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Creativity Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

May 11
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1151: How to Harness the Surprising Power of Ignorance with Alan Gregerman

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Alan Gregerman shares why the right kind of ignorance is the secret to driving innovation.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to challenge assumptions that are keeping you stuck
  2. Why not knowing can often lead to better solutions
  3. Six ways to unlock ignorance as a superpower

About Alan

Alan Gregerman is an internationally renowned authority on business strategy, innovation, and hidden potential who has been called “one of the most original thinkers in business today” and “the Robin Williams of business consulting.”

As the president and chief innovation officer of Washington, D.C.-based consultancy VENTURE WORKS, a bestselling author, and a sought-after keynote speaker, he focuses on helping companies and organizations unlock the genius in all of their people in order to deliver the most compelling value to their customers. He is also the founder of Passion for Learning, an award-winning nonprofit that teaches girls technology skills as a key to life and career success.

His three previous books—The Necessity of Strangers, Surrounded by Geniuses, and Lessons from the Sandbox—challenge conventional thinking about people, the world around us, what it means to be remarkable, and where brilliant ideas actually come from. He’s also the author of the critically acclaimed blog Surrounded by Geniuses.

Resources Mentioned

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Alan Gregerman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Alan, welcome!

Alan Gregerman
Greetings! Delighted to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am a plenty ignorant person, so I’m excited to hear about how that could actually be a force for wisdom. Could you kick us off with a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made as you were putting together your book, The Wisdom of Ignorance?

Alan Gregerman
Sure. So I’m really keen on the idea that all of us have the ability to innovate consistently, but we’re going to do it by paying attention and taking a fresh look at the things that matter most. And so the world around me is such a fertile ground for innovation. So let’s start with a simple story I love to tell. And that’s 1941, a guy named George de Mestral walking through the Alps with his dog.

So George is walking with his dog and he notices his dog is covered with burrs. All of us have had that experience and we’ve said, “What a nuisance!”

George thought burrs were cool. So he took some of these burrs off of his dog and he took them back and looked at them under an old microscope. Probably a lot of listeners have an old microscope somewhere.

And he noticed that these burrs were amazing because they had an amazing ability to hook on to things as they brushed against them like his dog. George discovered Velcro. Velcro wasn’t discovered by geniuses with expertise in a lab.

Velcro was discovered by a guy walking his dog. So my guess is all of us can walk around, pay attention, and imagine remarkable things that could be different. And that’s really part of how we keep our careers energized and valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Alan, I love that story so much. And that really reminds me of occasions in my own world and life where I noticed something and then I dig in and then it becomes really potentially impactful. I remember one time, I was at a podcast conference, Podcast Movement. It’s amazing. And someone had a podcast app. They had a booth. Everyone is promoting their stuff, you know, walking around the exhibit hall.

And I remember what I was struck because I saw this podcast app actually listed how many subscribers to a given podcast were on that app. And I said, “Holy smokes, you don’t see that anywhere. Not on Apple podcasts, not on Spotify.”

“So I could conceivably deduce based on your market share, a very rough estimate of the total listenership of a show based upon this number.” And the person behind the booth was like, “Huh, yeah,
I guess you could.” Like, that hadn’t occurred to them, but it was very fascinating.

And, hopefully, you’ll sort of deconstruct this alchemy because, I mean, I just noticed it and then it was like Eureka, and it was exciting. And then that was pretty helpful in terms of figuring out maybe some promotional opportunities, priorities, etc., and sort of market research and all kinds of little things. It’s been a handy tool going forward. And now Listen Notes exists, so people just go there.

But before they did, I had this nifty tool at my disposal because I noticed a thing and was really curious about the potential implications. But I’m imagining, Alan, I’m leaving a lot of noticing on the table. Like, there could be a lot of cool ideas just waiting to burst forth, but I’m oblivious to the implications of stuff, just like that Velcro burr example.

Most of us were like, “Ah, how annoying these burrs,” versus someone goes, “Wow, how fascinating. Let’s dig deeper.”

Alan Gregerman
Well, so think about most of us in most of our jobs don’t take the time, and it’s either because we’re determined to do a good job or our organizations don’t ask us to take the time to actually step back and imagine, “Could we do more with whatever we’re working on?”

And then imagine one other thing, which, for me, and I’ve been in innovation consulting for a long time, people can’t see me, but I have a few gray hairs. And so imagine what I talk about as the 99% rule. And that is 99% of all new ideas are based on something that already exists.

And yet, in most organizations, they ask us to come to a meeting, they give us a blank sheet of paper or a beautiful whiteboard, and they say, “Does anybody have a brilliant idea?” It’s as though we can turn on the part of our brain that has brilliant ideas because we haven’t been using it the rest of the time. The reality is just get out there, pay attention, and suddenly things start to click.

Everyone listening, I’m sure, uses Uber. Was Uber created by folks who knew the taxicab business? No, Uber was created by two friends who couldn’t find a taxi on a trip to Paris and suddenly realized something called GPS technology existed, which had the ability to bring someone with a car to someone who needed a ride. And so that was the origin of Uber.

And so the world is filled with ideas and they’re all based on people actually stepping back, paying attention to things that exist, and imagining how they can adapt it to their world.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now you got my wheels turning. I’m pondering here with regard to the 99% versus the 1%. Just so I have a taste for what does a completely new idea even sound?

Alan Gregerman
Okay, yeah. No, that’s a good question. So, of course, fire, that’s like a completely new idea when it happened two million years ago. And whether it happened because a lightning strike hit something and it’s set on fire, and then people suddenly decided, “We don’t have to wait for lightning. We can do it or not.” So that’s an original idea.

And then in 1895, the folks at Weber created a grill based on the idea that fire existed, okay? So that’s an important thing. The wheel, about a 6,000-year-old idea. Now the wheel is used in everything and we couldn’t get around on a scooter or a car or an Uber without the wheel. So those were original ideas,

Optical lenses. So I wear glasses, I’ve worn them since kindergarten, lucky guy. And when I was in kindergarten, glasses were pretty dorky. I’d like to think I have pretty cool glasses now. But the reality is optical lenses to improve vision didn’t happen until around 1285. And they’ve gone through lots of iterations.

So now we can even get Lasik surgery or whatever we want to do. But that was an original idea, I think, when it happened, and it improved the ability of 60% of people who see badly to be able to see. So there are lots of original ideas, but most ideas actually are based on something else. It doesn’t mean they’re not original, but they didn’t start by somebody taking a blank sheet of paper.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And then, by contrast, can you share with us some ideas that are just like, “Hey, you know, I combined a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and here we go”?

Alan Gregerman
Well, think about it. I mean, so many things that are all around us. So Airbnb, people like to use Airbnb. It’s an alternative to hotels. Not started by people in the hotel business. Started by some friends who were design students who needed to pay their rent.

And one of them said, “Gee, should we let someone surf on our couch?” And then, suddenly, they realized, “Well, couch surfing, everybody has a couch, an extra couch. Some people have an extra apartment. Some people have an extra house. Maybe those are places we can rent.” But the idea of having somebody stay somewhere and pay you wasn’t a new idea at all.

So ideas kind of abound. You know, the folks at Southwest Airlines, when they actually were really doing a good job – I shouldn’t probably say they’re not doing a good job – but they’ve changed their business model.

They changed not by knowing a lot about the airline industry but by knowing there had to be a better way to travel. And their model actually was Greyhound buses, the idea that people needed to get from point to point and it shouldn’t be particularly expensive.

So look around at almost anything that really matters to you, and the reality is somebody has thought about how to make it better. And when we get into talking about how to make your career more valuable, I believe the folks who pay attention and figure out how to make things better are the ones that are going to be consistently valuable and relevant and really be desirable in the marketplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Okay. Well, so it’s funny, Alan, as you do this, it seems like these ideas seem super easy in hindsight, “Well, of course, we just do this.” But when we’re in the midst of things, sometimes coming up with these combinations, these creative breakthroughs feels real hard.

Alan Gregerman
Well, it feels real hard for a few reasons. One is I don’t want to downplay that it’s not hard, but it’s doable for all of us. And the reason why I think it’s particularly hard for all of us is because we don’t get up and wander around and pay attention.

Think about when we were kids, we were innately curious, partially because we didn’t know a lot of stuff. And so we were trying to figure things out. So we asked questions, looked, wondered what things were all about.

We don’t know a lot as adults. The percentage of what we know compared to what we could know or think about is really, really small. But we don’t get up. And so either we’re working in a business or organization, or we’re working virtually, and we tend not to get up and wander around and pay attention. So the world passes us by.

My view is, if we simply get out there and engage the world, ideas are going to come to us. We see some place using a technology. We see people on scooters. We see whatever is going on. And, suddenly, it dawns on us, “Why can’t I do things differently?”

You gave the example of the podcasting conference. And, suddenly, when you saw an app, you thought of all the possibilities. Well, we should look at the apps on our phone and imagine what are the possibilities. Could we create an app that has that same functionality that does something a bit different?

So I believe we just don’t pay attention and we don’t wake up each day saying, “Maybe I should think differently about the world around me.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You’ve got a fun turn of a phrase, enlightened ignorance. What is that? And how is that different than just not knowing what’s up, being uninformed?

Alan Gregerman
Okay, good. So we live in a world, let’s be honest, where we’re surrounded by stupidity, okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Alan Gregerman
And so I think of the difference between stupidity and enlightened ignorance as stupidity is really, “I really don’t know but I actually don’t care to know.” And for me, enlightened ignorance is, “Great. I don’t know but I’m challenged to figure out how to do something remarkable.”

And so that’s what the book is really about is the idea that we can find a problem that we don’t know anything about and we can figure it out if we have the right mindset. And so I want people to think about in organizations how we have the right mindset so each and every day we can show up and be really kind of engines of innovation.

And so enlightened ignorance is really a formula for how we take something we don’t know, we admit that we don’t know the answer, and we actually figure out how to get smart enough to think about solving it.

And so that, for me, is really the heart of innovation. That’s what almost every innovator has ever kind of lived as, someone who’s enlightened about something that needs to be done, but ignorant about how to do it and determined to figure out a better way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s funny, I’m thinking about, I remember a moment of my ignorance back when I was consulting, I was, you know, a fresh Bain associate consultant, and we had a giant department store, was our client, a chain of department stores.

And I remember, they had some apparel stuff going on, and I learned about the concept of size packs, which was totally new to me. I thought, “So a department store doesn’t just tell, like, the manufacturer of the clothing, ‘I want 10 larges and 20 extra larges, etc.,’ like per their needs, but rather they are constrained to order a size pack, which has like five larges, four mediums, whatever, and then just hope they can mix and match like the size packs to get what they actually want?”

And I thought, “That seems really silly to me.” You know, not me not knowing about whatever supply chains and logistics and all the things. And I thought, “Well, wouldn’t a manufacturer really like maybe working with us more if we order just…?” or, sorry, “Wouldn’t it be better for us if we could just buy the things that we wanted to hit our inventory needs for the customers at a retail stores instead of being, you know, constrained by these size packs?”

And I was genuinely curious, this is new to me. I’m learning. I’m asking. And when I asked that question, basically, like, “What’s up with size packs?” I remember the partner on the case looked at me, and was like, “Are you serious?” I was like, “Oops! Oops! I guess I wasn’t supposed to ask that question.”

I’ve revealed that I am a total neophyte, ignoramus in the world of, you know, department stores and clothing distribution logistics. But, to this day, and maybe I should just look it up, but I still think there’s something to it, in terms of you could disrupt the way that game is played.

And there would be, I’m sure, you know, pros and cons on playing the game the same versus differently. But I felt like, in that moment, my ignorance could have potentially been an asset.

Alan Gregerman
Well, I think ignorance is often an asset if there’s a better way to do something. So now, based on what you said, let’s use our imagination.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Alan Gregerman
I can imagine now, using AI and having cameras located in department stores, and having those cameras look at all the people who come to shop for clothes, and those cameras, based on some parameters, making some decisions about the general sizes of the people who are coming into my store.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the customers will love it.

Alan Gregerman
And then I order based on that, okay? But now I just assume that people are evenly distributed and people looking at certain types of clothes are evenly distributed, and that’s why I get extra large and large and medium and small and extra small. And there are better ways to do things.

You know, so I’m always thinking about the fact that, and I’d love your listeners to think about, we’re only limited by our imagination. So anytime you get in a situation where you get a little bit frustrated at work or somewhere else, just pause for a moment and say to yourself, “There must be a better way. What’s my initial thought about how there could be a better way?”

And that’s really kind of part of the reason why I wrote the book, is I’d like to give people a guide to thinking about how there could be a better way to do the things that really matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And it’s interesting, and then, I guess, also to keep that humility, and I do want to hear about that’s one of your six keys. So let’s talk about those in a second, but to also have the humility that is like, “Well, no, Pete, actually, a size packs save us a huge amount on transportation and warehousing and whatnot. And to get all customized without size packs, you’re going to dramatically increase that cost. And it’s actually not worth it for anybody.” Like, “Okay, understood.”

Alan Gregerman
Okay, but I’m not certain that’s the case, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it may or may not be the case. There may be certain contexts where, you know, it’s often, I guess, I’m biased towards the middle a lot, Alan. That’s kind of my thing is I imagine there are probably certain contexts and circumstances in which size packs are perfect and others in which an alternative is superior.

Alan Gregerman
Well, so I’m not an expert in retail clothing, but I do know, because I order a bunch of stuff online, that when I order online, I actually vote with my feet, right? So I know roughly the size I wear and so I’m ordering.

So if I run an online clothing business, then the reality is, and Nordstrom Rack or something else comes to mind, that people are giving me guidance so I now know what to order because I can see what people are ordering.

If I run a store, maybe I’m stuck a little bit with size packs, but I think in the future I won’t need to be if, in fact, there actually are retail stores. But what I want people to think about is the idea that there are ways to collect information and that I can be most successful by starting fresh with a new challenge and saying, “Okay, what do I need to know to figure this one out?”

I’m not certain that retail stores are thinking about that and that’s why they offer the array of size packs or whatever they do. But I want people to actually just pause and say, “Okay, I can do anything here. Let me think in a new way.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, let’s talk through your six keys to enlightened ignorance.

Alan Gregerman
Okay, so here’s the thing, and I appreciate the chance to talk about enlightened ignorance and the idea that actually we find something that matters to us and we actually want to be remarkable at it. And I think, you know, as I think about your podcast, if I think about the things that are most important for people in their careers, it’s that that’s the challenge we need to navigate.

And the challenge is that we need to be committed to continuing to learn, grow, think of valuable ways to make a difference wherever we work, and then be open to suggesting those ideas. So where do we start?

The first one, I think, is, if I have a clear purpose, something that matters to me, I’m likely to make a difference. I’m likely to be focused on all the things I need to do because this is something I want to solve for. I want to create a solution to a problem. I want to create a new opportunity. So purpose is really powerful.

And purpose can be, “I want to create a product that enables women to feel good about the clothing they’re wearing.” Sara Blakely creates Spanx, okay? So Sara Blakely, think about this, she was a door-to-door fax salesperson.

Some of your listeners, because I know your demographic are first going to go, “Door-to-door sales? Would anyone open their door for somebody?” And the second they’ll say is, “What in the world is like a fax machine?”

So this woman was selling fax machines door-to-door, and she suddenly realizes that her undergarments probably can be seen through some of her clothes. So she says, “I’m going to solve this problem.” She becomes, for two years, totally purpose-focused on solving this challenge. And she does.

And she creates this company called Spanx. And she’s a billionaire now, all based on having no idea how to solve this problem, but then doing a series of tests and experiments to see if this problem is solvable. So that can be a purpose, certainly, but other purposes abound.

If any of your listeners are ever in Washington, D.C., and they come to the National Portrait Gallery, they’ll see a piece of art called “The Throne.” And “The Throne” is a remarkable piece of 184 objects that are all wrapped in aluminum foil, which was the work of a fellow named James Hampton, who was an untrained artist who worked in the federal government, and, for 14 years, evenings and weekends, built what he thought was a tribute to God.

He was determined to be ready when God came back to Earth and to show that he was among the most faithful. So he built this. This was his purpose, his life’s work, and he was doggedly determined to do this.

And this piece of art is amazing. In fact, you can Google it. Just called “The Throne of the Third Heaven.” And if you look at this piece, you’ll say to yourself, “Wow! What drove somebody to do it?” A clear sense of purpose. So I just like people to think about, “What am I doing and why does it matter? And why do I want to learn and excel at something?” And if we have a clear purpose, that really matters.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also just thinking very, very tactically, was it the reticular activation system? Like, that notion that if you’ve got a purpose and there’s something you’re trying to solve for, any number of random stimuli can become the impetus for, like, Eureka inspirations, like that dog Velcro situation.

I don’t know his story if he was looking for fastening options or anything, but if you were, you would get really fired up. You would notice that, like, “Holy smokes, I got to know everything about burrs stat.”

Alan Gregerman
Well, right, so I think you’re onto something. So here’s the idea, and that is if I have something that really matters to me, a problem I want to solve, an opportunity I want to create, then almost anything becomes the raw material for thinking about it.

So I wake up each day kind of overwhelmed with the idea that I can create a breakthrough and do something different. I show up at work on Mondays – can you imagine that? – really energized to do something different.

I’m going to improve customer service. I’m going to improve distribution. I have an idea for a new product or service. I am energized. If I don’t have a purpose, I show up and I’m just kind of slogging it through, you know, I’ll do more of the same.

And so I find purpose is the great energizer, in a way. It’s a great starting point for making a difference. I’m kind of super highly motivated to show people that you don’t have to be an expert to create a breakthrough. I wake up every Monday, super excited to get the word out to more people.

But I think whatever we have as our purpose, if it drives us, then it really makes us really powerful in terms of our ability to take a fresh look, because we’ll do whatever it takes to be remarkable at solving that purpose.

So that then leads us to the second, which is curiosity. And that is, if I have a purpose, I ought to be curious about, “Is there a better way to do the things that matter most?” So if you’re thinking about your job, think about, “What should I be curious about? And it might not be folks in my industry who are awesome at what I do, but it might be folks who are in something else, who do something else, another business, another walk of life, who would be a spark, a source of inspiration.”

So let me give you an example. A team of people came to me because they needed to improve customer service in their organization. And they said, “Well, where should we think about it?” And I said, “Well, think about all the leading providers, where have you gotten great customer service?”

And then I said, “How about this? Let’s go to Cirque du Soleil together.” And I have no idea what goes on at a Cirque du Soleil performance. They’ve got a funny language, they’re doing all kinds of things, they’re cool costumes, but I know they’re focused on, from start to finish, a remarkable customer experience.

So we arrived an hour early and we simply paid attention to everything they do to engage customers and get people excited about this kind of different type of entertainment. And then we stayed an hour afterwards to see all the things they were doing afterwards to make it so that people would really be involved, tell other people, be repeat customers.

So wherever you think folks are remarkable, in any walk of life at doing what you do, commit to being curious about what they do, figuring out what they do and seeing if you can apply it to your work.

Pete Mockaitis
And when I’m thinking about the biography of Leonardo da Vinci here, it’s like that dude may be the most curious human who ever lived. I mean, it was astounding in terms of it didn’t need to be remotely relevant, so it seemed, what he was directly working on, but he would just go deep into researching a random animal’s functioning body part, like, “Why it did it the way it did.” And in so doing, I mean, well, I guess the proof is in the pudding. That was remarkably fruitful for him.

Alan Gregerman
Well, yeah, so I mean, he ended up being called a Renaissance person, right? So I guess we have a term for somebody clever, but imagine, here’s one example from his world that ended up having a current implication.

So Igor Sikorsky, in 1939, invents the helicopter, the first vertical lift craft, okay? As an 11-year-old boy in a market, he saw a toy called the Chinese top. For those of you kind of listening, but you can’t see it, I’ll kind of demonstrate here.

It’s a stick with a propeller on it. You rub it in your hands and it goes straight up in the air. As an 11-year-old, that sparked him to think about humans someday going straight up in the air. He goes to a library in Kiev where he’s from, or Kiev, and the librarian says, “Well, you know, there was this guy, Leonardo da Vinci, and he actually drew pictures of a helicopter, like, he never, ever created one, but he drew pictures of them.”

Did he come up with this on his own? No. On his balcony in Florence, he saw dragonflies. And dragonflies are actually the natural embodiment of a helicopter. They’re like miniature helicopters. Sikorsky saw this, looked at dragonflies, and many, many years later created a helicopter that actually, on the maiden voyage, flew for 59 minutes. That’s kind of awesome, actually.

I mean, compare that to the Wright brothers, eight feet above a beach for a hundred yards, and they’re the fathers of flight? Sikorsky goes up for 59 minutes straight up in the air and flies around. But da Vinci was an important part of that because, as you said, he was innately curious about everything around him.

And so he imagined that dragonflies were something humans could do, and it took about 500 years for humans to actually do it. But, no, so I just feel like I would love everyone listening to just get out there and pay attention.

You know, when I wander around, and I’m in DC, but I’m in Chicago a lot and lots of other places, I see people walking around glued to their phones, you know, as though that’s like really important. They got to send a text or they got to take a call or they got to check their email. They’ve got to do all those things.

Just put your phone in your pocket and wander around and pay attention. You’ll be shocked at all the things you see and the connections you start to make just by being curious.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about respect?

Alan Gregerman
Well, so let’s, for a moment, because in my mind there’s a little bit of an order about it. So let me insert one more and then we’ll get to respect. And so that’s humility. And it’s a natural thing. So, look, if I honestly realize I don’t know everything, or that the stuff I know isn’t appropriate for solving the problem I’m trying to solve, I ought to be humble.

I ought to admit that I don’t know, and that ought to energize me even more to figure it out. And so I like the idea of humility. So let me give you a great example there. It’s a sad example that turns out to work out really well.

So a fellow named Dixon Chibanda, and you can Google his TED Talk, is one of only 13 — 13, that’s an actual number — of licensed psychiatrists in the country of Zimbabwe. And Zimbabwe is a country of 17 million people. And so if you do the math, and I was not like a rock star math student, but I can tell that’s not enough psychiatrists to take care of an entire nation that might have some mental health challenges.

One day, one of his patients can’t get to him and she takes her own life. And he decides there has to be a better way. And so he decides, in a country that’s under-resourced with psychiatrists, that he has to figure out who would be respected that people would listen to. And he determines that it’s grandmothers, the most respected people in lots of societies.

He trains thousands of grandmothers to be the front line of mental health defense, and creates an organization called Friendship Bench, in which he places benches in communities throughout Zimbabwe, and tells young people they can book a time to hang out and talk with a grandmother. And he teaches the grandmothers the fundamentals of talking with somebody who’s facing depression.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. I’m reminded of the Vince Vaughn movie, “Nonnas,” with the Italian grandmas who started a restaurant, but this is way cooler.

Alan Gregerman
Well, yeah. And so imagine this, five years later, the suicide rate in Zimbabwe goes down over 90%. And it’s based on the fact that people have someone they can turn to, and it’s a grandmother, and nobody’s going to do something really bad when a grandmother cares about you.

And so kind of a brilliant idea, but that’s the idea of humility. I’m trained as a psychiatrist. That’s not solving my problem. I’ve got to get more people involved in mental health. So, back to what you were asking about — respect.

I can learn something remarkable from any other person on the planet if I’m open to doing that and if I’m willing to connect with them. So imagine, I tell a story in the book about a homeless man, an unhoused person, that I met by actually going to McDonald’s to have my Egg McMuffin and coffee.

And I met a man out there who was sitting on the curb who asked if I could buy him two apple pies. And I said it first, you know, because I was trying to focus on health, I said, “Well, you know, two apple pies is not really a balanced breakfast.”

And he said, “Well, I really like apple pies.” And I said, “You’re an adult. Go for it,” though I did get him an orange juice because I figure we all need vitamin C. I began to see him regularly. You know, I would go to McDonald’s every week and buy him two apple pies and an orange juice. Never got him to eat protein, but I’m not sure there’s a lot of protein at McDonald’s.

And so I befriended him. A person who, on the face of it, most people would say, “What would I learn from him?” I learned a lot from him during our conversations. I would guess I learned at least as much from him as he ever learned from me. But I learned about, you know, he was a jazz musician. I learned about his love of jazz. I listened today to lots of the musicians he recommended to me.

I learned about his life and his family and some of the ideas he had. And, most importantly, I learned about resilience. Almost every company and organization talks about, “We need to be more resilient in a fast changing world.” Here was a person who lived on the street for two years. He had to figure out how to be resilient every single day. And the things that he knew were things that I incorporate in my life and my world.

So whether somebody is in another culture around the world, whether somebody is of a different generation, whether somebody, through a quirk not necessarily of their own, has landed in a difficult place, we can learn something from everybody but we have to wake up each day believing, “Anyone I meet, potentially, could be valuable to me.”

And the idea of respect is that, “I don’t know where the ideas that I’m going to need are going to come from but I ought to cast a wide net and be open to those.” So that’s the idea of respect.

The fifth thing I’d love people to think about is what I call future focus. Many of the people listening probably were either subject to or they loved reading about Jules Verne, Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Jules Verne was like the first science fiction writer or one of the first. He wrote all of his books based on wandering up and down the streets of Paris and imagining things, and going to the library and reading other books.

We can imagine what the future is going to be like by just engaging with the world around us and paying attention to the clues it’s giving me, “Why is everybody riding a scooter?” “Why do some restaurants not even have service people? I just scan a QR code and then I order online, and then my food appears.”

Lots of things going on. “Why are driverless cars really popular?” All kinds of, but I need to pay attention. I need to get up and pay attention. I need to think about what the clues are about the future that are actually leading me to the future, and then I need to figure out how to win by getting to the future before anybody else.

If I’m in a job, I should think about that for my company, “What’s going on out there in the world that’s going to impact us? And how do I bring that in and be valuable, suggesting ways we can respond?” So that’s the idea of future focus.

And then the last thing is the simple idea that I talk about all the time, and that is, and it’s not something that we all think is great, but we all should be paranoid. And what do I mean by that? You know, the reality is we all should pay attention to what’s gaining on us.

Right now, we’re all afraid that AI is gaining on us. It’s going to take our job. It’s going to make what we do irrelevant. I think we need to pay attention and then we need to figure out what’s our strategy, “As a human, how can I be valuable in a world of AI? I can imagine. I can make connections. I can care. I can be curious.”

AI is only as good as my ability to be all those things. And I can show how I can connect the dots in ways that no machine ever could. But I have to always believe that somebody is following me because that motivates me to have, you know, as we’re talking about it, this enlightened ignorance.

It motivates me to say, “Each day, I can learn something new that will make a difference that’s going to make me more valuable in the work I do. And I’m determined to do it.”

Pete Mockaitis
You’re right, the word paranoia doesn’t have the greatest connotation in terms of positivity. And yet, if we think of it as the antidote to complacency, I think that’s super useful to just have a bit of, well, we had one guest saying, you know, fun, fear and focus is just a great mix for getting stuff done and having creative ideas and all that.

So, in a way, there’s a bit of sort of an emotional, maybe biochemical component there. But also, you know, I think it’s possible that I’ve probably been guilty of it, it’s like, “Hey, the thing I’ve been doing has been working pretty well. I’m just going to keep doing that on repeat for years.”

And it might be worthwhile to not be so comfortable and to proactively change things up instead of having to have them change, thrust upon me from external forces at a timing and in a context that’s not ideal.

Alan Gregerman
Well, no, so I think you’re right. And just think about it logically. And that is, five years ago the world was very different than it is today. Five years from now, it’s going to be even more different than it is. If we believe we can do exactly the same thing and know exactly the same stuff and be relevant five years from now, I think we’re kidding ourselves.

In fact, if we think that we can go to school and major in computer science, and that the day after we leave school and get a job, we won’t have to learn something new, we’re probably kidding ourselves. So the reality is we need to constantly up our game, but I think that’s part of the fun of life, actually, learning the right new things when I need them.

I like to think about the idea that we should learn how to engage the world. These six things I talk about are the things we should be learning as kind of habits of our lives. And then we should learn how to kind of “just in time” learn.

Say, “What do I need to know in order to do what I need to do to get me or our company or our organization moving forward? And then I’m going to figure that out. I’m going to be all in and I’m going to cram like crazy to figure that out. And then I’m going to make some mistakes but I’m going to refine what I know and I’m just going to get better and better at it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you mentioned AI, I’d love your hot take in terms of how can AI help and hinder our creativity.

Alan Gregerman
Well, so I use AI a lot, but I don’t write anything with AI, and I don’t come up with my final answers for AI, and I don’t even imagine using AI. I often use AI just to think about what’s known about a certain topic, and I use that as a bit of a starting point in helping me to think differently.

I use AI to collect information. If I were to go to the web, I do a lot of speaking around the world, and I often say to myself, “I’d like to do some speaking in Chicago or Japan or wherever. Can you give me the names and contact information of folks who book speakers in these places?”

And AI can do that. I’m sure I’m using up way more energy than I have a right to. But AI can do that really, really quickly. If I had to search a lot of data sources to figure that out, that would be a monumental effort.

So I collect information using AI, but I use my human ability to imagine and to connect dots after I’ve used AI.

And so I think of wherever a job requires creativity and innovation, wherever it requires building strong relationships with other people, wherever it requires kind of connecting dots in different ways, seeing patterns in different ways, I think all of those things are things that humans are going to do really, really well. And so I’d invest in those things and then I just invest in how to learn quickly.

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

Alan Gregerman
I just believe, for everybody listening, we’ve been sold — I don’t want to say it’s a bill of goods — but we’ve been convinced, a lot of us, that we’re not particularly innovative, that the world is a place in which there are people who are really creative and then there’s the rest of us, and we need to be resigned to just doing stuff.

I believe we all have the potential to be remarkably creative. It’s just we’ve got to open our eyes and pay attention and start thinking in different ways. You know, I wrote this book to truly challenge people to say, “I can actually take a fresh look at the things that matter most and come up with something different.”

And so I want everybody out there to believe you can do awesome things. You just have to be open to trying to make those happen. And so that’s really what I’m kind of passionate about, is the belief that every single person can do awesome things with kind of this straightforward formula for the six things we need to do really well.

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

Alan Gregerman
So I love José Andrés, you know, the restaurateur who also created World Central Kitchen, and who’s determined, especially in war zones and danger zones, to feed people.

So he once said, “Life begins at the edge of the unknown.” And so I believe the stuff we already know is fine. The stuff we don’t know but could know is like energizing and awesome. So I love that quote.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Alan Gregerman
I like Don Quixote by Cervantes. I love the idea that we all need to kind of battle windmills and think about what’s possible, and imagine no matter where we start that we can do remarkable things.

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

Alan Gregerman
If I were to give a favorite tool that I like in the world of work that’s relevant to your audience, I would say, each day, find somebody in your organization you don’t know very well, but that you, working with them, would be beneficial to the organization.

And set up either a call or a meeting or coffee, depending if you’re co-located in the same place, and have a conversation in which you just talk about things you have in common that have nothing to do with work.

And I can guarantee you, in 10 minutes, you’ll make a connection with that person and you’ll be more eager to think creatively and make a difference with that person.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Alan Gregerman
I wake up each day and we have three dogs, I take them for a walk, and I pay attention to kind of what interests them, probably the smell of another dog being in some place. But because they take their time walking, it’s kind of called a sniff and stroll, it gives me time to ponder and think about things.

And so I’m imagining all the things I see, and kind of the power of the bright color of flowers this time of year, of kind of the different ways people transport themselves around. I just pay attention and my morning walk is a great start.

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

Alan Gregerman
There are a lot of key things, but I’d love to think about the thing that people kind of resonate with most is just the reality that we can figure out the stuff that matters most if we have the right mindset.

That we don’t have to know everything, that we should just get started. Figure out something that matters to you and, even if you’re bad at it, just get started because you’ll bump into ideas along the way and figure out how to be remarkable.

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

Alan Gregerman
Well, so lots of places. I mean, they can go to AlanGregerman.com. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. Don’t follow me. Connect with me. I’d like to learn what you’re up to. So you can do that.

As Pete said, you can go on, actually, on Listen Notes and put my name in there and kind of listen to me. I mean, I’m honored to be on your show. But if you want to hear more stuff, if you’d like more information, I can send you other stuff about me, articles or books.

Read a few of my books. I mean, read The Wisdom of Ignorance, and if you don’t like it, I will Venmo you the money, you know?

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

Alan Gregerman
I think, just show up at work each day and say to yourself, “How can we be more valuable to the internal or external customers we serve? So how can we make an even greater difference in their lives?” And I think if you use that as the starting point of your purpose, given whatever job you have now, it’s going to energize you to take a fresh look at the things you do. You won’t get stuck in the things you do. And, over time, you’ll find you’re more and more valuable to wherever you work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Alan, thank you.

Alan Gregerman
Thank you. I’ve appreciated the chance to be on your show. Thanks.

Dec 29
0

2025 GREATS: 1010: Getting the Most Out of Generative AI at Work with Jeremy Utley

By | Podcasts | No Comments

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

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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.

Oct 20
0

1103: The Four Universal Patterns of Winning Innovation with JoAnn Garbin

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Former Microsoft leader JoAnn Garbin reveals the patterns and principles behind Microsoft’s biggest innovation wins.

You’ll Learn

  1. What most people overlook about innovation
  2. The secret to getting executives on board
  3. The four patterns responsible for Microsoft’s success

About JoAnn

JoAnn Garbin is a sustainability and technology entrepreneur with a 25-year track record of leading teams “from nothing to something to scale,” creating numerous innovative products and profitable businesses. During her tenure as Director of Innovation in Microsoft’s cloud business, she guided her team in developing billion-dollar opportunities, including the Regenerative Datacenter of the Future. In 2024, she founded Regenerous Labs, a collaboration committed to creating cross-sector transformations. 

JoAnn is an active alumnus of Villanova University, where she studied mechanical engineering and philosophy. Her fresh eyes and thought leadership were instrumental in driving novel insights into The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft.

Resources Mentioned

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JoAnn Garbin Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
JoAnn, welcome!

JoAnn Garbin
Hi, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I’m excited to talk innovation, and I want to hear your backstory. I understand, one of your earliest tech innovations occurred at a mascot-cooling system company. Tell us the whole tale, please.

JoAnn Garbin
Well, it was my company, a brave 22-year-old that I was, and it was an innovation that came out of being a mascot. And if you, which I’ve heard a rumor that you were a mascot, if you’ve ever been in a mascot suit, you know that it takes about two minutes before you’re completely overheated. And I was a mechanical engineering student, and I was, like, “I can solve this problem.”

So, what turned into a senior project with some friends, then after school, became my first company, and I actually managed to sell a few, which was really cool, including to the Seattle Seahawks, which, full circle, I live in Seattle now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was a mascot way back in, maybe seventh grade, eighth grade. I was the Holy Family Hornet. So, I don’t think I ever got crazy hot because I was mostly at basketball games, inside airconditioned gyms, as opposed to being in a brutally hot outside baseball, football stadium. Whew.

JoAnn Garbin
And you were in seventh grade, and we seem to be able to tolerate anything when we’re kids.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that, too. So, how does the cooling system work?

JoAnn Garbin
It was a passive system, which, today, when I look at the tech we use, so this is late, early ‘90s, we, as students, we reached out to DuPont, and they had just come up with this new fanciful material called wicking material, which is now in every sports garment you wear. And we reached out to this Danish company that had something better than ice, what’s called a phase change material, which is essentially a salt that has a higher capacity to absorb heat.

Phase change materials today are also in everything. Like, you can get a cooling vest for your dog that, from like Chewy or the local pet store, that is essentially what my classmates and I designed in the early ‘90s.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. And just because I’m full of curiosity, we’ll get into how it could be more innovative shortly. But a phase change material, so does that mean it changes phase from solid to liquid at a different temperature, or it takes more total energy to pull off the phase change, or both?

JoAnn Garbin
Both. And so, the practical advantages of it, is that if I put ice packs against my skin and then put a mascot suit on, that ice melts in minutes, and now you’re carrying around pockets of water on top of, you know, already having this heavy suit on.

But this one, this salt pack that we found back then, if you put it in the Gatorade cooler on the football bench, so just iced water, essentially, it would refreeze.

And then because it had a higher capacity to absorb heat, you could wear it for two or three times longer than an ice pack before you needed to refreeze it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, now I’m thinking about coolers. It sounds like we could probably do a lot better than ice, but I don’t see much stuff, according to America’s Test Kitchen, that freezing packs are performing any better than just normal ice.

JoAnn Garbin
I haven’t done the research since the early ‘90s. But I do know, like, I get meal kits delivered half a dozen meals a week so that I eat, and it comes with non-ice packs.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, the gel stuff.

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah. And the really cool ones are the kind that, once they thaw, they’re biodegradable and non-toxic, so you can just pour them down the sink, so now you don’t have this massive collection of ice packs. We could talk all day about packaging innovation. I’m a total packaging nerd, but I would venture to bet that a lot of those gels are phase change materials.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’re a packaging nerd, I’m a packaging sucker, “Oh. that looks pretty. It must be a great product.” “That’s what they want you to think, Pete. Be a critical thinker.”

JoAnn Garbin
Well, that’s why YETI can charge what they charge.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

JoAnn Garbin
It’s not that dramatically different than a regular cooler. It just has the brand appeal of being a brand of mountaineers, and they use, this is marketing innovation, “How can I make you feel like a mountaineer? I can sell you the same cooler the mountaineer uses.”

Pete Mockaitis
I remember, I was with my buddy, who is a long-term Nike employee, and we were at the Nike employee store, which is fun because he’s got a big old discount. And I said, “Ooh, I really like this backpack. And it has these grooves in the back. And I wonder if that would facilitate airflow to cool my back down a little when I’m walking on a hot day and I got all that backpack sweat?” And he just said, “Hmm, do you perceive it to?” I was like, “That’s your whole game, isn’t it?”

JoAnn Garbin
That is a big part of it in a lot of products.

Pete Mockaitis
“Do you perceive it to?” Okay. Well, we’re talking more broadly and, hopefully, actionably about innovation. And, boy, you’ve spent decades directing innovation and teaching it and consulting on it. So, can you share with us, for starters, what’s one of the most surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made in your career about how innovation happens?

JoAnn Garbin
This is something that pops up every time I start a company, I join a company, I have a crazy idea and I start executing, but it’s really shown through in the book case studies, The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft Dean Carignan and I, we studied all these cases across Microsoft history.

And, time and again, we go into innovation discovery thinking it’s that lightning strike. It’s that moment of genius where the dots just connect, that’s innovation. It’s totally not. It is the 99.9% of the sweat and effort that comes after that. That is the biggest thing that comes up again and again throughout innovation, that doesn’t surprise me so much anymore, but I think it does surprise people because we just get, again, perception is everything.

We get sold the story that it’s the genius idea, or the lightning bolt, but it’s actually execution. So, Dean and I set out to write a book on how to innovate. And one of the major themes that came out of it is, it’s all about execution.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what is that, was that Edison, the famous quotation, that, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”?

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, execution is where it’s at, and understood. Well, then tell us, what are some of the key places that folks go wrong when they’re executing, “Ooh, we got a cool idea. Let’s go make it happen”? What are some of the common pitfalls?

JoAnn Garbin
There are so many missteps to be made. And then there’s just bad luck, bad timing, bad environment. But if we look at the things we can control, one of the hardest things for the person with the insight, or the idea, to accept is that it won’t be so obvious to everyone else.

Just because you have connected the dots and are so psyched about this doesn’t mean your boss will be, your coworkers will be, your vendors or suppliers will be. And you have to recognize that it does take all of those people to bring something into the world. There’s a great quote in the book by the head of the developer division at Microsoft, Julia Elgluisen. And she says, “If your idea hasn’t made it into the world and isn’t changing someone’s life, it’s not innovation. It’s just a cool idea.”

So, when you frame it that way and realize just how many people it takes, the very first thing you have to do is get them excited about the big vision. Once you do that, and that’s, like, that’s not engineering, that’s storytelling, that’s, you know, passion, that’s meeting people where they’re at and connecting into what wakes them up in the morning, and gets them out of bed, not what gets you out of bed.

So, there’s a whole mechanism and process and tools for doing that. Marketers know this. This is how they get us to buy the YETI cooler. You got to tap into that skillset very early on so that you get the people you need on side with you. And then you got to give them a path forward. You can’t keep people bought in for the long run on a hope and a prayer, right?

You have to lay down stepping stones, little wins, quick value creation, things that return investment to the company right away, but are in the direction of your big idea so that you can point to it and say, “Look at what we just did. Isn’t that great? We’re on our way.” And then you do the next one. And those stepping stones give you the confidence, and your teammates the confidence, that you might actually get to that horizon point you laid out.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. And talking about that marketing skillset, it seems that many of the top luminaries, visionaries, billionaires, at the heads of tech companies that are super famous, that seems to be one of the top things they do, is that the storytelling and the framing of their thing. And I’m thinking about the TV series, “Silicon Valley,” and it’s almost sort of like a joke. It’s like, “And we’re changing the world.”

And it’s like, “Okay. Well, you know, it’s a website and people post their pictures and stuff.” It’s like, “Okay, we’re changing the world to be more connected.” And so, it sounds lofty. And yet, at the same time, this storytelling, this framing, it seems to do the trick for investors and for users and for customers to hop on board.

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah, it’s how we’ve communicated since the beginning of humanity. We’ve told stories, and there’s plenty of science and research to support it. Actually, one of my friends just has a new book out called Primal Intelligence, by Angus Fletcher.

And he’s a neuroscientist, and what he calls a professor of story-thinking, and he breaks down why we respond so strongly to stories, and how to construct stories to get people bought in and moving along with you, whether that’s external marketing or internal rallying for the troops and innovation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you share with us any top tips or stories about stories that really got the job done?

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah, one of the favorite examples is the original Nike “Just Do It” commercial. So, if you remember, it was an octogenarian, an 80-year-old marathon runner. And when the commercial starts, they zoom in and he’s running across the Golden Gate Bridge, and he’s shirtless and he’s got this big tattoo on, but he’s this older man and you’re already like, “What is even happening here?”

But you’re brought right into the middle of the action, and then they back up and they explain, “Here is this 80-year-old marathon runner who runs 17 miles a day, but he didn’t start running until he was 70. Just do it.” And now your brain is going, “Oh, what do I want to just do? What’s my future? How do I get there? If he can run 17 miles a day at 80, I can do it, too.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that. It is, and primal, I think, is the word. It goes beyond an intellectual understanding of, “Ah, yes it’s possible even for someone who was elderly to embark upon ambitious endeavors.” It’s more of a, “Aargh, yeah. Let’s get after it.”

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah. So, Angus knows I love his book, so highly recommend diving into storytelling, story-thinking and all the tools around it.

Pete Mockaitis
Super. Thank you. Well, so could you share with us, perhaps the big idea in your book, The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft?

JoAnn Garbin
Yes, of course. Dean and I set out, we’re both innovators at Microsoft. I was leading the data center of the future program in our cloud business. And my background is really as a repeat entrepreneur, figuring out a problem I want to solve, building a team, going out and trying to solve it.

So, I came into Microsoft, this big organization, I’m like, “How the heck does innovation happen here? I’m in an innovation role and nobody can tell me how it happens here for real.” So, I sought out Dean, we got to know each other. And as we started trading what we joke are war stories about innovation, because it’s often a rebel cause or a battle, we started seeing that we had a lot more in common than different.

So that set us on this path of there must be common principles and tools and processes and insights that just cut across industry, time, and business model, right? So, we set out to talk to as many innovators from past and present Microsoft as we could. The company just turned 50, so there was just this massive history of stuff we could dig into.

And we came out, you know, that was our hypothesis, “We’re going to uncover these commonalities.” So that’s what we set out for, and we were very pleased that it showed to be true. We ended up finding four big patterns of innovation.

And we broke it down into everyday things you do, things you do over the years to be continuously and adaptively innovative, how you innovate with everyone, which goes back to that storytelling, and then everything beyond technology, because, too often, we think about the lightbulb and we don’t think about the marketing and the pricing and the supply chain, and all of those things matter.

So, within those four patterns, we identify a set of tools and a way to put them into use together to go from what we call nothing to something to scale.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us the one-minute version of what are each of these four big patterns, one minute-ish each. No pressure.

JoAnn Garbin
So, no, no, no, I’ve read the book a few times. Everyday stuff is building up habits. So, you’ll hear this from coaches and leaders alike in all walks of life – musicians, artists, professional sports player. Anybody that has become a master of their craft, they will talk about the habits that they form and that they practice every day, so that what they’re doing isn’t something they have to write a checklist to do or think about doing. It’s just how they function.

So, the first pattern of every day is, “How do you do that as an individual? But also, how do you build that habit-building cycle into your organization?” Because it’s one thing for you to be doing discovery by design as an individual. It’s another thing if you have your entire company doing discovery by design. Or, another one is double-loop learning, where you don’t just iterate on the solution to whatever problem you’re solving, but you iterate on the assumptions that you’ve made about the solution. So, there’s a whole toolbox just to that.

Over the years is, “Great. You have all these habits now, and you have all these ideas.” But if you’ve paid attention at all, disruption comes all the time. So, the idea that you’ve set out five years ago is either dead or dying right now. It’s just not going to be what you can run your company on. So, we spend a whole chapter talking about that pattern of continuous innovation.

It’s the theme of the cover of the book, which looks like an infinity. And we talk about both how to stay on that curve and keep going around and around so that you, like Microsoft, can say you’re 50 years old and have done it a few times. But we also talk about how you get kicked off the curb and you end up in the very deep pool of companies and great ideas that came, died, and disappeared.

Then we have innovating with everyone. And I think, Dean and I talk about this. This is probably the most important of the four because it takes so many people to bring something into reality. And that’s recognizing that change is hard, that most people are not pioneers or cliff divers or adrenaline junkies, that want to be the first one out on the big wave or whatever.

So, you’ve got this whole group of people in your company, you’ve got to figure out what moves them and how to speak to them in their terms, and how to connect with them and bring them into your idea so that it’s their idea too.

And then, finally, is the last one, we have this predisposition to think that innovation is technology, but there’s lots of books beyond ours that talk about all the innovations that have happened throughout history. Most of the value has been created by everything upstream and downstream of the innovation. A simple example, Uber or Lyft, these rideshare companies.

They didn’t create new cars, new scooters, new bicycles. They created a new business model in the sharing economy and how to connect people to the mode of transportation that they need. That’s not technology. Like, their applications aren’t all that wild. It was thinking through the problem from a different angle. There are all these aspects to innovation, and that fourth chapter goes into that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s perhaps zoom into a typical professional, mid-level at a mid-size company, not necessarily a tech giant, and they would like more cool, innovative stuff to be happening more often. Do you have any top do’s and don’ts you’d suggest for right away today?

JoAnn Garbin
Yes. First thing is you have to find your tribe. You’ve got to find other people looking to fix something that you think needs fixing. There is a lot you can do. You got to make time for learning and exposing yourself to what other companies are doing and the new science or tech or marketing. That you can do on your own.

But to really innovate, you’ve got to find other people that want to do it too, because that’s where the magic happens. Right now, it’s Hack Week at Microsoft. So, 70,000 plus Microsoft people are coming together in Hackathon to go from idea to prototype in one week. That started way back before Satya was CEO. He’s the CEO that brought Hackathon into being.

But before he existed, a bunch of people that just felt like the company wasn’t innovating enough at their level, at that mid-level, it was all like big guys coming up with ideas and passing it down the chain for execution, this group started what has now become the garage, but they called it a speakeasy.

And they would just get together and they would brainstorm and they would prototype and they would try things and they would bring other people in and tap into everybody’s skills to propose solutions to problems they saw every day. Again, practice, right? So, they started innovating by innovating. So, find a problem you want to solve, find some friends that want to solve it too and just start trying to solve it.

But then there’s the other side of it. No matter if you’re in anything other than a solo company, you’ve got to get buy-in from leadership. And every single case study, we’ve studied everything I’ve ever done in my career and Dean’s career, you have to have the executive champion. Especially, the bigger the initiative, the more important that becomes.

So, if you’re going to do the speakeasy in your organization, only push that rock up a mountain so far before you find your executive champion who can pull it to the top, because, otherwise, it gets a bit exhausting to keep pushing against what everybody else is looking to the leadership for what’s important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now in your book, you have many case studies. Could you share, which story do you think is perhaps the most illustrative and full of actionable wisdom for everyday folks looking to be awesome at their jobs? And can we hear that tale?

JoAnn Garbin
Everybody loves the Xbox story. The Xbox story is one of innovating culture. And what’s really cool about that one is that, at the time, this little team was challenged with creating gaming at Microsoft, actually, two teams were spun up to do it and one won out. That was the Bill Gates-Steve Balmer way is put people head-to-head and see who wins. But it was a productivity company. It was SQL Server.

It’s cubicles and, you know, pocket protectors and it’s not the thrill and the excitement of a gaming company. So, this group of people, from the very outset, had to overcome a cultural disconnect with the rest of the company. And they’ve had to do that four more times, if not more, since then, because of all the industries we deal with, gaming has changed the most and fastest. It’s always on the cutting edge of tech. It’s always using the fastest processors and doing the most incredible things.

And so, this little group of folks, back in the day, they first had a challenge, the perceived, things like Bill Gates saying, “I want this to obviously run on Windows. Like, our gaming platform is going to be a Windows platform.” And this group of people saying to Bill Gates, “Hmm, no, it can’t run on Windows. Windows is too bloated and slow. Nobody will want to play our games.”

So, those types of challenges are just so fascinating that you see in practice how having that tight-knit group of people that are passionate and productive in solving the problem can convince somebody like Bill Gates to invest in them.

One of my favorite pieces is, in the early days, they had this role, this middle management role called the business unit manager. And that person owned…

Pete Mockaitis
The BUMs, if you will.

JoAnn Garbin
The BUMs. I love that it was called the BUMs. And they had profit and loss control, right? Like, so each one of them had their own little fiefdom, their own little business. And Robbie Bach, who was the head of Gaming at that point, looked at it and said, “They’re all preserving their own fiefdom. They’re not working together because they want their P&L to look the best, get the biggest bonus, etc.”

So, he blew it up, and he said, “We’re going to have one P&L, the Gaming P&L.” And they got rid of the BUMs. And that changed everything at a critical moment for the organization to be able to come together and innovate cohesively, moving forward, without the inner competition between the teams.

And they didn’t know. It was an experiment. They didn’t know if those senior leaders, used to having P&L responsibility, would be okay with it being taken away from them. And once they put it out there and they did the storytelling and the reasons why, and they brought people along, all but one BUM transitioned, one left.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I also recall, I saw a YouTube video about the history of the Xbox, and I have all sorts of fun little memories associated with, I don’t know why, I guess it really left an impression, when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on stage with Bill Gates, and they presented the first Xbox.

But I heard that, in one of the meetings, a transformational moment, to the point about storytelling and talking about what people really, really value and what moves them, is I heard, and tell me the inside scoop here, that Bill Gates was kind of on the fence, like, “Ah, okay, maybe, yeah.”

And then someone said, “What about Sony?” And then that was pretty transformational in terms of it’s like, “Well, we can’t let Sony just take this. Let’s go. Yeah, we got to do it.” And so, just like that. Can you share about that?

JoAnn Garbin
Yes. So, if you remember the old Microsoft mission statement, it was “A personal computer in every home and office.” Well, they were doing great with the work, and they were doing great at home, to a certain extent, you know, PCs were leading the way. However, you have Sony, all of a sudden, and they own the gaming console, the TV, the radio, like, all of a sudden, the living room is starting to be Sony’s world.

And what Bill and Steve Balmer heard from the team was, “All right, if you don’t want to do this for the opportunity, how about fear? Sony owns the living room. How long is it going to take them to move into the home office?” And that little nugget, that little insight was enough, I’m sure among a few other things, to get them over the hurdle, and say, “Oh, that’s an existential threat.”

And we actually saw that come up in other case studies as well, like the Bing case study. I love the Bing team. I am their biggest fan after I heard their story, just blown away by what they were able to do for the company that nobody even knows about. But one of the biggest things that answered a question that I long had is, “Why does Bing exist? Like, if Google owns 90% of search, pre-AI, why does Microsoft keep investing in Bing?”

But it was for the same reason they started Gaming. Google, owning all of search with no competition biting at their heels, that’s a bad thing for everybody. So, Microsoft has stayed in to just be a thorn in the side of Google for all these years, chewing away half a percent of the market share at a time, so that Google couldn’t just say, “Oh, well, we won search. Let us go win productivity and let us go win these other markets that are the Microsoft bread and butter.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s interesting. The notion of winning dominance, influence, power, it’s a theme or a force or a motivator, I guess it’s primal, it’s emotional and present within some of the leadership there at Microsoft. And then I guess another theme is the being able to just jettison the old stuff that wasn’t working.

Because my understanding now, in the world of gaming, like Microsoft, as far as I know, is winning big with, like, the Game Pass and the monthly subscription. And part of that was they have chilled out a lot on the notion of, “We have to have these exclusive titles because we have to have them by the Xbox because they want the coolest games that are only available on Xbox.”

And now it’s shifted a bit to, “Yeah, we kind of don’t care what device you’re bringing to the table. We would just love for you to have a subscription to all these games, whether you’re playing them on an iPad or a TV or an Xbox or anything.” And it seems to be financially working out quite well.

JoAnn Garbin
Yes. And again, this is business model innovation, right? This isn’t technology. It’s actually decreasing the emphasis on the tech itself, because consoles, there’s only so many you can sell. There’s only so much diffusion of that tech out into the world.

And as Phil says in the book, Phil Spencer, the CEO of Gaming, “When you have 3 billion gamers, is there one device or one business model that is going to be affordable and enjoyable to everyone? No.” And, in fact, most games to this day are played on PC or laptops and mobile, not consoles.

So, it takes a lot of really good innovation discipline to look at your prized thing, like, in this case, a console, and say, “You got us here. You got us to a hundred million players, or maybe even 500 million players, but you’re not going to get us to three billion players. So, how do we get those three billion?”

And flipping those questions around, and it’s not, “How do we get more people to play our games, or play our games on our consoles?” It’s, “How do we get into the hands of three billion players?” Well, let them play games anywhere. Let them play any game. Let them play games with their friends that aren’t on the same technologies.

So, when you turn the problem around and really focus on how to win the gamer, not win the console war, it changes what you bring to market.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, JoAnn, tell me, any final quick tips, tricks, do’s, don’ts before we hear about some of your favorite things?

JoAnn Garbin
I’m going to steal from another friend who I think is brilliant, Michael Gervais. Michael Gervais has a show called Finding Mastery, and he’s the former advisor to the Seattle Seahawks, a theme that keeps coming up. And he’s a sports psychologist for high performance.

And again, we can learn a lot, looking at professional athletes because they’re at the top of their field. And it’s about breaking it down. Like, if you have an intention or a purpose, maybe your life purpose, that’s overwhelming. But if you can take that life purpose or intention and bring it back to, “What’s my purpose today?” and then live into that, “Tomorrow, what’s my purpose? Today, live into that.” And then gradually build that up into a weekly habit, monthly habit, annual habit.

This is the same thing we see in the innovation world of, “If my first instinct becomes curiosity, not assumption, ask more questions, don’t try to answer things right away, I’m going to be a better innovator because that’s just habit.”

So, I would say take whatever big thing you’re trying to do, bring it back down to those stepping stones, or what Michael calls the thin slices, and just start stacking them and make progress. And then congratulate yourself on the progress that you’re making, because that matters. You need to own up to what you do, both good and bad.

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

JoAnn Garbin
So, this is not a famous quote unless you happen to be in Goju-ryu karate. But the rules of the dojo that I practiced in with my oldest brother when we were teenagers and into college. They’ve really become guiding principles for me in pretty much everything I do. “Everyone works. Nothing is free. All start at the bottom.”

But those middle three, I see them again and again. And it just reminds me, when I’m not the best at something, I’m like, “Everybody starts at the bottom.” You got to do the practice, do the work, move up. “Everyone works.” You don’t age out of doing the work. You don’t get promoted up above the work. Everyone works and, “Nothing is free.” There’s always a tradeoff. There’s always a cost. You have to determine whether it’s one that’s suitable for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

JoAnn Garbin
My favorite tool is the question. I love, like, if I’m stuck on anything, I get a couple people together and we throw a hundred questions at it, and I never have walked out without some forward progress.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s beautiful. We had Hal Gregerson talk about question-storming and how transformative that can be to unblock things. So, it’s cool.

JoAnn Garbin
It’s one of my favorite practices. I talk about it in the book, and I’ve taken the class with Hal.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. And is there a key nugget you share that folks really love and quote back to you often?

JoAnn Garbin
It’s, “Say it ugly.” So, this is a mantra my teams use to remind ourselves that there’s no ego, there’s no holding back, no toes are going to get stepped on. Say it ugly. Put it on the table. We’ll pretty it up together. Because if you keep it stuck in your head, it’s not doing anybody any good. So just get it out quick and often.

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

JoAnn Garbin
We’re everywhere at this point, except TikTok, haven’t really.

Pete Mockaitis
You do some dances, get them worked up, some choreography.

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah, pull out the old mascot-ing moves. LinkedIn is our favorite platform, not just because Microsoft owns it, but because we are predominantly a business conversation. So, Dean and I are both on LinkedIn. The book is on LinkedIn and you can follow us there.

But we also have our website, InnovationAtMicrosoft.com, and we have a free Insiders Group where we share articles and new bonus chapters for free in the book. And we intend to keep it free forevermore. So, if you just want a place to go and continuously learn about innovation and meet other innovators, we would love to see you there.

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

JoAnn Garbin
Be honest with yourself. That’s the final call to action. Taking in all these things about building habits and thin slices and stepping stones, like really wake up every day and be honest with yourself about what brings you joy. And if you don’t have it right now, start laying those stepping stones down toward it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. JoAnn, thank you.

JoAnn Garbin
Thank you. Really appreciate you having us on.

Aug 14
0

1084: How to Navigate Change and Encourage Innovation with Jeff DeGraff

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Jeff DeGraff shows you how to go from managing change to mastering it.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why facts don’t actually change minds—and what does
  2. Why you should seek out constructive conflict
  3. What to do when you’re overwhelmed with choice

About Jeff

Jeff DeGraff is the Dean of Innovation – an author, speaker, and advisor to Fortune 500 companies and mission-driven organizations worldwide. He’s the CEO and Founder of Innovatrium, Founder of Intellectual Edge Alliance, and Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Jeff co-created the Competing Values Framework and developed the Innovation Code and Innovation Genome methodologies which provide organizations with practical tools to reconcile competing priorities and drive breakthrough performance. His mission is the democratization of innovation: making systematic innovation accessible to everyone, everywhere, every day.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Jeff DeGraff Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jeff, welcome back!

Jeff DeGraff
Thanks, Pete. Thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat. And I’d love to hear, since we last chatted eight years ago, what’s one of the most fascinating things you’ve discovered about us humans and change in that time?

Jeff DeGraff
One, that we’re hypocrites, starting with me. We know how things work, but it’s sort of like knowing you need to lose a little weight, but we don’t want to do that. And then sort of really using that to our advantage, kind of working through our own resistance to help not only ourselves change, but other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So, we’re hypocrites in the world of change. What’s one of the top ways that we are hypocritical?

Jeff DeGraff
Well, all of us know, because we’re on social media, that facts don’t change minds. And yet, whenever we’re trying to change, what’s the first thing we do? We use facts. So, it’s a paradox. It’s one of the first paradoxes in the book. And the challenge is, even though we know it, we still do it because it’s habitual.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. Well, we’re going to go in all kinds of fun directions. But while we’re here, okay, Jeff, lay it on us. If facts don’t change minds, what does?

Jeff DeGraff
Experiences. You know, one of the things I worked on during COVID, I worked on the acquisition process for the COVID vaccine. So, I got a letter of marque from Congress, and one of the few people that was called in to try and work on this. And what was really interesting to me was, when we started looking at the data, and this is not a political comment, this is just a comment about how powerful beliefs are.

It depends on whether you look at the Johns Hopkins data or the Brown University data, the first million people who died, somewhere between 25 and 40% of the people who died had a vaccine available to them. Meaning, people would rather die than change their mind. That’s how powerful that is. I’m not trying to be a provocateur, and I’m not trying to make a political statement. I’m trying to say that’s what belief systems do.

And the whole challenge of that is that the only thing that really changes minds is experiences. Experiences change minds. So, you’ve had something happen, you learned from it, now you have a different point of view. Learning and innovation and change are all sort of inextricably interrelated. So that becomes the big thing, “How do we help people get those experiences?”

What I mean by that is ask your listeners to think about a bell curve. At one end of the bell curve, there’s a crisis, and at the other end of the bell curve there’s exceptional, “Are you doing really well?” Think about when people really change. They lose their job, they lose their health, they get a divorce. And the reason they change at the edge of the bell curve is the risk of trying something radical, and the reward of staying where you’re at is reversed at the edge of a bell curve. The same is true when you’re on a roll.

When everything’s working, you got promoted, you graduated, you’re in love, whatever it is. So, the thing that people get wrong is it’s not the 80-20 rule. That’s a terrible rule for change. It’s the opposite of what change is. It’s the 20-80 rule. And what that means is it’s easier to change 20% of your life 80% than it is to change 80% of your life 20%. Let me repeat that. It’s easier to change 20% of your life 80% than it is to change 80% of your life 20%.

What you have to understand is that change is almost always going to happen when there’s an inflection point, a crisis, or exceptional. And part of the reason that I think people changed during COVID was that 20-80 rule. There was a crisis. They had to, right? When it ended, that everybody went back to their own finger pointing and yelling at each other. But during it, that’s the galvanizing piece, the inflection event.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think that’s interesting when you talk about the crisis is on one side and on a roll is on the other, I’m thinking about how it could also happen in a good way and it’s still an experience. And this is so mundane, but I’ll say it. So, I am all about cold plunging now.

And it used to be when I saw this expensive cold plunge device, like tubs, and all like the hip, sexy Instagram influencers, you know, plugging it, I was like, “Oh, brother, it’s really like, this is something. If it works, maybe, I don’t know. A second, it’s like ancient and we’ve found a way to make this really expensive and monetize it.”

So, I had all kinds of skepticism, but I saw a scientific paper, which sounded very compelling in terms of like dopamine release, whatever. And I did, I had the experience, like, “Well, let’s just put some ice in a bathtub. It doesn’t cost much. See what happens.” And I was like, “Oh, wow, this is amazing.”

Jeff DeGraff
You’ve hit the nail on the head here, Pete, about something really important. The main reason people don’t change is they’re stuck in the planning cycle. The meeting about the meeting, the report about the report. They’re gathering, gathering, gathering, gathering data. They’re getting no real feedback from the world.

So, what you do is you hedge. All you got to do is pay attention to kind of how the COVID vaccine got developed, or anything else. Meaning you give things very little money and very little time and you spread them out and you make them radical. So, you did a radical experiment.

You said, “Let’s go down and get some ice, put it in the bathtub.” It cost you very little money. If it didn’t work, you would have gotten out of the bathtub. It would have been the end of it. And you probably had three or four other experiments after that. You probably tried different kinds of devices, or you talked to people who are athletes and what they did with cold plunge. And you talked to the Finns and how they did it from sauna, right?

So, you probably had some pieces in there before you decided that this was really the thing for you. And that’s how most of us actually do it. The people who say, “Go big or go home,” what I’m delighted about is most of them go home. They’re obnoxious. It doesn’t work that way. And if it did, you got lucky.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so you’re saying, sprinkling a little bit of resource in a lot of places and see where something radical happens. Can you give us a work example of that?

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah. So, let’s say that I was trying to, I’m a nurse and I really want to start a bakery, right? So, what I’m going to do, rather than I’m going to plan for five years and then I’m going to quit being a nurse and try and buy a bakery and then I’m going to fail, you hear these all the time, what I’m going to do is, instead, I’m going to try my Italian grandmother’s, you know, her tiramisu. And I’m going to go to three different kinds of restaurants.

I’m going to go to an Italian restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, and a German restaurant. And I’m going to see if they’ll sell a little bit of this tiramisu. So, I’m going to take the risk of maybe making some of this up.

What I’m going to find out is that the Italian restaurant doesn’t want it. The German restaurant has a different name for it, but they actually like it. And the Mexican restaurant actually really likes it, but they’d like some differences to it. So, in the next round, you get rid of the Italian restaurant. Now you’re trying the other two restaurants, and you stumble onto something that makes your tiramisu radically different.

You put cayenne pepper or something, I don’t know, I’m not a cook. You put something radically different in it and it starts to catch on. So, what happens is think about it like a funnel, right? What you’re trying to do at the top of the funnel is not only see how wide you can go with experiments, but you’re also trying to mitigate risks. You’re trying to manage risks and you’re trying to accelerate failure. And the reason you’re doing that is you’re getting real information from the world and very quickly you’re drawing down.

You don’t have to have money or have a big thing like a COVID vaccine. You could just be trying to sell tiramisu. But you got to hedge at the beginning. You’ve got to get real information from the market before you draw down.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Well, so in your book, The Art of Change: Transforming Paradoxes into Breakthroughs, you lay out seven paradoxes of change. I’d love to hear a quick rundown of what they are, but first tell us what makes them paradoxes?

Jeff DeGraff
Well, I think most of us in modernity are living in this world where things are either incongruous, antithetical, or, most importantly, ambiguous. And we do know, going back to the ‘40s, there was two very famous scientists, one called E. Paul Torrance, the other called Calvin Wilson, and they started studying highly creative people. And this was really kind of for the Korean War, that kind of period, the Vietnam War.

And what they noticed was very creative people had a high tolerance for ambiguity. And what that meant was that they had a highly adaptive mindset. They were able to kind of make it up as they go along. Well, one of the big challenges in modernity, I believe, Pete, is that strategy is dead. And more and more people are trying to go to futuring. Again, God bless them, but the truth of the matter is events and technology is now moving faster than strategy does.

Ask yourself this, “How many people in their 2019 plan had a pandemic?” Well, pandemics have been around since Thucydides, Herodotus, they were in the Bible, right? How many had that there’d be a Russian invasion of Europe? How many, right? Go down the list of these events and almost no one had them. So, the issue becomes planning has become obsolete.

I’ll give you a perfect example of this. During COVID, all the big tech companies were not prepared for what happened. Remember the first day of COVID, Microsoft Teams collapsed. And yet there was this small company, Zoom, that didn’t have a great strategy, but was highly agile. Does this make sense? And they won the day. So, we’re now in this era of strategic thinking as opposed to just strategic planning, right? And, yes, we have to try and predict the future, but we should all look at the future like it’s Jello.

There’s a lot of things we don’t know about the future. How fast things are moving in the magnitude is an inflection point. People love to talk about that, Pete. They love to say, “This is the greatest period of change, and I’m very skeptical.” You’re living in Europe during the Crusades. They march back through your village in France, and three quarters of your village dies. Or the infidel’s at the door. That’s the human condition.

But we are going through this sort of punctuated piece where…and it’s not, I don’t think it’s going to be AI that drives everybody crazy. I think it’s what AI allows us to do. It’s going to change power generation big time. It’s going to change biology. What’s everybody going to do now that we’ve mapped all 200 million proteins in the genome, right? We’re pretty close to figuring out how to build a person, right?

So, the notion is the whole idea of work that we’ve got to handle on this, I think we have to say we don’t. I think we have to say we’re making it up as we go along.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I think that is so wise. And I think about that as I watch the pundits say what will happen with AI. It’s like, “You don’t know. You don’t know.” And I guess that’s what I find. Here’s my little joke, Jeff. Maybe you could appreciate it. It doesn’t get much, many laughs when I share it with my friends, but here it goes, Jeff, “Obviously, overconfidence is the most destructive force in the universe.”

Okay, thank you. Thank you. But I believe it. We don’t know, we don’t know, but we say we know and because we act with such confidence, when we ought not to, we get ourselves into some trouble.

Jeff DeGraff
We sure do, and that’s particularly true for change, change and innovation. These are what we call convex forms of value, which means they pay in the future, for which we have no data. So, the interesting thing is you got to know who actually knows, and that doesn’t mean you went to school.

If you want to know about raising children, talk to a woman who’s got five of them. You want to know about how to fix your toilet, talk to a plumber. The notion is somebody who has experience with it, somebody who has real trade, what I call trade craft. They understand how things work.

That’s why for my 36 years here Michigan, I’ve always had a very active portfolio of building companies and trying to turn things around. Because theories of practice don’t come from theories. They come from practice. They come from getting dirty. You have to. Otherwise, you don’t really understand.

Surgeons have to do surgery. Engineers have to build machines. Business school professors, my belief, should build businesses. That’s what we do. And it’s kind of vocational. I know it sounds terrible, but it is kind of vocational. It’s a how-to kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, so let’s hear some of these paradoxes.

Jeff DeGraff
So, one of my favorite paradoxes is that we seek to change others but we can only change ourselves. And I start the book with this interesting story. I learned this as a young man. I had a girlfriend in college named Katie.

She was really pretty and really smart and I liked her. And I came to college as a wrestler. So, I’m training all the time. I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t as good as maybe I could have been. And Katie was a chain smoker. So, every time I would see her, it always felt like my training was being undone, because she just smoked a lot of cigarettes. So, you do the three things that everybody does.

You start out with trying to inform her. So, you show her the surgeon general stuff, you show her the reports. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. Next thing you do, you try and be charming. You try and really get Katie to, you know, so I was doing some work in New York City and really invited her to go with me to New York with the caveat that she couldn’t in the hotel room, couldn’t smoke the whole time or I’d have to go out and smoke. She passed. She didn’t want to do that.

And, of course, the third thing you go through is what everybody does, “Well, you know, if you’re going to smoke like this, maybe this relationship isn’t what I think it is.” And you can imagine she dumped me. Right? So, I tried all the things that you try to change another person. None of it worked. Well, there’s a postscript to it. About graduation time, I was in a grocery store and I ran into her. And I noticed she wasn’t smoking. So, I had to ask, Pete, “Why aren’t you smoking?” And she said, “I met a guy.” So, I felt about two inches tall.

And then she said, “He never pressured me. He just really loved me and I started to love myself and so I decided that I would quit smoking. I decided it was really good for me to quit smoking.” Well, here’s the moral of the story. The moral of the story was this guy, who’s obviously quite a bit smarter than I was, had created a situation where he was very supportive to her. And she kind of figured things out for herself, right, because you can’t change other people.

And that’s one of the big things that people do all the time in these change books. They’re about how to use bonuses or how to use fear. Those things don’t last and they don’t really work. So, the question becomes, “How do you get to understand a person in a deep way, understand what they really want, understand how they really function, and put them in a situation where they can correct their own behavior, assuming that you want that to happen?”

And then they have a choice whether they make the change or not. And some changes are really hard to make and some are easy. If you’re talking about skill or things like showing up on time at the office, those are relatively easy. If you’re talking about how people handle stress or whatever, those are harder and those are things that you probably need some professional help for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Thank you. So how about the second paradox?

Jeff DeGraff
Well, I think one of the other ones that I really like is we set goals for change, but the goals for change, change with the change. So, people get really upset. We do this big program for the United States Air Force, and one of things that we start out with is to say, “What’s your challenge statement?” It’s usually somebody who’s a commanding officer is given a challenge.

Well, we say, “That’s great. That’s what everybody thinks the problem is now. But the truth of the matter is you’re going to start turning over rocks, talking to people, you’re going start running experiments, and what you’re going to find out very quickly in two weeks, if you’re really going, if you’re really doing this, you’re going to find out that’s not the problem at all. You’re going to find out it’s a different problem.”

Anybody who’s ever worked on their house gets this. You know, there’s a leak in your house. So, you get an Allen wrench and you go up, or you go downstairs, and you turn the wrench and that leak stops and you feel good. And then the next day the leak happens in the bathroom upstairs. And it’s much more active and you’re not sure what that is. So, you try and watch a YouTube video and figure that out.

And then what happens is you figure that out and the next day the pantry is flooded and you have to call a plumber. And everybody who owns a home has had this experience. Well, the challenge is the problem wasn’t the problem. And it almost never is.

It’s the same thing when people, you know, they go to WebMD, and they go to somebody who spent, you know, they spent four years in medical school and have medical certificates, which another four years, they’ll come in and say, “This is what’s wrong with me.” And inevitably, most of the time, it’s just a symptom of something that’s more endemic.

So, the change changes with the change. So that means you have to get rid of X marks the spot. You have to start thinking of yourself like you’re a scout, like you’re constantly looking for disconfirming information, “Where is it that I’ve tried something and it’s not working?”

So, the confirming information doesn’t help. All your friends on Facebook who like you are not going to help you get to the next place. The people who are going to help you get to the next place are people who have different ideas than you do. They have constructive conflict. Constructive is the key word here. Constructive.

They love you. They care about you. They want to help you get there, but they don’t agree with you. Those are the best people in the world to have around you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we have an overarching theme associated with, you know, be emergent and see what happens and go where the trail is leading you. Find the disconfirming information, solve the real problem and not sort of the upfront stated problem, and change and flow and roll with it. At the same time, we humans sure don’t care for this uncertainty business, Jeff.

Jeff DeGraff
I’m a total hypocrite.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Jeff DeGraff
I hate change. I drive the same car I’ve driven for 15 years. My wife says, “Get a new car. People will think you’re not doing okay.” I’m like, “No, I like this car.” I sit in the same seats in the stadium I’ve sat in for 40 years. I don’t like change. I need your listeners to understand, I don’t like it either. Incidentally, some of the best innovators I know don’t like innovation either.

I don’t buy new stuff. Most the stuff that’s new I look at, and go, “Meh, it doesn’t, really, it’s not a game changer.” So, I’m not that guy. So, the first thing is, nobody likes to change. And there’s two modalities of change. I can tell you how I get through it.

If it becomes, I have to change something that I’ve got, I’m in a reactive position. I don’t like doing that. That’s when you tell somebody about your new idea, but it’s not their new idea, they’re going to tell you everything is wrong with it because you’ve left him in a reactive position. Right?

This is the problem with change. Somebody goes, “I hate your change plan.” And what people forget is the next question should be, “Okay, good point. What would you do?” Because that one question takes you from a reactive position to you now have to participate. You’re not a proactive position. You have to show your hand. So what changes, and this is what I do, is I stop thinking about the past and I start thinking about what I want.

Now, this is important about how people are going to deal with it. Now, one is, how do we do this without being uncomfortable? We don’t. We don’t. We become uncomfortable. You have to make that normative. How do you deal with it at work when there’s conflict? Well, you have to keep the conflict constructive. I want to repeat this. Anybody who’s ever worked on a great team knows everybody doesn’t agree, but you want to be safe. You want to feel safe, right? But the notion is ideas are in play.

So, if you feel safe, you feel comfortable back and forth about ideas, which is important. So, it’s the creative power of constructive conflict, not destructive. It’s hard to keep that in front of you, between the buoys. Now, what’s important about this? People who just kind of make it up as they go along seldom accomplish anything. So, you have to have a North Star.

But what you’re doing is like navigating. You’re constantly correcting to that North Star. And as the North Star maybe looks differently depending on what hemisphere you’re in, etc., you have to make those adjustments. It doesn’t mean that you’re rudderless. It doesn’t mean that you’re going just anywhere. It’s not improvisation. It means that the road to it is going to be circuitous. That’s the first piece.

Second piece. The place in which you almost always want to start your journey is a place where the current situation seems intolerable. And that doesn’t mean it’s difficult. It could be you feel stuck. It could feel in your career like, you know, “I was trained as a doctor. I’m now 50 years old. I’ve been a doctor for X amounts of years. I think I’ve done as much as I can as a doctor. I’m stuck.” So that’s a place where you’re, because risk and reward there is reversed, you’re going to try stuff. You’re going to be willing to try stuff. Remember hedging.

The third thing. Nobody makes the journey alone. I’m so tired of the self-help stuff about, “Here’s how you’re going to do it alone.” Nobody gets there alone. We all get there with other people, and if the other people who are with you all agree with you, you’re probably not going to get there because you’ve added no skill, no wayfinding, nothing that you have on your own. So, you need to find people who follow the same North Star or people really care about you and love you but are different than you. Sort of think about like your mom.

Your mom, hopefully in your life, was very supportive, maybe your dad too, hopefully he was very supportive, really liked the stuff that you did. But didn’t they also provide some real differences in views than you had about things that maybe you needed to do? It doesn’t mean that mom or dad were always right, but it means that they probably had your best interest at heart.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Okay. Good. Thank you. All right. So, it’s just going to be uncomfortable. Just is. And so, we have to learn to deal with that constructive conflict. Any thoughts in terms of our own internal emotional management? Any mantras or practices?

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, I do. I think that the issue is you have to be able to take a higher point of view about your life. And, again, I am not an evolved being. I have the same problems your listeners are going to have with this. But think about it this way. Think about it like one of the big contemporary issues that we have is the freedom of choice paradox. We can make any, you know, I talk to people all the time. I spend a lot of my year abroad. I’m one of those guys that’s coming up on three million miles on Delta Airlines alone. So, I’m in a lot of different parts of the world.

Well, somebody made a comment to me recently in Asia, and they said, “You know, it’s really funny to me, America is one of the freest places in the world, but nobody acts like they’re free.” And I went, “Yeah, that’s true,” right? Because unlimited freedom to do whatever you think, you know, within morality and within the law is scary, right?

So, the one hand, you like that you have all that freedom, but on the other hand, you don’t want all that freedom because it’s kind of overwhelming the responsibility you have for your life, right? So that becomes kind of a paradox.

So, one of the things I think we have to do in modern life is to take a higher point of view, which would mean, “What’s best for me? What’s best for my family, my community? What’s the balance I’m looking for in here? How do I work through that we’re free? But too much freedom brings too much responsibility and that might be overwhelming to me.”

So, it’s like gauging. It’s like gauging how much sweetness do you want in your coffee? Are you a one Splenda person? Are you a three Splenda person? I don’t know. You have to figure that out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s just really an intriguing, provocative statement from your friend in Asia there. Americans are so free and yet we don’t act like it. What are some of the top ways that Americans do not take advantage of their freedoms? It’s like, “Hey, you could do this, but you never do. It’d probably be good and wonderful for you.”

Jeff DeGraff
People vote one party, typically vote that party all their life. People belong to one religion, belong to it. People who drive to work, usually take the same route to work. People like a certain type of music seldom move to a different station or to a different streaming service than they like. People have a tendency to want to feel comfortable, which is, of course, part of the human condition, right? But they have the freedom to change all of that.

And often they don’t. And I come back to you have to pay attention to when people change and why they change. And this is an important part about the book. I’m looking at this from a situational standpoint. So, this is not a Myers-Briggs test. I’m an ENTP or an INFJ. Okay, that’s great. It’s important. Isabel Briggs Myers actually is from here in Ann Arbor, right?

But here’s the issue. Think of it like it’s a bull market or a bear market. If it’s a bull market and you’re a bear trader, you’re not going to make any money. If it’s a bear market and you’re a bull trader, you’re going to lose your butt. You have to trade according to what the market is. If you like football, is it a running down, a passing down, or are we playing offensive? Pick whatever it is.

There’s a situation in which a certain skill is optimized. And this is true for all professors too. There are periods of time when being the change and innovation professor is like, “Oh, now everybody calls.” But then what will happen five years from now when everything kind of settles? No one will call. Well, that’s because it’s not – does this make sense? It’s not my situation, right? So, what people have to understand is that they have to fit within the system. Families have it, companies have it, churches have it. Understand who you are and what character you are in that movie.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, it sounds like you’re not saying, “Hey, find what way the wind is blowing and then rock and roll with it,” so much as, “Accept that this is your time, this is not your time.”

Jeff DeGraff
And adjust to where you can adjust. I think everybody, like companies, they used to, you know, CK Prahalad, the late great CK Prahalad, of course, coined the term core competencies. I think the same is true for people. And CK would famously say, “Is it valuable, rare, difficult to imitate? And are you organized for it?” Right? What do you call the VRIO? Is it valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and you’re organized for it? I think the same is true for people.

I think most of us have one or two things that we’re really good at. And even though the situation changes, how do we use that one or two things, because they’ll be useful? But how do we use it in that situation? And what frustrates people is they’ll say, “I used to be really great at this and then the situation changed.” I’m like, “Yeah, it does.” And again, that’s outside change. None of us like that. I don’t like it either. The inside change is, “I’ve been doing this for a long time. I want to grow.” And this is the fundamental tension, Pete, below everything.

Just like people, organizations have two states. They have a state of sustainability and they have a state of growth. In an organization, the state of sustainability is basically management. And the state of growth is change and innovation. Change and innovation, by definition, is a form of deviance. Hopefully positive deviance. It’s negative too. I mean, wars create innovation, I’m sorry to say.

But the notion is, the whole idea of being the same and growing is not just a style issue. It’s a fundamental issue about value. So, think of it this way. You have a small company. You’re trying to be really efficient. So, you keep track of everything and you’re really a hawk on top of everything. That’s great.

There’s no resources or no opportunity for somebody to explore a new market because that’s the opposite. You have to have slack resources to do that. You have to have non-accountable resources to do that. And what happens is these small companies will say, “What we’re going to do is we’re going to innovate. And we’re going to innovate under the kind of efficiencies that we normally do.”

And what they get is they get product improvements, etc., and they get left behind by the companies that basically say, “This is a different season now. Now we’re going to try and get into something new.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Thank you. Okay. Well, before we hear about some of your favorite things, I’d love it if you have any final top do’s or don’ts when it comes to change.

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, I think my big top do when it comes to change is, understand the limits of what you actually know, and understand where your blind spots are. Know who does actually know. Stop trying to figure everything out yourself.

Start calling other people. Start bringing other people in that have different ideas than you do. I know I do this all the time because the way in which I build these change teams is they’re very cognitively diverse and they’re different. They’re very diverse in the skillsets that they’ve got. And that’s really important.

Now, people will say, “But we share a common culture.” I’m not even sure that’s required. I think what’s required is you have fond regard for each other and you have a similar goal, right? So, the notion is you’re not trying to destroy anybody or whatever. You’re basically understanding that they have commensurate skills that you have.

The other thing that I think is really very important is that the paradox you’re looking for, the things that seem incongruous to you, it’s not that this is an element of change, it is the change. It is the change. So, think about what’s going on right now globally with AI. Think about this for just a minute. Think about the sustainability paradox.

Here’s the paradox. In order to get to the kind of devices we need to have a low footprint, almost low emissions, we’re going to need a lot of artificial intelligence in all different areas, right? On the other hand, in order to have artificial intelligence, it basically drinks energy. It’s a huge energy. It consumes a large amount of energy. So it’s not that we need a change. The change is in the paradox.

The change is implicit in, “How do we get to the next place without destroying the planet in the next place?” Now let’s bring this down to a listener so it’s not so highfalutin, right? Somebody’s got a company that they’re trying to run. It’s a small company. You’ve got a company that does electrical wiring. And you’ve got a bunch of high schools in your community that you wire. And you keep track of all that’s going on.

And what goes on is you’ve got contracts, but because of federal laws, all of sudden, the cost of the wire that you’re putting everywhere or the, you know, whatever we’re using these days, right? Because of the cost of doing that has gone up exponentially, you’re going to go bankrupt if you keep doing things the way you’re doing it.

So, your paradox is, “How do I keep the business and keep myself at the center of this using new technology and maintaining cost containment? So, I’ve got an innovation piece and I’ve got an efficiency piece that I have to do at the same time.” So, think about this.

So, somebody’s going to find out that there’s devices that basically can move energy in different ways or there’s different ways of routing energy in different ways. And you’ve got to go back to school and maybe hire a couple different people. Maybe you have to lay off a couple people. But it’s in the paradox itself that the success of the change exists. The paradox is not a sidebar, it’s not something along the way, it’s fundamental.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if that’s the case, then what are we doing wrong if we fail to acknowledge that?

Jeff DeGraff
So, the issue becomes, even in our own life, “How do we get to the next place before we’re required to get to the next place?”

And, again, I come back to get out of a reactive position. Once you’re in a reactive position, it’s what you’re trying to not make happen. Get into a proactive position saying, “What should it be? Is this an opportunity for career change? Is this an opportunity to write that novel you wanted? Is this an opportunity to semi-retire?”

There’s a whole bunch of freedom in the middle of this that I think people could take advantage of. And we have to get out of this either/or thinking.

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

Jeff DeGraff
I love Bertrand Russell’s quote, which we now see everywhere, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves. And wiser people so full of doubts.” I hope your listeners are like me, I’m full of doubts. I think that’s the only way to go through life.

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

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, I think one my favorite experiments, is going back to sort of a classic one, which is the prison experiment at Stanford and how people, when they’re around other people, have a tendency to defer their moral judgment. And I think there’s a lot of that that goes on in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jeff DeGraff
I love a book by Henryk Skolimowski, as I think how you say his last name. He wrote a book called The Participatory Mind. And I love the book and it’s kind of weird. It’s almost new age-y.

But what he’s basically saying in the book, which I think is so important, is that our thinking is largely informed by the world around us and we largely inform that as well. And there’s a whole kind of philosophy behind this called emergence philosophy, if your listeners are interested in this whole idea. But it basically means that we can never really transcend our world, we have to live in it.

And we can imagine what the world is like beyond this world or whatever, whatever you believe about the world, but you’re still in the fishbowl. And so, the good news is you’re a fish and you have some agency. The bad news is you’re in a fishbowl and you can’t get out of the fishbowl.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Jeff DeGraff
Yes, napping. Every day after lunch, I lock the door and turn the lights out. And I don’t have to have an alarm or anything, I nap for 20 minutes and I feel completely different.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share, a Jeff original that really seems to resonate and connect with folks?

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, “Nobody cares about your innovation.” They care about you solving their problem. Nobody cares about your innovation, so stop showing it to them. Show it how it solves their problem. Everybody reads their own horoscope first.

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

Jeff DeGraff
Number one, I would go to LinkedIn. So, I’m one of the original LinkedIn influencers. So go to LinkedIn, look up Jeff DeGraff and connect.

The other thing is I would go to TheArtofChange.net, which has all of the stuff about the new book, and I would go to JeffDeGraff.com. That would be probably the easiest way to reach me.

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

Jeff DeGraff
I do. My final call of action would be what I call the democratization of innovation. And that is, I think we think about our own selves and what we’re doing. I would say apprentice somebody. If you’re an innovator out there, apprentice someone. I’m very much concerned that kind of the way I came up in America, behind these kinds of grizzled old innovators who’d been through the war and all this stuff, we learned to be great that way.

I think we’re missing some of that. We’re missing some of that human connection, somebody who’s got some trade skills, somebody’s got some trade craft about change and innovation. Find somebody who’s the next generation, who’s going to carry the torch beyond your generation, because that’s what matters. It’s what we do to keep us moving forward, all of us moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jeff, thank you.

Jeff DeGraff
Pete, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Good seeing you again.

Jul 03
0

1072: Reclaiming Your Creativity–No Matter Your Role with Tania Katan

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Tania Katan reveals tricks for turning daily drudgery into opportunities for innovation.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why creativity can be an antidote to burnout
  2. How to find inspiration in the everyday
  3. Creative hacks to make meetings more human and engaging

About Tania

Tania Katan is a global transformational speaker, award-winning author, and co-creator of the viral social impact campaign #ItWasNeverADress; a movement that has inspired over 100 million people to see, hear, and celebrate creativity and diversity. Her visionary way of formulating ideas led to her award-winning book, Creative Trespassing: How to Put the Spark and Joy Back into Your Work and Life (Penguin Random House),  as well as the award-winning memoir, My One Night Stand With Cancer (Alyson Books).

Katan is highly sought after to teach people and companies how to generate unlimited creative breakthroughs in less overtly creative industries, work cultures, and lives. Some of the organizations and major conferences impacted by her talks and workshops include: CiscoLive!, Expedia, Amazon, Talks at Google, Etsy, TED Talks, American Express, and more. 

Resources Mentioned

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Tania Katan Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Tania, welcome!

Tania Katan
Pete, thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited. We’re pushing record right away because we noticed that there’s something unique about us, or noteworthy, I should say, about us. You and I, we talk differently and we are also super into being creative and doing creative things. Is there a thing at play here, Tania?

Tania Katan
Totally. The reality of it is we were all actually born creative period. And, unfortunately, based on systems and well-meaning or less well-meaning parents and teachers, all the creativity was sort of, like, slapped out of us on our wrist. We were taught to kind of follow the rules and not think differently and all this.

But there is actually a study that proves that zero- to five-year-old kids are creative geniuses, which, means we’re born to think divergently, come up with infinite solutions or ideas for any problem or prompt. And then at 10 years old, that drops off to 50%. And then at 15 years old, we just can barely get out of bed and be creative. And then by the time we’re full-grown adults, all the creativity is gone unless we choose to cultivate it.

But the good news is that we were born with it so we can get it back. But I do like your enthusiasm for you and I being extraordinarily creative. Clearly, we’ve been stretching our muscles for a long time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, you know, but I guess, if I may, and maybe I’m grasping at straws or trying to find something that’s not there, but I think there’s really something to that, that notion of we start creative and it’s beat out of us in all kinds of little ways, and we’ll dig into it.

And so, I think, perhaps, you and I, both have just doggedly refused to allow the world to wring the weirdness from us and how we choose to express ourselves. And so, we’ve held on to a bit of a unique flavor in how we express ourselves, as well as the capacity to continue pumping out a lot of ideas.

Tania Katan
Totally. Well, the good news is, guess who caught up with us weirdos? Forbes. You know it’s over. But, in all seriousness, about a year ago, Forbes said that the most important skill that we all, and by we, I mean, the workforce needs to learn and have, is creative thinking for the next four years. So, us suckers who double down on our weirdness and awkwardness and silliness and play, we’re the ones shining right now.

And that, I mean, Pete, I would be curious about your background. Like, my background ended up being, I went to theater, I did improv, all that kind of stuff. But it was because it was my natural instinct and I couldn’t fit into any other box. Like, I tried so hard. I was like, “I want to be straight. I want to have straight hair. I want to do like everything.”

And just my nature was such that I didn’t have any other option, but it did take a long time, quite seriously, and quite honestly for the workforce to catch up with what me and my parents thought were cool attributes about being creative and coming up with cool and interesting ideas. It took a while for me to find my place and for me to convince companies that, maybe, hiring me because I don’t fit in will be valuable to your bottom line and top line. And that took a long time.

And what for you? Were you just like, “Hey, I’m cool and quirky and weird and Pete, and hug me. Hire me”?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny how, like, oh, wow, there’s a lot I could go into, and some of it I have with therapist and others. But I did, I was into some theater in high school. It was just sort of fun, and I liked doing it. And I guess I just like performing in the stage, in general. And then when I was in high school, I thought, “I want to be a motivational speaker. That’s the job I want for myself.”

Tania Katan
You did?

Pete Mockaitis
I did. So, I was reading the book Speak and Grow Rich when I was like a 16-year-old. Like, “How does one become a professional speaker?” So, I was digging that, having fun with it. And I did an improv intensive course once just for fun. It was so funny, I was told that I’d really mellowed out. Some mentioned I’d really mellowed out a lot, and they liked that.

And it’s funny, I did not like that. I wanted to be un-mellow. But I think it’s funny how it is beaten out of us. It could be explicit or subtle. Like, there was a string of times I got dumped. I had some girlfriends, things seemed like they were going awesome, and then I just got dumped, and it wasn’t quite clear why. And it could be any number of things.

But what I managed to piece together from the little things they did say, was because some of them even said, it’s like, “Hey, no, I think we’re great one-on-one but, like, in group settings, it’s like a little off.” It’s like, “Oh, I’m too weird for you that I embarrass you.” It’s like that’s what I’m gathering, right? It’s like I am entertaining and amusing like a comedian, like, “Ha, ha, this is fun. I like this guy.” But it’s like, “Oh, but actually, I’m associated with you publicly, and that’s kind of uncomfortable.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, or then, like very subtly, I recall…well, I just recently bought a house, and it’s funny, I remember I was with a buddy, and I was helping him move, because he was also buying a house, and he said, “Hey, well, I’m going to the closing. I mean, I don’t know, you could keep boxing my stuff or you could join me at the closing.” I was like, “Hmm, joining you at the closing sounds much more fun.”

And so, I was intrigued because I’d never seen this before. I’d only seen like the episode of “The Office” where Michael Scott closes on his condo. And so, I was into it, and I was like, I had like young, childlike enthusiasm and excitement for the experience. And it’s funny, they asked, “Oh, can I get you…?” like the realtor or the closing agent or a title person, someone asked, “Oh, can I get you some coffee or anything?” And I said, “Oh, yes, please. I want the full experience.”

And, like, my buddy who I was with, he’s like, “Come on, man, don’t be weird.” And I think that’s the messaging. It’s usually fairly subtle, not like a heartbreaking dumping, but it’s like, “Hey, so like kind of just sort of be more like normal and not like you. And that would be more comfortable for all of us, please.”

Tania Katan
I love it. Pete, so, basically, what you’re saying, in essence, a couple of things. Well, one is you have been a creative trespasser your entire life, and me, too.

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose I have.

Tania Katan
So, I, basically, have been you in a parallel lesbian universe.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear it all the time, Tania.

Tania Katan
Yeah, I’m like you, only lesbian. But in all seriousness, I was the one who was like, “Buddy…” and I would say things that people wouldn’t say, and people would either laugh, crack up, or be totally embarrassed and everything in between. And at some point, they realized, “Wait a second, I want to be funny or I want to speak up, whether it’s like hanging out or in a meeting or all these spaces in between.”

And I think people started to see me as like, “Well, how do I get some of that? Like, how do I do it my own style?” And I’m like, “Ooh, what’s emerging here?” And then when I went into the workforce and, ironically, I didn’t study a book to be a motivational speaker. I was actually writing a book at 16, and a motivational speaker came to our high school, and I can’t believe that bastard.

We were in, like, a super impoverished school. We were like just a bunch of poor kids, and this guy comes in with an over, like, a cartoonishly large can that said, had printed on it, “Success comes in cans, not in can nots.”

Pete Mockaitis
I’m inspired.

Tania Katan
And then, wait, and then proceeded to talk about, like, “If you aim too high, you’re going to miss. If you aim too low, you’re going to miss. But if you aim right in the middle, that’s where success is.” And so, my message was, “Oh, so, if you aim for mediocrity…” Like, that’s what you teach poor kids, “Aim for mediocrity.”

But somehow through all of that, and through me in the same way that you couldn’t help yourself from being funny, and by funny, really, I’m guessing we pointed out obvious things or two things that seem sort of weird and stuck them together, and made new meaning. People were like, “Yeah, I want in on that, too.” By nature, again, we just get all the playfulness, all the creativity, all the fun sort of, like. beaten out of us in all these systems, and especially as adult people.

And again, this is where we are right now where everybody needs this stuff. So, at some point, I’m like, “What is this thing that I’m bringing to teams and companies? And are there other people bringing it to this level of joy that makes us want to contribute more or makes us want to bring literally our whole selves to work and we feel safe? What is it?”

And I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, it’s creative,” but we’re bringing into spaces where it’s not invited, but it’s desperately needed. And now that people have experienced it, they can’t live without it. Okay, creative and trespassing, that’s when you sneak shit in that doesn’t obviously belong. But then now it’s invited in through the front door many times. I mean, sometimes it’s not, but here’s where we are. We are basically kings and queens of the nerds. And I’m happy about this anointment.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so trespassing, I really like that. So, that’s the title of the book, Creative Trespassing: How to Put the Spark and Joy Back into Your Work and Life. And so, trespassing, like, it wasn’t invited or asked for, and it kind of seems like it doesn’t belong, frankly, “But now that you’re here, okay, we’re kind of seeing that it’s nifty.”

And that’s interesting then in terms of, so our unique flavor of expression, you and I, it resembles that of a child before it’s been beaten out. And, I guess, is the connection then, because we’re more free to explore weird, wacky, unconventional things, some of them end up being very useful innovations along the way?

Tania Katan
Yeah, and also in that, though, is the practice of doing that. It’s not just like we wake up one day after having all the creativity taken away from us, or a lot of it, because of systems and people and all that jazz, and then we believe it. We believe all this sort of default crap of like, “Oh, I’m not good enough,” or, “I’m not smart enough,” or, “I’m not funny enough,” or, “I don’t belong here,” or whatever.

And then you and I, clearly, have maintained the practice of believing like, “Huh, if I double down on everything that I’ve got, which is creativity, ability to come up with weird ideas quickly, and also not to feel ashamed or threatened by others if the ideas are wrong, to take risks and generate more ideas than not in order to get to something.” That’s interesting.

And, in fact, I was just giving a talk at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and one of the things in my book, and that I engage this audience in is, I said, “You know, why don’t you come up with, find a problem that nobody’s looking to solve, that nobody’s looking to solve in the world? It could be local, it could be small.”

And that in itself was a trigger for people to be like, “Wait, I can just look for something that I wasn’t told to look for? I can look for something that might be invisible and kind of bring it to life?” And I had people partner with people who didn’t know each other. So, it was this older woman and this young kid, they’ve faced each other and they did the, you know, what could they solve.

And then afterwards, I’m like, “Okay, so what did you do?” And they’re like, “Well, there’s a really great restaurant in Santa Barbara, but they’re really garlic-focused and a lot of people go there for dates. So, the problem is, is you don’t want to, like, make out with somebody if you got garlicky breath. So, we’ll plant a mini garden, like a little flower box of parsley right outside the restaurant, have some colorful scissors so people can cut parsley on their way out, eat them and they don’t have to worry about garlic breath.”

Now this seems sort of like simple, but it’s actually brilliant. I mean, it’s genius. It’s like a really great idea. They had three and a half minutes to come up with this solution. And they did. And there were other people who figured out how to clean oil from the beaches, how to grow wine grapes in the sea, like all of these things.

And so, I think the first part of that is to give ourselves permission, which obviously you and I have been doing for a long time, to sort of stretch our creative muscles, trust our instincts, and be prepared to take risks and be wrong a lot. Who cares, right? Like, in the pursuit of that one sort of solution, you have to have wild, weird, outlandish ideas, and see what comes out of them.

It’s not like be perfect right out the gate. That’s ridiculous. That’s not prototyping. That’s not innovation. That’s sort of the antithesis of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it’s interesting. Let’s talk about that emotional notion of being beat down. It’s funny, sometimes when I’m brainstorming or whatever, I have zero offense whatsoever. I provide an idea and it’s just like shot down summarily and robustly. Often, that will bother me not at all. It’s like, “Well, hey, I’ve got 20 more, so next. Let’s go.”

But other times, it hits hard, in terms of it feels personal, like a rejection of me and myself-ness. And I don’t know where the distinction is. Maybe it’s about self-expression as opposed to ideas that feel a bit removed. But, help us out, if the world is going to beat us down, and sometimes we won’t care, and sometimes we will, how do we take it and keep on trucking?

Tania Katan
Well, first of all, I’ll give you and everyone who’s listening the gift of a question, which is, “What if?” What if…? So, the minute we kind of engage this question, what if it allows for possibilities beyond this time and space? What if kind of softens the blow or lowers the stakes of, like, “I need to be responsible to come up with a solution to solve the problem of lack of women in technology.”

What if it’s, like, “What if we decided to look at something differently? Like, what if we decided to come up with the wrong answer? What if we decided to launch a campaign in outer space? Like, what if?” So, there’s something about this question that I always give to people, I’ve had it in my back pocket since I went to theater school, that lowers the pressure and the taking it personally, and making it about yourself.

It’s like a gentle punting of a question into the ether, and maybe a solution will come. Even your voice goes up an octave when you ask “What if?” as opposed to like, “Okay, here’s my solution.” And also, it decenters. It’s not about you. It’s not like, “I have an idea. I have a solution.” It’s like, “What if…?” It offers it up to everyone.

So, I think that taking it out of yourself, decentering you and our egos in our brains, and allow it to sting. It does sting. I remember coming up with the idea for, “It Was Never A Dress,” which I don’t know if you’ve seen, but I’m sure your listeners have, and they can envision in their mind’s eye, you know, the bathroom lady, the symbol? And so, she’s wearing, what is she wearing, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I know better. She’s wearing a cape.

Tania Katan
Oh, come on. Gosh, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I’ll play along. Oh, she’s wearing a dress, Tania. She’s wearing a dress.

Tania Katan
Thank you for playing. We have some lovely party gifts for you, Pete. Right. So, I came up with this idea in a meeting and, literally, to your point, there were people who were like, “That is the dumbest idea ever in our team meeting.” And some were like, “That’s the best idea,” and everything in between.

And, to me, the moment that I took that personally was when I knew it was such a good idea, I was willing to fight and push for it to be in the world. That’s when I took it personally. But before that it was like, “Well, here’s some ideas. Let’s see what happens.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. By saying “What if,” it is, it’s not about you. It’s not about your ideas, your contribution, your smarts, your worth, your value to the team, yada, yada. It’s like, “Hey, we’re just going to play a game here and we’re going to step into this world, and we’ll kind of see what happens when we play around here.

Tania Katan
Totally. You remind me of a phrase that I loved so much and nobody ever uses it, but I bet you do, Pete. Spitballing. And when I think about spitballing, I think about saliva leaving your mouth in an ungraceful way, and just like shit kind of getting messy and all over the place. And so, thinking about spitballing as a way to just kind of like, “Eh, you know, if a little spit gets somewhere, it doesn’t mean it’s not about perfection. It’s actually the minute I open my mouth. It’s about messy imperfection.” Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, so sometimes, when we’re talking about creativity on How to be Awesome at Your Job, a listener will think, “Well, you know, I’m not really in one of those creative-type jobs.” Do you have a response to that? And how can we think about creativity impacting all humans and workers?

Tania Katan
Yeah, so, really, there have been studies to prove that we are all creative. There’s one, and for those people who say that, they probably have a lot of constraints in their job. Maybe, like, “I don’t have time. I don’t have a budget. I don’t have a team.” I’ve been that person many times. And there was a seminal study by Patricia Stokes with rodents, rats. And she took two groups of rats; they each had a bar they had to push.

One could use both paws. One group could only use one paw. And the group with two paws just pushed the lever, pushed it, pushed it, pushed it, and fine. The group with one paw, they pushed the lever, they pushed the lever, and they are, like, hold up. Then they pushed it behind their back, then between their legs. They came up with hundreds of ways to push this freaking lever.

And the point was that, when we have constraints, we actually are more generative. We come up with more creative ideas. So, my challenge to those people who are like, A, “I’m not creative,” you were born that way. It’s your birthright so let’s tap back into it. And, B, constraints actually foster creativity. And creativity is, literally, just coming up with infinite ideas and solutions for any problem, challenge, obstacle. Period.

So, there’s two C’s of creativity. There’s the big C, which is like, “I’m a painter,” or, “I’m a playwright,” or, “I’m a choreographer, and that requires training and maybe some innate ability.” But the little C is we can come up with infinite solutions and ideas, and that’s within us. So, constraints, so I dare you to take these constraints.

There’s actually an exercise I give in Creative Trespassing, which is come up with like the positive opposite of this sort of problem that’s ailing you. So, I don’t know, Pete, who have you had on your show that’s like, “Ah, creative? I work at a call center”? Or, I don’t know, what do you, or what kind of person or industry are you talking about?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think you nailed it in terms of the constraints, in terms of if a person feels constricted as though they don’t feel they have the authority or resources or autonomy to go invent a new approach to whatever, it’s sort of like, “Well, hey, the processes have been established, and my role is to execute them.” Like, that’s kind of the vibe or context where they’re coming from.

Tania Katan
Well, I’ll tell you, I’ll give you an example from the art world, which is where everybody gets their goodies. There is an artist named Meg Duguid, and years ago she just wanted to open a gallery, right? She had met all these cool artists from around the world, and she’s like, “I live in Chicago. I want to bring all these artists in.” And then she went to look for a gallery.

And guess what? It’s very expensive, she’s not making much money, and this is her dream, and she doesn’t have investors. She’s not friends with VCs or whatever. And so, she had a choice. She’s like, “I could just let my dream go away, or I could find a creative way to deal with these constraints of no money, no space, no patrons, nothing.”

And so, she started Clutch Gallery. And it’s, literally, she has a…do you know what a clutch purse is? It’s like 10 inches by 10 inches, and hers is sort of hard shell. And she has, if you open it up, there’s rotating exhibitions in there. There’s, like, really tiny, she had a painter who had to do like, half-inch scale paintings. She had a performance artist who had to figure out a way.

So, the point is that, instead of giving up on her dream of owning a gallery, she decided to make it 10-inch by 10 inches. And if you call her, she’ll come with the gallery and meet you anywhere, like a coffee house or on the streets or whatever, and she’s showing art of people that she admires around the world.

And then they have the constraint and challenge of “How do they make their work fit within 10 inches and 10 inches?” And these are people who show in massive museums or galleries that are more typical. And I just thought that was the best way. I had some engineers come up to me after I gave a talk at Uber, and they’re like, “We want to start an innovation lab. But we don’t have money or buy-in or anything.” And I’m like, “Why don’t you get a clutch, okay?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s where it all starts.

Tania Katan
That’s where it all starts, yeah. And we’re laughing, and whenever I share this with people at Fortune 500 companies, they laugh, and then they’re also like, “Yeah, actually, I guess I do have some less obvious resources that would be really interesting and actually fun to activate and play with.” And that’s real innovation, not bullshit like, “Oh, I’ve got a ton of money and a whole team.” I’m sure you know, anybody who’s done anything that we admire was not necessarily done with a whole team and a lot of money.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s really interesting about, it is creative in so far as it is novel, like certainly, like that hasn’t been done before. But then interesting implications sort of unfold from that, like, there is one clutch and she has it.

And so, like, if folks who are into a unique, cool, arty experience, if you have a money problem, may very well be, it’s like, “Well, shoot, how am going to get all my art friends together? And if I want this gallery to come to our event, well, now there’s a supply constraint so there might be a substantial fee associated with it.” It’s like, “You want the clutch? Yeah, well, your fancy friends, that’s going to be $800 for me to truck it on the L over to you there.”

Tania Katan
I like how you went to scale and capitalism in, like, one beat. Man!

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Yeah, thank you.

Tania Katan
I like that. I like it a lot. Nice transition. So, yeah, but that’s just like saying, “Oh, somebody came up with a project management SaaS we can’t come up with anymore,” right? But the cool thing is when somebody comes up is first to market, whether that’s a clutch with a miniature painting show in it, or a software as a service, and it becomes a North Star for everybody else to tap into.

Like, “Okay, how am I going to use my unique voice, brand, style, tone to connect with my intended audience in a positive way. What’s my clutch? What’s my clutch? Ooh, hashtag, I see a new campaign. #WhatsMyClutch.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s really interesting. You mentioned, like a software as a service project management piece, and it’s like, “Oh, well, that’s already been done. There are multiples.” And yet I’m just thinking, I see so many variants, and they’re kind of fun. I’m thinking randomly about the CARROT Weather app.

Tania Katan
What? I don’t know that.

Pete Mockaitis
It’ll give you attitude. You could choose from several personalities and how you want it to tell you about the weather, from professional to friendly, to snarky, to homicidal and overkill. So, it brings that fun to a very mundane activity, like, “Oh, what’s the weather? There’s plenty of weather apps. Well, if you want your weather app to have some attitude, you’ve got CARROT Weather,” and it has a boatload of users. It’s really taken off.

Tania Katan
Well, because what it’s done and that, to me, is the ultimate expression of creativity. Just taking something that’s seemingly mundane, or every day, or overlooked, and actually turning it on its head or upside down or inside out so that it can really engage people in a fun, uplifting, and positive way. Really, I mean, that’s what we need in all industries in all areas.

You’re reminding me of this, my side hustle in which I don’t get paid, but I’m turning to you to understand how to commodify and scale it, sir. But which is, whenever I’m on hold with like the bank or any kind of institution, which is all the time, they always have their hold music. And so, I decided to start doing dance and performance with the whole music and just videotaping myself, and sharing it with anybody who’s had to be on hold, and it’s so much fun.

And so, it turns something that’s not only just mundane, but actually frustrating. And sometimes when I’m haven’t had a nap, just downright irritating, I become the nasty carrot, more like a gourd, I feel. And, yeah, and so it’s taken something that I have to do, that we all have to do, which is engage with customer service in a way that’s sometimes, and oftentimes, not enlivening.

And it all starts with the canned music, and turn it into a performance or dance even if it’s just for myself, especially if it’s for my friends, and we can all enjoy it a little bit more. So, I love the CARROT.

Pete Mockaitis
Now that is fun. And I want to talk about some additional examples of that because it’s your subtitle, “How to Put the Spark and Joy Back into Your Work and Life.” Let’s talk about some mundane dimensions of work life.

Let’s say answering emails and participating in, we’ll say, Zoom meetings, that you know they’re not the most interesting and maybe not the most essential, but, nonetheless, you’re expected to be there. And there’s probably a few minutes that are actually really necessary for you out of the 60. So, how might we bring a little bit more of that zest to these experiences?

Tania Katan
Well, first of all, I consider this one-inch by one-inch frame in our camera as a stage. It’s not this sort of, like, passive participant. We can engage with this as if we’re as a speaker, as a motivational speaker. I give a lot of talks on Zoom. And so, if you are conducting the meeting, then I would recommend that you start with seeing the space as an active, alive, performative one, not performative work, but more performance-based.

So, for example, Pete, if we were just entering a Zoom meeting, and I was “running it,” I would say, “Okay, Pete, our meeting today is creativity. We’re talking about creativity. So, you know what? Let’s start with something creative. We’re going to leave the frame and we’re going to count to three on our own. One, two, three. And when we get to three, enter the frame in a new way. You ready? Let’s do it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Tania Katan
“Okay. We’re going to leave the frame. Bye.” Okay, so, look, here’s the deal. A lot of people forget thought and form, right? The thought is, “Why have we all convened? What’s the theme? Why are we here?” And if it’s about creativity or innovation, a lot of these meetings we’re having are for a reason and we forget about it. We get just perfunctory and, like, we check off the bullet points on the agenda.

0And I’m here to tell you that connect what you’re talking about to the actual form in which it takes. So, don’t start a meeting about innovation by saying, “Okay, who has the notes from the last meeting? Hey, Pete, can you hear me? Can you hear me?”

I mean, why wouldn’t you engage people with the substance that you’re trying to sell, to commodify, to champion as, like, “This is our vision and mission.” And yet, it’s the first thing to go away when we sit down at a meeting or when sometimes we engage in practices that we think are like less interesting.

Having that connection to what we do and why we do it is so important. And I don’t think it should be left out of anything. It needs to be brought into everything. And I promise you, it’ll change culture and it’ll change your mindset and change how fun Zoom meetings are.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, that’s fun. I’m imagining, when you talk about the little camera square as a performance space, like a stage, well, I‘m imagining from “Arrested Development,” Tobias Fünke, you know, placed aside his artist’s smock to adorn his director’s hat or whatever, you know, get props, get silly with it. And that’s kind of fun.

I want to hear your take on email. You reminded me of some things. I’ve only done this a few times. I guess I was that desperate, like, “I need to do these emails and I really, really don’t want to.” I put on a headset, which kind of helped because I was doing some dictation to speak a little bit. But more so, I was pretending to be the character Chloe from “24,” talking to Jack Bauer about some very urgent situations as I was quickly typing away on the screen, because that’s what Chloe always did.

And it was life or death, terrorism, you know, big high stakes, just to put a little bit of juice into the email processing. And that kind of worked. I’ve also tried timings, like, “Oh, it’s a race. Let’s try and get 100 by these many minutes or whatever.” So, I’d love your hot take on how do we bring some more spark and joy back to email processing.

Tania Katan
So, I love that you created a whole meal out of your persona to sit down to respond to emails but you’re not responding in their vernacular or like with their language. It’s Pete responding, but you’re giving yourself that urgency and excitement of being the character.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, but if I don’t answer these emails, the terrorists are going to win.

Tania Katan
So, you’re holding yourself hostage.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, put some duct tape on your mouth, “Hmm, hmm.”

Tania Katan
I’ll approach it from another way, which my clients, who I worked for like big tech companies, like Expedia and stuff like that, and they have to construct the most boring emails to people who have not read anything that they were supposed to read, in a way in which suggests, like, “I’m sure you read the 20-page reports. And here’s blah blah blah.”

And so, what they do that is really exciting, is they just throw in an Easter Egg, because not everybody has tapped into that. So, it’ll be all about like the new version of, you know, whatever, the new release of the technology, and they’ll throw in like a few Easter Eggs from Star Trek or whatever film or TV show, to see if they’ve read the thing they should have read.

And if they do then, they get bonus points. And the person who’s on the other end gets excited, they’re like, “Okay, I’m going to read that because I know there’s going to be some Easter Eggs in there.” I’ve never tried that, but I’m going try adapting. I feel like my persona is just so I’m always performing in relation to that. I love that. I’m going to start using that. I’ll hashtag, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. I’m on it. Thank you.

Tania Katan
I’ll TM you. I love that. That’s such a great way, is to like put on the hat of whatever character you think is sort of weird and wily and wonderful, and get all the high-pressure stakes that they have in their situation, and respond to an email about the next team meeting. I think that’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Fun. Well, is there anything you do when drudgery enters your work life? What are your personal practices for spicing it up?

Tania Katan
Well, first of all, this is really practical spice and it’s a tomato. I feel like you had a carrot. I should bring some vegetable-fruit to the table. And the Pomodoro method, I know this sounds sort of boring, but this is the best thing that I’ve given to all my clients. It’s a time management. It’s a constraint. So, basically, it’s started with like a tomato timer, but set a timer for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and get done what you need to get done. And when the timer goes off, you take a break.

You dance, you work out, you breathe, you jump up and down, whatever the hell you want. You drink a coffee, and then you set it again. So, creativity isn’t always like, “I’m racing against time in, like, a larger sense.” Sometimes it’s all about, like, “I give myself this constraint so that I can approach what I’m doing in a way that’s, like, doesn’t beat me down, feels kind of fine. And I can move on to the next thing that’s actually more fun for me.”

So, I know that’s not sexy, but tomatoes can be sexy sometime, time management can be sexy, because it allows us to do the things that we really love to do. Thus, the gift of AI, I’ve got to say. I mean, that’s where, if you really want to be developing your creative muscles, let something else do the boring tasks. Boom!

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, when it comes to AI, I would love to hear your pro tips, do’s and don’ts. I mean, I think we’ve seen AI really go both ways in terms of a worker has used it to be more effective and efficient, and a worker has used it to embarrass themselves royally because these citations or legal cases don’t exist, or they let it sort of do all. They actually let it do the fun parts for them. So, help us out, what are your do’s and don’ts for AI in helping us have more fun and creative goodness in our work?

Tania Katan
Okay. Here’s the deal. I did a thought experiment. So, I was an early adopter with ChatGPT, and you can’t forget the learning part of machine. It’s machine learning. So, it’s what you’re feeding it and what we’re all feeding it, whether we’re feeding it burritos or like Twyla Tharp, you know. It’s getting a lot of stuff in its pie hole, and that’s part of the process.

But for me, early on, with ChatGPT, I realized, what AI won’t do is it won’t write 50 shitty pages in order to get to that one line that you’re like, “Oh, my God, I thought my book was about this, but it’s really not about that.” It’s not process-oriented, it’s a process-er. And we are process-oriented and we are driven to have those moments where we doubt we could write the book, we doubt we could write the code. We doubt it.

And in the doubting, we dig in deeper and then we find a totally different way to do it, a way that isn’t a pattern that is less obvious. And that’s the beauty of us being human beings.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, agreed. So, then is there anything you think it’s handy for?

Tania Katan
So, I find it really effective and efficient for the stuff that slows me down as a creative, right? Making the bullet point list, organizing thoughts and ideas into a clear form that I can take to a company that I just met with. And I’m like, “Here.” I met with them, I’m like, “I can help you tell your story in all these different ways, engage your audiences.”

And then I get home and I’m exhausted. I don’t want to sit down and make a proposal that’s cogent. So, I’ve really worked with ChatGPT and helped it nail down the tone, and do the hard stuff. That’s what it’s there for, is to do the stuff that is boring to me. That’s why I love it so much. And also, and in fairness to this processor that is kind of gleaning and gathering all kinds of information, because I’ve fed it so much over the years, it can be kind of a thought partner.

I guess I think about it as like a very high achieving intern. It’s not, like, it’s shabby ideas, to your point. It can come up with creative ideas, but that’s based on years of me sort of showing how I think, how I feel, how the people I work with think and feel. And so, it can be really good, like an intern who’s like, “Hey, Tania, I have a really good idea.” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s good. It’s super good.”

The tone isn’t there yet, but that’s my job. That’s what I delight in is the creative crafting of that, of the messages. So, I think it’s a good thought partner, first drafter, and definitely great with the tedious tasks that us humans shouldn’t be doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and it’s intriguing. Tedious tasks, in some ways, to get philosophical, it’s a bit in the eye of the beholder insofar as an attorney might delight in crafting a contract that seems, oh, so thorough and risk-mitigating and comprehensive. Or, maybe they hate it, too, Tania. I’m not sure.

Tania Katan
Yeah, but, no, conversely, to your point, Pete, so if that’s your creative output is the sort of the tasks and the focusing in on the details, then you’re training it to come up with the creative ideas that you’re feeding into it.

And maybe those ideas aren’t perfect, but maybe within the realm of the people that you’re engaging with, that those are like really radical ideas that you can explore together as humans and see if they work. Test them out.

So, use them for the opposite, the person who’s expressing or sort of stretching their creative muscles all the time, desires to use it for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell me, any final thoughts, tips, do’s and don’ts about creativity and joy?

Tania Katan
There are no don’ts. It’s do’s. Creativity is the new job security. Pass it on. Really, I mean, in all seriousness, back to the full circle to the Forbes quote, I mean, they’ve literally doubled down. In four issues, they’ve written about how important creative thinking is for knowledge workers, because AI will be able to do everything we can do and faster.

And if we don’t cultivate our creative thinking, if we don’t get back to our birthright of being creative individuals who can solve any problem, accept any challenge, and even turn ourselves into a character that has high-pressure stakes in order to answer emails, we’re going to be out of a job. And I don’t want us to be like that. We’re the ones who created AI. So, let’s wield the power of technology rather than it dragging us around.

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

Tania Katan
Maya Angelou all the way, “People will forget what you did, people will forget what you said, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

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

Tania Katan
The Patricia Stokes study on rodents and creativity and constraints.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Tania Katan
Yeah, Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart. That’s my favorite, When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön, all the way. It’s a good read anytime, especially now.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Tania Katan
An espresso cup.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Tania Katan
Laughing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that people quote back to you often?

Tania Katan
God, no. What people say is, “Oh, Tania, I love what you said. Can you say it again?” And I say, “No. Whatever comes out of my pie hole is there for you to use or throw away immediately. There’s no in between.”

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

Tania Katan
TaniaKatan.com, T-A-N-I-A Katan.com.

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

Tania Katan
Lower the stakes. Take some risks. Do it in places and with people you feel safe first, and then expand the circle, and then expand the circle even more until it’s so big that every place is a place for you to take risks and find some joy, and double down on being a creative human.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Tania, thank you.

Tania Katan
Thanks, Pete.