everywhere.
Edmondson, A. C. (1996). Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 32(1), 5–28; and (1999) “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
The hospital reversal: better teams reported more medication errors — they admitted rather than hid them. The construct, psychological safety, followed in 1999. Two studies, deliberately not collapsed into one.
Katalin Karikó: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 (with Drew Weissman). nobelprize.org; Karikó, K. (2023). Breaking Through.
Demoted off the tenure track in 1995 after failing to attract grant funding for mRNA work — the university's stated rationale was funding, not a verdict on mRNA.
GE Predix / GE Digital: WSJ, Fortune, Bloomberg coverage 2017–2018; GE three-company split announcement, November 9, 2021. ge.com
Caveat, as spoken on stage: outside estimates of the spend range from $2.5 to $5 billion; nobody outside GE knows the exact number — which is itself part of the diagnosis. Predix was not all theatre; the theatre was in the measurement.
Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The Progress Principle. Harvard Business Review Press.
~12,000 diary entries, 238 professionals: progress in meaningful work is the #1 driver of creative output. A separate survey of 669 managers ranked it dead last. Diary methodology is correlational.
The Trickster Score threshold.
“Below 15 = innovation theatre” is Felix's line in the sand from coaching 50+ startups — an observed pattern, not a controlled study. Nobody randomised startups for him, so you get no fake precision here either.
Everything on this page as a printable A4 PDF — the method, the exercises, and every source.
Print versions of the field card and templates: email felix@vulpine-industries.com and name the talk.
Live version with clickable links: https://felixlenhard.com/trickster/
The Book
Subtract to Ship
A four-volume methodology. Publishing 2026.
The Trickster's Method is the front end of the Subtract to Ship system — before you can subtract, you need to find what matters. Cross.Question.Build is how you find it. The full methodology, the research, the case studies, and the implementation playbook are in the book.
About the BooksBook Felix for Your Event
Keynotes (20–45 min). Workshops (half-day). Post-talk office hours. Available in English and German. Based in Graz, Austria — available internationally.
Felix is a professional magician. He will bring a volunteer on stage and make them perform the impossible — then explain why that matters more than your last hackathon.