187: Increasing Creativity via Constraints with Drew Boyd

Pete Mockaitis
Drew, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Drew Boyd
Thanks, Pete. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so looking forward to this and I wanted to ask, for starters, to really put you on the spot, since you work with a lot of folks on innovation and present in many ideation sessions, I’m imagining you’ve heard some wild ideas in your day. Could you share with us one or two that are just outrageous and continue to make you kind of giggle when you think about it?

Drew Boyd
Oh, you mean like actual ideas that people thought were very serious ideas? Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, they could’ve thought that they were serious, or they could’ve known that they were ridiculous on the way to something good. But I just got to imagine, you’ve heard some things in your day that would just be knee-slappers.

Drew Boyd
Okay. So the one that comes to mind, I still laugh about it, it’s not a crazy idea at all but it comes out of the mouth of a third-grader, and that’s the reason I love it so much. And when I thought him how to innovate using a systematic approach, he created an umbrella that has a handle on the normal place you’d have an umbrella handle, and then another handle on the spike. Okay? So you have two handles.

And I looked at this kid, his name was Sam, I said, “Sam, why the heck would you want an umbrella with a handle here and a handle on the spike?” And he looked at me and his eyes got real bright, and he said, “Oh, oh, Mr. Boyd, I know exactly why.” He said, “If the umbrella is up and the wind blows it out, all you do is just turn it around, grab the other handle and you’re ready to go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes.

Drew Boyd
It was one of my crowning moments. It was a really funny thing to see, this kid learn how to innovate and actually came up with that idea on the spot. It’s not a bad idea at all. It’s cute and funny and naïve but still innovative, no doubt about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. And I guess if you’ve ever been in that spot where your umbrella is, in fact, blown upside down or concave/convex – I always get those mixed up – if flipped around a bad way then, yeah, you might want that extra handle. That’s pretty cool.

Drew Boyd
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I understand that there is a bit of a story, your own lived experience that underlies your method. Could you maybe walk us through that narrative for starters?

Drew Boyd
Yeah, absolutely. So what’s interesting about creativity, Pete, is that most people think that it’s some special gift that you have to have. I preach just the opposite, that innovation and creativity is a skill that you can learn like any other skill whether be in business or in your personal life. And that takes people by surprise because they’ve had this notion all their life, they’ve been told all their life that they’re not creative, that you have to have special gifts, and that’s just isn’t true.

And so what I teach is based on the book that I co-authored with my colleague Dr. Jacob Goldenberg, The secret to creativity is based in patterns. And here’s the story. For thousands of years, every day inventors, innovators, have used patterns in their inventions usually without even realizing it. Those patterns are now embedded into the products and services you see around you every day.

I want you to think of the patterns as the DNA of a product or service. So imagine if you had a way to extract that pattern and reapply it to anything you wanted to innovate whether it’s a product, like an umbrella, or a service, or a business model, or an organization. As it turns out, based on my co-author’s research, the majority of innovative products in the world can be explained by just five patterns. Five patterns, that’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s intriguing.

Drew Boyd
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Drew Boyd
Pete, it’s very intriguing. And what’s true is you don’t really have to master all five. I teach my graduate students and my corporate clients all the time that just mastering one or two of these in your organization is going to instantly boost your creative potential.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you got me so intrigued and, well, we will dig into these five patterns. But I got to hear this from you, and I don’t know where else to park it, so apologies if this is awkward. But you also mentioned that creativity is not just cool and fun in terms of advancing your career and kind of having a better time at work and making a bigger impact. But you said there’s actually some compelling research like in terms of being more creative can reduce your mortality risk. Can you give us some of that quick why foundation before we jump into patterns?

Drew Boyd
Absolutely. So I’ve read this research recently that I think it’s based on this notion that people are predisposed to want to invent. It’s survival, right? We have to solve problems all the time. And what frustrates people a lot of times is they just don’t have a lot of times the cognitive ability, right? They can solve basic problems but they haven’t been trained on how to solve more advanced problems.

And so this fascinating research shows that people who have learned and make an effort to be more creative, live a happier life. They’re more fulfilled. They’re able to solve routine as well as complex problems put in front of them every day at work, at home and everywhere else. And so it makes sense. It seems to reduce the stress, it ups and amps up your enjoyment. And I can vouch for this. Anytime I teach creativity to my students or corporate clients and whatnot, I find this common theme to all of them.

Somebody comes up with a great idea and you should just look and see the look on their face, the look in their eyes. They get this big smile and this big grin, and then they feel this sudden glory of coming up with a great idea, and it’s a very fulfilling thing. And so I think that is probably the genesis of this research and the explanation behind why people would probably live longer if they could only learn how to be more creative.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Yes, okay. So I’m sold and I know that feeling that sometimes you’re just so excited and you’re just you don’t want to be rude but it’s like, “When is that other person going to stop talking?” so you can say it to the world before it escapes. So, understood. Alright, so have more fun, make a bigger impact, live longer, we’re sold. So what are these five patterns?

Drew Boyd
So the five patterns, let me tell what they are first and then I’ll tell you the secret to using the patterns, that’s also very important. The patterns, now they may sound mathematical in terms of their names but they’re not really. Let me give an example. So one of the patterns is called subtraction. Subtraction is removing something, some core element that first you thought was essential.

So you think back to the Walkman, the Sony Walkman which had the recording function and the speakers is removed, right? Completely counterintuitive. And that product sold over 200 million units and completely transformed the way music is consumed today – subtraction.

Another pattern is called task unification. Many innovative products have had a component of it assigned an additional job. The component had its original job and now it has some additional job. A good example of that is if you think about in your rear window of your car you’ll see small wires going through it. And, Pete, if I ask you what that is you’d probably say, “That’s my rear window defogger or defroster.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so you got to melt that ice down.

Drew Boyd
Sure. Absolutely. Guess what else is on many cars? It’s also the antenna.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Drew Boyd
Yeah, so the wires have the additional job, very innovative, and many, many products have this aspect as well. Another pattern is called division. Division is when you take a product or a component of it and divide it either physically or functionally and then rearrange it somewhere back into the system. So this is a pattern you’ll see a lot in process innovation.

So think about where you print out your boarding pass today versus where you used it to print it out in the old days. So, of course, the airlines have done, believe it or not, a lot of innovation on check-in processes, so have car rental firms where they’ve done a lot on check-in process innovation but it’s also highly prevalent in products and services.

So take something like a straw, a regular straw that has flavor inside of it, right? So the flavor from the drink has been taken out and put inside the straw, and you only get that flavor as you consume and bring the beverage up through the straw. Pretty creative.

Pete Mockaitis
So division then, just to make sure I’m clear, we call it division because, when you say check-in, well, I started thinking, “Well, one about my run-ins with rental car agents,” but, two, when it comes to, I thought of division, like, “Oh, I could check in online, we’re printing a boarding pass on my phone, or at the kiosk, or to an agent.” That’s what I thought about division. The checking in is divided amongst different ways. Or how are you thinking? Are we thinking about it the same way? What do you mean by division there?

Drew Boyd
You’re exactly right. So in process innovation, imagine the traditional steps of the process the way it used to be. You would go in an airport, you would go to the counter, they would give you a boarding pass. And now that step, think of it has been divided out and placed in a different point in time and a different location.

Maybe a simpler one to conceptualize is a drone, right? A drone has had a very important component divided out and placed somewhere else. That component, of course, is the pilot. So that’s a classic example of the division technique. Or here’s an even simpler one. A remote control for your TV is an example of the division pattern. The controls of the TV have been divided off and placed in this thing called a remote that sits in your hand. Classic division. Very prevalent pattern like the other ones, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Drew Boyd
The fourth pattern is called multiplication. This is where you take a component, you create a copy of it but change it in some qualitative way, and this is the umbrella example where young Sam took the handle, made a copy of it but changed its location to be up on the spike of the umbrella. But you see it in other places too.

So, for example, bifocal glasses. Bifocals, of course, have the main lens but now they have a copy of the lens that is down lower at a different power so that you can read fine print and things like that, a great example of multiplication.

Pete Mockaitis
Or like the iPhone camera, they’ve got multiple cameras which make it easier to, I guess, Facetime talk as well as to take photos from different angles or vantage points, and I think they even do stuff synergistically together now, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t actually know.

Drew Boyd
So, Pete, you would do very well on my final exam for my innovation class because one of the things I ask students to do is, “Take a smartphone, an iPhone, and find examples of all five patterns,” and it’s kind of a contest who can find the most patterns in an iPhone and there’s plenty of them to choose from. And you just hit on a great example of the multiplication technique.

In fact, cameras, through the ages, the world of photography is based on multiplication. You’re duplicating an image and re-imagining it on a different format on a piece of paper. But cameras have dual flashes. Now the double flash of a camera reduces red-eye. I’m sure you’ve seen how a camera would flash once and that’s actually to close your pupil before the second flash jumps out at you to light you up, and that simple act reduces the occurrence of red-eye in pictures.

And then the final pattern, Pete, is called attribute dependency. Now this one is unique. This one probably accounts for the majority of innovative products and services. The other four are very powerful too but this one is the mother of all invention patterns, so to speak. The way this works is as follows. Attribute dependency is taking two attributes – one of the products and one of its environment and creating a correlation or a dependency between them.

So, in other words, as one thing changes, another thing changes. I want you to think about transition sunglasses for example. You know this product?

Pete Mockaitis
So as the sun’s light changes, the lens changes to mask it to make it darker.

Drew Boyd
Exactly right. As the brightness of the sun increases, the darkness of the lens increases. A classic attribute dependency. Or another one, the windshield wipers of your car. Many cars now have a feature where the windshield wiper will slow down or speed up depending on what?

Pete Mockaitis
Just how intense the rain is.

Drew Boyd
Exactly. Attribute dependency.

Pete Mockaitis
Because I didn’t know that. That’s really cool. I’m so backwards. My last car was so long ago. So I’ll do it automatically. I don’t have to adjust it in terms of slow, medium, high. That’s cool.

Drew Boyd
Exactly. Yup. And so what these patterns do for you now is they give you a way to essentially channel your ideation for you, they guide your thinking. And, essentially, if you let your brain follow and apply these patterns correctly you product an idea that you would not have produced on your own. Now there’s a secret though, there’s an important concept that I have to explain to use these patterns, and let me go through that with you.

Most people think the way you invent a new product or service is that you start with a well-formed problem, something that may come out of the voice of a customer research, for example. You start with a problem and then you innovate to some solution to that problem, right? From the problem to the solution.

What if I told you you could turn that around 180 degrees, that in fact you can start with a solution to a problem, so a solution, and then work backwards to the problem that it solves? It turns out that humans are actually better at that than the other way around. Let me see if I can prove it to you.

Pete, I want you and your listeners to imagine that I’m holding in my hand a baby’s milk bottle, okay? And this baby’s milk bottle changes color when the temperature of the milk changes. Now, Pete, quickly tell me why do you think that would be beneficial.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you can quickly see that your milk is not too hot to scald the baby.

Drew Boyd
Exactly. And any audience anywhere in the world immediately gets that. But, Pete, what if I had said to you instead, “Okay, folks, we need to come up with a way on how not to burn a baby with milk that’s too hot.” How long would it take you and your listeners to come up with a color-changing milk bottle?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I imagine I would come up with a bunch of stuff which would be pretty clunky. Who knows if I would land on that one in the mix or not?

Drew Boyd
And even if you did you’re going to do it much later, it’d take a much longer time. Truthfully, you may never land on it. And so I want you to see, you had the ability to start with this configuration – color-changing milk bottle – this hypothetical solution and immediately connect it back to a benefit much faster than when I said, “Hey, Pete, here’s the problem. Come up with a solution to it now.”

Pete Mockaitis
Now, my lean startup instincts are screaming right now so I got to pay heed to them and bring this up. I think that sometimes – and I’ve made this mistake and I’ve mentioned it on the show before – you’ve got a solution, you realize the problem it solves, and then you overestimate the extent to which anybody really has that problem intensely enough to pay you money for your solution, and then it’s a disappointment in terms of the results and not heeding product market fit. So I just got to throw that out there and say how do we contend with that issue?

Drew Boyd
So, no question, that’s important. However, that is what I call the testing phase or the viability phase but it still starts with the idea. You’ve got to have ideas, novel ideas to go out and test in the marketplace, and so I certainly agree with you. What we do when we work with our groups, with our students or clients, is put some of these ideas to, let’s call it a back of the envelope or a quick check-in, “How viable really is this? Does it have some benefit? Is there a potential market? Is there a potential user?”

So in the case of the color-changing milk bottle the people in the room would probably go, “Yeah, moms have this problem. They worry about their kids all the time having milk that’s too hot or being burned.” And so we also put it to a technology or implementation filter. It doesn’t make sense to have a great idea but everybody in the room is sort of shaking their head. They know that it’s just not feasible from a materials point of view or maybe a regulatory point of view.

So I’m a big believer in weeding out the non-viable ideas right off the bat. And you know what happens, I have some bad news for your listeners – please don’t shoot the messenger here – but brainstorming doesn’t work. Brainstorming is a tool that’s been around some 60 years now and there is a ton of research, so much research now that the research community doesn’t even debate it anymore whether brainstorming doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work because what brainstorming does is it sends your mind out on this vast unconstrained space where the mind suffers idea chaos or idea anarchy. And what happens in brainstorming sessions, of which I’ve been through many, somebody will come up with a whacky idea but everybody has been told to withhold judgment. And so people get excited about the idea but there might be one person in the room that knows deep in their heart that, “This idea will never see the light of day. It’s just not going to happen.” But they don’t say anything in the room because they don’t want to be the naysayer.

And what happens, these ideas then eventually get killed, they’re not viable, the organization spends a lot of time and energy and frustration weeding these ideas out when, I’m with you, it makes much more sense to put these ideas to an early test, just a reasonableness test so you don’t waste a lot of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say brainstorming doesn’t work, I understand what you’re saying with regard to it’s risky business to not have a testing, filtering phase on kind of early-ish on your ideas. But I guess I want to make sure I’m hearing your sentence appropriately. I’m thinking that it is absolutely, in my experience, the case that if you have a group of folks together with the goal of generating numerous ideas you will, in fact, generate numerous ideas as a result of other people being present, imbibing off on one another and building off on one another and withholding judgment.

So that’s not what you mean by brainstorming doesn’t work or like that. That does happen. So you mean, yeah, go ahead.

Drew Boyd
Pete, here is what it means. Brainstorming was invented in the late ‘40s by a man named Alex Osborn and, boy, was it popular. This idea of people in a small group, six to eight people, generating ideas. And the academic community jumped on the brainstorming bandwagon too and they started to study it to see what would optimize it.

And the first of these was a researcher named Taylor from Yale, and what Taylor did was a straightforward study. What he did is he took a group of, say, eight people that would brainstorm on a task versus eight randomly-selected individuals brainstorming on their own, individually, on the same task. Fair fight, right? Side-by-side comparison. And what do you think happened on the very first clinical trial?

Well, the control group, the eight individuals, in that group, outperformed the brainstorming group, producing 80% more ideas and better ideas. Now this upset a lot of people, and a lot of other researchers rushed in to discredit Taylor. And what’s true is that for the last 50 years there are tons of research that validate this idea that brainstorming is no more effective. In fact, it is actually less effective than ideating on your own.

Now, brainstorming has a place every so often when you just want to quick-check again or team building and things like that, but as a rigorous corporate innovation method I encourage people to move on to things that have more efficacy and science behind them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s really interesting, Drew. In a way it’s a bit disappointing to me, an extrovert, who loves brainstorming.

Drew Boyd
Oh, it is fun. The research showed that people enjoy the brainstorming experience very much more so than sitting individually but the results just don’t bear out. And here’s another quick example of this research. One of the things that Osborn believed is this first rule of brainstorming, “No bad ideas,” right? Defer judgment. And it seemed to make sense. It seemed to make sense that if you separate the generation of the idea from the judgment of the idea that people will feel more free to give their ideas, right? It seems to make sense.

But what the study show is just the opposite happens. Here’s what I mean. Imagine you’re in a group brainstorming setting, and you’ve been asked now to share an idea but nobody can judge you. Now you don’t know where your naysayers are. Now you don’t know what people are thinking. And what humans naturally do is they feel this tension to offer only safe ideas that are going to be acceptable by the group. In other words, it exactly defeats the notion of coming up with wild ideas.

And so two types of ideas get produced in brainstorming sessions. The really wild exotic whacky ideas that everybody knows you’re not going to take seriously, or the safer ideas where you’re more concerned about how the group feels about you. You’re more worried about your status in the group, so to speak. And this is just one of numerous reasons why brainstorming has been shown to be ineffective.

And, Pete, like you, I was pretty upset when I read this research because I had been trained in brainstorming and I kept thinking to myself, “Good grief, why does the corporate world continue to use this?” And I think it’s simply people just don’t know about this research.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I’m wondering, Drew, if maybe this is just my last ditch grasp at brainstorming. But I’m wondering if you can get the best of both worlds in the sense that everyone does their individual ideation and then the group comes together and says, “Hey, look at this motherload of ideas. Hey, tell me, is that sparking some new stuff for you guys?”

Drew Boyd
So there had been attempts to do that kind of permutation on brainstorming and there had been a lot of variations, brain-writing, brain-zooming, and all these different crazy-named ideas. And the only flaw that I see in them continues to be this idea of this. When you put the human mind in an unconstrained condition it suffers. It goes through idea chaos.

And what the research is clear about, all the researchers agree that you need to put constraints around the mind. You talk about how to be awesome at work, right? Well, this is one way to do it. Put constraints around you, where most people think constraints are a barrier to creativity. Guess what? Constraints are actually a necessary condition for creativity to occur. And the mind works much better, much tighter when it’s bounded. It’s able to come up with ideas and, essentially, that’s what these patterns do, Pete.

These patterns force people to be very tight and constrained in their thinking, very formulaic and systematic. And I’ve had people in workshops look at me as I’m facilitating the way they think, and their eyes get real bright kind of like salmon. They look at me and say, “Oh, my God, I feel so free to come up with ideas.” And it’s not because they’re thinking outside the box. Just the opposite. It’s they’re thinking inside the box.

Pete Mockaitis
And, hence, the title there of your work. So, then, I’m wondering with the group ideation there, are you saying that it can still be done in a group setting so long as there are some constraints or a challenge to work with those principles?

Drew Boyd
Yeah, I certainly would say that’s the case. In other words, if I were going into a group session with some colleagues, and we weren’t going to use the five tools but just work together on a problem, the first thing I would do very, very clearly is to find the constraints around the problem, because it doesn’t make sense to generate ideas that violate the constraints.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Drew Boyd
And so when I work with a new client, one of the first questions I’ll ask them is, “Tell me what the constraints are.” And, occasionally, I’ll have a client say to me, “No, Drew, we don’t want any constraints. We want to be open to all possibilities.” And you know what I say to them? “No constraints. No project.”

Think about it. I don’t want to go in and fail, and I know I’ll succeed if I get the client to put the constraints around the problem that generate the creative resources in people’s minds. So I know it’s counterintuitive. I remember when a client called me once, he was the head of a large division and he was about to have a town hall meeting the next day, like 600 people, a big, big meeting. He said to me, “Drew, here’s what I want to say to my team tomorrow. What do you think?”

He said, “Imagine next year you had all the resources and time and money you wanted. What would you do to produce growth?” And he says, “Drew, what do you think? What do you think?” And I said, “No, that’s not what I want you to say at all. What I want you to say is this, ‘Imagine next year you have no money, no time, no additional headcount. Now what would you do to produce results and growth?’”

So which approach do you think is going to produce more novel ideas? Well, clearly, the latter, right? It’s going to force people to be more creative when they work in constrained environments than when they work in unconstrained environments.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Okay. I hear you, and I think we can talk to Scott Sonenshein, had some similar perspectives on that, talking about constraints and their value. And so I’m wondering, now in the realm of constraints I guess you have the universe of zero constraints, and then max constraints in what you’ve sort of laid out there. What about moderate constraints?

Drew Boyd
Yeah, what you’re describing is another cognitive sort of skill or behavior. You talk about being awesome at work. I call this skill zooming in and zooming out. And I used to have my colleagues, Jane and Jay, come to me all the time, and they would say, “Drew, how do we get our young people to be more effective at this? The more senior people seem to know how to get high up above the problem and then zoom right back down on the ground and be able to work through the mechanics.”

And so we teach this as part of this method, this idea of zooming out and zooming in. So let me give you a couple of examples. Imagine you work for a company like Boeing, and Boeing makes a lot of things, one of them is commercial aircraft. Now Boeing likes to innovate their commercial aircraft, and so one of the constraints would be, we would say, “You can only come up with innovations within the cabin of the aircraft.”

And so we think about all the different things in the cabin like seats, like windows, like flight attendants, passengers, overhead compartments, things like that. But, now, to get more creative, we say, “Now you can only invent new ideas dealing with the seats.” In other words, we zoom right down on top of the seats and force the team to only innovate in that space. In very tight constraints, and sure enough, they come up with very clever ideas. But we can take it further. We can zoom out.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Zoom it out, yeah. I was like, “Let’s do the tray. How can I make it hold a phone or an iPad?”

Drew Boyd
Well, now, so the closer now you zoom the more creative you’re going to get. No doubt about it. And I’ll give you another quick story here that demonstrates this. I had a pharmaceutical client that was trying to launch a new drug in China and a lot at stake. A big market, very important drug, it was a diabetes drug, and the team was just struggling. And they said, “Drew, we just can’t get our head around this.” And I knew right away it was a problem with this idea of constraints, of zooming in and zooming out.

And so here’s what I said to the team leader, a guy named Whaley, I said, “Whaley, let’s not look at China. Let’s pick one city in China.” And he said, “Shanghai,” and I said, “Okay. Well, that’s 25 million people, that’s still pretty big.” I said, “Let’s think of a smaller city, maybe a couple million people within, let’s say, 300 kilometers of Shanghai.” He named some cities. And I said, “Okay. Now let’s go to one suburb of this city with maybe 30,000 people.” He said, “Okay.” He’s kind of looking at me, scratching his head, and I said, “Now, Whaley, let’s look at just one neighborhood in that little suburb. Now let’s look at one street on that neighborhood. Now let’s look at one home on that street.”

Now I said to Whaley and his team, I said, “Now, I want you to imagine one man in that home with age 50 with Type 2 diabetes.” And I said, “Team, look, if you can’t figure out how to get your drug from where it’s made into that man’s body, that’s just that one man, every day at the right dose,” I said, “you can’t forget about China. But if you can figure out, just for the one man, all the logistics and shipping and packaging and supply chain and duties and customs and refrigeration and needle disposing, and all the things that have to happen just for one.”

“Well, then you zoom out and you go to another house, and then you zoom out and you go to another street, and you zoom out and you zoom out. You get it? And before you know it, you have built from within, the very tightly-constrained one home, one man-scenario and you build out from within up to the broader market.”

And that’s what gave them the breakthrough. It was a real breakthrough for me, too, because it just reinforced this notion of constraints and thinking inside the box, and the skill of zooming in and zooming out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So what I’m hearing then is that you want to have some constraints and you want to keep kind of flexing it in terms of zoomed in, many constraints, zoomed out, fewer constraints, and you’re going to be getting different layers of goodness at each iteration.

Drew Boyd
Exactly. With this one caveat. All the team members at any point in time have to be on the same level.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Drew Boyd
So you can’t be innovating on trays while I’m working on cockpits of an aircraft, right? So we have to be on the same page on that. And then you get exactly different layers of ideation as you pointed out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I’d love to maybe tackle a different example right quick. I just got an email today from a listener who said he was trying to figure out the question, “When do I know it’s time to leave my job?” And so I thought, “Well, that is a tricky one, and I’ve done a lot of thinking and kind of worked on that.” And so you had many great examples associated with products and sort of services and processes and delivery mechanisms. So I’m wondering, when you’ve got a question that doesn’t fit as neatly into either of those categories, how do we make the connection so that we can put these good tools to work on it?

Drew Boyd
Good. So it recalls a story when I was at Johnson & Johnson of one of my team members. A lady that came to me and she just was exasperated, she just said, “You know, I’ve been here a long time and I love my work but I need something new. I just don’t know what direction to go in,” kind of like your listener, “When do I move on?”

And, at the time, I was still learning this method and practicing with it and experimenting, and I decided to experiment with her on this very scenario. And so I decided to use the subtraction technique. Remember that one where you essentially take away some essential component?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Drew Boyd
So here’s the way it works. I said to her, her name was Phyllis, I said, “Phyllis, let’s list out the components of your life.” And so we got up on my whiteboard and we made a list of the aspects of her life: her family, her spouse, her neighbors, her friends, her job, her education, her hobbies, her financial situation. We listed it all out, right? All the different components of her life.

And then I looked at her and I made her pick a number randomly. She went to the whiteboard, she had to pick a component numbered randomly, and I’ll tell you why I did that later. So she would blurt out a number, like number five. “Okay. So you have no children.” Now, I know it’s a sad thing to conceptualize but here’s what I said to her, I said, “Okay, Phyllis. Now, imagine you have everything else in your life, but you just have no children. What would you do instead? Where would you take your life? What would you do differently? Would you travel more? Would you invest differently? Would you go back to school? What would you do differently if you didn’t have children?”

Then she came up with a lot of interesting ideas. She said, “Well, you know, I’ve always wanted to write a book,” and dah-dah-dah-dah. And then I said, “Okay, let’s pick something else.” And she said, “Okay, I don’t have the same educational background that I love.” And I said to her, “Okay. Great. So, now, you have all the other components, just not this one component. Now, what would you do differently in your life?”

And through this short exercise, only 30 minutes, she started to see much more possibility in her life that she wasn’t considering. And she was suffering from a condition that we all have. It’s a condition called fixedness. Fixedness is this cognitive bias that makes it hard for us to imagine other possibilities than what we know. And by using this cognitive tool, this subtraction technique, she was able to see new possibilities by having this systematically removed one at a time. Not that we’re going to do that for real. We’re not going to get rid of her children, for God’s sake, but as a mental exercise it helped her see and reframe the problem.

So, to your listener, I would ask her to do the same thing. List out the components of her life. But here’s the key, she can’t go back and look at the list. She has to kind of turn around and avert her eyes, and then randomly pick something. Otherwise, she’ll succumb to fixedness.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “Oh, I don’t want to give that up.”

Drew Boyd
Yeah, exactly. “I don’t want to give my jewelry up. I don’t want to give my car up,” right? And that’s why I do it randomly. You want to take away something that’s provocative to make you in a new constrained way see a possibility that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. And it worked for her, I’m going to guess it might work for your listener as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Drew, I love that kind of final note because it seemed like you keep talking about, “Go ahead and pick up constraints.” I’m thinking, “Oh, it sounds so boring and it’s like tying me down.” But then, effectively, the constraint you’re offering, imagine not every possibility but possibilities directly popping up as a result of this thing being subtracted. In a way it’s a constraint but it’s also the relief of a specific constraint. So it’s like we’re having our cake and eating it too.

Drew Boyd
It does. It removes something that release you of it even if it seems essential but what it does is it reframes your life. It reframes the problem for you. It breaks fixedness. And we can’t get rid of fixedness. We all have it but we need a cognitive tool like these five tools if we’re going to be more creative in the workplace and other parts of our life.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Well, Drew, thank you. This is so good. Tell me, anything else you want to mention before we rapid fire and hear about some of your favorite things?

Drew Boyd
No, it’s been great to talk to you. As you can tell I’m very passionate about this. It really does make people better off, and they feel encouraged and motivated when they know they can be creative by learning a straightforward method.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Alright. So, now, how about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Drew Boyd
“Could the greatest invention of all be a method of invention?” Heavy. That’s pretty heavy. And I really believe in that one because I think this method is just that. It’s an invention, it’s a method of invention that can really, really affect any part of a person’s life.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Drew Boyd
Well, a favorite book. I am just starting a new book. I’ve just received it from a colleague of mine, it’s called Raising Thinkers, and it’s Preparing Your Child for the Journey of Life. It’s written by a lady named Tremaine du Preez. She’s based in the United Kingdom, in London, and I helped her with some of the content for this book. And I’m really excited to read it. Honestly, I haven’t read it yet but that’s on my next reading list. So I love books that tackle cognitive skills especially as it applies to our young people because we’ve got to prepare the next generation for this crazy world we live in.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool?

Drew Boyd
A favorite tool. Okay, that’s tricky. So I make guitars. I’m an acoustic guitar maker in addition to other things I do – teach and speak and whatnot. And so I have to tell you I’m in love with my chisels. I know that’s crazy but these chisels are not just any old chisels. They’re made, specially, in Maine and they are just amazing what they can do in the right hands. And so, yeah, that’s my favorite tool. That may not have been what you’re looking for.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite habit?

Drew Boyd
Yeah, a favorite habit. Well, one of the things I’m always keen on is something I learned from one of my professor colleagues at the University of Cincinnati. It’s a condition that he has researched called omission neglect. We have this tendency to not take into account things that are missing in our life. We overweigh things that are available to us. And so I’m now in this habit of being always cognizant of omission neglect. So something is missing from any situation you’re facing. In fact, we’re starting a new book about this, and so I’m trying to really build this awareness, this sensitivity to missing information in my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And, tell me, is there a particular nugget that you share in your teaching, your speaking, or writings that seems to really connect with folks, get Kindly book highlighted, re-tweeted, note taken, heads nodding?

Drew Boyd
Something that really resonates. Yeah, I love to look at people, but here’s what I say to people. I looked into the eyes of so many corporate practitioners and students and friends and neighbors, and everybody is looking for their breakout moment, right? So, Pete, if I were with you right now, I would say, “Dude, what are you waiting for? Life is short. Make your breakout move.”

And I find that people are reluctant to take risk, and I push them. I said, “Look, you’re skilled, you’re smart, you’re ambitious. What are you waiting for? Go out and stake your claim, play big, make the world a better place.” And sometimes people just need a little swift kick in the butt to help them think that way, and I think that’s an important thing to remind people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And, Drew, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Drew Boyd
www.DrewBoyd.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Perfect. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Drew Boyd
A final challenge is this: just remember, your job is not to be the smartest person in the room. It’s really to go out and collaborate and nurture and build alliances with people. That’s what’s going to make you awesome. You’re awesome, too, but, boy, when you put the power of awesome people around you, you really do amp up your game and stand the chance to make the world a better place.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Drew, thank you. This has been such a treat. I think that I will be thinking very differently in the months and years to come. So you’re such a blessing. Thank you.

Drew Boyd
Great. Thanks, Pete.