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Apr 13
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856: How to Awaken Your Genius and Become Extraordinary with Ozan Varol

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Ozan Varol says: "Embrace your useful idiosyncrasies, spend time on airplane mode, and be careful where you point your attention."

Ozan Varol reveals how to surface your unique talents that enable you to achieve extraordinary results.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The surprising technique writers of The Office used to keep their ideas fresh
  2. A powerful question for uncovering your hidden genius
  3. How being a people pleaser is killing your genius

About Ozan

Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned award-winning professor and #1 bestselling author. He is one of the world’s foremost experts in creativity, innovation, and critical thinking. His writing has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Time, Washington Post, and more. His latest book is called Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary.

Resources Mentioned

Ozan Varol Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ozan, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Ozan Varol
Thanks so much for having me back, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your latest work Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary. All things I enjoy doing, so it seems like we’re in the right place here. And to kick us off, I was so intrigued by one of your bullets. I love the show The Office. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them all a couple times, and you say there’s a surprising strategy that boost creativity, that the folks who wrote The Office used right off the bat. Can you tell us about this?

Ozan Varol
Absolutely. The Office is also one of my favorite shows of all time, and one of the things that’s extraordinary about that show is that they had, I think, over 200 episodes, but they were able to maintain the quality of the show throughout, which is really, really difficult to do. And so, they did have this strategy that I talk about in the book, which is, in the writers’ room, when they got stuck in a rut, when they’re, like, the ideas stopped flowing, they would play a game.

So, they would stop working on The Office and they would start putting together an episode for Entourage. And if you remember, Entourage is an HBO series about Vincent Chase, this actor who lives in Hollywood with a bunch of his friends. And so, the writers of The Office didn’t work on the show but when they found themselves in a creative rut working on The Office, they would say, “Okay, let’s play a game. Let’s put together an episode for Entourage.” And whenever they played this game, they only had one rule. The episode had to end with Vincent Chase, the main character, winning the Oscar for Best Actor. And with that constraint in place, they would play.

And so, they do this for about, I don’t know, half an hour or so, and then they would go back to working on The Office, and something interesting happened whenever they did this. By virtue of playing this game, and coming back to their own work, their creativity would dramatically increase, like the ideas that weren’t there before, all of a sudden, would start to flow.

And I mention that, or I talk about that story in the section of the book about the importance of playing. And so, for the writers of The Office, this is a way of setting their own work aside, and then playing with someone else’s show, someone else’s project. And when they went back to their own work of actually writing an episode for The Office, that playful mindset would carry over.

It was like it’s a way of warming up your creativity muscles before you start doing really heavy lifts. And having done that, yeah, it would be much easier for them to actually creatively write the episode for The Office that they were working on.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting about that play there is it’s not that wild. It’s not, like, “Okay, go grab some Play-Doh,” or, “Imagine how I would make a rocket out of Sharpies.” It’s like, “Okay, we’re still writing a TV show,” and yet it’s play in the sense that, I guess, there are no stakes there.

Ozan Varol
Yup, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “We’re not going to be putting this out into the world, so be thinking just be whatever you want.”

Ozan Varol
Exactly. And you hit the nail on the head there. It’s very low stakes, there’s actually no stakes at all. Like, the episode for Entourage can suck and it’s not going to matter at all because it’s never going to air. And so, people listening to this might see that as a waste of time but, again, for creativity to happen, especially when you’re stuck in a rut, play becomes really important.

And you don’t have to be a writer to do this, by the way. So, say, you’re in the marketing world, and if you find yourself stuck in a rut, take 10 minutes and come up with marketing ideas for a competitor’s product, like put together a Super Bowl commercial for a competitor’s product, and then come back to your own work, and you’ll find that that playful mindset, that you just created by taking just 10 minutes to play with somebody else’s problem, somebody else’s product, will carry you over to the issue or the problem that you’re working on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. Well, so you’ve got a number of these approaches in your book Awaken Your Genius. I’m curious to hear if there was a particularly striking, counterintuitive discovery you made that made you go, “Oh, wow, aha” along the way that’s really stuck with you.

Ozan Varol
One of the points that really stuck with me that I use probably on a daily basis is it goes back to something that my high school soccer coach would tell me, and then I came across a research study which essentially validated what he was saying all along. So, I’ll begin with what he would tell me, and then I’ll bring you to the research, and then share with you what I do on a day-to-day basis to implement this mindset.

He had this saying, he would say, “If you’re not in possession, get in position,” meaning if you’re not in possession of the ball, move to a different position on the field where you’re open to receive the ball. And it turns out that the same idea applies to you, regardless of the type of work that you do. And so, if you’re finding yourself stuck, if you’re finding yourself without the ball, if you’re finding yourself in a rut, move to a different position. So, physically move yourself away from the position that you’ve been sitting in into a different location.

What happens with the way that most of us work, we’re like sitting in the same position, in the same chair, looking at the same computer screen for hours and hours at a time, and that space we’re operating in gets associated with the same old thought patterns, traditional ideas, and so it becomes really hard to change the status quo and generate new ideas.

But the simple act of picking up your laptop and walking to a different location, it might be a café, or what I do at home is I walk to a different room in our house, with different decorations, different books on the shelves, different background, different everything, and when I do that, that space becomes this, like, blank canvass that I can project new ideas on, and because that space is not associated with the old though patterns that I’ve been operating under for a very long time.

This is why, by the way, research shows that smokers, for example, find it easier to quit when they’re traveling because the new location doesn’t have the same patterns associated with their smoking habit as their own home. And so, it’s really easy to implement in practice. If you’re finding yourself in a rut, pick up your laptop, move to a different place. Walking also helps. Research shows that walking significantly boosts creativity.

And walking, by the way, without audiobook, without podcast, without a phone call to keep you company, just you and your thoughts, there are so many stories of scientists, literally, walking themselves into the right answer. It seems like a really simple practice but it can really create a fundamental transformation in the quality and the quantity of the ideas that you might generate.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And that context stuff, you mentioned smokers, that’s wild. I’ve heard that some war, maybe it’s Vietnam, maybe it’s multiple wars, soldiers from the US, a good chunk of them, engage in some hardcore drugs, like cocaine or heroine or something, when they’re off in the theater of war. And then they came back, and the vast majority of them just had no problem.

This is mind-blowing because it’s, like, among the most addictive substances in existence, and then it’s like, “Oh, well, hey, you know, different people, different country, different scenery, different activities, and hardcore narcotics are just not part of my life anymore.” Just like that. Mind-blowing stuff.

Ozan Varol
Amazing. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of that but it makes sense if you think about it. So much of our behavior, our habits, our ways of working in the world are just tied to the environment. And the moment you put yourself in a drastically different environment, it becomes much easier to change. And this is why, by the way, one of the things I love most is international travel.

When you go to a foreign country, your whole world becomes topsy-turvy, like the majority becomes the minority, surrounded by echoes of this language that you’ve never heard before. You return to infancy when your mother tongue was foreign to you. You become a young fool again. And so, everything is new and it becomes so much easier to generate new ideas and get out of old patterns of thinking simply by breathing foreign air, which is pretty remarkable.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, we’ve got a number of fun strategies and ideas. Could you hit us with of the big idea, core thesis of the book Awaken Your Genius?

Ozan Varol
Sure. And I pick the word genius on purpose. So, genius, most often, is used to mean smartest, or the most intelligent, the most talented, and that’s not the way I used genius in the book. There’s a quote that opens the book from Thelonious Monk, he says, “Genius is the one most like himself.” Genius, in the Latin origin of the word, means the spirit attendant at birth in each and every person.

So, each of us is like Aladdin, and our genie, or our genius, is bottled up inside of us waiting to be awakened. And the core thesis of the book is this, no one can compete with you at being you.

Pete Mockaitis
“I’ll smoke them.”

Ozan Varol
You are the first and the last time that you’ll ever happen. And if your thinking is an extension of you, if what you’re building is a product of your inner wisdom, you’ll be in a league of your own. But if you suppress yourself, if you don’t claim that wisdom within, then it’s going to be lost. That genius is going to be lost both to you and to the world.

And so, at a time when so many people and so many businesses are looking externally for answers, outsourcing their thinking to algorithms, copying and pasting what their competitors are doing, I wanted to write a book to give people concrete tools to escape that culture of conformity and unlock original insights within their own depths and unleash their own unique genius.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if awakening the genius is what’s happening here, could you give us a cool story of a sleeping genius and how they awoke and what happened?

Ozan Varol
Yeah, the first name that popped to mind is Johnny Cash. In 1954, he walked into an audition room at Sun Records, and at the time he was a nobody. He was selling appliances door to door and playing gospel songs at night with two of his friends. He was broke. His marriage was in ruins. And for his audition, Cash picks a gospel song because that’s what he knew best, and gospel was really popular in 1954. Everyone else was singing it.

The audition doesn’t go as Johnny Cash plans. As Cash begins to sing this dreary slow gospel song, the record label owner, who’s name was Sam Phillips, he pretends to be interested for, like, 20 seconds before interrupting Cash. He says, “We already heard that song a hundred times, just like that, just like how you sang it. This song,” he says, “is the same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio all day about your peace within, and how it’s real, and how you’re going to shout it.”

He looks at Cash, and he says, “Sing something different. Sing something real. Sing something you felt because that’s the kind of song that people want to hear. That’s the kind of song that truly saves people. It’s got nothing to do with believing in God, Mr. Cash,” he says. “It has to do with believing in yourself.” And that rant jolts Cash out of his conformist “Let me sing you some good old gospel” attitude. He collects himself. He starts strumming his guitar. And he starts playing the “Folsom Prison Blues” in that deep distinctive voice of his.

In that moment, he stops trying to become a gospel singer and he becomes Johnny Cash, all because he rejects the tendency to conform, and decides to embrace the genius within him. And I think that’s one of the best stories, the most memorable stories about how somebody who walks into that room as a sleeping conformist, and walks away by awakening the genius within him.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m curious, so Johnny Cash, he’s already got a pretty good sense at the time, I’m assuming, I’m not as familiar with the ins and outs of his story. He’s got a pretty good vibe that, “Music is the thing I care to do,” so he’s got a zone that he’s operating in. To your point about how we are one of a kind and the best at being us as we can be, so we want to be ourselves and tap into that fully.

I guess, I’m thinking, how do we even know where to start in terms of the zone that we’re going to be operating in if we’re not even at the point of Johnny Cash, “All right, I’m doing music”? I think many of us in a career, it’s like, “Well, I don’t know, I like helping people, I like figuring stuff out, I like communicating, and, I don’t know, I could do any number of jobs.” Where do we start?

Ozan Varol
Yeah, great question. I talk about a number of strategies in the book. I’ll share one of them here. One is to ask yourself, to look back on your life, and figure out what your useful idiosyncrasies are. And you might actually ask your partner or best friend about them, like, “What is it that makes me different from other people?” your superpower, the thing that you can do better than the average person, and see how you’ve used that power in the past. And I really encourage you to dig deep when you do this exercise.

So, for example, if you tell yourself, “Well, I’m really good at organizing events,” dig deeper into that. So, just because you’re a great event organizer doesn’t mean you can only be an event organizer. That means you’re great a communicating with people, that means you’re really good at rallying others, that means you’re really good at putting people together in a space and creating an informative entertaining event.

And so, the goal is to tease down those Lego blocks of your talents, interests, preferences, useful idiosyncrasies. And once you’ve got those Lego blocks figured out, then you can build other things with it, build other things with that you haven’t built in the past. And it might be staying within your current line of work, and switching from singing gospel to actually singing “Folsom Prison Blues.” It might also mean switching to an entirely different field.

But the first step is trying to figure out what your useful idiosyncrasies are. And this is really hard to do. It’s really hard to do in part because, at some point in your life, you were probably shamed for having those idiosyncrasies because they made you weird or different from other people. And so, we learn to conceal them, we learn to suppress our superpowers because they make us different from other people. But if you can figure out what those superpowers are and lean into what made you weird or different in the past in a useful way, that, in and of itself, can make you extraordinary.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. That phrase useful idiosyncrasies is way more useful in terms of surfacing the goods as oppose to “What’s your superpower?” which is a cool powerful useful question. I recommend interviewers ask it. Let’s understand that, hopefully, the interviewee has some self-knowledge to be able to disclose that. But if you’re kind of working towards that, useful idiosyncrasy is handy.

It’s funny, I’m thinking that when I was in high school, in the summer, I remember there were a few times, and I was ridiculed for this, I was hanging out with my friends for, yeah, a good long stretch of time, maybe six hours, and I thought, “You know what, I’d like to go home and read business books now,” and I’m, like, 15 and they didn’t care for that. They thought that was a little bit alienating, like, “You prefer to read business books than hang out with me.” I was like, “Well, we’ve been hanging out for a long time, and kind of…”

And so, this is a really fun job, getting to talk to people who write a lot of those such books. And so, yeah, that’s interesting, is that it’s useful and it did bring about modest ridicule from my friends there. Could you just lay it on us a bunch more examples of useful idiosyncrasies?

Ozan Varol
Sure. In my life, one of the useful idiosyncrasies has been storytelling. And if I look back, and this is also really useful, too, looking back at your middle school years, your high school years, before you became an adult, like you enjoyed reading business books, for example. I loved writing stories. Actually, from the first time I learned to read and write, I would type stories on my grandfather’s old typewriter.

And looking back on my life, that core ingredient, that useful idiosyncrasy, that basic Lego block has been there all along. So, I went into, for example, the practice of law. I was in rocket science first and then switched trajectories and went to law school, and became a practicing attorney. And as I was a practicing attorney, you’re writing briefs for the court, you’re in oral argument, which is essentially storytelling. You’re telling stories on behalf of your client.

And then I was in academia, and I was a law professor and taught these big classes filled with first year students who are taking these required classes, and many of them did not want to be in the classroom and so I had to come up with ways of telling engaging stories to that audience to get them excited and energized to be in the classroom.

And so, that core ingredient has been there all along, that ability to tell stories, but the recipe that I’ve made with it has changed over time. And so, now I use storytelling in my writing, in the books that I write, in terms of telling stories that are going to make principles stick in a way that, like, simply dry-listing something is not going to.

And so, that’s another example of a useful idiosyncrasy. And we all have them, and the beauty is they’re all different for each of us. So, people listening to this may not have storytelling as one of their Lego blocks, they may not have the desire to read business books for fun as one of their useful idiosyncrasies. But if you look back on your life and go back to the very beginning, before the world told you what you should be doing, what you were actually excited to do, you’ll begin to notice these themes and trends and core ingredients of useful idiosyncrasies that have carried over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fun. As I’m thinking about my kids now, my son Johnny, who just loves to make some kind of a drawing, and there might be stickers or whatever, and then put it in an envelope and seal it, and then write “Mama, Dada,” whatever on it. So, he’s five and he can write a few words, and I just think it’s so funny because this happens almost every day.

And it’s funny because you think, “Oh, what a precious gift from my child.” And it was like, “Well, yeah, but I’ve got dozens and dozens of them, and I don’t know what I’m supposed…” It feels wrong to throw them away. It’s like, “Should I curate?” But it’s funny, he just keeps bringing it, and he loves giving these creative gifts to us. And I just wonder if that is a fad, a passing fancy, or if that’s going to be a core thing and where that will land.

Ozan Varol
Sure. It’s amazing that he does that, though.

Pete Mockaitis
It is.

Ozan Varol
If you think about it, it’s not like he learned that from anywhere. It’s just naturally coming to him. It’s so cool that he’s sharing that gift with you, and that you’re leaning in.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It does. It feels good, like, “Oh, this is for me. Thank you.” Okay. So, we’ve got storytelling, we’ve got business books. I’d love to hear a few more just for people to see themselves in that.

Ozan Varol
Sure. For me, another one was programming, like, I fell in love with computers at a very young age, and I was definitely shamed for it. I was the president of my high school computer club, and that did not bode well for my dating life but it gave me crucial skills that I could use later on in life. And so, even now as a writer, I lean into technology in a way that most writers don’t.

And I think those rare combinations can also be really helpful. So, there’s really nothing novel about a singer who can dance, but a lawyer who can also do computer programming, or a doctor who knows something about the law, for example. Those rare combinations of ingredients, useful idiosyncrasies, can be really powerful because you can use those tools from very different fields to create things in your field that no one else can because they don’t have the depth of knowledge that you do.

So, they honestly can be anything. It could be effectively communicating with other people. It could be simplifying really complex things. So, some people are amazing at taking a really complicated thing and then explaining it to somebody who’s a complete beginner in language that they can understand. Really, really rare but extremely powerful skill.

Empathy is another one. People who can read the energy in the room can see what other people are feeling. Say, you’re marketer or a salesperson, and you can actually see the tension. You can see that the pitch you just gave to the potential client isn’t really resonating, it’s not really sitting well. The ability to recognize that in the moment, and then tailor your pitch accordingly, to lean in and get curious about the client’s perspective, is also a superpower that a lot of marketers don’t have.

And so, think about those skills that have been there from a very young age, and see what they might be. And then you can take those and build new things as you go along.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. It’s funny, I’m also thinking now about, I guess, another idiosyncrasy is that I just do an excessive amount of product research in terms of buying something just because I really like optimizing, in general, or finding the best toenail clipper. It’s like, “I’m only going to get one, so why don’t I just get the best one that there is, and you feel that decadent luxury because I’m not going to have the fanciest house or car in the world, but I could get the most high-performing nail clippers.”

And that’s also paid off in terms of guest selection. So, Ozan, not to toot your horn, but we do a boatload of careful prep, and research, and thought in choosing each guest, and it’s a blessing having tons of incoming pitches to be able to be so choosy. And it’s paid off in terms of show growth, and quality, and engaged listeners, and all that kind of thing.

Ozan Varol
I love that. And the example you just gave is a perfect one because you’re applying it in very different contexts. You’re applying it to selecting products that are going to be useful for you, but you’re also applying it to selecting podcast guests. And so, that useful idiosyncrasy of curation can be applied in very different contexts, so it’s not just limited to one. It can be applied to so many different areas.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Ozan, I’ve got just a few random things I want to know about because your table of contents and pitching things really intrigue me, but I want to give you the floor first. Is there anything that’s just so critical we must know about awakening genius that you want to make sure to get out there?

Ozan Varol
I think we already talked about the crux of the book, but I just want to add one thing. I think it goes back to the comment or the discussion we just had about useful idiosyncrasies, which is that there’s this desire to try to appease everybody, to appeal to everyone. And when people do that, you end up appealing to nobody. You actually reduce the force of your strength because you become ordinary, you become like every other gospel singer in the world.

And we notice things because of contrast, so something stands out because it’s different from what surrounds it. If there is no contrast, no anomaly, no fingerprints, no idiosyncrasy, you become invisible, you become the background. And the only way to step into your genius is to actually embrace, not erase, your idiosyncrasies, your useful idiosyncrasies.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love that. Now, that’s making me think of Bo Burnham, if you know the comedian-musician.

Ozan Varol
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, I’m a little late to the game but I just saw his special “Inside,” which I just thought was so brilliant. And as compared to most comedy specials, we have a form we’re expecting: a stage, an audience, some jokes, a microphone. But then he does this thing where it’s all inside with different creative tidbits. And it has stuck with me like no comedy special ever has.

I’m thinking about it again and again, and it does feel all the more genius, and I’ve recommended it many times, and I guess, hey, and on the show. That contrast is powerful. And I’m sure it’s not for everybody, “This is really kind of weird,” and tune out but those it’s connecting with just go gaga for it, and share it, and grow it, and all kinds of good things happen.

Ozan Varol
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Because then you’re setting up this light beam and you’re attracting people to that light beam who really want what you’re offering. And I think a lot of people don’t do that. We’d rather fail singing the same gospel song that everybody else is singing than risk failing individually. Another talented person, an extraordinary person that comes to mind who did just that is Bruce Springsteen.

I recently saw him in concert, and I was blown away. Like, it was my first Bruce Springsteen concert, and here’s this 73-year-old guy who’s like jumping and dancing and sliding across stage, and pulling off all of these moves that would put people in their 30s to shame. And as I was watching him on stage, I was reflecting on how he’s had this sort of longevity that he had. He’s been doing this since 1965.

And it’s not his voice. So, his voice is not amazing, and he readily admits that. And he can play the guitar but, as he writes in his book, Born to Run, which is excellent, by the way, he says, “Look, the world is filled with great guitar players, and many of them my match or better.” But the thing he did, instead of trying to out-sing or outplay other musicians, he leaned on the one useful idiosyncrasy that made him different from everybody else, which was his ability to write song lyrics.

So, he became a sensation for writing lyrics that capture the blue-collar spirit, and tell the gap between the American dream and the American reality. And this man, who was initially dismissed by agents and bandmates and critics, just about everyone, eventually became rock and roll sensation because he leaned into the one quality, the one useful idiosyncrasy that actually made him different from other people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Thank you. All right. You’ve got a few teaser bullets I just got to know about. You say our most scarce resource is not time or money. What is it? And how does it matter for awakening your genius?

Ozan Varol
It is your attention because attention doesn’t scale. You can pay attention to only one thing at a time, and your reality on a moment-to-moment basis is defined by what you pay attention to. So, if you pay attention to junk, your life becomes junk. If you’re paying attention to useful sources of information, then your life becomes more colorful.

And so, I think, as they say in the movies, with the gun, like, “Be careful where you point that thing,” be careful where you point your attention because it’s going to fundamentally shape your reality. And there was a time in my life where, four or five years ago, I would wake up and the first thing I did in the morning was to grab my phone, immediately check email, immediately check the news, immediately check Instagram, and it was the digital equivalent of gorging on a bucket of M&Ms for breakfast every morning.

I would immediately pollute my mind, and then my mind and my output, by the way, would turn to junk because that’s what I was taking in, that’s what I was paying attention to. So, if you want to change your reality, start by changing what you’re paying attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Well, now I got to know, what do you read in the morning now instead?

Ozan Varol
I don’t read anything in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Ozan Varol
My mornings now are reserved for creating. So, one of the first things I do in the morning is to journal, to free-write. So, not journalism, like I’m describing what I’m going to do or what I did the day before, but what kept me up at night, or an idea that keeps bugging me, something that has just been top of mind for me, and I just sit down and I write it. I do this thought dump in the morning, and that’s how I start my morning. And then I write in the morning.

And everyone is different, but for me, the morning is my most creative time. And so, I now reserve that morning for creation as opposed to consumption.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. Now, how does detecting BS help us awaken our genius, and how do we do it?

Ozan Varol
Awakening your genius isn’t just about that inner journey of finding the wisdom within. It’s also about the outer journey, which is getting information from outside sources but, crucially, figuring out which sources are useful and which ones are not, filtering out low quality or sources of information that might mislead you. And I have an entire section of the book dedicated to providing readers with a toolkit for doing just that.

But one of the simple ways to do this, which most people don’t do, is to actually read the article. It’s become so prevalent to just read the headline and then jump to a conclusion based on the headline, hit the retweet button based on the headline. Just reading the original article is something that so few people do.

But if you just take a few minutes and read the actual source of the thing where that headline came from, and if you want to go down the rabbit hole, then actually go back to the primary source, which, again, most people don’t do. But that one thing is going to set you apart from other people, and you’re going to find things, little nuggets of information that people miss because they are just so focused on the headline.

And I’ll mention one more thing. There are ten strategies in the book on this. Pausing and asking yourself, before you accept what you read, a simple question, which is just, “Is this right? Is this right? How can I poke holes in a curious way?” So, skeptical curiosity, not just being skeptical of what you’re reading but approaching it with curiosity is such an important skill that most people don’t have.

And one of the examples I give in the book is from this Mars mission that I worked on where it was reported by a journalist in a tweet that one of the two rovers that I worked on, its final transmission to Earth was “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.” And it got retweeted like millions of times, a bunch of media sources picked it up, and the story is false.

Before the rover died, it sent back to Earth a bunch of routine code that included, among other things, its power levels and the outside light reading. And then a journalist, who didn’t let facts get in the way of a good story, then took a short section of that random code, paraphrased it into English, and then tweet it to the world that these were the rover’s final words, and then millions of people hit the retweet button, and a bunch of media outlets published stories all without pausing and asking, “How does a remote-controlled space robot spit out fully formed English sentences designed to tug at people’s heartstrings?”

It’s so useful to ask, step back, and ask, “Wait a minute. Is this right? How does a reporter know what the rover said?” And then that would lead to additional questions, like, “Well, how does a Martian rover communicate with Earth in the first place? Does it use fully formed English sentences? Like, how do we know what the rover is doing at any moment?” Those questions are guided by a skepticism of the reporter’s claims but, more importantly, by curiosity about the underlying truth. And questions like that will lead you to places that few others dare go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what’s your strategy for asking better questions?

Ozan Varol
One of the ways you can do this is to ask what I call a soliciting question, and it solicits a more insightful answer. I’ll give you an example from my life when I was a law professor. I would pause during class from time to time, and ask, “Does anyone have any questions?” Nine times out of ten, no one will raise their hands, and I’d move on, confident that I’d done an amazing job of explaining the material.

Well, I was wrong, there were plenty of students who were not getting it. The exam answers made that clear. So, I decided to run an experiment. Instead of saying, “Does anyone have any questions?” I began to say something like, “The material we just covered was really confusing. I expect many of you to have questions. Now is a great time to ask them.”

The number of hands that went up increased dramatically. And I realized in hindsight that “Does anyone have any questions?” was actually a stupid question. I’d forgotten how hard it was for a student to raise their hand around, like, hundred of their friends and admit that they didn’t get something or they didn’t understand something.

The way that I reframed that question normalized confusion. It made it easier for students to raise their hands and admit that they didn’t get it, they didn’t understand it, because I made it clear that this material was really difficult. And I think we ask stupid questions all the time outside the classroom as well.

So, if you’re a manager and you ask a team member, say, during a quarterly review, “Are you facing any challenges?” most people will say no. They will say no because they might fear that admitting that they’re facing a challenge is going to be seen as a weakness by their boss. But as a manager, if you say something like, “We just finished a really tough quarter. Everyone is facing significant challenges. I’d love to hear about yours.”

Now you’re much more likely to get a more honest, insightful response because, now, you’ve normalized challenges. Now, you’re saying, “Look, everybody in the company, everybody on the team is facing challenges. I’m just curious about the specific challenges that you’re facing.” And so, phrased that way, it becomes easier to create psychological safety and for people to open and give you a far more insightful answer than the one that you, otherwise, would’ve gotten.

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

Ozan Varol
I love this quote from Rumi, “As you walk on the way, the way appears.” The implication being that the way is not going to appear until you actually start to walk. I think most people ignore the fundamental tenet of that quote and they want perfect information about the precise destination and all the twists and turns that are going to get them there, but life doesn’t work that way.

Life has a way of lighting the path ahead only a few steps at a time. And as you take each step, you go from not knowing to knowing, from darkness to light. And the only way to know what comes next is to start walking before you think you’re ready.

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

Ozan Varol
There was a study I came across where they put students in a room, they took all of their devices away, and they were given the option of either doing nothing or administering themselves an electric shock. And I don’t remember the precise figures but a shockingly high percentage of people chose to shock themselves, and it was painful, rather than just sit there for 15 minutes just by themselves and their thoughts.

I like this research study because we’ve lost this ability to just sit and be with our thoughts without reaching for the nearest available distraction, whether it’s a shock from an electric device or a shock from your smartphone. And there’s so much value in putting yourself on airplane mode, and just sitting there with you and your thoughts, and letting yourself daydream.

That’s where the best ideas come from, and that’s why you get your best ideas in the shower is because it’s that few moments in your day where you’re actually completely free of notifications and distractions. It’s just you and your thoughts. Imagine the types of ideas that you might be able to generate if you replicate those shower-like conditions more frequently throughout the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Ozan Varol
Well, I have so many favorite books but the one that popped to mind is How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. It just opened my eyes into this whole new world. Well, actually, it was an older world because the research was done back in the ‘60s and ‘70s by using psychedelics for therapeutic purposes. And he goes back to the research and brings it back alive. And it just opened my eyes to these alternative forms of healing that I knew nothing about.

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

Ozan Varol
I love Roam Research for taking notes. When I mentioned free-writing and journaling before, that’s something that I journal in and write in. I keep it open on my browser throughout the day, and I just jot down whatever is coming up. And I have this setup in there where I can go back and review notes that I took three months ago, six months ago, and a year ago.

And I find that review process really helpful, to go back and what I was thinking about a year ago, or six months ago, because when you spot these same themes emerge, same ideas, same thought patterns keep repeating themselves, it becomes harder to ignore them.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Ozan Varol
I already mentioned it, but I’ll come back to it. Favorite habit is putting myself on airplane mode. So, just sitting with just a notepad and a pen and nothing else, or going out for a walk, no podcast, no audiobook, nothing, just me and my thoughts. And those moments in the day where it seems like nothing is happening end up being the most productive moments because that’s when my best ideas come.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite resonant nugget, something you share that people seem to latch onto, retweet often, etc.?

Ozan Varol
“Creativity isn’t produced; it’s discovered,” is a quote that gets retweeted a lot, or gets repeated a lot, because we have this industrial-age mentality that we bring to knowledge work. Like, if you’re just sort of nose-to-the-grindstone is the best way to generate ideas, and that’s not accurate. Ideas actually come in moments of slack, not moments of hard labor.

Like, if you’re trying to innovate, you’re not going to do that by trying to hit inbox zero. They happen when you step away. And taking your foot off the pedal every now and then can actually be the best way to accelerate.

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

Ozan Varol
You can get Awaken Your Genius wherever books are sold. If you go to GeniusBook.net, there’s a special bonus that you can get there for ordering the book, which says free mini course that you can watch in less than 30 minutes with 10 life changing insights from the book, similar to the ones you heard here today.

And if you like to keep in touch with me, I’m not active on social media just because my attention, I found, is better pointed in other directions. So, the best way to keep in touch with me is to join my email list. I have one email that goes out every Thursday to over 45,000 subscribers, and that you can read in less than three minutes. And you can sign up for that by heading over to my website, which is OzanVarol.com, that’s O-Z-A-N, V as in victor, A-R-O-L.com.

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

Ozan Varol
I think just recapping what we covered so far, embrace your useful idiosyncrasies, spend time on airplane mode, and be careful where you point your attention.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ozan, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and moments of genius.

Ozan Varol
Thanks so much, Pete. Thanks for having me on.

Apr 03
0

853: The Four Workarounds that Help Solve Nearly any Problem with Paulo Savaget

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Paulo Savaget says: "The idea of working around requires adaptation, flexibility, and it is imperfection learning as well."

Paulo Savaget reveals unconventional tactics to solve just about any problem.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The four workarounds–and how to use them.
  2. How to maximize incentives to start change.
  3. Why you shouldn’t let limited resources stop you.

About Paulo

Paulo Savaget is associate professor at Oxford University’s Engineering Sciences Department and the Saïd Business School. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar and has a background working as a lecturer, consultant, entrepreneur, and researcher finding innovative solutions for a more inclusive world. As a consultant, he worked on projects for large companies, non-profits, government agencies in Latin America, and the OECD. He currently resides in Oxford.

Resources Mentioned

Paulo Savaget Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Paulo, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Paulo Savaget
Thank you very much for inviting me, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, I’m excited to be chatting about your wisdom. And I’d love to hear, you’ve seen a lot of creative solutions to a lot of interesting problems. Could you point to any particularly intriguing and creative solutions that have really stuck with you over time?

Paulo Savaget
I think I have to start with an example before defining the concept that I introduced in this book of workarounds. I work with these organizations in Zambia that address lack of access to diarrhea treatment. It’s an organization composed only by two staffs, so very small organization but feisty and creative in the ways they address the problem.

If you think of why medicines and many, including lifesaving medicines, that are cheap over the counter, that even populations living in extreme poverty could possibly afford, and if you try to understand the bottlenecks preventing these medicines from being found, you’re going to identify things like very poor infrastructure, or logistics, or governance issues, things that are very difficult to tackle.

And many organizations worldwide have been trying to address these bottlenecks but they might be very costly, there are many failures that arise throughout the process, failures that you may not be able to conceive from the outset.

So, what did this organization do? They realized that you don’t find these lifesaving medicines in remote regions, but you find things like Coca-Cola everywhere, even in the remotest places on earth, you find Coca-Cola and other fast moving consumer goods, like sugar, coffee, cooking oil. So, they started, literally, taking a free ride with Coca-Cola bottles to make medicines available in remote regions.

That’s what I call a workaround. It’s this idea that you don’t have to necessarily tackle an obstacle to get things done. There are many creative ways of addressing problems. And, in this case, as you can see, Pete, they bridge across silos, they addressed a problem in healthcare by piggybacking on the success of fast moving consumer goods.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when we talk about a free ride in the Coca-Cola bottles, the medicines are literally placed inside the bottles of Coke?

Paulo Savaget
In the beginning, they started fitting medicines between bottles in a Coca-Cola crate. When I went to Zambia, I saw how the distribution of Coca-Cola happens, and it’s very decentralized. So, Coca-Cola doesn’t necessarily know where the bottles travel to. Let’s say that Coca-Cola produces Coca-Cola, and then there’s a local bottler that is outsourced, then many wholesalers, retailers, supermarkets, and people transporting Coca-Cola ranging from vans of hospitals, so even bicycles when they’re reaching the last mile.

I’ve seen, for example, someone riding a bike with a crate of Coca-Cola and, like, a goat strapped around the bike. So, it’s a very decentralized value chain that Coca-Cola doesn’t even know where the bottles end up going to sometimes. And it’s fascinating how robust and resilient the value chain is because these glass bottles, they return. They go and they return to the origin.

So, the idea that was initially fitting medicines between the bottles in Coca-Cola crates, so the medicine can take a free ride. And as they started this intervention, they realized that they could build and piggyback on the entire distribution chain that makes fast moving consumer goods so successful. It’s not simply fitting medicines between bottles to take a free ride, you can actually use the same actors that distribute and sell Coca-Cola to do that for diarrhea treatments, which is over the counter.

There’s no prescription and it doesn’t require refrigeration. People who live in even extreme poverty could afford this medicine. So, that’s how they evolve the intervention. And the uptake of the medicine, in a very short period of time, we’re talking about six, seven years, increased the intervention districts from less than 1% to more than 50%, saving thousands of lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, there’s one right there, the piggyback, and so there, it’s quite literally distribution of something on top of something else. That’s really cool and beautiful to see the impact when that’s implemented.

Paulo Savaget
Pete, it doesn’t necessarily have to be distribution. You might piggyback, for example, in a marketing budget from another organization. For example, let me give an example that is not distribution-related. Airbnb, when it was very small, it started with this value proposition of matching people who had lodging to offer with people who needed lodging.

At that time, most people who didn’t want to stay at hotels and wanted these sorts of arrangements, would go to Craigslist, but Craigslist didn’t have a very good user experience because it had, literally, everything bad. It was sort of the yellow pages on the internet. So, when Airbnb started, they had a better platform with better user experience and offered a more customized service, including professional photography of the houses that would be listed.

The problem was that people didn’t know about Airbnb. So, what did they do, which was genius, this workaround that they pursued? They started piggybacking on their rival, on Craigslist, to increase the visibility for their listings. And how did they do that? Let’s say that I’m Airbnb and you are someone who want to list your house on Airbnb, and you are a first mover, you identified Airbnb pretty early and you post your listing to your own Airbnb. And then I would send you a message saying, “Hey, Pete, you listed your house here with us. And if we cross-post your listing on Craigslist, it’s going to increase your visibility because a lot of people use Craigslist, and it’s free, and we’re going to do that for you.”

And, of course, you would say, “Yes, go ahead,” because you have nothing to lose, not going to take any of your time or money, and it would increase your chances of getting your house rented. So, they did that, they cross-posted on Craigslist. And let’s say that someone else who’s going on Craigslist who did not know about the existence of Airbnb, and then they tried to find accommodation, then they see your listing that was much better, it looked better, it had professional photographs, once they click on it, they are redirected to Airbnb’s website.

So, what would happen to these people? They started going directly to Airbnb the next time they were searching for lodging. And that happened to a lot of people and it had an exponential impact as well because of word of mouth, they started talking about Airbnb. That was a way of scaling and increasing massively the user base of Airbnb without having to draw up diamond ads. They simply piggybacked on their rival. And when Craigslist realized that Airbnb was trying to poach their users, it was already late. Many users were already using Airbnb, and Airbnb took off.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, we got a piggyback there in the marketing domain, so beautiful. All right. Well, so we’ve got a couple fun examples of piggybacking, which is one of the four workarounds. Can we zoom out a bit and tell me what’s sort of the big idea or main thesis behind the book The Four Workarounds?

Paulo Savaget
The main idea is that we often find ourselves in complex situations, problems that you may not necessarily be able to solve, or that make you feel paralyzed, and workarounds can help you with that. They allow you to get things done in a very effective way but also in a resourceful way, getting quick results, and sometimes allowing you to make outsized impact as well.

So, workarounds are very accessible imperfection-loving methods that allow you to get things done in very different contexts. And I try to show that based on the knowledge and this research that I’ve done starting with computer hackers to see how they hack systems to make change so resourcefully, and sometimes with meager resources. They make these huge impacts in computer systems. And then with very scrappy organizations worldwide that were being hacky as they approached their own problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes sense as I imagine being in a computer situation, like, “Huh, how do we get this thing to go everywhere fast? Well, piggyback off something that’s already going everywhere fast. Okay, there’s a resourceful thing we just did there without a lot of developer time, without a lot of money. We made that happen.”

So, we talked about the piggyback. I understand there’s three other categories of workarounds in the book: the loophole, the roundabout, and the next best. Could you define and then give an example of each of these? For example, with the loophole, I was intrigued by the Brazilian ventilator case study. Can you lay it on us?

Paulo Savaget
Sure. The loophole consists of these approaches that reinterpret rules and that leverage ambiguity, and sometimes tap into different systems of rules that are not necessarily the most obvious but are applicable to your circumstance as well. In this case that came from Brazil was from a governor of the poorest state in Brazil, called Flavio Dino.

At the time, well, he’s a former judge, and he had a very good understanding of what the rules allow but also what they don’t, and he was an enemy of the then president Jair Bolsonaro, and he saw himself, as many other politicians at the time, struggling to get ventilators for the hospitals in the time that COVID hit in the very beginning. And it’s a state that is particularly challenged to offer healthcare because it’s one of the poorest ones.

So, he got some funds from local partners, many partners that were in the private sector, to buy ventilators but the problem was that every time they tried to purchase these ventilators something happened. So, once, for example, they tried to purchase ventilators, and because the ventilators were coming from China, and they had to stop somewhere to refuel because there’s no direct flight from China to Brazil, they first went to the United States, and because there was a shortage of ventilators, the ventilators were confiscated.

Then the second time they did that in Germany, and the same thing happened. The ventilators were confiscated in Germany. Then they thought, “We have to work around this,” and they worked around a series of obstacles to get these ventilators into his state, and they had to stack workaround after workaround.

So, the first one was that, because of the accountability and the bureaucracy from the state, it would take a lot of time to be able to procure directly these ventilators from the manufacturer in China. So, instead of getting the funds from the companies and purchasing through the government, the companies themselves were purchasing the ventilators and then donating to the state. So, that was a first way of speeding things up.

Then, because one of them was a supermarket, and the other one was a mining company, and both had operations in China and many suppliers in China, they had local connections, and these local connections went to these manufacturers, procured, and also waited until they actually got the ventilators.

Then they took a flight that wasn’t a commercial flight, as in the previous times that they failed. So, they got a plane to do this flight, and instead of going through more conventional routes, they stopped in Ethiopia to refuel because the chances of getting the ventilators confiscated in Ethiopia, or even monitored by local authorities, was not as high.

After refueling, they had to go to São Paulo. They couldn’t go directly to that state, so when they went there, the challenge was that all ventilators, at the time, were being controlled by the federal government, and redistributed by the federal government to the states. But these were being procured by a single state, the state of Maranhão. So, what did they do?

They went to São Paulo at the time in which they already had a second flight arranged in a way that they wouldn’t have to go through customs in São Paulo. They could do that in Maranhão because there was also custom services at the airport in Maranhão. But when they landed in Maranhão and everything was planned, it was a time that people who worked at customs were no longer working because it was after their work hours.

So, when it landed in Maranhão, the team of the governor took the ventilators to the hospital and signed the documents saying, “We’re going to come back here later to do the customs procedures, the necessary customs procedures that are our responsibility from the federal government.” So, they took the ventilators to the hospitals, they started being used immediately, and next day, they went there to file the paperwork for the federal government to do the customs procedure.

When the federal government realized, they were not happy because these ventilators were supposed to be taken by the federal government and redistributed, but they couldn’t go to the hospitals and take these ventilators that were already being used and already saving lives of people. They would never be able to do that. And when they tried to bring this case to court, they didn’t really have a strong case because the process was technically right, and it was a state of emergency as well, so they didn’t necessarily violate any rule.

They did the technical administrative procedure to get these ventilators through and to the hospitals in Maranhão but they found these ingenious ways of circumventing all these obstacles in the way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, keep them coming. Let’s hear about the roundabout.

Paulo Savaget
So, the first one, the piggyback, was about leveraging these different relationships, cross silos, finding unconventional pairings, like addressing lack of access in medicines with Coca-Cola’s value chain. And the second one, as I said, it’s about rules, reinterpreting or leveraging ambiguity, different sets of rules. The third one is about self-reinforcing behaviors.

Self-reinforcing behaviors, when I teach systems change here at Oxford, we describe them as positive feedback loops. It’s another terminology for that. That means that there are some behaviors that spiral out of control, and that normally they become…they’re seen as if they were inevitable. So, let me give a few examples, a very trivial one.

When I was a child and I have an older brother, I would fight against my brother very often, and I would flick him, he would slap me, I would punch him, and then, suddenly, like he was trying to choke me, and we were trying to kill each other. So, things spiral out of control. The same with a snowball, for example, that’s what we call self-reinforcing behavior.

And the workaround that I call roundabout offers the possibility of disturbing or disrupting a self-reinforcing behavior. A very critical example that I like to share is one that I noticed when I was in India. I was in Delhi, and I realized that some walls were drenched in urine because public urination is a very normalized behavior, and it’s a very gendered issue because women do not necessarily urinate in public spaces but men do.

And every time you talk to someone, and say, like, “Why is this issue still such a big problem here?” people would say, “Ah, it’s inevitable. It’s culture. It has existed for so long.” So, it’s this kind of self-reinforcing behavior that is very difficult to change, to tackle. Even the efforts, for example, to provide public toilet facilities have not necessarily generated the results that the policymakers expected.

So, this roundabout workaround that is so small but so genius was that some wall owners, who had their walls drenched in urine, started putting tiles of Hindu gods on the walls.

Pete Mockaitis
Tiles of what?

Paulo Savaget
Hindu gods, like Shiva.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Hindu gods. Okay.

Paulo Savaget
Yeah, because a man, regardless of their religion, in a country where the majority of the population is Hindu, they would not dare to urinate on a god. So, by putting these tiles of Hindu gods, they disturbed these self-reinforcing behaviors, and the walls that were once drenched in urine became cleaner, and cleaner, and cleaner, and they diverted the stream of urine to other places, not to their walls.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Paulo, this is fresh. We haven’t had a good urine example across 840 plus episodes, so I dig this. When I was reading through your book a bit, I don’t know if this example fits neatly into this categorization, but it kind of reminded me, like the reinforcing, the roundabout, when we invert it, we’d get a different result.

I remember one time I did some speeding. Naughty Pete. Drive safely, everybody. But I did some speeding, I was young and foolish, and I didn’t know that the speed limit changed quickly from a state route to, like, we’re inside a village. So, anyway, I got a ticket for big speeding, and they said, “Hey, if you go to this driver safety class, then we can reduce the fine and prevent it from being on your record and causing problems and insurance, whatever.” I was like, “Okay, yeah, let’s do that.”

And I thought I was so brilliant; this state police officer was teaching this class on safe driving that nobody wanted to be at. All of us just wanted to just, like, tuned out but that doesn’t make for a great educational environment in which you can really learn and retain things. So, he did what I think – Paulo, you tell me, this might be a roundabout. He ingeniously said, “Okay, every time you answer a question, or you contribute, I want to make a tally mark on this chalkboard, and that represents one minute that you get to leave earlier.”

So, the class was maybe four hours, I don’t know. And so then, suddenly the incentives were turned around, like, “Oh, well, we would like to leave sooner, and even though this is boring, we can achieve the objective of leaving sooner by participating.” And, sure enough, it made for a pretty engaging class on safe driving that none of us wanted to be at because he inverted our incentives on us.

Paulo Savaget
Exactly. That’s a great example that I hadn’t heard before, and it reminded me of an example that I didn’t include in the book but it’s kind of similar to what you said, also about speeding in Sweden, that they created this policy that they took the fines from people who were speeding, and created a lottery for people who did not speed.

So, let’s say that you didn’t get a fine that month, you would be joining the lottery, like you might make some money out of this. But, of course, we like the gamification aspect of this. We like lottery. We like the thrill. So, a lot of people stopped speeding, not because they didn’t want to pay the fine but because they wanted to be part of the lottery.

And that’s similar to what you’re saying, you change the incentive. You turn something negative into something positive. Or, the language of many economists, it would be turning the sticks into carrots, the idea of carrots and sticks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, let’s hear about the fourth workaround here, the next best. You got a cool drone example. Could you share that?

Paulo Savaget
Of course, yeah. So, the next best is about repurposing resources or recombining them in ways that are unconventional and beyond the original design of these resources. And resources can be tangible or intangible. The drone example is from an organization called Zipline. As you know, there’s a lot of expectations about drones as technologies.

Perhaps the company Amazon will soon be delivering your products, Amazon Prime, Next Day with drones in New York, like going in San Francisco, but the reality is that it’s not viable yet. So, the many organizations that are interested in investing in drone delivery in places, where at places that are not as busy, and in a way that they can build capabilities, they can develop themselves, they can patent, and then later have this competitive advantage when a drone becomes viable in many places.

So, these organizations, I thought it was genius how they used drones to forge a hand in this game, and they used drones in Rwanda. Also, a case about the last mile, these very remote regions where healthcare is very difficult to get, and they deliver to remote regions, blood for blood transfusions, because blood is very challenging to deliver or to store in remote regions with very poor electricity and healthcare facilities but they are needed urgently, like you don’t have a lot of time, it cannot wait much if you need a blood transfusion.

So, they started shipping from a central facility in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, blood to these many rural regions that are so hard to reach via roads or normal more conventional transportation methods. And this has been extremely successful and has scaled to other places as well. And as they did this, they created patents, they understood better how to operate drones, to make deliveries with drones, and they built all these skill and knowledge while saving lives and contributing a lot to healthcare in Rwanda.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful, Paulo. So, we got a nice little rundown of these four workarounds. I’m curious, is there a type or category of problem or trigger that gets you thinking, since you know this stuff really well, “Ah, there’s probably one of the four workarounds I can use here.” What are some of those triggers or signals?

Paulo Savaget
They boil down to the core attributes. If there’s something that you think is paralyzing you because it’s a very normalized behavior, go with the roundabout. If there’s a rule, for example, that is constraining you, a legislation, a customary rule, something that is habit, for example, or something that is in the constitution but you think is unfair, go with the loophole.

If you have these possibilities of crossing boundaries and these lines that managers often draw, but they might be arbitrary. We don’t have to address healthcare problems only with the methods from healthcare. We can use fast moving consumer goods to deliver medicines to remote regions. That’s a good way of thinking of a piggyback, how you benefit or leverage the success of orders for your benefit as well.

And if you have resources at your disposal, and that you can repurpose or combine them in different ways beyond the original functions or the most conventional ways of using them, then go with the next best.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. All right. Well, let me just put you on the spot and throw some problems on you that I hear from listeners frequently. One, “I’m overwhelmed by too many projects, responsibilities, action items, emails, meetings.” How can we work around some of that?

Paulo Savaget
That’s great. I also face similar challenges and I try to constantly work around some of them. The idea of working around requires adaptation, flexibility, and it is imperfection learning as well. Like, you do something that is good enough. So, when you start with pursuing workarounds, it conduces to planning less and being more adaptive. It’s more pragmatic. It’s more practical. It’s less about long-term changes and behaviors.

Let me give an example of something that I’ve done that was related to sending emails that I think might resonate with some of our listeners. A long time ago, before I started studying workarounds, I was an intern and I had a boss who, very erratically, answered emails. And, of course, I was frustrated because I wanted my emails to be answered. Then I started talking to other people who worked with him, and I realized that he had a certain pattern of email answering that he normally started from the top of his emails, and he started answering emails very early in the morning because he was an early bird.

So, let’s say he woke up at, like, 5:00 a.m., and then he would answer emails for, like, two hours starting from the top. I infer that based on conversations and from the many emails I had sent him that were answered or not. So, what I started doing, I programmed my emails to be sent in the wee hours of the morning.

So, let’s say that I wrote the email at 6:00 p.m., I would program that email to be sent at, like, 3:47 a.m. because then it would go to the top of his pile of emails. And that increased a lot the rate of response for all these emails that I wanted to get answered. That was a workaround in our workplace that might…I still haven’t told that former boss what I’ve done.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, he’s not listening. And just to reinforce the learning, I guess we might call that a piggyback, in that you are piggybacking your way into the golden timeframe via simple software a bit. Or, what category would you put on that?

Paulo Savaget
I would actually consider that a next best because the next best is about resources and repurposing resources. I thought of emails and use them in different ways to communicate and identify the times that work best for my emails to be sent. We don’t normally think of the times that your email will be sent, and that’s how I repurposed, yeah, the ways I communicated. So, I would call it a next best.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s hear another one. This might be tricky when it’s about interpersonal relations. Like, let’s say someone says, “My boss, or my key colleague, I got to work with is just a jerk. They’re engaged in some toxic and narcissistic behaviors, and it is just tough being around them.” Any clever workarounds that can be put to this thorny interpersonal stuff?

Paulo Savaget
Definitely. One of the chapters in my book describes how you can pursue workarounds in your organization. And I try to challenge a little bit this idea that collaboration is necessarily beneficial or better in every circumstance. Sometimes you will face people that are toxic, that you don’t want to work with, or that might be too slow or not contributing much to your projects.

So, many of the cases and the ways that I describe workarounds is not about pleasing people. It’s about getting things done, and things that will benefit you or whichever goals you have in mind. Let me give an example that I covered. It’s a roundabout workaround.

In many organizations, the bosses will not necessarily allow employees to pursue their own innovative projects because it might not be the priority for the organization, it might not align with the goals or priorities of the organization. So, what do many employees do? It’s what is called boot lagging by innovation management scholars and has resulted into some of our most beloved projects, like the aspirin, or blue LED lights, or large screens by HP.

And the idea is that instead of getting the support or endorsement from bosses, they work around these direct orders, sometimes simply ignoring rules, sometimes actually ignoring what bosses said, so they can develop the innovative projects when the idea is still very rough in the beginning of innovations. It’s what we call sometimes hopeful monstrosities. They are hopeful but they are monstrous. They might not align. You don’t really know necessarily how it’s going to turn out to look like.

And then by working around direct orders, people can invest in these ideas, going underground, and develop the projects until the moment is right to communicate to others in the company. So, you pretty much buy time while developing your solution, your product, or technology. And once that becomes more viable and more attractive, then you make it public and you go to your bosses, and that will be a much better time for presenting that idea instead of in the early stages when the idea is still very crude.

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

Paulo Savaget
No, I think we’re good to shift.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Let’s hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Paulo Savaget
That’s very difficult for a nerd like myself who works with so many quotes. But one that I use a lot is from this organization called Alight in Zambia and they describe how they embrace complexity, and instead of building riverbeds if there’s water flowing, you go with the water. You try to embrace those flows and make use of what is already there instead of trying to create things that might not be viable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Paulo Savaget
Wow, that’s also a very difficult for a nerd like myself. The many books that I really enjoy in business, for example, some of the most recent ones that I’ve read includes Originals by Adam Grant that is very nicely written. I really enjoy the books by Malcolm Gladwell, for example.

And there’s a book by Caroline Criado-Perez called Invisible Women that is fascinating as well, describing how gender inequality impacts data, and how this data that we pretty much collect only from men impact the products we use and the services we have available to us as well.

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

Paulo Savaget
Well, l would say that my favorite tool or technology is a coffee machine because I need a lot of coffee. As a Brazilian, I’m constantly caffeinated. And in order to also get things done, I need to get a lot of coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit, something you do to be awesome at your job?

Paulo Savaget
I’m a bit hyperactive so I need to exercise very often, and it also helps me focus. So, I try to exercise every day. I swim, cycle, play tennis, do many different kinds of sports.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share, something that really seems to connect and resonate with folks when they’re talking about your stuff, they quote back to you often? Or, do you have any quotable Paulo original gems that folks, they’re Kindle book highlighting, they’re retweeting, they’re saying, “Man, when you said this, that really stuck with me.”

Paulo Savaget
One of the quotes that I have in the book that a lot of people enjoy, and I’ve heard many comments about, that was about deviants, that I said that deviants are frowned upon but I think we don’t deviate enough. And then I try to bake a case about how deviants is important as means of challenging the status quo, and how it’s different from disobedience.

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

Paulo Savaget
I would say reach out. I’m always very happy to talk and exchange. I really enjoy learning about workarounds that people have pursued after being exposed to my work or before as well, that they hadn’t really given much thought about. And, of course, my website and the profile that I have available on the Oxford website.

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

Paulo Savaget
I would say working with others can be much better and much more fruitful but sometimes we got to be adaptive and make sure that we don’t necessarily go for the people-pleasing solutions, that we can think of different ways of addressing our problems, and that workarounds might help you with that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paulo, this has been a treat. I wish much fun and many good workarounds.

Paulo Savaget
Thank you very much. I hope you’re going to also face with many workarounds.

Feb 20
0

841: How to Get Creative on Demand with Baronfig’s Joey Cofone

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Joey Cofone says: "Creativity is not about creating. It is about combining."

Joey Cofone shares what it really means to be creative and why everyone can be creative in any role.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why creativity isn’t just for the “creatives”.
  2. Why we shouldn’t shy away from our fears.
  3. How to come up with ideas on the spot.

About Joey

Joey Cofone is the Founder & CEO of Baronfig, an award-winning designer and entrepreneur, and author of The Laws of Creativity.

Joey has designed and art directed over 100 products from zero to launch. His work has been featured in Fast Company, Bloomberg, New York Magazine, Newsweek, Bon Appétit, Quartz, Mashable, Print, and more. Joey was named a New Visual Artist and, separately, Wunderkind designer, by Print magazine. He is also a 1st place winner of the American Institute of Graphic Arts design competition, Command X.

Joey strives to make work that appeals to curious minds—work that’s beautiful, smart, and communicative. He believes that design is the least of a designer’s worries, that story is at the heart of all tasks, and jumping off cliffs is the only way to grow.

He lives in New York City with his wife, Ariana, and his dog (and writing buddy), Luigi.

Resources Mentioned

Joey Cofone Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Joey, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Joey Cofone
Hello. Hello. I am psyched.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m psyched too. I want to know so much about your insights, creativity, Baron Fig. I have one of your notebooks on my desk.

Joey Cofone
Surprise.

Pete Mockaitis
It was there before I knew I was talking to you.

Joey Cofone
Watching it the whole time.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I wanted to ask you about your hobby of playing video games but then I learned that you almost died in Tennessee, so I think we need to hear both of these tales. What’s the story here?

Joey Cofone
I did almost die in Tennessee. We discovered this before recording when I said, “Where are you?” and you said, “Tennessee,” and I said, “I almost died there.” And that is because I went hiking the Appalachian Trail when I was 20 maybe, 21. I was in phenomenal shape. I’m not in bad shape now but I was in killer shape then.

And so, it was just me and a buddy, went on the mountain, not underprepared. I will say we did our homework. However, we missed a spring, did not get water, the sun started going down, we became disoriented mentally and then, of course, disoriented because we couldn’t see anything, started not making sense, and we literally had to hang on to each other.

Two very large dudes, walking hand in hand like we were walking down the aisle, all the way through the mountains until we found water. And then we had to sit there and watch it boil before we could drink it. It took, like, 30 minutes to boil this on this little tiny thing. Anyway, I did almost die because I was about to lie down and give up.

And my friend, who is now the COO of Baron Fig, Jay, was there to give me his last little bit of water, and say, “We got to keep going, man.” So, I almost died in Tennessee, but here I am today with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, what a guy.

Joey Cofone
He did. It was his last sip of water and he gave it to me.

Pete Mockaitis
That is beautiful.

Joey Cofone
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also thinking about Jeff Boyles, how you could’ve cut that 30 minutes way down.

Joey Cofone
Oh, man. You talk about waiting for a pot to boil, man, I thought it was a lifetime, and then it was the best-tasting water I had ever had in my life even though it was scalding hot.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s good stuff. Good stuff.

Joey Cofone
Yeah, it was good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad you’re alive and made it out of Tennessee.

Joey Cofone
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And I also wanted to hear about you and video games. Some say they’re a waste of time. You, well, I want to know what you think, but that’s what you like to do, and you are a thought leader in the realm of creativity. So, I’d like to guess that there’s some sort of a connection between video games and creativity, but you tell me.

Joey Cofone
Sure. I would consider myself a thought leader in video games, as a consumer. I’ve been talking about video games and pro video games since I started Baron Fig, and have been interviewed all over the place, and that’s about just over a decade now. So, gaming has become significantly more mainstream in that time but, in my lifetime certainly, gaming has been viewed as a nerdy guy who sits in his parents’ basement type of activity for quite a long time. And only in the last, let’s say, five-ish, seven years has it become really, really mainstream, so I’m glad about that.

I personally prefer XBOX but I’ve owned them, played them all, and I think what’s beautiful about games is that it is, to me, and I’m going to say this, I think it is – ooh, it’s going to hurt too because this is going to come hard – but I believe it is one of the pinnacles of creative expression. And I say that because in a video game you have music, you have visual art, you have programming, you have storytelling, you have a host of other practices, cinematography, all coming together to not only tell you a story like a movie would or a book would, but put you in the center of it.

So, yeah, I love gaming. And if you’re going to sit in front of the TV, you might as well interact with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I don’t find that statement to be controversial to me at all. Once, I took a look at what’s really going on in terms of was it the Unreal engine or some of the cutting-edge stuff, it is spectacular what is now possible visually. And then I saw, in the pandemic, I was watching, this game is called “Detroit: Become Human” which is fascinating. Fascinating stories.

And I was just watching the game play because I didn’t have my console yet and I was sick with COVID and nothing else to do. And then I saw some of the making of it, and it was nuts. This composer was just talking about how he invented new instruments in order to get the sounds he was going for, for each of the key characters, to really capture the emotional essence. And it’s, like, wow, that is hardcore.

And those millions of dollars spread across a huge staff really is exceptional in terms of many layers of creativity. So, yeah, that makes sense to me.

All right, we’re talking about creativity. You’ve learned a whole lot about it in your years in your career. Can you share with us any particularly surprising, counterintuitive, extra-fascinating discoveries you’ve made about creativity during this time?

Joey Cofone
Oh, my goodness. It is a boatload or, I should say, a book-load, there are so many. I can start with one of the most profound things that I discovered. Before that, let me tell you why I think creativity is so radically important and where it originated for me.

In the introduction to my book, I explained where creativity entered my life. So, it was first grade, seven years old. I walked into the classroom thinking it’s just any other day. Teacher hands out a worksheet. It has a cartoon worm on it. All you got to do is color it, cut it out, put it on the board. No problem, like every other Monday. But this Monday was different because I decided I wanted to have the best worm in the class. So, I get down, I put my arm around my paper, I take out my big-ass box of crayons, and I go to town. And I am thinking, “This is the greatest creation of all time.”

I cut out my worm, I walk up to the board, and I stopped dead in my tracks because, as I look there, on the board, all the other students who have put theirs up, even though it’s different, they color little dots here, maybe one is a little more red, a little more blue, they all feel the same. And so, now I’m like, “I can’t put my…” Little Joey is like, “There’s no way I’m putting my worm on this board. I cannot be one of many.”

And I don’t know where that came from that day but I went back to my desk, and I sat down, and I was about to cry. And I had my head in my hands, I was hiding because I didn’t want anyone to see how upset I was. When I looked down, and what do I see, but the shards of paper that I had cut out the worm. So, I’m taking a look this, crying, and a lightbulb ticks, and I realized I can use them.

So, I draw a microphone, a boombox, and a necklace, cut them out, put them on the worm, put that on the board. Now, the whole class walks up, the teacher gets up behind me, the assistant teacher comes up, and everybody is looking at my worm, and they go, “This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen,” and they’re all shocked.

It was in that moment that I became addicted to creativity. Literally, that feeling, I just wanted it all the time throughout my life. And so, now as I got older and I started Baron Fig and we made all this cool stuff, and then it became time to write a book, and I thought to myself, “You know what, that’s my personal experience. But how can I inject something really profound and extremely objective into the book?”

And so, I discovered what became the cornerstone of my desire to pursue this, which is NASA did a study that found that 98% of five-year-olds are creative geniuses. Okay, 98%. Take a guess what percent it goes down to by the time we hit adulthood.

Pete Mockaitis
Two percent.

Joey Cofone
Two percent. Nailed it.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent.

Joey Cofone
Somebody did his homework. And so, I realized that, “Wow, this is not an accident.” We are systemically doing a very good job at reducing creativity where it goes from 98% to 2%. And so, now I have my experiences, I have a reason to write this book, put them together, and here we are. And so, that was the very first thing that I encountered about creativity that I thought was incredibly interesting and profound.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so creativity, it seems like a cool good thing. Like, sure, yeah, better be creative than not creative. I’d love to get your hot take in terms of, for your average professional who’s interested in being more awesome at their job, let’s say they would assert, “You know, I’m not really in a creative role. I don’t sort of invent new stuff. I don’t have to come up with catchy ad campaigns. I just manage projects and interact with folks and go to meetings, and make my PowerPoints and do my analyses, and keep things humming along, and, hopefully, get some improvements in our operations here and there.” What’s the case for why creativity matters to such a person?

Joey Cofone
Well, for two reasons. Number one, everything you mentioned actually requires creativity.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Joey Cofone
The idea that creatives are people who make visual pictures or music or something is a common belief but is totally absurd. Creativity is simply the practice of ideas. And when you take and use your ideas, it’s self-expression. So, anytime you’re working on a spreadsheet, or you have to give a presentation, or you have to do a little project management, you are exercising your creativity. This is not a robot. This is not an automaton. You actually have to think about it and come up with a result, and that’s creativity. It doesn’t have to be some grand expression of it.

Every day, we have over 6,000 thoughts, for example, and the idea is that if you are…How do I say this in a way that doesn’t sound silly? If you are an intrepid person, which I hope you are, working on those 6,000 thoughts to make them even better is not only a good idea, it’s kind of a no-brainer to me because, to answer your second reason, is because, as an adult, it is proven that you are, number one, more happy if you involve creative exercises in your work, and, number two, you make more money. Like, statistically, you make 13% more than people who do not integrate creativity. And that’s just for adults.

Organizations, because I want to tie this all together, organizations who integrate creativity are more productive and they have higher revenue growth. So, as an individual and as a group, it is a no-brainer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s say we say, “Ooh, I’d like to be in the integrate creativity camp, and see that 13% pay bump and more cool benefits,” can you paint a picture for what that looks like during the course of my work day of, “I’m a person who is integrating creativity” versus “I’m a person who is not integrating creativity”?

Joey Cofone
Yeah, it depends on what it is you do, and what it is you feel challenged by in your experience. For example, I’m a designer so that’s a little bit more obvious, but I don’t do design things all day. The last three weeks, for example, I set up a really complex notion series of documents that basically tracks out the company’s operating and how everybody is related to the projects that are going on. No one would look at that and go, “That’s some traditional creative stuff, bro.”

But it is, of course, creative because you have to problem-solve. So, day to day, it depends what you’re doing. But if you are taking in inputs and then assessing an optimal way to execute something, that’s creativity. It doesn’t have to be any more complex than that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s what integrating creativity looks like, the 13% bump up camp. And then how does one live their work day without integrating creativity?

Joey Cofone
That’s a good point. It’s when you just take what’s given to you and you don’t do anything with it. You just are literally, as someone would call it, a paper-pusher, or you are not trying to make this better, you are not trying to improve in any way upon the processes or the deliverables or the requests that are handed to you. You simply process as if you were a fax machine or a typewriter or something. You get an input and you put an output. The only thing you’re there for is to execute it rather than assess and optimize and then execute.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess I’m thinking about some roles…it’s funny, these are the very jobs I don’t like in terms of I have a spreadsheet of somebody’s hours, and I need to turn that into an invoice to say to somebody, “Pay me. Okay, so there’s, I guess I have to copy, paste, double-check, email.” Okay. Although, I could certainly integrate some creativity there in terms of, “Surely there’s a way I can get some automation going with this.”

Joey Cofone
I was just going to say that.

Pete Mockaitis
“Maybe I can do a research if there’s a software program that can do this, or a little bit of Visual Basic replications, VBA code to accelerate this. Do I want to use a sort or do I want to use a filter in terms of amending these spreadsheets?”

Joey Cofone
Precisely. And now you’re getting it because when you say it that way, it is a no-brainer, of course, that folks who do the latter, and say, “How can I automate this, or optimize it, or change it in a way where it actually takes work later even if it’s a little bit more work now?” they get paid more. It’s obvious. But, believe it or not, a lot of people don’t do it. The majority, unfortunately.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, I can’t believe it. Ooh, geez, when you say majority, it sounds like you’ve got some hard data. Bring it, Joey, what’s the state of the world in terms of folks integrating creativity?

Joey Cofone
I mean, 98% of folks don’t. That’s where we’re at.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, they’re not geniuses according to the NASA situation.

Joey Cofone
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you mentioned the part about us systematically crushing the creativity and folks just they age. Do you have any idea for what are some of the drivers, the forces, the principles behind that?

Joey Cofone
Yeah, I do. It’s unfortunately the way we educate our youth is the systematic destruction of creativity. So, it is no wonder that, at five years old you peak, and then you go down. And five years old is when you start school. There are three reasons, primarily, that creativity decreases, things that we teach our kids.

First is that authority, like teachers, principals, deans, and so on, that they’re unquestionable. Well, that’s just not true because those people weren’t always in charge. There are other folks in charge, and those people had to supplant those folks, and so on and so forth. And so, it teaches us that you have to do number two, which is man-made rules have to be followed to a fault. And that means that whatever someone says goes, and you are taught not to question it.

And then the third and the most damaging of all is that the end is visible from the start, Pete. And this is terrible that we teach our kids this, but we teach the end is visible from the start. Now I’ll bring that down to earth. When you are given a book in third grade, and you have to read, I don’t know, Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. And then you know, in two weeks, on Friday, you have to hand in a five-page paper about the plot and my thoughts, including a synopsis.

Cool. Okay. Well, I know everything I have to do before I do anything. Same thing in math, “Solve these ten proofs, hand them in.” Same thing in science, “Read this chapter and build a volcano.” Whatever it is, we are always taught to know the end before we start. Then we go to work, and then in work, our bosses tell us what to do and lay it out so that we know what we have to do before we start.

The problem is we are never taught to deal with the unknown. We are never taught to start without knowing where it could end up. And because of that, people have, unfortunately, more anxiety than ever before, and can’t deal with the curve balls of life. And that’s just a metaphor for creativity, was to make something you have to not know exactly where you’ll end up.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, this anxiety, can you unpack that mechanism or link there? Because we see the end before we start, we are more anxious…

Joey Cofone
Because we don’t, yeah. So, essentially, the modern society right now – what did we have – we had the agricultural age that lasted a long time. Then we had, fast-forward to the industrial age, the information age. Those happened fairly quickly. However, our human instincts, our programming, lags behind by tens of thousands of years. We don’t just evolve, unfortunately, as fast as society changes.

So, what happened back in the day is that when you had fear, ten thousand years ago, 20,000 years ago, that was because it was your body and your instincts making you move away from something that could kill you, the unknown, “Don’t go into that cave because you could die. Don’t go into this unknown land because we don’t know who’s there and defending it.” Fear was a tool. We still have fear but we don’t have life-threatening experiences anymore.

So, this fear, that is a natural part of our programming, is making us move away from things it thinks we can die. In reality, we cannot die in that regard. What happens nowadays is, instead of death, it’s just your ego is bruised, or you’re embarrassed, or you screw up. And so, because of that, this fear that is still a part of our lives, in this totally evolving social structure and the way we go about doing things nowadays, we still feel fear.

And that leads to a ton of anxiety because we have fears, “But I don’t know what to do with them. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” And then we’re taught not to know what the unknown is. And so, when you combine all that, it’s a beautiful recipe for a ton of anxiety.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So, in a world full of unknowns, when we’ve only been trained and built up our capabilities in a world where the outcome is known in advance, we are sort of ill-equipped for the realities that we are in.

Joey Cofone
Exactly. And then you combine that with the fact that our instinctual reaction, fear reaction, is not really serving us the way it used to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. Well, let’s get some more creativity flowing. I’m curious, when you mentioned assigning, I think about work in a way that the end is not known before you start, with the difference when you’re making a request of someone, or of yourself, instead of, “I want to find a specific app that does thing,” so we’ve sort of narrowed it to we’re looking for a software application, to, “I need to find a solution which will enable me to pull off this outcome.” Is that sort of the idea, is we keep it open-ended, like, “It could look like any number of things that delivers the goods”?

Joey Cofone
Sure. You’re even already moving probably too far down the line in many cases, where someone comes up to a problem that they haven’t encountered before, and they haven’t even sussed out that they need to find a piece of software to solve it. It is just a bit of a shock and an anxiety-inducing moment, and that’s where we get fear.

And so, actually, fear nowadays is a positive rather than a negative. Thousands of years ago, fear was something that said, “Danger! Danger! Don’t go that direction.” Today, fear, if you are tuned to it, is a, “Hey, man, go in that direction.” Because you’re afraid, you have identified a boundary, “If you go in that direction, you’re able to break a boundary.” Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Joey Cofone
When I was, I think it was 13 years old, I was sitting in a parking lot, McDonald’s, with my uncle, and we always used to go in together, and have a Big Mac each, and it was a wonderful time. On this particular day, Uncle Ralph decides, “Joey is going in alone.” And I said, “I can’t do it.” And he said, “What do you mean you can’t do it? It’s right there. Just walk in. Order it. You’re a big kid.” I was six foot.

And I said, “I’m afraid.” And I was honest with my uncle. And he grabbed me by the shoulder, and he looked me dead in the eye, and he said, “Because you are afraid, now you must do it.” And sure enough, I went in and I did it, and I never forgot that. And it took me a long time to parse what he meant, but it meant that my fear was showing me a limitation, and when I was able to overcome it, I was able to expand the boundaries of my capabilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good stuff. And I don’t think it’s that uncommon. I remember, in high school, there would be times when you meet a group of people, it was like, “Oh, should we order pizza?” And maybe a third of the people in the group were genuinely uncomfortable picking up the phone to call the place to order the pizza. You don’t even have to look at them in the eye. And I found that it’s probably worse now, I’m guessing, in the year 2023, as compared to back in the day for me.

Joey Cofone
Pete, it is bad now. It is bad now. I don’t want to call anyone out but I have experienced people who are close to our age who still won’t pick up the phone and make a call for something simple. Just like saying, “Hey, what time are you guys open to?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Maybe this is why DoorDash is really doing so well because you don’t have to interact with a human but you still get to eat what you want without moving. It’s a winning offer. All right. Well, let’s talk about this book here, The Laws of Creativity: Unlock Your Originality and Awaken Your Creative Genius.

You got 37 of these laws. Can you list some of them, maybe the top three, four, five that you think are just transformational for a professional who wants to be more awesome at their job, things you can do that don’t take a whole lot of time, effort, energy, pain, and sacrifice, and yet liberate a lot of good creative juiciness?

Joey Cofone
Oh, sure. I can name 37 of them that are really damn good but, since you’re limiting me to a few, I will, I suppose, choose. I’ll tell you right now that Chapter One: Be weird, it’s the law of expression. And it is chapter one for a reason. And it is simply stated, embrace the parts of you that’s called weird. Don’t hide what makes you different. Allow them to flow to the top and be seen.

Now, what does that mean, Joey? That means that, you know how when you grow up, and your parents tell you that you’re really a unique butterfly. And then you get a little older and you realize everybody tells their parents that, and then you don’t feel so unique when you have the same problems and the same challenges that everyone feels, and you kind of feel like you’re not unique at all. Well, actually, you are incredibly unique. They were right.

As what my geometry teacher in high school, Mr. Allen, would say, “Right answer, wrong solution.” They were just saying it because it’s an encouraging thing to say, but, actually, you are incredibly unique. So, Pete, give me three interests that you have. Give me a favorite book, a favorite movie, a favorite video game, or just a…Now, if I say favorite, it might be too much, so just name one you like of each of those three things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, sure thing. For a book, well, right now I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which is thrilling.

Joey Cofone
So am I.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Joey Cofone
How about that? That is wild. That is the book I’m reading.

Pete Mockaitis
I encountered it in an episode of “Wishbone,” the dog, if you watched that show. When I was 12 years old or so. I was like, “Well, that book is awesome.” And so, now, decades later, I was like, “Maybe I’ll go ahead and read that.” And so, that’s fun, about halfway through. No spoilers. So, that’s cool. For a game, boy, from my childhood, “Master of Orion.” You conquer the galaxy. Very strategic kind of form, the way I think, actually. So, we had book, game. And what else?

Joey Cofone
I would say movie.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s go with Batman, “The Dark Knight.”

Joey Cofone
Ooh, okay. So, we have “The Count of Monte Cristo.” What was the second one?

Pete Mockaitis
“Master of Orion.”

Joey Cofone
“Master of Orion.” I never heard of that one, man. “Master of Orion.” I’m writing these down. Good stuff. And then “The Dark Knight.” Okay. Cool. So, these are three things that you like. And now you have a lot of interests, we’re just going to take three. And let’s say, in each of those categories, we limit it to a thousand.

There are, just in those things, there is a billion permutations, okay? If there’s a thousand options of each. That means that, right away, if you can combine “The Count of Monte Cristo,” the “Master of Orion,” and “The Dark Knight” into something you create as really strong influences, you go from one in eight billion to one in one billion, okay? To one in eight, I’m sorry. My wife always says…

Pete Mockaitis
So, eight humans on the planet who…

Joey Cofone
That have this combination. You go from, I’m sorry, one in eight billion, to one in eight. Pretty interesting. Now, let’s add a fourth thing. Let’s say, what’s a TV show you like?

Pete Mockaitis
“Breaking Bad.”

Joey Cofone
“Breaking Bad.” Walter White.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it kind of dark, I think. It’s like I’m really a friendly person.

Joey Cofone
Oh, all these are like dark. Okay, so with the fourth added, permutations go up into trillion, and now you have 127 times the population of earth. When you put those four things into what you do, you become incredibly unique, and you’re way more than just four things, and there’s way more than just a thousand options. So, you can imagine the actual permutations, and when you get the stuff you like into what you’re doing, it is incredibly unique.

So, let’s take me, for example. I really like philosophy, I really like writing, and I really like the blank page. So, what did I do? I took philosophy, I took writing, and I added narrative, and the blank page, aka notebooks, and I combined those into a brand called Baron Fig that didn’t do notebooks the way I did before, and put it on Kickstarter, looking for 15Gs. We did $168,000 in 30 days, and this was 10 years ago before Kickstarter was a big deal, and that is rise and fall. And people loved it.

And to this day now, Baron Fig has, from that one product that we started with, the notebook, we now have made over 115 products, we ship in 95 countries, we have hundreds of thousands of customers, and we partner with incredible people like Netflix, James Clear, Roxane Gay to make wonderful things. And it is because I started by taking the things that I really liked and figuring out a way how to meld them together.

And anybody could do that, and you could do it on a big scale, like creating a company, you can do it on a small scale, like creating a presentation. But when you put yourself into your things, and as cliché as it sounds, when you be yourself, it becomes incredibly unique.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that makes sense mathematically. And I guess the holdup is just that people feel uncomfortable being weird, they think they’re going to get a social reprisal of some sort, like, “Ugh, okay.”

Joey Cofone
Pete, well said, dude. Well said. That is the chapter one, is that the problem is weird, the word itself has been weaponized. When we think about it, you are in grammar school, and, “Hey, don’t eat with the weird kid,” or you’re at work, “Don’t have lunch with the weird person.” “Okay, cool.” It’s literally weaponized and it ostracizes the folks in our bubble, in our everyday life, who are different than the rest. And the message it’s saying, the subtext is, “Be like us and conform.”

Now, here’s the really crazy thing though, and this is why the chapter is titled “Be weird” is because inside our bubbles, we force everybody to conform. However, outside of our bubbles, we absolutely celebrate and worship weird people. And I’m going to name a few people, these are not necessarily that I worship or care about but they’re good examples. Lady Gaga, weird, not in my bubble. We love her. Johnny Depp, weird dude. Jack Sparrow, super weird. Freaking love that. Elon Musk, Kanye West, so on and so forth. We celebrate weirdness as long as it’s not in my bubble. And so, when I say…

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re making me uncomfortable now that I have to live within you, but you’re being amazing in this in  the world that I’m enjoying consuming from afar.”

Joey Cofone
Right. So, I’ll end this by saying those folks inside our bubble that people are going, “Hey, don’t sit with that weird guy. Don’t talk to that weird guy,” what I see is the bravest person in the room because they’re the ones, despite being ostracized, are letting themselves be themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very beautiful. And I do love reading about the weird things that folks do. I heard Bill Gates when he was a youngster, he’d just be in his room for a long, long time. His mom would say, “Oh, Billy,” I don’t know what she called him. Let’s pretend it’s Billy, “Oh, Billy, can you come on down,” and he’d say, “Mom, I’m trying to think,” like he’s just faking for a long time. He still does. He thinks weeks or think weekends, where, “I’m just going to be completely silent and read a bunch of things that are stimulating and useful for my creativity.”

Or, the dude. Hey, you’ve been a game guy. This guy in Japan, I forgot his name, he is one of the geniuses behind Mario and many other super franchises.

Joey Cofone
Miyamoto.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go. Apparently, he just carries around with him a tape measure, and has people guess the length of different objects, he’ll say, “Hey, how long do you think this is?” Like, “I don’t know, seven inches.” They probably use metric over there, centimeters. And so, you check it out, and you thought, “Boy, that’s weird.” And yet there is a little bit of a connection, it becomes like, “Oh, well, so part of your whole genius is representing things in a confined space, the dimensions of a screen or a video game.”

And so, that kind of fits that, it goes down like that. So, it is really fun for me to see the weird things people do. One weird thing I do…Look at you, Joey, you’re already liberating me.

Joey Cofone
Go for it. Let your weird out.

Pete Mockaitis
As soon as I will think of just the most wildly inappropriate thing to say or do in a given situation…

Joey Cofone
And see how people react?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And, in a way, that really does support my strengths in terms of I am pretty good at formulating words that work and people respond to because I’m also good at identifying the exact wrong thing to say. But someone walks in the steam room, I don’t know, this is weird. Let’s say I’m in a sauna or steam room, and so when I’m about ready to get out, if someone just gets in, and I think, “I don’t want to get out immediately because I don’t want to hurt their feelings.” I guess I’m really considerate, not that they care. But the weird thing I’ll do is I’ll think of the exact opposite of that.

Joey Cofone
You scoot next to him?

Pete Mockaitis
And, like, they walk in, and I just sigh, and say, “You know what, F this. I’m out of here.” So, that’s weird and ridiculous.

Joey Cofone
That is ridiculous. I like it.

Pete Mockaitis
But in doing this all of the time, one, it keeps me amused and lighthearted and entertained, but, two, it does kind of hone one of my strengths, which is communicating stuff to folks in a way that’s effective, in terms of I’m effectively trying to learn something with interview questions or I’m effectively trying to persuade, and that’s just, I think it’s funny. Like, the weirdness often, but not always, has relationship or overlap into strengths, genius, giftedness.

Joey Cofone
It does. It does. I like to acronym things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, let’s do it.

Joey Cofone
If you’re like, “Hey, I’m going to go to the store,” I’ll be like, “H-I-G-T-G-T-S,” and I try to do it as fast as I can, and I have no idea why, but I used to be really good when I was a kid. I would go to bed, acronym-ing every sentence I did. And, lo and behold, like I became an English major, and then I wrote a book, and I think it all kind of ties together the ability to dance around words and letters, and be comfortable with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. Well, that’s just one law, be weird.

Joey Cofone
Yeah, let’s do another one. I think there’s a powerful one that people are always like, “Man, that makes so much sense.” So, creativity, what is the…? I forget, what are they called? What is the base word of creativity?

Pete Mockaitis
Create?

Joey Cofone
You got it, but you don’t create in creativity. It’s a complete misnomer. It’s ridiculous. Unfortunately, people do think that creativity is creating. It’s not and it sucks because that means people don’t think that they are creative when, in fact, they are. It’s just expressing yourself. So, the law of connection addresses this.

And it says, base concepts can neither be created nor destroyed. They simply merge to form new combinations. Creativity is not about creating. It is about combining. And then I give some examples, and I’m going to give you a few examples right now. The iPhone combines a computer and a phone. The Avengers combine the allure of the gods and the relatability of everybody people. Pokemon, the number one franchise on planet Earth, combines our love of pets and our fascination with fantasy worlds.

Pete Mockaitis
And I would say in collections, too. We like to be collectors.

Joey Cofone
Absolutely. It’s multidimensional for sure. I just base it down into something that you can parse. When you ask…now, I call it the grandparent test, which is when you say, “Hey, grandma or grandpa, what is Tesla?” And they say, “Oh, those are those cars with batteries.” Well, you just figured out exactly the two things that someone combined to make this new thing. Or, Instagram is photography and messaging, so on and so forth.

And so, the number one thing to take away is that when you are being creative, really, you are taking things that exists and just mushing them together. And it’s a much more palatable way of saying, “Hey, maybe I am creative. I do that all the time,” rather than thinking you are creating from scratch because that’s not real.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that sinks. Well, I’ll put you on the spot, Joey. So, your notebook, I’m holding one. What was the genius of combination that went down here?

Joey Cofone
Great question. The genius of combination is that I did not care about the question you just asked. So, it’s the first thing people say, “What’s so special about your notebook?” I don’t know, Pete, what’s so special about Starbucks’ coffee? Does anybody care? No. It’s the brand. It’s the differences, the story that a brand is telling.

So, when I started back in 2013, and all these notebook companies were telling people about the GSM of the paper, and how hard it was pressed, and if it’s soft – what do you call it – textured or smooth. I didn’t say any of that stuff. What I said is, “We made a really damn good notebook because it’s really, really important that you have a place that you can trust to put really important thoughts, because we all put a lot of really treasured ideas into our notebooks.”

When we’re journaling, our deepest thoughts go in there. When we’re brainstorming on a project, something that we’re really excited about, and that we cherish, and that we can see the future, goes in there. A notebook holds so much that’s important. And when I started Baron Fig in 2013, that’s what I spoke about.

Sure. Sure, I made a high-quality notebook. The paper is better than any other notebook. I made a binding that I actually patented that opens totally flat. And I made a cover with cloth that no one had done at the time, and the bookmark is much more high quality. But who cares? At the end of the day, no one is like, “Man, look at that. Look at that bookmark quality.” Doesn’t matter.

I made them good, but the point is I want you to go to our website, I want you to see that the product and the people who created the product speak to you as a human being that puts important things down on paper, that you care about, and that respects it. And that’s what we did, and that’s why we’re still here 10 years later selling notebooks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Joey, I’d love to also get your take, let’s say you’re in the heat of battle, it’s time to create, there’s a proposal to write, a thing to make, and you’re just hitting a wall, you’ve got “writer’s block,” or artist block, or just things aren’t firing the way you’d like them to be and have fired historically. How do you get into the groove, the mode, the mojo, the vibe, the flow to make it happen?

Joey Cofone
Good question. I do 50s or 100s. What are they, Joey? Another good question. Fifties or hundreds is you list 50 or 100 ideas about something pertaining to the thing you’re trying to solve. And now here, the real twist is you’re going for quantity. You don’t judge. If it makes sense, you do it. So, I don’t know, if I’m writing or if I want to do a limited edition pen, I just got to write down 50. I don’t care if one is…I’m just coming up with it now.

A green pen, it’s called the pickle edition. Oh, a TV remote control edition. It has a sticker that’s a remote control that you slap on your forehead. Oh, let’s do the forehead edition where you roll the pen on your forehead and it creates really smooth feeling. They’re ridiculous ideas but they solve, even if they’re not good. And so, what happens is you detach yourself from the expectations of the outcome when you do these.

Pete, you’ve heard of the phrase quality over quantity?

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Joey Cofone
Now, very common and it makes sense. You want one nice thing over a bunch of mediocre things, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Joey Cofone
Totally fair. Problem is that phrase speaks to the destination, to the end. That’s like me saying, “Hey, Pete, go to the gym. Be strong.” And you’re like, “What do I do at the gym?” It skips over the middle. So, I’m going to rephrase it for us. Quality over quantity but quantity begets quality. And so, when you do a lot, you end up getting good. No one ever does their first shot on the court, or their first swing of a golf club, or their first chapter of a book, and says, “It came out perfect.”

Yet, when a lot of people who are uninitiated with doing some type of expression like that jump in, they get really upset that they didn’t succeed on the first shot, and that’s just ridiculous. Focus on doing a lot and the good stuff will come.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you.

Joey Cofone
Thank you, Pete.

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

Joey Cofone
No, I am an open book, man. How do I like to say it? I’m at your service.

Pete Mockaitis
You open and you stay flat.

Joey Cofone
I do stay flat. Patented, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Fashion. All right. How about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Joey Cofone
Favorite quote is without a doubt, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates.

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

Joey Cofone
Favorite study is, huh, probably Schrodinger’s cat comes to mind just because it’s so misinterpreted. When he pulled that exercise, he was actually proving a point how silly it is that you could think that the cat is alive and dead at the same time. It was like a joke. But now people use it to prove that it’s a possibility, which is so ironic.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Joey Cofone
Favorite book, besides The Laws of Creativity, is The Phantom Tollbooth. Are you familiar with it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Joey Cofone
The Phantom Tollbooth is a kids’ book, and it is about a kid who goes into a world of total creativity and playfulness, and the language and the pictures, and it’s absolutely great. You should read it once a year every year so it reminds you in 120 pages what it’s like to think with a kid full of wonder.

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

Joey Cofone
Coffee. Is that fair?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Joey Cofone
Love coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Joey Cofone
Favorite habit is I do at least one pushup every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m intrigued. Does it often turn into more than one?

Joey Cofone
It does often turn into a lot more. But the idea that I only need to do one is great. Then I do pushups, then I do some squats, then I do some lunges, and then I do some pullups on the pullup bar. And then, huh, wow, that pushup turned to a lot.

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

Joey Cofone
Well, I gave you my favorite one, which is quantity begets quality, so I’m going to stick with that.

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

Joey Cofone
Go to JoeyCofone.com, and you will find all that you need.

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

Joey Cofone
Well, actually, yeah, I have a call to action. If you go to my website, you could take my free email course which will give you nine of the laws that you can judge for yourself whether you think you have it right about creativity or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Joey, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and creativity.

Joey Cofone
Pete, thank you, man. It’s been a pleasure. And, everybody out there, thank you for listening. I hope you have a beautiful day.

Feb 09
0

838: How to Listen and Solve Problems Like a Master Innovator with Mark Rickmeier

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Mark Rickmeier says: "Fall in love with the right problem before you get too attached to a solution."

Mark Rickmeier shares the specific approaches product innovators use to develop breakthrough solutions.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The double diamond framework for more effective problem solving.
  2. How to quickly generate new, original ideas in two ways.
  3. A handy tool to help you select the most resonant solution.

About Mark

Mark Rickmeier is the Chief Executive Officer at TXI, a boutique strategy and product innovation firm that specializes in UX research, design, and software development and closes the gap between ambition and reality. Over the past 20 years, he has created more than 100 mobile apps, custom-built web applications, and intuitive user experiences.

Resources Mentioned

Mark Rickmeier Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mark, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Mark Rickmeier
Thank you. I hope I can be awesome today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I hope you can, too. I have high hopes and I think the odds are great.

Mark Rickmeier
Starting off strong with optimism. I like it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, we have passed over, well, I guess 50 other people in order to select you, so I think there’s a product innovation lesson in there somewhere.

Mark Rickmeier
Now, I’m feeling all kinds of awesome pressure. Yeah, exactly. I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m excited to talk about innovation, creativity, great listening. And could you kick us off by sharing maybe an extra-exciting fun story about a eureka moment, an aha breakthrough, an exciting creative experience that’s just a very fond memory for you that lights you up?

Mark Rickmeier
Yeah. All right, so this is timely because it’s also one of my most poorly timed decisions of all time but still, I think, really important in my life. So, go back a couple of years, I was the COO at the time, and I’d just been asked by our founder, who, he was doing his own self-reflection on his career and his journey. He was recognizing that he was a zero-to-one type person. Loves starting things, being entrepreneurial, but as we were growing the business and expanding it, it was a lot more appealing to me to think about how to grow and scale the business, whereas, he wanted to go back to his entrepreneurial founding roots.

And so, he asked if I would be…if I’d step into the CEO role and help to grow and keep running the business. And, at the time, I was like, “I don’t know,” because I was like already a dad, on school board, and doing some philanthropic work, and this idea of taking on this additional role was both very exciting but also a little intimidating at the time.

And so, I told him, “Give me a minute,” and I took a week off to think about this prospect. And what I often do, I turn to the community to get input from outside my little bubble. And so, I invited nine other CEO-type people to go with me. I found a walking trail in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and said, “I’m going to take a week away without having Slack, or Twitter, or email, or my family, or my coworkers. It’s just some time to think.”

And I wanted to pick the brains of other people who had done this job, this really crazy stressful job before. And said, “I wanted to ask them about their advice and how to be successful in that role. And rather than calling it a workshop, like we always do in most of our facilitation sessions, we called it a walk shop, because we’re gonna be walking the entire time.

And so, five men, five women go to Scotland to talk about, “What is the job of a CEO? How do you handle that? How do you think about the pressures of the job? And how does that affect your other work-life balance concepts?” It was funny, when we came back, each of us were taking pictures of the trail, and when the trail was really wide, we have good group conversations. When the trail got narrow, we paired off more one on one.

And everyone was talking about this experience that we had. And so, when we came back, on LinkedIn, people were hitting us off with, “That’s a really odd idea, going into the woods for five days. Like, what was that all about?” And people started asking me when the next one was, and I had to tell them, like, “Well, there’s no next one. I got a whole company to run now. What are you talking about? Like, I have a thing, a job I just said yes to.”

And everyone kept asking, so I was like, “All right. Well, I’ll organize another one. I got so much out of it, let’s try the Black Forest of Germany.” And now 18 people said they wanted to go on this to unplug for a week, and have this time to think and to process with other people. And we did a hike for the Black Forest, and, again, when we came back, and everyone was posting stories in that, two people ended up going into business together after that hike. And I got an idea for a thing that became a kickstarter concept, and then that got backed.

And all this creative energy came out of the walk shop that people kept asking when the next one was. So, we did a third, and by that point, when it sold out almost instantly, I was like, “Okay, this is something I want to do and find a way to do more regularly.” So, I’m also the genius that started a travel company during the 2020, brilliant timing, before all that happened.

But as far as a fun, creative experience, one of the best things I do as a gift for myself is, at least once a year, try to shut down away from the day-to-day kind of experience, and get away from what otherwise a very sedentary job, and be on my feet. Quite literally thinking on my feet. This year we’re going to the Algarve in Portugal.

So, 12 of us are going to be hiking, talking about this year, “How do you lead organizations in remote situations? Like, how do you really involve yourself in remote leadership?” Since a lot of us are coming from a place, not that long ago, of running organizations are being involved in a lot of co-located scenarios with team members all side by side, and now we’re living in much more distributed and remote kind of worlds.

And so, there’ll be 12 executives are going to go hiking through Portugal with no distractions and technological interruptions to have those dedicated time together to dig into this kind of stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And can you orient us a bit to what is TXI and Product innovation?

Mark Rickmeier
Yeah, TXI, so it stands for technology, experience, and innovation. So, the three things we care about most. And when we talk about product innovation, it is being able to help our clients think about new ideas for their business that will drive them forward, and then having the designers and engineers that can take those ideas off of a slide deck and make them into reality. So, building a chatbot, or a mobile application, or a web app, or wearable products, like some kind of digital application that can then provide business value.

So, half of our brains are thinking about, “How do we build something right?” which is all the agile background and technological background to build something that scales well on a good tech platform. But beyond that, also, “How do you build the right thing?” which is where we get into some of the design thinking and product innovation, helping clients unlock some value in their business by coming up with new concepts that can then become a digital product.

Pete Mockaitis
And a core skill to doing that well is listening a little better than the average professional, I dare say. Could you make the case for how listening makes the difference and how you listen differently?

Mark Rickmeier
I think it’s two things. I think it’s both finding how you, like the actual skills of active listening, very, very important, but also what you’re listening for. And so, I can give a story here to maybe provide a concept. So, a client came to us, this is in maybe 2015, 2016, just as I was learning the difference, I would say, between custom development and product innovation.

This is a research university in Texas, and they said, “We want to build a mobile app.” And, honestly, up until that point, I would’ve said something silly, like, “Great, we’re really good at building mobile apps. We call them, these products, like MVPs, our minimum viable products.” So, you’re going to give us requirements, we call them stories in agile, and in a few short months, we’ll knock that out, we’ll build you a mobile app.

And, thankfully, we had, at that point, been working with a number of designers that are required to design team in building out more of this design-thinking framework. And the team said, “We hear that you have this idea for this mobile app, which is wonderful, but back up a second. Don’t tell us about the solution. Rather, tell us about the problem you’re trying to solve. Let’s start there.” And that was confusing because, at the time, they’ve talked to a lot of other companies and everyone was doing the same thing, “Tell us about your mobile app, we’ll write a proposal and then you’ll pick the cheapest one.”

And the team said, “Really, just humor us. Who are your users? Let’s start there. Let’s better understand that.” And the case they were making is that “Custom technology is really expensive. To build a custom mobile app could be a quarter to half a million dollars, and before we go do that, let’s just make sure we’re doing the right thing.”

And in their case, their users were their students. They were trying to figure out how to navigate the four years at the university, how to pick a major, how to build trust with an adviser on the administration side, and the team said, “Great. Let’s go talk to some students before we assume that the mobile app, which could cost half a million dollars. That’s an awful lot of money. Let’s just make sure this is the right path.”

So, we spent a few short design sprints, talking to them, getting a better sense of their challenges, what their goals were, doing some rapid prototyping and validation, and came back, after only two weeks, and said, “I don’t think this is what you want to do. Think about if you were student, it’s been a week-long of frustration and anxiety, it’s Friday afternoon, you don’t know who to turn to, what to do, so the first you’re going to do is go to the App Store. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

“Like, you probably want to talk to a human as soon as possible. And while we could build you a mobile app, and it’ll go live on time and cost half a million dollars, and we don’t think anyone is going to use it, or something that acts more like a chatbot, where if you ask and answer a few certain questions, we can partner you with the right person. That probably we can do in about four to six weeks.”

And so, in this case, it wasn’t just listening to what they were saying, because, again, if we had listened to what they said they wanted, we would’ve built them a mobile app, which would’ve gone live on time but not actually met the need. It was listening for what the real need was and helping them to understand the desire of, like, fall in love with the right problem before you get too attached to a solution.

In this case, they came in with a solution because they really thought mobile app would be the best way to engage students. And, in this case, helping them to listen better was getting them to step away from the, I guess, the solution they were already kind of excited about, and go talk to some students, and go talk to them about what their issues are, and what really will help, and really try to identify the right problem first.

So, the beginning of design thinking, the beginning of product innovation is always seeking to understand and trying to do as much of that before you get too attached to a potential idea. There are lots of ways this is going to scatter. There are lots of apps you could build, or digital products you could build. In this case, it was helping them to realize there was maybe a better problem to focus on, and a cheaper solution to build that would give them a better outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to this active listening and doing it better, do you have sort of a step-by-step or a few key principles? It seems like one is just getting oriented to, “What are you really trying to achieve here? What is success look like?” And taking a step back, zoom out, getting that broader view as oppose to just getting off to the races.

Another principle is engaging with the folks who are actually affected, impacted, going to be using the thing, and to see what their scoop is. What are some of the other favorite principles, or steps, or tips that you find make a world of difference to upgrade your active listening?

Mark Rickmeier
So, some of it is mindset things. So, when you’re working with an organization, I mean, a lot of people come in with already pre-baked ideas of, “This is what’s going to work. This is what’s going to be successful for us.” And to some degrees, especially if you’re looking to do something rather innovative, you have to be willing to invest in a little bit of what we call unlearning. So, yeah, there are things that may have gotten you at this point, but you may need to let go of some of those to be able to make space for a new way or working, or a new approach you might take.

And so, there’s a concept, there’s a mindset of unlearning, of getting rid of maybe old patterns and old ways of doing things to be able to be open to new concepts, and that’s very important. Also, as we said, going in with the mindset of you really want to be open, and so this is where you follow a framework called the double diamond. But if you think about the ways a diamond is drawn, the very first thing is you go wide, and it’s called diversion thinking. You’re trying to get as much exposure to new ideas and outside perspectives as you can.

And then from there, you consolidate down to a point which is identifying what the core problem is. And it’s from there that you can explore and go wide again, and say, “Well, now I know what the real problem we want to solve is. Now, let’s get really creative. Let’s come up with lots of ideas of how we could solve that problem. There are tons of ways to solve problems.”

And then from there, we consolidate down the ones we think are best. And so, it’s important, as we go through that process, to be able to explore different ideas. And then, and this is the hard one, I think, to make sure you’re listening to the best idea, which is not always the most loudest voice or the most executive voice. It’s really helping the best idea to win.

And so, part of the challenge, I’ve always been encouraging that unlearning aspect of letting people to let go of old ways of doing things, but also making sure that, like a single part owner, or a single executive, doesn’t be like, “And this is what we’re going to do,” that you really want the data and the insights to be able to guide the product.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so funny, as you walked through that double diamond, I’m thinking I was involved in a club in high school called Future Problem-Solvers, and we did exactly this, and I had to pull it up. Step one, identify challenges. You listed like a bunch of challenges. Step two, select the underlying problem. Step three, produce solution ideas. Step four, generate and select criteria. Step five, apply criteria. Step six, develop an action plan.

So, indeed, we’re diverging and converging, and then diverging and then converging. It’s like, “Whoa, okay.”

Mark Rickmeier
“I’ve heard this before.” What’s funny though, how many people think about this jump in at the second one, they’re like, “Okay, let’s start brainstorming. Let’s get some ideas going.” And it’s really hard, you got to back up, they’re like, “We hear you.” And there’s a lot of enthusiasm for generating ideas but are we solving the right problem? Like, let’s back up.

Like, identifying the right problem, way more valuable. Asking the right question, way more valuable than generating a ton of ideas. Like, in this case, how do we brainstorm a whole bunch of great mobile app concepts? It would’ve been fun to do but it wouldn’t have solved the problem what they were looking to solve with the student engagement, so it is hard.

Especially, when people are really jazzed and you’ve got stakeholders really excited about, “Let’s get to the whiteboard and start sketching out apps.” You’ve got to find a way to back them up a bit, and say, “We will get there but, first, let’s talk to some users and make sure we’re identifying the right problems to solve.”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that’s the broad overview framework perspective for how you’re proceeding. I’m curious, once you get into some of the steps, are there any key things that help you generate more ideas, or key questions that help get to the root of things super effectively?

Mark Rickmeier
Yeah. So, one of the things we’ll do, let’s say we have identified that right problem, and now we all are thinking about the same thing, we like trying to find ways of, again, diverging to get new ideas without being too heavily influenced or kind of biased by a single concept. So, one of the things we might do is ask everyone, it’s a really easy exercise, take a sheet of paper, A4 paper, and fold it in half, and then fold in half, and fold it in half again till you get like a series of creases on the paper that looks like a series of eight squares on a normal paper.

And then within each one, we ask people to draw out concepts. They don’t have to be high-fidelity graphic design. Just draw concepts of what you’re thinking might be a good solution to this problem. And people go about doing that independently, so we don’t have people influencing each other’s ideas or stealing each other’s creative thoughts. We just go diverge there.

And then we do a series of dot-voting where people can go through, they’re walking through, and say, “I like this concept. I like that concept.” And dot-voting is where you put a dot on the idea that you think is most valuable, most interesting. And we found that to be…those two practices to be very effective because, one, everyone can sketch. Sometimes there’s this misconception of, like, only designers can come up with ideas. We like everyone being involved in the ideation side. So, developers, designers, product people all doing some high-level sketching.

And then we also really encourage this practice of dot-voting because what often happens is sometimes, like we said, the most expensive paid person in the room, which is called the HiPPO vote, the highest paid person, or you have an executive will come in, like, “Ooh, this is the right thing,” and then everyone says that. Dot-voting is a nice way for everyone to independently say, “This one really caught my eye. This could be really valuable.”

So, there are techniques that we use in our facilitation to try to get everyone to be part of the generative process, but also find a way to eliminate bias from some of the discussion is kicking around ideas, so that the best idea is not the most executive voice wins out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, dot-voting is one mechanism by which you’re doing some narrowing and selecting. Do you have any other favorite approaches or criteria?

Mark Rickmeier
One of the things I’ve done, actually, this goes back on the generative side, is getting people to think about like a new way of working. And sometimes, as we say, like, unlearning is very difficult. You have to think about a new way of approaching something. And so, have you ever heard of escape thinking?

Pete Mockaitis
Do tell us.

Mark Rickmeier
So, imagine you have a process, and it’s a process that you assume everyone follows, so everyone does it the same way, and we just assume this is the way it’s done. So, if I were to ask you, like, “How do you go about a typical restaurant experience?” Most people would say, “Well, you get met by the greeter, and then you’re brought to a table, and the waiter brings you a menu, and you order. The waiter brings you your food, you eat. The waiter brings you your receipt, you pay, and you leave.”

And escape thinking is you map out a process that everyone understands, everyone assumes to be true, “This is what it looks like to go to a restaurant,” and you say, “Okay. Table one, we’re going to take this one core component that everyone assumes has to be true. Remove it, and you have to have the exact same outcome.”

So, table one, you have no menu, how do you handle that? Table two, you have the exact same process but you have no waiter. How would that happen? And then you start getting some really creative new ways of thinking, like, “How would I go about doing that if I didn’t have a waiter? Well, I probably would have to have some kind of kiosk at the table or some kind of mobile menu option. Or, if I didn’t have any, if I just walked out of the restaurant, I never paid anything, like with an Uber, you just walk out the cab, how do I still pay for things? How do I organize this?”

Escape thinking for us is an interesting way to facilitate a new kind of ideation to get people to think about new ways of engaging in a process, especially if they’ve been doing it for a long time, and they’ve been following a process that’s, “This is always how it’s been done.” We find that things like that will allow people to try new ways of working and thinking about things in a slightly different way. So, it’s a way of thinking about a process to encourage creativity and allow them to go wide and think of new ways of doing things. And so, it’s a kind of facilitation pattern we can use.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And any other perspectives on the convergent, the narrowing down and selecting?

Mark Rickmeier
One of the things, and this is where we get into listening. I find this really interesting. I was trying to experiment with this, especially as we had more remote team members. Obviously, there are tools like Miro. Like, Miro, you can use for facilitation and for things like dot-voting. But I was trying to think about a new way of hearing from people when you don’t have everyone all co-located, and to make sure that there wasn’t more, I guess, influence and bias.

And so, there’s a new facilitation technique I learned about during the pandemic, which I’ve really fallen in love with. It’s a tool called ThoughtExchange. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. But it’s an interesting way of being able to get to specificity around the concept when you’re trying to hear from lots of different people.

So, an example, when I would run our all-company meetings, I might ask a question, like an AMA, “Ask me anything. What do you want to know about next week?” And then I would assume, when we’re all together, I’d just bump into people in the kitchen, or I could ask them in the hallway, “What do you want to talk about?” Well, I no longer have that as an option during 2020. I did what I thought was next best, which was to do a survey, and say, “What do you all want to talk about next week?”

And then I would assume that the most-frequently mentioned things were the highest priority ones. And so, I would say, “Okay, five people, ten people all mentioned office space. Let’s talk about office space.” A different way of doing prioritization is doing a thing called a ThoughtExchange, which was something I’ve never heard of before.

But the basic concept is that you ask an opening question like this again, “What should we talk about next week?” And then everyone anonymously answers that question. Afterward though, they also then get to see everyone else’s anonymous responses and can up-vote or down-vote, and be like, “Ooh, I didn’t think of that but that’s a five-star idea. This other one, meh, one-star idea. Much rather agree with that.” And you get to all interact in each other’s suggestions.

The reason why that’s really important when you come into prioritization is that if you’re doing a survey, like I would’ve done in my old world, again, I would assume that the most frequently mentioned things, the highest responded are the most important because they kept getting mentioned over and over again.

And so, when we did this, for example, all kinds of responses of like, “Do we need an office space?” “Are we going to renew our lease?” “Are we going to get a new office space?” All these questions about space, and only two people, probably very brave people, were saying things like, “God, I’m going through a lot right now. I wish we could talk more about mental health and anxiety. Like, that’s where I just am feeling really burned out. I wish we could talk more about that.”

But when I saw frequency of mentions, I was like, “Oh, only two people said this. Ten, fifteen people said space, ‘We should talk about space.’” When we did a ThoughtExchange or whatever happened, was that people saw each other’s responses, and everyone anonymously say, “Ooh, you know what, I didn’t think of that, or maybe I wasn’t willing to put myself out there and say that. But now that I see that, I’d much rather talk about burnout and mental health than I would about physical space. That could be in email. Let’s use our precious to give our time to talk about this thing instead.”

And so, we changed the access to say, “Don’t show me frequently mentioned. Show me highest voted,” and that totally changed the prioritization matrix. And now we look at that mental health went from only being mentioned by two people and being like second to the bottom to being second from the top, like one of the most highest voted concepts. Even though it wasn’t frequently mentioned, when people saw it, they’re like, “That’s the thing we should spend our time on.” And it became a much higher priority for our company for discussion.

And so, this idea of a ThoughtExchange where people can interact with each other’s ideas and up-vote them and engage with them allowed us, in six minutes, to get over a hundred interactions on each other’s ideas and stickies, and allow other ideas to bubble up at the top, which would not have happened had we just done with a survey-type approach.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you’re engaged in conversation, maybe you’re doing some one-on-one user research and interviews, etc., are there some key questions you found that just tend to yield cool insights over and over?

Mark Rickmeier
It depends on the nature of the problem we’re trying to solve. I always like, for open-ended things, I like ideas, if we’re talking about the company experience, ideas of what keeps you up at night. Or, if you’re working with someone, what advice would you have to work with me? If someone was working with me for the very first time, what advice would you give a new person for working with me? Like, there’s interesting ideas can always come up from those kinds of questions.

And if it’s very product-focused, then I think it depends on the nature of the problem you’re trying to solve. But I think one of the best questions I like thinking of is, “What is the worst way you could solve this problem?” because that always gets interesting fun answers. And you try to get to the worst possible scenario, and that generates a whole bunch of new creativity. You can say, “All right. If we didn’t do that, what would be a way we could fix that? Or, what will the one small way to tweak that?”

But, generally speaking, if you ask that question, “What’s the worst possible way we could solve this problem?” ultimately, what people do when they answer that is they will bring up some of their latent fears or maybe like things they’re nervous about. Everyone has some concern about maybe a direction a product might go, or a direction an organization might go. And when you ask that silly question, it’ll give them freedom to be like, “Oh, man, I could see it going really horribly down this path if we’re not careful.” It allows them to maybe say the thing they would otherwise be unwilling to say or nervous about saying.

So, I like exploring both, like, the positive direction as well as the kind of the anti-pattern, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” because even though, hopefully, you’d never pick that path, it gives people the flexibility and the freedom to talk about what would otherwise maybe be unspoken concerns.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And I like that question with regard to what would be the worst way. Could you share with us what are some worst ways to approach innovation, problem-solving, listening, or common mistakes people end up making when they are taking things the double-diamond way?

Mark Rickmeier
Well, the worst thing we’ve seen is that people jump right into the brainstorming, “Let’s get some ideas on the table of the thing we’re going to build,” and we really have to bring them back, to be like, “Let’s talk about the problem we want to solve first.” Like, that’s the first critical mistake, is that people jump in on the wrong foot, on the wrong diamond.

Or, when they actually get to identify what the problem is, that they don’t actually involve the users who will be impacted by the product to be influential in the ideation process. And so, again, you have a top-down product design or executive-driven ideation session. Those are frustrating. When we’ve asked questions, like, “What’s the worst way that this will be solved?” or, “What’s the worst way that this might be rolled out?”

It’s really funny when people would be like, “Oh, we’ll build out a product and we won’t do any training whatsoever.” And then you start thinking about, “Well, how will we solve that?” And you start thinking about, “Well, how do we design something that’s so intuitive, it doesn’t require a lot of training? Maybe we don’t need a product that comes with weeks and weeks of training for people to understand how to use it. What would be the best way to solve that? Maybe it isn’t having more training time. It’s more intuition, like a better intuitive unique way of experience, so we should talk and validate and do more testing on the experience we’re designing.”

So, anyway, as you’re going through and thinking about ideas, you can keep asking that question over and over again about ways you could optimize something. I just like when you are able to take a little bit of levity and humor to it, because humor can often bring out other things people might not be willing to say.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you’re listening to folks, and they are saying stuff, are there any key signals or things you look out for that often surfaces gold?

Mark Rickmeier
I look for, I think, making…so, if we’re doing a good workshop, I like looking for everyone participating, making sure you get input from everyone. We mentioned that, we kind of glossed over it, but when you’re doing this kind of discovery, it’s valuable to have insight from the users, from designers, from developers.

Like, from example, even though an engineer is not a designer, they might say like, “There’s this API we can use. There’s a dataset that we could leverage that’ll make this faster, or maybe a cheaper way of building this. And it’s valuable to get technical info even at that early design stage.” And so, I think one of the things we’re looking for is making sure that no one is too quiet, that everyone has an opportunity to participate.

Even when we’re doing those sketching sessions, because we’re sketching, it’s such a low-fidelity way, I think a lot of people, when they hear that, they’ll bow out, they’re like, “Ah, this is the designer’s job. I’ll step out of the room now.” We really try to encourage that level of participation from everyone to make sure that we get those well-rounded ideas and input.

So, one of the things we’re looking for is just participation, and that people are willing to jump in and be part of that ideation side. I feel like that’s really helpful when we’re doing discovery work to get input from not just a single source.

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

Mark Rickmeier
I think, at the risk of beating a dead horse, I think how you facilitate a room and getting them to really explore the problem set before they get too attached to a solution is the difficult thing to do. And thinking about the group dynamics within the room, also very challenging. I mentioned earlier, when we’re on that hike together through Germany, we had an idea that ended up becoming a kickstarter.

It was thinking about a game we could play within workshops to be able to encourage the right level of discussion. And from that game became a kickstarter which actually became a product that people started playing around, “How do you facilitate really inclusive meetings so that the best ideas are heard?”

And you know like when you’re playing soccer and you hold up a yellow card when someone does the wrong thing? We started looking out for patterns of, like, “This person is interrupting this person, or speaking over someone,” so there are like interaction patterns we wanted to call out as negative interactions in the session.

There were different kinds of penalties we’d hold up a card for. If someone was beating a dead horse, or saying the same thing for the 15th time, or getting so technical they were losing their audience. And then we started thinking about new facilitation techniques, like escape thinking, that could encourage people to try a new way of engaging.

Anyway, we made these series of cards around facilitation patterns and anti-patterns people could follow in discovery and, on a whim, put it out for a kickstarter, and it got backed, which cracked me up. So, in addition to building digital applications, we also built a very analog card game. But it’s been fun to think about when you’re working with a group of humans in a room, how do you get the best out of them? And what are the kind of common patterns to look for or things to think about when facilitating a group?

And I think it’s harder when you’re distributed because you can’t read body language, but all the more important that you’re thinking about, “Who’s interrupting each other? Who’s really being open to ideas? Who hasn’t spoken in a while?” just to make sure that everyone really is participating in a healthy way.

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

Mark Rickmeier
Yeah, “Not all who wander are lost,” is a favorite quote of mine from JRR Tolkien. I think a lot about the value I’ve gotten from being able to step away from my desk. Doing that long hike, like I said, at least once a year, I try to give myself like gifts of time, of dedicated time away, but even if you can’t do a five-day hike through Scotland, just an opportunity to step away from your desk, go for a walk.

So much of what we do is sitting down at a desk and typing, and I find that not only is it beneficial for your physical health, but the mental health of getting a break. Doing more walking one-on-ones, doing more walking breaks is particularly something we have to think about in Chicago where it’s freezing and cold outside right now but I think always worth it, so I’ve always loved that quote. “Not all who wander are lost.” That wandering time, let your minds and your leg wander. Both valuable.

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

Mark Rickmeier
I think some of the best research we’ve done recently, this goes back in the last couple of years, we’ve been thinking about for even our own company, we often ask our customers about how we’re doing, and we found that sometimes customers are more willing to talk to a third party than they are to you directly.

And so, we did a thing called brand insights. We brought in a third-party firm to talk to us about our own experience. They also talked to some of our longest customers, and then talked to people that we did not work with but maybe talked with us early on and chose to go in a different direction, to get a kind of unique perspective on what the customer and employee experience of TXI really is.

And I feel like that third-party insight is really, really valuable, something that sometimes we don’t always think about doing as having someone else help you see yourself. And so, I highly recommend that kind of opportunity to talk to your own customers, but also talk to people who did not work with you, and get insight around your business and your own experience of how that can be shaped. So, that kind of what we call brand insights has been really, really valuable for us. We do it every couple of years.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Mark Rickmeier
There are two. One is really boring. One is really fun. Which one do you want?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear both.

Mark Rickmeier
Okay, the boring one. Well, I should say impactful but dry. It’s a book called Traction. It talks about EOS, or the entrepreneurial operating system, if you’re familiar with that. It’s, basically, if there are books out there that tell you how to run agile projects, how to help you run a project or a program at work, EOS is about, “How do you help run a good company?”

And it has a lot of borrowings from things like Good to Great. Just taking a lot of good principles around running a healthy business that has, well, traction, and that’s why the traction the book is called. So, Traction is all about, “How do you set up a leadership team to have good accountability, good traction in your business, and run a more resilient organization?” It’s dry but I found it to be very, very helpful.

The other book that I really like is a book called Rituals for Work, and it is this pattern of maybe like 50 different rituals you can use within teams, within the entire company, or for individuals. And they talk a lot about how to get the best out of your teams in, like, moments of conflict, which has been a topic on this podcast in the past, moments of ideation and creativity, recognition and reward.

They have all these really interesting rituals you can adopt within your company, within teams, or just for individuals. So, different kinds of rituals and different kinds of levels, and they also just rewrote a new version of the book for what rituals you can adopt within hybrid or remote teams. So, a fun read and a very different kind of book. One is very workshop and practically focused.

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

Mark Rickmeier
Well, we talked a little bit about it. I like to cite this tool called ThoughtExchange that allows me to see different kinds of data that I won’t otherwise see in a survey. If I’m trying to get input from a large number of folks and have them interact with each other’s ideas, it’s one of the most innovative things I’ve seen that I’ve been able to use. In addition to the tools we use, like Miro, to get good facilitation exercises, ThoughtExchange provides unique set of insights I wouldn’t have otherwise. So, I’m a big fan.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Mark Rickmeier
Walking. I try to do it all the time. I try to spend at least an hour a day where I’m away from my desk. There was a great quote, someone was doing interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and they were asking them about, these two captains of industry, “How do you spend your time? What does your week look like?”

And Bill Gates held up his weekly planner, it’s full of all these things he was doing, his fingers on all these different parts of the business. And then Warren Buffett had like half hour on Tuesday and a half hour on Friday, and the rest was just time for him to consider to read and to think. And his famous quote from that little interview was, “Busy is the new stupid.”

You can spend so much time doing so many things, you’re not giving yourself the time to really think, and giving yourself that space. It’s very hard when you’re jumping between meetings and invoices and emails to be really productive and have meaningful thought about the direction of your product or the direction of your company.

So, the habit I’m trying to instill, especially in the new year, despite the cold, despite the dark, is to get time out of doors and to do those walks where I can really think about where I want to be going, what I want to be doing, and using my time as productively as I can. So, I take it to extremes by doing these long hikes together with other execs. I really find that to be valuable.

But even in a one-hour a day thing, I feel like that habit, and reminding yourself of that, “Busy is the new stupid” mantra, it’s really productive to give yourself that space to think.

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

Mark Rickmeier
I think that one, I think “Busy is the new stupid.” It gets quoted back to me quite a lot. I talk about it quite a bit. I even tried to put a block on my time on my calendar that says, “Busy is the new stupid” so people know not to block that time when I’m just thinking and giving myself that carte blanche time as a valuable use of time on my calendar, that I should not be interrupted. So, that one gets quoted back to me quite a lot.

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

Mark Rickmeier
Certainly, the TXI site, TXIDigital.com. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn and talk about the work that we do, also about this upcoming trip we’re going to be planning to Portugal. That experience is called Walkshop. you can find that on walkshop.io. But, also, I’d say I’m mostly active on LinkedIn these days.

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

Mark Rickmeier
I think too often people are in a rhythm, I’m certainly guilty of this myself, where you have all the stuff to do. And I think when you fall into that rhythm, you fall into a cadence, not unlike when we’re talking about on the product innovation side. There’s a way that you’re operating and to step back and to unlearn old ways of doing things, to give yourself the flexibility and time to consider a new way of working.

It’s hard and super, super valuable. My career has changed dramatically since I took that first long hike with other execs to get ideas from. And I think that’s why I’ve intentionally been carving out that space every year to be doing that kind of experience. So, I think people who are looking to really be awesome in their job and thinking about what they’re doing, give yourself that gift of time to step away from your day to day and think about what part of your job you really enjoy, what part of the job you would want to change.

And I think there’s a great book called Prototyping Your Life. It talks a lot about how you can take the similar design-thinking concept, this double-diamond process, to your day to day, and think about, “What problems I really enjoy solving? How do I want to solve them? How do I want to be working?”

And I would say you can’t figure that out in between meetings. You can’t figure that out when you’re running around doing all bunch of emails. You really need to take that dedicated time to consider where you want to go. So, get out, go for a walk, and think about what you want to be doing. Give yourself that time and precious time to consider where you want to be this year.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mark, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and innovation.

Mark Rickmeier
Thank you very much, sir. Appreciate it.

Oct 20
0

810: How to Get Stuff Done inside Bureaucracies with Marina Nitze

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Marina Nitze reveals what makes bureaucracies tick and how you can work your way through them.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why bureaucracies can actually be great
  2. Six favorite bureaucracy hacks
  3. What not to do when trying to challenge a bureaucracy

About Marina

Marina Nitze, co-author of the new book Hack Your Bureaucracy, is a partner at Layer Aleph, a crisis response firm specializing in restoring complex software systems to service. Marina is also a fellow at New America’s New Practice Lab, where she improves America’s foster care system through the Resource Family Working Group and Child Welfare Playbook. Marina was the CTO of the VA after serving as a Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House. She lives in Seattle.

Resources Mentioned

Marina Nitze Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Marina, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Marina Nitze
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear about your wisdom but, first, I think we need to hear a little bit about your job as a 12-year-old making fan sites for General Hospital.

Marina Nitze
Well, it was the best way to learn HTML back then. It was the days of AOL keywords, and I loved my General Hospital soap opera couples, and it was a great way to learn technology, and that was absolutely the start of my tech career.

Pete Mockaitis
So, at 12 years old, you’re loving General Hospital?

Marina Nitze
Yes, it was our neighbor’s grandma watched it, and I got to sit and watched it with her. And then you get hooked, right? Friday cliffhanger, you got to see what happened Monday, and then you’re running home from the school bus every night.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun. That’s fun. I have a feeling that in your childhood you probably had a lot of fun conversations with “grownups.” Is that fair to say?

Marina Nitze
I was really bad at being with kids, so, yeah, I mostly just talk to grownups and tried to have my own businesses. Yeah, being an adult is more fun.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m intrigued to hear you’ve got a cool specialty. We’re talking about your book Hack Your Bureaucracy. You’ve worked in some in your career in your days. Could you share with us, any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about bureaucracies in general? Is there something most of us have wrong about bureaucracies?

Marina Nitze
I think so. I think bureaucracy is often a four-letter word. We think of them as things that you need to blow up, you need to move around, you need to get rid of. And, for me, the most surprising thing as a Libertarian joining the Federal Government, believing that the whole thing should be blown up, and it totally did not work, was that bureaucracies actually work quite effectively and you can do a lot of effective things to get them to change for the better. And so, learning those techniques was really the impetus behind writing the new book and sharing those with others.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so tell us more about that. Bureaucracies, in fact, do work effectively. Can you give us some data or evidence or examples there?

Marina Nitze
Well, we kept seeing, when I was in the Federal Government, we had a program called the US Digital Service, which recruited top-tier technologists to come into government for tours of duty. And, repeatedly, kind of the pattern was always the same. They wanted to come in and the first thing they thought was the path to success was getting a waiver or an exception to the rules, or going around the rules, and that worked zero percent of the time.

But what did really work was learning what the rules were, and then not only using them to your advantage, but sometimes changing the rules of the game themselves so that the next thing the bureaucracy was doing was the right thing and the thing that you wanted them to be doing consistently even after you left.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, they were able to accomplish what they were hoping to accomplish by doing things the way that they say are to be done, and that was fine.

Marina Nitze
Yeah. I had a great story there around trying the normal way first, which was one of our bureaucracy hacks. When we wanted to use cloud computing because, at the time, all the websites for veterans were literally operating on computers that were like under people’s desks or, in one case, in a mop closet. And even if you don’t know a lot about technology, computers and mop closets and water should never the twain shall meet.

But one of the big objections that we got to doing this was from the inspector general, who said, “Well, wait a minute. You can’t use cloud computing because you can’t put the cloud in an evidence bag.” And so, by actually going through this process and working with them and understanding how they conducted their investigations, which was they would walk into your office, they would pick up the computer, and they would put it in an evidence bag. They didn’t know how they could do that in a world where cloud computing, and you can’t actually touch the computers anymore.

So, we had to work with them to help them see how they could actually conduct their investigations more effectively.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, you don’t have to truck it over to the mop closet.

Marina Nitze
Exactly. You don’t have to lift anything, you don’t have to put it into bags, your back won’t be strained anymore. And then, in the course of following up with that, we ended up hitting the IT approval paperwork had questions, like, “Marina, do you pinky-swear that you jiggled the doorknob to make sure that it was locked on the cloud?”

And you can’t jiggle the doorknob of the cloud either, so you had to actually change the paperwork itself. But in the course of changing the paperwork, now you can say, like, “Hey, is this server in a mop closet?” And if it is, then it doesn’t get approved, “Does this server have backups?” And if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t get approved. “Does this website have business hours?” And if it does, then it doesn’t get approved. And that’s how you can make a really systemic change in a bureaucracy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I just need to follow up. So, there was actually an official form somewhere that had the phraseology pinky-swear and jiggle the handle on it? Is that accurate?

Marina Nitze
The pinky-swear is my color, admittedly, but the jiggling the handle was actually literally a security control. We had to promise. I had to swear and sign on a piece of paper that I had jiggled the doorknob to make sure it was locked.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, this is fun. This is the way I love it, it’s the detailed insight scoop. All right. So, maybe let’s zoom out a bit. What’s the big idea behind the book Hack Your Bureaucracy?

Marina Nitze
Yeah, it’s really the Frank Sinatra test. So, in Frank Sinatra’s song “My Way,” he says, “Hey, if I made it here in New York, I can make it anywhere.” And so, the bureaucracy hacking tactics we learned in the White House, when I was at the VA as the chief technology officer in Department of Defense, when they worked there, we then found, my co-author Nick and I, that when we left, now he’s in venture capital and at Harvard University, I now do IT crises consulting for Fortune 500 companies and I work in state and local governments on foster care, and the bureaucracy hacking tactics still keep working.

And then we tried them in PTAs and Homeowners Associations, and they still keep working. So, the idea is, “Here are some hacks that work in some of the toughest bureaucracies, and they’ll also work in your everyday bureaucracies.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us an inspiring story of someone who, indeed, successfully hacked their bureaucracy and got something cool done which others may have said is impossible?

Marina Nitze
Absolutely. So, at the VA in 2013, there was a horrible backlog of healthcare applications from veterans that were trying to access VA healthcare, 800,000 of them waiting, pieces of paper waiting in a warehouse. And it was in the news that the inspector general had determined that 100,000 of those veterans had died waiting for the VA to process that paperwork.

And so, the VA was going to do what the VA always did, which was, “We’re going to do more mandatory overtime and more data entry.” But my team believed that there was a different way to go about that, “What if we could bypass the paper and get digital instant enrolment for veterans?” And what unlocked that was actually sitting down with a real veteran whose name was Dominic and, with his permission, we recorded him trying and failing to apply for VA healthcare 12 times.

He called; we hung up on him. He tried to open the website; it wouldn’t load. He tried to open another website; it wouldn’t open. And up until that point, the VA’s belief had been that veterans don’t use the internet because the numbers of veterans that apply online were so small. When, in fact, it was that the websites didn’t work.

And so, when we had this video of Dominic trying and failing so many times, and then it turned out he was actually absolutely eligible, and we were able to enroll him the next morning. We gave him our new mobile form, which is not rocket science, it’s not machine learning. It’s literally a form that was under on your mobile phone. He was able to enroll instantly, and we’ve since enrolled 2 million veterans instantly in VA healthcare through that mobile form.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Okay. So, taking a step back and parsing some insights from that story, it seems that the leadership has a mistaken view of what things are really like on the ground, it seems to be my takeaway there.

Marina Nitze
Yeah, and so our tactic here is you got to talk to real people. No matter where you are, if you’re a brand-new hire, if you’ve been in your role for 30 years, if you’re the leader or if you’re like an entry-level employee, going out and talking to the real people that are really experiencing your service, whatever your company may offer, is the way that you’re going to find those disconnects that you’re not going to find if you never leave the office.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is a grand story. Well, so you’ve got 56 such approaches for hacking. I don’t imagine we’d cover all 56 in the time we have here today. But could you maybe give us some of your greatest hits in terms of, and here’s my criteria, how I define greatest hits, that’s widely applicable in terms of it covers many kinds of bureaucracies; it is widely effective in terms of, “By golly, there’s a high percentage of the time this thing gets it done; and it has a good return on effort, if you will, like a little bit of time here can give big returns?” So, I’m putting you on the spot, Marina, if you could give us a few of your favorite bureaucracy hacks that meet these three criteria, what leaps to mind?

Marina Nitze
Absolutely. It would definitely be the space between the silos. So, the bigger your bureaucracy is, the more specialized it gets, the more that there’s different departments, it may even be that your company interacts with other companies through the course of a process. And while there’s tons of defensive antibodies that don’t want to change inside a silo, there’s often absolutely nobody paying attention at the handoffs between the silos. So, it’s a really awesome opportunity to make a really big change.

And I’ll tell you a quick story around this. I was helping a state trying to shorten its foster parent application processing time. And this is really important because, while grandparents, or aunts, or uncles have kiddos in foster care in their home, they’re not getting paid, they’re not getting any financial support until they complete this really byzantine paperwork process. So, it’s really important to get it down.

So, I’m following the claim in this case from start to finish, and this is the advice that anybody can use. If it’s a claim, if it’s a case, if it’s a customer, whatever it may be, follow up from start to finish. When it goes through the fax machine, you go to the other end of the fax machine. When it goes to the mailroom, you go to the mailroom.

And so, I was following this one foster parent application through the office, and I get to this woman, and she says, “Well, now I have to request the applicant’s driving record from the DMV,” and she pulls out the carbon copy triplicate paper, you know the kind you have to like press really hard and it’s different colors, and she says, “Oh, I hate this step so much. The DMV lives in the 19th century. I don’t even have stamps. Like, it takes forever. This sucks.”

And I walked over to the DMV because I’m following the real application, and I say, “Hey, can you show me how you’re processing the driving record request?” And the woman there says, “Oh, yes. We use this electronic system, and the request come in, and we process them same day.” And I said, “Well, wait a minute. I saw a carbon copy paper. Where does that come in?” And she said, “Oh, you were at child welfare. Those people are in the 19th century. They keep sending this carbon copy paper. Why the heck won’t they use my electronic system like everybody else?”

And so, I was able to connect those two individuals and, overnight, shaved 32 days off a process, removed a cumbersome step that nobody wanted to do, and make everybody’s lives easier simply because, in most bureaucracies, nobody ever sees or owns the end-to-end process. And so, if you can just crawl through it, follow your person, you will be shocked at the amount of insights and improvements that you can make.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Marina, this is the first time someone has made government work sound exciting to me. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh, what a huge value-add,” sorry, consulting language stuck with me. That’s like a huge amount of value for what sounded somewhat easy. Marina, maybe you did a lot of work over many days to pull this off, but that didn’t sound too hard. And, yet, that’s a huge improvement in people’s lives that’s quite touching. And those opportunities exist when you’re inside big bureaucracies.

Call me optimistic, but that almost sounds like a positive, “Oh, I’m in a huge bureaucracy.” “Oh, lucky you. There are so many improvement opportunities you can probably just grab that make a huge impact for not a lot of effort. That’s kind of a cool place to be.”

Marina Nitze
I would agree with you. I’d agree with that. The bigger the fire, the more interested I am. But even if you’re at a smaller bureaucracy, there might be handoffs you do with other outside partners, or maybe you’re interacting with the government as a nonprofit or something. Go follow that application process through and see if there are inefficiencies to be had.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Okay. So, we talked about the space between the silos, and following from start to finish. What are some of the other approaches?

Marina Nitze
Picking up the pen. So, I first learned this one, at the VA, for a while, we were missing one of our senior leader roles. We hadn’t hired for it yet and so we were kind of distributing that role’s tasks among the staff. And one of them involved having to go to the White House for a meeting, which sounds really exciting, like everybody would want to do it, but that means waiting in the security line for two hours in the hot sun.

So, I, as the new person on the team, got tagged in to take on this meeting, and I was supposed to write the President’s management agenda, which is a pretty big deal in Federal Government, and one of the tasks of that meeting was, “Hey, can someone write a technology goal on a slide?” And so, I’m looking around figuring other people showed up with their ideas, but, no, here was the blank slide, and so I said, “Oh, I’ll do it. I’m going to write down that the VA should have the first agency digital service to this team, and it should have 75 employees reporting to the CTO,” which was me.

And I assumed someone would come along and edit my slide or delete it or modify it, but, nope, it kept moseying along through the process, and then, lo and behold, the President is announcing the President’s management agenda that includes the goal of having 75 technologists assigned to this CTO of the VA, which is me.

So, then I got to take that slide that I had written because I had picked up a pen and take it and justified hiring these 75 teammates that I really, really needed. And that was a great way in the Federal Government but I since used it all the time to include…we have a story in the book of someone using that to change their condo’s pool policy because there was a lot of bickering around, like, “Is the Homeowners Association going to let us have the pool opened during COVID?”

And I said, “Well, why don’t you write the policy that says it’s open, because then the person that wants to keep the pool closed, they’re going to have to also write a policy and shows up and like get counter votes, so you’re actually raising the bar and effort for them, and making it easier for everybody to do what you want.” And this worked pretty consistently among everybody that I knew that was having this pool problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool. And what’s funny, because there was a bit of resistance there, so it’s like, “Ugh, writing a pool policy, that sounds kind of boring and lame. And what do I know about pool policies? I’ve never written anything like this.” But, at the end of the day, everybody just makes it up. Someone just makes it up. You just made it up and you got 75 employees. That’s pretty cool.

And someone else is just making up a pool policy. It’s unlikely that they’re consulting with someone with a tremendous deep expertise in pool matters from an insurance company or law firm, but that’s conceivably possible. But the most parts are like, “Oh, I guess this makes some sense when it comes to having a pool, so it’s the policy. Any input, feedback? Okay, here we go. This is the policy.”

Marina Nitze
Yeah, if you look around, no offense to your particular Homeowners Association, but if you’re looking around it, it’s just made of other regular humans that are just like you and me so there’s no reason why you can’t write a pool policy. And, yeah, maybe somebody will have an edit to it, but if you want the pool open, pick up the pen, draft the policy, see what happens.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I dig it. Marina, this is awesome. Keep going.

Marina Nitze
All right. I’d love to share a Harry Potter analogy here because I think this is a really, really effective one if you’re ever working with technology. So, there’s a concept called strangling the mainframe, and it’s the idea, like, say you’ve got an old, old system. Everybody’s got one in their company if it’s around long enough, and everybody thinks that the goal is to shut off the old system.

But the old system ends up powering a little bit of everything. It’s going to power HR, IT, something maybe, and everybody’s trying to have this magic huge perfect plan to turn off the old thing and one day magically turn on the new thing. And I’ve never, in the history of time, seen that worked. Like, in all of Western civilization is actually powered by these mainframes.

And so, my best analogy here of how to actually fix this problem, if it’s something you’re facing in your workplace, is a Harry Potter one. And this is a spoiler alert, so if you don’t know how Harry Potter ends, you should skip ahead 60 seconds. That is Voldemort is the mainframe and Harry and his family and the whole wizarding world are trying to destroy the mainframe head on, and it doesn’t work. The mainframe gets more powerful than ever. And after six and a half books, Harry’s lost most of his family, there’s billions of pounds of Muggle property damaged, and Voldemort is stronger than ever.

But what does work are finding the Horcruxes and slowly peeling off bits of the mainframe’s power one bit at a time. So, if you think about it in your organization, maybe you could pull off a little bit of case management, maybe a little bit of claims status tracking, maybe a little bit of HR, such that, at the end, you have a small enough of a puzzle that you can actually replace it in, say, six months or one year.

And so, this is a technique that we use all the time. Even if your company is working, frankly, off of like a really advanced spreadsheet, you still often can’t turn it off overnight. You got to peel off piece by piece. And this can be a really amazing bureaucracy hack and tactic if you’re trying to make change because there may be some new innovation that you want to have seen.

One example here would be around the unemployment claim backlog. In a lot of states, they had a strangle a mainframe tactic of helping stand up a claim status tracker because that’s what everybody wanted to know, “Did you get my claim? When is it going to get paid?” And the mainframes couldn’t support that, but many states stood up and, literally a week, a claim status tracker where everybody checked their status just from their mobile phone by building this little piece off to the side that just syncs to the mainframe once a night.

So, just want to encourage folks to think creatively about how they might strangle their mainframe and what their first Horcrux might be.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. That’s really cool. What comes to mind is I was in a Facebook group all about professional speakers, and this was only like four years ago, and someone took a photo of a dot matrix printer at a rental car location, and said, “Dot matrix printer is still holding town at the rental car agency.” It’s like, “Yes, that is so weird that those still exists there.” And then that’s intriguing, if you think about it, in terms of…and I don’t know the rationale for why those are still there.

Marina Nitze
They’re all in airports, too. Airport manifests are printed on dot matrix printers.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and maybe that is or is not relevant but if we’re genuinely waiting, I don’t know, an extra 30 seconds per person in line for the dot matrix thing to go through that, then it sounds like it needs to be replaced. But if it’s plugged into a mainframe, or a bigger computer sort, then I guess it’s quite possible that you have an alternative means by which the information is sent to a different printing thing.

As I zoom into these conversations, how I imagine they would go, it’s like, “Oh, well, we can’t change that because it’s connected to the thing. And that thing runs everything, so just don’t even touch it, don’t even think about it. Just forget about it and move on.” And then most of us are not so persistent, shall we say, or stubborn, however you’d like to phrase it, as to dig in a little deeper and further. But if you were to do so, peeling off a little bit at a time is likely to get us a lot farther.

Marina Nitze
Absolutely. That’s the message.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. Let’s hear another.

Marina Nitze
So, if you’re kind of a staff-level person, a recommendation that we have here is really think about tailoring your pitch to who you need to persuade to your way of thinking. And one of my favorite bureaucracy hacks here was done by a colleague. We needed a bunch of IT executives to approve an API policy. An API is an application programming interface. It’s something that lets two computers talk to each other.

But if you don’t know what an API is, that just sounds like a huge security blackhole, like, “Wait a minute. I’m going to let another computer connect to my computer and take data out of it? Like, that sounds like everybody’s going to hack it and take all the private data out of it. That doesn’t sound safe.” And so, people were pretty opposed to it.

But because they were senior leaders, they had no safe place to ask basic questions about what an API was. They were too senior to ask the basic questions. So, we had to set up a space for them to learn, so we had a session called APIs for Executives, and we held it in a fancy room and had some fancy speakers and fancy invites, and invited them to come.

And at the beginning of the presentation, it said, “You know, hey, we know everybody here knows what APIs are, but just in case,” and then gave a basic 101 review of APIs so that it gave those executives a safe place to learn so they could actually engage in the conversation. And if we hadn’t done that, they would’ve just blocked our policy from day one from a place of fear.

Pete Mockaitis
It feels really brilliant in terms of so you knew exactly what your roadblock was. It’s like, “These folks don’t understand what an API is and they’re afraid to ask. And I can’t just say, ‘Listen, bud, I know you don’t know what you’re talking about, so let me lay it down for you.’” You knew that wasn’t going to fly in this environment.

And so, I’m curious about how you presented that, it’s like, “Oh, wouldn’t you know it? Like, crazy coincidence, this event is happening,” because you had agency in creating the event. So, how did you play that game?

Marina Nitze
Well, it was just about framing it in a totally respectful way. So, like, yeah, it does sound a little bit manipulative. I fully acknowledge that but we had to find a safe place to get them to learn. And having an event called API 101 wasn’t going to do it because they were going to be afraid of, like, being seen in front of their direct reports, potentially, as not knowing. So, we had to create a place that they would feel safe.

And we had a little bit of an advantage. We could also invite them to a fancy White House office room for the event, but you probably have an equivalent wherever your organization may be of creating some sort of safe space for people to learn without making them feel dumb. Because if people feel dumb or threatened, they’re not going to engage with you in a constructive way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. All right. Marina, you can just keep going all day. More hacks. Lay it on us.

Marina Nitze
Something that I think is really overlooked that we really encourage is when you’re understanding how process works or when you find a change that you want to make, you have to understand the internal employee impacts of that process the same as you understand how you may want to change it for that end-user or for your customer.

So, often your internal employees have particular risks or incentive frameworks, like their position description said they have to do this or that. Their practice manual says they have to do this or that. They have more steps to do in a day than they can possibly do. So, if you show up with your, like, bright, fancy, new idea for outside customers, that you’re going to have a new customer support model or you’re going to have a new product that makes the internal people have to do seven more steps on their already-over full plate, they are going to resist you, and they are going to fight you.

But if you can understand kind of like my story earlier about the DMV, like neither of those women, they were both busy. They didn’t want to fill out carbon copy paper and mail it to one another. Like, they were happy to take that step off their plate, but you had to acknowledge that it existed in the first place to understand how you could kind of trade, and say, “Okay, I’ll get you two more internal efficiency gains and, in exchange, I need you to do this one extra step that’s going to help my actual project goal.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, now, could you tell us a little bit about what not to do when it comes to hacking a bureaucracy? If we want to make something happen, we’re inside a bureaucracy, we’ve got some really cool things that we should do, what are some things that we absolutely should not do?

Marina Nitze
Yeah, this is a mistake I see people make all the time, and I made it myself a lot in the beginning, which is you can’t try to make the bureaucracy care. Bureaucracies do not have feelings. They have decision criteria. And something I see a lot, and I see this especially in IT, where you want a new IT application approved, or you want to be able to use a spreadsheet software because it’s going to make you more efficient.

But the argument that, like, “Hey, if we don’t get this, there’ll be foster children that are homeless, or there’ll be veterans that don’t get healthcare.” Those are not approval criteria on the approval form. They’re not part of the decision matrix. So, you can beg and plead and make the emotional arguments to the end of time, but if you don’t actually fill out the approval form and meet what it needs, you’re not ever going to get to the goal that you actually want.

So, a big mistake I see people make is trying to make the bureaucracy care. And what, instead, you should do is understand what the bureaucracy cares about and meet those needs even if it may be frustrating and not feel particularly emotionally fulfilling in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, what’s interesting here is we’re talking about the bureaucracy, it’s like an entity because I’m thinking of it like The Borg. It’s like an entity, a person, a corporate thing unto itself and that doesn’t have feelings. I get you. Like, if we defined bureaucracy as a series of steps or processes, then maybe, first, we should get your definition of bureaucracy. I guess individual humans within the bureaucracy might care, and that could maybe motivate them.

It’s like, “Wow, you’re right. This is a big problem and we need to do something.” So, you maybe even enrolled them and you’ve gotten them on board with some emotions, but you’re not really going to get any traction in terms of making it happen until the actual steps of the form or process or whatever are getting adjusted. Is that a fair synopsis?

Marina Nitze
Absolutely. You might win them over to pay attention to you first, to take your form first, but you’re not going to win them over to allow your half-filled out form to get approved.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And then since we’re saying the word bureaucracy a lot, could you define it for us?

Marina Nitze
Yeah. In the course of writing the book, we actually tried to find something that wasn’t a bureaucracy. And this quest took us even to, like, a co-op grocery store in Brooklyn, California. It turned out it was still a bureaucracy. It’s any organization of any size that’s run by a series of processes and rules, both written and unwritten. And unwritten I think is really important, too, because, at the end of the day, like if there is a process, if you have to go through Bertha, and Bertha considers your form in a particular way, and she is the gatekeeper there, it’s important to understand that as an unwritten rule.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you for that. So, anyway, more don’ts. What else should we not do?

Marina Nitze
Yeah, my other one is beware of the obvious answer. I, literally, have a TextExpander keyboard shortcut on my computer, where if I typed the word just, it will delete it, so it will not let me type the word just because that word is what gets tons of people in trouble, especially if you’re new to a problem or to an organization. Do not show up and say, “Well, why don’t you just do X, Y, Z?” because the odds are that hundreds of people have had your idea before, and there are some reason why it is not been done already.

So, before you say, “Why don’t you just do this?” it’s really important to kind of, first, keep that idea to yourself, but dig in, try to find people who had that same idea, see who has tried what, where didn’t it work, because maybe that the solution is not impossible. That’s not all what I’m saying, but it’s a lot more complicated than the obvious answer that it may seem like you have.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And articulating the word just out loud can, I imagine, enrage some people, like, “Who do you think you are? Oh, I guess we’re all just idiots, Marina. Excuse us for not having just made an online form. Pardon our foolishness.”

Marina Nitze
Correct. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve often coached people, like, “Don’t say the word obviously ever. It doesn’t help you out.”

Marina Nitze
That should be a TextExpander shortcut, too. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, just is in that same category in this context. So, okay, any other don’ts?

Marina Nitze
I think those are my two main ones.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And I want to talk a little bit about the emotional component here. I think some folks have a feeling that if they try to hack it through the bureaucracy, their bosses might think that you’re trying to undermine their authority, or you’re trying to circumvent them or their system, or you’re going over their head, like you’re committing some kind of a no-no. Can you tell us, to what extent are these fears real? And if we have them, what should we do about them?

Marina Nitze
Yes. So, my approach there would be to build a stakeholder map, and that’s something we recommend in the book. And a stakeholder map is usually such a valuable tool that we explicitly recommend that you never share it with anybody and that you don’t put it anywhere that somebody else can find it, because everybody’s got those different perspectives, like you were just saying.

You may have a boss that is threatened by you shining. In which case, if you really want to see your initiative take hold, the way to do it might be to give your boss credit for having done it. Or, you may have a boss that is really like a rule-follower, and so the way to get around that is to follow the rules. You may have people that are very motivated by getting a promotion and, therefore, you have to understand what is the criteria for them getting that promotion, and how do you help them achieve that in the course of helping you achieve your initiative.

So, by mapping out kind of who each person is, what their resources or power structure is relative to the decisions that you need made, and what are their risks and incentives, you can start strategically figuring out how to move forward so that you can get your initiative done, whether that means, again, giving some people credit, distracting some other people with a different shiny toy, and then maybe even changing some position descriptions themselves so that people’s motivation to do their regular work is shifted to help support what you’re trying to get done.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s so much wisdom here, Marina. Thank you.Okay, so when you’re making this map of things with the stakeholders and what they want, I’m curious, are there a few key categories of drivers, of things that people tend to really want or not want that we might tick through as we’re trying to fill out that map? Because we might say, “Huh, what does Paul want? Hmm, nothing’s leaping to mind.” Could you give us a few starter categories to help get those ideas flowing?

Marina Nitze
Yeah, absolutely. I think we have, like, two pages of bullets in the book as additional brainstorming exercise. But people think about what their recognition is. Some people, for example, actively avoid the limelight, and some people really want to be seen in it. Money, which could be tied to promotions or raises or getting more budget line item for their own program.

Some people want to be perceived as innovative, and some people want to be perceived as rule followers. And then it’s also important not to overlook the literal lines of like, “What is this person supposed to be doing? And what are the lines, whether they’re grey or bright lines, of what they’re not supposed to be doing?” And how might you need to adjust those to accommodate the kind of different kind of work that you might need them to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Marina, it seems like as you described this, you sound like such a master, and, hey, you’ve got a lot of experience in some organizations, you’ve learned some things the hard way, and you’ve codified some of it. So, beyond simply reading your book Hack Your Bureaucracy, do you have any tips on how we can, generally, become all the more savvy and hip to this skillset?

Marina Nitze
Yeah, I think this is one that anybody can learn. I don’t think you have to get a bachelor’s degree in it by any means. And so, I would start with just identifying a problem in your space of, again, whether it’s you’re annoyed by a Homeowners Association rule, or since this podcast is about being awesome at your job, something in your immediate department, or maybe at a slightly higher level on your organization that you want to change.

And then I would go about trying to change it. Talk to your peers. Enlist other people in the journey of making the change. Try the normal way. Understand and ask why, “Is it the way that it is? Is there some law or policy, or is it just that a CEO, three CEOs ago, said that it was the case, and no one has ever questioned it since?”

And then you can build up your skills there. I would definitely recommend picking problems, if at all possible, that don’t involve life or death as your first bureaucracy hack. Pick something a little bit lower stakes. And then as you build up your bureaucracy-busting muscles, you can take on harder and harder problems.

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

Marina Nitze
One last thing I’ll just say is it’s also a lot of this sounds like you’re really in the weeds, and it definitely is, but it really helps to hold a north star. And that was something that I built early on when I was at the VA. But literally, it just started with a bunch of Post-It notes, but saying like, “What could the VA be? If we get through all these bureaucracy hacks, like what is the VA at the end of the rainbow, as it were?”

And, actually, so the Federal Government has an equivalent to the Grammy’s or the Emmy’s called the Sammy’s. And the VA won the Sammy for the whole Federal Government for customer service two weeks ago.

Pete Mockaitis
Congratulations.

Marina Nitze
And that was such an incredible vision, that from ten years ago, that it wasn’t even on my vision board. So, I just encourage you, it’s nice to have a north star, and it can also motivate you through the dark times to know, like, what the big picture you’re working towards is even if you have to make a lot of concessions along the way.

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

Marina Nitze
Absolutely. It’s Lily Tomlin, and it’s, “I always wondered why somebody didn’t do something about that. And then I realized, I’m somebody.”

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

Marina Nitze
I love re-reading Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, and the research that you’re just kind of as happy as you were before no matter what bad things happen to you, or no matter what decisions that you make. That helps make some decisions feel a little lower stakes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Marina Nitze
Well, a book that I really modeled our book off of is The Success Principles by Jack Canfield because I love that you can just open to any page and get like a little mini dose of inspiration without having to commit to reading a 300-page book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Marina Nitze
Definitely the stakeholder maps or the journey maps, that it would be like when you’re mapping out a process from end to end, all the different steps, all the people working at the steps, what the error rates are, what the volume rates are, what the wait times are. I love those immensely. And maybe, as a meta toy, it would be my enormous dry erase board sticker because it takes up like my whole wall, and it’s where I draw all my maps.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so it’s a dry erase board but it’s like a Post-It, or you say sticker?

Marina Nitze
Yes, it’s from 3M. Yeah, it’s like six-by-twelve feet. You can buy them in different sizes. And mine, I’ve had it for five years now, and it’s held up perfectly, but I accept I’d have to replace them.

Pete Mockaitis
But you could reposition it with the adhesive.

Marina Nitze
I had never tried that. So, yes, you could reposition it, but most of my vision was if I got it…you know how you dry erase something for a while and you’d kind of have that red hue that you can’t get rid of? I envisioned, I could just, “Oh, great. I can just unstick the board and put up a new one.” But I haven’t even had to do that yet, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Then you get it done.

Marina Nitze
Yeah, I use it all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Marina Nitze
Inbox zero. It took me many years to get to that point but now I get super anxious if I even have, like, five unprocessed emails.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Marina, maybe we need to have you for a whole another episode to discuss that.

Marina Nitze
It took a lot of work to get there.

Pete Mockaitis
So, a quick follow-up, what have been some of the most game-changing insights, or approaches, or tools, or hacks to pulling this off?

Marina Nitze
One, definitely, the snooze feature in Gmail helped a lot because some email it’s a hotel reservation one, or something about a meeting agenda for next week. I snooze it till one minute before I need it so it gets out of my inbox but I know it’s going to appear when I need it. Another piece is really from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which is I just have to make a decision about what to do in the email.

I don’t have to do the thing, so that reduces the friction of like, “Oh, my God, I don’t have time to write a 20-page report.” But I don’t have to. All I have to do is capture it in my to-do list that I have to write a 20-page report, and then I tag the email as having a task, and then I can get it out of my inbox. I’m also a pretty merciless un-subscriber, and I love apps like Matter, for example.

Anytime I get an email newsletter, something I’m supposed to read, that automatically gets forwarded to Matter and delete it from my inbox, so that when I’m in the mood to read, or David Allen, in the context to read, I can just pull up my Matter app and I get all my reading material in one place so it’s not in my inbox.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear people quote it back to you often?

Marina Nitze
Yes, it’s the idea of cultivating the karass. Karass is a concept from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, which is that, in the book, that God has hidden other people on the planet to help you accomplish a goal. We use it in a little bit more of a secular way, which is imagine if, instead of thinking that all people in your agency or your department are out to get you or out to slow-roll you, imagine that there are people that are out to help you, and they are just hidden around as security guards or secretaries or accountants. And how can you find them and then band together to get your goal accomplished?

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

Marina Nitze
HackYourBureaucracy.com. We have a blog where we’re continuing to share more bureaucracy-hacking tactics and stories. And then you can follow me on Twitter at @MarinaNitze, N-I-T-Z-E.

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

Marina Nitze
Yes, find your karass. I mean, the best allies I had when I was in government trying to get through some of the hardest projects were literally the security guards and the executive assistants. And so, you just never know who your best allies are. So, go out there, meet as many people as you can, and hack your bureaucracy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Marina, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you many successful hacks.

Marina Nitze
Thank you so much. You, too.