048: Creative Collaboration for Wicked Problems with Brook Manville

Pete Mockaitis
Brook thanks so much for being here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Brook Manville
Thank you Pete. I am glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
So can you tell us when you’re not writing books and Forbes articles, what are you doing for fun? What else is keeping you busy?

Brook Manville
I like to travel. I was recently in Cuba which is quite exciting given the political change there, and went hiking with my wife in Patagonia, a couple months after that which was really awe-inspiring, and I tend to sit in the tennis game from time to time to keep myself sharp with my waning athletic ability. So I do a little bit of that too.

Pete Mockaitis
I think my roommate just left for a tennis lesson.

Brook Manville
Good.

Pete Mockaitis
So much good stuff up on Forbes and so I just kinda wanna jump right into a couple of your articles that I was enjoying recently. Could you share with us a little bit of what are some of the ideal leadership practices when it comes to wicked problem-solving?

Brook Manville
Yeah sure. I got interested in problem-solving kind of through the back door, that I’ve been studying for a long time decision-making and collaboration for innovation, and a lot of those lead back to some kind of problem-solving, and I met a researcher who’s been studying this for years and this particular type of problem-solving called wicked, it’s kind of a jargon word but it basically means you know really big thorny problems where the problems keep changing, where you’re never completely done, where there many many different stakeholders, where the whole approach to how to solve the problem at the beginning is not even clear, let alone what the answer is.

Maybe one of the classic wicked problems was the discovery or the beginning of what led to the discovery of AIDS, the HIV outbreak. Course climate change is probably another one, and over time there’s been a sort of a methodology that evolves about how do you actually tackle these kinds of problems, and it’s all about building some kind of collaboration and collective intelligence with a group of people and then inevitably a broader network of people to continue to frame the question, reframe the question as more is learned and grow the momentum that sustained itself over time because it will be a continuing process.

Pete Mockaitis
So tell us what are some of the practices or questions or means by which you can do some prudent framing and reframing of the question.

Brook Manville
Well when you’re dealing with so-called wicked problems, you have to take a sort of a system perspective. You gotta realize that you’re dealing with a range of variables that interact with each other, a range of players that are in constant motion if you like, and so you’ve got to put your arms around what is the whole system, and you need to involve as many players or representatives of that system as possible.

So for example, when they started to crack the AIDS problem, there was a huge breakthrough when one of the doctors, doctor researcher said, “We can’t really understand this well enough unless we actually have patient suffering this strange disease here at the table with us.” So over a lot of course of disagreement at the beginning, this doctor who’s now well-known doctor at NIH, Dr. Anthony Fauci, he brought AIDS patients who were literally suffering to the table, to work side by side with researchers and clinicians and other people directly serving the NIH, to start to tackle what is the nature of this, of this disease and how do we begin to think about finding a vaccine or some kind of solution to managing it.

So anyway, the notion is that daring to open your arms and say everybody who’s a part of the potential system, which I as a leader you know me well, envision as one of my contributions. It needs to be brought together so that’s really critical. Another thrown around term in leadership discussions but it’s so important for any kind of collaborative innovation or creativity or problem-solving, particularly of this sort when you have lots of different stakeholders, is building trust and the whole game is about essentially putting people in a safe frame of mind and a relaxed frame of mind so they can be the best that they can be, so that they can learn from each other, that they can contribute to each other and as soon as fear or hidden agendas creep into the room, the innovation, the problem-solving shuts down.

So there’s a very utilitarian and people often portray trust is this kind of moral social justice kind of thing but it is very utilitarian. It’s all about allowing people to work together toward solutions in a much more comfortable and open way.

Another theme that came out of my discussions with this researcher and some personal experience as well, is that you’ve got to balance kind of the short-term and the long-term, but more specifically you have to build a momentum for people by giving them some kind of payback or some kind of benefit that they can kind of quotate to the bank or take back to their home, home office in their home, constituency. Even when the big long-term and often uncertain solution is off in the future, you have to build momentum and keep people engage and you have to do that by giving them some sense that progress is being made in that some kind of short-term milestones are being met and that they can actually take advantage of. So the leadership challenge is actively managing getting people some short-term deliverables if you like and maintaining their momentum and maintaining their enthusiasm so that they essentially stay on the team and keep working together for the long pay off.

Pete Mockaitis
And so when you say payback, you’re talking about, “Oh, we’ve achieved something! We check this off the list, I could feel progress” or are there other forms of payback?

Brook Manville
There’s kind of two things. There’s the collective, we achieve something, we can feel good about that as a group, but there’s also, there’s a specific thing that your particular constituency has been asking for or needs. So it’s being very savvy about player by player, you go around the table. What do they really need, what do they need to feel like this is worth their while and their constituencies while to stay engaged.

So in the case of AIDS, the patients, they just wanted hope that they’ll be able to have access to some of the latest clinical trials even if it was unclear that the clinical trials were actually gonna lead to a specific solution but they have been shut out from a lot of those. So that was a very concrete kind of Gimme if you like that the leaders of that effort were allowed to open up and that helped sustain the momentum and keep the pressure collectively on everybody, to keep working.

Pete Mockaitis
I see, okay. So understood and I’d also like to hear when it comes to keeping folks relaxed. Are there kind of best practices or things that show up that can really strangle the relaxation before it can flourish?

Brook Manville
Well again it’s another cliche but a lot of it begins with relationship building. So the good leaders who were doing this kind of problem-solving, are working hard to make people feel comfortable in terms of who each other around the table are. Maybe he or she is spending some time off line with individuals to understand if you join this workshop for this session we’re gonna have what are your personal concerns, what are you afraid of, lot of it is kind of emotional intelligence kinda stuff and also just plain relationship building, getting people comfortable with somebody who’s maybe they’ve never met before, somebody who maybe has been an adversary of theirs in the past but they have to be at the table with. So it’s almost like setting up of a great dinner party, making sure the right people sit next to each other and that the right topics are talked about. I don’t wanna make light of it but I mean it’s kind of a social engineering of a group that comes through, in a very hands on and very empathetic treatment of every individual around the table.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, and so once some short-term wins have been flowing there, what comes next?

Brook Manville
Well I think there’s a whole process of kind of, to use some jargon is called adaptive learning. That’s a fancy word for essentially continuing and continuing to assess what have we learned, what’s different than what we believed a week ago, in light of what we now have reflected upon and seen, it’s either different or not working, what would we do now? But systematically doing that are not counted doing it accidentally.

You’re periodically pausing, reflecting, assessing and then reframing is necessary the problem. It may be well that you start out the process saying, “The three core questions are this, this and this” and then after month you say, “You know what, only two of those questions are right we completely missed the third one, the real third question is this” and to be willing to change that and to get everybody on the same page and again to institutionalize that kind of pause, reflect and reframe is a very critical aspect of this kind of problem-solving and  it’s a form of adaptive learning. They’re adapting your process and you’re adapting your methodology if you like periodically, and in structural way as you learn new things and frankly discard things that really do wrong, that were mistaken assumptions.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m wondering there. I guess that it does take some of trusting in relationship-building so that folks don’t kind of plant their heels on the ground like, “Now this is my idea, this is my kinda path, picture for what happened.”

Brook Manville
Exactly and not take it personally, and that’s a very hard kind of culture to establish in a room. I was talking to another researcher recently, I got another blog coming out about sort of what’s called big teaming. Working with a Harvard Business School professor named Amy Edmondson, who’s wrote a book about this. She talks all about what’s called the trap of advocacy, which is when a leader gets very enthusiastic about a vision or maybe in a problem-solving situation. It’s about his or her idea of what the answer is of the solution and start pushing harder and harder to get people sort of excited about working on it.

The active advocacy even though it’s well-intended can often shut down the learning because people start to feel like well, he or she is so in love with this idea and like I don’t want punctured his balloon, I don’t wanna raise my hand and say, “I actually think there’s some data that says that’s not exactly what you say.” So you have to, on the other hand if you’re not enthusiastic and sort of in an advocacy mode, people wonder like well, “What’s gonna happen?”, “Is this for real?”, “Is this leader committed to this process or not?”, “Am I on the right team here working on this?” So it’s a very delicate balance about kind of moving the group collectively forward for being very open, to both admit that you might be wrong or hearing somebody else’s ideas and I think that’s another aspect that’s important.

Pete Mockaitis
I totally agree and I remember this is one of Bain’s operating principles, was the “Openness to the 1% possibility” which is what they called, and that possibility being that you’re dead wrong, that you are, some things are totally mistaken here.

Brook Manville
Yeah. Exactly and that’s hard for a lot of leaders. I mean many leaders literally self-defined as I’m the person who is most often right or even a hundred percent of the time and in any of these kind of collective processes, that’s actually a huge danger and even an obstacle because it shuts down exactly where the power of the solution-building is gonna come which is the people around the table.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we got the learning and then what happens?

Brook Manville
Well I think it’s a native process so usually these things take place over a long time so I’d say there’s probably another couple of things to mention.

One is, in embrace and in signaling of essentially a process of immersions, and by that it’s that it’s not so much that the answer is known and then we just have to find it, but it’s that the answer will evolve and then it’s not necessarily to be something that is in fact known and hidden, but it has to be almost constructed iteratively in a way that it will literally emerge out of the work that we do, and again that is a counter-intuitive understanding of problems for many people on edge. They think it’s like finding the treasure chest at the bottom of the ocean, all we have to do is keep digging, but sometimes there is no single treasure chest and you have to sort of construct it and be willing to come together  in ways and from areas in arenas that you didn’t expect so uncomfortable with sort of an emergent process I think is part of the leadership that has to be modeled in and pursued, and finally this is kinda complimentary to a lot of things I said but it shows up in a lot of discussions of these kinds of situation.

Leaders have to be willing to share power but, and this is the caveat, not totally, and by share and it’s like you have to be willing to sometimes let somebody who has superior knowledge or superior access or superior experience takeover and either have his say or have her say, and sometimes literally just rotate, taking turns at the head of the table, but signaling that you’re open to not always being in charge and not always having the last say.

On the other hand, leaders have to be able to understand when the whole effort is dangerously going off the rails or if there’s some larger constraint that goes beyond the abilities of the people in the room or the people on the team. Then leaders do have to step in and knowing when to step in, and knowing that there is a risk of overreaching whenever you do step in as final voice is a very tricky balance and yet it’s so important because rarely do these kinds of projects completely self-organize.

There’s a lot of utopianism out there about given the right network, the right people always come together and solve the problem and that’s true but it’s an incomplete statement. There’s always at some level a leader who is guiding, nudging and stewarding that kind of process along. In my experience that, I’ve interviewed for my Forbes column expert after expert on different aspects of the collective and collaborative work and they all say the same thing, self-organizing is overrated. It plays some role but it’s never complete, leaders do matter.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well that’s a nice final word, a message anything else you wanna say about this piece on the wicked problem-solving?

Brook Manville
Yeah, yeah sure but I think that’s good I mean let’s pause there, I think usually people should feel free to go read the blog where it’s fleshed out a little bit more formally, but I think you’ve hit on the highlights Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s great, it’s really comforting to me especially that emergent solution piece because I feel like I am on this like quest for the holy grail. Particularly when it comes to marketing I’m thinking, okay this podcast is 10x the size it was launched, that’s exciting, but growth is slowing down a little bit.

Brook Manville
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
My, fine where’s the solution is, is it Instagram, is it Snapchat, what I need to be doing and then to think that no hates emerging and we’re gonna kind of figure out over time and in a conversation dialogue with listeners and others, what works best. It kind of gets me chill out a little bit.

Brook Manville
Yeah well exactly. Even in my Forbes column, it’s been incredible education because I watch carefully which of the pieces I write get the most page views and some of the ones that I thought they were sure winners, did okay but nothing greater. Others that I thought were just kind of, maybe yes, maybe no, but they took off and it’s very very hard to predict and you have to be very humble at one level and realize that sometimes the crowd to the market knows more than you do. In fact it often does and you just have to honor that. Again it’s another aspect of sort of an emerging process that you have to embrace.

Pete Mockaitis
You may find that the crowd overwhelmingly downloads Brook Manville episode and that’s a proportions and then we know –

Brook Manville
Yeah well yeah. I mean there’s the political currents going on now is another example that I mean my god you talk about the the Brexit, or the candidacy of Donald Drumpf, or the non-Candice you have Jeb Bush. I mean all those things were such surprises versus you know the quote expert opinion of what was gonna happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Brook Manville
And it’s just an example of stuff emerges and you have to kinda deal with it and at it is best you embrace it or at least you embrace the process even if don’t know its answer.

Pete Mockaitis
“Stuff emerges and you got to kinda deal with it”, might make it to the pulled quote, we’ll see, we’ll see. That’s the one to beat right now.

Brook Manville
All right, okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s talk a little bit about you’re creating creativity articles. That’s pretty fun, you’re interviewing a theatrical director and coming up with some key take-aways there.

Brook Manville
Yes. It started because I’m a fan of the theater and I had seen a couple productions of this guy, his name is Ethan McSweeny and I had by chance, the Shakespeare director or at least I saw him in the Shakespeare theater which I belong to, here in Washington DC, and I had a chance to hear him at a lecture.

As I was hearing him talk about putting on some of his plays, I was struck how unlike certain number of directors or film directors I’ve interviewed, it wasn’t all about him. It was all about how did he sort of discover and bring out the best of the actors and the other people in the company that he is working for and he’s very thoughtful about and he had a real sort of management perspective on this. Eventhough he’s quite a creative guy, and so I asked him if I could interview and we had a series of conversations about. It became clear that he had a real, he can never really even articulate it, in fact he enjoyed our conversation and help him sort of bring those ideas forward, but he actually had a whole kind of sort of theory of how to develop creative productions and so I captured those in two back to back blogs that I wrote, very interesting. …

Some of the themes are similar to what we were just talking, problem-solving. Again his approach and again not all directors do this but certainly someday when Ethan McSweeny does. They think about not so much their own vision although they don’t suppress it, but they think about their own vision in concert with a vision that is adapted, evolved and even co-created with actors and set designers and lighting designers and that kind of thing.

So everything that he is doing is about again creating a level of comfort and safety of people so that they can co-create with him. They’re spending a lot of time improvising and trying things out and he’s very open to a different way of approaching an interpretation of a particular character, particular seem to, in one character’s own interpretation. But he’s also willing to sometimes say, “I don’t think this is gonna work”, and he has to serve credibility to be able to enforce that but he’s still balancing it. But anyway back to the third analogy so it’s about creating a collective product of intelligence or a collective product of creativity, but it’s done so with the process that creates transparency, creates trust, creates truthfulness, and allows in many cases the answers to emerge as opposed to being directed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very intriguing. So could you maybe offer a couple more examples of how that comes to life and practice so, you got a scene and he has one vision for how it should go, and then there an actor has a different perspective and could you maybe paint a picture for us?

Brook Manville
Yeah well he actually invited me to some of the rehearsals and I was wishing watching him. So he was doing a scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and there’s a scene where there’s a play within a play, and all the trade similar sort of putting together this clumsy play in a clumsy way about Pyramus and Thisbe which is a sort of a Greek myth about two lovers and of course it’s an uproarious scene within the play and normally it’s played in a fairly slapstick sort of way, but he introduced some very serious elements to it, having to do with sort of that the social status of these different tradesmen in the world, the living, and that came out through conversations with some of the actors were having with him.

He hadn’t originally thought about that, but they were their own alternative practitioners and some of them said, “I think instead of making me a buffoon in this part of the scene, why don’t I show some pain and some agony because I’m struggling with something that I don’t know how to do and that will be comic, that’ll be comic in a more Charlie Chaplin kind of way.” So there were a lot of examples like that, that he walked me through.

So these kinds of half-improvised, have-guided collaboration, and there’s lots of tiny little pieces through a three-hour play that are constructed. It’s all below the surface and it’s all kind of emerging of the sort we see and the stewarding of all these little co-created pieces is I think what a real creative approach of the sort that he takes anyway, does it and can be very effective.

And I think it’s a model for leaders doing any kind of creative or collaborative work, being open to good ideas on the surprises of the people working with you, being willing to co-create those innovations but also something enough of a firm idea about what overall you’re trying to accomplish. So that when something comes up as clever and empowering as it might be, if it really doesn’t fit you have to say, “This one has to go to the cutting room floor we can’t use it but thanks for trying.” They’re making people feel not so bad that particular idea didn’t get used. So I think that’s a real art of kind of creative leadership whether you’re problem-solving or doing creative innovation or anything like that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so interesting. I’m making some connections over here because well, maybe this is a controversial view but I believe the TV series Breaking Bad is among the finest art that has been produced recently.

Brook Manville
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m one of their fan, did you watch them?

Brook Manville
Yeah I’ve seen them sure yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And Vince Gilligan, I was so obsessed, I was listening to multiple podcast about Breaking Bad at one point in time and it’s so fast this like Vince Gilligan will speak to how he had wildly outlandish ideas and the writing staff backed him away from like, “No no no no no don’t quite do that because of A-B- C-D” and he’s like, “Yeah okay you’re right”, and so here’s this person that we really can a put up on a pedestal as being a super creative genius and he’s following kinda the same playbook in terms of letting others reel him in and him collaborating with the other writers around the table.

Brook Manville
Yes yes exactly but there was a new movie that was just documentary about Yo-Yo Ma that was produced called The Music Of Strangers I think it’s called, which I highly recommend very very fascinating. He puts together this international band called the Silk Road Ensemble and he hand-picked, Yo-Yo Ma handpicked these very sort of accomplished but also kind of slightly rebellious musicians from all over the world to play with him and the Senshi fuse their music.

There somebody from Iran who played a particular kind of a string instrument, there was this flute player from I think China, there was another person from Galicia in Spain and the whole movie is about how they try to fuse their music together and they’re playing off of one another and sometimes clearly the fusing and the collaboration is working and other times it isn’t.

Yo-Yo Ma in general will not be sending a whole lot but he will step in from time to time and say, “I realize this isn’t working, let’s try it a different way.” Another time he just completely steps back and watches with amazement as two of the band players come to find each other and create this entirely new sound and he incorporates a right lay. So it’s this wonderful, active, both sort of reaching out and in some cases guiding or even directing and other times, stepping back and letting the members of the team, if I can use that term, discover the innovation and then finding a way to integrate that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful picture. Okay. Anything else you want to put out there Brook associated with this creativity pieces and the merging collaboration before we shift gears into the fast faves?

Brook Manville
The only thing I wanna say is that in my writing, in a lot of the research, in interviews that I’ve been doing, I continue to see that the kind of teams we’ve been discussing are really kind of a systemic shift for leadership and they’re increasingly important for the world. I don’t wanna sort of over dramatize it but some of the general themes we’ve talked about finding performance across a collective group of people, complementary skills, and experiences, and even cultures.

Building trust, to bring those people together and to make them work effectively, you’re taking a role of sharing power so that the best ideas not only come forward but are often co-created or emerged over time. Those are themes that we’re gonna see again and again with increasing frequency and as we think about some of the world’s biggest problems, whether it’s global warming and climate change or you think about fixing the medical systems, they’re so broken in so many countries, or you think about stopping terrorism.

It’s all about bringing together lots of different constituencies and people with different kinds of expertise often with very different perspectives and bases of power. In old industrial speak, it’s the silos that must be broken down. Figuring out how can these really large problems not only be solved but can we find the right kind of innovation. But the leadership skill is about essentially creating this kind of community approach to problem-solving and innovation and it’s just gonna be so important for us in whatever realm of an endeavor lies ahead for us.

I think it’s a major thing for people to be thinking about and working on, and if you have leadership aspirations, it’s definitely I think a very healthy framing for how to think about what leadership is gonna be in the coming years.

Pete Mockaitis
I agree and it’s kinda fun to imagine what are those teams, what do they consist of, associated with the folks who are, or stopping terrorism or what not, like what interesting new faces and voices which you bring around the table, like someone who escaped from example ISIS.

Brook Manville
Yeah you could certainly bring some ex-terrorists but just to talk at the moment about something like ISIS or what not. So much of the devastating growth of that entity has been because there’s such superb storytellers of a certain ideology and they’re using social media.

So my two cents on this question is one of the forces of good that has to be at the tables, we need more people who are good at telling stories about the good things in life. Where are the counter narratives? So it’s not just about intelligence and arms and borders. It’s also about storytelling and it’s also gonna be about citizen engagement because the police can’t do everything. We’re gonna need people in neighborhoods and people in communities playing their role to guard against when unattended packages and so on. When you think about all the different players that have to be working together to really stop that, it’s a much bigger circle of people that I think most of our current efforts are.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a lovely final point and with that, I’d love to get your take on some of your favorite things here.

Brook Manville
Yeah sure.

Pete Mockaitis
So could you start’s off by sharing a favorite quote? Something you find inspiring?

Brook Manville
I’m a great fan of Mark Twain and I love the quote, I couldn’t get it exactly right but it goes something like, “Always do the right thing. Some people will like it and the rest will be astonished.” It’s a kind of a funny quote which remind you that most people don’t actually do the right thing and that I try to in my consulting work and when I’m writing. It’s often harder but going the extra mile to either make the ethical call, or do google little bit extra homework or really bring something to the right level of quality is a rarity and one should strive for it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, and how about a favorite study or piece of research?

Brook Manville
There’s no single study that I point to again and again. I do have a bias towards a call at the facts behind the stories. So there are journalists, and there are bloggers, and there are researchers who, this is more of a type, they pick a common belief for a common narrative, or a sort of a mythology they found in the public space and they ask, “What are the facts actually about this, about the top?” And so for example I’ve been, I was reading some research in the other day about, it has the one on poverty actually worked. How much do the people who support Donald Drumpf actually represent ill-educated, low-income, white male and often the answers to those kind of popular wisdom questions are counter-intuitive answers that well in fact it’s not what the narrative sense and I think looking at the facts and really understanding it, and people who try to do that to continually adjust this avalanche of sort of mythologies that in a rocket across all the social networks in the media today. I think is a really valuable kind of study or kind of research to pursue so I look for all sorts of versions of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. How about a favorite book?

Brook Manville
There’s books all through history and literature, that’s a long list. Probably way back in my past, I was actually a professor of history, and I think the most meaningful history book I’ve ever read was … I still revere that study of history. It’s this very emotional but at the same time ultimately rational look at what went wrong with a great idea call democracy and also a war in support of democracy and what do we learn from that and I go back and look at … all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay and how about a favorite, whether it’s a tool, whether it’s a piece of hardware or software or gadget or extension? Something you find yourself using frequently?

Brook Manville
There’s a sort of an obvious answer and tools around, things like you know Gmail. That’s not really very thoughtful. …

Probably the consulting tool or the thinking tool that I used in my consulting days with my clients again and again. I even use it in my own decision-making. It’s the classic 4 Box Matrix which is hard to do, easy to do, high value, low value. The shorthand of it is find the low-hanging fruit, but of course it’s a little bit more than that. It’s trying to in some simple and often quick and dirty but nonetheless systematic way, understand what’s the cost and the value of actually doing something versus some other choice. They’re really mapping that out, I find that whether it’s personal decisions or investment decisions or helping something like clients think about how to prioritize, the first three things that they should do in the next quarter. It’s so useful, it’s so simple, and yet so many people kind of forget about it or don’t understand it or haven’t had experience with it. So I find it to be very helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes thank you. I love a good two by two. Good times.

Brook Manville
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit? A personal practice of yours that’s boosted your effectiveness?

Brook Manville
People have written about this in recent times and it used to be sort of laughed at but it’s a quick power nap. I have my own body, everybody has their own body rhythm and body cycle. I just find that in the late afternoon, not always but often, my clock goes down and instead of staring at my screen trying to bumble along, I just gonna lie down and close my eyes for 15 minutes with my IPhone timer and it works wonders. It’s the best thing and if I can’t do that I’d go out for a walk around the block or not. We are civilization today, we’re so in love with sitting at our screens and just powering on going going going, but  realizing that some measure productivity goes so far down you just got to refresh yourself. So I was trying to do that and it really does work for me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m a believer there, and how about a sort of a fan favorite nugget or piece that you share, finds its way getting up retweeted a lot or shared broadly or kind of folks nodding their heads and taking notes when you share it. Is there any little tidbit or quote of yours that’s quite popular?

Brook Manville
The quick answer is no, in the sense that I don’t have something that’s always ready to go but I can tell you, we’re talking about a virgin processes and what not. I used to be a college professor and then of course I’ve been writing off and on articles and couple books through the years.

I’m always struck by when I meet people, “Has somebody will pick out one particular piece of something I wrote?” and said, “The most important thing that you said in this article that I quote again and again is this” or “I still remember professor Manville, your lecture when you said –. ” But it’s never the same thing and so the learning is although I guess, probably I’m known for a couple of things I’ve written about organizational learning and things like that. Some of the things I’ve written are circulating, quoted again and again. The bigger issue for me is that if you can touch somebody in a way that they really remember one piece of something you did or one quote, one particular diagram or something like that. It’s very rewarding personally, to be able to make that kind of contribution to somebody, but the real lesson is it’s not gonna always be the same thing. Different people on different pearls and in what you’re writing or what you’re thinking about and that to me is the exciting thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, and how about a favorite way to find you, folks wanna learn more, interact with you, where do you point them?

Brook Manville
Well there’s two places. I publish pretty regularly at Forbes so it’s forbes.com/sites/brookmanville, my blog is there. I do have a website at brookmanville.com where my Forbes articles and other articles that I publish and have published are there and I’m also on Twitter at brookmanville and always glad to correspond and to exchange things through that vehicle as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Do you have a favorite challenge or partying call to action that you leave folks with who are seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Brook Manville
I have a quote and I don’t know who it should be attributed to, but it’s a quote that I’ve had on the top of my desk for years and it’s that, “Worrying is the misuse of imagination.” The reason I put that there is I probably have a tendency, my wife certainly says, to worry too much sometimes and we always in any kind of job, I find, start thinking about too quickly, “Why is this not gonna work?”, “Why is it better for you not to do this after all?” so on and so forth and that worrying, that sense of maybe it’s probably a somewhat more elegant version of the Nike slogan, “Just do it.” You’ve got to not spend your imagination worrying about all things that can go wrong, think about all things that not only can go right but that you are try. So I thought that’s a quote I like to invoke from time to time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well Brook thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise here. It’s been a ton of fun. I wish you lots of luck at Forbes and all the cool things you are up to over there.

Brook Manville
Thank you very much Pete. I enjoyed our conversation thank you.