INSIDE OUT – The Unofficial Sequel
We saw the movie Inside Out last weekend. It was good, not great, but I recommend it because the concept is so original. The movie takes us inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. We witness her trials and tribulations from the point-of-view of her five emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. Riley’s world is rocked when her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco.
The movie is good enough that there’s sure to be a sequel. But what if that sequel doesn’t do the predictable and follow young Riley to high school? What if it races ahead three decades and features the emotions of a 41-year-old Riley, her life in the corporate world, and the role those emotions play as she struggles to be an effective leader?
I’d like to be involved in the development of that concept. From my vantage point as an executive coach, I’d offer four suggestions to the folks at Pixar to make the movie interesting and authentic, and deliver leadership lessons for the viewers. Here they are:
1. Bosses replace parents.
Riley’s parents are preoccupied with their own issues about the West Coast move and, as a result, show little empathy. They fail to pick up on Riley’s nonverbal cues, which would have told them she was struggling. The same is true of Riley’s bosses in the sequel. They’re preoccupied with their own emotions and don’t understand that a leader’s job is to create connectedness. They’re clueless about mirror neurons and fail to understand that Riley’s emotions will mirror theirs. Like a boat motoring on a lake, they too have a wake, an executive wake, and when their wake is choppy, direct reports like Riley have a difficult time navigating.
2. Fear plays a bigger role.
Fear is constantly awfulizing about the 11-year-old Riley’s life, worrying about the bad things that could happen to her. In the sequel, he morphs into the gatekeeper of Riley’s comfort zone, giving her bad advice about avoiding confrontation and fierce conversations and encouraging Riley to micromanage her direct reports to assure that they don’t make her look bad.
3. Disgust takes center stage.
Disgust is the preteen emotion that monitors how Riley dresses and how she acts to assure she gains the approval of the “cool” kids. In the sequel, Disgust transforms into the dominant emotion that most threatens Riley’s success. It motivates her to put status ahead of results and choose invulnerability over trust, and leaves her wondering why her team isn’t aligned with her.
4. Peer group to the rescue.
The actual movie culminates when two emotions, Joy and Sadness, collaborate to find their way back to headquarters (get it?) and get Riley OK with her parents, new home, new school and her hockey team. The sequel’s denouement arrives when Riley joins a peer group to help her improve her leadership skills. The group’s dozen members are a diverse lot, unafraid to confront Riley on her work behaviors and hold her accountable to change. The group’s chair (facilitator) is a Merlin-like sage who channels the wise men and women from his past who trained him. He’s voiced by Kenneth Branagh, whose direction of Henry V offered so many lessons for leaders. Her group helps Riley see things about her leadership that she was afraid to face. They open her eyes to how her emotions have held her back as a leader; she learns to confront her fears and be indifferent to those emotional attachments that have caused her to worry about what others think. And she lives happily ever after.
I hope Pixar likes my suggestions and doesn’t think they’re too self-serving. And as they develop the script, I hope we learn more about Riley, important stuff, like did she continue playing hockey in college? Did she ever date a red head? And if she earned an MBA in b-school, did she attend Booth, like some other smart people I know.