Take off the training wheels.

In the Spring of 2012, my collaborator Anna Love and I were in Sao Paulo, Brazil, leading a design thinking workshop for a newly established innovation team at the Grand Hyatt.

We’d had the privilege of working with other Hyatt innovation teams that year, but it was in Brazil that we made a big leap.

Prior to that trip, we’d been asked to deliver a scaled-back version of what we delivered at the d.school, which was great because we were new to delivering this content and new to teaching/coaching as well.

But at a certain point, we started to realize we weren’t giving these teams what they needed to be successful. We could do more for these new innovation teams if we had the courage to color outside the lines a little bit.

So we reached out to the (then) Chief Innovation Officer of Hyatt and asked for more time during these innovation kick-offs as well as permission to do something very different.

Permission granted, Anna and I sat outside the hotel the night before we were kicking off and designed our very first workshop together. Something pretty different from what we delivered at Stanford boot camps.

It was a BIG success for the hotel team, for the larger corporate innovation team, and most notably, for Anna and me.

That week of traveling and working together was the catalyst for co-founding our company Stoked. It was the moment when we knew that we had the ability to create something new and impactful. Anna and I went on to work together for the next decade.

Copying someone else’s format or their style can help you get started. But it’s not sustainable. My experience is that I didn’t feel like my true self when I was using someone else’s format.

But when we designed our own workshop using the same principles, our true selves got to shine, and that made us so much more effective.

If we’d continued to just replicate what we do at the d.school, Stoked never would’ve been started.

Imitating other people's work can act as training wheels, but don’t forget to take them off and learn how to ride on your own.