211: Creating Great Choices to Resolve Tough Questions with Jennifer Riel

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

Jennifer Riel
It’s my pleasure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’re really going to enjoy digging into some of this, and I want to kick off by hearing a tale from your checkered past perhaps. You, at one point, were in the back of a police car. What was the backstory?

Jennifer Riel
Well, it is important to understand that I was a bit of a rule follower as child in order to understand why it’s relevant that I was in the back of a police car. So I was in the back of a police car when I was four years old, and this came to be because my mother had discovered that there was a neighbor’s dog who had had puppies and my brother and I were very excited to go see them. And my brother was so excited, my two-years-older-than-me brother was so excited he set off before me, and my mother said, “It’s no problem. You can go. Just keep walking until you see your brother.”

It did not occur to her, nor to me, that he would’ve gone into the backyard rather than in the front yard. So rather than walking the four houses, it would’ve been appropriate. I, being a very literal and rule-following child, kept walking and walking through many, many, many streets, through an intersection with a light and, I guess, ended up walking about 30 minutes as it were, until a very nice lady stumbled upon me and wondered why there was a crying four-year old walking down the street, and sent me home in the back of a police car. That is the most badass moment of mine.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s a great one, and you’re telling the story on podcast years later.

Jennifer Riel
Indeed. And, interestingly enough, my brother became a police officer. So somehow he was more shaped by the experience, I think, even more than I was.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. Thank you.

Jennifer Riel
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m really excited talking about your book Creating Great Choices. I love great choices and creating them. Tell us, what’s the book all about and why does it matter?

Jennifer Riel
So the book is about an idea called integrative thinking, and it actually comes from my co-author Roger Martin. He was the dean here at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. And about a decade ago, he wrote a book called The Opposable Mind, and this idea that he was writing about was that there are some highly-successful leaders out there who, when confronted with a really challenging, daunting either/or choice refuse to make the unacceptable tradeoff and will actively seek to create a better answer out of the opposing answers, so that tough either/or.

And it was a really beautiful book. People really enjoyed it. I was a student here and met Roger as he was writing the book. And when I graduated, he asked me to stay and work with him to figure out how you would actually teach this. If this is a useful thing to do, if highly-successful leaders seemed inclined to do it, is there something that we can teach to those of us for whom it isn’t a natural way of being or something that just comes naturally to us?

And so that was, as I say, ten years ago, and over the last ten years, Roger and I have spent a lot of time figuring out what is that process that you could follow, whether as an individual or in a team, to help you have a greater likelihood of creating a great choice rather than just accepting the tradeoff.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s exciting. And so can you give us an example of a tough either/or intense tradeoff choice? And you say out of those opposing choices, a new one emerges. Could you maybe show us how that unfolds in practice?

Jennifer Riel
Sure, and I think that it can happen at all levels of the organization, but I’ll start with one that happens to feature a CEO just because it’s kind of a fun example. So this is from Lego Group. So we all know the great little Lego bricks of our childhood, and the CEO there is, a former CEO there, now Chairman, is a lovely man, former McKinsey consultant, named Jørgen Vig Knudstorp. And he was CEO at a time when they were thinking beyond the bricks, “How do we start to extend our brand even more than we have?” Literally, all that they make at Lego are the little Lego bricks.

And they partnered to do branded entertainment, and so we’re familiar with Lego Star Wars and Lego Batman. At the time, they hadn’t really done that on their own. They partnered with Lucasfilm or Marvel or whoever else it might be in order to produce that branded entertainment. And, eventually, someone did come to them and say, “Hey, we think there should be a movie, it’s really a Lego movie all about the Lego brand, original entertainment that isn’t tied to someone else’s existing properties.”

And they had actually started down that path, they made a film a few years before based entirely on their own intellectual property, and it was kind of a direct to DVD back when we had DVDs. Not terribly successful, not terribly entertaining film. And the reason that it had been so unsuccessful was that they had really tried to make almost corporate propaganda, right? It was like the most true to the brand inoffensive kind of entertainment. You can imagine the kind of film that is produced out of a corporation, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I would love it if there’s a gem of a dialogue we can recall to reference but I don’t know if you have one handy.

Jennifer Riel
Well, this I will tell you, I don’t have a dialogue, but they named the main character after the chairman of the company.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Jennifer Riel
And so when a Hollywood studio came calling, and said, “Let’s make a movie together,” Jørgen said, “Okay. I feel like I’m in the grips of a really difficult choice here. I can either hand over all of the creative control to the Hollywood studio believing that they know how to make a great movie, but I am giving up my brand. I’m going to have someone else have the ability to be true and loving to my brand or destroy it if I give up all creative control.”

“Or I can insist that we have final say that we, as the company, are going to have the ability to get final signoff on all of the creative decisions. But it’s going to be really hard to get a great creative team who is willing to make a movie under those conditions.” And it really felt like there was no great answer there. He’s sort of in a place where you’re trying to optimize, like, “How much creative control do I have to give up in order to get just enough good creative talent on the film?”

And Jørgen’s challenge was to say, “Now I got to create a new kind of answer here. I have to recognize what I truly value from each of these different models.” And he said, “If I stop going back and forth and trying to convolute an answer and just ask myself, ‘How might I actually get a film that is creatively brilliant and wonderfully fun and is also truly loving to the Lego brand? How might I take an approach that actually gives me the best of both of those worlds?”

And, as it turned out in this particular case, he leaned very heavily into the idea of giving up creative control, didn’t have any signoff, he said, “You guys are the filmmakers. We don’t actually want approval. But we do want to insist on one thing which is that before you start writing a film, before you start actually animating anything, there’s a bunch of people we want you to meet and let’s just go spend that time.”

And so went and introduced the filmmakers Lord and Miller to Lego fans, Lego employees, the people who truly lived and breathed Lego and have been passionate about it their entire lives. And knowing that in deeply engaging with those users that it was going to help those filmmakers to fall in love with the brand as well so they wouldn’t need to have strict controls, they wouldn’t need to have final say because they were turning those outsider filmmakers into people who had true love and affection for the brand.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s clever. I’m with you. Thank you. So, very good. Thank you for making that come to life. So then when it comes to integrative thinking, you’ve got sort of a four-step methodology. But first, could we define, when we say integrative thinking, what precisely are we referencing here?

Jennifer Riel
So when we say integrative thinking what we’re really talking about is leveraging the tension of opposing answers, leveraging the tension of the either/or to create a better choice than what you started with, to actually use that to push you to generate a new answer, new value that didn’t exists already instead of starting with a blank piece of paper or instead of taking one answer and trying to make it a little bit better. It’s about really using the tension between these two opposing ideas and using that as the creative spark.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, so then, how do we get that in practice?

Jennifer Riel
So we think there are four stages that you need to go through. I’ll take you step-by-step through this and I’ll just take you through the first one and you can let me know when you’re ready for me to move on to two, three and four.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Jennifer Riel
So, step one is to take the problem, whatever problem that is, and as I say, I believe that there are problems at every level of the organization every stage of your career where you feel torn between two opposing answers where you wish there was a better choice, and really tease out the two opposing answers.

“So I’ve got a project in front of me, and I know that the efficient and cost-effective thing to do is to standardize, to do what we’ve done before. But I’m a creative person and I really want to make this project my own and I want to customize it to this context and make it truly great, and I feel like that’s going to be a great answer but it’s less efficient and that’s going to be more costly to do it. And so what choice do I make here?”

And so in that particular case what we would say is build out the two opposing answers. “What would it look like if this was a totally standardized approach? And what would it look like if it was a totally customized approach? And then seek to fall in love with those two models. What do I really get from that standardized approach? What do I get? What do my teammates get? What does the customer get? What does the chair holder get if I take a super standardized approach to this project?”

Really seek to understand those benefits, and where they come from and why someone would choose to take that path, and then shift gears and do exactly the same thing with customization. What is it that I get in this really important… other stakeholder get from choosing a highly-customized approach? And really spend time with each of them. We do talk about this as a process of falling in love with the models, and then you will have in front of you, instead of a pro/con chart, the pros and the cons of the two opposing models, it really is an expression of what’s valuable or worthwhile about these two opposing models.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So that’s step one. You’re really trying to fall in love and build out a massive compelling why on each of them, you know, in some detail. So what happens next?

Jennifer Riel
So the next part is actually a little bit harder. So even in the first stage, the hard part would be if there’s one of the models you feel a little less comfortable with or you’re less likely to fall in love with. You can bring people in to help you, you can put yourself in the shoes of people who really do love that model, and see not only people are able to get through the process of falling at least a little bit in love with the two opposing answers.

The next stage is taking a step back and really looking at the two models together, holding them in tension and asking yourself, “What do I see as I look at these?” You might observe that, “Actually they’re more similar in some ways than I might’ve thought.” There are outcomes that you get like engagement, for instance. You might get really great engagement from certain stakeholders from standardization, and you might get really great engagement from other stakeholders from customizing.

You might see points of tension where there’s really great outcome on one side and it’s just missing totally on the other. And you start to use that to really push yourself and say, “What is it I truly value? What is it our team truly values from these two models? What am I trying to get?” And this can be challenging because it’s a social process. What I truly value from the two models might be different than what you value, Pete, and so we have to kind of spend time navigating that and understanding what it is that you value and why, what it is that I value and why. What assumptions are each of us making about these existing models or about what’s possible?

We spend some time thinking about cost and effectiveness in this stage. So if there’s a really great outcome, what currently causes that outcome? And could it be caused in a different way? And when I say this is a little bit harder, it’s in part harder because we don’t always know what we don’t know, right? And so when I say to you, “Tell me the assumptions behind your thinking.” You may not be aware of those, right? It just feels like the right answer.

And so this is why it’s really, really helpful to do this with a group and, in particular, a diverse group, a group that has diverse perspectives already coming in. It’s just a little bit easier, then, to start to see different kinds of assumptions that sit underneath and underpin our thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So it’s interesting, the contrast, then, from step one, which is just elaborating upon, articulating, writing it down, trying to make the case for, or fall in love with alternatives. The second one, holding them in tension. That’s interesting turn of a phrase. I mean, that’s just how I feel in my belly as you describe this. It’s like, by temptation, a Myers-Briggs judging type over here, my temptation is I want to lock it down fast and get it done and nailed and clear or kind of established. And so it sounds like you’re just saying, “Well, Pete, just go ahead and do the opposite of that and roll around in both of them for a while.”

Jennifer Riel
That’s absolutely correct. That’s what I’m encouraging you to do and it is a bit of an active will. I’m with you. I really like closure. I really like certainty. My inclination is always to look for that right answer. And this has been a way of thinking that’s taken a little time for me to learn and engage with because it is holding off judgment, it’s holding off saying, “This is the right answer. This is the one that feels like it. It satisfies me,” and dwelling in discomfort, frankly, of not judging, of not saying which is better, but really seeking to understand.

I have a colleague, a great friend who’s really informed our thinking on this, a woman named Hillary Austin, and she studies artistry, and she makes the distinction between consideration of an idea and evaluation of that. And we learned evaluation really early, right? Is it a good idea or a bad idea? Is it the right answer or the wrong answer? And what she encourages us to do, and she believes great artists do really well, is stay just a little bit longer than we normally would in a space of consideration, considering the models without dismissing any too early.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So an active will, holding back, experiencing the tension, do the consideration. And then what’s step three?

Jennifer Riel
This is where we start to flex our creativity muscles a little bit. This is where we say, “Given all of that, given the tension, given the thinking that we’d done, given the things we truly value from these two models, how might I create a better answer?” Something that takes the best of the two opposing models and create something new that actually solves the problem.

And in this particular case we provide three questions that you can ask to help you push your thinking forward on this. When we first were building up this process for integrative thinking, I’ll be honest, we would get to this stage of the process and we would say to people, “Okay. Now, try…”

Pete Mockaitis
“Have a great idea.”

Jennifer Riel
Yeah, “Try to come up with a better answer. Good luck. Off you go.” And sometimes they could, right? Like they’d spend enough time with the models and there was someone who’s naturally more a creative person, whatever it might be, or just luck, they would generate an answer that felt good to folks. But it didn’t feel totally satisfying that we had no better advice than look for a better answer.

So we actually went back, Roger and I went back and looked at, this was about five years into our work, we took all of the answers we’d seen from those original interviews that Roger had done of highly-successful leaders, from all of our students up to that point, who had done projects for us, executives who had applied to their work, and said, “Are there patterns here? Are there ways they go about combining the models together that helps them create new value?” And those are the three questions we’ve generated is the three patterns we detected.

So some folks would narrow down to just two tiny but essential elements of the opposing models. It’s really about these two core ideas for me and all the rest of it is kind of extraneous and less important. But if I could take just these two pieces and use them as the start of my new better answer then I can create and build and go from there. And so that’s one pathway. What are those two little hidden gems that you would choose? And once you’ve pulled those out you can start to say, “What could I create if those were the basis of my better answer?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I really dig that. Because I’m thinking about the Legos right now. It makes sense to me that if you have those intentions for a while you could say, “Boy, what’s most essential is that these creative people just love Legos the way we love Legos. That’s got to happen.” And it’s just like, “Well.” And so I’m hearing you that in so doing like you might not arrive at some of those essential hidden gems are if you don’t sort of hang out in the tension for a while in order to let that percolate up.

Jennifer Riel
Yeah, I think that’s a great way of putting it, Pete. You’ve got to spend a little time in that and grapple with, “What really is the essence of this for me?” And I think you got a great example there where it’s like, “What we need on the one hand is for us to have confidence, and on the other hand, for the filmmakers to feel freedom. And the way to do that is to build something where they love us enough, that we feel confidence but that love enables them to create in a way that is true to their vision but also true to us.

So you can imagine that that would be something you had to dwell in for a while. And Jørgen, clearly, he didn’t come to that answer by himself or immediately, but he just knew he needed a better answer than the film that had come before. So that’s one question you can ask.

You can also say, “Yeah, I’ve got one model I really, really love but it’s missing one important thing from the opposing answer. And so could I actually take the model that I love and really bet on it, double down, in black jack terms, bet on that in such a way that it actually extends it and does so in a way that I get that one thing I really care for from the other model? And in that case you’d have to say, “What’s that one really important thing to me? And how could I reconfigure the model I really love to get me to that?”

And so the example we often use is actually homegrown. I’m Canadian from Toronto, and we’re about to start the Toronto International Film Festival here this week. And it was founded in the 1970s as a little community film festival, a festival just for the folks in the city to go and see movies from all over the world. And it was pretty successful in terms of getting engagement from local members of the community, but it wasn’t very sustainable, right? You can imagine there’s all kinds of little film festival all over the world that they really eke out enough in revenue to keep going. And that was really the case that they were facing by the mid-90s.

And so there were two models of how to run a film festival in the world at the time. And the CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival was a man named Piers Handling and he actually is really clear. He says, “You know, we are our little community festival where it’s really non-competitive and it’s really about access to those movies and you just buy a ticket and you go and see them.” Very open and accessible, kind of very Canadian, if you will. And then there is this very different model that is highly sustainable but really operates in a completely different way, and that would be the festival at Cannes, and that is an industry festival, right? That is movies for insiders. It’s got a jury and a prize. It’s very tightly curated. Toronto might have a few hundred films and Cannes has 25.

And so Piers is challenged to say, like he loved almost everything about his little community festival but it was missing one thing that he truly valued that he could look at Cannes and say, “What is it that drives that?” And it’s too easy to say the thing that it’s missing is money, right? What drives the money at Cannes? And as he looked at it and he grappled with it and really sought to understand what Cannes had and that he didn’t, it actually came down to something kind of interesting. It was buzz.

So you get all of the media in the world and all of the movie stars all show up at Cannes for these fabulous parties and it’s highly exclusive, and all the velvet ropes and the yachts, and even the prize itself, the Palme d’Or is a highly-exclusive prize, it’s like 25 films can compete and then one wins. And all of this is a real engine for buzz. It creates excitement and enthusiasm and it’s a virtuous cycle, right?

The movie stars would want to win a prize, and they show up and then all the media wants to cover it, and they show up. And the more the media is there the more the movie stars want to be there. And the more the movie stars are there the more the media wants to be there. And all of this drives huge engagement by sponsors and film studios and brings in all kinds of money.

And so Piers is challenged with to say, “Now, how can I be a little bit more like Cannes? How do I bring in a bit of exclusivity in order to drive some revenue? And maybe it’ll take away a little bit of what I love from my existing little community festival.” Instead what he said was, “Could I imagine that my festival even more inclusive? Could I imagine it becoming the most community-oriented film festival in the world in such a way that I could actually use that to drive buzz?” And what he had on his side was the fact that the particular audience he was talking about is a Toronto audience.

And if you’ve never been to Toronto, one of the really cool things about it as a city is it is massively diverse. We’re told, I don’t know if it’s really true, but we’re told it’s the most diverse city in the world, more language is spoken, more foreign passports held than any other city anywhere in the world. And what that means is that if a Toronto audience buys tickets and goes and likes your movie so will everyone else, right?

It’s massively predictive. It can help a studio figure out which films to bet on and actually help them figure out what kinds of film festival movies are more likely to be successful at the global box office or more likely to be appealing to the Academy Award voters. It’s just a very predictive kind of prize in a way that the Palme d’Or isn’t. The Palme d’Or will tell you if it’s a great film but it won’t necessarily tell you if it’s going to be successful.

And so Piers was able to take that idea of the audience being central and create a prize based around the audience that was buzz-worthy and exciting and that the industry cared about and it would actually create a really cool new and better kind of film festival. So it is now, 20 years on, Toronto International Film Festival is incredibly successful. It takes over the city for two weeks every year. And a couple of years ago, Time magazine actually said that it is still the case. Cannes is still more famous than Toronto, but Toronto is now the most important film festival in the world, which is pretty cool, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, mission accomplished.

Jennifer Riel
Exactly. And the secret ambition of all Canadians is to prove to Americans that we’re just as awesome as… we try really hard, and so we’re excited about our Canadian stories. That’s one of my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I guess, it maybe goes without saying, but I’ll just say it anyway, so, and thusly, with the huge buzz and growth and attendance, etcetera, the money picture became just fine. Is that true?

Jennifer Riel
That is absolutely so.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, good.

Jennifer Riel
They were able to attract even more sponsors because whereas Cannes is for a              very exclusive, very small group of people, and you can absolutely get very high-end sponsors who want to engage with that very select audience, we’re now talking about a much broader kind of audience so you can get things or beer companies or car companies who want to appeal to that audience as well, and to be associated with this really glamorous, cool, interesting, buzz-worthy event.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what’s the third question?

Jennifer Riel
The third question is, “Could I think about the problem differently?” So, in this case, you might have two models and as you look at them you say, “You know what, there’s so much really great stuff in each of these two models. And what I wish was that I could actually do them both but there are some particular reasons, some tension that makes it really, really hard for me to imagine doing both. It’s hard for me to imagine being centralized and decentralized at the same time. Or to focus on investing in the status quo and also invest in the future. Often if I try to do both, what I wind up with is kind of a sad compromise that isn’t quite as good as either one and doesn’t really solve my problem.”

And so, in this case, we say, “Can I think about the problem differently? Can I find a really meaningful dividing line in the problem where if I break the problem apart along that sort of schism I can apply these two models to totally different parts of the problem so I can say if it’s about a learning organization? Are there kinds of learners, or parts of the world, or stages of development, or learning programs that operate totally differently where I get huge, huge benefit from decentralization in this part of the world, or this kind of learner, or this kind of program, and huge, huge benefits from centralizing in this totally different kind of program?”

And, in this case, it’s not just saying, “Well, let’s do both,” or, “Let’s just arbitrarily divide.” It’s trying to find some meaningful dividing line where you really do get that “one plus one equals three” kind of answer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so do you have an example for this one there with a bit of segmentation makes all the difference?

Jennifer Riel
Yes, so I’ll actually go back a little bit because this is my favorite example. It’s actually one Roger wrote about in The Opposable Mind and it’s one that helped me come to the inside that you could actually break the problem apart in new ways. And it’s A. G. Lafley who was the CEO of a company called Procter & Gamble. You probably know them. They make everything, Crest and Pampers and Tide and Pantene.

So when A. G. took over as CEO, the company was in an innovation crisis. Their previous CEO had been fired, this was about the year 2000, and the previous CEO had faced this real meaningful challenge which was that P&G was pretty good at incremental innovation, new flavor of Crest, they were great at that. And every time they came out with a new flavor of Crest they’d steal a few customers away from Colgate and maybe a few of their own customers would move over to the new flavor, and they’d gain just a little tiny bit of share. But then the next year Colgate would introduce their new flavor, and they’d steal all those customers back, right?

What they struggled with was breakthrough innovation. That brand little world, no one’s ever thought of it before, whole new category, brand new idea kind of innovation. And as it turns out, I know this is going to be shocking to you, it turns out that really big bureaucratic multinational organizations aren’t good at that, right? They’re actually the world’s perfect idea-destroying machine, right? They couldn’t design something better, to actually kill new ideas in the modern multinational global organization.

And so he was faced with this conundrum of how to think about investing in R&D. His predecessor had massively invested in R&D, he ramped up the global spend on R&D by three times. It was huge. But then nothing happened. There was no change. And 18 months had gone by and there was no discernible difference, and you could say, “Well, that’s just because innovation takes time,” but the board wasn’t willing to take that bet so they fired A. G.’s predecessor, handed him the job.

He walks in, essentially on day one, and he is confronted with this crisis because his predecessor had invested so much in innovation they tanked the short-term financials. They weren’t meeting their numbers. They were actually losing money. And so there were a bunch of people in the organization who said, “We have to stop this craziness on innovation. We’ve got to get our innovation spend back down to industry average or even below because, frankly, it’s just too high. We are not an innovation company. We’re a marketing company. We should just focus on selling more soap and we will figure out the innovation problem some other way, some other day.”

And there are things that A. G. likes about that. He likes fixing the financials, he likes getting the analysts and the shareholders off of his back, and maybe earns a bonus if he does it, but he can’t stand them walking away from innovation. And there’s a whole bunch of people in the organization who say, “Of course we have to invest in innovation. The problem is we just haven’t invested enough or we haven’t given it enough time.” And, again, he likes the idea of fixing the innovation problem but he just can’t stomach the idea of doing so at the cost of these absolutely massive expenditures.

And so, again, you could treat it as an optimization problem, right? You could draw a line between what we use to spend and what we spend now, and these are projections around just how much we have to spend in order to get just enough innovation. And here’s where A. G. says, “No, what I need is the ability to spend way less money than I’ve ever spent on innovation but actually get way more innovation out the other end.” And lots of CEOs would say something like that. They would say, “Please just do more with less.”

And then, shockingly, nothing would happen because anyone who’s ever been told, “Do more with less,” knows that if they knew how to do more with less they would be doing it, right? People are not just lounging about spending resources willy-nilly. They are doing their best to be stewards of their organization. So A. G. had to say, “How do I think differently about innovation? How do I break this problem apart?” And in this particular case, he looked at the stages of the innovation process and how they respond to money, because ultimately that’s the thing he’s trying to do is figure out, “How do I think about how I spend money on innovation?”

And where he found his dividing line was between two stages of the innovation process that respond very differently to money. So if you think about R&D, research and development; research is invention, coming up with a brand new idea no one has ever thought of before; development is commercialization, taking that cool idea and turning it into a viable product and getting it on supermarket shelves and advertising it, branding it, and all those great things.

It turns out there are massive economies of scale in commercialization. If you had a bunch of great ideas and you’re doing more commercialization than anyone else, you get better at it, you buy more inputs and so they’re cheaper on a per input basis, you have a better relationship with the retailers and so you can get preferential rates, a huge economies of scale in commercialization.

There really aren’t the same kinds of economies of scale in invention, right? Invention is coming up with that new idea, and you can spend a million dollars to come up with a great idea and get nothing. You can spend $10 and get a billion dollar idea, because these ideas are at least a little randomly distributed, right? You or I could come up with a breakthrough idea tomorrow, and neither of us works for Procter & Gamble.

And so A. G. said, “There is nothing that I could do to give myself proprietary access to great ideas. There’s no amount of money I could ever spend that would get me there. But could I think about dividing the activities of invention and commercialization into two very separate tasks and treat them very differently? So, commercialization, yes, let’s invest. Let’s spend more than our competitors and get great at it and build a real commercialization expertise and engine but reinvent how we do invention. Instead of saying, ‘We, P&G, have to come up with these ideas and we have to have a patent on it within our labs,’ can we go out and connect with small inventors and university professors and startups out in the world, lots and lots and lots of them?”

“And instead of saying we needed to invent the idea, we’ll buy the idea, or we’ll license it, and maybe only a small portion of the ideas that we actually encounter will be worth buying, worth investing, but the really cool thing is that we don’t have to pay anything for the 80% of the ideas, 85% of ideas that don’t look like they’re going to be worthwhile to us. Whereas if we were inventing everything ourselves you don’t know until you spent the money, right? You ultimately wind up having to spend the money.”

So that’s what he did, he and his team. He wouldn’t be the first to say, it wasn’t him, he and his senior team who were working on this challenge broke the problem apart along the dividing line of invention and commercialization and applied the lean, less expensive, almost outsourced model to invention, and then really invested and really built up a muscle inside the company in commercialization, and the idea, he called it connect and develop, it really became the way P&G does innovation. It’s been so successful for them that now many of their competitors do innovation the same way.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s perfect. Thank you. I like the dividing line, is a good way to say that in terms of it’s not just a segmentation just because by product type or by customer type, but something like things really do respond differently based upon whether it’s sort of in camp A or in camp B.

Jennifer Riel
Yes, that’s a nice way of putting it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, then, what’s the fourth and final step there?

Jennifer Riel
Fourth and final step. This is one where we’re really inspired by design thinking. So for a long time there were three steps, and people would come back and say, “I love the answer that I came to but organizationally I’m having trouble getting traction or it’s not really getting implemented.” And so we recognized that it’s actually not a terribly optimal process to lock yourself in a room with a bunch of smart people, wait until the smoke rises out of that room and go out to the organization and say, “Voila! The brilliant and better answer. Go, execute on this answer.”

And so what we have done is borrow from the world of design thinking which one of the core principles or tenets of design thinking is rapid prototyping where you develop the idea by testing it and then going back and revising it based on that feedback, and then going out and testing and continuing that rapid prototyping process. And so we believe that the same thing can be applied to new ideas in an organization.

You might not be physically building an object but you can go out and share your ideas and ask, “What would have to be true for this to work? What would have to be true for this to solve our problem?” and do some testing around that before you actually go and say, “This is what we’re doing. Go make it happen.”

So you actually blend the process of ideating and making the idea better and improving it with the implementation of that idea. And that’s really what stage four is all about is testing the ideas, making them better, and then getting to a place where you say, “Of the possibilities I generated, this is the one that I want to move forward with.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so good, and I love that question. I come from a consulting background myself and so I talk about hypothesis-driven thinking a lot, and on the July 3 episode, the two questions that prove every decision, we went there in terms of, “What must be true for this to work? And how can you go about testing that quickly and cost-effectively?” And so that’s great to hear that the best thinkers are right in the process.

Jennifer Riel
I’m glad that that’s a connection that you made because we think it’s an incredibly important final piece to this. And it’s really important socially, right? It’s how you help bring the organization along with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Jennifer, tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Jennifer Riel
I don’t think so. I mean, I think you’ve done a great job of asking me all the questions about the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks. Thank you. All right. Cool. Well, then, tell us, is there a favorite quote you have, something you find inspiring?

Jennifer Riel
I mean, it’s really cliché but I always default to, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I’m a big believer in taking action and to effect change particularly in this day and age. I think if we could all embody that we’d have a better shot at a better world.

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

Jennifer Riel
Well, there were too many. I thought about this as a question because you sent me a couple of sort of thought starters. So instead of telling you my favorite, I’m going to tell you the two books that are on my bookshelf I’m going to read next.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sure.

Jennifer Riel
So the first book that I’m going to read next is called The Revenge of Analog by David Sax, Real Things and Why They Matter. And so David is making the argument that in a digital world there are actually some profoundly wonderful things that are entirely analog, and we lost a lot. And so that’s vinyl records, but it’s also just the way we engage with each other in a more analog way. So I’m excited to read that and see what he has to say about how we engage with each other.

And then the other one is called The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them – And How They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan and Ray Fisman. And this is about how our modern economy is composed in all of these really interesting little markets, and that can be Uber has created a marketplace, Amazon has created a marketplace. And so Tim and Ray make the argument that we need to more deeply understand the dynamics of these markets in order to understand the future of business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And how about a favorite tool?

Jennifer Riel
Favorite tool. So I would say my favorite tool from this book, so I’ll self-promote just a little bit, is one that we borrowed from systems dynamics. So in systems dynamics you can do system max that help you understand how a system works. And, in our case, what we do is build what we call a causing model. So how do you capture a cause and effect, help visualize your thinking in a way that helps you think about how the outcomes you value are produced today and what you could do to produce different effects?

And what’s cool about it is it forces you to take the thinking that’s in your head and actually visualize it and get it out on paper. So it’s like a mind map but you have to think about how the different bubbles are connected by cause and effect elements.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And how about a favorite habit?

Jennifer Riel
So I try to read something every day that isn’t for work, at least a little something that isn’t for work. I think that fiction is an incredibly important dimension of how we develop as people, how we build empathy for each other. There’s actually academic studies that will tell you that reading a work of fiction actually boosts your empathic ability for a short period of time immediately after you finish reading it, particularly if it’s good fiction. And so I think reading a little bit more fiction is a great habit to get into.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget that you teach or share in working with students or clients that really seems to connect and resonate, getting them nodding their heads and thinking that you are brilliant?

Jennifer Riel
Well, I don’t know if they think that I’m brilliant, but we often just talk about this need to fall in love with the models, right? Which is, in one way, kind of hokey but in another helps demonstrate what we’re trying to do. And it’s not always easy. I once tried to get a group of healthcare folks to fall in love with a model of letting parents choose whether or not they vaccinate their children.

It was the hardest conversation I’ve ever had but it was really worthwhile because if you think about it, we spent 30 years telling anyone who doesn’t want to vaccinate their children that they are both stupid and evil for refusing to do so, that there’s no scientific evidence that they’re bad people, that everyone should just follow the scientific doctrine, and we’re getting the opposite result and fewer and fewer people are vaccinating their children, and I’m a huge believer in vaccines. I think that they’re a medical marvel. I want more people to vaccinate their children.

And so can seeking to understand why those parents are making the choices they’re making and think about the models on their terms at the very least change how we think about and talk to those parents can actually change the outcomes, something that is closer to what we would want.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that. And I’m wondering, in practice, if you’re working with these clients and if you’re really successful having them fall in love with the models, what if like, “You know what, you’re right. Let’s let all the parents decide. This is so much better.”

Jennifer Riel
So get quick in there with the healthcare folks. We really should vaccinate everybody. But it did because it’s a feel the tension drop a little bit when it was just okay to do something other than yell at people about not vaccinating our kids, that it was okay to engage in a deeper understanding of these people as people, and imagine there’s something other than crazy lunatics, right? I think that the discourse that we see politically right now is so negatively inclined to the other side, whether that’s Democratic-Republican, whether that’s the healthcare community and the anti-vax community.

We’ve lost the ability of listen to each other, to engage with each other. And part of integrative thinking, for me, is about saying, “Yes, you can do this as a process. You can get your team and go and spend a day in a room working on a really hard business problem.” But it’s also about a way of being in the world. It’s about how you engage with people who see the world differently than you do. And our natural instinct is to protect our models and to prove the other person is wrong and to argue and debate.

And instead it’s about saying when someone sees the world fundamentally differently than you do, that’s a gift. There are things they see and understand that you don’t and it’s the only way of making our own understanding of the world better, is not to hang out with people who agree with us and feel great that we have the right answer and we’re done, but rather to spend time with people who challenge and provoke and totally disagree because it helps you understand where your own thinking is limited, helps you understand why they believe what they believe, and gives you a shot at making your own thinking richer, more robust, a better answer.

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

Jennifer Riel
So probably Twitter is the easiest. So you can find me at @JenniferRiel on Twitter, and my co-author is Roger L. Martin on Twitter as well. And you can also find us both at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And, Jennifer, do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jennifer Riel
So, for me, it’s about saying, “How do I respond when I’m going into the meeting with the person I know is going to push my buttons, I know is going to disagree with me? And for one meeting, can I recognize before I go in that that’s likely to be the case, remind myself that I have a view worth hearing? I still love it. It’s an important perspective so I’m going to share it but I might be missing something. And so I can spend a little more time inquiring into what they believe, why they believe it, and see if there is an answer that is better than what I walked into the room with.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Oh, Jennifer, this has been so eye-opening and insightful. I’m excited to put some of these stuff into practice in my own world, and trying to fall in love with different models and dig the tension for a little bit longer. And I think there’s going to be some really cool results in my own thinking and, hopefully, for thousands of listeners as well. So this has been a treat. Thank you.

Jennifer Riel
It’s my pleasure. And I hope you do use it and let me know how it goes.