123: Maximizing Creativity by Minimizing Cognitive Bias with Adam Hansen

Pete Mockaitis
Adam, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Adam Hansen
Pete, thanks so much. Happy to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, I’m so glad to have you here, and I’d love it if maybe you could kick us off, if we’re thinking a little bit about cognitive biases or biases and their difficulties, could you maybe open us up with a story of what happens when biases rule the day and things go really wrong?

Adam Hansen
Oh, man. I hate to start off with a downer. I interned at Kodak back in the Pleistocene era. Vertebrates had just emerged. It was really cool.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh.

Adam Hansen
And Kodak actually invented digital photography (a lot of people don’t know that) way back when. And the cognitive bias in question here is status quo bias, which is the idea that in anything that we set upon to do, the alternative that’s always there is to do nothing new and just to kind of affirm all previous decisions and just kind of go with that. And status quo bias is particularly pernicious because it’s just comfortable. The burden, the hand, we all have these aphorisms around it, right?
And so despite inventing digital photography and actually leading in consumer digital photography for the first several years, which even most people don’t even remember that, Kodak actually had digital cameras and everything else. For a while, it looked like Kodak is going to be able to make the change and go from being the obvious leader in silver halide photography to digital photography. Ultimately, it’s their addiction to silver halide photography and kind of their accompanied, unexamined instincts around that that led them down this path of taking on these massive risks of omission.
And these are the risks that we don’t really think about often enough because it’s hard to quantify what you don’t do when we think only about the risks of commission that you can assign numbers to. And so those are the only risks that we talk about because we can assign numbers to them, so then we can think about them more specifically. But then we see this amortization of billions of dollars of wealth in Kodak simply because they did not try nearly enough. And nobody can say that what took Kodak down was that they tried to do too much with digital photography. No, no, no. They didn’t try nearly enough.
And so I like to ask people the question, “At what year do you think was the peak of Kodak’s market cap?” and people will say, “Oh, you know, it was sometime in the late ‘70s,” or “It had to be sometime in the ‘80s at the very latest.” And I say, “No, it’s actually 1998.”

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Adam Hansen
So 1998 is the peak, and then they’re pretty much nothing by 2011. And so the status quo bias, I think, is such an obvious indicator there for Kodak. We remember Nokia. We can kind of go through, if you remember, Gateway computers, the cow boxes and everything. You go through all these stories of companies that were once great and no longer around and its risks of omission and the status quo bias, I think, that you have to say took them down. And it’s tragic.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fascinating. And this Kodak story, I guess I’m really wondering. So they got the digital stuff. I’m sure they saw it was going, it was growing, it was working, and it was probably growing faster than their other stuff.

Adam Hansen
Absolutely. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So then what does that conversation sound like, where there’s like “You know what? That’s probably enough.”

Adam Hansen
Well, I mean, it’s stunning, isn’t it? So there’s the part of them that obviously understands that they have to do it. And in fact, they are doing it and they did lead in digital photography for years, but what they still tried to do is they did it in half measures. Or maybe even half measures is being too generous. It’s like quarter measures. They still had this whole paper business, right? So they tried to go, “Well, how can we at least kind of keep the paper business going? So how can we have people take their digital pictures, but then still have to make them come in to us and hand off their digital picture to us?” Their digital whatever on a chip, the media cards we used to have, remember?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Adam Hansen
“And have them bring in and have their media cards to us, and then we’ll print them out on our paper?” You still have to come in to a store somewhere, a Wal-Mart or a Target or whatever, and hand in your media. And how you’re going to view them will be still printed out on Kodak paper. So they still wanted to hang on to that. So they were still clinging to whatever they could to still keep whatever piece of their business thriving.
And so ultimately, it’s still the addiction to the previous model that they had that they couldn’t fully separate themselves. And they kept trying to make that work instead of saying, “What else can we do?” and go fully into it and just try a whole lot more and just conduct 87 more experiments and do small fail fast/fail cheap kinds of experiments. And goodness gracious, they had the money to do it. They were sitting on tons of cash. Obviously, they could have done it, and they just didn’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Well, I guess that makes sense. You got a great thing in hand, and you just don’t want to see it evaporate that you think, “How can we preserve?” Understood. Well, thank you. Now, I’d love to hear. You outlined about eight biases in your book, “Outsmart Your Instincts.” But I’d like to know, when are our instincts on the money, first of all? Like when should we have a degree of trust or gut in our intuition before we kind of dig into all the ways we’re often wrong?

Adam Hansen
Yeah. Very good. Now, you have to understand the instincts evolved for a reason. I mean, they were adaptive at particular times, and they can still be adaptive at particular times. So these are shortcuts. And so the way to think about them is just as our bodies were… like how we process calories and how our whole metabolism was set up for times when calories were scarce, right? And our ancestors might have gone maybe a couple of days without eating anything. And that’s why you actually can survive a few days without eating. You do need to drink. Like if you go more than a couple of days without drinking, then you start to get in trouble.

Pete Mockaitis
You mean you’ve got to have a beer every couple of days to stay alive? I hear you.

Adam Hansen
You at least need water.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Water. Okay.

Adam Hansen
Yeah. You at least need to drink. You can go without food for a little while, but you at least need to drink. And water was more plentiful than calories, right? And so our bodies adapted accordingly. Now, today, it’s caloric overabundance that has us in trouble because our bodies are still wired for caloric scarcity. Mentally, we face kind of a similar issue. Our minds are still wired for the needs of a different time.
And for those of your audience who are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the base of this hierarchy is survival. You don’t need to worry about higher order needs until you satisfy survival needs and food, shelter, warmth, some of those basic things. Only after you satisfy those needs do you go on to some of the higher order needs such as belonging and love and eventually getting up to such things as self-actualization and everything.
Back then, the big win for everyone was survival, and so a lot of the cognitive biases developed for those kinds of things. And what led to survival back then? Being really great at having a default mode that all novelty is threat until we figure out otherwise. It was smart to first think of anything new as a potential threat. We thought very differently about false negatives and false positives back then. If there was a rustle in the bushes, and the rustle in the bushes just sounded a little bit different than any rustle we heard before, the curious and inquisitive might have gone, “Hey, you know what? That’s intriguing. I’m going to go check that out.”
We can kind of guess what might have happened to them. And they possibly, in making that decision to go check that out, their genetic fate in that moment probably took a pretty good hit and they might not have stuck around to pass on their DNA. And so you can imagine that our ancestors were probably the people who were the quickest to go, “I’m not sticking around to try to sort this out. I’m getting the heck out of here.”
And so this negativity bias, we call it, is the result of generations and generations of people going, “Okay, all novelty is threat. I’m gone.” And so we come by this very honestly. We don’t have to fault ourselves for it. It just is what it is. It was adaptive. It really helped our species survive. And you kind of go through each of the cognitive biases, and you can kind of almost reverse engineer why they might have developed.
Conformity bias. It was adaptive to be really good at going along with the group because that kept you safe. And there was strength in numbers. When there were all these existential threats just outside the perimeter of where your clan lived, then sticking together, not venturing beyond what everyone kind of came to some consensus around, that was just smart, if not even necessarily just for reasons of avoiding existential threat, just because it showed that you’re a good team player and people could trust you. And knowing that they could trust you then led them all to say, “Okay, when it comes to share the spoils the hunters and everything, yeah, sure, let’s get this person in on those goods and everything.”
So you can kind of go through all these cognitive biases and you can kind of see why they might have been helpful back in those times. Flash forward to today and to your question, “When are they still good now?” and the first question is they’re good now whenever we face similar conditions to those conditions in which they were first formed. So in times of danger, in times when very quick decisions need to be made. Like when… I’ve been in a position of having to perform the Heimlich procedure on a couple of people.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Adam Hansen
Yeah. I’m really glad that I didn’t kind of stop and ponder about it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Adam Hansen
Instinct just kind of kicked in. When there is danger, you don’t want to kind of stop and think, “What might be really great about this situation?” You just kind of want to take action. You want to kind of go with that. And so identifying threat, taking quick action, and going right to it is important. The work of Barbara Fredrickson really points to this. She has a theory that says the negative emotions are helpful in that they narrow options and they point toward action. The downside of that is you don’t always need that, and so you need to be thoughtful about that.
Our instincts, I think you should listen to them still, but let them be counselors, not your decision-maker. Don’t let them be an autocrat. As Proverbs teaches us, “Make war with a multitude of counselors,” but that advice never lets us off the hook from being the executive who ultimately makes the call. So listen to that. The instincts are all not conscious, and so you’re going to have these feelings. So listen to the feelings. You don’t need to spend too much energy trying to shut them down or anything. But just acknowledge them, reflect on them, see if there’s anything there, but just don’t let them be what’s driving the bus.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very good. Thank you. And so that is handy. I was going to ask that next. We’re going to kind of dig in to the eight a smidge, or a subset of the eight. And so I wanted to hear, what are some key guidelines or principles that are helpful in thinking about all of these things? And so you gave one great one right there was to note that we’re going to reference many counselors and we’re going to be decisive in the right timing, whether that’s short or long, and taking the necessary time there, and not just being a slave to them, but rather sort of an executive and forming those decisions. Are there any other kind of universal guidelines that are helpful in overcoming the native impact of bias?

Adam Hansen
Yeah. I would say there’s a… I met a really interesting guy at a conference back in September. A guy named Paul Stillman. He has an organization called Six Seconds, so you can look them up at sixseconds.org. And it’s great shorthand which is just fantastic. He makes the point that six seconds can be the difference between emotional intelligence and emotional, I guess, stupidity. And that is, Pete, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the term amygdala hijack.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s like your lizard brain is running the show for a bit?

Adam Hansen
Yeah. And six seconds can be the difference. And so when you think about that, if I just take a pause of six seconds, that’s all that’s necessary to rest, to pull back control from my amygdala. That’s great. I mean, who can’t do that? And so just even being aware of that… So like the next time then… And we all know this, and we’ve all been in those conditions where something happens and we just go, “Argh!” and you start to go into that, and you want to do this.
And so if you’re familiar with the book by Daniel Kahneman kind of making his research accessible to us, to the lay people, his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” where he talks about the two types of thinking, and that fast thinking, system one thinking, is this very quick, just reflexive as opposed to reflective. I wish those two words weren’t so close in pronunciation, but they’re almost opposites. But that quick action, this is where all the cognitive biases are seated. And if you can just take six seconds to come back and not let the amygdala take over, that’s often then where we then do things that we end up regretting. And I just think that’s fantastic.
And so that’s kind of step number one. When you’re feeling it, great! Go ahead and feel it. Just don’t necessarily take action because, again, those are often negative emotions. And as, again, we know from Barbara Fredrickson’s work, the negative emotions narrow options and kind of want to drive you to action. Often, those are just dumb actions. Again, unless it is truly danger and taking quick action is really the right idea, often that’s happening and you’re really not in danger, and the action that you would take wouldn’t really be all that helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Adam Hansen
So rule number one there, I’m kind of reprising what we’d already said, but yeah. So true to the nature of the biases, trying to knock all of them out at once is tough because they’re often not showing up at the same time. Certainly, some of the techniques that we talk about in the book can address pairs or even trios of the cognitive biases all at once. We do a lot of work in healthcare and we’ve learned cool terms from doctors and from nurse practitioners and everything. We get to work with them. And there’s this term. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this term, Pete. Comorbidities.
But it’s like when diabetes shows up with heart problems or other problems. Often, diseases will show up, but there will be other diseases then that because of this first disease, it’s easier for other diseases to then show up. You’re at greater risk for other diseases as well because of the first disease. So we do see some of the biases show up kind of in comorbid clusters, to kind of overuse that metaphor.
So some of the techniques do a pretty good job at knocking out two at a time or three at a time because some of them will show up together. So like negativity bias, availability bias, and confirmation bias, I think, will often show up together. And some of the techniques that we talk about, I think, do a very good job at knocking out all three at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s interesting. So now, maybe… And I want to be careful here because I have a feeling you can talk about each bias for an hour plus.

Adam Hansen
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
But we’re not going to do that.

Adam Hansen
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
So could you maybe spend two or three minutes maybe simply defining the bias and maybe giving it a tagline or slogan or one sense example just so that we’re all on the same page? When you say availability bias, “Oh, what does that mean? Okay, got it.”

Adam Hansen
Absolutely. So negativity bias, it’s the first one we talk about because in our observation, it’s the biggest baddie and it’s the most prevalent one. It’s the one that we feel that if you don’t solve for it, you’re in trouble. And so negativity bias, it’s the idea that bad is stronger than good. Again, it’s the one that you can see our ancestors… It was important for our ancestors to have this particular predisposition because survival was the big win. And so it’s the idea that if new stimulus is presented, anything new comes up, and even the more cheerful and optimistic of us also…
So first thing that I want to say is all of us have all of these cognitive biases. To have them is to be human. It’s not that certain people have them and others don’t. We all have them, and so none of us can be judgmental about these. And in fact, the more we spent researching these, the more humble we’ve become because we just see it in ourselves more and we just see ourselves succumbing to it more, because we now know more about it, so it’s more in our radar, and we go, “Oh, yeah, look what I’m doing.”
So negativity biases, particularly when new ideas come up, it is just so easy to go straight to what isn’t working rather than what might be interesting about the idea. And I do this for a living. My whole career has been in innovation, and I still do it because, again, it’s reflexive. It’s an instinct. It’s just there. I mean, these are the echoes of thousands of generations. And so that’s what that is. We fear loss more than we appreciate gain, and even knowing about it doesn’t necessarily help.
Availability bias, Daniel Kahneman’s term for it is what we see is all there is. We believe that. And so when we’re trying to make decisions, what we summon up, what we can recall most quickly is what we tend to base our decisions on. And that’s not always the most helpful to have in mind. We often miss things, valuable information, a more realistic sense of likely outcomes that could lead to better decisions. And often, if you can even take sometimes even a minute and use some quick stimulus just to bring some other considerations to bear, you don’t need to take a whole lot of time just to bring in some additional considerations, and it will vastly improve your decision-making.
The curse of knowledge is the idea that once we become expert in something, our version of dumbing it down to explain to someone who is naïve to it is still way too advanced. And we think we’re giving the 101 level version of it, and we’re really giving like the 301 or 401 level version of it. And so we really need to figure out ways to blast through that and really get back to the very, very stripped down version of it. And it’s just very difficult. The curse of knowledge is a tough one.
Status quo bias, again, it’s just this idea that the burden, the hand, in every proposed course of action, the automatic position is to keep things as they are and to ratify all of our previous decisions. It’s just easier to stay where we are. Confabulation, I think, is the single weirdest ongoing issue. And here’s what’s going on with confabulation. We are often asked why we did something, and the answer almost always is we really do not know why because we truly don’t have access to why we did what we did, because we just don’t have access to our motivations.
And most of what we do… We are first and foremost now, what they learned from behavioral science, we have to acknowledge that we are emotional creatures and we do things, and then when asked why, we come up with rational explanations for it that are plausible and they make sense. And they’re not out and out lies, and they do make sense. And we’re trying to be helpful, so we’re providing answers to the questions.
And it’s not like this is like a big… It’s not like political spin and we have our press agent by our side. We think we’re being truthful and everything, and it’s probably pretty close, but the real answer is we don’t know. And so we do our best, but we just really don’t have access to why we really did what we did because we ourselves don’t know. And so that’s what’s going on there. And so that’s one that’s going to take some work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s just so interesting right there. And I guess sometimes our motivations are probably lame in the sense of…

Adam Hansen
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s so funny. One time, I heard this speaker. He was talking about why he got into a career in banking, as he was giving us some knowledge about finance, which was my major in college. Or finance, depending on how… Maybe that’s how an Idaho hick would pronounce it, as a Danville boy does as well. Finance.

Adam Hansen
There you are, man. Finance.

Pete Mockaitis
Instead of finance. At the University of Illinois, sides collided on that question, so it was fun.

Adam Hansen
There you are.

Pete Mockaitis
So we’re learning this stuff and he said, “I was chatting with a banker about what he did and I thought, ‘Well, shucks. It seems like where they work, they have always got air conditioning,’ and that sounded pretty good to me.”

Adam Hansen
Isn’t that funny?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And at the time, I thought, “What a terrible basis for making an important career decision.” But he’s just being dead honest. It’s like at the time, air conditioning sounded really good, so he took another step in exploring it.

Adam Hansen
And that’s probably as transparent a playback of his real motivation as you’re ever likely to get.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Adam Hansen
And so that’s great. The confabulation to me is just absolutely… I love it because it’s just so weird and it’s fantastic. And it just points to just how truly strange we are. And I love it. I think it’s endlessly fascinating. Conformity bias is back to this notion that we talked about, the play along to get along. The need for agreement in a group keeps us from exploring alternative perspectives, even when we think… Particularly in the United States, we have these great kind of founding myths of the lone cowboy.
Compared to most cultures throughout the world, we are still pretty fiercely individualistic in everything, but we are still human and so we still have these urges to try to work within a group. And there are great books, a really great book called “I’m Having What She’s Having,” or something like that that plays back to the great line from “When Harry Met Sally.” That just kind of speaks that notion. We are swayed by where the group is going, and we need to acknowledge that. Again, you can see why that evolved with our ancestors.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out evidence that supports the position we’ve already embraced. And again, this is subconscious. We’re not even aware it’s going on, but we will place our thumb on the scale for all evidence that supports where we kind of already are. Even if we haven’t made a firm decision, emotionally we’re already leaning in one direction, and so the fact that we’re not aware that this is happening can be dangerous. And then any evidence that is disconfirmatory, we’ll somehow figure out… And this is funny. We’ll somehow figure out, “Well, yeah, I can see how normally that might kind of disqualify where I’m going. But in this particular case, it doesn’t really work because of A, B, and C.” And we’re really good at rationalizing that.
Framing is not necessarily a straight up cognitive bias, only in the sense that we’re not aware how a lot of the stuff that’s presented to us has already been consciously framed or set up in a context for us to perceive it by other people. And we can choose to reframe it so we can think about it differently. And in doing so, it brings about a very different way of thinking about it. And so everything is thought of within a context, and when we choose a different context, you can’t help but think about it very differently. And so just being aware of that principle, and so when anything is presented to us, if we just don’t take how it’s framed as a given and we’re a little more thoughtful about alternative ways of framing it, then we can just be better thinkers about everything that’s thrown our way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well, thank you for that rundown. That’s great. So let’s talk about negativity bias, then. If indeed that is pervasive and dangerous and challenging, what are the key approaches to overcoming?

Adam Hansen
Yeah. This one is very straightforward, so you are going to want to go straight to what isn’t working when things are thrown your way because that’s your instinct. And so what we say, we have a thing that we call Forness, the Forness mindset. And it may sound weird. I remember the first time I heard it. I was originally a client of Ideas to Go when I was innovation director at Mars, the candy company. And the first time I heard it, I just kind of chuckled. I thought, “That’s a weird term.”
But it’s important because the word “forness” focuses in on the word “for.” So it says when you first hear any new idea, instead of going straight to what you don’t like about it, challenge yourself to go first to what you are for in the idea. What do you like about it? What’s interesting about it? What might have value or benefit? And importantly, what might be the potential in there? And what it reveals is that any idea is really a compound of ideas, and it has all these different facets, different pieces of it. When you hear a new idea, you can always break it down. We analyze. We break things down whenever we hear anything. And we just do it naturally, and that’s also part of being human.
And so go to that first. And what we do with our clients in training, or with our creative consumers when we’re training them, is we actually throw out… We do a role-play where we go to a different industry or something, and we deliberately come up with a really horrible idea to model this. And we show that even in really horrible ideas, and then we show that sometimes especially with horrible ideas, you can get some really great stuff if you’ll take this approach, because by going to some really weird, dumb, horrible place, you’re really getting out of the mainstream and you’re really getting out of kind of the regular channel or rut where the more expected ideas would be.
And then if you start to break it down this way and look for sparks, for nuggets, for these different facets within that, and then go, “What am I for? What do I like? What is interesting? What might have value?” and importantly, “What is the potential in this idea?” then you can start to play with it. And then any one idea, as you play with it this way, starts to become stimulus and it starts turning into 5, 10, 20 new ideas. And so we say, early on, consider ideas for their provocative value, not necessarily for their immediate merits.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh. Sounds like we got a quote from you for the website.

Adam Hansen
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Bam!

Adam Hansen
There you are.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Adam Hansen
So the more you can consider ideas as vehicles to take you to new places, and not as end destinations in and of themselves (that’s just another way of saying what I just said), then the more helpful that’s going to be early on. And so don’t be too literal with them. We’re not going to launch these ideas yet. We’re playing with them. So just see where you can go with that.
And then this is not all about being Pollyanna. This is not about riding a unicorn on a golden highway somewhere. There’s still concerns. But now, instead of just using the concerns to shut down thinking, actually use those concerns to come up with more ideas. And so, instead of saying, “Now, I don’t like that,” we say, “What are you for?” Now we would say, “What do you wish for?” So now use the problems in that idea, but use language like “I wish for… I wish to… How might we… What if we…”
And then use your concerns now to point you to come up with even more ideas because those concerns will take them as legitimate. But use them. Instead of constricting and shutting down and just pointing to problems, take the next step on those concerns and use them as stimulus to come up with even more ideas that address those concerns, because that’s great. You’ve now thrown some specific light on opportunities, so go with that. And now use the concerns. And now, from this one even horrible idea, we’d probably come up with 30 ideas. And so you see very quickly this multiplicative nature of the approach.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. Yes. Thank you. And I guess I’m also wondering, when I hear negativity bias, I’m also thinking about that notion of losses looming larger than gains in general. Like if I’m looking at Option A, Option B, Option C, and making a selection, it’s like that notion of wanting to hold on is just… It is. It’s deeply within us. So what do you with that, when there you are, it’s time for choosing?

Adam Hansen
Linus Pauling said, “The best way to get good ideas is first to get lots of ideas.” And then you can be really smart about the ideas that you move forward. Hopefully, when you create lots of ideas, you have this feeling of abundance. Again, I keep referring back to Barbara Fredrickson’s work, but the positive emotions broaden and build. That’s the name of her theory, the broaden and build theory. But once you get this feeling of expansiveness, hopefully, these feelings of having to cling on to what you already have start to loosen up a little.
And in doing all of this work, we would say, “Yeah, still be a smart businessperson.” I mean, protect your downside. The research around the smartest entrepreneurs shows that they’re really smart. These aren’t just kind of like heedless, crazy people who always throw caution to the wind. No. The smartest entrepreneurs always figure out very smart ways to protect their downside, but they just also have a very smart relationship with risk and they understand that the risks of omission might actually be the ones that end up hurting you much more than the risks of commission.
So protect your downside on the risks of commission, but also make sure that you’re haunted equally by this thought of the risks of omission. And it’s just really making sure that you don’t have this mismatch on how you’re thinking about risk. And whenever I hear about people that are too tenacious about clinging to what they already have, I just think, “Well, you’re not thinking about risks of omission enough, and you haven’t thought enough about how those often are the risks that end up hurting people more than the risks of commission.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, now, there’s a fun turn of phrase in your book, “creative dissent.” What does that mean? And I think I know where you’re going. How do we get more of it in a good way?

Adam Hansen
Yeah. Well, we need to recognize that different business tasks just require different types of thinking. There are times to invite dissent for the sake of the objective, and ultimately, for the sake of the company’s thriving. So when coming up with ideas, conformity just isn’t the concern, just as courtesy isn’t the first consideration in javelin throwing, I guess.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yeah.

Adam Hansen
You know? Courtesy is nice, but when I’m throwing the javelin, that’s not the main thing I’m thinking about.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re going to grunt. It might be discourteous.

Adam Hansen
That’s right. So courtesy just doesn’t fit here. It’s not helpful. You deliberately want difference, breadth, diversity, and contrasting views. You want amplitude and energy. You want all that going on. And it’s hard to get there if everyone is checking the temperature of the room. And so, certainly, the senior people can recognize their role, if you’re doing this group process. The senior people need to… And we often will kind of pull aside the senior people and say, “Hey, guys, you can really help us here by modeling this.” Make it clear that pleasing them, going along with them, following in step with them, really isn’t the idea. And having fun and really going out there is really helpful.
Now, our process really encourages that because when you’re working with us, all ideas go into a common database, and it’s anonymous. So that’s helpful. But again, very quickly, in doing work with us, you see that nobody is paying particular attention to what the senior person is putting in. Maybe just because they’re not sure what ideas the senior person is putting in. And we’re just coming up with hundreds and hundreds of ideas, and so it just kind of all gets lost in there anyhow.
And kind of the geek math that we use is that n=! Again, it’s just kind of a recap of the Linus Pauling quote, “The best way to get good ideas is first to get lots of ideas.” And so even to say dissent here is kind of weird because dissent implies pushing against a starting point. And so we actually just say dissent to kind of say just nonconformity. Dissent even almost kind of suggests a binary situation that doesn’t even really exist because you’re not necessarily disagreeing. It’s almost kind of like a non-applicable framework. Did that help?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. I hear what you’re saying, and that’s handy. Dissent is kind of the opposite of conforming there. And so I guess I’m thinking what I loved about the word choice is that sometimes it can feel like if you’re disagreeing with the senior folk, then it’s like you’re like a rebel. You’re like the resistance dissenting from the wisdom of those on high. And I think a lot of people, that terrifies them, maybe rightly or not rightly, based on the culture that they’re in. So what gems do you have to share with folks who find themselves in that situation?

Adam Hansen
So here’s the way to go about it. Recognize where you are in the process. And particularly early on, even the idea of conformity and dissent is kind of weird because that’s already implying just kind of like one or two options, like there’s their way or this other dissenting way. And early on, you don’t want one or two options. You want hundreds. You want so many. And this rush to solution, the rush to narrowing down, there’s time for that earlier.
And so we know businesspeople have to produce results. But sometimes, this rush to solution and that rush to narrowing actually ends up coming back to bite you because we know that the top two drivers of innovation success are uniqueness and relevance, and in the rush, uniqueness is often left behind. And so then, great, you go to market with something that’s same old same old, so then you produce something that has to compete now in this notion of need to a competition and you can’t produce profit.
And we know then what that looks like. So then the net effects of that are head count has to be cut because we’re not making enough money to support everything, belts have to be tied, and so then we don’t have enough money to support more innovation. And you get into this really downward spiral that we’ve just seen again and again. And why would we do that? Now we’re just exchanging dollars. We’re not creating true wealth for our shareholders, and it’s just kind of pointless.
And so take the time. Do it right. There’s a reason why we talk about a new product funnel and why it’s fat at the beginning and end. And you want to come up with lots and lots of ideas so you can be really, really smart and considerate about what you’re moving forward. And so just even the notion of dissent and conformity early on is just such a non-starter. I mean, it’s a category error, and you want more. You want to give executives more to chew on. And kind of the rush to get it into any kind of binary thumb-up/thumb-down setup, it’s bizarre and it’s just not the way to think about it. Again, it’s courtesy in javelin throwing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, thank you. That’s fun. So now, let’s hear about a few of your favorite things here. Can you start us off with a favorite quote?

Adam Hansen
Favorite quote? Another one I really love is the avant-garde composer, John Cage, the guy who composed… You may have heard about this one. His magnum opus is called 4’33”. It’s where the pianist comes out onto the stage, opens the lid of the piano, sits down, places his fingers on the keys, and does nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds. Anyhow, his quote is “I don’t know why people are afraid of new ideas. I’m afraid of old ones.” That’s my quote.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a piece of research?

Adam Hansen
Yeah. A fascinating study… And we talk about it in the book. It’s kind of a spoiler, but what the heck. If you’re going to buy the book, don’t listen to this part of the podcast. You know what? I’ll just kind of tease it. It’s around confirmation bias, and I’ll just put in this teaser. It’s around the strategy that you employ to solve a number puzzle. And we do it with our clients when we’re doing training. And we first ask if anyone has ever heard this study, and we say, “Okay, shut up. Please don’t spoil it.”
But it is so repeatable. It’s so consistent. It’s so much fun to do because everyone always falls for the same trap. But we encourage you to, when you buy the book, just kind of play along with it because we actually kind of walk you through it. And it’s the idea that we will confirm what we already believe to be true and we’ll do it tenaciously. I wish I could say more, but I actually want you to experience it. So this is my plea to buy the book, if for no other reason, so you can walk yourself through that study. And it’s in the confirmation bias chapter.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. All right. You got to do what you got to do. And so, other than your own, how about a favorite book?

Adam Hansen
I’m going to give you two. A perennial, one that I’ve read probably eight times. It’s called “If You Want to Write” by Brenda Ueland. And I would just substitute the verb “to write” with “to create.” If you want to create anything, read this book. Brenda Ueland walks you through it. It’s not Strunk and White. It’s not just about writing. It’s about creating. And the reason why I love it is she talks about really just you’ve got to be true to what you’re here to do. And I first picked it up when I was in my probably mid-20’s, and I come back to it probably every two or three years, and it’s an ongoing kind of booster shot for me. And I absolutely love it.
Current fave. I just picked this up two weeks ago, and I can’t wait to finish it so I can immediately start to reread. It’s called “Humility is the New Smart.” It’s by Edward Hess and Katherine Ludwig. Truth bombs on pretty much every page.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And how about a favorite tool, whether it’s a product or service or app or something you use often?

Adam Hansen
Yeah. I would just say I could not have written “Outsmart Your Instincts,” my contributions to the book, and just I couldn’t conduct live without Evernote. It has become my auxiliary brain. In relying on it so much, I’m wondering if I’m setting myself up for long-term cognitive failure somehow. I don’t know. I just wonder if I’ve offloaded so much of what I probably should be doing cognitively that… I don’t know. Have I become too reliant on it? I don’t know, but I just absolutely love Evernote. I send stuff to Evernote six times a day. I always know that I can go back and retrieve it, and I now have it in such a great working system seamlessly for me that I just absolutely love it. And so if something ever happened and that all went away, man, I would be messed up.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that helps you be awesome at your job?

Adam Hansen
I really would say that the thing I walked you through with the Forness mindset (“What are you for? What do you wish for?”) it has now become so habitual to me that I do it automatically. And it’s been a challenge because when I first taught it to our kids and I would find myself “Yes, but”-ing our kids, they would say, “Dad, you’re ‘Yes, but’-ing me. What are you for? What do you wish for?” and I said, “What? You want me to be consistent? What’s that all about? That’s not fair.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fun. And how about a favorite nugget that you share when you’re working with clients that really seems to connect, resonate, get their heads nodding in agreement, like “Yes, you guys are brilliant”?

Adam Hansen
That’s a good one. Yeah, here’s one. A lot of our clients come in believing that their culture is uniquely screwed up. And what I share with them is just that very fact. And I think they kind of go… They’re almost kind of relieved to hear that pretty much every other company believes the same thing. And then I just share that thing that I told you about that we are all in this together. We all have these flaws. A lot of them are tied to the cognitive biases that we’re talking about. But I think the way forward on this is…
And we talk about it in the book. Once you’re aware of all of this, and we all just kind of have to work together on it, the way forward is humility, curiosity, and a spirit of play. And nobody can be judgmental about any of it. And just knowing kind of our common humanity that because we are all flawed, we just kind of have to pull together and have a little bit of fun with it, and we’re going to be okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good deal. Thank you. And what would you say is the ideal way for folks to reach out or contact you if they want to learn more?

Adam Hansen
Absolutely. You can go to outsmartyourinstincts.com. There’s a link there to order the book and additional resources. We’ll be adding more and more. But right now, we have some PDFs, video, audio, and we’ll be adding to it all the time. You can find me on Twitter, @adhansen. And certainly, just our company website, ideastogo.com. And you can find me on LinkedIn also.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And do you have a final parting challenge or call to action for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Adam Hansen
Yeah. I really want everyone to really consider that notion of the amygdala hijack and taking the six seconds. And when you have those feelings, just consider them as counselors, not as autocrats.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Perfect. Well, Adam, thanks so much. This has been a lot of fun. And keep on rocking.

Adam Hansen
Pete, thanks so much, man.