Creativity

Pete Mockaitis
Allen, thanks for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Allen Gannett
Thanks man. Thanks for having the best named podcast on the internet.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I appreciate that. I was kind of inspired by Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich because it’s like, I know exactly what I’m getting from you. I like that clarity.

Allen Gannett
It’s like that movie Snakes on a Plane. It was about snakes on a plane.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Oh, and it was a delight. Speaking – well, you’re a marketing guy, I loved what they did with. Samuel Jackson’s voice–calling people and leaving voice mails like, “Hey Allen, you’ve got to get your butt to see Snakes on a Plane.” I just thought that was the coolest thing.

Allen Gannett
I don’t remember that. That sounds – I need to go look that up. That’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
I hope it’s still live. It brought me such joy and probably a healthy return on investment that you could measure with TrackMaven.

Allen Gannett
This is true. This is true.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Let’s get into it a little bit, but first I think we’ve got to hear about your Wheel of Fortune experience.

Allen Gannett
Oh my God. Yeah, I think this is one of those fun facts in the bio.

Yes, when I was 18 I decided – I had this phase where I was like I want to get cast on game shows. How hard could it be? I basically applied to all these different game shows and I got – there was a local audition for Wheel of Fortune, so I went. I never really watched Wheel of Fortune before. I decided instead of studying the puzzles I would instead study the contestants.

I watched like hours and hours and I played like the web game. I did all this different stuff to get a feel for it. What I realized about all the contestants that were on the show is that they weren’t all that good at puzzles; what they were good at is they were all bubbly and they all like enunciated really well.

Yeah, I went in and I did terrible on the actual like written test part, but when it came to do the audition, I did an Elmo impression, which I will never, ever do again and I think they were like, “Okay, this guy’s sufficiently crazy.” Yeah, I went on and I lost terribly. I lost to Joan from Alexandria, Virginia who won 60,000 dollars. I did not win that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh.

Allen Gannett
I know.

Pete Mockaitis
I wonder where Joan is now and what she’s done with the money.

Allen Gannett
Joan, if you’re listening, if you’re listening, please send me a DM.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh that’s fun. That’s good. All right, cool.

I want to get into your book here, but first to get a little bit of back story, so you are the founder and CEO of TrackMaven, which is marketing analytics software. Can you give us a little bit of a feel for how your experience in that world informed your view of creativity and made you think that you need to write this book?

Allen Gannett
Yeah, I’ve been running TrackMaven for almost six years now. The thing that’s really interesting is so we work with a lot of really big brands to help them find the patterns in their marketing data, so like what are the things that you’re doing, what are the stories you’re telling, the products you’re focusing on, the messages, the audiences, what are those things that are actually driving results for your business.

What we’ve found is that there’s actually a lot of science behind this sort of marketing creativity. I’ve always had this sort of right brain/left brain sort of overlap view of creativity.

A few years ago I started noticing that when I would talk to the marketers we work with, they would say something like, “Well, I’m just not that creative.” I was like, “Uh, what?” “I’m not that way. I wasn’t born like Mozart. I’m not Steve Jobs.” I was like, “Um, but creativity is like this skill that you can develop and learn.” They’re like, “No, no, no. You either have it or you don’t.”

I’d always read a lot of autobiographies and I always read a lot of stories of creative genius. When you read the autobiographies and the memoirs and stories from these people, what’s clear is that they don’t feel like they were just born with it. They also don’t feel it was just the result of hard work. They feel like it was a result of a lot of smart work and a lot of intentionality.

I started giving this talk at marketing conferences all about how we need to get rid of this notion of the creative genius just sort of like walking out of the womb with all these talents and that being a reason why you can’t also be creative.

That’s spiraled into a book proposal, which spiraled into broadening the book to all creatives because the thing I realized as I started digging into the topic was that creativity is one of these things that is actually one of the most misunderstood concepts in popular culture. We all think we know what it is, but there’s actually been tons of new fascinating science and research about creativity that people don’t know about.

It’s actually at this point pretty well studied. We have a really good understanding of what causes people to like certain things, dislike other things, what are the underlying things in your brain that actually drive creative thinking. We have a lot of good science on this.

The book was this attempt to both a) debunk this sort of inspiration theory of creativity and 2) to paint a picture of okay, if creativity is something you can nurture and develop, well, how do you do it.

For that half of the book I interviewed about 25 living creative geniuses. These are like billionaires like David Rubenstein, startup people like Alexis Ohanian from Reddit, Kevin Ryan who did MongoDB, Gilt Business Insider, DoubleClick. Oscar winners. I did YouTube vloggers like Casey Neistat. I did Tony award winners, Emmy award winners, all these different people.

I found that there was these consistent things they did to enhance their creativity over and over again. The book I explain what those things are and I explain how you can do them too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yes. I want to dig into these practices, absolutely. But first I’m just so intrigued. Can you unpack a little bit some of the key things that are universal like what makes us like stuff and dislike stuff?

Allen Gannett
Yeah, what I found was really interesting when you dive into the research is that people have studied this question a few different fields. They’ve studied it in psychology, in sociology, in neuroscience. It all sort of converged on this thing where it turns out a big part of our preference is tied around these two urges we have.

The first urge is that as people we crave the familiar. We like things that we’re comfortable with, that we know are safe. This is very much a sort of evolutionary or reptilian effect where part of our job of our brain is to keep us safe.

If we see – if thousands of years ago we saw a cave we had never seen before, we sort of know, “Hm, we should probably avoid that thing.” We have this ability to really seek out the familiar. Like what is – think about your home, think about visiting your grandmother’s home. These places where you feel sort of safe. That’s one thing.

The second type of thing that affects preference, the second urge is that we also are really interested in things that are novel because we like the potential rewards. For example, in the hunter/gatherer days you’re looking for new berries, you’re looking for new sources of food. You’re constantly looking for that next thing.

But the problem is that these two urges, the craving for familiarity because of safety and the seeking of novelty because of potential reward, are in direct contradiction with each other. It almost makes no sense.

The thing is and what scientists found is that this is actually a really elegant way for our brain to balance things because let’s say for example you see a new berry in a field and it looks wildly different than any berry you’ve ever seen before. You should probably not eat it because it’s probably poisonous.

If on the other hand you see a berry that’s basically a bigger blueberry, it’s just a big, fat blueberry, you can probably go, “Okay, it’s probably fine. I’m going to try it out.” Your brain has this really graceful way of balancing familiarity and novelty.

What scientists found is what this relationship looks like is that the more we see something, the more we like it, but only up until a point. Once that point is reached then every time we see it we like it less and less and less. What they found is that there’s this inverse U relationship. There’s this bell curve. There’s this bell curve between exposure and preference.

In the book I call it the creative curve. It’s this relationship where your job as a marketer, as an entrepreneur, as someone who’s tasked with creating anything is to create ideas that have that right blend of familiarity and novelty.

Star Wars was literally a Western in space. It was familiar, but it was also novel. Harry Potter was a traditional rags to riches, orphan rises to greatness story, but it was told in this whole world around witches and wizards and magic in a way which many children’s books had never done before.

That combination of familiarity and novelty, that was the thing that really stuck out as one of these findings that has been so well researched, so well founded, so well supported, but we don’t really talk about that when we talk about creativity.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. An inverse U, I guess I’m thinking of a lower case n, if you will, then how that unfolds. I don’t know who it was, a comedian or just one of my buddies who said, “Oh, that looks like something that I already know and love and yet is slightly different. I will try this new flavor of beef jerky.”

Allen Gannett
Yes. Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. “I already like this brand of beef jerky and yet this is mesquite, so I am intrigued.” That connects and relates certainty to our experience.

I’m thinking about sort of like I guess startups that are really hits like Uber. It’s like, “You’re familiar with a cab? Okay. Well, hey, how about we just do that a little bit differently in a way that you find to be more convenient.”

Allen Gannett
When you think about – I think food trends are a great example of this. You saw, for example when Pink Berry rose to prominence. It was ice cream but it wasn’t. It was a little tangy. It was a little different. It was kind of healthy I guess. Now, obviously, it’s fallen from prominence.

Right now there’s that big trend going around of sort of the sushi burrito, like these giant, oversized sushi rolls. It’s something familiar. It’s sushi. It’s also something familiar. It’s a burrito. But it’s different. It’s a sushi burrito.

That’s one of those things that it was interesting because there’s all this science about it, but in the book I have a bunch of – have some quotes from some of the interviews and a lot of these creatives, they know this. They acknowledge this.

In fact I talk about this really fascinating study that this one professor did. He’s a professor of empirical musicology, which is a study of the math behind music. He did this study looking at how The Beatles used experimental song features over their career and it follows this U shape, where they use it more and more and as their audience started getting fatigued, they started using it less and less.

They always balanced the right balance of familiarity and novelty. They weren’t doing stuff that was too new. They weren’t doing stuff that was too old.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also thinking about music there in terms of like if there’s a hit song on the radio or always just popping up again and again wherever you go. At first it’s like, “What is this? Oh no, eh.” Then it kind of grows on you, like, “Yeah, I dig this.” Then it’s like, “I’m sick of this. It’s everywhere. It’s just got to go. ”

Allen Gannett
Oh exactly. There’s actually a study in the book that literally did that in a scientific setting where they just played the same song over and over again. Again, there’s this U shaped relationship.

The first time you hear a new Drake song, you’re like, “Oh, okay.” The third time you’re like, “Oh, this is great.” The tenth time you’re like, “Please stop playing Hotline Bling” Then the twentieth time you’re like, “Why is this playing?”

You see this over and over again is that there’s this relationship. Things fall in and out of favor. If you’re going to master creativity, you have to first master that. You first have to master this curve.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I’m wondering then, so let’s say you’re a professional. You are in an environment working with your folks, your colleagues day and day out. You need to come up with the big idea that’s going to, I don’t know, improve a process or be a new opportunity that we should chase after. How does one apply this principle in the trenches?

Allen Gannett
I think the biggest thing that you can apply from really sort of a micro-perspective is I think too often in business environments we focus on the novel. We focus on – we use words like innovation, brainstorming. We’re constantly trying to find these new, out-of-the-box ideas.

I think some of the most valuable innovation, especially in corporate America, actually comes from taking what’s already working and just updating, just doing those little tweaks, those little changes.

I think we have to get away from this idea that sort of originality and innovation are the key to success because that’s not actually what the science shows us. That’s not actually what history shows us. The things that are successful are actually oftentimes the things that are somewhat familiar. I think making that mind shift change is really important. I hate the word brainstorming. It’s like my least favorite word.

Pete Mockaitis
Is ideation also a no-no for you?

Allen Gannett
Ah, ah, you’re killing me Pete. Don’t say this. Stop.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I’m thinking in terms of products. I guess you always think of Apple design and innovation and all those words. At the same time though the iPhone is kind of like, well, hey, it’s a phone and a music player and some internet goodies sort of in one.

It’s like you’ve got a thing in your pocket, maybe you have multiple things in your pocket, but you sort of put them all into one convenient package that looks great.

Allen Gannett
100%. You see this a lot – basically what you’re talking about is form factors. Form factors are a really common form of innovation because it’s the same actual functionality but in a different form factor.

Now we sort of joke about Tide pods because of the viral meme about people eating them, but before that they were a really successful product line because it was just taking detergent and making it easier to deal with.

It’s crazy because it’s literally just that – people I guess didn’t want to pour the detergent, but Tide pods were hugely successful just by changing the form factor. That’s all the change they made was. It wasn’t like some huge crazy innovation. It was just let’s put it in a little plastic dissolvable bag.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. That’s intriguing how you can also think about it in terms of a Tide pen, a Tide wipe.

Allen Gannett
Oh yeah, all these things. A Clorox wipe, it’s really the same thing.

Pete Mockaitis
A travel size or a jumbo size. That’s intriguing.

I’m almost sort of imagining sort of like a matrix or a spider diagram in terms of hey, form factor is one thing you can tweak a little bit on one axis or dimension. What are some others in terms of hey, form factor is one variable, size is another, what else?

Allen Gannett
It really depends on the creative field obviously. With consumer packaged goods, form factor is obviously one that’s pretty common. Brand’s another one that’s pretty common.

Oftentimes you’ll see this for example when people are writing novels, they oftentimes will use really traditional story arcs. There’s actually all this interesting research about story arcs. There’s like these six recurring story arcs that people always use. People will take that same story arc and then they’ll add their own characters, their own genre.

Sometimes people will innovate on the actual story arc and add like a weird twist or a sort of a surprise ending, but actually more traditionally successful types of art are taking the standard structures and formulas and they’re working off of that. Much more common is you see people using the standard sort of structure of formula in art and working off that.

Most successful radio songs are three minutes. There are the occasional songs, I guess like Bohemian Rhapsody that’s like forever and that are successful from a sort of popular perspective, but those are the exception, not the norm. Typically you actually have to really focus on what are going to be the things you do that are similar to the baseline not wildly different.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, one of the key pieces in your book is coming up with the right idea at the right time. You talked about this curve. Any thoughts in terms of the timing? Do you play the game a little bit different if it’s played out in super familiar versus, oh, it seems more novel?

Allen Gannett
Yeah, I think the thing you need to recognize is you need to learn how to listen to your audience to identify where your idea is and whether or not you can change it or pivot it to the right place because you need to be at that blend of familiar and novel, that right perfect blend to really take off.

In the book I talk about these four things these highly successful, creative people do. One of them that I was surprised by is that they all engage in a highly data driven iterative process. I don’t mean data necessarily purely in the data way, although some do, but I mean some sort of systematic rigorous process of creating, testing, editing, reediting, recreating, sort of doing that over and over and over again.

For example, I talk about how I spent a day with the Ben & Jerry’s flavor development, which was like a really fun, delicious day for lots of reasons.

One of the things that I thought was so interesting was you have these people who are like experts in ice cream, they’re experts in flavor, they’re former chefs, they’re food scientists, but the biggest thing, the most important thing for them that they do is every year they come up with a list of 200 flavor ideas and they survey their audience.

They literally send – they have an email newsletter. They send a survey to a subset of the people in the email newsletter. They just ask two questions. The two questions are 1) how likely are you to buy this flavor and 2) how unique is this flavor. They’re basically asking how familiar is it and how novel is it.

The reason why that’s so important is because what they want to do is if they create too many things that are too familiar, that are – people say, “Oh, I love that,” that are similar to things they already like, well, you’ll end up with a whole line of brownie and cookie flavors, which sounds good, but will eventually make the brand feel stale.

If you just focus on novelty, you’ll just get a bunch of flavors that are like crazy, but no one will actually buy them when they see them on the shelf, even if they taste good. They use data to winnow down those initial gut ideas into ideas that they feel have a high degree of success based on listening to their audience.

So much of creativity, so much about doing anything creative is about nailing that for your audience. I think it’s amazing how little we actually listen to our audience.

That was one of the things I thought was most surprising was we have this vision of these great creatives like going off into a cabin in the woods and creating these things and then returning with a finished product. In reality creatives interviewed, they love getting audience feedback because they’re creating for the audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. I’m intrigued. Those two questions then is it like a 400 item survey then if there’s 200 flavors and oh dang.

Allen Gannett
Yeah, it’s like a whole production.

Pete Mockaitis
Those are the committed ice cream-

Allen Gannett
Yeah. No I think they split it up, but yeah people get into Ben & Jerry’s. They have a big email list. You’d be shocked.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very intriguing. I remember one of the first times I had this ah-ha was when I was – I don’t know how it happened. I was with my buddy, Conner, shut up. We were watching The Simpsons movie DVD commentary. I don’t know. It just happened that day.

Allen Gannett
It happens.

Pete Mockaitis
What occurred again and again in the commentary was the creators would talk about, “Oh, hey before in this scene we did this joke, but that didn’t work. Originally we did this, but that didn’t work.”

Allen Gannett
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
“We tried it out,” and this and that. I was like wait a second. From my perspective as a consumer, okay this is just a silly cartoon movie, but from behind the curtain with the creative folk going after it, it’s like test it, test it, test it. It’s like, yeah.

Allen Gannett
Comedy is so fascinating. Standup comedy, I profile a standup comedian in the book. Standup comedy I think is one of the most interesting examples of this because they literally get on stage and their whole shtick is they’re supposed to look like they’re organic and jokey.

But literally if you ever watch the new Seinfeld special on Netflix, they have this scene where he’s sitting in the middle of a park and they took out all of his yellow legal pads of jokes that he’s written throughout his entire career and it fills the entire park.

Because the whole thing in standup comedy is what they actually do is they’re constantly writing down little ideas and then all these standup comedians, even the big ones are constantly going to small comedy shows to – they call it working out a joke because they want to get the every little pause and facial expression, they want to get that all nailed.

By the time it’s going in their comedy special a year from now, they’ve been practicing and testing and getting that joke just right for them to deliver it on air recorded. Then they mostly throw out the jokes they’ve done for their special and they do the whole thing over again.

Standup comedy is actually one of the most practiced, rehearsed, written types of creativity, but we think of it as this organic thing. It’s like, no, that’s not how it works. These people don’t just come up and start cracking jokes.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I remember I always wondered when I was watching standup comedy, it’s like that joke is not at all connected to the previous joke. It feels like if this were a conversation, there would be a segue or whatever. It’s like, “Well, what can I tell you. I’ve got a bunch of jokes that are winning and they didn’t happen to be connected to each other, so this is what you got.”

Allen Gannett
Yeah, have fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so that’s one great process there in terms of the laws of creative success and you share a couple others. Can you reveal them for us?

Allen Gannett
Yeah, of course. In the book there’s these four laws of the creative curve. One I already mentioned obviously is iterations and these highly iterative processes, so all these creators do that. The other three, the first one is consumption.

One of the things I thought was so interesting is that we think of creators as constantly doing, as constantly putting stuff out there, but all the creators I interviewed actually spend a lot of time consuming information in their vertical.

I explain in the book why. I explain why they do that. But that was one of the things I thought was so fascinating. There’s a huge amount of time consuming information in their vertical.

The second thing is that, again, we talk about this sort of originality myth, but every single one I interviewed talked about at some level how they spend time imitating the greats. Imitation is a huge part of the creative process. The second law is imitation.

The reason why is that there’s these common structures, these common ways in which creative products are presented to an audience. When you have to balance familiarity and novelty, knowing those structures is very, very important to create the familiar.

The third one and the one that I think is probably the most important and the one that’s often underappreciated and misunderstood is creative communities. We have this sort of myth of the solo genius. The idea that there’s these creatives like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and they’re doing these things all by themselves.

This is so far from the truth. It’s so destructive because so much of creativity is a social phenomenon. You have to create work that other people recognize as creative. They have to tell people about it. People have to agree that it’s creative.

When you actually look at these stories, like look Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, he had investors. He had employees who worked for him. There’s all these people involved. In the book I break down the different types of people you need to have in your creative community.

But one of the ones that people always sort of forget about is all the creative geniuses I interviewed have what I call prominent promoter, someone who gives them and lends them credibility because if you are creative and no one ever hears about your work, sure your work may be technically proficient, but from an academic perspective, it’s actually not creative.

Creative work by definition has to be recognized as creative. People have to see it in order for it to be labeled as such. Having people who lend you credibility, who lend you air time, who do that is actually incredibly important.

The sort of social construct around creativity is one of the things that I thought was really interesting when you dive into creativity because if I asked you, “Hey Pete, is that painting creative?” It’s actually a hard question to answer because if you’re looking at a painting of the Mona Lisa, well if you’re looking at a new one today that’s an exact reproduction well, you’d say, “Well, it’s not creative.”

Okay, but what makes the original one creative? There’s other paintings from a similar time period that are just as well painted and just as interesting. There’s actually a really big social phenomenon aspect around creativity that really is actually an important sort of nuance to understand.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that turn of phrase prominent promoter. I’m just imagining sort of like a … man like, “Yeah dog. What he said. Oh, that’s so good.” What are a couple other key roles?

Allen Gannett
A couple other ones are – the other one is a master teacher. All the creatives I interviewed had someone who is a world-class expert as a teacher not just sort of middling level.

The prominent promoter and the master teacher, sometimes people find them in one as like a mentor but I think it’s important to break those two because they’re actually two separate roles. For a lot of people those came from two separate people.

The other one is what I call conflicting collaborators. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs are a great example of this, where Steve Jobs didn’t want to design his computers. Steve Wozniak did not want to go around selling them.

Oftentimes we talk about these people as okay, they’re the face of it, they’re the name, they’re the genus, but they also have all done a good job of acknowledging their weaknesses and bringing other people in who conflict with them, who have those different talents to actually get to where they want to go.

That is so, so, so important because if you buy this myth that it’s all about you, it’s just about this one person and you have to do it by yourself, you’re never going to get there. You’re never going to get there and frankly, you probably shouldn’t because you’re going to need to learn how to engage with other people to really once you have a great product to actually get distribution.

The final one of the four types of people in a creative community is what I call a modern muse. What you find with these creative people is that they often surround themselves with people who inspire and motivate them. They’re not necessarily like a teacher or a mentor.

But for example, I interviewed a couple of really popular YouTube vloggers. I interviewed Casey Neistat and Connor Franta, who probably combined have like 20 or 25 million subscribers, like a lot.

What was interesting was that all of them would surround themselves, their friends, their friend group with other creators, other YouTube creators, other people and would keep them motivated, to keep them pushing, to give them that energy and it also gave them that friendly competition. It gave them that push of saying, “Okay, he or she did that, so I want to do that too.” They inspired each other. They did that.

Those four elements were incredibly important to have. Even missing one of those can be fatal to creative success.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Thank you.  I also want to dig in a little bit. You talk a bit about neuroscience and what it has to say about inspiration and ah-ha moments. What are some tidbits there?

Allen Gannett
Yeah, one of the most amazing things is that ah-ha moments, these flashes of genius we have that we think of as so magical are actually really well studied, Pete. People know, we know a lot about why they happen and all of that stuff.

The thing is that as people we can’t explain it. Oftentimes for things we can’t explain ourselves we ascribe sort of like magic, like it’s unexplainable. It’s not unexplainable. It’s actually pretty simple.

We have two different types of processing that go on in our brain. One is logical processing the other is sudden insight.

Logical processing happens in our left hemisphere. It’s very step-by-step. It’s like when you solve a math problem or work out a word puzzle letter by letter. It’s all conscious. You’re aware as the steps are going through. You know it’s happening.

The other type of processing is sudden insight. This happens in your right hemisphere. This type of processing is all subconscious. This is more connecting dissonant ideas together. Only once the answer comes together and three’s sort of like the left hemisphere is quiet enough, only then do you actually consciously experience these things.

That’s why we have this idea of sudden insight because these ideas suddenly pop out of consciousness but that doesn’t mean they’re magical. They’re in your right hemisphere and in fact this is why you have these so much when you’re in the shower or a lot of these stories people were in bed or they’re on a train or they’re on a commute is because in these moments your left hemisphere has sort of quieted down.

You kind of think about your left hemisphere and your right hemisphere as your left hemisphere is your noisy lab partner who won’t shut up about working through the problem and your right hemisphere is your quiet, smart lab partner who’s like working through and they say like, “Hey, I got the answer. I got the answer,” but you can’t actually hear them say it until your noisy lab partner kind of shuts up.

The thing is that since it’s really just a different type of processing, we actually have pretty good insight into how to have more of them. It’s more complicated than this and I explain in the book. But the short version is that if you want to have more sudden insight, you need to do two things.

One, obviously, you need to have the time, the sort of quiet time for your left hemisphere to sort of be settled. The second thing, the thing most people miss, this is why consumptions were in the laws, is you need to consume a large amount of information. You have to have the raw ingredients in your right hemisphere to actually connect.

I experienced this in the book where I’m reading thousands and thousands of pages of peer-reviewed research on creativity and so when I have ah-ha moments in the shower or whatever, I’m having ah-ha moments about these really dorky creativity concepts. If I hadn’t been reading all that, I wouldn’t have had those moments.

People are like, “Well, J.K. Rowling had these ideas for Harry Potter,” but she also spent her entire childhood reading because she had this chaotic household and she wanted to get away from it. Yeah, those are the raw ingredients in her brain. Those are the things that were percolating around.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that notion in terms of the quiet. I’m finding – we had a great podcast conversation with Dr. Michael Breus talk about optimal timing and our ultradian rhythms and neurotransmitters and goodies kind of internally biochemically you’re kind of predisposed to functioning in one or the other place better.

For me, I see it all the time, I actively sort of schedule my workday around it, sudden insights, creative goodies happen in the earlier part of the morning and then logical processing happens when I am kind of more fully woken up, breakfast and cruising.

I kind of deliberately try to schedule, “Oh, I’m going to write something for the early morning and then I’m going to categorize all these tax transactions in the later part of the day.” My brain is happier having the task match up what is required from it in the state that it happens to be in.

Allen Gannett
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
Well this is so cool, so good. Allen, tell me anything you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things.

Allen Gannett
No, that was great. I think that the one thing that I worry about is that the book is saying that there is science and a path towards creative success. Pete, I’m not saying it’s easy. I think that’s a really important thing. In fact, I think it’s incredibly hard.

I think oftentimes we sort of think because it’s like a luck-based thing that, “Well, I don’t have it so I have an excuse not to try.” I actually want to challenge people. I think you can do it but you do have to try, you do have to lean in, you do have to really, really push yourself if you want to achieve that.

It’s not that I’m saying it’s easy. Actually, it’s really, really hard, but there is a path. That I think is an important thing to know.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Thank you. Now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Allen Gannett
Oh my God. I have so many. I love Ben Horowitz book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I mean there’s like 500 quotes in there that I just think are – speak to me so much because I think at the end of the day if you haven’t read that book, it’s a book by Ben Horowitz, who’s one of the early employees of Netscape and he went on to found Andreessen Horowitz.

He talks about sort of the – he talks about what it’s like to be an entrepreneur in a way that I think is very authentic and real. The big point he makes is that the stuff isn’t easy. It’s not simple. It’s not straightforward. There aren’t silver bullets. I just think that message really resonates with me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh beautiful. How about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Allen Gannett
Oh, I think anyone who gets into creativity will tell you that the study Robert Zajonc did the mere exposure effect study a long, long time ago. It has such a big influence in marketing and neuroscience and creativity research.

Basically the finding was that people’s exposure actually has a pretty big relationship on whether or not they like something. From there we’ve sort of gone down the rabbit hole and there’s been all this fascinating research around preference and likeability. That study started the whole thing.

Basically it’s kind of cute. He showed people these fake Chinese characters. They didn’t mean anything. Then he showed it to people different numbers of times and would ask them a) how positive or negative they thought it was and how much they liked it.

It’s really funny because people are like – people actually have opinions on it. “Oh, that’s a positive meaning word.” It turns out how that often people see it does affect it.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Allen Gannett
Oh my God. I love Boomerang. I’m one of those people who tends to write emails at like 1 AM in the morning. I don’t want to be that obnoxious person or obnoxious boss who’s sending emails at 1 AM, so scheduling stuff for 9 AM is like – keeps me sane and makes people think I’m sane, which is good. We want people to think that.

Pete Mockaitis
But you just ousted yourself. We all know that you’re not sane.

Allen Gannett
Yeah, I know. Everyone’s like why do these emails come right at 9 AM.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit?

Allen Gannett
For me every Saturday I take an incredibly long walk with the dog. It’s one of those times where it’s just like – I just think. I have that moment. I have that breath. I have that pause sort of in life. It gives me a chance to check in with my body. I can sort of feel is something wrong. Am I anxious? Am I tense? Usually we may stop and get a doughnut along the way. It’s a delicious habit.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a key nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks when you say it?

Allen Gannett
I think the biggest think I’ve realized just in running a business is that everyone you work with is so human, people on my board, the people we sell to, the people who work here. Everyone is so human with flaws and contradictions and messy feelings.

I think as you come to realize that it really opens up your mind to how to interact with the world, how to interact with other companies and customers, and prospects, and all these different people because you realize that you need to treat people with the sort of respect and dignity that you treat any new friend or any new human you meet.

That for me has been a really powerful experience personally and something that I think has benefited other people.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m intrigued. Dig into that a bit in terms of have you shifted your behavior in terms of how you’re interacting with folks based upon this kind of core premise?

Allen Gannett
Yeah, I mean the thing is I tend to treat people with respect but as peers and I think it tends to be the biggest impact, especially for someone who is younger, is not overly formalizing things. I think you realize as you sort grow in your career that if you make everything overly formal, people don’t really want to work with you or interact with you. I think that’s a very common mistake that people make early in their careers.

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

Allen Gannett
My website is Allen.xyz. That’s A-L-L-E-N-.-X-Y-Z. You can check out the book at TheCreativeCurve.com. It comes out June 12^th everywhere books are sold.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their job?

Allen Gannett
My call to action for all of you is that every single day when you walk in, know that if you are responsive, if you are responsible and you get done what you say you’re going to get done, you will outpace, outshine 95% of the people you work with.

If you’re building a team, you want to build a team of people who are all performing at that level and that’s where the magic happens. That’s where you get the lift. That’s where you can really step back and see a team grow.

Pete Mockaitis
Usually that’s the final word for that, I must know more. Tell me then, it seems like that seems foundational, “Yes, but of course I should do the things that I say I’m going to do.” Can you unpack a little bit in terms of common practice versus what you’re saying is an exceptional practice that makes an exceptional difference?

Allen Gannett
Yeah, the thing is that as people we’re busy. We get tired. We generally have a tendency towards homeostasis. We don’t actually always want to put in that extra incremental 10% effort. I know for me sometimes I’m tired. I don’t want to respond that email. I don’t want to do these things.

Those little actions, those actions that seem so small and inconsequential that you can write them off, that’s actually where the magic happens. That’s actually where high-performing teams happen because when the basics, when the foundations are taken for granted, when they’re assumed that you got that done, that’s when you can focus on the big stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Allen, this has been a lot of fun. I wish you and TrackMaven and The Creative Curve tons of luck and success here.

Allen Gannett
Thanks man, I appreciate it.

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

Edgar Papke
Well, thanks. Yeah, it’s a real pleasure to spend time with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy, I think we’re going to have a lot of fun. And I was intrigued digging into your background. So you’ve got three albums of music, whether it’s a singer or a songwriter, a degree in Culinary Arts, and you do a whole lot of the speaking/consulting workshop thing. I want to get your take on, what is it that you delight in within these kind of different-seeming fields, and is there a common thread that really kind of works with you and how your brain functions?

Edgar Papke
Yeah, very much so. I think right at the core of it is a common thread that runs through just about all of my work and anything that I do, both professionally as well as pursue artistically – is art, it’s creativity, and just allowing myself to explore and discover and express creatively, is that common thread. And then around that there is this desire to learn and explore. So whether it’s learning to play a musical instrument better, learn how to sing better, or how to create a great dish in the kitchen, or writing a book – to me it’s all a creative process and a learning process. So there’s always the learning that goes with it, which just fascinates me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is good. And I didn’t think we’d go deep on here, but I have to touch upon it. So right now as you talk about the learning and how that’s sort of intrinsically enjoyable to you, I guess the first thing I thought about was Carol Dweck’s fixed mindset versus growth mindset, and how it seems like you are just very comfortably situated in a growth mindset. Well, you tell me – it sounds like you’re not stressing if the dish you create is terrible, or the instrument you play sounds harsh and shrill and annoying to anyone who’s within earshot. You’re just digging the growth. Any perspectives you have, in terms of how you keep that kind of alive, or does it just come totally naturally to you?

Edgar Papke
Yeah, I think there’s that aspect of it, and there’s I think an ongoing conversation about letting people fail in the business world and in organizations. And I don’t really think of a moment in time or an outcome as ever being a failure; not much anymore. I think I used to do that much more when I was younger. I’ve come around to the idea that everything that I do is a prototype of one type or another, and so it’s not so much a failure as an outcome. And the outcome is just another step along the way.

I know it may sound corny to call it all one long journey, yet it is. And so every time I endeavor into something I’m willing to do it and then let go of it into the world and just keep moving on with it. And yeah, I’ve done a lot of things that just somebody would look at and say, “That’s kind of crazy” or, “That’s not perhaps as good as it could be.” And yet for me as long as I’m trying my best and as long as I’m putting something out there that I can continuously improve from – that makes me happy, and I do think that that’s part of the human endeavor – that ability to pursue knowledge, to create, to expand our personal and social horizons. I think that’s a necessity of the quality of human nature.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it, I dig it. The human experience – it’s starting deep. And even that turn of phrase – I think I’m going to stick with that in my own personal life and viewpoint. Everything I do is a prototype, because just the word “prototype”, at least for me… I don’t know, I have already just fantastic connotations of a prototype, is one – progress. It’s like, “Hey, I’ve got a prototype.” “Cool, let me try it out. Let me take a look.” Once you go from an idea or a rough sketch to a prototype, equals progress. And at the same time it implies unfinished-ness. So, at least for me, it’s hitting my emotional cords just right to say everything I do is a prototype, because it is simultaneously cool progress, but also unfinished, and nobody should expect it to be finished. It’s just a prototype, so chill out about it.

Edgar Papke
Yeah, and that’s what attracted me initially to the ideas around design thinking, because design is change, it’s art, it’s a creative approach to solving problems or using an idea. And I think that’s what design thinking and my work with Tom has been all about – the co-author Thomas Lockwood of the book. I know he’s extremely, extremely creative, and he’s also very logical and sequential in his thinking. I lean much more towards the creative side, the freewheeling side; yet in my personality there’s always this quest to be more competent, to try and master something and get something to a certain point, and knowing that whatever point I get to is just another stepping stone moving it forward.

That’s what design thinking is really all about in an organizational context. We don’t really get hooked or get too rigid about anything that we’re doing or an outcome that we have. Rather we keep seeking a better or a more advanced way of doing something or creating something.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then the design thinking – this term has come up a couple of times on the show. But I’d love to hear your crack at it. How would you sort of define this term? If someone says “design thinking”, what is that generally referred to?

Edgar Papke
And in the book we talk about this as the collective imagination and what design thinking brings out is just who we all are as human beings, and that’s our creative capability. So design thinking in and of itself is looking at a problem or looking at a situation very contextually, and looking at it in a holistic way and starting a conversation of what’s possible. And from there it leads into more process or systemic ways of coming at that in organizations.

One of the things that we really enjoy is some predictability of how things are going to get done, and design thinking gives people permission in organizations and in teams and groups – it gives them permission to be more creative, to express themselves more freely, to pursue knowledge and ideas in different ways. That pretty much in a lot of organizations gets dampened, it gets suppressed by wanting too much process. And really in and of itself it’s kind of an interesting dynamic, because you’re applying a predictability or a process to more unpredictability, more creativity, more freewheeling thinking, an idea generation.

So design thinking in and of itself – it’s an approach, it’s a process, and it’s a mindset; it’s a way of thinking. Much like you and I have been talking about it, it leans much more into possibility-thinking than it does into restricting or being rigid about our way of thinking or seeing the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. And so then, your book here – Innovation by Design – you lay out some perspectives and practices that can unleash great creative and innovative things in organizations. So, I’d love to hear the sort of top level thesis, in terms of, ultimately what is the distinction or the key to go about tapping into and leveraging more great innovation?

Edgar Papke
It’s an excellent question, and what comes to mind immediately for me, and one of the things that we looked at through the lens in doing research for the book, is the connection between design thinking and creative thinking in organizations and their cultures. When we look at high-level what we do, there’s always a “What” and then there’s an emotional driver of “Why” behind it. Then we start getting into the “How” part of it.

And culture really is all about how things get done and what’s expected of people in terms of their behavior, what’s acceptable or unacceptable. And I think one of the keys here is to really be able to understand how problems get solved, how decisions get made, how conflicts get managed in an organization, and how its culture informs people about how to go do that, and then be able to understand how design thinking as an approach, as a process both fits a culture, as well as can move a culture. And what I mean by “move it” is in positive and more innovative ways.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I love how you say it’s so important… Well, you didn’t say it, but I think you believe it, that it’s important to have some clarity associated with those areas – how decisions get made, how problems get solved. And I’m having flashbacks to consulting work at Bain & Company, in which we used a tool called the “RAPID framework” for decision-making, like who has what role for a given decision – who makes a recommendation, who approves it, who performs it, who provides input, who ultimately owns the decision. So it’s the acronym RAPID. And I found that so helpful, because in some organizations there are some decisions that are quite fuzzy – it’s wildly unclear who really has the decision. Everyone’s kind of concerned about covering their rears…

Edgar Papke
That’s the same thought I just had, was in some instances people don’t want to make the decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly.

Edgar Papke
Because of potential consequences.

Pete Mockaitis
And so they rope more and more and more people in to provide input, such that it’s like someone can be blamed or whatever. So, I’ve seen in my own working life how bringing clarity to decision-making is fantastically helpful and useful, in terms of the, “How does this given decision get made?” Could you search with us a little bit in terms of how do problems get solved? Could you maybe lay out the menu of options associated with, “Hey, in some organizations problems get solved in this kind of way; and others in that kind of way”?

Edgar Papke
Yeah, and we break it down in my previous work through True Alignment, we break it down into three distinct types of cultures. And so, from that, you can use those as a springboard to see how decisions are made in different ways. One culture we call a “participation culture”, which is very collaborative, and so decisions are much more driven… Leaders don’t own a decision as much as a group does, and so there’s much more of a collaboration consensus-building and a quest towards agreement within the group as to what the best path is, not just to buy in; rather to gain a high level of commitment to the decision and the outcome that’s being reached.

That’s different than an “expertise culture”, where decisions are generally driven by those that either have the authority, or by way of establishing and demonstrating their competency, that they’re given the power influence to make decisions. So it’s less of a collaboration process; it’s more of, we either turn to the experts, we turn to the people with the authority, whatever it happens to be.

And then there’s also a third one, which is “authenticity cultures”. And there’s a great degree of personal empowerment that takes place, so decision-making can be driven very rapidly by individuals in whatever situation that they’re in because they feel empowered and they’re given the right or they’re expected to make the decision at a very personal level.

So you can hear there are some distinct differences. And it’s interesting to note that those elements become very important in terms of how problems get solved as well. Do we collectively come together, do we turn to experts or have one or two people solve a problem for us because we deem them to be the most competent, or is it a matter that everyone gets to explore and learn and everybody gets to take risks? So even risk-taking takes on different definitions.

What is interesting about that is that very often leaders don’t pay enough attention to that in organizations, and so there’s a degree of disconnect. In other words, in an expertise culture sometimes a leader will say, “Well, I want people to feel empowered, I want them to make decisions”, etcetera. Yet the reality is that people are constantly seeking permission or going to one or two people in the organization to solve most of their problems and make decisions for them. So it’s very interesting how often leaders and mangers don’t really know how to interpret their culture, and don’t really have a map for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Well, that’s very thought-provoking, and I could chew on that for a while. But I’d instead maybe like to zoom in on… In your book you lay out 10 attributes that sort of facilitate great innovation. And as I peruse them, it seems like a number of them are maybe helpful at sort of the more senior leadership level – and correct me if I’m mischaracterizing anything – and others seem like that’s something absolutely any professional can do, no matter their stature or authority or absence or presence of direct reports. So, could you share maybe a couple of the practices that are amongst the most actionable and universal for all professionals?

Edgar Papke
Yeah, I think all 10 of them are accessible to anybody in any part of the organization or at any level of an organization, at least from an understanding perspective. The first one that we talk about in the book – “design thinking at scale” – has a tendency… We probably look at it from atop of the organization, say, “Well, how do we train and how do we move design thinking or the process of design thinking through an organization?”

And yet we find that the organizations, and those in our study group in the book, that do it exceptionally well, are the ones that engage everyone in the organization in learning the process of design thinking – how to look at a situation with empathy through say a customer’s eyes or another person in the organization, their eyes, and what the context that they’re in, and be able to solve problems well at that level. So I think that they’re all accessible and it really has a great degree to do with how leadership approaches it and how it moves through an organization.

That being said, I think the ones that really step out most often for anyone to be able to use are, one is the attribute of curious confrontation, because as we well know from our experiences, just about everybody struggles with how to manage conflict effectively, especially in the workplace. Conflict is an ongoing challenge that we all have as human beings. And curious confrontation is really taking a look at the term itself “confrontation”, meaning to face the truth.

I don’t have to have a solution to a problem or have a solution to a conflict that I’m in with someone or within a group. What I do need to be able to do is to step into it and to be able to say, “There is something we need to talk about here. There is a conflict, there’s a disparity in the way that we see or think about things, and let’s have a conversation.”

And the curiosity element is the one that says that there’s a desire to explore, a desire to investigate, a desire to peel away the layers in the conflict and see what’s really at the core and what the core problems are. So, anyone in an organization can actually learn to confront through inquiry and to ask questions, as opposed to always just stepping into everything with an answer. And that in and of itself is very, very powerful for any of us to engage in, whether it’s in the workplace or in our personal lives.

And also the aspect of co-creation – just a simple idea that we rely on one another in our creative process. In other words, great innovation and creativity is the building of one idea upon another. And it goes back to earlier in our conversation about prototype – “Here’s one idea; let’s build on the idea.” And so this idea of co-creation is really leaning into including people around us in ways that we probably haven’t done before, and asking them to help us to be creative in solving problems or finding new paths to innovating at higher levels.

And so much of what we do, we have a tendency to just look at our own world or live in our own world, whether it’s at work or in other parts of our lives, without really reaching out or opening up to engaging others in creating and finding solutions to the problems that we have. So the idea of co-creation and opening up to that, I think is a wonderful attribute for anyone to have as an individual and to be able to use.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I’d like to hear a couple of things here. When it comes to curious confrontation, I guess a couple of things are coming to mind. And one – a friend of a friend mentioned that he or she had a coworker who would often just shoot out an email note like, “Several of my comments have not been integrated into the document.” So, this person did not have a solution, which is I guess pros and cons. Some folks will say, “Don’t bring me a problem without a solution”, and you’re saying it can be totally cool to say, “No, I don’t know the answer yet, but we’re going to engage in a curious confrontation, and that’s cool.”

And then I guess there are other times when someone just makes an observation like that – it’s like, “I don’t know what you want me to say or do, or this doesn’t really warrant any conversation time right here or now.” It’s sort of like, “Should I drop everything and say ‘Yes, you’re right. I looked at your comments and I determined that they did not in fact strengthen the document, given these rationales.’”

And so I guess at times I’m thinking that could be very helpful for folks to learn and grow and develop and get more tuned into the brain and the goal of the leadership, and getting sharpened and strengthened and challenged. And the flipside – that could just take a whole lot of time for that. Is that really a smart use of resources? So, how’s that for a curious confrontation? I’m just going to drop that in your lap, Edgar. What do you think of that?

Edgar Papke
Well, several thoughts crossed my mind as I’m listening to you, so let me go back to the beginning and then work my way through it. The first one is, a lot of times people use this statement: “Don’t just bring me a problem; bring me a solution.” Unfortunately, if I don’t have a solution, and that’s the price of admission for us to have a conversation, we’re going to have a hard time talking about things. My preference is always to – and I coach leaders to do this directly – is, stay away from that part of, “If there’s a problem and you want to talk to me about it, bring me a solution”, is probably better delivered by just changing it slightly to, “If you identify a problem and you want to talk about it, let’s talk about it. I’d like you to find a solution or think about possible solutions. If you can’t come up with anything, let’s talk anyway.”

I think we’ve got to always have the door wide open as leaders to engage in coaching and learning with the people around us. And so, “Bring me a solution” – I like the idea of, “Try and bring me a solution. If you can’t, let’s talk anyway.” Because a lot of times problems don’t get surfaced because people are afraid to talk about them, because they’re going to be seen in a light as not smart enough or not competent enough or not doing enough about it. So that in and of itself I think can be problematic.

Going back to your example – your example is a really good one. So somebody shoots off some emails and they’re not responded to. There’s three things that everybody always wants – it’s human nature. And this is also what wraps around the idea of the collective imagination and who we are as human beings and how we innovate. And one of them is that we all want to be heard, we all want to feel a part of it, be acknowledged. And when we’re not acknowledged, we feel ignored, and that’s very problematic.

So I think if somebody’s sending emails and they’re not responded to, and they raise the issue, rather than have a quick come-back for it or have an answer, sometimes it’s just simply to ask somebody and open up to the idea of what’s important to them – to say, “Okay, yes, I didn’t respond – let’s speak truthfully here – I didn’t respond. And let’s talk about what’s important to you – about this issue or about your ideas.”

And if I did, by the way – like in your scenario – if I did take a look at the emails and I didn’t think they were good ideas, then it’s probably a little bit of a problem why I didn’t communicate back with you. So a lot of times I think it’s also a matter of being responsible to our relationships and to be able to do what we need to, to respond in a human way, to not ignore, to pay attention. And very often rather than if somebody does confront us with an issue or we have to talk to somebody about something, I think inquiries about being able to open up the conversation to, “Help me to understand what’s important to you about this, and what your ideas are and what might work and what might not.”

I think there’s not just only a coaching opportunity for leaders in these kinds of conversations. I think just with coworkers, I think it’s important to recognize that if we take the time to build relationships at the level that we need to, then a lot of the time that we spend in dysfunctional conflict and not being able to talk about things or having to go back and fix things – I think we can avoid those. We can move past those much more quickly if we have a good ongoing relationship. And that does take time; it’s like any other great relationship – take the time upfront and you’ll save a lot of time down the road.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Edgar, I appreciate that and I think you have a kindness and generosity about you in that response. And I guess my knee-jerk reaction in hearing this story relayed, I was thinking, “Who expects to have 100% of their comments integrated into any document ever?” It’s kind of like the nature of the beast, is that when you have a lot of cooks in the kitchen, some of your ideas will stick and some of them won’t, and it might be a little unrealistic for a person to just sort of say, “Not all of my comments made it into the document”, as an expectation.

But you’re saying, to paraphrase, it sounds like maybe that relationship isn’t at the strongest – that they feel ignored, hurt, unseen, and thus, this is sort of like a request to address that matter. And so there could very well be some “valid, deep-seeded” things, in terms of their beliefs and values and input that are not getting acknowledged, as opposed to, this is just an annoying coworker who has unrealistic expectations who needs to get over it.

Edgar Papke
You’ve just really touched on something really powerful, and that’s the idea of expectations. One of the things that we generally don’t do well enough in any relationship, especially within a group context in the workplace, is talk about the expectations we have for one another, how information might be used, how well we’re going to be heard by one another, how we expect responses from one another. Unspoken expectations wind up getting us into resentment and into conflict that’s often unnecessary. It’s a slippery slope. So bringing expectations into the spoken realm becomes key.

And I’m going to tie that back, if I may, back to design thinking, because if you have a process through which people are heard, how they can engage, that they can predictably be open and willing to express themselves freely around their ideas, around concerns or whatever it happens to be, in and of itself you’re creating an environment of some predictability of expectation of how things are going to happen. So, the idea of design thinking of itself is to have inclusion, it’s to have involvement, it’s about sharing information and it’s a different way of working together. And it does in fact satisfy a level of expectation need that we all have. Yeah, go ahead, please.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that. So absolutely, you’ve zeroed in on that. It’s like, it seems as though we have a mismatch of expectations. I’m sort of imagining lots of inputs coming in and we’re just going to quickly triage them and going to get the document out the door quickly, given the timeline. And it sounds like you may have the expectation that each of your comments will be absolutely integrated. Is that fair? And then you can have that conversation, dialogue, and then it seems like everybody wins. So, I like that notion of, there are unspoken, mismatched expectations at work in that example and it’s great to get after them.

And there might be an epiphany moment, like, “Oh, okay, so nobody gets all of their comments integrated into the document? Oh, that’s totally cool. Okay, well sure, I didn’t know that’s the game we were playing here.” And then we’re all aligned there; that’s awesome.

So, I also want to follow up on co-creation. Could you maybe just give us an example or two, in terms of, you talk about we’re often in our own worlds, doing our own thing and missing out on the opportunities to really co-create something cool by reaching out in different places. So, could you maybe bring that to life with an example or a case study?

Edgar Papke
Yeah, sure. One of my favorites is actually what Visa does in their innovation centers. So Visa is one of the companies we talk about in the book, and they have a design function within the organization that specifically is geared towards bringing design thinking throughout the organization as a whole and involving everyone.

And what they’ve done in the co-creation space is they’ve opened innovation centers. They have several – one out in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, one in London. And what they are doing is inviting the actual customer in. So they’re doing business-to-business and of course there’s the business-to-consumer of their customer experience that’s taking place. And so what they do is they invite the customer into the innovation center, and they actually recreate or create a retail experience of some kind for a customer, for a consumer, and will get inputs from different people as part of that process, all the way down to the consumer.

So you have Visa, then you have the business itself, say whether it’s a Costco or a Neiman Marcus, whoever it is that they are working with, and then they also include their consumer, and they co-create and look at what the actual experience is of the shopper in a retail space. So you actually create the environment and the co-creation process is everyone begins to get involved in a particular innovation, whether it’s an information component, whether it’s an actual experiential moment that a consumer has, whether it’s online or in a retail environment. And so this co-creation is really about a broader involvement, different parties getting involved and bringing their ideas and bringing their thoughts into the process.

Pete Mockaitis
So, as we say the “retail environment” – so we’re actually inside a Costco with a customer, and just sort of maybe talk it out loud, like, “Hey, what are you thinking about this credit card swiper right now?” And see what happens?

Edgar Papke
Yeah, pretty much you’re taking it down to that level and see what exactly does the experience look like and how do we get input into that, so that we contextually can better understand and better create solutions to problems and create new ideas and new ways to do things.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. And so then that can really surface some of the nitty-gritty, in terms of, “Do I have to push English or Spanish first before I can swipe it, or can I go ahead and swipe it?” or, “Is it a chip, is it a tap, is it a swipe? How do I know when it’s ready for my swipe?” So you could really probably zero in on some of those things that might be sort of not in the immediate consciousness of a Visa executive.

Edgar Papke
Yeah, very much so. Also in the book we write about New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, and their co-creation process is broader. So New Zealand’s Trade and Enterprise group – what they’re responsible for is for expanding New Zealand’s economy on a global basis. So they also invite entrepreneurs and business owners and executives from different companies in New Zealand into the process, and they take that all the way out and do co-creation and training around design thinking that then can be used worldwide in different markets in different ways with different customers and consumers, as well as different companies.

So this co-creation can be very expansive, and it allows us to be able to integrate different ways of thinking and different ideas much more readily and quickly, as well as the creative process is more expansive, so it’s more open. And as a result of that, your ability to identify and to solve problems or identify and create opportunities is much faster, it’s much more fluid. There’s also this aspect of free expression that we all enjoy as human beings naturally, which is just to throw ideas out and see what happens. And a lot of the co-creation process and great ideas actually get generated that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. So now you also have an attribute that you mention called “going after the right problems”. And so, what do you mean by that, and is it common to slip into addressing the wrong problems, and how do we keep our mental acuity to stay focused appropriately?

Edgar Papke
Yeah. I think what happens a lot and we all, I believe, have this experience, is that very often we look for the shortcut or look for the easiest problems to solve. Sometimes we’re not going to take the time to collect all the information that we need to identify what a real problem can be. This attribute is coming at it through the lens of identifying what the right problem is; it becomes key to success in innovation and business.

It really does mean paying much more attention to the consumer and to the customer, and ideally involving them in identifying what is it that they’re really seeking and wanting. I’m going to go back to something that you mentioned before that I think is powerful, is that, “Do I have to go through a sequence for you as a provider of a product or service to understand who I am?” So, whether it’s in Spanish or English or whatever language it happens to be, how quickly can you communicate with me in a way that I feel both appreciated, that you’re paying attention to my way of communicating, as well as how easily you can communicate with me.

So I think when you start peeling that one away, you might say, “Well, the problem isn’t how do we guide someone into our way of doing a transaction. Perhaps what we do is we understand who the customer is and we create a technology that allows us to respond to that particular customer in a way that makes them comfortable.” In other words, if I’m Spanish-speaking and you understand that as a provider of a product or service, the right problem may not be that you put me through a process that you want me to go through; rather you design a way of interacting with me, whether it’s artificial intelligence or using whatever technology that you have, so that my comfort in communicating is much more immediate and allows me to actually be able to communicate in the way to get what I want.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool, thank you. And so, Edgar, tell me – anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things?

Edgar Papke
I think there’s one other aspect of this that I think is important, and that’s another one of the attributes, and that’s this idea of “open spaces”. What we find more and more are these community-like spaces at organizations and that we’re creating in the workplace. And so when you start thinking about open spaces and whole communication… And whole communication is taking on different forms – different forms of art, different forms of expression that you see people using, and co-creation in and of itself – you see how these then come together, you see co-creation in open spaces, community spaces, where people can interact much more easily with one another and things are much more fluid.

That seems to be one thing that any organization can undertake to help them to be more successful, especially when it comes to design thinking. So, walking into a conference room or a boardroom and rather than having paintings on the wall, having white space on the wall for people to build ideas and to draw and to capture different ideas and build on them as they move forward over a period of time. So you see all of these attributes coming together in such wonderful ways. And one of the keys is to create the spaces for people to be able to engage one another and have that sense of both community, as well as a sense of a shared purpose. 

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

Edgar Papke
The first thing that comes to mind is actually something that comes from one of my heroes, one of who is Bob Dylan. And some time ago, in an interview somewhere I came across his thoughts that everything comes in threes. His way of describing it was that the blues in music is that you’ll have a 12-bar blues and it’s only wrapped around three chords. And what happens is that two cords create a tension and then the third one comes along and breaks that tension, or it takes the listener in the direction. And it builds suspense, it also delivers a resolution.

So, when I think about that and I think about how innovation occurs, there’s always these three key elements that we’re engaging in. One is that element of what it is that we’re wanting to do, and then the emotional element of “Why”. And what design thinking does in relationship to that idea, that somewhat of a quote from Dylan, is that this third piece – that creates a resolution to the tension. And if you look at “What”, “Why” and “How”, we can’t really have two successfully without having the third.

So if we have a clarity of what we want to accomplish and we have an emotional driver of “Why”, then we need to be able to understand how to get there, and what’s the process or what’s an approach to doing that. Much like if we had a “How” and we had a “What”, if we don’t have an emotional driver of “Why”, then nobody really emotionally gets engaged in pursuing the outcomes that we’re trying to create and how we do it. So there’s this element of always looking at it through that lens.

And we also do that in the book around the ideas around the collective imagination, where we talk about our human capacity and desire to participate, our desire to pursue knowledge, and our desire to express ourselves freely, that those are the aspects of human nature that drive our innovative thinking. And it’s important to always recognize the importance of having all three. You can’t really do it on two; you have to have that third.

And that simple idea that Dylan puts forward to say you’re always going to have a tension between two things in life, there’s always going to be two things that we want. It’s the third one that we need to create a resolution to move it forward. And I think design thinking does that a lot – it gives people a “How”, in terms of how to approach and be more innovative and creative and get the things out of life that they want.

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

Edgar Papke
I think some of the wonderful things that Peter Drucker… And I’m going to say that there is more of a body of research in particular that Peter Drucker, one of the great management minds I think of just human history – he had a wonderful way of coming at things. And one of the things that I grab hold of is this simple idea… He wrote a book at one point about questions, and a great set of questions to ask in an organizational context.

And they do wrap right back around to things that matter most to us: What it is that we’re trying to achieve and why, and what is the true benefit we’re trying to create? And in an organizational and management context, how can we best make that happen? And I find that over time I keep going back to Peter Drucker’s work, because he was on the forefront of inquiry and asking wonderful questions as to how organizations and leaders, how they can perform at their best.

And then the way Thomas Lockwood and I in writing the book – we came at it, we started with that simple idea in mind: Let’s pose a question and let’s research, and let’s find out what great innovative organizations do and how their ability to use design thinking to be more creative and more innovative – what does that look like and is there something that’s of value in that? And I think Peter Drucker provides a wonderful model for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Edgar Papke
Catcher in the Rye, and Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing, are the top two that come to my mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Edgar Papke
A guitar.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Edgar Papke
Yeah. When I need some creative space, I stop what I’m doing and I pick up the guitar and play music. That very often just opens my mind up.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. And how about a favorite habit?

Edgar Papke
Eating well. Sometimes it’s a bad habit. Being a former chef and having gone to culinary school, I love to eat good food, and I think it’s habitual. It’s a part of our family life as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. And is there a particular nugget that you share with your audiences or your consulting clients or in the book that really seems to resonate and gets folks kind of quoting yourself back to you?

Edgar Papke
I think the one thought that comes back the most often is that the most powerful thing we have in life is choice. Just the simple idea that if we’re open to ourselves and the world around us, we’ll always find that we always have a choice in what we do and say.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And is there a particular place that you would point folks if they want to learn more or get in touch?

Edgar Papke
Yeah. One of course is the book, and you can get that anywhere – on Amazon and book sellers everywhere. So, just the book Innovation by Design. And we’re launching a website InnoAlignment.com, and that’s where Thomas and I are sharing our collaboration and the work that we’ll be doing together going forward.

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

Edgar Papke
Yeah – to listen more. To just inquire and listen. Lead with asking good questions, sometimes the simplest question of all, which is, “Tell me more. What’s important to you? What are you thinking? Help me understand.” I think if we all just were more inquisitive with one another and listened better to one another, I think all of us would have better lives and I think progressively the world is going to keep getting better as long as we do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, Edgar, thank you for these sort of inspiring and uplifting perspectives. I agree, the world would be a better place if we did some of these things. And so, it’s been a helpful reminder for me and hopefully for everyone listening. And I just wish you tons of luck with the book and all the people that you’re impacting here.

Edgar Papke

Yeah. And thank you very much. This has been a real pleasure. Thank you for the conversation, thanks for your great questions, and again, the opportunity to spend this time with you. Thank you!

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

Steven Kotler
Pete, it’s my pleasure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, first things first, I got to know how you broke 82 bones.

Steven Kotler
It’s actually 83, but so, you know, I’ve spent essentially my entire career asking the same question which is, “How do people do the impossible? How do you level up your game like never before?” And I came to that question through a really weird door. I walked into the door of journalism and I became a journalist in the early 1990s, and back then action sports, so surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding and the like were really hot topics, and back then if you could write and ski, or write and rock climb, or write and surf there was work.

Couldn’t do any of those things super well but I really needed the work so I lied to my editors and I was sort of lucky enough to spend the better portion of a decade chasing professional extreme athletes around mountains and across oceans, and when you’re not a professional athlete you spend all your time chasing professional athletes around mountains and across oceans you break a lot of things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Steven Kotler
Which is how I ended up breaking 83 bones along the way.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m curious, now how many different bone-breaking episodes was it that accumulatively totaled 83?

Steven Kotler
Okay. So, when I was 16 years old I skied off a cliff in Switzerland and split my patella. Two weeks later after I got home out of the hospital I was in a car wreck and split my other patella. From that point on my legs did not fold properly, so when I started chasing professional athletes around mountains and across oceans, every time I impact that create a micro fracture into my legs.

So, when I had about 67 micro fractures they all turned into a major fracture. So, 67 of those happened over a really long period of time but they all kind of happened at once. It’s a very funny thing to go to your doctor’s office, the doctor looks at you, he holds up your X-ray and says, “All right, so how did you get here?” And I said, “Well, you know, I parked my car and I walked.” He said, “No, you didn’t. Don’t lie to me. You can’t walk. Look at your X-ray. How did you get here?” And I said, “Well, I walked.” And he said, “No, no, you’re lying to me. You can’t walk. Look at your X-ray,” which was pretty funny.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a whole other subject. So, you only have basic mobility and capability to deal with pain. How do you like live your life with that?

Steven Kotler
It’s really funny because people ask me that all the time. And I’m 50, I still spend, you know, I still ski about 50 days a year, I still chase professional athletes around mountains, I mountain bike another 30 days a year. I’m really active. I have almost no pain. And I credit a lot of it to Ashtanga yoga. I mean, I’ve lived through ways, I’ve done a lot of stuff but I found that as long as I continue to do Ashtanga yoga I have almost no pain.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that’s a little bonus tip we weren’t expecting. Thank you. Cool. Well, now can you share with us a little bit, what’s the Flow Genome Project about and your research there?

Steven Kotler
Absolutely. So, at the Flow Genome Project we study ultimate human performance, right? We study what does it take to be your best where it matters most. And we’re a research and training organization. And on the training side we work with everybody from kind of the US Special Forces, the Navy Seals and such, through kind of elite action adventure sports athletes and like professional athletes to companies like Google or Ameritrade, we spend a lot of time on Wall Street to average individuals.

And on the research side, we’re the largest, I think the largest, open source research project into ultimate human performance in the world. And kind of at the heart of all the work we do is the state of consciousness known to researchers as flow. So, you may know flow by other names. We call it when we’re in higher, being in the zone or being on conscious, flow is the technical term. And it’s defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.

And, most specifically, it refers to any of those moments kind of wrapped attention and total absorption. When you’re so focused on the task and have everything else just vanishes. Actually awareness will emerge, your sense of self disappear, time will pass strangely, it’ll slow down or it’ll speed up, and throughout all aspects of performance – mental and physical – go through the roof. So, flow is sort of the source code, the signature of ultimate human performance, and pretty much any domain you study, and so that’s at the heart of the work we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s so good. So, now you’re bringing me back to memories of reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I think, was the subtitle. And so, I remember a chart that stayed with me forever with regard to one of the keys to getting into flow is that the task is not too easy, then you’re just bored, and the task is not too hard, then you’re just overwhelmed and stressed, but that the task is just right with regard to having a bit of challenge that requires a little more attention, and focus, and absorption in order for you to execute it.

Now, in your most recent research, does that hold true? And what are the most kind of essential other core ingredients to reaching that flow as often as possible?

Steven Kotler
So, you are absolutely correct, you’re talking about what’s known as the challenge skills balance.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Steven Kotler
And you are absolutely correct in your description. Emotionally we say flow shows up not on but very near the midpoint between boredom, not enough stimulation or not paying attention, and anxiety while way too much, right? In between is this sweet spot of what’s called the flow channel, or if you speak physiology, it’s the Yerkes-Dodson curve. Nonetheless that is still, so what we were talking about is a flow trigger, a pre-condition that leads to more flow.

When Csikszentmihalyi did his original work, these weren’t really well identified. It’s 20 years later and we now know there are 20 different triggers for flow. There are probably way more but we’ve identified 20 triggers for flow, 10 that produce individual flow with you and I would be like low in a flow state. And then there’s shared collective version of flow state known as group flow, that it shows up very commonly at work.

If you’ve ever taken part in a great brainstorming session, or you’ve sung at a church choir, or played in the band, or seen a fourth quarter comeback in football, or if you happen to see what the Patriots did to the Falcons last year in the fourth quarter – perfect example of what group flow looks like.

So, we got 10 triggers on each side, and the challenge skills balance is obviously, one of them is actually – it’s funny that you remember it, it’s a good one to remember – it’s often called the golden rule of flow. A lot of people thought about as the most important of flow triggers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so it’s the only one I know, and you got 19 more for us. So, how would you like to tackle this? In terms of I’m interested in the ones that are the most powerful, the most easily accessed by the greatest number of people. That’s probably the great magnitude right there.

Steven Kotler
Yeah, so let me give you a quick-and-dirty overview of some of this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Steven Kotler
So, the first thing you got to know is the most obvious, is that flow follows focus, right? The state only shows up when all our attention is focused on the right here right now, so that’s what these triggers really do. They drive attention into the present moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, if I could hit that, when we say flow follows focus, a corollary to that then is that you focus first and then flow comes as opposed to you hope that flow shows up and then you’re able to focus. Is that fair?

Steven Kotler
Okay. So, when we work with organizations, the first thing I always tell people is if they can’t hang a sign on their door that says, “Bleep off, I’m flowing,” they’re in trouble. And the reason is you need intense focus and uninterrupted concentration for flow. And the research actually shows 90- to 120-minute blocks of uninterrupted concentration are the best, and that if you’re doing something really creative you may need to stretch that out even up to like four hour blocks a couple times a week.

So, if you are running an organization or working in an organization where the – which is very, very typical these days – messages have to be responded due in 15 minutes, an email within an hour, those are horrific working conditions, terrible working conditions because you are literally blocking the very state of consciousness, the very kind of focus you need to perform at your best.

And let me just put some numbers around the boost you get from flow. I can go into the research, behind all this stuff that you won’t, but you have to understand the upside we’re talking about is McKinsey did a 10-year study, if a topic that’s good, it was reported being 500% more productive in a flow. It’s a huge boost.

Research done by Milo organization, done at Harvard, done at bunch of other places, have found that creativity spikes 400% to 700% when in flow. Research done by the Department of Defense found that learning goes up 470% in flow, so these are huge, huge spikes in cognitive performance. So, it’s really worth kind of trying to alter your working conditions to produce them because the benefits are significant.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that is so striking. I got to speak up on behalf of any skeptics in the audience, like, “Whoa, how are they measuring a 500% bump in productivity or creativity or learning?” Do you have a sense for the score?

Steven Kotler
Yeah, so they’re measuring in lots of different ways. And it’s funny, because we’re relaunching that. We want a better look at the productivity so we’re relaunching a flow in business success. I think it’s February with Deloitte to take a better look at it. So, for example, learning is a really easy one that I can speak to. They basically take – they were working with people from the military snipers. The military knows how long it takes to train a sniper up for performance, right? There’s really clear records on that.

So, they were working with a team at the Advanced Brain Monitoring in Carlsbad, California, so one of the other thing that’s starting to happen now is that all the stuff that we’re talking about are psychological hacks, but we’re starting to get technological with this. We understand the neuroscience of flow, we understand what’s going on under the hood, and we can steer people using technology toward flow states, so that’s what they did.

They used EEG technology, they recorded expert brain waves, expert archers’ brain waves in flow shooting at a target, then they used that and used neuro feedback with novice marksmen to train them up until they shot at an expert level using their own feedbacks, so trying to get their brain waves into the same state so the flow the experts were in.

But if you search, by the way, Chris Berka, Advanced Brain Monitoring Head, you will find her TED Talk on this work and you actually can see video, and I think it literally took like two days to train people up to shoot like experts. It was frightening.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so wild. Can I get my hands on a neuro feedback machine?

Steven Kotler
Of course, you can. There’s everything from like super friendly easy like places to start like the MUSE headset, all the way up to some really crazy stuff. The Transformative Tech Market which is what this all sits in is exploding right now. I mean, all kinds, there’s a revolution going on right now in consciousness. And a lot of it, there’s a really good reason for this which is one of the things that we’ve discovered is that there are certain skills that are absolutely critical to thrive in the 21st century, and the list vary but accelerated learning is on most lists, creativity tops everybody’s list, cooperation, collaboration, communication. And we’re horrible at training up these skills.

Creativity is a really funny one. We got to take part in the Red Bull Creativity Project, it’s the largest meta analyses of creativity ever conducted, like 30,000 studies reviewed. And they learned on the end two things. One, creativity is the most important thing that we need to thrive in the current century, and we suck at training people to be more creative. And the reason is we keep trying to train up skillsets, and what we really need to be doing is training up states of mind, right?

All of these so-called skills are amplified by altering our consciousness. That’s how we’re wired to do this. That’s what the biology tells us, so we’re just now starting to figure that stuff out, but it’s spreading really quickly. And the Transformative Tech Movement is helping it spread.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s so cool. Now, in your book Stealing Fire you sort of lay out kind of four sets of forces, and technology is one of them. And so, why don’t we round that one out and then you can share with us some of the triggers that fall into the other three categories.

Steven Kotler
For sure. So, what we’re basically trying to figure out, what was driving all this acceleration in this whole field, right? Like why was it exploding? Why are we seeing really weird things like 44% of American companies rolling out mindfulness training programs? Yoga is now over a billion-dollar industry. Everyone micro-dosing with psychedelics is on the cover of The Economist. Really strange things are going on in this world right now and we want to know what was driving it.

What we’re seeing is that four forces are all essentially accelerating exponentially, right? They’re moving very, very, very, very quickly and they’re driving us forward, and their psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology. And the thinking with psychology and neurobiology, since what we’re talking about is kind of altered states of consciousness here, we now have the tools to kind of map and measure what’s going on in our brains and our bodies when we’re experiencing the inexplicable.

Pharmacology is giving us access to these states nearly on demand, and technology is also giving us access to those states nearly on demand but they’re also taking it wild, right? So, all four of these forces are kind of spreading these things out. And we did a calculation, so we called it the altered states economy. And we, basically, looked at how much time and money and effort people spent chasing peak states of consciousness like flow, and we looked at it globally and we looked at a lot of different categories, adding things up.

And I’ll give you a more detailed breakdown if you wanted. But we came up, the number we came up which was $4 trillion, it’s like 1/16th of the global economy is spent chasing these kind of states. And some of that is really sloppy, right? Some of this is not a healthy approach to these kinds of things, but a lot of it is, and it’s interesting and growing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, okay. Well, so then, let’s get into it. So, what are some things that we can do here, now, today to tap into some extra flow?

Steven Kotler
So, let’s just walk through a handful of the triggers and I’m going to talk about. So, there are a bunch of triggers and a bunch of different categories, but there’s three triggers in the psychological category, and you talked about one of them already which is the challenge-skills balance. So, that is unbelievably critical, of course.

Two other ones, immediate feedback is another flow trigger. And so, for example, I studied action of action adventure sports athletes who are very good at getting into flow, and one of the reasons is when you’re performing in the mountains, on the oceans, whatever, it’s a living environment. You’re getting immediate feedback, right? You either set your ski edge on the top of that slide, a face that slide to the bottom.

Well, the same is true everywhere. And the reason this is important, flow follows focus, so if you have immediate feedback you don’t have to pull your attention out of the present moment to course correct. You don’t have to wonder, “Am I doing a good job?” You know because the feedback is immediate. So, what this looks like organizationally is interesting.

And so, if you work for an organization or run an organization where you’re getting quarterly feedback or quarterly yearly progress reports or that kind of stuff, well, that sucks. That’s not enough feedback to stay at all in flow. It’s terrible. So, where this works really well, companies that have kind of an agile methodology if you’re in the software business where there’s lots of rapid experimentation, small experiments, that’s really good. You’re getting lots of feedback that way.

I’ll tell you, so I’m a writer, and book editors are sort of editor in name alone these days. They’re so busy and the market is so taxed, they’re very talented, but they don’t do a ton of editing. So, I can’t write a book and have an editor weigh in three times and that’s it, like that doesn’t work for me. So, I have a guy in my staff who reads everything I write about twice a week for feedback.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Steven Kotler
And there’s something, like you can even take it one step further and figure out. So, I figured out in my writing that when I tend to believe that when I make errors, my writing is either arrogant, boring or confusing, so that’s really what’s he’s looking for. Is my writing arrogant, boring or confusing? And those three errors are tied to like I know why I make each of those errors. I just happen to make them all the time. That’s what I call the minimal feedback for flow.

And you can kind of figure this out for yourself with whatever your main task is, but what I tell people is that you can’t afford to hire somebody to give you that kind of feedback. Find a feedback buddy. Find somebody you can work with where you can get feedback from them all the time and speed up those feedback loops. That’s really helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, so when you say the minimal feedback piece, you’re saying, “Okay. Hey, colleague, I don’t need you to masterfully critic it to perfection, but what I do need for you to do is make sure I’m not committing these three common errors that we can nip in the bud rather quickly.”

Steven Kotler
Yup, exactly. And, by the way, so this is not my exercise. This is Josh Waitzkin’s exercise but I kind of love it. One of the ways to dig out what those errors are is to ask yourself, “What did I believe three months ago that I know is not true today?” And ask yourself why did you make that error. What was missing in your logic?

And do this, obviously, like on your core tasks wherever you want the most feedback, so focus on that. And ask yourself, “With this task I’m on, what do I know now that I didn’t know then? And why did I make that mistake?” And if you do that repeatedly you’ll start to tease out exactly where your common errors are, where your blind spots are, and what kind of feedback you need.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And what’s the third psychological trigger?

Steven Kotler
Clear goals. And here we’re talking about goal setting in general first, so if you’re interested in hacking motivation, we learned in the ‘70s that setting just a high hard goal, a big goal is enough to boost motivation almost 25% in some cases. So, a huge spike in motivation simply by setting a high hard goal. Now, high hard goals are different than clear goals. Higher goals are these big and more of these things in the future, “I want to go to med school. I want to write a book.” That’s a high hard goal kind of thing, right?

Clear goals, flow follows focus, right? Clear goals mean, “I know what I’m doing right now and I know what I’m doing immediately afterwards, so I don’t have to pull my attention out to steer,” right? So, it’s interesting because clear goals are often really, really, really tiny. So, for example, when I set out, I try to write 700 words a day, right?

And if I’m stuck and the clear goal isn’t working, that’s too big of a goal, I will break it down and I’ll say, “Okay, I need to write 200 words that get at the emotion of this paragraph that I’m trying to get,” and really, really clear goals and I shrink them down.

Where this is really useful kind of for most people, I find, is most professionals. So, one of the things that we know is that most professionals will spend about 5% of their work life in flow without even knowing it. Like, McKinsey figured out that if you increased that 15 percentage points to 20% of your time, overall workplace performance would double.

Just to give you an idea of how imminently trainable this stuff is, three years ago we did a six-week joint learning exercise with Google where we took 80 Googlers, 70 Googlers from across the company, so coders, engineers, people in facilities, people in marketing, PR, you name it we had them, and we trained them out in four flow triggers and four kind of high-performance basics, like really basic stuff, sleep hygiene, didn’t get enough sleep at night, that kind of thing.

And over the course of six weeks they did about an hour’s worth of homework a day sort of spread out. We saw a 35% to 80% boost in flow. In fact, we have a flow fundamentals course, it’s a digitally-delivered six-week course available through the Flow Genome Project website. And we measure pre and post, and we’re seeing measuring seven different characteristics of flow, a 70% increase.

And the point is not that we are secret ninja experts at training people in flow, there are lots of people who do this, we think we’re very good at it, but there are a lot of other people who do it. The point is that this stuff is really easy to train. We just haven’t been paying attention to it. So, clear goals, know what you’re doing, know what you’re going to do next, make a to-do list and when you’re moving from one item to the next mind the gap.

That’s where most people get lost, right? You’ll finish one task and before you go to the next one you will do something that will pull your focus out of the present, like check your social media which is terrible because it produces an emotional reaction, and that’s exactly what you’re trying to avoid. You want the clear goals, “I know what I’m doing now. I know what I’m doing next,” and it works that way. So, that’s really useful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, when it comes to the gap, I want to make sure we hit this. We talked to other peak performance folks who talk about full engagement and energy and attention and all that. So, before you mentioned some spaces of time such as 90 minutes to 120 minutes or even more, do you have a quick take on sort of rest, rejuvenation in terms of maybe it’s a quick breath or bathroom? Or what sort of counts as rejuvenation without breaking the flow?

Steven Kotler
Some people like a little bit of physical flex exercise, right? They’ll get up every 15 minutes and do three sun salutations which is just fine, that’ll work great. Three sun salutations are a little kind of Pomodoro set of some kind, or I really like – I don’t know if you know what box breathing is. It’s a mindfulness practice that the Navy Seals use.

You can just search box breathing online and learn, it’s very effective as a mindfulness technique. Anybody can learn it. But I can do kind of three cycles of box breathing and it takes maybe 90 seconds to two minutes to do depending on how slowly you’re breathing. And so, if I need to reset between tasks that’s what I’ll do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Perfect. Got it. So, that’s the psychological triggers. Now how about some neurobiology triggers?

Steven Kotler
Well, so all these triggers are neurobiological.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.

Steven Kotler
So, they do different things. So, for example, there are three environmental triggers: high consequences, deep environment and a rich environment, and I’ll talk about those in a moment. But most of these triggers drive neurobiologically, they trigger the release of norepinephrine and dopamine or both. These are performance-enhancing chemicals, they do a lot of different things in the brain and the body, but they’re also focusing chemicals so that’s why they’re so important here.

Some of the other things, so clear goals doesn’t appear to drive norepinephrine and dopamine but what it does appear to do is lower cortisol levels and keep the brain waves out of high beta and down in the alpha beta range which is where flow is. So, there’s different things underneath different triggers.

And let me just be really clear, there’s so much more research that need to be done here that everything I’m saying is true as far as we know but there’s a big but question mark after some of these stuff on triggers because it’s just really new information.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Steven Kotler
So, let’s go back to the other triggers. So, for example, a rich environment means lots of novelty, complexity and unpredictability in the environment. And I’ll give you the common example is, again, back at adventure sports for athletes, right? One of the reasons these folks had so much flow is they perform in living environments, right?

. . . in a minute-by-minute basis, the waves are always changing if you’re out in the ocean, so there’s lots of novelty, lots of complexity, lots of unpredictability. Those are all three things that the brain loves. It produces huge amounts of dopamine, drives a lot of focus, slides you right into flow.

You can also get at those architecturally, and my favorite example is Steve Jobs. So, when Steve Jobs was kind of redesigning Pixar he wanted more creativity in the building, he wanted more flow in the building, and he thought the problem was there wasn’t enough novelty, complexity and unpredictability because the staff was balkanized, right?

The producers were stagnant talking to producers, and the marketing people stay and talk to marketing people, and the cell animators stay and talk to the cell animators, and nobody was bumping into each other and so there’s no random spark of ideas. Not enough novelty, complexity and not enough creativity as a result.

So, when he redesigned Pixar he famously put a giant atrium in the center of the complex, and he put the only meeting rooms, message rooms, cafeteria and the only bathrooms in the entire building right off the atrium. You had to walk through the atrium to get to any of them.

So, what happened was people started bumping into each other and they started getting into random conversations, and suddenly novelty, complexity and unpredictability massively increased. You got a whole lot more dopamine flow between people, you got these little moments of brute flow, huge spikes in creativity and all those off spurts.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, yes. Cool. And so, what about the high consequences?

Steven Kotler
High consequences, this is obvious, right? Flow follows focus and consequences catch our attention, right? So, the obvious is physical risks. Again, action adventure sports athletes, lots of physical risks. But it’s interesting, we noticed that emotional risk, intellectual risk, creative risk, social risk all work really, really well. Social risk is a great example.

You would think from evolutionary perspective that like the number one fear in the world is something like getting eaten by a grizzly bear, but it’s not. It’s speaking in public, right? And the reason is your brain can’t actually tell the difference between social fear and physical fear. They’re processed by the exact same structures which makes no sense at all until you realized, you go back 300 years ago, and before if you got kicked out of your tribe, if you got exiled you couldn’t survive. Nobody could live on their own, so it was a capital crime, and so the brain treats it like a capital crime.

So, social risk is a really kind of great way to trigger flow as well, so risk is really useful. And once again, what does this look like organizationally or in your daily life? And I always said that like to play with the risk trigger, the companies you want to work for, the environment you want to design, something with that Silicon Valley fail-faster fail-forward motto. And you need the space to fail because you need the space to take risks. Without risks there’s not enough energy in the system to really drive flow.

So, again, this is where agile methodology makes a lot of sense, rapid experimentation makes a lot of sense, skunk works make a lot of sense if you’re trying to drive flow in innovation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And now can you share some of the pharmacology triggers?

Steven Kotler
Advances in pharmacology are more kind of in the psychedelic realm and that’s slightly different from flow but what the research is showing – and this is sort of one of the things we talk about in Stealing Fire – is that in the neurobiological changes that show up in flow are not that different from the changes that show up in meditation or during psychedelic experiences or during so-called mystic experiences, trans states or contemplative states.

All these things are states of awe for that matter. All these things share a very similar underlying neurobiological signature. And so, what we’re seeing in neurobiology is kind of psychedelic research, is going gangbusters, right? I mean, we’re seeing absolutely amazing work being done in PTSD and trauma and anxiety. And the point here and where this gets interesting and probably let me just give you a couple examples to answer your question because it’s a long way around but it’s worth understanding.

So, why all this research matters, is we’re starting to get actions. And the best example is work done on posttraumatic stress disorder which is like the extreme end of the anxiety disorder spectrum. And pharmacologically we’ve learned back in the early 2000s through work done by Dr. Michael Mithoefer and the research came at MAPS that one to three doses of MDMAs – so, MDMA is sort of the pharmacological name for the street drug Ecstasy or Molly, whatever you call it. It’s an empath-delic type of psychedelic, it increases empathy.

But they found that one to three rounds of MDMA therapy, so that’s MDMA administered in a clinical setting with psychiatrists there and like eight hours of talk therapy, was enough to completely cure or significantly reduce symptoms of PTSD in victims of child abuse, sexual abuse and solders returning from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it’s been about five years since that original study was done, six years at this point, and these people are still in remission, so that’s neat, right?

Then they redid that experiment at Camp Pendleton with a thousand soldiers, and this time they were like, “Okay, so psychedelics aren’t for everybody. Let’s use surfing,” which is a known trigger for flow states for a lot of reasons that we’ve been talking about, right? So, they used surfing and talk therapy, and they redid the whole thing, and they found that after five weeks of surfing and flow states and talk therapy they saw a significant reduction or a complete disappearance of PTSD.

Then they redid the study with meditation, a mantra meditation system, I believe. And they found that four weeks of daily meditation, 20 minutes a day, was enough to produce the same results. So, what all this is telling us is we have options. We have options like we’ve never had before and they’re coming from all directions and the research is accelerating everywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so cool. Well, Steven, tell me is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Steven Kotler
The other thing I want to mention, only because it’s new and it goes much deeper into individual ideas, is if you go to the Flow Genome Project Facebook page, which is literally www.facebook.com/flowgenome, every Monday at 5:00 o’clock Eastern Time, I do Monday On The Mind. It’s a half-hour deep dive into, you know, two weeks ago we did a half an hour on clear goals and really how to get into that and how to apply it in every situation, that sort of thing, so that might be interesting to people listening.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Steven Kotler
Margaret Atwood, “Everybody I know is an adult. Me, I’m just in disguise.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Steven Kotler
There’s a couple of them. How about I give you two?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Steven Kotler
Song of the Dodo by David Quammen which is just amazing. If you really want to understand the environmental crisis this is the most amazing book on that. And my favorite book on consciousness ever is a book called The User Illusion by Tor Nørrentranders which is one of the smartest books ever written about consciousness.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite tool?

Steven Kotler
Well, it’s got to be my skis.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite habit?

Steven Kotler
Oh, I get up a 4:00 a.m. is my favorite habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I have to know, when do you go to sleep?

Steven Kotler
Depends, but early. Somewhere between 8:00 and 10:00 most nights.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget that you share in your writing or your speaking and working with folks that seems to really connect and resonate and get them quoting you back to yourself?

Steven Kotler
Well, what I said to you earlier that we keep trying to train up skills and what we really need to be training up is a state of mind seems to be a pretty good mantra for people these days. I hear that back a lot.

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

Steven Kotler
StevenKotler.com, FlowGenomeProject.com.

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

Steven Kotler
Yeah. So, this is going back to the challenge skills balance, it’s the one thing we didn’t really cover. And so, you mentioned Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, so a couple of years ago he teamed with a Google mathematician and they did a back-of-the-envelope calculation trying to figure out, with the challenge skills balance, how much greater the challenge should be than your skillset, right? That was the question.

And the number they came up with was 4%. Four percent greater. Now, that was just a guess. We took that number into the Flow Genome Project and said, “Okay, let’s see what we can do with it.” And we’ve been running a number of amateur experiments, and beta tests, and just looking at it deeply for about four years now, and time and time again we’re finding that is exactly the case.

So, here’s the super interesting about this. Four percent is not much, right? You really are just a little bit harder. Now if you’re an underachiever, a little bit of an underachiever, you’re a little shy, you’re a little meeker, you’re a little along those lines, 4% is tricky because it is literally the line where you’re pushing on your comfort zone. You’re stepping outside your comfort zone but you’re right there.

For top performers their problem is the exact opposite. Their problem is they’ll blow by 4% without even noticing, they’ll take on challenges that are 10%, 20%, 40% greater than kind of – and by doing so, they’re locking themselves out of the very state they need to kind of meet those challenges. So, it’s a little bit harder every day.

But the interesting thing is when you spend time around the best of the best, what you really see is what they’ve internalized and what they do so well, is they understand that it’s 4% plus 4% plus 4% day after day, week after week, year after year for a career. That’s how you actually like really do the impossible.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so good. Well, Steven, thank you so much for taking this time and sharing. There’s, boy, a lot to chew on and I’m excited to get some more flow going into my life and work sessions, and I wish you much flow in all that you’re up to.

Steven Kotler
Thanks, man. I appreciate the time.