When I joined Mattel Future Lab in the summer of 2022, the team was operating outside the traditional systems that made Mattel run. That independence was intentional. Still, it had created friction. People across the organization didn't quite know what Future Lab was or why it existed, and some of them weren't happy about it.
You can't invent the future if you're fully tethered to the present.
The first thing I did wasn't to build a strategy. It was to build trust. I already knew many of the brand leads from my years at Mattel, and those relationships turned out to be invaluable. I could translate between what Future Lab was trying to do and what the rest of the organization needed to feel comfortable. Getting that trust in place was the precondition for everything that followed.
The second challenge was internal. Innovation requires sitting with ambiguity. Not knowing the answer is genuinely hard for people trained in executional environments where clarity is the goal. I introduced Design Thinking as a framework for navigating uncertainty, then developed the Future Lab Way, a stage-gated process for decreasing risk before committing significant resources. Helping the team get comfortable with not knowing was as important as any process we put in place.
When trust existed in both directions, outward to the organization and inward within the team, the work changed. People stopped defending their certainty and started getting curious. That shift is what made the next step possible.
In 2025 we established the Discovery team, a cross-functional group of product, design, and technology experts whose job was to run concepts through the Future Lab Way before significant resources were committed.
The first year of Discovery was hard. We had an aggressive goal of putting 20 concepts through our process in an effort to identify 2 that could move into production. We were asking people to move fast, stay humble, and kill ideas they'd invested in.
We exceeded our goal by 30%.
The only reason that happened is because there was trust in the room.
Thinking back on my time with Future Lab, three things really stand out for me.
The relational work isn't separate from the innovation work. It is the innovation work. New ideas need internal advocates, cross-functional trust, and organizational permission to exist. Building that isn't a distraction from the creative process. It's what makes the creative process possible.
Teach people to sit with not knowing. Most organizations are structurally allergic to ambiguity. Getting a team comfortable with uncertainty, staying curious and resisting the urge to lock in answers too early, is one of the highest-leverage things you can do before any innovation process begins.
Innovation is not for the weak of heart. There is a lot of failure in this work, and no process eliminates that entirely. What a good process does is help you find out what you know as quickly as possible, then build frameworks to navigate what you don't. The goal isn't to avoid the unknown. It's to meet it with a plan.