In the highly volatile, disruptive world of information technology, solution providers need to be prepared to think freely and quickly to respond to changing conditions in their markets.

Daron Roberts has personal experience at that in finding his career path.

While on track to graduate from Harvard Law School a decade ago, he was ready to go to work – as a volunteer on the coaching staff of the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs.

Roberts, now founding director of The Center for Sports Leadership and Innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, believes business leaders need to recognize – and even welcome – "vulnerability and empathy" as keys to generating ideas from within the organization to yield positive results.

"The ability to take the perspectives of others is a starting point," he told a gathering of technology leaders from midmarket organizations Monday at Midsize Enterprise Summit West in Austin, Texas, sponsored by IT Best of Breed's parent, The Channel Company. "Research has shown that managers who are willing to be vulnerable in the workplace to their teams" wind up leading teams that "tend to be the most disruptive and foster the most innovation, because [team members have] seen the vulnerability from the top."

Here's Roberts' three-step "blueprint" to allow disruptive thinking in business:

Write a "rejection resume." This is where you start, Roberts says. In the education section of the resume, list every school you did not get into and, under awards, every award and honor you did not receive.

When you're looking to generate input and ideas from other members of your team, "it begins to level the field," Roberts said. So, "you take that rejection resume and then you pass it along to the members of your team." He said he did this with a Fortune 100 company.

"Within days" after the lead manager wrote a rejection resume, "people were creating their own rejection resumes and circulating them. So, there was this circle of rejection."

"It begins to level the field," Roberts (pictured) said. "It humanizes you and it enables the other people on your team," leading them to realize that "we're all in this "together."

People put us on a pedestal because they think "we have all the answers, and you and I know that we don't," he said.

Choose strategy over hope. During Roberts' two years on the staff of the Detroit Lions, then-new head coach Jim Schwartz, taking over a team that had finished an unprecedented 0-16 in 2008, put up a sign that read, "Hope is not a strategy.

Players, as well as staff from the Lions' marketing and sales groups, were "just hoping that Detroit would turn the corner. But no one was converting that hope into strategy, sitting down and thinking, 'What are the steps that we need to take in order to get this team out of the basement?'"

Schwartz also put up whiteboards throughout the Lions' offices to solicit ideas. "It became an empowerment tool" that enabled people to contribute toward the goal of making the team improve, Roberts said.

Create "Failure Fridays." Roberts picked up this idea from a company he worked with, in which a team "applauds the biggest screw-ups of the week."

The manager, he added, wanted to "create a climate where people understand that … none of us are perfect and … we're all going to mess up." But, as he recalled the manager saying, "as a manager, I'm always playing the long game. So if I can make people feel comfortable to innovate and fail," that will generate ideas, Roberts said.

So, if you have an idea, Roberts concluded, "throw it out to the marketplace. … Maybe the company's going to run with it, maybe not, but throw it out there."