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Nov 25
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1014: How to Make Meetings Better for Everyone with Calendly’s Darren Chait

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Darren Chait discusses how to make meetings more engaging using data from Calendly’s State of Meetings 2024 research.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why 81% of respondents want more meetings 
  2. Three meetings to keep—and the one to stop 
  3. Surprising statistics on meeting etiquette 

About Darren 

Darren Chait is the VP of Marketing at Calendly, leading the world-class marketing organization. Previously, he was a co-founder of Hugo, the leading meeting workflow solution powering meetings for tens of thousands of customers backed by Google, Slack and Atlassian.

In a prior life, Darren was a corporate lawyer at one of Australia’s leading law firms, where he attended meetings for a living – the start of his passion for meetings and the future of work.

Resources Mentioned

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Darren Chait Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Darren, welcome.

Darren Chait
Thanks, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into your unique vantage point, your insights, your wisdom. So, you work at Calendly, which is my all-time favorite meeting scheduling software. Use it in two businesses. So, great job, guys.

Darren Chait
Good to hear those. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m curious, while you’ve been there, how many meetings have been scheduled in Calendly?

Darren Chait
Personally? Thousands.

Pete Mockaitis
Thousands? Millions?

Darren Chait
Well, yeah. I’d say thousands. I’ve been at Calendly for two and a half years. I think I probably would have exceeded hundreds. I spend a lot of my day in meetings, like we all do, which is why it’s such a good topic for discussion. And I really try and schedule most via Calendly because who’s got time to jump around with the back and forth and try to coordinate multiple schedules? And being an Australian, living between the US and Australia, time zones are a nightmare. So, I need Calendly to work, and luckily, so do other folks.

Pete Mockaitis
And how many meetings has the Calendly software product platform scheduled for humanity?

Darren Chait
That’s a very good question. That’s not a number that we’ve actually published before. So, you’ve heard it here first, if I had to do the math quickly, I wonder if we’ve crossed a billion, it’s possible, but I’m not sure. So, keep that one between us, all right? But I want to look into that. It’s the number I should know off the top of my head.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, we’ll say rounded to the nearest billion and one million.

Darren Chait
Exactly, that’s right. It’s closer to a billion than zero, but it could even be more. I’ll have to check on that one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, so that’s cool. So, a billion meetings, and you’ve been in many yourself, personally there. I’d love to hear, off the top of your head, what are some of the most striking, surprising, fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us workers and meetings from your vantage point here?

Darren Chait
We’ve recently published a report on this. We do it every year, and the 2024 State of Meetings Report, went in and asked over a thousand workers a whole lot of questions about meetings. And what I love about this process, this piece of content is because we do it year on year, things are changing right in front of us.

So, the number one thing that jumped out at me, which I can’t reconcile, I don’t know what your thoughts are, Pete, but 81% of workers want more meetings. Here we are talking about meetings being the bane of our existence, competing with productive work, there’s a million and one memes about meetings that should have been emails and those sorts of things, but the overwhelming majority say, “Give me more.”

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. Okay, now I imagine that the devil’s in the details in terms of do they want more meetings like the ones they’re having right now? Or are they looking for something else on the menu that they haven’t received yet to appease their appetite?

Darren Chait
Yeah, exactly. It’s both. So, number one, firstly, productive meetings was the caveat there. We want more productive meetings. Are we having productive meetings today? Yes and no. But I think there’s a more interesting take, which was my opinion, anyway. We sort of said, “Why? Like, how do meetings help you?”

And if you look at all the different reasons why people love meetings, 51% said connection with colleagues, 44% said more collaboration, and the list goes on. And what it really led me to think is that we’re in this new world where we’re now post-COVID, we can’t blame COVID anymore, but it’s certainly reset the way we work. We have many, many, many remote-first companies out there, many, many, many hybrid companies, and some companies that are operating in a traditional office environment, but we’re really just seeking out connection.

So, yes, we want more productive meetings, but based on what respondents said in this particular survey, and what I hear talking to folks every day, meetings are how we stay connected. It’s how we build relationships at work, it’s how we make the work we do human. So, I guess it’s not that surprising if you think about it like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we like more meetings, in so far as they are productive and connecting. Got it. And can you lay it out for us, just how much time are we spending in meetings these days?

Darren Chait
Most of us, in terms of the respondents, are only having one or two meetings a day, but about half are having three or more meetings a day, and I guess it comes down to what you do for work, right? So, this year for 20% told us, they’re spending more than six hours per week in meetings, which, 20% doesn’t seem like a whole lot. But I think there’s a few things to consider.

Firstly, the folks that are customer-facing, we heard way higher. We saw five, six hours a day in some cases. The folks that aren’t customer-facing, so in roles that they don’t need to be talking to customers, just internally, is where we saw those numbers of one or two meetings a day.

The other thing is you might have two meetings a day at two hours in total, which doesn’t sound like much, but think about the time needed to prepare for the meeting, to travel to the meeting, in some cases, attend, take notes, travel from, identify what the follow-ups were, share them out, and before you know it, your two hours of meetings a day could be closer to four. And that’s why the cost of these meetings and making them productive and valuable matters so much.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about making them productive and valuable. What are some of your top insights and discoveries here associated with what makes meetings excellent versus bad?

Darren Chait
The fundamental question is whether you need a meeting at all. It’s 2024, we have a ton of technology at our fingertips, there’s so many different ways to collaborate and communicate, but in many cases, we just jump straight back to the calendar.

I used to tell my team, I’m in a different role, there’s only three reasons you need a meeting, the three D’s: debate, discussion, and decision-making. So, if that’s not going to happen, does it need to be a meeting? Can I send them a video, right, with, “Here’s what I want you to know, the background on this particular topic,” or, “Here is the plan for next quarter,” or, “Here is some feedback on something I’ve read.”

If I don’t need debate, discussion, or decision-making, I can share that asynchronously via video. And there’s many other different ways we can achieve that. So, if you don’t need to have a meeting at all, that’s the number one way you can reduce the cost of those meetings.

Pete Mockaitis
And I suppose connection as well, it doesn’t fit into the nice 3D framework, and it’s not necessarily about making productive value creation happen, but that is a key source of reason and value of a meeting going down.

Darren Chait
That’s a very good point. I think you’re right, and it sounds like that’s what people are craving. So, even if we could do everything async, we would be losing out on that element of connection. But then, again, is a meeting always the best way to achieve that connection? Can we catch up spontaneously? Can I give you a call? Can I text you and say it’d be great to have a one-on-one and check how things are tracking and hop on the phone? Different style of meetings can, obviously, favor connection and can be achieved that way.

But a traditional meeting, if I have eight people in the room, in a meeting room with some slides up on the screen and so on, debatable the level of connection you get there. But it’s a good point and something to keep in mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, with the three D’s – the debate, the discussion, the decisions – what are some inappropriate meetings then, meetings we’re having where this is not occurring that should perhaps sound the alarm bell for us, and make us say, “Wait a sec, maybe this meeting should not exist anymore”?

Darren Chait
The knowledge sharing meeting, I think that’s the one. worst culprit. So, where I’m just coming to share information, “So, can everyone come because I need to present the 2025 plan for whatever with you?” And you come along, and everyone’s happy because I’ve got some interest in the 2025 plan, and I go and tell you a story for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, and that was helpful to know. I need to know your plan.

But do we really need everyone in a meeting on the schedule that I dictated, joining the Zoom call, or traveling to the meeting, sitting there at the same time, perhaps having distractions because I’ve determined the time that they have to listen, and really, they’re just gleaning this information from me. Could I not have shared that some other way? So, that’s one. I think that jumps out at me a lot.

The other alarm bell for me when I look at a meeting is the attendees – too many or too few. Too many is where everyone has some sort of, you know, interest in the topic. They all join this meeting and you’re never going to have any real debate or discussion, right? There’s 20 people in the room. Even if there’s 12 people in the room, that’s just not going to happen. We can’t have this productive discussion with, effectively, a conference that we’re running.

Or, too few people in the room, or the wrong people in the room. How are we going to make a decision? I can’t go and talk about planning or strategy when Pete clearly is a stakeholder who couldn’t attend and has to be a part of the decision, or talk about what we’re doing for social next year where there’s no social media marketing folks there. So, the attendees is the second red flag that jumps out at me.

And then, I guess, the third thing I’ll say, which is back to really tips for a great meeting, they sound obvious, but we don’t do them well, which is goals for that meeting. So, when you actually look, and ask yourself, you shouldn’t have to ask yourself, it should be clear, but if you have to ask yourself what the goal of the meeting is. If you can’t answer that very quickly, we shouldn’t have had that meeting. We didn’t need that meeting in the first place.

So, what do we need to walk out of this room with, virtual or physical? If we haven’t achieved this, this meeting has been a waste of time. If you can’t express that for a meeting, at least once it’s started, I think we’re making a mistake here.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when it comes to the right number and the right people in the meeting, you have some work there associated with folks having a specific role. Could you expand on that?

Darren Chait
So, one of the downsides to virtual meetings in 2024 is the risk of multitasking and distraction. We know that 52% of workers report multitasking always or often in virtual meetings. Now, yeah, it doesn’t surprise me, but when you look at it like that in the numbers, it’s mind blowing. That means, in every meeting I go to, more than half the folks in the room are doing something else.

Pete Mockaitis
When they’re remote?

Darren Chait
Yeah, they’re doing both. Now, how well can we do both? Well, I won’t debate you on that topic, I know we’ve all got different views there, but you don’t have 100% of their attention. And I’ve got a goal here for this meeting, we don’t want to walk out of the room without achieving this meeting, but I know half the people there are doing something else. So, that’s number one.

And then, to more directly answer your question around engagement level for different types of meetings, if I have an assigned role in that meeting, we saw more than 90% say that they’re engaged in that meeting, “I’m actively listening.” So, an assigned role, I might be chairing, I might be taking notes, I might be presenting a piece of it, everyone’s kind of listening. Very few said otherwise.

But if I don’t have an assigned role in that meeting, it’s almost inverted. We see, at this point, almost 30% of folks who are somewhat disengaged or completely disengaged. And that role, again, could be part of a brainstorm, providing a status update. Again, taking notes, whatever the role is, it makes a very, very big difference.

The reason I like this stat, it sounds obvious, again, naturally, if people don’t need to be there, number one, they’re not going to be engaged. But even if people need to be there, it’s really important to run these meetings in a way where other folks are involved, where there’s collaboration happening, if you want everyone to be engaged. And as I mentioned, particularly for virtual meetings, you’re competing with that 52% who are doing something else otherwise.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s kind of fascinating, and there’s a whole lot of debate right now like, “Everybody come back to the office!” “No, we don’t want to come back to the office!” Or some people are like, “No, we’re fine, you don’t need to go back to the office.” So, that’s sort of raging now in 2024, and probably will continue in 2025.

And so, I can imagine, if those people who are calling the meetings are aware of these phenomena, that’s probably sort of annoying to them, “No, I would like you to be physically in the space such that you cannot be multitasking.” But, at the same time, I think some people really do perhaps think and function better when we’re multitasking.

I’ve been to meetings where someone’s on his walking treadmill desk, and it’s like, “More power to you. I think your brain is working better when you’re moving, and that’s cool.” Or folks are able to just kind of move around a little bit, or fidget with some things, or ponder. I think, I don’t know, I don’t have any evidence in terms of scientific randomized control trials on this, but I think some people just happen to be in a more comfortable thinking, working groove when they have the flexibility to be in their own space.

And yet, having a little bit of that forced pressure of, “No, you’re here and there’s no escaping. There is no multitasking available in this room without you looking rude and embarrassing yourself.” So, it is really juicy and personal what’s at stake here.

Darren Chait
I have two views on that. I think fascinating point. One is what sort of multitasking, right? So, I’m a big fan of the walking meeting. A lot of my team will know, I’ll put in the AirPods and go for a walk and have a conversation at the same time. Certain meetings, right? That works great when we’re catching up about the week and I’m helping to hear and unblock.

But if I’m going to have a really direct conversation with you about feedback or performance, or we’re trying to solve a problem that might be financial and we’re sharing our screen, obviously, you can’t do it that way. Similarly, if I’m sitting in a meeting and I’m now working on writing a piece of content, there’s no way I’m listening or engaged with what you’re saying. No part of my brain can do that. So, I think it comes down to definitions of multitasking. It’s a fair point that some types of multitasking can be productive.

The other side I was going to mention is around remote, and Calendly, full disclosure, Calendly is a remote-first company. What we mean by remote-first is we designed a workplace, a way of working, that takes into account the fact that our team is remote. And I think what we learned through the pandemic, many companies sort of just picked up their culture and dropped it in online and ran into a lot of issues. Different businesses have different views on the topic, and that’s why many companies have required their employee base back to the office, either full-time or part-time.

If you design a meeting culture around the way you’re set up, I don’t think it makes any difference. So, if I’m running highly collaborative meetings where everyone’s engaged and has a role to play in that meeting, I’m going to see the same levels of engagement, or higher even, than I would if I force everyone into the room such that they can’t be on another device, such that they can’t be doing something else.

And to your point, Pete, many people do better because you think better when you’re on your treadmill while you’re in that meeting or when you go for your walking meeting, and we allow for that. So, I guess what I’m saying here is your meeting culture and the way you meet has to be purposeful and intentional based on the way your organization operates.

Pete Mockaitis
And to your point about our own idiosyncrasies and perceptions, you’ve actually got some fun tidbits about etiquette, like what we consider to be rude or unacceptable. This is fun, because I think some people wonder, “Is it okay if I do this on this meeting?” Well, you actually have some answers. Lay the numbers on us, Darren.

Darren Chait
So, in general, we asked a whole lot of questions around, “Is it okay to eat in a meeting? Is it okay to schedule over lunch?” and those sorts of questions, things we do all the time. And let me run you through some of this data.

So, in general, we saw that 23% think eating in a meeting on camera is totally fine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so 77% thinks it’s not fine.

Darren Chait
No, no, no. But, if you’re on mute and your camera’s off, that’s fine.

Pete Mockaitis
And they’ll never know.

Darren Chait
Most people thought that was okay, 68% said that’s fine, “I just don’t want to see you taking those bites.” I thought that was interesting. I’ve definitely been a bit self-reflective after that because I’ve probably been guilty of that over the years. But some more, I guess, relevant ones to the way we work, the dynamics with camera on and camera off is really fascinating. So, when most people have their camera on, 39% said it’s okay for you to have your camera off, but, obviously, 61% said the opposite.

Pete Mockaitis
So, 61% said, “I want those cameras on.”

Darren Chait
Yep, that’s right. “If some people’s cameras are on, yours better be on,” that’s what they’re saying. And that kind of makes sense, right? You’re trying to build connection here. You know you’re remote in these examples, they’re virtual meetings. It’s hard to do that when you’re the one that’s not there. You think about the real world parallel. So, I wasn’t too surprised by that, the people weighed it up.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what would the real world parallel be, like you just have a black bag over your head? It’s like, “Okay, I’m not available to be looked at.”

Darren Chait
It’s true. It’s true. Again, it’s funny with technology because, just a few years ago, if you weren’t in the office, hopping on the phone is totally acceptable with no camera. But now that we have the likes of Zoom at our fingertips, no longer good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think it gets to the notion of, “Well, hey, if this was a properly sized meeting with the proper people in attendance, it makes sense for everyone there to be on their camera,” in most contexts, as I think through it. And yet if it’s like, “Well, you invited 80 people to this meeting when, really, only nine are there,” it’s sort of like the other 71 are more so spectators, so, like, it seems to make sense to turn the cameras off at that point.

Darren Chait
And that’s why I blame the media organizer, or the onus is on the media organizer. If you have a meeting where folks consistently have their camera off, or if they are doing things while the meeting is running, rather than go to the attendees, and say, “Why are you doing this?” you should be looking at yourself, and saying, “Hang on, what is it about this meeting that disengages, that means that folks can go and do something else, or have their camera off?”

So, I think that’s the feedback there. I think related to multitasking point, before I shared some data with you around how many people are typically multitasking during a meeting, but what surprised me is 70% said that’s okay. They don’t have a problem with it. So, then 30% said, “Nope, everyone should be there.” I don’t personally agree with that.

Again, if you’re running a great meeting and everyone needs to be there, I think that number should be lower. But I think it’s a sign of the fact that we’re not all running those great meetings. We’re all attending many meetings. We don’t have enough hours in the day to get our work done because we’re attending all of these meetings that maybe I didn’t need to be in and that’s why I’m multitasking and that’s why I think it’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s some good stuff about inside a meeting. Anything else you want to share about best or worst practices when you’re inside a meeting?

Darren Chait
So, generally, I mean, from a data standpoint, we asked some questions about folks calling in when they’re not at their desk, but others are at their desks, only 37% thought that was okay. I was offended by that one. Again, I’m a fan of that walking meeting. If people are at their desks, you should be calling in the same way and so on, so similar sorts of insights.

But really, we’re just seeing the same trends again and again in terms of great meetings, great engagement, everyone needs to be there, everyone’s there. Poor meetings, unclear goals, not everyone needs to be in the room, didn’t need to be in a meeting, everyone disengages, and technology has made that so much easier, because I can click one button and turn my camera off. And again, I can’t do that in the live meeting like we discussed.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s really intriguing. The word “should” is so heavy, like, with judgment, you know. And I guess it varies how strongly people hold these “shoulds.” Like, is it more like, “I’d kind of prefer if it were on,” versus, “I can’t believe this unprofessionalism on the other side”?

But I think that really highlights the need to have these conversations because we might very well be entering into this situation, blindly unaware, it’s like, “Well, no, I got my video camera off because, I mean, it’s during lunchtime and I’m hungry and I’m going to get really cranky if I don’t eat. You’re going to have a dumber Pete if I don’t eat. So, this is all in everyone’s best interest for me to be eating right now.”

So, I’m just thinking, “Hey, I’m making prudent decisions that make sense for me and my team and organization.” And unbeknownst to me, I’m getting some judgments from others participating in the meeting, so it sounds extra super important that we have those conversations candidly and upfront so that we’re not incurring the negativity that can just be unspoken and foment and grow, you know?

Darren Chait
Well said. And it gets even more complicated culturally because different demographic factors drive different opinions. I saw in the research, for example, 72% of folks in the US feel like it’s okay to eat off camera, but only 64% in the UK felt that way. So, if you’re meeting with Americans, have your lunch. If you’re meeting with Brits, maybe not a good idea. And there’s generational differences and all sorts of others. So, to your point, being clear on expectations and the way we’re operating this meeting matters because you’re never going to make everyone happy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Yeah, that’s handy. Well, I think it’s just good that the fact that you have this report gets some people thinking and perhaps more likely to discuss, “Oh, hey, I had no idea that a reasonable portion of you might find my behavior completely unacceptable. Why don’t we go ahead and chat about that, shall we?”

Darren Chait
We actually had that a few weeks ago. We have a weekly meeting with the team, and a lot of the team don’t have their camera on, and there’s 40-something people in this meeting, and I get it. Everyone’s got busy. This meeting has just been dropped on their calendar. We haven’t really found a time that suits everyone. It’s impossible with so many folks, and about half of them come with camera on, half come with camera off.

And for the people that are presenting content in that meeting or sharing and driving the discussion, it’s really difficult because there’s no feedback, right? When I’m chatting live with video, we can read each other’s faces and body language and build a great relationship. If you’re just a name, it becomes really hard.

So, we did two things at the same time. One is we set expectations. I said to the team, “Hey, I really want to make this into a meeting that you have your camera on, and I’ll explain why.” And I gave that rationale. And at the same time, we redesigned the way we ran that meeting so it was a lot more collaborative, we had a lot more engagement. Even though it’s a big team, we’d have breakouts most times, we’d have polls running, we’d have an open agenda that anyone could add to.

And both of those things together, a terribly designed scientific trial, both of those things together changed the way this meeting operated. So, I think it comes down to, as we keep saying, right, being clear on expectations and why it matters, but also creating meetings where we want to be there, we get value out of them, and naturally I’m going to be engaged.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Darren, let’s dork out a little bit, if I may, on tech tools. So, Calendly is one of the finest software as a service tool as I’m aware of on the planet. So, yep, I said it. I made it, Darren. You can quote me if you like.

Darren Chait
It must be true then. I’ll take that. I was going to say, just capture that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, it sounds like you’re doing some cool stuff with regard to the open agenda, the polls. Lay it on us, in terms of when you’re in meeting, what are some cool tech features you’re utilizing, and how’s it go down?

Darren Chait
So, firstly, talking about Calendly, as you and hopefully many of the listeners are familiar, we make scheduling automation software, so we make them very easy to book meetings with you and with your team and co-workers from your website, directly by sharing a link, balancing multiple schedules, round-robining, allowing lead routing, whatever the use case is, we want to make scheduling very easy.

And the reason I share this with you is some of my favorite features and tools out there related to meetings actually happen in the pre- and post-. So, I know one of the common reasons I hear why people buy Calendly reminds me of great meeting practice, which is confirming the meeting, sharing out content before the meeting, and sending that thank-you or that follow-up after the meeting.

But, in general, whatever tooling you’re using to do that, you got to do it, you just got to do it. You have to make sure that everyone knows why they’re coming, what the goal is, and making sure they’re actually attending, and then that you capture the value afterwards. So, sure, use Calendly’s workflows by all means, but otherwise, find a way to do it.

Outside Calendly, we spoke earlier about avoiding the meeting. Here at Calendly, we’re big fans of Loom. Loom is an asynchronous video collaboration tool. They’re actually now part of Atlassian, but you can buy Loom independently too and they’ve got a free tier I believe. And the reason I love Loom is it helps me avoid those meetings when I don’t need meetings, but it does it in what I would call a high bandwidth way.

So, here’s what I mean. If I want to share something with you, Pete, I can go and send you an email or a message, say, a Slack message, and say, “Hey, Pete, I want you to know what I’m thinking about this topic, and here’s some feedback on this work,” you just deliver in bullet points. You’re going to come to work. Firstly, I can do it on my schedule, time zone, the way I work, when whatever my workday looks like.

But you’re going to come to work, you’re going to read this message, and you’re going to have 50 questions, right? You’re going to wonder if what I really meant was this or that, if I’m unhappy about that, what the tone was there. Or, I can send you a video, which is what Loom allows me to do. I can record a video, and say, “Hey Pete, great work there. I want you to be even better because you’re next in line for that director promotion. Here are some tips to make your amazing work absolutely incredible.” And I can run through that.

And, very quickly, you’re seeing my tone, my body language, the words in between, the real words, and you’ve got a completely different message delivered, and we’ve avoided that meeting with all those questions. So, async video tools like Loom, I’m a big fan.

Pete Mockaitis
I love Loom so much, and I’m amazed at just how much you could accomplish there. We bought a company about a year ago, and much communication between buyer and sellers is like, “Hey, so here’s kind of how I’m thinking about the financing situation, dah, dah, dah.”

And so, like, we’re going into all these details of a spreadsheet, and so it’s like, “Huh, this is kind of high stakes kind of a communication, and yet we all recognize that, yeah, this is the best way to do it. We want to say, ‘Wait, what was that sell? Where did you get that number? Where’s that coming from?” And we can’t find the right time to meet together quickly, but it’s like, so it really kept our back-and-forths moving faster as opposed to, “Oh, I guess we could all meet Thursday.” “No, give me the Loom Monday, and then we’ll all have our comments Monday evening.”

Darren Chait
Exactly. I love it. What a great testimonial. So, I think that’s an absolute secret for success.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. So, Loom or something like it enables you to, very quickly, easily do a screen record share. You can see your face in a bubble and mark up documents or spreadsheets or work products of any sort. Very cool. Any other favorite tools?

Darren Chait
So, at my core, I’m a marketer. I crave voice of customer. I want to hear from the customer all the time. So, looking for solutions that allow me to do more of that, and there’s lots out there and it depends on the nature of customer and so on. So, without going to a specific solution, because I think it depends on the company, if you can find a tool that helps you record customer conversations and allows you to share them around internally, that is game-changing. That helps us organize.

Because, in my marketing org, I can go and tell you what the customer says, I can give you slide deck after slide deck, spreadsheet after spreadsheet, until you’ve heard a real human standing right there, talk about the value they get from your product or service, the challenges they have with your product and service, nothing aligns you more like a marketer. But it’s also an area that we’re very interested in directionally at Calendly.

We are moving beyond just scheduling. We are very interested in tasks around meetings, preparation, engagement, and follow-up. I think you’ve got to find ways to capture what’s discussed in meetings and circulate them and surface them and share them to create that organization that’s always working for the customer.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. So, when you say record the voice of the customer. Is that just as simple as, “Hey, we’re on a Zoom, or a Google Meet, or whatever, and I’m clicking record, and now here’s the snippet”? So, what you’re saying is there’s tools that make it even simpler than that?

Darren Chait
Totally, yeah. I know a lot of enterprise organizations use Gong, for example, where sales calls are recorded, you can search and share snippets so there definitely are. But, again, it’s a bit like some of the meeting features and workflows I mentioned earlier. It’s a way of working more than a particular tool that matters. And we really have seen total change in the way we work and collaborate and how customer-centric we are as we’ve created that culture of sharing meetings.

Because the thing about meetings, right, I should have said at the beginning, is we love to hate them. Yes, they drive all of these great outcomes for our business, but it’s where business gets done. If you think about external meetings, every meeting you have with someone outside your business is somehow tied to making money, or recruiting to have the right team to make money, or build relationships that ultimately may lead to customer acquisition, whatever it is.

So, the fact that we’re letting the value of these meetings dissipate into thin air when the meetings end doesn’t make sense. So, we need to capture them, and the same rationale is, the same reasons why we have to make sure we take notes, we have to make sure that we have follow-ups, and make sure those follow-ups actually happen and so on. So, just all of these ways of working and tools out there are all really reminding us of the fact of the value of every meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, inside a meeting with remote technology operating, you mentioned open agenda, polls, whatever. So, these are just the features baked into your Zoom or Google Meet or whatever you’re using?

Darren Chait
Yep, yep. In many cases, yep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, just making the most of them. Like, they’re there for you. Go ahead and learn about them. Try them out.

Darren Chait
Yep, and like that, we won’t be eating in meetings anymore, right, because I’ll be so engaged in what we’re talking about.

Pete Mockaitis
“I get to vote! I’m excited!” It might not be immediately that transformational.

Darren Chait
Yeah, that’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
It may or may not be that immediately transformational.

Darren Chait
There you go. That’s the disclaimer.

Pete Mockaitis
But you’re right, it is fun. It’s intriguing. I don’t know about you, but something about real-time data, there’s a little bit of a reveal. If it’s an interesting question, like, “Oh, hey, how many of you are calling in from the West Coast?” It’s like, “Okay, I don’t know.” But like, if I’m genuinely wondering in terms of like, “Hey, we came up with 12 ideas. I’d love for everyone to vote on which ones they think are the most likely to be high impact and they want to start on first.” Like, I don’t know about you, but that just gets my heart thumping a little bit. Like, “Ooh, who’s going to be the winner?” It’s like election night, like county by county.

Darren Chait
You know what though, Pete, if you said, “Does anyone have any views on how we should prioritize this?” Silence. Right?

Pete Mockaitis
Totally.

Darren Chait
We use a lot of Miro here as well. Miro is an online whiteboarding tool, and there’s a few of them around as well, and some of them are embedded in other products and so on. The reason I like Miro is it allows a very fluid, freeform way to collaborate in the form of whiteboards. But they have a lot of great real-time tools you can share.

You can share your Miro board for your Zoom or directly, and it’s great for voting. People can put stickies. They can contribute to a conversation. They can drive that collaboration in a real way. So, that’s what you’re reminding me of as you’re talking about that behavior because it definitely does exist.

Pete Mockaitis
Very nice. Well, Darren, tell me, any other key things you want to make sure to mention, any top do’s or don’ts?

Darren Chait
So, one other thing to mention that we noticed in the research this year, and again, I’m not surprised, but also really cool at the same time. We asked, in general, we asked all the respondents in this survey their views on the role of AI in meetings, if they’re interested in the use of AI in meetings.

2023, 17% said yes. This year, almost 50% said yes. But we’re all learning so much about AI every day and the advent of all the big players in tech in AI. It’s now very clear, to these respondents at least, that it’s here, we’re heading there. Most products are releasing AI features now, particularly those in the meeting space, Calendly included, and we’re coming up there soon.

So, I think it’s fascinating to see that AI has unlocked a ton more powerful online, and it’s a logical place to start, right, to make us more productive in our meetings, more effective. So, that trend in just 12 months was really surprising to me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Darren Chait
One of my favorite quotes, in general, in business, comes from, it’s actually been quoted many times by many people so I won’t try to attribute it, which is not to confuse work with progress. So, something I often think about is, “Is this just work keeping me busy or is this actual progress or output?” So, “Don’t mistake work with progress” is one of my favorite business quotes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Darren Chait
Team of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal. Definitely a bit of a less conventional business book, but a must-read if you’re leading a team.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Darren Chait
I don’t end my day until I’ve got a plan for the next day. I think, especially with time zones and the likes of Slack and other tools now that bombard us when we’re not online, you always wake up, you always start your day feeling behind. So, I, at least, want to start my day having clarity for the goals for the next day.

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

Darren Chait
Absolutely. So, obviously, if you want to learn more about Calendly, Calendly.com. But on LinkedIn, always happy to connect and chat and nerd out on these topics, and we can, yeah, definitely dive more into what we’ve learned. You can also, if you go to Calendly.com. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link or other resources to the State of Meetings 2024 so you can dive into this data. And there’s many more thoughts and perspectives here that we didn’t have time for, but you can nerd out on the State of Meetings yourself as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Darren Chait
Go through your calendar, and look at those meetings that are competing for productive time. See what you can cut, and then choose a favorite meeting and see if you can make it that much better. Go and look at who’s attending. Look at your process around setting agendas and planning. Look at the tooling that you’re using to power that meeting, scheduling all the way through to follow-ups, and see if you can get that favorite meeting performing that much better. And no doubt you will, you’ll see the results and you’ll move on to the next one. So, meetings really are a hack for team productivity, and I encourage you to try it out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Darren, thank you. I wish you many excellent meetings.

Darren Chait
Thanks, Pete. Likewise. Great to chat.

Nov 21
0

1013: Harnessing the Six Motives that Shape Culture with Neel Doshi

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Neel Doshi reveals how to build and sustain high performing cultures through total motivation.

You’ll Learn

  1. The six motives at the root of culture
  2. How to use metrics the wrong and right way
  3. The questions that kill motivation

About Neel 

Neel is the co-founder of Vega Factor and co-author of bestselling book, Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation. Previously, Neel was a Partner at McKinsey & Company, CTO and founding member of an award-winning tech startup, and employee of several mega-institutions. He studied engineering at MIT and received his MBA from Wharton. In his spare time, he’s an avid yet mediocre woodworker and photographer.

Resources Mentioned

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Neel Doshi Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Neel, welcome.

Neel Doshi
Pete, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. I’m excited to talk culture. Could you kick us off with something strikingly surprising and counterintuitive that you know and have learned about culture that most don’t?

Neel Doshi
Yeah, absolutely. The core of our research has landed on this realization that, fundamentally, culture is about motivation. And to unpack motivation, you have to understand what motivates people. To unpack that question, what you realize is that actually fundamentally only six motives, reasons why people do things. Motives are the root of motivation.

The first is play, you do something because you enjoy doing it, it’s fun. The second is purpose, you do something because you believe your contribution matters, what you’re doing matters. The next is potential, you think it’s building up to something that’s important. The next is emotional pressure. Think about when maybe you guilted someone into doing something. Well, that’s an example of emotional pressure. You’re acting on someone’s identity to get them to take an action. Economic pressure, you’re trying to chase reward or avoid punishment. Or inertia, you’re just now going through motions.

What we’ve realized, and we can prove this all day long, is that when a culture maximizes play, purpose, and potential, you get outlier performance. When it does the opposite, maximizes emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia, you get fairly lousy performance.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Wow, check it out, there’s so much there right off the bat. Thank you, Neel.

Neel Doshi
There’s a lot there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, there’s so much to get into because it feels right. Because, naturally, when I get a set of categories, I want to try to find the counterexample, like, “Oh, what about this?” but it seems like that’s holding together pretty well. Anytime that I do something that’s kind of what’s behind it, and I’m having a hard time thinking of anything I do that doesn’t fit in there. So, very nice.

Neel Doshi
You know what’s funny, Pete, like you say that, it’s hard to find the counterexample, but at the same time you look at the average company and they don’t work this way, which I think is a very interesting paradox because when you hear this research, and you say this really resonates. It kind of has to be true. Like, it follows my intuition, it follows my life experience, but then why do we look at our teams, our companies, ourselves, and not manage this?

I’ll give you two examples which I think you’ll find interesting because I think your pursuit of the counterexample is fascinating. We spent many years helping to transform the performance model of one of the world’s biggest hedge funds. And I remember in the opening conversations, I was talking to the founder of this hedge fund who is wildly successful, he’s made more money than 99.99999% of humanity, and the rumor had it that was when he was on vacation, he’d bring an IT team with him to set up his nine-screen Bloomberg Terminal in the hotel room next to his.

And he says, “Neel, okay, I respect your work. I loved your book, but play, really? Like, do you really think that’s a driver of performance?” And so, I asked him, “Why do you bring an IT team on vacation and set up a nine-screen Bloomberg Terminal when you’ve already made more money than humanity?” And he said, “Well, it’s because it’s fun.”

And I said, “Okay, that is what made you the most successful person in your industry, and you don’t think that applies to any other human being?” And that really clicked for him.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, I’ll tell you, trading can be crazy fun, too fun at times, so I’m resonating there. So, play, yes, it’s just fun. And when you say corporations aren’t doing this, you mean they’re just sort of ignoring it entirely, or they’re only thinking, “Hey, you know, it’s a job, there’s a compensation, you need money, therefore, we’re fine here,” and that’s about the extent of it?

Neel Doshi
Yeah, I think that’s more or less it. Like, a common question and answer I often see and have, so I talk to an executive or CEO, and usually it’s because they read our book, they asked me to come talk to their team or their company, and I’ll say at this point, “Do you doubt that motivation drives performance because that feels pretty intuitive, I would imagine for most people, that we kind of know that the more motivated we are, the better we perform?”

So, that’s an easy one, like, “Yes, of course, I know that motivation drives performance.” “All right, in your company, do you manage motivation?” “No, not really.” Okay, so that’s thing number one. Thing number two is exactly what you just said, Pete, like when you think about how you manage motivation what are you doing?

And, generally, what companies have put into place are systems that create emotional pressure and economic pressure and often inertia. So, they’re not just not managing it, they’re managing it in the opposite direction of how it should be managed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Well, could you perhaps bring this to life a little bit in terms of a tale with a culture transformed? What were things like? What did you go do? And then what happened?

Neel Doshi
One that played out in the news not long ago was the issues that was manifesting in the retail banking industry, specifically, with Wells Fargo’s fake account scandal. Like, if you remember, this is now circa, like, 2014 or something like that, Wells Fargo hit the news for ultimately creating on the order of three to four million fake accounts. Now, that’s amazing, by the way. Just think about the volume of that, like three and a half million fake accounts.

Pete Mockaitis
There must be some motivation behind that effort.

Neel Doshi
Yeah, exactly. You got to want that. Now, the thing about this is when that situation was unpacked, the fundamental reason why was because they were using pressure to drive performance, emotional and economic. And so, as a result, you get phenomenon like check-the-box behavior and cheating.

So, a different financial institution approached us, and I’ll never forget what the CEO said, literally, these are the words he said. He said, “We know in our industry how to create mercenaries. We have no idea how to create missionaries. So, what do we do?”

And so, I said, “It’ll be easier for me to show than tell.” And he said, “We’ve got lots and lots and lots of branches. Why don’t you take a dozen of them, do whatever you want? Our analysts will measure them champion-challenger style so that we can see, did what you do actually have performance.” So, here’s what we did. First, we eliminated the pressures.

When you looked at these institutions, these branches before, they used to have this weekly high-pressure call. Like, the goal of a call was to make you feel bad about your performance. I mean, if you really observed the call as an anthropologist might, you have to conclude that is the purpose of this, to create pressure. Their systems were about pressure. The way they thought about compensation, the degree to which your comp was commission-based, for example, the degree to which your promotion was based on metrics, all of this was essentially a system designed to drive performance through pressure.

The first thing we did is we got rid of all that. We got rid of pay-for-performance, we got rid of the high-pressure conversations, and what we replaced it with was a system that was really about creating play and purpose. Now, what does that look like? Think about the times where you felt real play in your work. Like, my guess is what it felt like was you were chewing on a new problem, it was really interesting, it was filling you with curiosity, maybe you had the opportunity to learn something or experiment in some way.

These are all precursors for growth. Fundamentally, if you think about the opposite of play, it’s boredom, and so it really tells you that play is highly attached to novelty. So, what we did was we put into place a set of practices, rhythms, measurement systems that were about play and purpose. So, for example, in our future state branches, every week, every branch would lay out the problems they want to solve. These aren’t goals. These aren’t financial metrics. These are just problems they want to solve.

And the ask of every person is to come up with ideas, and as a team decide which ideas we’re going to experiment with. They just ran that rhythm every week. It was fun. Like, when you start to understand the problems that we’re trying to solve, “Well, this is really interesting, and I can come up with my own ideas? That’s really interesting. And as a team, we’re going to help improve and choose ideas to experiment? Well, that’s interesting. And I’m going to actually run experiments? Well, that’s really interesting, too.”

That is one of about five different tactics we put into place, probably the most powerful one, and immediately, you saw a bunch of changes happen. You saw everyone start to care about performance without all the pressure, because they start to view it as a game. You start to see everyone create more ideas. As they created more ideas, their sense of ownership increased. As their sense of ownership increased, that casts a halo on all of their work. All of their performance increases.

We’re measuring motivation as we go, so their motivation is increasing. Then ultimately, they were measuring performance, and what they found was productivity, customer satisfaction, and sales all increased, and that was after eliminating the pressure systems.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Neel, that’s so cool and beautiful, that notion of play, like, “Yes, that stuff is fun.” And that’s what they say, I’m thinking about in Silicon Valley, in terms of, “Well, if you want to attract the top talent, the most brilliant software engineers, the top thing is not the foosball table or the compensation. It’s like, ‘Are you giving them interesting problems they get to solve?’”

It’s, like, they’re playing. They’re using their brain like, “Huh, how would we do that?” And then they get to try some things, experiment, see if they worked, vibe with other talented, sharp people who push them so they’re learning and growing and trying new things. And then in the course of doing it, they actually care about the metrics.

And I’m also thinking about a time, I coordinated a couple youth leadership conferences, and I was really big—because I used to work at Bain—so I was big on the Net Promoter Score, like, “What is the satisfaction of our students who are attending these?” And so, I had tracked it from the previous year, and everyone was a volunteer, so with my team, my staff. I didn’t have any economic anything over them.

But we were just thinking, “Hey, how can we make just a really amazing experience? Last year was great, but can we make an experience that’s even better?” And so, we had all these ideas, “Well, we could try this. We could try that. Well, maybe let’s watch out for how we do this. Get some more outside time, mix things up, make this interact.” So, we had all these ideas, and we were playing with them.

And then I thought nobody else really would care about this Net Promoter Score metric all that much, because, like, hey, I work in Bain, and I’m a numbers dork. And so, I remember I told my buddy, Graham, a fellow volunteer, he’s like, “Our Net Promoter Score is higher than last year by like 20 points!” And he said, “YES!”

He was so jazzed! Like, other people were in the room, like, startled. Like, he has just told we won the lottery or something, and he gave me a huge bear hug, and I was like, “Oh, I didn’t expect you to care about my dorky little number nearly this much, but you did because we were playing, and then as you’re as you’re playing, you’re invested and you care about the performance and the winning, even though I didn’t say, ‘Now, Graham, if we don’t boost our Net Promoter Score then this was a failure.’”

Neel Doshi
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, “I’m taking you out for drinks.” There was none of that.

Neel Doshi
Exactly. You know, Pete, what you’re raising is a really important misconception I often find in our research. Well, people ask me, “So, Neel, are you saying metrics are bad?” “The scoreboard can make a game more fun. You often need the scoreboard to make the game fun. The problem is not the metrics. The problem is you weaponized the metric. You made people feel bad about it. You used it to create pressure.”

If you set up a game like you just did, you set up a game, you had a scoreboard for the game, you didn’t put any pressure against the scoreboard, but you encouraged experimentation, you encouraged thinking, problem solving, well, now the whole thing is fun, and you feel a great deal of ownership for that.

And so, in a lot of these systems, what you find is companies are using their measurements the wrong way. The irony is, like, you see goal systems in companies, and you ask, “Well, what is the purpose of a goal system? Like, why are you doing this?” And, generally, if you’re really thinking about it, it’s two things, “I’m using it to create focus and alignment, and motivation.”

But it’s the second one that often gets completely forgotten, and so, you see companies with goal systems that are actually creating a great deal of pressure, negative motivation. And what you described is a perfect example of the opposite.

Pete Mockaitis
And I want to back it up all the way to almost your first sentence, when you say, “Culture is about motivation.” That seems to really cut to the core of things, because so often with culture, we say, “Oh, is it more of a top-down or is it a bottom-up or distributed?” So, we think of all these sorts of domains by which we might categorize or put into types different sorts of culture, “Is it formal or is it informal? And then how does that show up with the dress code or the artifacts that are put…?”

So, usually, in these sorts of almost generic textbook conversations about culture, that’s sort of what we go to. But I like how you’re getting after culture is about motivation in terms of, fundamentally, “Do all of these things make folks more into doing their finest work, and making things happen? Or, are they more so stifling?” And I guess there’s a little bit to be said for different personalities and individual preferences there, but it seems like you’re really pointing out some universals that cut across whatever my personal proclivities are.

Neel Doshi
Yeah, a hundred percent. When I started this research, which is almost three decades ago now, if you ask somebody, “What’s the recipe for building a high-performing culture?” you’d have been given the answer, “Just copy GE.” And that didn’t work for them, as you see playing out these days. That “Copy this other company” is, essentially, we don’t understand the root cause, so we’re kind of guessing. We’re guessing at patterns that may or may not fit.

The root cause is, fundamentally, motivation. So, all of these attributes of an organization’s operating system, like centralized, decentralized, remote work, not remote work, like all these attributes are the symptoms at the edges. The key is we can make a lot of those attributes work. You can make an entirely remote-based company super highly motivating. You can make an in-person one super highly motivating. You can make one that leans more towards centralized, more towards decentralized.

You can get these dynamics right, but what you have to understand is that the fundamental thing you have to solve for is “Is everyone motivated the right way?” And then you realize there’s actually a lot of flexibility in how you build that machine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve heard a bit about play. Can you unpack purpose and potential for us?

Neel Doshi
Purpose is probably, I’d argue, maybe one of the most misunderstood. So, play, the misunderstanding is ping pong tables, like, “I want to build a high-play culture, so I give ping pong tables.” No, that’s not it. It has to come from the work. Purpose has a similar problem, where a lot of people believe that purpose comes from our mission statement, like, “I have this big grandiose mission statement, we put it on the walls, we put it on the mouse pads, we put it on the screensavers, and that somehow imbues purpose.” Not really.

Like, the better way of thinking about purpose is its opposite. Like, if the opposite of play is boredom, the best opposite of purpose that I’ve found is fungibility. You feel fungible. You feel like a cog in the machine. Because even if the machine is incredibly purposeful, if you are a cog in that machine, you will not feel the purpose motive, and that’s a very important distinction that people don’t quite understand. I’ll give you an example of this.

I was working once in a performance transformation of a really cool, fast-growing tech company, And I was sitting down with the CTO, and I said to the CTO, “I’ve noticed that you’ve set up a model with the engineers where they are quite fungible.” And he says, “I did that intentionally.” He says, “You know, Silicon Valley, low retention rates, lots of attrition, I need to make sure I don’t have business continuity problems so I’ve made them all fungible.”

And I said, “By making them all fungible, you’ve increased your attrition rate because they don’t have that purpose motive. They don’t feel like they matter. They don’t feel like their work matters, their contribution matters. It’s about personal purpose.” And that’s the thing companies really miss on the purpose motive. It’s you feel like your contribution matters every day, day in, day out. If you don’t go to work that day, outcomes that you care about won’t happen.

Another example of that is think about the modern-day call center, where you’re sitting in that call center, you’re plugged into a phone system, and once your one call ends, you hear a beep in your earphone, customer immediately starts talking, and let’s say you have to take a break, you just kind of log out, no big deal. All the calls get routed to someone else.

You are a definitional cog in the machine at that point. You don’t really feel like your contribution matters. If you log out, no big deal, “No big deal. There’s no stakes to my work.” In that world, you don’t feel the purpose motive.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m hearing you. It’s interesting because, on the one hand, that really resonates. And on the other hand, there is kind of always a vast population of people who could do what we are doing. So, it’s like an individual person has talents and skills and abilities and is fun and special and unique as a miraculous creation. But also, it’s like, just as the call center employee could be swapped in for another call center employee, so too could the software engineer. So, maybe let’s get a little bit clearer on the stakes. It’s like outcomes they care about will not be advanced if they don’t show up to work.

Neel Doshi
I totally hear you. Like, on some level, aren’t we all replaceable? Yeah, totally. It doesn’t mean that a company has to make you feel that way. Like, let me give you a simple example. Toyota. Toyota does this incredibly well on the automobile assembly line. So, if you think about an automobile assembly line, how could that not be cogs in the machine? Like, you’re standing there, this chassis kind of rolls up in front of you, you maybe bolt a door on, it rolls away. How do you not feel fungible? How do you not feel like a cog in the machine?

What Toyota does, Toyota has a very deep and interesting set of beliefs, which turn out to be highly accurate. Their beliefs stem from the realization that there’s really two types of performance. One type is called tactical, the other is called adaptive. Definitional opposites. Tactical is how well you stick to your plan. Adaptive is how well you don’t stick to your plan. You can think of a tactical as convergence, adaptive is about divergence. Definitional opposites.

So, the Toyota line worker who’s just standing there just mindlessly plugging the bolt in, that’s all the tactical performance side of the job. What Toyota realizes is that there are so many possibilities for improvement on an automobile assembly line, they can’t even really compute it. That every job could be done better, every part could show up broken, every supply chain could have an issue, and what they want is they want their line workers to be as adaptive as possible, and they’ve built that into their system.

So, imagine you’re that guy, you’re bolting the door on that car, and you have an idea. It could be any idea. It could be to improve your performance in any way. You reach up above your station, and there’s this yellow cord hanging from the top called the Andon cord. You pull that cord, your line manager comes up to you and says, “What’s your idea?” You say, “Well, if my tool was shaped a little bit differently, I could do this job better, cheaper, faster, safer.” Your line manager is kind of jotting it down on a clipboard.

In your team are machinists whose SLA, their agreement to you, is to take your idea and hack together something that you can try within 24 hours. They bring it back to you, you try it. If it works better, they scale it up. If it doesn’t work better, no big deal. There’s a bit more nuance to this process. I’m kind of simplifying it a bit. But the gist of it is they are saying to every line worker, “Your ideas matter.” And by doing so, they’ve emphasized the adaptive side of their job, where your unique thoughts are important, your unique ideas are important.

And so, they’ve essentially built a system that emphasizes the part of the job that requires you to think and, actually, de-emphasizes the part of the job that doesn’t. A lot of companies get this completely wrong. Like, the biggest thing I’ve seen as a mistake is they think that Toyota’s system is a suggestion box. So, like, Pete puts an idea in a suggestion box and some group of folks in corporate think about it.

This is not at all what Toyota has done, “It’s Pete’s idea. We’re arming Pete with the tools to experiment. Pete is going to see if his idea worked or not. Pete is going to be the one that learns from it.” That is a, fundamentally, different model than most organizations could even wrap their heads around. And so, not only is that building your sense of play, it’s building your sense of purpose also.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it just sounds sort of fun. I kind of want to hop on a Toyota line right now and see what ideas come to mind.

Neel Doshi
This is what’s remarkable about what they’ve done. They’ve taken a job that most managers would have said is motivationally irredeemable. You just cannot make this job motivating. They’ve taken that job and they’ve pulled those levers as hard as anyone could possibly pull them to great success in terms of both productivity in factories and quality.

Pete Mockaitis
Now you’ve got a turn of a phrase, “the total motivation factor.” Can you define that for us? And this is actually a number that could be calculated.

Neel Doshi
So, if you start with that foundational research that proves that if an organization creates more play, more purpose, more potential, and less emotional pressure, less economic pressure, and less inertia, you’ll get to maximum performance outcomes. Now, it turns out that performance is actually shockingly hard to measure. You can measure the tactical side of performance, like, “How many cars do we make?” It’s hard to measure the adaptive side.

Because how do I measure, “Did you come up with a good idea or a bad idea? Or did you experiment? Did you not experiment? Did you see a problem? Did you not see a problem?” Like, all of the adaptive side of work is actually very, very difficult to measure.

But what we found is motivation is actually not difficult to measure. And what we recommend to most organizations is measure motivation. If you know that it’s a root of performance, measure it, and that measurement essentially measures the degree to which you feel play, purpose, and potential. Those are positive to the number. The degree to which you feel emotional pressure, economic pressure, or inertia, those are negative to the number, and that number is the total motivation factor. Relatively easy to measure, relatively easy to calculate, highly predictive of performance.

And so, much like you found with Net Promoter Score and your example with your volunteers, the act of measuring something as long as you don’t put pressure against it actually signals you value it. Oftentimes, in more organizations, what you measure is the strongest signal of what you value. And so, measure it, you’re signaling you value it, you’re signaling you want people to think and experiment against it. It starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy of improvement at that point.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with the measuring, is it just sort of surveys? Or how is that figure actually generated?

Neel Doshi
There’s a few implements. I’ll describe to you our most cutting-edge implement. Because the challenge is, what we found is the act of measuring something affects the thing that you’re measuring. There is certainly a quantum physics aspect to human measurement.

So, for example, a very simple example, let’s say I had a survey for an organization that had a question that was, “Pete, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you hate your CEO?” Like, obviously, no one’s going to put that, but let’s say I wrote that question. Well, all of a sudden, I’m priming you to think a certain way. The question itself is priming a thought process.

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, it didn’t even occur to me to hate my CEO. Well, now that you mentioned it, a little bit.”

Neel Doshi
You know what the funny thing is, I’m kind of giving you an absurd example, but I see more subtle versions of that exist in organizations’ measurement systems. In the spirit of trying to measure negativity, they often prime negativity, which I find to be really fascinating. Like, you’re trying to build an organization where people have agency. They’re trying to affect that… agency is fundamentally an attribute of play and purpose. You can’t really have a play and purpose without agency.

So, you’re trying to create these cultures of agency, these cultures of positivity, hope, optimism, and then you have instruments that actually are priming the opposite, like instruments that are saying, “Pete, you have no agency. The only way you can affect change is to anonymously complain to our executive team.” And so, what we find is that the instrument has a way stronger effect than people think on the mindset the questions themselves are creating, which is wild when you kind of think about that.

Now, so our cutting-edge instruments on this, they’re not just about measuring motivation. The instrument itself is about creating it. The act of filling out the instrument creates motivation. So, there’s a few tricks that we have. There’s probably like a hundred tricks that we’ve kind of built into our cutting edge of measurement, but I’ll give you one specific one.

When we measure motivation using our best implements, we won’t say, “Pete, how do you feel about your work?” What we say is, “Pete, think about your next quarter, the quarter ahead of you. And as you think ahead, do you see that work as it’s going to be fun and interesting, or do you see it as boring? Do you see that you will have a lot of personal impact, or do you see that you won’t?” So, play and purpose, and we kind of go through all the motives that way.

But by making this forward-looking, making this about the work you haven’t done yet, the measurement doesn’t become about complaining. It becomes a diagnostic to improve something that hasn’t happened yet. It becomes about anticipation. Very simple example of how our instruments are designed to avoid the problem of fomenting complainers. But that’s simply that. What we do is we say to an organization, “Every single team, every quarter, should do a health check. That health check is not a survey you do on your own. It’s a conversation you do as a team.”

And in that conversation, we suggest “The first 10 minutes, everyone does fill out this questionnaire, this diagnostic. You’re doing that first 10 minutes on your own. You immediately, as a team, get the results, and the results guide you through a conversation as a team to commit to something to change.” Because a lot of times, measurement, what’s the point if it doesn’t lead to action? And on these topics, a lot of teams are ill-equipped to take action. They just don’t know.

They don’t know what degrees of freedom they have. They don’t know what the tools are. And so, what we do is we, essentially, say, “Every quarter, every team, do this health check. First 10 minutes, we’ll do this positively priming diagnostic. The next hour and 20 minutes, we’re going to commit to changes we’re going to make in the next quarter based on it.” And that instrument not just measures, it puts you on the path to improvement more or less automatically.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Okay. Well, Neel, tell me, are there any other key do’s and don’ts when it comes to motivation and culture? And I’m thinking, specifically, even for individual contributors who are thinking, “Oh, I don’t know. This sounds like some really cool systems I wish were in place in my organization. But what can I do? Or maybe, how might I be able to hack my own work to experience more play and purpose in it?”

Neel Doshi
Start with yourself. That’s the easiest place to start. What we recommend to folks is, first, just start to understand the science of motivation. You can read Primed to Perform, we have a bunch of other articles. There are a lot of ways to kind of get your head around understanding the science of motivation. That alone is an important first step as an individual, because you want to start to ask yourself, “Am I feeling play in my work? Am I feeling purpose?” That’s kind of step number one.

Step number two is there are levers that you can pull on your own. So, for example, a lot of organizations, as we talked about earlier, their mechanism of alignment is usually just a number, like, your goal. It would be the equivalent of, imagine if I’m coaching a basketball team, and I say, “Okay, guys, here’s your goal. Get 100 points. I’ll see you guys after the game.” A lot of companies actually work that way, which makes very little sense when you think about it.

Like, the goal was the easy part. The strategy is the hard part. The problems to solve are the hard part, like, “Why am I, essentially, not coaching any of that?” So, the second step I’d say to an individual is take a step back from the systems of your company. Maybe the systems are creating pressure. Take a step back from them.

Ask yourself, what problems could you solve in the next month or two that you think will be valuable to your customer, to your team. Really start to understand those problems and start to come up with ideas against them. Just get yourself into a mindset of falling in love with the problem you have to solve, even if your company hasn’t made that easy.

The third thing I would say is get your team to learn the science of motivation, because teams have a lot more degrees of freedom than they think. Individuals, typically, have the least amounts of net degrees of freedom in an organization, but teams have way more than most teams exercise. Teams can do a lot to actually affect their rhythms, their habits, how they think about problem-solving, how they think about novelty and creativity. Lots of that is owned locally.

In fact, what a lot of companies don’t realize is, if you think about motivation as a construct for a moment, play is inherently local. Like, if you’re a large organization, like imagine you’re JP Morgan Chase, there’s very little that Jamie Dimon can do to create play in a working team because it’s inherently a local phenomenon. Purpose is also inherently a local phenomenon.

And so, as a result, when you measure motivation out, a majority of that motivation that’s controllable by the organization, about two-thirds of it, is actually controlled at the team level. Yet, most organizations don’t manage that. So, the third thing I’d suggest, even if you’re an individual kind of listening to this or reading our book, get your team to start to learn how to do this. Get your team to start to experiment in ways that they can improve themselves, and you’ll be surprised by how much a team can actually do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And as we start to imagine, “Okay, we want more play and we’re going to find interesting problems and we’re going to just go after them,” are there some particular pointers that make that effective or not so effective?

Neel Doshi
I’d say a couple of things. One, any team can start to get into the rhythm of a health check. You don’t need your company to do that for you. Like, any team could start to go down the path of measuring, having this conversation, coming up with ways to improve. We have loads of tools for this. Like, they’re super easy to start to experiment with. Like if you’re kind of in that path and you want easy first steps, what I’d recommend is go to Factor.ai and do a health check as a team. Simple as that.

The second thing I’d suggest, have a habit in your team where you take whatever goals that have been given to you and you turn it into problem statements. It’s very simple, but like, let’s say you said, “We want to increase Net Promoter Score of our volunteer group. Okay, what are the three problems that we might want to solve in the next quarter that could get us there?”

Just do that. Just keep doing that every single week. Turn your goals into problems to solve. Make that muscle memory. Make that habit. You start to do that, mindset changes really quickly. You start to realize, “These aren’t pressure systems. Like, I actually have a lot of agency and control.” That’s the second thing I’d do. Like, if I’m transforming any organization, those first two steps are usually our first two steps.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, Neel, tell me anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Neel Doshi
The thing that I often find organizations asking is, “Is this easy?” because everyone’s under pressure, executives are under pressure, CEOs are under pressure. A lot of their pressure is usually on short-term time horizons. And so, there’s often a temptation to say, “Well, I could just use pressure for the next quarter to get that bump that I need to get, and maybe like we deal with this in a few years.”

The funny thing is, at this point, it is just as easy to motivate a performance lift the right way as it is to motivate a performance lift the wrong way. It is just as easy to do it, and you just have to learn a new technique. And so, the one thing I want to make sure every person, every individual contributor, manager, leader, CEO realizes, you want the short-term lift? You can get it by motivating people the right way. You don’t have to motivate people the wrong way to get it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Neel Doshi
I’ll give you one that we often use in our own work, because people come to us and they often say, “Neel, my engagement levels are low, like the engagement scores are low. How do I grow engagement? What’s the trick? What’s the perk? What’s the next ping pong table?” Simple answer. If you want your people to be engaged in their work, make their work engaging. That’s it, full stop. The other one I find I’m often using in change management with companies is “You can’t wake up somebody who’s pretending to be asleep.” One of the biggest problems I find in a transformation is, often, we’ll work with CEOs who’ll say, “I want the outcome that you’re describing. I want the more adaptive organization. I want the higher motivated organization. That’s great.” Their existing systems typically are the problem, and their existing systems usually create a great deal of pressure for their middle managers.

So, the middle managers are usually under the weight of a lot of pressure, and that problem is that pressure makes you less adaptive, less likely to learn, less likely to experiment, less likely to try new things. And so, the ironic challenge of change into a high-performing organization is your high-pressure organization is the thing that thwarts change. That’s the irony of this whole thing. A lot of organizations will implement systems that will incentivize people to resist change.

And so, when we often work with an organization, what we’ll find is that there’ll be people that will say, “We can’t do this. We shouldn’t do this. Like, this isn’t the time to do this,” like, all sorts of change barriers, sometimes overt, sometimes passive, like passive-aggressive. Now, when you talk to those people individually, they’re not bad people.

Like, I worked with one, for example, where we’re doing this big transformation, and I’m sitting down with this person who started off as being someone that was resistant. And, in this meeting, he sits down and he says, “Neel, first of all, the transformation is going really well. Can I talk about my kids?” I’m like, “Sure, let’s talk about his kids.”

He says, “You know, Neel, before I learned your research and read your book, I was a high-pressure dad. All I would do is exert pressure on my kids.” And he said, “I found that they started avoiding me. They didn’t want to spend time with me. I’d come home from work; I’d see that they would scatter. Their grades weren’t very good. And so, we’re going through this transformation, I’m reading your book, and I thought, ‘I am that. I am that high-pressure dad.’”

So, he says to me, “What I did with my eldest son was, I said to him one day, ‘Hey, if you don’t have to go to school, what would you want to do?’ And I really listened, and he said, my son surprised me, he said, ‘I want to go to school. And here’s why, and here’s what I want to learn, and here’s what I want to get.’”

So, his strategy as a father shifted entirely from pressure on grades, for example, to, “I’m going to help you do the thing you want to do. I’m going to coach you, I’m going to mentor you, I’m going to support you on the things you want to do.” He said, “I started to do that. My kids stopped avoiding me. Their grades in every way went up. And, all of a sudden, my relationship has completely changed. I just want to thank you for that in this conversation.”

Now, my point in the story is the people that I often run into in organizations that are resisting change are not bad people. They’re byproducts of the system that the company has built around them. And so, the challenge is the system is causing people to pretend to be asleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yeah. Thank you. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Neel Doshi
I’ll tell you one that I really adore. Researchers wanted to understand the impact of motivation in the wild, like a natural experiment. Like, is there something that happens in real life that they can actually see and measure?

So, what they found was an interesting case example with sugarcane farmers. So, sugarcane farmers, before their harvest, you can imagine that many of these folks are operating hand-to-mouth, and before their harvest, they have to put out a lot of cash because they’re not actually earning from it. So, before their harvest, most take out loans, most are hawking personal goods to fund their operation, feeling a great deal of pressure. Like, if the harvest goes bad, it’s a real problem for them, and after the harvest, loans are being paid back, their pressure is decreased.

So, the experiment they did was they took these sugarcane farmers, and pre-harvest and post-harvest, they put them through, essentially, a set of intelligence tests, like various forms of measuring cognitive aptitude, flexibility, etc. What they found was that the difference between intelligence for the same people, pre- and post-harvest, was about the difference between going from a 90th percentile on IQ to like a 30th percentile. Same person, just driven by pressure.

What you’re seeing there, by the way, is the vicious cycle of poverty. You’re under a great deal of pressure, economic pressure, like you’re having struggles to make ends meet, for example. Your economic pressure increases, your adaptability decreases. Therefore, your work performance decreases. Therefore, you perform worse, and it’s harder to get a job, and so you end up with a vicious cycle. This experiment clearly showed that, and not even in a laboratory setting, in like a real-life setting, which is one of the reasons why I love it so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And a favorite book?

Neel Doshi
Maybe rather than favorite, I’ll tell you what I’m reading that’s latest. I’m reading a book right now called Pattern Breakers. It’s by a set of seed-stage VCs in Silicon Valley, and they’re laying out the pattern of what they see in ideas that typically result in breakthrough growth. It’s a really good read, especially if you’re an organization that needs to build a culture of adaptive innovation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Neel Doshi
My favorite habit right now is bedtime with my kids. So, one of the things I’m doing these days, which I think is really fun, is I’ll have my kids come up with a bedtime story, and I’ll ask ChatGPT to make it like a rhyming epic. And so, the kids will write a little story, and it’ll be silly. My youngest is about four and a half, so her last story was about how she and her brother went to the beach, they got their foot stung.

They went to a doctor, they went back to the beach, and there were aliens there, and the aliens were messing up the beach, and they had to fix that problem. That was the story that she wanted to tell. So, I just plugged that into Chat GPT, got this long, rhyming epic of the story of “Sam and Cam in the Beach.” So, this has been my bedtime routine for the past few months. It’s just been a lot of fun.

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

Neel Doshi
Go to Factor.ai, you’ll see a lot of things there. You’ll see tools to measure your motivation to drive problem-solving your team, to actually just fully manage your teams. You’ll see our research. We publish new research, usually, every other week. So, you’ll see the latest thinking on things like remote work, or burnout, things that are affecting the workplace today, but go to Factor.ai and you’ll find all of that.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Pete Mockaitis
My final challenge is, at this stage of the game, you can find a job that motivates you the right way, or you can turn yours into motivates you the right way. Like, when I first entered the workforce, the reason why I studied this was I was so demotivated in my first job, I couldn’t even tell you why I was. I couldn’t even explain to you the reason that I was feeling demotivated, and I didn’t have the tools to fix that. I didn’t have the tools to understand that.

Thirty years later, we have the tools to understand it. We have the tools to fix it. So, my ask of everyone is if you’re feeling like you’re in a state of demotivation, don’t linger in that. Like, these are now solvable problems. Take a step. Learn more about it. You can fix this.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Neel, thank you. I wish you much peak performance.

Neel Doshi
Thanks, Pete. I really appreciate it.

Nov 18
0

1012: Triple Your Learning through Productive Failure with Dr. Manu Kapur

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dr. Manu Kapur reveals how to maximize learning by intentionally designing for failure.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why to avoid explanations and experts (at first) 
  2. How to achieve the sweet spot of deep learning 
  3. Four ways to hack your motivation 

About Manu 

Dr. Manu Kapur is a world-renowned expert on learning and currently heads the Future Learning Initiative at ETH University Zurich. He divides his research time between ETH Zurich and the Singapore-ETH Center in Singapore. Dr. Kapur earned his doctorate in Education from Columbia University.

Dr. Kapur is known for his pioneering research on intentionally designing for and learning from failure, demonstrating how this approach can lead to more effective learning compared to traditional methods. He frequently speaks at corporate and educational events and is often interviewed on learning-related subjects, including several appearances on NPR and two successful TEDX talks: Productive Failure and How Failure Drives Learning.

Resources Mentioned

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Manu Kapur Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Manu, welcome.

Manu Kapur
Thank you, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to talk about learning and failure, and you are a master of failure. I mean that in the best possible way. And so, I’d love it if you could kick us off with you sharing a tale of one of your personal, or professional, most productive failures.

Manu Kapur
You know, looking back, I think it started very early on in my teenage years when I wanted to be a professional soccer player, and it’s a story I tell. It only makes sense looking back, as I said. My coach used to have a philosophy of training, strengths training, where he’ll say, “You’ve got to push your body, you’ve got to do your push-ups and your pull-ups and your sprints and everything to failure, until you really buckle, until you really can’t, and then you push a little bit more, as long as it was safe.”

And his idea was, you know, good things happen on the other side of failure. You really have to push it to know what it feels like to be there. And it’s only after that, when you give the body a chance to recover, and the nutrition and rest, it comes out stronger on the other side. And that, at the time.

We used to really hate that training, but as a metaphor for, not just a metaphor, now a science for just learning and growth, whether it’s strengths training or learning, it’s something that has inspired me for many years.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And science, indeed. I’ve dug into those papers that powerlifters and bodybuilders look at. And, yes, progressive overload is absolutely the name of the game in strength training.

Manu Kapur
Super compensation, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’re saying this same principle is applicable in many domains of learning growth improvement.

Manu Kapur
Exactly. It’s the idea of bringing the system to rupture, to failure in a safe way, and then allowing it the chance and the support and the feedback and the resources to adapt and grow so that it comes out stronger from where it started. Yeah, we see this in a number of systems. In fact, it was the subject of one of my TED Talks recently as well, “How failure drives learning” in many different scenarios, in many different contexts.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, please share with us some other examples because I think some might say, “Well, yes, of course, that is just how the interesting biology of muscle fibers happen to work.” How is that working in other domains?

Manu Kapur
You know, if you just look at language itself, if I ask you to think about happy words or positive words, you may be able to start rattling off a few words. Now, if I ask you to think about negative words, negative emotion words, not only would you be able to rattle off faster, which also means that you will rattle off a lot more. And language itself has preserved this idea that negative emotions, things that are not happy or fun, they’re more salient because they convey more information for survival that we need to learn.

Because if you went out and you survive and you came back and you’re happy and fun, it’s really good, but it doesn’t help you learn or grow in any way. It’s only when you fail at something, you learn something and you develop a vocabulary for it. And conveying that vocabulary for how you felt, how you failed, and how you came out of that, that becomes very critical. So, it’s captured in a language as well but also, like I said, in biology and strength training.

In memory, for example, we see the similar effect. It’s when you introduce people at a party, for example, we often say, “Hi, I’m Manu. And you are?” and you would say, “Pete.” I often tell people you should not do that at all. You should say, “Hi, would you like to guess my name?” And you guess my name, a random name, right? You can say, “Oh, are you Mark?” I’d say, “No, I’m Manu.” And then when I say, “May I guess your name?” I’ll say, “Are you John?” And you’ll say, “No, no, I’m Pete.” You see, even a random failure of just guessing your name will help me remember your name more. I’m more likely to remember your name than if you were to just tell me your name.

Pete Mockaitis
Now that’s fascinating right there, it’s this completely contrived situation. And so, I’m curious, in terms of scientific literature, like, just how pronounced is this effect? Do I get, like, a little bit of a bump, like “Oh, I’m 3% more likely to remember a name?” Or is it like night and day?

Manu Kapur
It is a significant bump. I mean, I have to go back to the literature to look at the effect sizes, right? But it is a significantly strong effect that if you practice this method, it’s called retrieval practice, or a failed generation effect. If you’ve practice this, you are likely to strengthen what you’re trying remember over time.

In fact, the idea is you should allow, and here it gets even more interesting, is if you want to strengthen the memory of something, you should allow some forgetting because forgetting increases the chance that when you try to remember it, you will fail to remember it fully, and that failure to retrieve it fully actually gives you a better encoding when you learn to correct-think.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know what is so amazing about what you’re saying is that this just happened to me last night. And this is the most small-scale example, but my wife asked me to open up the Waterpik, the water-flossing oral hygiene device. It has a reservoir of water on it, and it’s kind of tricky to remove it, and so I kept trying to remove it, and I was like, “Ah, shoot, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.”

And then she reminded me, she was like, “Oh, well, last time you did this, you said you were surprised. You thought you had to pull it one way, but you actually had to pull it the other way.” And I was like, “Wow, I have no memory of that,” but then I did it, and I was like, “Well, sure enough, that’s exactly right. I had to pull it down instead of out, or to the right.”

And then that experience just felt so novel and resonant to me, in terms of, like, “Wow, she remembered how I failed last time and I didn’t, and it’s just, like, this experience of being reminded in this way makes me…” I just have a feeling, we’ll see what happens in the years to come, but I am pretty sure this is locked in my brain now, the second time, how I’m going to open up this Waterpik.

Manu Kapur
That’s a really great demonstration from your life where you forgot how you did it, because you could do it at one point in time, you could remember it, you forgot how you did it, and then you failed to do it the second time around, but when somebody told you that “This is how you did it,” now the charge, now the encoding is even stronger. So, again, this idea that failure to retrieve something actually increases the strength of your memory, provided you get the correct thing, is really powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you share with us some other surprising discoveries here?

Manu Kapur
Then we go into the idea of, if memory can be improved by a failed retrieval effort, then can we go beyond memory? So, we’ve looked at, or researchers have looked at in tutoring situations, for example, people tutoring, tutor-tutee sort of interactions.

And they found that tutors tend to give a lot of explanations about how to solve the problems, and so on and so forth. But they found that the same explanation would have an effect on learning only if it comes at a point in time where the tutee is stuck in their efforts. So, if you’re a tutee and you are proceeding, you’re not stuck in your problem-solving efforts at all, and I give you an explanation of the correct explanation of the concepts required, you’re not likely to learn that at all.

It’s only when you get to a point of impasse, of getting stuck, that’s when you, if the explanation is timed at that point in time, that’s what leads to learning. So, it almost seems like that we need to be in the state, a cognitive state, or even an affective state, where we are stuck or we have failed to remember something or to do something, and if at that time somebody reminds us or somebody gives us the correct explanation, that’s when we learn really powerfully.

And in productive failure, we’ve taken that to the next level, where if you’re learning anything new from the get-go, how do you design for failure intentionally in this early learning process so that you can then bootstrap that failure for learning from an expert later on?

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that is really cool. And it resonates in terms of when you’re stuck for a while, and then you hear the information, it seems like an epiphany, a revelation, an “Aha!” so much more high stakes, as opposed to someone just laying out the whole pathway, like, “Well, this is the basics of physics,” or whatever subject it is.

Manu Kapur
Exactly. And the reason that doesn’t work is, to understand something deeply, you need to be able to see “What is the underlying structure? What is so critical here?” So, imagine if you’re watching a movie, right? Say, it’s a very entertaining, very engaging movie. Now, if the person sitting you is an expert director, unless, I don’t know whether you make movies or not, how expert you are, but, say, you’re a novice at making movies.

Now, you come out of the movies and I ask you, “Did you see the same movie as the director?” Chances are, no, you did not. The director sees things that are right in front of you, right? It’s not that you were not engaged, you were not entertained, your attention was all there, the stimulus was right in front of you, yet the expert sees very different things from a novice. The expert sees the deep structure that the novice is just not able to see, because seeing is a function of what you know, not just a perceptual exercise, right?

And so, this is one of the reasons why experts just telling what they know, even in a very entertaining, very structured manner, is still not sufficient because what an expert sees in their presentation is not what a novice is seeing. And, therefore, the first job of learning something new is actually not to be told what the correct thing is. The first job is to preparing yourself to be in a state where you can then learn from.

The same explanation is very important, but getting into a state where you can process that information, see what is critical, and then code it properly and more deeply, that is even more important. And that’s what failure does, and that’s the whole system that we’ve designed.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say preparing yourself to get into a state, I mean, it sounds like we just have to enter that state, is I guess we have many words in our vocabulary for it. It’s sort of like frustration, aggravated, stuck, like, “This doesn’t make any sense. Aargh!” I mean, it sounds like, well, you tell me. Is there a sweet spot in terms of, I guess, you don’t want to get utterly enraged that you quit and stomp out of the room? Help me out there.

Manu Kapur
So, let me take you through a thought experiment. Suppose I give you a task and you’re able to do it successfully, are you learning anything new other than knowing that, yeah, you’ve mastered this, you’ve done something successfully? So, I give you an even harder task, say, you’re able to do that too. You’re still not learning anything new. You’re just applying what you know.

I have to give you a task that is so hard, or just hard enough that you’re not able to do, and that’s when I know that you’ve entered the learning zone because failure gives you a signal that, “Here is something I cannot do. With all the capabilities that I have, I’m entering the failure zone. And in this zone, I’m bound to struggle, I’m bound to get anxious at times, but I can also try different things, different ideas, different solutions, and so on and so forth. And all of this is actually what prepares me for learning from the expert or a common resource later.”

So, getting in this state is really important, and knowing that these emotions, and normalizing the struggle in this state, is the norm, basically, it’s the expectation that helps you persist in that learning zone, so to speak. But you’re also right, it cannot be so hard that you just give up. So, there is like that Goldilocks zone where it is hard that you can’t do it by yourself, but it’s not so hard that you just give up, and you have to be in that zone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then tell us, how do we intentionally enter into experiences, or design it to be that way? So, it sounds like the wrong way, or old way, or non-Manu enlightened way is to just have the expert pontificate, and say, “Hey, here’s all the steps.” Or you can read the instruction booklet, and say, “Okay, this is the guide. I do A, then B, then C.” But then the superior way for retention and really learning growth is “I get in there, I feel stuck and frustrated, and then I absorb some brilliance.”

So, I’m wondering, so let’s say I want to learn how to make my first app. I want to figure out what’s up with these programming languages. So, maybe I, rather than just reading the book or watching the YouTube video, like, “Hey, here’s how to program Python,” or whatever, I would want to just kind of, following these principles, just give get up in there, and then get stuck, and then try to get the specific answer to what I’m stuck with?

Manu Kapur
Yeah, so it’s basically trying multiple ways of approaching that problem. So, try to design, maybe the app is too big sort of a construct. Maybe some aspect or a feature that you maybe you scope it down, maybe an email capture, or a visit capture feature, or you want to build an AI algorithm into it, whatever that thing is.

The important part is you try to design not one but different ways of putting that feature in place and then try to see whether there is a canonical way or there are more expert ways to sort of design those features. But, again, here I must say that if the goal is for you to be able to deeply understand how to do those things and why they work the way they do, then you need to do productive failure.

But if your goal is just achieving that it happens without necessarily understanding it so, then you do not need productive failure. Because the effect of productive failure is on deep learning and transfer and creativity. We are not always in situations where we need that. So, this is a personal thing that everybody has to ask, or a teacher or a trainer has to ask, “Is this something that people really need to deeply understand? Or is this something that is so procedural that we just need to get it done?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I think that’s very helpful for organizations as well, and just your whole life, in terms of, “Is my goal to become excellent at assembling IKEA furniture? Is that a thing that’s important to me?” So, in the domain of IKEA furniture or anything, maybe that sparks a bigger question of, “Is this even something we should be doing?”

And if it is something, so in a way, that’s almost kind of one key consideration is, “Well, if it’s something we want to be doing, it may make sense for us to learn a ton and be utter masters and have a deep, excellent competence in this thing. Or it might be something that we just want to be okay at and we’ll do it in-house fine. Or it might be something we don’t care at all about having that knowledge. Let’s totally outsource it.”

Manu Kapur
Exactly. Exactly. And that’s the distinction I mean between you want just high performance without understanding, just get the job done. So, there are many things at work and life we can just do, and do it to a certain level that we are happy with, and that’s it. But there are other things that we have a learning goal attached to it, the things we deeply want to master and understand and so on and so forth. And it’s only for those things that you may want to enter the failure zone and struggle and persist and then learn from an expert later on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then give us some more perspective on how we design such a situation up front.

Manu Kapur
So, for example, in, say, in schooling situations, whether you’re designing a course for somebody or something to learn, as we already established, if this is something they want to deeply understand, you don’t want to tell the person exactly what the thing is, and so quantificating doesn’t work. So, the first thing you want to design is, you want to design a task or a challenging activity that is beyond the learner’s skillsets and abilities.

You need to have a sense of where the learners are in terms of their knowledge and skillsets, and you want to design this problem-solving activity or a task that you want to give them that’s beyond that, right? But you also want to design them in a way that’s very intuitive. It should be intuitively accessible so that learners or people can try multiple approaches.

So, think at work, maybe you’re given a challenging project where you’ve never managed such a project before, and then you work with your team to strategize or design different approaches to getting this project done. But because this project is beyond your skillsets and abilities and beyond your team skillsets and abilities, chances are all the approaches or solutions or strategies that you develop are going to be either not going to lead to success or they will just be suboptimal in that way.

But giving people a chance to be in that space, and design that space and be in that space where they can explore different strategies, even if they don’t work, I think that is key. Also what this key is to tell people that it’s okay not to be able to get to the correct solution, because the goal of this learning task is the preparation, not the solution. And the more people explore different ideas and strategies and solutions, the more they are prepared to then learn from the experts.

So, it’s designing the space in that way that helps you then learn from the expert. And you can do this as a teacher, as a parent, as a trainer, as a manager, and so on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if you could really paint a picture for just the sheer efficacy of this stuff. I want to hear about this meta-analysis of I the 50+ studies that showed students who were taught productive failure methods saw some really cool academic gains. Can you share with us what was that study’s findings? And paint a picture of sort of a beautiful scenario of these principles all used in practice and being amazing.

Manu Kapur
So, the context of the meta-analysis in learning experiments, in mathematics, and science and so on and so forth, so the context is an education context, so let me concretize. Suppose you’re trying to learn math. I don’t know how you learned math in your school but my teacher would come in and say, “Today, the new concept we’re learning is blah. Let me tell you what this concept is. Here’s the explanation. Here’s the formulation. Here are some examples, and we work through examples. Now it’s your turn to apply those examples and solve problems.” And that’s how you learn.

And this is a method that’s called direct instruction. You don’t know something, I tell you exactly what it is, and I explain it to you very clearly what it is, and I give you problems to solve. And this is the dominant way that even current educational practice actually runs. Now, in productive failure, we went into classrooms and say, “Well, before you teach somebody something, let’s design problem-solving activities based on productive failure principles where students are given a chance to explore solutions to a problem.”

And we know that the solutions they will generate will not be the correct one. We even tell students that “It’s okay not to be able to get to the correct one, that’s not even the point, but try different ideas, just try different approaches, and then we will teach you.” So, it’s like instead of going straight into the instruction, they first do generative problem solving, and then the teacher comes in and teaches.

So, we can put these methods side by side and say, “Okay, if you learn from one method or the other, and you conduct an experiment study where you equalize the time, the same teachers teaching for the same time using the same materials, and so on and so forth, so you create a nice experiment where you can compare and then people learn through these two methods. And in the end, you test them on different kinds of knowledge.”

So, we particularly tested them on three types. One is the basic knowledge, which is, “Do you understand the concept? Can you remember it? Can you apply it to solve problems that you’ve seen in the class?” And then, also on conceptual understanding and transfer, your ability to take what you have and apply it to novel contexts, which is really the holy grail of learning, is to take what you know and apply it to novel contexts. And then we compare these two groups of students in terms of how they do.

And we find that even though both methods are very good at developing basic knowledge, foundational knowledge, students who learn through productive failure actually develop deeper understanding of the concepts that they are trying to learn, that they learned, and their ability to creatively or adapt the knowledge that they have to solve new problems in novel contexts, that actually is significantly better.

Now, imagine, this is just one study that shows this, and how scientists proceed is they say, “Oh, this is one study. Let me try to replicate it.” And the logic of replication is that “I’m going to prove you’re wrong.” So, now they try to replicate it, and say the attempt to replication failed. They find the same effects that, roughly, as I found. So, now there are two studies.

Say, another person comes in, a new lab tries to replicate it, and again the attempt to fail fails. And over time, you get a series of studies, each trying to you know fail the basic hypothesis and they fail to do so. So, over time, you have many studies who have failed to fail the basic hypothesis. And that’s when scientists start to say, “Ah, because of this vast magnitude of studies in different contexts, in different countries, trying to explore the same experiment or similar experimental effect, that there’s something there now.”

What we call truth is really an attempt to fail has failed. And that’s what a meta-analysis does. It aggregates findings from all the studies that have tried to compare over the years, and those are the 50 study, 160-odd experimental effects, and we aggregate it and analyze that, and said, “What is the average effect across these multiple studies in the world for productive failure over this other method, the dominant method, direct instruction, and how strong is that effect?”

So, we found a positive effect in favor of productive failure. As I said, they understand better and they transfer better, they’re more creative. But how strong it is? Now, we found that if you learn with a good teacher for a year, and say the unit gain in your knowledge is, say, X, then if you learn using productive failure, on average your knowledge gain is 2X.

Pete Mockaitis
Twice? Okay. Double.

Manu Kapur
But if productive failure is carried out really well, because it’s a method, right, some teachers carry it out much better than others, if it’s carried out really well, then you can go up to 3X. And that’s a very, very strong effect in education, in learning situations, that you can do, that you can have this kind of an effect on learning. And so, that’s the evidence-based, that’s the research, the empirical-based, for example, for this body of research, and we know that it works.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, triple your learning feels like a headline, Manu. All right, we’re getting somewhere. So, could you really paint a picture for a specific classroom educator approach situation in which we see, “Wow, here’s this, all these productive failure principles and philosophies put into action masterfully”? What’s that really look like?

Manu Kapur
Well, that design itself is called productive failure. So it has certain features. So, A, it has to be beyond our current skillsets and knowledge. You should not be able to solve the problem using what you know. That’s one very simple feature that it has to have. B, the problem should admit multiple representations, multiple solutions, multiple strategies. It should not have a single answer or single way of approaching it. So, it has to have that multiplicity.

It has to have contrasting sort of cases. So, don’t just give people one example, one case to work with. Give them contrasting cases. An example in this situation and in that situation, data about this, say, football player compared to data about another football player, the performance of this company versus performance…so always work with contrasts in these cases. Again, design these contrasts in ways that some things are the same, other things are different, so that you can direct attention to what you want people to attend to.

Keep the computational load very low so that you know people are really working with the conceptual basis, not trying to compute things all the time. And, yeah, so, again, this is not a like a prescriptive set of features, it is still a design activity. So, even with this set of features, people can generate many different kinds of tasks. And so, the more you get trained in using these features to design tasks, the closer you get to the kind of a productive failure task that really works.

Now once, say, you have a task ready or it’s working really well, you need to design interaction around those tasks. So, if I give you the task to solve, you may say, “Oh, I think this is my solution. This is one solution I have.” “How do I facilitate your exploration in that task?” So, there’s a very simple two-step exploration scheme, or facilitation scheme. So, I will, in the first instance, I’ll come to you and say, “Oh, this is your solution? Can you please explain it to me?”

Just the idea, just asking you to explain your solution to me is likely to trigger thoughts in you for other ways of doing it. We’ve seen this in our research. So, because the goal is multiple solutions and strategies, just asking somebody to explain often triggers them to explore something else as well. Second, sometimes people are really sure that this is their method, or this is the solution, and they’re quite convinced that it might work, even though from an expert standpoint it doesn’t.

That’s when you need to sort of get them into a habit of hacking their own thinking. What do I mean by that? It’s like when somebody says, “This is what my solution looks like.” After I ask them to explain it, I say, “Can you think of a situation where your own solution is not going to work?”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that.

Manu Kapur
So, it’s creating the counterfactual, and developing a habit to hack your own solution and say, “This is when it does not work.” Because it’s easy to say, “Oh, I developed it, it works.” It’s much harder to develop the habit of finding a situation or a context where it does not work. And just between these two, if you do this facilitation really well, you really help people either generate more solutions or understand the limits of their own solutions, even if they don’t work, most likely.

And all of this is then carried out in what I call an envelope, a social surround, within which people have to be told certain expectations, norms. Those are part of the design as well. And here’s the idea that the expectation is that you will not be able to solve the problem. The goal is not for you to be able to solve the problem correctly. The goal is really, “Can you generate multiple approaches, solutions, ideas, strategies for solving the problem? And don’t worry about getting it right.” Very explicit messaging.

Because if people think that they have to solve the problem correctly, they give up. The sweet spot is very, very narrow. But if people are told, “Look, we don’t even expect you to solve it because you don’t have the knowledge. But the idea here is, generate different ideas based on what you know,” then I think people can go a little bit more, so that sweet spot becomes a little bit wider. People can persist a little bit longer. They can deal with their anxiety and frustration a little bit longer, because, “You know, yeah, I’m not expected to solve it anyway, but let me give it a few shots. Let me give it a few tries.”

But these norms and expectations have to be set and persisted with over time so that people can do this. And when people have, you know, they’ve done the exploration, people have generated multiple ideas, and then they are now ready to receive instruction or receive expert knowledge, and that’s how it all comes together. That initial failed exploration becomes productive because an expert comes and assembles it all together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a story of, perhaps, one of the most brilliant, beautiful implementations of this that you’ve witnessed?

Manu Kapur
I think, sometimes, I’ve seen it in the classrooms, for example, when teachers do it really well, and you often see it in what the kinds of ideas the students produce. So, I remember a math classroom where, when we tried this and the teacher was really good, and she was also a very experienced teacher who had been working with us for a while, and after the problem-solving phase of productive failure where students are generating the solutions, I went up to a student, and said, “So how do you feel?” and the student said, “Oh, I feel like a mathematician today.”

And it’s astonishing because, he could not solve the problem correctly, and still the remark was that, “Oh, I feel like a mathematician today.” And this is so true because one of my colleagues is a mathematician, and he’s one of the top mathematicians in the world, and he told me, “You know, 95% of my efforts at solving problems are failures.” Ninety-five percent.

And he says, “But if I don’t have them, I’m not able to get to the correct solutions. I’m not able to get to the correct answers. 95% of the things just don’t work out, but they are the backdrop, the launchpad for me to then think about the things that can actually work.” And so, there’s something in how we just get to the really breakthrough ideas, real creativity, real innovation, and the path through that is failure, otherwise, we won’t get to it. And we’ve applied the similar dynamic, and sometimes it works out beautifully in the classrooms as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, I like that a lot, “I feel like a mathematician today,” seems to really convey a sense of, “Oh, I am really wrestling with the kinds of issues and concepts and considerations that a real professional grapples with, and I’ve gained an understanding of that.” And I feel like I had that moment recently after the election. I learned all about these predictive prediction marketplaces, like PredictIt and Polymarket and Kalshi.

Manu Kapur
Prediction markets, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “Whoa, this is wild!” So, I went into that rabbit hole, and so I’m thinking about, like, risks and probabilities, and bid-ask spreads, and I’m learning all these things. And then I had that thought, like, “I feel like a trader today because,” and though I’m not, I’m just some amateur schmo, but it’s like, “Those are the kinds of things they’re thinking about every day in terms of, ‘Oh, how much risk am I taking on? Is this appropriate? Da-da-da-da-da.’”

Manu Kapur
Exactly. Exactly. And this is the part of mathematics we don’t expose our students to. They learn a mathematics where a teacher just comes and pontificates and tells them, as though math is, people who do mathematics always know the solutions to all their problems, and it is far from the case. In fact, how people do mathematics is exactly how we can learn mathematics, provided we can design these failure-driven sort of problem-solving activities for students, and then teach them the concept.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you’ve got a great turn of a phrase, “motivational hacking.” How do we do that?

Manu Kapur
So, being in this zone where you’re trying things is not easy, right? And there are a few motivational hacks that help you persist in this problem-solving mode where you’re trying different things and things are not working out. First is the sunk cost fallacy. And that is the idea that if you’ve invested time and effort into something, you tend to stick to it even if it’s not working.

Now in general parlance, it’s not a good thing because then we continue to stay in losing strategies longer than we should, we continue to stay in bad relationships longer than we should, and so on and so forth. So, in those situations, it’s not good.

But in a learning situation, where if you’ve given a problem, if you’ve tried multiple strategies, you’ve put in the effort, that’s a good sunk cost, and that actually has motivational benefits. That’s the first. Just putting in the effort to solve something keeps you in the game because then you want to know how to solve it correctly. So, the sunk cost is a very good motivation from a learning standpoint and productive failure designs for that.

But before that even, like, how do you get started even, right? And that is the idea that if you want to learn, or basically if you want to solve a problem that may seem very, very daunting, the idea is to take the first step. And suppose I do, for my exercise, I do swimming. On some certain days, I’m just not motivated to enter the pool. It’s just too much. I’m too tired, I just don’t feel like it. But I know I must, I want, I must go.

So, I tell myself on those days, “I’m going to enter the pool and I’m just going to do one lap, and that’s it. If I can just manage one lap today, that’s my goal. It’s a success. Normally, I do 20, but today I’m just going to do one.” And guess what happens after the first lap? Do I just come out? No. “I’m in it? Okay, let’s do more, right?”

So, again, I just hacked my motivation by convincing myself that if I just get out, after taking the first step, I’ll be totally fine. When, in fact, once you’re in it, you’re in it, you continue. So that’s the second. Take the first step or find a way to make just the first step your goal. Then there is the goal gradient effect. You find that the more you do, the more laps you do, the more you want to do it, the more you want to reach the goal.

So, there’s like a gradient effect. It’s just not linear. So, effort actually pays off. And when you’re really near, and that’s the fourth one, when you’re really near, the last lap, we actually derive, we somehow seem to find this extra motivation to just get to the completion. So, we want to complete, and you will notice that. You find this second wind, extra energy. The last leg is always people want to complete. And that’s called the completion effect.

And so, these are the four sort of kind of motivation, how motivational hacks that people can do, to take the first step, to go on the goal gradient, to get to near the completion, and then the sunk cost comes in because then you want to really know, “Why didn’t my work, why didn’t my methods did not work? What is the correct method?”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, Manu, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Manu Kapur
Did we talk about the mechanisms, the activation, awareness, affect, and assembly, the four A’s?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it. Let’s cover it.

Manu Kapur
So, I call them, like, the underlying mechanisms of productive failure, and there are four umbrella mechanisms. There are sub mechanisms as well, but the four umbrella mechanisms, and they are the four A’s: activation, awareness, affect, and assembly. So, activation is the idea that if you want to learn something new, you need to activate your own knowledge so that you can process this new information.

If I start speaking in, say, Mandarin, and you have no knowledge about Mandarin, you can’t understand anything. So, new knowledge always requires prior knowledge to connect with and make sense. So, the more I can activate relevant knowledge in a learner, when you’re learning something new, the better they are prepared to learn that thing. And failure does a very good job at activation because it makes you try different things, different strategies, and that activates all the relevant knowledge. That’s the first A.

The second is what activation does. It shows you the limits of your own knowledge. You’ve tried multiple things, and they did not work or did not work optimally. You know the limits, “Here’s what I can do.” So, there is an awareness of a gap between what you know and the expert. That awareness itself is a very important mechanism. Having that awareness is a really important mechanism for learning because what that does is it creates an affect.

And by affect, I mean your motivation to find out what the expert knows, your interest in the solution, your orientation towards when the expert explains. You’re really oriented to understand why mine did not work, not just to see what the expert is saying, but really understand why mine did not work.

And also, the affect has emotions involved, and we talked about struggling and anxiety. And we found in our studies that sometimes negative emotions can have positive effects on learning, and other times not all positive emotions are positively associated with learning. So, it’s good to experience in a small dose, in a safe way some of these emotions around struggling and anxiety in a safe way because they can have positive effects on learning.

And affect encapsulates all of these sorts of constructs of interest, engagement, motivation, persistence, and emotions. So, you get into this affective state. So, your knowledge is activated, you’re aware of a gap, and you are in an affective state which is ready to learn. If at that point, an expert comes and assembles it, just shares with you, “Okay, what did you do? Let’s see why it did not work. Let me compare it with this other thing. Why that worked, why that did not work. Let me compare it with the expert strategy,” and slowly build up the canonical knowledge, the correct way or the correct ways of approaching those tasks or problems.

Assembly, that’s the fourth A. That’s what makes the whole thing click. So, activation, awareness, affect, and then assembly. That’s the science behind why intentionally designing for failure and then harnessing it for assembly works, makes failure productive.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Manu Kapur
Well, one of my favorite quotes is from my dad, actually, and it only makes sense looking back. He used to say, “Your ambition should always exceed your talent.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Manu Kapur
Oh, those I have several, and one of the ones that I’d like to give examples are of children playing with toys. And here, and I also talk about that in the book, is people have studied how children play with toys in experiments where, suppose you’re a group of children and they’re given a new toy, and says, “Here’s a new toy. Would you like to play with it? And just play as you like.” So, they just see how children play with those toys.

And to other groups of children, they give the same toy, and they say, “It’s a new toy. You have not seen it or played with it. Let me show you how to play with it.” So, they learn from an adult how to play with the toy, and then they’re given the toy and then they play with it as they like. And then people experiment, scientists examine, “What are the differences between these two groups. Who’s more engaged with the toy? Who’s more inventive in playing with the toy? Who creates strategies to discover how the toy works?”

And, invariably, people find that it’s the first group, which was not shown how to play with the toy, who’s actually more interested, more engaged, more curious, inventive, and finds strategies to play with that toy. And this is the part that I really love because it means that our ability to explore and tinker and fail is built into us from the get-go. And that’s one of the reasons why… you may think of play with tangible toys as one thing, but knowledge is conceptual play. So, a big part of productive failure is “How do you bring conceptual play to start with, followed by instruction?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Manu Kapur
I would say one of my favorite ones is Shantaram.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Manu Kapur
Oh, making my bed.

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

Manu Kapur
Well, my online presence, so ManuKapur.com. If you want to learn about the book, it’s ProductiveFailure.com, or search on Amazon. I’m on LinkedIn as well, mainly, and also on Twitter or X, and Instagram. Or watch my two TED Talks.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Manu Kapur
Change mindsets. I think that’s the biggest thing that I want people to think about or take away in terms of our conversation today. That if you change your mindset, that if you don’t learn to fail, you will fail to learn and grow.

Pete Mockaiti
All right. Manu, thank you for this. I wish you many productive failures.

Manu Kapur
And you. Thank you so much, Pete.

Nov 14
0

1011: How to Defeat Overwhelm and Get SO MUCH Done in 15 Minutes with Sam Bennett

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Sam Bennett shows you how to transform the way you work through the magic of the 15 minute method.

You’ll Learn

  1. The impressive amount you can get done in 15 minutes
  2. How to deal with the overwhelm 
  3. Why it’s worth “doing it grumpy”

About Sam 

Sam Bennett is the author of Get It Done, Start Right Where You Are, and most recently, The 15-Minute Method: The Surprisingly Simple Art of Getting It Done. A writer, speaker, actor, and creativity/productivity specialist, she is the founder of TheRealSamBennett.com, a company committed to helping overwhelmed creatives and frustrated overachievers get unstuck.

Sam is also a popular course instructor on LinkedIn Learning with over a million class participants worldwide. She lives in Connecticut, and you will find her online at www.TheRealSamBennett.com and 15MinuteMethod.com.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Sam Bennett Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sam, welcome.

Sam Bennett
Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks for having me. Hi, everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to be chatting. We’re talking about The 15-Minute Method: The Surprisingly Simple Art of Getting It Done. And could you tell us a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made while researching this stuff? You’ve been in the game for a while and you’ve settled in on 15 minutes.

Sam Bennett
I have. I have, yes. So, let’s talk about how you can change your life in 15 minutes a day. Because, here’s the thing, people are always going to be like, “Sam, is it really possible to change your life in 15 minutes a day?” I’m like, “You already are. You’re already living your life in 15-minute increments. You may not be describing it that way, but, you know, that’s how time works, as far as we know.”

And the thing that I’ve noticed, over and over again, is how much a person can get done in 15 minutes. Everyone is always shocked, “Oh, my God, I got so much done.” And how much you can get done in 15 minutes every day, for a week, for a month, for a year, for six years, for 60 years, and it sort of makes logical sense, like, “Oh, yes, if I practiced my ukulele every day for 15 minutes, you know, in not very long of a time, I would be a better ukulele player.” Or, “If I did my prayer and meditation practice every day for 15 minutes.”

Every medical and health professional in the world will tell you, if you move your body in any way, shape, or form every day for 15 minutes, you’re good, you know. And even things that people think like, “Oh, you know, I want to write a book. I can’t do that in 15 minutes.” Well, if you sit down and write every day for 15 minutes, you can get out about 250 words. And so, in about 200 days, that’s 50,000 words, that’s a book. So where were you 200 days ago, and would you like a book right now?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, understood. Could you share with us any particularly inspiring tales of folks who have taken this particular prescription and just really ran with it and seen cool things?

Sam Bennett
So many. I got an email from a guy who was, funny, he said he got the book on Audible, and he said he’s from Philadelphia so he’s a natural-born hater, and he got a certain amount of ways through the book and decided, “Oh, no, this isn’t for me. This isn’t for me,” and he turned it off. But then something kind of kept tapping him on the shoulder and so he went back to it and he started to listen again.

And by the time he wrote me, he said he had listened three full times all the way through, and he had started doing some 15-minute tasks that were sort of changing things for him. But the biggest change is that he was able to quit his job that he has been trying to quit for nine years.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. So, what are the tasks that enable one to quit a job much more rapidly than, I guess, his default approach? And how do you put those into 15-minute increments? That’s intriguing.

Sam Bennett
I think a lot of it has to do with keeping your promises to yourself. We build esteem and respect with other people by keeping our promises to them. We build self-esteem and self-respect by keeping our promises to ourselves, but sometimes we get caught in the loop of not keeping our promises, “Oh, I’m definitely going to go to the gym today. I’m definitely going to give them my two weeks’ notice. I’m definitely going to tell my spouse this isn’t working,” and then we don’t, because it’s scary or it’s hard or it’s not the right time or whatever.

I don’t have any judgment here about how fast things are or are not supposed to happen. I think we’re not always in charge of that. But I think, for him, there was something about spending every single day, 15 minutes a day, on something that mattered to him, right? So, this is one way to approach the 15-minute method, is pick something that lights you up, that brings you joy, that you’ve always been naturally interested in, that you’ve always good at, maybe something you’d love to do as a kid or you used to do, you know, before the kids, and reincorporate that into your life.

Because even though, yeah, you may not join the Bolshoi Ballet anytime soon, 15 minutes of ballet can make you feel like a ballerina again, and that can carry over into your life, right? So, I think that was a lot of it, and learning that he could trust himself to be an entrepreneur, to take the reins of his own life. Because, okay, here’s the thing, it was a family business. So, the person he was trying to quit was his dad, which, you know, makes it a little loaded.

And he said, yeah, he said he had felt just so much calmer and clearer about his life because he was making the steady incremental progress. And they were negotiating their summer vacations, and the guy said, “Yeah, oh, and after August 15th, I won’t be back.” And his dad said, “Okay.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right then.

Sam Bennett
Like, total non-deal. It was so exciting. I was really pleased for him. But sometimes it’s a lot more, a lot less dramatic. I had a client who had moved to North Carolina to take care of her ailing mother. Her mother eventually died, and now she’s living in this house with all of her mother’s stuff. Again, giant, overwhelming, like, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t do this in 15 minutes a day.” It’s like, “Well, but you got to start somewhere.”

So, she starts with her mother’s office, and she starts sorting her mom’s papers for 15 minutes a day. Okay, great. Making some progress there. And then she figures out that her mother’s record player is in there and all her old albums, and music was something they really shared a love for. So, she started putting on albums and playing an album. So, that’s like 22 minutes is like half a side of an album. Children, albums are how we used to listen to music.

And then she found a box of her mom’s old stationery, you know, that beautiful, heavy cotton linen stationery that they just don’t even make anymore. So, she started writing notes to people because she’d moved away to North Carolina. And then she had all these notes, and so then she had to walk to the mailbox every day, and she started to get to know the neighbors and the dogs and the mail carriers.

And, like, all of a sudden, this little 15-minute task of “I need to clear out my mom’s office” starts turning into “Oh, I’m rekindling my love of music. Oh, and I’m reconnecting with my friends. Oh, and I’m connecting for the first time with this new neighborhood.” Like, you start to follow the sparkly breadcrumbs and it’s amazing where it leads.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. Well, I’m curious, why 15 minutes?

Sam Bennett
Because that’s about as much time as anybody’s got. I mean, you read the article, it’s like, “You should spend five hours a week in the gym.” I’m like, “Really? What five hours would that be? Could you please point that out to me, those five hours, because I don’t see it?” But 15 minutes, pretty much everybody’s got 15 minutes. I don’t care how busy or overcooked you are. You’ve got 15 minutes. And that whole feeling of like, “Oh, no, my work needs me, my kids need me.” Not for 15 minutes, they don’t, and, in fact, it’s kind of a good exercise for all of you to have to let people leave you alone for 15 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose if I were to get all nerdy and optimize-y about it, I might say, “Well, why 15 and not 12 or 18?”

Sam Bennett
Well, and that’s the whole thing, right? Make your own adventure, right? If 15 minutes doesn’t work for you, but 12 does, fantastic! Do 12. If 15 doesn’t work for you, but 7 does, great! Do 7. If 15 doesn’t work for you, but an hour and a half does, terrific! I don’t care. I’m not your mom. But the idea is to start doing something, to be taking baby steps every day.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Okay, so there’s no precise super neuroscience magic behind the 15 number. But I would, if I may, give you a little more of an extra credit on it. I think that 15 is, approximately 15, has some magic to it, in that it’s big enough to actually achieve a thing and go, “Okay, cool. I bought a thing. I found a thing that solves this problem I’ve been dealing with for years by clicking around Amazon, reading their reviews, looking at four options, and now I bought the thing, and so, okay, done.”

Sam Bennett
Done. Off the list.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s long enough to do something meaningful, but it’s short enough to not spark resistance, like, “An hour? Oh, I already don’t want to do that. This is going to be miserable.”

Sam Bennett
Exactly. Exactly. And so, I offer a thing for sale on my website called The Daily Practicum, and every weekday for 15 minutes at 12 noon Eastern, we hop on the Zoom, wave hello, start the timer for 15 minutes, 15 minutes later, it goes off. And everybody looks back up at me, they turn their cameras back on, with, I swear, this post-orgasmic glow about them. They’re like, “Oh, my gosh! I did it! I did it! I made that phone call! I’ve been putting off that phone call for six weeks and I made that phone call!” Amazing.

“Oh my gosh! I sent an email to my friend. She just lost her husband and I didn’t know what to say, but I wanted to say something, so I just did it. I just wrote it, and I sent it, and now it’s done.” Or, “I sat out in the garden with the sun on my face for 15 minutes.” Everybody’s always astonished at how much they can accomplish, how great it feels to accomplish something, something tangible, something that’s meaningful to you, to be taking those baby steps toward a bigger project.

And the little secret with The Daily Practicum, especially for our neuro-spicy friends and our extrovert friends, being in a group, knowing that there’s other people also working at that same time, we call it parallel play or body doubling, is really helpful. It’s sort of a form of positive peer pressure. It works. It just works.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. Well, we had Taylor Jacobson, who founded Focusmate, on the show, and that is a tool that likewise helps you say, “Okay, now I’m meeting a person and we’re doing a thing even though you’re remote.” That accountability magic is powerful. Well, how many people show up at noon for this thing?

Sam Bennett
You know, it depends. There were some people who were there every single day. There were some people who were sometimes there and sometimes not. There were some people who are never there, but they keep the subscription going because it’s worth it to have it on their calendar every day because just they can’t do it at that time, but the fact that it’s on their calendar makes them remember to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And it sounds like one theme there is something that we’ve, historically, avoided, resisted, put off, ignored, deferred. There seems to be some magic there in particular. Like, there are some extra goodies that you receive in terms of reward or benefit internally, psychologically, when that’s the case.

Sam Bennett
Definitely. Definitely. And I really, again, in the same way that I’m not particularly attached to 15 minutes, specifically, I’m not at all attached to what you spend it doing. And some people come to me and say, like, “I have no idea, Sam. I don’t even know where I would start. I don’t even know what I would spend my 15 minutes on.” I’m like, “Okay. Well, great. Maybe you spend your first 15 minutes making a list of 15-minutes-es, what might interest you, what’s sort of tapping on your shoulder, what seems kind of fun.”

You could also spend 15 minutes staring at a blank piece of paper, because 15 minutes of enforced boredom never hurt a person. And when was the last time you looked at a piece of paper for 15 minutes without reaching for your phone?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, you’re giving a lot of cool ideas here. In fact, in your book, you got a chapter with 52 suggestions. I’m curious, are there a couple within that listing that a lot of people have grabbed, and said, “Wow, this is so transformational, Sam. Thank you”?

Sam Bennett
I think the things that I see the biggest “wow” on is taking a walk every day for 15 minutes, even just, you know, once around the building. Connecting with people, taking 15 minutes to look up an old colleague or an old school friend or somebody you haven’t talked to in a while, and just pinging them in whatever way you like to ping people. I mean like, “Hey, you know, I just thought about you and how great you are and I’d love to catch up.”

Because, you know, Pete, relationships are everything. The quality of your relationships is the quality of your life. And those little just catching-up phone calls can lead to amazing things. So, I think those are probably the two biggest wows. But I also like, yeah, anything that you just feel like is too big, that you’ve just been putting off because it’s too overwhelming. The minute you start thinking about it, you get completely overcooked.

And this happens with highly creative people, right? We get an idea and, all of a sudden, we see it in full color, sequels, theme parks, international grassroots movement, you know, it’s all there, and then we immediately go, “Oh, my gosh, how could I even…where do I even start with that idea?” So, I’ve been giving the example of if you have to clean out your garage, which obviously everybody’s going to go like, “Sam, I can’t do that in 15 minutes, I need like two weekends.”

Okay, first of all, again, where are those two weekends? And if you did have two weekends, I seriously doubt you’d want to spend them cleaning out the garage. But let’s say the garage has really been weighing on you. It’s upsetting. It’s causing some stress family, like, “Let’s take care of the garage.” So, I would say, for the first 15 minutes, just make yourself a mug of something.

I’ve got my little Art Before Housework mug here, and just go out and, like, contemplate the garage. Be with the garage. See what the garage has to say to you. Don’t do anything. Just take it in. And it may be that around minute 11, you go, “Wait a minute, those seven boxes belong to my brother Jeffrey. Jeffrey, come get your boxes!” And now you’ve cleaned out a whole corner of the garage and you don’t have to do anything.

And maybe the next day, you go out again with a mug of something and look in one of those Rubbermaid tubs, and you go, “Oh, that’s got holiday stuff in it.” You make a little sign with your Sharpie that says “Holiday” and put it towards the back because you only need that stuff once a year. And maybe the third day, you take that broken bicycle and you roll it out to the sidewalk with a sign that says “Free broken bicycle.” And in this way and fashion, a person could, in fact, clean out their entire garage in 15 minutes a day.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like it. And it’s funny, as I visualize it, I’m thinking, “Uh, Sam, you forgot the step dust out the cobwebs so it doesn’t feel gross walking around there.”

Sam Bennett
That would be another excellent 15-minute task, but cobwebs are hard to get rid of. You could get pretty far with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, totally, you could. I got to fix cobweb duster, too. It feels good.

Sam Bennett
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s actually more effective than just, whatever, a paper towel. So, yeah, there’s little extra bonus tips sprinkled throughout it here, Sam.

Sam Bennett
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
And, contemplate, I love it. That’s a valid, useful thing to do because it’ll spark all sorts of ideas and potential strategy, and maybe saves you from getting in too deep in a silly way when you can just call someone else and have them do part of it for you.

Sam Bennett
Also a valid strategy. That’s another great way to spend 15 minutes. Call the nice people who will come and do it for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so I’d love it if you could zoom out a little bit in terms of, psychologically, what’s going on here. You’ve got some interesting insights in terms of, you say overwhelm is an inside problem and not an outside problem. Not so much like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s too much stuff!” but something inside of us. Explain.

Sam Bennett
Yeah, it’s an inside job. We feel like it’s happening because, “Oh, my gosh, everything’s coming at me with such an equal level of intensity, and I don’t know where to start and I don’t know where to begin, and I just feel overcooked.” But that’s not actually true because, when we look at people who work in chronically overwhelming circumstances, the person who is working the front desk at the emergency room, first responders.

I did a television interview on a news channel with a woman who said, “Oh, like when we’re covering breaking news, or when something tragic has happened and we’re reporting right in the moment.” I’m like, “Right. Those are circumstances that many people would find overwhelming, but you are not overwhelmed. You are doing your job, right?” The reporter is not overwhelmed. The person at the ER is not overwhelmed. The first responder is not overwhelmed. They’re running into a burning building, but they are not overwhelmed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, Sam, that’s actually eye-opening right there. Like, is that really true? Have we talked to the people? I’ve got a buddy who’s firefighter. I should ask him.

Sam Bennett
You should ask him. I’m sure there are sometimes things that are freaking, but it’s their job. They’re trained for it. I spent most of my adult life working as an actor, and especially as an improviser. I was with the Second City in Chicago and played with a lot of those alumni out in LA. And even just getting up on stage with no script and no agenda and four chairs would, to many people, be overwhelming. We’re going to improvise for two hours off of one suggestion or make a play up as we go along. But that wasn’t overwhelming to me, that was my job. It was fun. It’s fun for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It’s funny, now that you mention it, as I’m reflecting on times that I or loved ones have been in the emergency room, the folks around me seemed so chill and calm and, like, they’re taking their time, it almost annoyed me, like, “Can’t you see this is very serious and urgent?”

Sam Bennett
That’s right. I also think about the people who work in hospitality or the people at the airlines. Every single time I go to an airport, you’re in line for the security check, and there’s always people who are like, “I mean, we’ve got to catch a plane.” I’m like, “Kitten, everyone in this building has to catch a plane. That’s why we’re here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so noted. So, then, indeed, there are folks who are in a situation we might find overwhelming who, yet, don’t feel overwhelmed. What is their secret? Or how can we get some of that inside of us?

Sam Bennett
So, I think some of it is just that, like I said, they’re doing the thing. They’re dealing with what’s right in front of them, they’re trained, they’re prepared. Also, I think they’re engaged. They’re engaged in what they’re doing. When you’re overwhelmed, you’re sort of outside of things and thinking about things as a whole.

And sometimes, I think, we say we’re overwhelmed when we’re actually underwhelmed. Like, I’ve done that where I’ve written out a to-do list, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I’m exhausted before I even start. Like, I don’t want to do any of this.” That’s not overwhelm, that’s underwhelm. That’s, like, “This is a lot of stuff that really should be delegated out to somebody else. Or, does it even need to be done at all, really?”

And so, this is part of the reason why I want people spending 15 minutes a day on the stuff that lights them up, that engages them. And I know I can hear the people, I can hear you all out there, saying like, “Yes, but, Sam, that would be selfish. That would be selfish of me to spend 15 minutes on my own thing.” And I want to say, again, you’ve got it backwards because what’s actually selfish, what’s actually an imposition on us, is when you are walking around exhausted and stressed out and with no sense of humor, and the rest of us have to deal with you like that. That is selfish.

You show up rested, prayed, meditated, walked, creatively fulfilled, whatever it is, we love that version of you. You’re calmer. You’re less reactive. You’re a better listener. Like, please, please claim that 15 minutes for yourself, and do the thing that you know keeps you a little bit lit up inside. And, Pete, I have a revolution I want to start.

All right. Stay with me, everybody. I have had every job in the world. I’ve delivered flowers, I was a barista, I was a whitewater river guide, I produced radio shows. Like, you name it, I did it. But I’ve never had a job in corporate America. So, I always have this feeling of like, “What are they doing in there? I don’t understand.”

But I keep reading the statistic that 77% of employees are disengaged. Seventy-seven percent? That’s a lot. I mean, if somebody took away 77% of your money, you would notice. If you lost 77% of your friends, you would be bummed, right? And it seems to me that this must be a very expensive problem for businesses to have three-quarters of their people walking around not giving a flying hooey about what’s going on.

So, here’s my thought, here’s my revolution. I want businesses to start saying, “Okay, everybody, we recognize that you are human beings, and we want to give you 15 minutes a day just for you. So, every day between 9:00 and 9:15, or between 4:15 and 4:30, that’s your time. You don’t check your email. Don’t make your dentist appointments. You spend that time on something that matters to you. If it has to do with work, fine, but it doesn’t have to. Please do you.”

And, certainly, businesses have tried this kind of thing before. But here’s what I think will work. So, now, we go into our meeting, we have this habit of 15 minutes a day where everybody does their little thing, and I can sort of imagine the water cooler talk of like, “What did you do?” “Oh, I wrote crappy poetry.” “I love crappy poetry. I was writing crappy poetry last month. It’s cool.”

But we go into the meeting and, I say, “Oh, hi, I’m Sam from Events. And today, I spent my 15 minutes working on a needlepoint project for my godchild that I started when she was born, and now she’s about to graduate from high school, so I’m really excited to get it done.” Now, there are studies that show that if you let people say something about themselves as people at the beginning of a meeting, they will be more innovative and more productive in the meeting because you have reminded them of the fullness of themselves.

They’re not just Sam from Events and Pete from Sales. They’re like, “Oh, I’m Sam from Events and I do needlepoint, and that was taught to me by my grandmother and, and, and.” So, now I’m bringing more of me to the table. And then, down the table, there’s Debbie, “I’ve never liked Debbie. We don’t get along.” But then Debbie says, “Oh, yeah, I’m Debbie from Accounts, and I spent my 15 minutes today doing cross-stitch.” “Doing what? Well, now, we’re needlework buddies. We can talk embroidery floss. And no wonder she gets on my nerves because she’s a counted cross-stitch person. No wonder she’s in accounts, like that’s detail work.”

And do you know what we call that? Engagement. People being engaged with each other personally, and people will do way more for each other than they’re going to do for any job.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. That sounds lovely. I mean, if you say some organizations have done this, can you share some of these cases?

Sam Bennett
Google, quite famously, had a thing where you could devote, I think, a fifth of your time. I think one day a week you could spend on a project sort of your choosing. I think the idea was that it was sort of help humanity or help Google or help, you know, it wasn’t so much on enriching yourself as it is enriching the world. There’s been a couple of other places that have tried.

But I think just treating people like grown-ups and just acknowledging, like, “We get it, you’re people with a life, and we want you to have a full and rich life, and we’re going to just give you 15 minutes a day to do something about that,” it seems to me to be very inexpensive way to say we care about you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like it a lot. I like to imagine that in terms of, “Yes, folks are talking about it and you…” especially if it’s sort of the same time across the whole organization for everybody, then we all know. Because some organizations, for example, they will have the week between Christmas and New Year’s is just off for absolutely everybody, or right around the 4th of July.

And people just rave about this because it’s like, “It’s not just my vacation. I know everybody’s gone. Nobody’s expecting anything from anyone and/or sending anything to anyone. If they do, they know they’re the ones who are not to expect anything.” So, I think that’s pretty cool. So, likewise, if you had that daily 15 minutes, that’s just kind of fun to imagine.

Sam Bennett
Well, exactly. Maybe if some people wanted to get together and do like 15 minutes of chair yoga every morning, or they wanted to take a little walk around the building or something, you could do things in groups. I mean, there’s all kinds of, people come up with amazing things that they can do. Get together a little rock and roll band, you know.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you say this 15-minute approach defeats perfectionism. How does that work in practice?

Sam Bennett
So, perfectionism is a big word that sort of covers a multitude of destructive behaviors. So, I think one of the things with perfectionism is sort of breaking it apart a little bit, because it is made up of a lot of little parts, and to say, “Okay, which of these is really functional for me?” because there are some just faulty beliefs in there.

And sometimes I’ll hear from people, like, “Well, I just feel like if it can’t be perfect, why would I even bother to do it at all?” I’m like, “Okay, that’s an interesting perspective. Where did you learn that perspective? And is that really what you want to be teaching your children, if it can’t be perfect the first try, you shouldn’t do it at all? I doubt that’s what you want to model for your children. I think you probably want to teach your children to, like, “No, try it. Stick with it. See where it goes.” Right?

So, be a good parent to yourself now, and let that voice that says, “You better live up to this standard, young lady, or nothing good is going to happen for you.” There’s also just the overthinking. Some of us get a little addicted to planning out every last little thing inside of our minds but then never actually taking action.

I had a friend who, when he was a kid, he used to buy all the science books and he would study all the experiments until he really understood all of them but he never actually did any of them. He just worked it out inside of his head, and he was like, “Okay, good, I’m done.” So, that’s a worthwhile intellectual exercise, but would you like to bring something into the world? Like, would you like to try it?

I think it also works for kind of what you were saying before, “It’s only 15 minutes, and you’re going to do it again tomorrow anyway, and the next day. So, how perfect is it going to be in 15 minutes? And you’re going to have plenty of time to perfect it later, so it just sort of hopscotches right over all that pressure.”

And I think it also gives ideas a chance to flourish. I think a lot of times people psych themselves out initially by going, “Well, I have an idea, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. I’m still thinking about whether or not it’s a good idea.” And I work with all kinds of people. Academy award winners, Emmy award winners, award-winning writers, famous people, not famous people, and I’m here to tell you, there’s no such thing as a good idea. There’s only ideas, and some of the ones that you think are terrible turn out to be fantastic. And some of the ones you think are fantastic turn out to be completely dull.

Like, you don’t know until you bring it to life, or start to take the steps to bring it to life. So, to get out of that pondering mode, and out of that inner judgment mode, of like, “Oh, it’s got to be good. It’s got to be a good idea.” No, it just has to be an idea. Like, just start, and then see where it takes you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now you have a number of fun phrases, and what you’ve just described reminds me of one of them. Can you unpack a couple of them for us? One is the alchemy of effort, and the second is grumpy magic.

Sam Bennett
So, the alchemy of effort is something I noticed as an artist, but I see it in real life, too. Not that art isn’t real life. But there’s a magical thing that happens when you have a little idea and you take some steps towards it, and then maybe you share it with the world. It sort of changes the minute it hits the air. And then you work on it and it changes, and then maybe someone sees it and it’s changed again because they’ve seen it and they’ve had a reaction to it. And now they are changed and it is changed and then you are changed by that feedback.

And we get this little sort of Mobius strip, this little infinity loop of you putting out energy and effort and ideas and other people responding to that, and that shaping and gaining momentum and influencing you and influencing the world. Like, it’s really exciting and fun, and it’s the joy of the creative process, it’s that communion, that sense of like, “Ooh, I did something and people got it. They heard me. They felt seen. They enjoyed it. They laughed. They sang along,” whatever it is.

Or they loved the equation. They loved the app. I mean, creativity is not just art. Everyone is creative. And I just think that that little cycle is so magical. And every time you stop yourself from sharing your gifts with the world, you’re stopping that alchemical magic from happening.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And the grumpy magic?

Sam Bennett
Grumpy magic is a little process that I put into the book. It’s a little thing that I teach but, really, what it is, is just a reminder to everyone that, you know, I work in personal development now, and no shade to my personal development brothers and sisters, but there can be a certain amount of oppressive optimism, and what we might refer to as “toxic positivity.”

And I just want to say, you can create magic in your life being very grumpy, and very tired, and very pessimistic, and not that interested. I notice that grumpy people have happy marriages. I notice that pessimistic people often make lots of money. It is not a prerequisite for you to be 100% spiritually aligned in order to get what you want. So, don’t wait to feel good. Do it grumpy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it feels like there’s some merch there, Sam, if you don’t already have it.

Sam Bennett
Do it grumpy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I think that’s really good, and it’s nice and short, too, because “Do it grumpy,” it’s kind of hard for me to think about remember big, long things or complicated things. It’s like, “Ah, there’s this thing, but I don’t feel like doing it.” And so, I sort was able to have that conversation with myself, it’s like, “Okay. Well, in 15 minutes later, or 30 minutes later, you might still not feel like doing it, but then it’ll be behind you and that’s kind of cool. You’ll feel better having it behind you than you will stewing in the fact that you don’t want to do it for this period of time, even if you try to distract yourself with other more fun things.”

Sam Bennett
One hundred percent. One hundred percent. And don’t underestimate the positive effects of smugness. Like, when you do something hard or something you don’t want to do, but then you do it anyway, it’s a little bit like when you go to the gym in the morning and you just spend all day being like, “That’s right. Hair toss. Hair toss. I’m awesome. How are you?” You know?

Like, that feeling of a little bit of inner pride of like, “Yeah! I did that. I told myself I was going to do it, and I did it. I didn’t feel like it, but I did it.” Like, that’s good. That spills over into your life and has a really positive ripple effect. So, all that like, “Don’t be too proud of yourself. Don’t be too big for your britches.” No! Buy bigger britches, for sure. Be proud.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell me, Sam, any other top do’s, don’ts, things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Sam Bennett
I just want everyone to remember that y’all are doing great. You’re doing great. People love you. You’re making a difference at work and in your community and in your family, and it’s okay to take the pressure off the gas pedal, maybe. And some of you are driving with your foot on the gas and the brake at the same time, sort of not really letting yourself succeed as much as you might want to, and I just want to say you’re doing amazing. And maybe just 15 minutes a day can help tweak you up to the next adventure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Sam Bennett
My favorite quote is, “The cure for anything is salt water, sweat, tears, or the sea.” It’s from the Danish author Isak Dinesen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Sam Bennett
I remember cutting out an article from a piece of paper, probably from a newspaper, probably 30 years ago, that was done by a wealth management company. And they found that, across the board, at all levels of wealth, two-thirds of the people felt like they would be better off if they just had twice as much. So, even the millionaires were like, “Uh, I’m not sure. I think if, really, if I had twice what I have right now, then I would be okay.”

And that little bit of information made me realize, “Oh, it’s not about the number. Feeling okay, feeling secure in your life, feeling like you have a good nest egg is not about what that actual dollar amount is. It’s a decision to feel okay.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And a favorite book?

Sam Bennett
You know, what’s bubbling up for me is the Little House on the Prairie books. I must have read those a thousand times as a girl, and I still think about them a remarkable amount. I think there’s something about that homesteader spirit that I kind of like.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Sam Bennett
Levenger Legal Pads.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, with the little discs?

Sam Bennett
Oh, no, I don’t do the disc ones. I do these here, I’ll show you one of them. They’re nice heavy pieces of paper and they’ve got room at the top to put a date and a subject title, and then there’s a little space along the side so you can make annotated notes. I can put little action items on the side. I do everything. I’m an analog girl, Pete. I like legal pads.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, doesn’t Levenger have a little magic to make it easy to take an individual sheet from that and to put it in elsewhere and organize and stuff?

Sam Bennett
They do. They have a system called Circa that is like that, those little things.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Sam Bennett
My favorite habit is probably my 15 minutes a day. I do mine before I even roll over in bed. I do a little sort of breathing prayer meditation practice thing that I sort of have made up over the years. And, like I said, I do it before my eyes are even open. I think that liminal time right there between waking and sleeping is a really valuable time, a very fertile time, especially for highly sensitive people, highly creative people, busy people.

So, to stretch out that moment for myself and connect with my feeling of the divine, and my own body, and my own breath, it really makes a difference for me in my day. And when I don’t do it, I really notice it. And if I don’t do it for a couple days or a couple weeks, things really go off the rails. So, I don’t know how many more times I need to prove that to myself before I just do it every day. I’m pretty consistent, but even so, it’s not every day. But that’s the beauty of 15 minutes a day. Like, you didn’t do it today, you’ll do it tomorrow. It’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Sam Bennett
Yeah, one that I hear a lot is “Get a C.” Stop trying to get an A+ in everything. Just get a C. C is the grade that you get for showing up and doing the work. Not doing the work better than everybody else, not being in the front row with your hand raised, just show up, do the work, show up, do the work, show up, do the work, show up, do the work.

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

Sam Bennett
You can find me at TheRealSamBennett.com, and you can hop onto my email list there, which is where I kind of do everything is via email, but I am also on the socials. I am also on all the socials as The Real Sam Bennett. 

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Sam Bennett
Yes. Start doing your 15 minutes, and then write me and tell me all about it, and we’ll be pen pals and best friends because I want to hear about your projects.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sam, thank you. This is fun. I wish you many delightful 15-minute increments.

Sam Bennett
Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks for having me. What a treat.

Nov 11
0

1010: Getting the Most Out of Generative AI at Work with Jeremy Utley

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Jeremy Utley reveals why many aren’t getting the results they want from AI—and how to fix that.

You’ll Learn

  1. The #1 mistake people are making with AI
  2. ChatGPT’s top advantage over other AI platforms (as of late 2024) 
  3. The simple adjustments that make AI vastly more useful 

About Jeremy 

Jeremy Utley is the director of executive education at Stanford’s d.school and an adjunct professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering. He is the host of the d.school’s widely popular program “Stanford’s Masters of Creativity.” 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Jeremy Utley Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jeremy, welcome.

Jeremy Utley
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to chat, and I’d love it if you could kick us off by sharing one of maybe the most fascinating and surprising discoveries you’ve made about some of this AI stuff with all your poking and prodding and playing.

Jeremy Utley
I’ll poke the bear right from the get-go. My observation is most people are what I call prompt hoarders, which is that they’ve got a bunch of Twitter threads saved, and they’ve got a bunch of PDFs downloaded in a folder, marked, “Read someday,” but they aren’t actually using AI. They’re just hoarding prompts.

And I think of it as empty calories. It’s a sugar high. And what a lot of people are doing is they are accumulating, for themselves, prompts that they should try someday, but they’re never trying them, which is akin to somebody eating a bunch of calories and then never exercising.

And my recommendation, like, here, I’ll give one simple thing that somebody would probably want to write down. Hey, when you’re jumping into advanced voice mode, isn’t it annoying how ChatGPT interrupts you? Well, did you know that you can tell ChatGPT, “Hey, just say, ‘Mm-hmm’ anytime I stop talking, but don’t say anything else unless I ask you to”?

Everybody who’s played with advanced voice mode one time is like, “Oh, my gosh, I got to do that. That’s, oh, it is annoying.” And I guarantee you 95% plus, people who even think that, will never actually do it because they think it’s more important to listen to the next 35 minutes of this conversation than actually hit pause and go do that. And my recommendation would be, stop this podcast right now, go into ChatGPT and actually do that. That would be like going to the gym.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking I’m doing that right now. Is that okay? Is that rude?

Jeremy Utley
Yes, of course. No, it’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
I think I’m following your suggestions. So, in ChatGPT, iPhone app, I’ve got Pete Mockaitis, I just issue the command, like, “Remember this”?

Jeremy Utley
I would open a new voice chat. So, from the home screen, on the bottom right, there’s kind of like a little four-line kind of a button. If you hit that, that’s going to open a new conversation in Advanced Voice mode. And the first thing I would say is, “Hey, I want to talk to you for a second, but I don’t really need you to say anything. So, unless I ask you otherwise, would you please just say, ‘Mmm-hmm,’ one word only and let me keep talking.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Hey, ChatGPT, here’s the thing. When I’m talking to you, what I need you to do, if I ever stop talking for a moment…there, he just did it.

Jeremy Utley
Isn’t that hysterical? Yeah, that’s hysterical.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Amber, when I’m talking, I need you to remember to only interrupt with just the briefest mm-hmm, or yes, or okay until I ask for you to begin speaking. Do you understand? And can you please remember this?

Amber
Be as brief as possible with confirmations and wait until prompted to speak further.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. It’s done.

Jeremy Utley
Now what you need to do is you actually need to continue the conversation. And you need to see, “Does ChatGPT respond with mm-hmm?”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that. And I love those little tidbits in terms of, “Hey, remember this and do this forever.” Sometimes I like to say, well, I have. I have said, “Give me a number from zero to 100 at the end of every one of your responses, indicating how certain you are that what you’re saying is, in fact, true and accurate and right.”

Now, its estimates are not always perfectly correct, but I know, it’s like, “Okay, if he said 90, I’m going to maybe be more inclined to do some follow-up looks as opposed to if I get the 100.”

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, I think that’s great. I think there’s all sorts of little things. The problem is, right now, people are accumulating, or they actually aren’t even accumulating, but they think they’re accumulating for themselves all these tips and tricks, but they aren’t using any of them. And so, to me, what I recommend folks do, I actually just wrote a newsletter about this just yesterday, it went out this morning.

What I recommend folks do is take 15 minutes per day and try one new thing. It requires two parts. Part one, a daily meeting on your calendar that says “AI, try this.” And that’s it. It’s just 15 minutes, “AI, try this.” And thing number two, you need an AI-try-this scratch pad, which is just a running list of things that you heard.

So, like everybody’s scratch pad right now, if they’re listening to this conversation, should include, one, tell ChatGPT to only say mm-hmm unless you want a further response. That’s not forever, but at least in a one interaction, right? And, two, they should tell ChatGPT to always end its responses with a number, an integer between zero and 100, to indicate its conviction of its response.

Everybody literally what? We’re 10 minutes into this conversation, not even, everyone should have two items on their scratch pad. The problem is most people are going to get to this, to the end of this interview and they aren’t going to have a scratch pad and they aren’t going to have any time blocked on their calendar to do it.

And the next time they use ChatGPT, it’s going to be mildly disappointing because they’re coming off a sugar high and they think the treadmill’s broken, basically. So, I mean, obviously, there’s a ton there that we can unpack, but I think for most people, what most people fail to understand is the key to use is use.

And just like a treadmill doesn’t help you combat heart disease unless you actually get on it, AI is not going to unleash your creativity or your productivity unless you use it and learn how to use it. And that, to me, that’s pretty much my obsession these days, is helping people be good collaborators to generative LLMs.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. And I suppose we could dork out about so many tips and tactics and fun things that you can do. But I’d love it if you could just orient us, first and foremost, in terms of, if there’s research or a powerful story that really makes the case that, “Hey, these things are really actually super useful for people becoming awesome at their jobs for reals as opposed to just a hype train or fad.”

Jeremy Utley
I’ll tell you about my good friend, let’s call him Michael. It’s not his name. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. But Michael was a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. and he and his family wanted to move back home to Tennessee.

And he was looking for a job, and he got a job offer from a firm. And he reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’m kind of bummed because I feel like this firm is low-balling me. But my wife really just wants me to take it because she wants to be back near family in Tennessee, and I’m really struggling with knowing ‘Should I push back?’ because I know that I deserve more, but I don’t want to screw up this opportunity to get close to family.”

And I said, “Well, have you role-played it with ChatGPT?” And he said, “What do you mean roleplay with ChatGPT?”

Pete Mockaitis
Of course, the question everyone asks.

Jeremy Utley
Right. And I said, “Well, you can roleplay the negotiation and just kind of get a sense for what the boundary conditions are.” And he’s like, “Okay, wait. What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, open ChatGPT and tell it you want to roleplay a conversation. But, first, you want ChatGPT to interview you about your conversation partner so that it can believably play the role of that conversation partner.”

“You want it to start as a psychological profiler and create a psychological profile of your counterpart. And then once it creates it, you want ChatGPT to play the role of that profile in a voice-only conversation until you say that you want to get feedback from its perspective and a negotiation expert’s perspective.” And he’s like, “Give me 15 minutes.”

So, he leaves, texts me in 15 minutes, “Dude, this is blowing my mind. What do I do next?” I said, “Well, Michael, the next thing I would do is tell your conversation partner that you want it to offer less concessions, and you want it to not be nearly as amenable to recommendations because it’s had a bad day or it’s slept poorly or something, okay? I want you to get a sense for what does it feel like if the conversation goes badly, right?”

He goes, “Okay, I’ll be right back.” Comes back, “Dude, this is blowing my mind.” And he did a series of these interviews, and I touched base with him. And a couple of days later, I said, “Michael, what’s up?” And he said, “Well, three things. One, I didn’t know what my leverage in the conversation was until I roleplayed it a handful of times. Two, I didn’t have clarity on what my arguments were until I roleplayed it a few times, what the sequence of my argument should be. And, three, and most importantly, I’m no longer nervous about going into this negotiation.”

And then a week later, he dropped me a note saying, “By the way, we’re moving back to Tennessee, and I got a much better salary than they had originally offered me.”

It turns out one of generative AI’s unique capabilities is imitation and taking on different roles. As an example, you can go into any conversation you’ve ever had with ChatGPT and just say, “Hey, would you mind to recast your most recent response as if you’re Mr. T?” And, instantaneously, “Yo, fool, I can’t believe you didn’t believe the last thing I said,” just immediately starts doing it. It doesn’t take much.

And the power, actually, emotionally and psychologically, of having roleplayed with a very believable conversation partner has a profound psychological and confidence boost effect to the person who’s engaging the roleplay.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s perfect in terms of, yes, that is a top skill that the AI has, and about the most lucrative per minute use case I can think of a typical professional doing. And you’re right, that confidence, I have actually paid a real negotiation coach, and he suggested we do a roleplay. And I had the exact same experience, like, “Oh, you know what, I guess I don’t feel so silly asking for what I wanted to ask for now. It seems fairly reasonable for me to do so. And I’m going to go ahead and do so.” And it worked out rather nicely. And so, to know that you can do a decent job for near free with AI instead of hiring a phenomenal negotiation coach is pretty extraordinary.

Jeremy Utley
It’s remarkable. And so, we actually, my research partner, Kian Gohar and I wrote a weekend essay in The Wall Street Journal about this topic. But think about a salary negotiation as a flavor of a broader thing, which is difficult conversations. Maybe it’s a performance review. Maybe it’s a termination conversation. Maybe it’s talking to a loved one about the fact that you’re not going to come home for the holidays.

There’s all sorts of scenarios where roleplaying the interaction increases your confidence, strengthens your conviction, helps you, perhaps, exchange perspectives. Perspective taking is a really important thing, to understand, “How did this land to the perspective of my conversation partner?” That’s actually something that’s really hard for humans to do but an AI can read it back to you in a way that’s really reflective of your conversation partner, and, in a way, that you can understand.

So, we wrote a whole article about this but that’s just one class of activities. But the point is it really helps when you actually do it. Again, the tendency is for somebody right now to go, “Oh, cool, roleplay.” But if they don’t pull out their scratch pad, and say, “Ask ChatGPT to be a conversation partner in this upcoming salary negotiation, or my quarterly performance review, or my conversation with my loved one about our care for our kids,” or whatever it is, you just won’t do it.

I’ve even built, and you can link it in the show notes if you want, I built a profiler GPT, which is basically, it’s a version of ChatGPT which remembers who it is, unlike Drew Barrymore in “50 First Dates” where you have to remind ChatGPT who it is every time. A GPT is just like a Drew Barrymore who has memory, right, and like a real human being.

And what this GPT is instructed to do is interview a user about their conversation partner as a psychological profiler would, and then create an instruction set to give the user to copy-paste into a new ChatGPT window of instructions to GPT to perform the role of the psychological profile that it created. So, that’s totally free, but somebody can just open that up and you can say, “My significant other, Sherry,” and all of a sudden, this GPT will just interview you, ask you a bunch of questions, you answer them, and then it spits out an instruction set to a new GPT to play the role of Sherry in the scene that you have told it about.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. And it also illustrates one of your core principles to effectively using AI is to flip the script a little bit and say, “No, no, you ask me questions.” Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Jeremy Utley
I mean, why is our default orientation that I’m the one with the questions and an LLM is the one with the answers? That’s how everybody approaches it, right? Because that’s how Google works, right? We never think, “Google, ask me a question.” It’s like, “Uh, what are you talking about?” A language model is not a technology, it’s an intelligence. That’s how I would invite people to think about it.

And you can get to know another intelligence, in a weird way, that sounds kind of crazy, but one of the things you can do is another intelligence can help you get to know yourself better. And the simple way to think about it is, here’s another thing for your AI-try-this scratch pad, folks. Get ready to write this down.

Think of a difficult decision you’re trying to make in your life, “Okay, should I take this job? Should we make this decision? Should we move? Should we put our kid in this other school?” whatever it might be, think of that decision, and then go to ChatGPT and say, “Hey, I’d like to talk about this. But before you give me any advice, would you please ask me three questions, one at a time, so that you better understand my perspective and my experience?”

Well, that is right there. If you say you were trying to figure out whether you’re going to send your kid to a new school, I have four children so it’s a very realistic kind of decision for me. I can Google and learn all about the school. But should I send my child to the school? I’m just going to get their marketing material and it’s not going to be contextualized to me at all. But if I go to ChatGPT, and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about sending my child to this school, I’d love to get your advice. But before you tell me anything, would you please ask me three questions?”

All of a sudden, well, it’ll… “Tell us about your child’s favorite subjects.” I’ll tell it. “Tell us about any weaknesses or difficulties that your child has had in school thus far.” I’ll tell it. “Tell us about your child’s favorite teachers.” I don’t know, but an LLM will ask questions like that. And then it will say, “Based on your answers, here’s how I would approach this conversation.”

That’s what I mean by turning the tables on an AI, is put it in the position of an expert that’s getting information from you rather than the default orientation, which is you’re the expert and you’re getting information from the AI.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, we’ve been saying the words ChatGPT a lot. I’m curious, in the world of LLMs, we got your ChatGPT, we got your Claude, we got your Perplexity, we got your Gemini, we got your Grok.

Jeremy Utley
Don’t forget Llama.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you think of them as having different strengths and weaknesses? Or are they kind of all interchangeable for whatever you want to use them for?

Jeremy Utley
I don’t think they’re interchangeable, but I don’t think it’s necessarily because of the underlying model. I think a lot of it is a UX thing. I think that the best AI is an AI that’s available to you that you will use. Again, the key to use is use. So, which is the best AI? Well, it’s the AI that you’re going to use. So, where are you? Most of the time you’re on your mobile. So, I would say it’s probably the AI that’s got the best mobile experience.

And what’s your default orientation? My belief is that the far better orientation towards AI is voice, not fingers. If you think about how you typically interact with a machine, you’re typically typing stuff into a machine. And I like to affectionately refer to my fingers, like as I wiggle them in front of the screen, as my bottlenecks. These are my communication rate limiters right now.

Notice you and I aren’t typing to each other. Like, that sounds absurd, right? And yet that’s how we talk to most machines. I’m typing into the terminal. Well, now, I mean, OpenAI, besides developing the world’s fastest growing consumer application, they created the world’s best voice-to-text technology. And furthermore, now they’ve got AIs that actually just process voice, don’t even go to transcription.

But the point is AIs are now capable of understanding natural language. We talk about this phrase, natural language processing. You probably hear that phrase, natural language processing. And that means something technically. I think to humans, the important thing about natural language processing isn’t what happens technically, but it’s actually you as a human being can now use your natural language, which is your spoken word with your mouth instead of your fingers.

And I would say to anyone who’s listening to this, if your default orientation to any AI, ChatGPT or otherwise, is fingers, you are limiting yourself. You’re trying to run with crutches. It’s, like, you’re in a sack race, okay? Use your voice, lose your thumbs, and watch the level of your interaction skyrocket.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, as we speak in late October of 2024, as far as I know, having played around with the apps, it seems like, indeed, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has got the voice natural interaction thing down the best, as far as I am aware of. Is that your experience?

Jeremy Utley
In my experience, it is. The only other comparison I would say is Meta’s Llama has voice as well, which you can access via WhatsApp or anything like that. The caveat, I would say, is, you know, I was doing a demo. I had a reporter at my place yesterday, kind of I was doing a demo of how I how I use AI in my personal workflow as a writer. And one of the things that I was showing was I’ll use OpenAI ChatGPT voice mode, but then I’ll often grab all the text with my cursor or with my mouse, and I’ll drop it into Claude, and I basically will parallel process ChatGPT and Claude.

So, the fact that Claude doesn’t take voice input isn’t a hindrance if I’m on my computer. When I’m on my mobile device, which, I’m probably on my mobile more than I’m at my computer actually, Claude doesn’t handle voice input, and it’s a little bit unwieldy to go back and forth in apps on your mobile relative to toggling between windows on your computer. So, it’s not to say that means ChatGPT is the best, but when you say, if you have to choose one, right now the model which is most optimized for voice interaction in a – intuitive interface. That, to me, is the way that you should prioritize, is, “What’s intuitive? What can handle the widest range of human input?” And ChatGPT’s got great vision and great voice recognition. And, therefore, I would use that. I’ll give you another example. I’m taking Spanish classes with my kids, okay, and we’re doing these lessons and we have a tutor talking to us on a bi-weekly basis.

And I get this assignment. I’ve got to conjugate a particular verb, and she wants us to write it down. We got to take pictures of it right now. Write it down in my notebook. I’m trying to conjugate this verb, and I kind of get stuck. And I’m thinking, in my mind, like, we only get her twice a week. I’m not going to be able to talk to her until Thursday. It’s Tuesday afternoon. And I thought, “I wonder if ChatGPT can help me.” And I just take a photo of my notebook and my crappy chicken-scratch handwriting, okay, in Spanish, by the way.

I take a photo, I say, “Hey, you’re my Spanish tutor. Can you tell me what I’m doing right now?” “Oh, it looks like you’re trying to conjugate the verb “estar,” and it looks like you’ve missed seven accent marks. If I were going to correct your paper, I would do this,” and rewrote all of the statements that I just made, but properly. “I made this change because of this. I made this change because of this. I made this change…”

And I go, “Dude, it read…” I mean, if you see my handwriting, it’s abysmal. But I did miss all the accent marks, it got that right, because I’m not an accent marker. But, anyway, the point is, the vision capabilities are spectacular too. And when you start to think, again, right now, write that down on your AI scratch pad, people.

Like, people are listening, and the thing is it’s like popcorn at a movie, and we’re just like, “Nom-nom, that’s so interesting. Oh, photos of AI should do that.” You will not do it if you don’t write it down. I’m obsessed with this idea. As you probably know, I’ve got this AI podcast called Beyond the Prompt, which we have amazing kind of experts and lead users and things like that.

We had a guy, who’s former dean at Harvard, 30 plus year learning scientist veteran named Stephen Kosslyn, recently. And he’s kind of the father of the school of thought called active learning. Maybe some folks have heard of it. Active learning, some people mistake as, you know, learning by doing, which isn’t exactly correct, but doing what you learn is an important step.

And what he says is he would contrast what’s typically known as passive learning, which is just consumption, but he would say it’s not actually learning at all. It just happens to you. It’s like you’re renting it. And that information has a very short shelf life and a very short expiration window. Any information that you consume but do not use, you effectively did not consume it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yes, well said. Well, I’d also love to get your pro take here. It seems like we’ve got a whole lot of cool things we can do that are very handy. What are some things you recommend that we not do, or some limitations like, “No, no, you’re not prompting it wrong. It’s just not going to do what you want it to do right now”?

Jeremy Utley
You know, I’m not a fanboy, I’m not a stockholder, I don’t have any secondary shares. I have yet to butt up against the limitations of use, to be honest with you. I think, right now, most people’s primary limitation is not the technology, it’s their imagination. I would say, like, one way that I’ve put it to students at Stanford is, “The answer is yes. What’s your question?” “Could it…?” The answer is yes. The problem is, for most people, they don’t actually have a question.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Jeremy, if I could put you on the spot a little.

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, please, please, please, by all means, but the challenge is actually finding a question worth asking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. One thing I’ve tried every which way I can to say, “Yo, here’s a transcript of a podcast interview. What I want from you is to give me 10 options for titles that would be great, that are kind of like these dozens of title options I’ve written for you right here, I previously selected, or teasers.” And then whenever I do that, I get 10 or 20 options, and I go, “Hmm, not one of them am I like, ‘Yes, that is intriguing. That is awesome. That’s a phenomenal title that I want to use.’”

Now, it can nudge or steer me in some good directions, like, “Okay, that was a good phrase there. That was a good word there.” And maybe that’s sort of good enough in what I should expect from it in terms of, yeah, you can have a back-and-forth dialogue, it’s not going to spit out the perfect thing the first time, and be grateful for that. But I don’t know, since you are the master, any pro tips on how I can make it do this thing it just doesn’t seem to be able to do?

Jeremy Utley
So, this is great. What I’m hearing you say is actually a great case study of what we observed in our study, which got published by Harvard Business Review and Financial Times and NPR. We studied teams trying to solve problems, and you could call “Titling this podcast” as a problem that you’re trying to solve. We studied teams and individuals trying to solve problems with generative AI and studied “What do they do?”

And one of the kinds of natural problems that people have is they treat an LLM like it’s an oracle. Like I give it a question and it just magically gives me the right answer right off the bat. And what we would say is teams that treat AI like an oracle tend to underperform. But that’s not to say that everyone who uses AI underperforms. There’s a small subset of folks we studied who actually outperform.

The difference is they didn’t treat AI like an oracle. They treated AI like a co-worker, like a collaborator, like a thought partner. And so, what that interaction might look like is you ask for, say, 10 or 20, “Make it like this.” And then you get the output, and what it looks like to…let me ask you this. If an intern gave you 10 titles that you thought were mediocre, what would you do? Would you fire the intern?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, I would say, “Oh, hey, thank you for this. This is my favorite. This is my least favorite. That kind of what I’m looking for is, generally, more actionable, more intriguing, based on the needs of our listeners,” da, da, da, da.

Jeremy Utley
Do you do that to ChatGPT?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve tried it sometimes.

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, you got to kind of, you got to critique the model’s output. You got to give it feedback. And I had that experience, actually. I had a hero of mine, Ed Catmull on my show a while ago, founder of Pixar, and I wanted the perfect title, of course. It’s, like, got to be the best title ever, right? And I asked for 10 and then I immediately always asked for 10 more.

I don’t even read the first 10. I asked for 10 more and never had ChatGPT say, “Dude, come on, you didn’t read my first ones, you know.” And they’re mediocre, you know, they’re okay. And I said, “Hey, I like one and three in the first set. I like seven and nine in the second set. Can you give me 10 more like those?” What do you think, are they better or worse?

Perfectly the same. Like, not any better, not any worse. And I was like, “Huh, but why? Why didn’t I like one?” I said, “Huh, okay,” I had to think. And what’s funny is, in our study, people who underperformed, AI feels like magic to them. It’s, like, they don’t do as well, but they’re like, “Wow, it just happened so fast.” People who outperform, who use AI to get to better work, it doesn’t feel like magic. It feels like work.

And that’s actually, that’s kind of a fundamental tension. I think we expect it to feel like magic or it sucks. And the truth is it’s just like working with another collaborator, and you do get to better outcomes if you’re willing to put in the work. And in this case, for me at least, the work was, I like number one because I’m a nerd and it has like an obscure movie illusion. I like number three because there’s a pun, and I’m a punny guy. I like number seven because there’s a movie reference baked in and I like number nine, whatever it is.

Then I said to ChatGPT, “Would you leverage that rationale as design principles for another 10, please?” six of the 10 were better than anything I had thought of. But the point is, it does require that collaboration. Now, that being said, that’s as a one-off interaction, Pete. I think what you should do in this case, if that’s it, and what anybody should do is, if there’s a routine workflow, like, how often do you title a podcast?

Pete Mockaitis
At least, twice a week.

Jeremy Utley
Okay. So, to me, that’s kind of square in the crosshairs of a task that it’s kind of a creative challenge, probably takes some amount of time. There’s a potential, you know, so there’s, call it, there’s a two-by-two somewhere that you would hire BCG to spit out, right? But you got a two-by-two, and this probably falls in the top right corner in terms of, like, it’s in GPT’s wheel housing capabilities, and there’s enough regularity that it would meaningfully impact your life or productivity. Great. Okay, there’s your two-by-two. I think that that’s a prime candidate for making a GPT.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll just make a full-blown GPT?

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, why would you not make a podcast-naming GPT? And then you would put in its knowledge documents, all of the titles and your rationale. And then, importantly, it’s not that you make a GPT and you’re done. You make a GPT, then you try it, and then you see where it’s deficient, and you work to get it right, and then you reprogram, you iterate the instructions to the GPT relative to the work that you had to do in addition.

And what’s the process for that? I would say probably you’re going to instruct the GPT, “I want you to analyze the transcript. I want you to find what are the key points of emphasis in the conversation. I define emphasis as we spent more than two minutes on it or whatever,” I don’t know, right? “I want you to find wherever there is more than five back and forth, that’s evidence that this was particularly engaging.”

Or, furthermore, you might develop a protocol where, after your calls, you have a two-minute Zoom call with yourself, where you say, “Hey, here are the four things I thought were interesting.” And you load that into the GPT as well. I don’t know, “Consult the transcript and the follow-up call transcript that I’ve provided for you. Look for these points, then distill these into these brand guidelines, perhaps, or whatever it is. Then do this, then do this.”

You’d kind of walk the GPT through, you would actually articulate and codify that workflow. And then you would test it, and then you’d iterate it, and you’d test it, and you’d iterate it. And you’d get to the point, I would say, probably, if you’re doing it twice a week, by the end of the month, you’ll probably get to the point where, if you really take it seriously to iterate the GPT’s instruction set, over the course of a month, you’ll have something that’s really great.

Now, the problem is most people aren’t really systems thinkers and they just want to do like a one-off kind of like band-aid solution, which is fine. I’m probably more that way myself, unfortunately. So, I’d rather just, it’s less painful on a one-off just to do the work again myself. Systematically, it’s much more painful to do it one-off every time by myself. And so, you kind of got to decide.

And to me, that becomes a function of “What is a task whose output you would refuse to settle for less than exceptional?” That’s a great task for a GPT because you’re not going to be okay with anything less than a really good GPT. And it summons the requisite activation energy required for you to continue to invest in iterating it.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. So, it starts with a mindset of, “Okay, don’t talk to it like it’s an oracle. Expect we’re going to need some back and forth, some collaboration, some iteration, some refinement.” And then it’s your bullish take that, at the end of the day, it’s going to cut the mustard and deliver the goods.

Jeremy Utley
Unequivocally.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful.

Jeremy Utley
That, to me, is it’s unfathomable that it can’t deliver on that use case.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. You heard it here first.

Jeremy Utley
I mean, really and truly, and I’d be happy to workshop with you if you’d like. But, to me, that is absolutely a use case that GPT can shine with.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we talk about use cases. You’re real big on idea flow. It’s getting a whole lot of ideas, a whole lot of creative options generated. Tell me, how do you use AI in that endeavor well?

Jeremy Utley
Well, the easiest thing to do is, which you did well in your example, is request options. I think, for most people, they ask one question, they expect one answer. And with a probabilistic, non-deterministic model, which means LLMs are probabilistic in nature, every time you ask a question, you’re going to get a different answer.

And sometimes the answer is there’s a higher degree of overlap, sometimes they’re radically different, even within the same instruction sets. You could say it’s a bug. I actually think it’s a feature because I believe in variability of thinking is actually what drives creative outcomes. And so, when you realize that, then, “Wow, I could hit regenerate and it will reconsider the question again?” “Yeah.” “Well, why wouldn’t I hit regenerate five times?” Great question. Why wouldn’t you?

And most people go, “I’ve never hit regenerate.” I think it’s actually probably the most important button on the screen. Because you have a collaborator, you and I are going back and forth, and I say, “Hey, Pete, what do we do about this?” You go, “Well, here’s an idea.” And I go, “Okay. Well, what else?” And you’re like, “Okay, let me dig deeper,” and then you say something. I go, “Okay. Well, what, like five more ideas?” And after a while, you’d be like, “Dude, I gave you all my ideas.”

But ChatGPT is not like that. AI is not like that. And so, one of the simple tricks for idea flow with AI is recognizing you’re not going to tire itself out. In fact, you need to recognize your own cognitive bias. I mean, it’s one of my kind of nerd obsessions is what’s called the Einstellung effect, which is the tendency of a human being to settle on good enough as quickly as possible, demonstrated since the 1940s by Abraham and Edith Luchins, where they’ve kind of documented, very clearly how human beings kind of get in a cognitive rut, and they just want a good enough answer, and they don’t actually get the best answer. They just get a good enough answer.

And so, to me, the key to maximizing idea flow with an AI is recognizing that the creative problem in that collaboration is actually your human cognitive bias, not the AI’s bias.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Oh, boy, Jeremy, I could talk about this forever. But before we hear about some of your favorite things, could you share any other top do’s and don’ts?

Jeremy Utley
One thing, I think, is a really simple thing that you can do, and it’s not unrelated to your idea of asking ChatGPT or whatever, for a number, kind of saying how confident it is. One thing that you can often do is ask it to evaluate its own work, “Scale of zero to 100, how great was the previous response? Be like a tough Russian ballet instructor, give me critical feedback.” And it’ll go, “Oh, it’s a 60 out of 100 for this reason.”

Well, then you could say, “Okay, based on that feedback, can you rewrite it as 100 out of 100? Rewrite it as 110 out of 100. Now, regenerate it. Now, regenerate it again. Now, grade that one. Is it really 100? Bring in another Russian judge. What does the second Russian judge think?” So, one thing that you should definitely do is get AI to evaluate its own work. It’s far better at being objective.

Like, as a simple example for me, and then I also want to mention chain of thought reasoning, so make sure I come back to that. But one thing I’ll do is I’ll do kind of parallel processing between ChatGPT and Claude, and I’m having both work on something. I take their output and I feed it to the other, and I ask, “Which one is better? Is Claude’s work better or ChatGPT’s work better?”

You would think that they both advocate for themselves. They don’t, but they almost always agree. It’s fascinating, actually. There are times where ChatGPT is like, “I actually prefer Claude’s response for this reason, this reason.” And if I go to Claude, it goes, “I think my response is stronger for this, this, this.” And half the time, it’s the other way.

But it’s actually exceedingly rare that they disagree. They often will say the other’s is better, but they almost always agree with the other’s assessment too, which is fascinating, which is to say you can have models evaluate one another’s work. The other thing, the other huge do, probably the single greatest empirically validated finding is that the best way to get better output from an LLM. is to prompt it with what’s known as chain of thought reasoning, which is to say, tell the language model to articulate its thought process before answering.

And so, humans have this tendency, so do AIs, of what we all know as ex post rationalizing. So, if I ask you, “What’s your favorite color?” You say, “It’s blue.” “Well, why did you say blue?” You go, “Oh, well, I like the sky, and I like the ocean, and da, da.” But if instead, I say, “Hey, tell me how you think about what your favorite color is,” and you go, “Well, I probably think about my favorite things.”

And then I go, “Well, what are your favorite things?” You go, “Well, my wife, obviously, and I think about her eye color, and they’re green. You know, green’s my favorite color.” “Well, is it blue or is it green?” Actually, and for me, even as I think through that thought exercise, green, emphatically. I take my wife’s eyes any day over the sunset. That’s a no-brainer, right?

Well, similarly, language models do the same thing. If you ask it for an answer, and it says blue, and then you go, “Why did you say blue, ChatGPT?” it will ex post rationalize. And blue is very subjective, but even with things that are objective, more objective, it will ex post rationalize its answer. If, however, you say, “Hey, before you answer the question, would you walk me through how you’re going to think about solving this problem?” It will articulate its answer and it arrives at, from a research perspective, empirically better, more valid, more cogent, etc. responses.

And the reason it does so is because of how language models work. They aren’t premeditating their answers. So, what it’s not doing, as Pete asks a question, and then it thinks of its answer and writes it out. That’s not what happens. What happens is Pete asks a question and it reads the question and says, “What’s the first word of the answer?” and it says it.

And then it reads your question, and the first word it thought of, and says, “What’s the second word?” And then it reads your question and its first and second word, and thinks, “What’s the third word?” So, it’s not premeditating responses. It’s, literally, only predicting the next token. And so, when you ask it for an answer, the only thing it’s predicting is its answer.

If, however, you ask for reasoning and then answer, it first next token predicts reasoning, and then it incorporates the reasoning that it has articulated in its response, which results in a much better response because it’s not only considered your question, but it’s also considered reasoning first. And as a user on the other side of the collaboration, what that enables you to do is not only, one, get better responses, but, two, you can interrogate its reasoning too.

And you can say, “Actually, it’s not that I have a problem with your answer. I have a problem with how you approach the question. I actually think you should do this.” And then you can guide its reasoning path because you’ve asked it to make its reasoning explicit. Those are the two probably biggest do’s, I would say, when you ask for do’s and don’ts.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And it sounds like the key is that you ask for it in advance as opposed to, “How did you come up with that?”

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, exactly. That’s ex post rationalizing. It will give you a great answer. It’s a sycophant. LLMs have been programmed to be helpful assistants. And when you realize what that means, it’s a euphemism for suck up. So, if you ask it what it thinks, it’s going to say, “I think that’s a really great idea, Peter.” But if you say, “I don’t want you to compliment me. I want you to be brutally honest. Don’t pull any punches,” like, you got to really ask an AI to level with you to get honest feedback.

When you’re aware of that, it influences how you collaborate with the model, which goes back to the question earlier about idea flow. It’s recognizing your own, I mean, there are limitations to the technology, but a lot of times the truth is we want a suck up. I don’t want to hear how my first draft sucks. I want to hear, “Actually, you don’t need to do any more work. You go have a coffee.” That’s what I want to hear.

And if I don’t realize that the model has been trained to be a suck up, I ask it, assuming I’m getting the truth, and then when it tells me I’ve done great work, I say, “Well, let’s take a break, boys. We’re all done here.” Whereas, if I realize, “You know what, unless I really push it to give me straight feedback, it’s probably going to tell me I’ve done a great job. And I know my human cognitive bias is to overweight the response that I did a great job, and to underweight…” So, you have to understand yourself. In a way, the key to good human-AI collaboration is to really understand our own humanity.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Thank you. And now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jeremy Utley
One is Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, who said, “No matter how heroic one’s imagination, a man can never think of that which would never occur to him.”

The second quote that I love is Amos Tversky, Danny Kahneman’s lifelong research partner, who died prior to receiving the Nobel Prize. But Amos Tversky was once asked how he and Kahneman devised such inventive experiments. And he said, “The secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed.  You waste years when you can’t afford to waste hours.”

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jeremy Utley
I think there’s a great one that I always come back to called the creative cliff illusion, which is conducted by Nordgren and colleagues at Toronto, I want to say. You can look it up, creative cliff illusion. But the basic idea is when they ask participants what their expectations of their creativity over time were, there is an illusion that one’s creativity degrades to a point that reaches a cliff where it almost asthmatically falls off. And people’s, their expectation is, “I’m just going to run out of creative ideas.”

The paper is obviously called the Creative Cliff Illusion because then, when they test people, it’s not true. They don’t run out of creative ideas. They, actually, their creativity persists. And my favorite part of the study is the shape of the creativity, over time, the variable that it’s most highly correlated with, i.e. “Does creativity dip or does it increase?” because it does increase for some people. The variable that determines the shape of your creativity over time is actually your expectation.

So, if you expect that you will keep having creative ideas, you do. If you expect you will cease having creative ideas, you do. And so, that to me is just totally fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. And a favorite book?

Jeremy Utley
I love Mark Randolph’s book about the founding of Netflix called That Will Never Work. It’s a fascinating story about entrepreneurship, about grit and perseverance, and about ideas. And there’s a lot of very practical takeaways about the importance of experimentation in finding product market fit and succeeding.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Jeremy Utley
I’ve got an electric chainsaw, and I love tromping around the woods, just chainsaw in hand, like, just in case I need it. It’s just so fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. And a favorite habit?

Jeremy Utley
NSDR, non-sleep deep rest protocol, Andrew Huberman. It’s, basically, laying down and becoming totally still, not for the purpose of sleep, necessarily. It’s okay if you do sleep, but it’s not in order to sleep, but to facilitate neurological replenishment, connections between neurons, and codification of memory. And I try, if I can, to NSDR once a day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate with the folks; they quote back to you often?

Jeremy Utley
I talked earlier about the value of variation in one’s thinking. And the truth is ideas are naturally occurring phenomena, which is a nerdy way of saying they’re normally distributed. So, you got some really great ideas, very small, it’s a bell curve, right? You got a lot of ordinary ideas and you got some stupid ideas. Steve Jobs called them dopey ideas. He regularly shared dopey ideas with Sir Jony Ive.

Taylor Swift says, “It’s my hundreds or thousands of dumb ideas that have led me to my good ideas.” You got dopey or dumb on one side of the spectrum, you got delightful on the other side of the spectrum. The quote that I often say that people remember and resonates, and they take with them is, I tell people, “Dopey is the price of delight.”

The only way you get good ideas is by allowing yourself to have bad ideas. And the reason most people don’t have better ideas is because they won’t allow themselves to have worse ideas.

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

Jeremy Utley
JeremyUtley.design And LinkedIn, I’m happy to chat with folks on LinkedIn. My website, JeremyUtley.design, I’ve got a newsletter folks can subscribe to. I’ve also got an introductory AI drill course where you get two weeks of daily drills for, you know, they say you need 10 hours of practice with AI to start to become fluent. This gives you daily practice to get your first 10 hours under your belt.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a final challenge or call to action for folks who want to be awesome at their jobs? Sounds like we just got one.

Jeremy Utley
To me, it’s very simple. Do one thing you heard here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Jeremy, this is fun. This is fascinating. Thank you. And keep up the awesome work.

Jeremy Utley
Thank you. My pleasure.