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Jan 20
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1025: Boosting Your Learning and Presenting with the Science of Memory with Dr. Charan Ranganath

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Dr. Charan Ranganath discusses the science behind our brain’s capacity to remember (and forget) and how it can help you make better decisions and impressions.

You’ll Learn

  1. How emotions shape memory
  2. How to hack your brain for enhanced retention
  3. The 4 C’s of memorable messaging

About Charan 

Charan Ranganath is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. For over 25 years, Dr. Ranganath has studied the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to remember past events, using brain imaging techniques, computational modeling and studies of patients with memory disorders. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. He lives in Davis, California.

Resources Mentioned

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Anna Dearmon Kornick Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Charan, welcome.

Charan Ranganath
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to hear what you’ve got to say about memory and your book, Why We Remember. And could you kick us off with a particularly fascinating insight you’ve discovered about us humans and memory from all of your research?

Charan Ranganath
Two things that I think are particularly interesting, one is really recent research is showing how much we reuse the same kinds of elements across different kinds of memories. In other words, you think like, “If I take a bunch of pictures of my dog, my phone will store different photos of my dog. It doesn’t reuse the same space on my phone for multiple pictures, but my brain is really using a lot of the same elements across multiple memories that overlap.”

So, memory seems more like a structure that you would build out of Legos, and you could just as easily take those Legos apart and use some of the same Legos to build something completely different, right? And that’s, I think, what I’m most excited about right now, is just seeing how economical our brains are. It’s not laying down something brand new for every event that we experience. It’s really doing a lot of recombination.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is really intriguing. And then there could be some interesting implications there associated with misremembering things. Like, if your brain has a Lego block for dog, your dog, and then your dog may have had a very different, I don’t know, facial expression, posture, whatever, in a particular memory, but if you’re using a more generic dog memory, then those nuances are not present and perhaps more prone to distortion. I’m just totally speculating, making things up here.

Charan Ranganath
No, that’s absolutely true. In fact, what happens often is, as people remember the same event multiple times, the memory drifts more and more towards what people kind of knew beforehand, and you get less and less of the details that are unique to a particular event.

So, what we think the brain is doing is it’s taking this kind of a template and then it’s tacking on some details that make this particular moment unique. And so,  you might remember something specific about what your dog actually did the last time you took your dog for a walk, but most of that memory, the backbone of it is going to be based on just my general knowledge of what happens when I walk the dog and the expectations that I have about it.

If you actually look at brain scans of people who are, let’s say, watching a movie, what you find is that if people remember the movie, you’re using a lot of those same Legos as you do when you’re watching the movie. And then if you ask people to imagine something completely new, we think what’s going to happen is that you use some of those same Legos again to imagine something that hasn’t happened.

In other words, when we remember, we’re using those Legos basically to assemble a little model of the past, to imagine how the past could have been. But you could just easily take those Legos and assemble a little model of the future, or assemble a little model of what’s happening right now. And I think that’s a pretty profound idea that we’re very excited about.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then that gets me thinking about the sort of like the state or mood that we’re in and how that’s influenced by what we’re focusing on, and whether in the present or what we’re choosing to reminisce about, whether that was a very pleasant or unpleasant experience, or what we choose to imagine about the future, whether that’s a worry or a visualization of a dramatic victory that you’re going through.

So, that would seem to imply that we have a tremendous power within us in terms of what we choose to focus on and visualize and the moods and, I guess, vibe, presence that we bring into a given moment. Is that accurate?

Charan Ranganath
Oh, that’s totally accurate, yeah. In fact, what you can find is that when people remember an event, you can say, “Hey, try to remember it from the perspective of this other person who’s part of the event.” And people will remember a lot of details that they didn’t remember before. So, we can always reframe and revise our memories of the past by looking at it from a different perspective, right?

But, likewise, what can happen, especially when we’re in particularly emotional experiences, is the emotion kind of puts us in a particular frame of mind and filters a lot of the way that we think about the memory later on. So, I think with emotional memories, especially more difficult memories, people feel a bit stuck, and often you need to actually talk about that information with someone else to be able to incorporate a different perspective and see the experience from a different way of thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I mean, this is just intrinsically fascinating stuff. We could poke and dive into all kinds of tidbits, but how about you give us the broad frame for it? What’s sort of the big idea or core message from your book, Why We Remember?

Charan Ranganath
The core message is that memory isn’t this repository of the past that is keeping a comprehensive library of everything that we’ve experienced it as we’ve experienced it. It’s much more about the present and the future than it is about the past.

And so, the analogy that took me months after writing the book, but I really like it because in the months after publishing the book, I’ve been traveling a lot. And one of the things I came to notice is that when I’m packing, I’ve become very good at anticipating what I’ll need. And so, you don’t want to pack too much because then you’re lugging around a bunch of stuff. And if you pack really too much, you’ll never find what you’re looking for. And you don’t want to under-pack and miss out on the stuff that you need that you’re going to use all the time.

And I think it’s like people approach memory as if we’re supposed to take everything that we’ve ever experienced with us on the journey of life. And I think our brains are much more designed to pack just what you need so that you have it when you need it. I mean, there’s all sorts of stuff that I own that I like, like my lamp and stuff like that, that I’m not going to take with me when I go on trips. And I think our brains are really designed to take what we need and to leave a lot of the rest behind so that we have the information that we need when we need it in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting, and yet it seems sometimes I have memories that seem to be not at all helpful, and, in fact, counterproductive that I would like to forget. What’s this about?

Charan Ranganath
It’s a great question. And sometimes those counterproductive memories can be because we just happen to be zoning out and paying attention to something and got excited about some random factoid during the moment. And that excitement can actually create a memory or kind of improve your ability to remember something later on.

Sometimes it’s because we’re not focusing on what we’re supposed to be focusing on, and so we end up going on these, having difficulty filtering out our experiences. And, in fact, there’s some work suggesting that, as people get older, that inability to filter out what’s irrelevant means that you end up remembering stuff that’s irrelevant at the expense of the stuff that’s important and relevant. So, that could be a factor too.

But you can also think of it like we don’t necessarily know what we need later on. And so, sometimes our brains are probably just taking their best guess. And it could be because something was just a little surprising and made you go, “Hmm, that’s interesting.” Or it could be because you were in a particular emotional state at the time, or who knows, right? It’s really hard to reverse-engineer a particular memory that you might have. But there are all sorts of reasons why you might have access to some memory that seems really random.

Pete Mockaitis
And since there’s so many dimensions or directions we could take this into, what do you think are some of the top implications of this research for our professional lives and careers?

Charan Ranganath
I think that one big implication is if you’re trying to communicate, which is essential to almost all jobs, but especially in knowledge-based jobs, I feel like you need to start with the assumption that most of what you communicate will be forgotten. And so, that is very, very important because once you start with that, then you can say, “What are the key points that I really want someone to take away?”

And you can use some strategies to really emphasize those key points over and over again. But I think often what we can get caught up in doing is we just say a lot of things and then we expect everyone to remember them later on.

Likewise, one of the things that you find is that people will usually tell me, “Hey, I have a terrible memory. Help me out.” But then in the moment, they assume that everything that’s happening, they will remember it later on. So, people have this weird overconfidence in how much they’ll remember.

And so, if you’re listening to someone else, it’s also really important to factor in that you’re not going to be able to remember everything. And so, that can be very important, too, because sometimes you might need help to document all the things that are going on if it’s something that’s super memorable. I feel like it’s really good to rely on devices that have a photographic memory because humans don’t.

And so, when it comes to reminders of things, I think devices are great. Now there’s all sorts of problems with our devices that can cause problems for our memory, but we can talk about that, too. I mean, I think that’s another big important thing for the workplace, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just because it’s hanging in the air. Problems with these devices, are you talking about like interruptions or what do you mean?

Charan Ranganath
Yeah, so the problems with the devices, the biggest one I would say is interruptions, but not only interruptions that are external, but our own kind of conflicts that are happening in our heads. So, in other words, you have a phone, let’s say if I have my phone in front of me, and I know I have my phone there, well, that phone is associated with checking email. And if you have a habit of checking email on your phone constantly, even when you’re not checking email, you might have an urge to go on the phone and check your email because it’s there, it’s around. So, it’s this cue.

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, it’s reminding you of the behavior, “So, let’s go ahead and do it.”

Charan Ranganath
Exactly. And so, the phone itself isn’t the problem. It’s the habit that’s the problem. And, likewise, you have social media. If you check social media habitually, if you have social media apps on your phone, every time that phone is around, you’ve got a little bit of an urge to check it that’s going on in the background.

One of the weird things, I’d learned about this after I wrote the book is when you do something, let’s say that’s long and tedious, like we often have to do at work, what tires you out is not necessarily doing the tedious work as much as the fact that our brains start to ask ourselves, “Okay, what could I be?” And I realize this is sounding very unscientific, but there are more mechanistic ways of describing this.

But essentially, our brain starts pulling up other options the longer we persist on something that’s not rewarding to us. Our brain starts popping up other options, they’re going to give us immediate rewards. Our brains really like things that are immediately rewarding, as opposed to activities that have some benefit in the long run.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, intriguing. Well, could you tell us a story of someone who struggled in some of these dimensions and then implemented some of your approaches and saw a cool transformation as a result?

Charan Ranganath
I can talk about myself as somebody who struggles with all these issues and talk about how I’m trying to transform my life. I mean, it’s not easy, right? I get all sorts of messages from people that are labeled urgent. And so, it’s very hard for me to completely disengage from things like email. In fact, actually, come to think of it, I should quit my email program that’s running in the background right now.

And I have to say, I don’t know how they actually came to this conclusion, but my school, when I was a kid, told my parents that I have ADHD. And this was long before the whole, like, thing where schools had real benefit in actually assigning these diagnoses. Back then, it was just like nobody even thought about this stuff. And so, more recently, I’ve kind of come to terms with that. I sort of stuck that, that was in the back of my mind for a long time.

And then, recently, after the book came out, I had some reminders that brought that to mind. And I started to go, “Oh, yeah.” And then I had this aha moment of all of these things that I do and things that go on in my life that are seriously problematic because of ADHD. And so, one of the things that I’ve done is really tried to engineer my environment. And what I mean by that is I’ve removed my social media apps from my phone.

I was getting really stressed out about the presidential election, so I removed all my news apps from the phone. I’ve really removed all the alerts except for things that are calendar alerts. I removed everything else from my phone so that I’m not getting notifications. I have a whole kind of set of things that I do for planning and so forth, but I guess relevant to memory, the biggest things that I do are things that involve minimizing distractions, trying to reduce switching.

Switching is very costly to us in terms of our mental resources. And if we switch too much between things, what can happen is that that leads us to have very fragmented memories of the activities that we’re doing so that’s not a really good thing either. So, on an ideal day, I might block off time to do things like social media and email and so forth, and then block off time where I’m going to be doing other activities. So, I would say that these are some tools.

But I think the biggest thing is that I’m learning that slow thinking is a lot more effective than fast thinking, and really trying to catch myself when I’m going into this kind of panic mode of all the hundreds of things I have to do, catching myself and then kind of taking one thing at a time. And the reason is that, if I am scattered too much and I’ve got too many things going on that I’m thinking about, I really will have no memory of that day afterwards. So, that’s a big thing.

I guess another thing I’ll say, this is probably the biggest transformation that I made, is I really think about bigger decisions in life in terms of how I want things to be remembered. And what I mean by that is, like, we just all got through the New Year. And every time you get to the end of the year, it’s natural to reflect on what happened earlier in the year. And then people make their resolutions for the next year.

And I feel like it’s really important to ask yourself, for all the things that we do, “Is this how I want to remember this year that’s gone by?” And there’s all sorts of activities that we do that we won’t remember. And even if we did remember, we won’t want to have remembered our lives that way. It’s not like you sit around and go, like, “Boy, I’m really glad I spent like four hours watching TikTok videos,” or something. Nobody says that, I don’t think.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this is powerful stuff. Well, so let’s put some things into action. Let’s say, in the course of doing my professional duties, I want to learn some things. I want to develop some skills and recall some key information, tips and tricks, and insights from the How to Be Your Job podcast, etc. Like, I’m learning some stuff and I want to remember more of it. What are some best practices?

Charan Ranganath
One of the best practices, I would say, if I had to pick one thing, is give yourself the chance to fail. And what I mean by that is you tend to think, “Okay, well,” and realistically speaking, I mean, it’s a very understandable intuition that if I’m trying to remember something, if I’m trying to memorize something, saying it to myself over and over, is the best way to do it.

But, in fact, if you give yourself the chance to try to remember it later on, and you don’t remember it, and then you give yourself the answer, that’s going to give you far better retention of the information than if you didn’t give yourself the chance to do it. It’s called, I talk about this in my book, as error-driven learning. Other people talk about it as active learning.

But this error-driven learning principle is so powerful that even before you learn something, if you test yourself on what the answer could be, you’ll remember that answer better than if you just tried to memorize that answer. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Yes, I hear you. We had Dr. Manu Kapur on the show, and talking about, I think the label he used was productive failure. And this very notion that, and I’ve noticed it myself ever since he tuned me into it, is that if I do a thing and then fail, and then I learn what happened there, it is so much more impactful in terms of, “Oh, it feels like an epiphany. Like, that’s where I went wrong, of course,” as opposed to I’m just passively receiving one of thousands of things in the day, which can wash right over me.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah. Yeah, and it’s really funny because in certain activities, it’s almost a given that that’s going to be the way you want to learn. Like, if you’re going to be in a play, you don’t just sit around and memorize the script. You actually try to recite the lines. And that’s when you realize how little you know, but also your brain can repair those memories and optimize them so they’re more accessible later on. Or if you’re learning to play basketball, you don’t watch a bunch of footage. You actually do it, right?

And, likewise, I think we don’t do this with other things. I mean, if you look at school, school is all about good performance. It’s not about learning. It’s really about mastery. And I think it’s what you really would want to do is be able to encourage people to push themselves to the point where they’re getting C’s and then they learn the answer, and then they actually get better as a result. But we don’t really do that.

And so, I think that’s why there’s this intuition out there that we’re just supposed to be good at remembering, and that’s not true. I mean, you’re going to be better at remembering if you fail to remember and then learn from that mistake.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now you got me thinking about my kids and the learning that’s happening right now. So, I’ve got my five-year-old Mary, we have a keyboard, a little Casio. She’s been playing around on it, and she was trying to learn how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And it was so interesting to watch because she would get a few notes right, and do the wrong one. And she could hear and recognize that it was wrong. And she would sound so frustrated, like, “Aargh!” It’s like, “It’s totally okay. This is just how it works.

But, in a way, that frustration, that “Aargh!” moment is, in fact, quite valuable. Like, she’s better off, for the purposes of learning “Mary Had a Little Lamb” as far as I understand it, experiencing that than not experiencing that to cement the learnings.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And the key is that you have to, and I know this is kind of a hot topic because of all the stuff with the growth mindset, for instance, but it’s absolutely true. The key is that you have to see the mistake as an opportunity to learn. You don’t want to see the mistake as evidence that you have a bad ability. You want to see the mistake as, “Okay, here’s how I fix this memory.”

And that’s really key because you want to be able to focus your efforts on the right answer as opposed to simply, like, just getting mad at yourself and kicking yourself. That doesn’t help you. And so, what’s important about that is, again, we don’t really do a great job of incentivizing people to try and fail. And, at the same time, I think it’s also important, in the “Mary Had a Little Lamb” case, it’s good to have a teacher who can actually say, “Here’s how you should do it.”

On the other hand, if she knows how to do it, she could take a moment to slow down, and then say, “Okay, here’s where I made the mistake. Let me try this again and focus on the right answer.” And that is where, again, you can get the biggest gains.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I was also thinking about, talking about kids and learning, I was inside the Khan Academy app. And so, my other child, Johnny, we were doing some math stuff. And I had these thoughts about productive failure in my mind. And I noticed just from top to bottom, the sequencing is, first, “Here’s the video of how to do the math problems. And here are some math problems to do.”

And I wondered, not to think that I know better than the mighty Sal Khan, but it’s like, “Would it be better if this were completely flipped in terms of ‘Try to do these math problems and fail miserably. Now, hey, here’s how to do them.’?” That might be a better way to learn, even though it’s the exact opposite of what I’ve done in my learning and how the app is set up. What are your thoughts?

Charan Ranganath
Yes. Yeah, I absolutely think that would be the case. It might be better to give yourself the chance to screw up and then, after each problem, get “Here’s how you do it.” And then get another problem, because this is a general skill that you’re trying to learn. You could give the question, give yourself a chance to screw up, get “Here’s how you do it,” then get a similar question, and then screw up, and then, “Here’s how you do it” again. And keep giving yourself those opportunities and keep bringing up.

I mean, the algorithms could easily bring up the ones that you’ve struggled with the most and give you very similar problems. And I think that’s a much more effective way to learn than to, you know, it’s still good that they include those tests in there, but I think it would be better if you could really optimize it in a way that’s sort of pushing people to struggle a little bit more.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, let’s flip it. Let’s say we are the dispenser of wisdom, knowledge, information as a presentation or training or any form of communication. You said it really is helpful to think about, “Hmm, give most people will forget most of what we have to say, really hone in on the top key messages that we wish to be remembered.” Do you have any pro tips on how we implement that in practice?

Charan Ranganath
Yes. And, in fact, I actually wrote an article about this in Harvard Business Review. It was the four C’s of memorable messaging, is what I called it.

Okay, so one is chunking. So, chunking is a principle by which you take all the things that you’re like, let’s say, if I’m presenting information, and there’s all these details, you want to be able to explicitly tie it into, like, one chunk. So, for instance, what you can do is you can start to say, “Okay, here’s a general principle.”

I’m trying to tell people to basically try to take care of their brain health. And I’m trying to remember what all the things are there that I tell people because there’s a hundred different facts I can tell people about how to improve their brain health. Well, one of the key principles is your brain’s a body part. So, what’s good for your body is good for your brain.

Now you start for that and you can say, “Okay, well, what’s good for my heart?” “Oh, yeah, so doing all these things to reduce your blood pressure, to reduce your cholesterol and so forth. Those are things that you could do to improve your brain health.”

And then another one is callbacks, where you want to keep going back to what you said previously. So, now people have to take a moment to remember what they were just being, what you told them about five minutes ago, and they’re tying together what’s happening now with what’s happening then. And, again, you’re creating this little chunk of knowledge.

Another is curiosity. And so, you were asking me before about one of the discoveries from my lab. And one of the things that we discovered, which really surprised me, was how curiosity can drive learning. And it relates to this error-driven learning stuff that we talked about, where we were interested in this idea that being curious is a motivator.

And when you look at other motivators, like, people trying to get money, for instance, or people trying to get food, what you find is that you get activity in these areas of the brain that process dopamine. And dopamine isn’t really a reward chemical. It’s really about energizing you to get reward and teaching you about what’s rewarding.

And so, what we found is that when you give people a question and they’re really curious about the answer to this question, they don’t know it, what happens is there’s an increase in activity in the areas of the brain that process dopamine. And it’s triggered, as I said, by the question, not by the answer per se. Now, if the answer is surprising, then you might get more of an effect. But, in general, just getting a question can energize people and drive them to find the answer.

And when they’re in that state of curiosity, they’ll be better at memorizing things that they’re not even curious about. So, if you can start off by getting people interested in the question before you give them the answer, that’s really important. And so, for instance, when I wrote my book, I had to relearn this principle and I had to really think about, “Okay, what are the counterintuitive in memory research?”

Because once you highlight a counterintuitive, then you can start to ask, get people thinking about your points in a way that gets them more likely to stick because they really are going to be curious to find out the answers to these questions. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it does. And I’m thinking about, yeah, I believe Bob Cialdini in his book Influence mentioned that this was an approach he liked to use in the classroom, in terms of, he generates a question and then deepens it a little bit, so it’s like a full-blown mystery. And some YouTubers do this very well in terms of like there are many documentaries. And so, that’s a good tip is like we start with the question.

But then help me out. If we ask a question, but then, sometimes when I hear a question, I just don’t care at all. And so, then it feels like I’m not getting the benefit of that curiosity in terms of, “Okay, you asked a question, I don’t care.” So, I guess that’s a tricky number. How could I…?

Charan Ranganath
Well, so the question needs to trigger curiosity. And for people to be curious, you have to hit this sweet spot. Because if it’s something where you have just no knowledge about anything in that area, well, you’re not going to necessarily be curious about it because, “Yeah, of course I don’t know the question. I don’t know the answer to this question.” And if you know the answer to the question, then you’re not going to be curious if it’s obvious.

Where you really want to get people is where there’s a gap between what you’ve just told them and what they need to know to answer the question. And that gap should be something that is bridgeable. So, one way you can do it is by highlighting this thing that people go, “I hadn’t thought about that,” or, “I thought I knew this topic but now there’s something I realized that I didn’t know.”

So, I mean, I’m just pulling something out from just random, but if somebody were really into The Beatles, and you said, “Hey, do you know the lyrics to the song?” and they hadn’t heard that song, they would be really curious about it. But another way to go is to also be able to say, “Hey, there’s this thing that you thought you knew, but, in fact, I’m going to flip it on its head, and, in fact, I’m going to ask this question that really prompts you to realize that there’s an error in what you thought you knew.”

So, in general, these tools to increase curiosity are driving what’s called prediction error, which is essentially you’re expecting to know the answer to something, and then there’s, all of a sudden, this gap between what you knew and what you’re actually getting. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s actually perfect, thank you, in terms of, I’m thinking about, I had some podcast sponsors for like really deep software technology things, as come through the agencies, like, “Hey, do you want this sponsor?” And then I go to their website, it’s like, “I have no idea what they’re even saying about some deep cloud architecture something or another.”

“And so, they may very well be solving an important problem for somebody, but I feel like I’m not your guy to speak this advertisement because, if I don’t know what it is, I’m not going to be compelling. And I can’t vet it properly in terms of whether it really is a good, cool thing or not.” And so then, there’s no curiosity because I don’t have a clue. I’m not even on the same map.

And then on the flip side, if I have full knowledge, they’re like, “Hey, Pete, you’re a podcaster. Do you know the number one thing podcasters do to grow their audience?” Like, “Yes, I do.” So, it’s like, “You were trying to make me curious, but you failed because I already know it.” And so, I think that’s perfect with the gap.

And, in fact, you’re identifying one of my favorite types of books, which is an event occurred some time ago, and we have some perspective on that in deep layers in terms of the author went deep with the interviews of the people like, Bethany McLean, her books are so great. Like, the smartest guys in room about Enron. It’s like, “I know, I’ve heard about Enron.” “Well, here’s what really went down and all the details.”

Or, the housing finance crisis in 2008, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I kind of know a little bit about it.” It’s like, “No, here’s all the details.” And so, Bethany McLean just lays it all out for me. I love it. And it’s exactly that, it’s, like, I have some knowledge of the thing, but there’s some gaps, and she fills them with gusto and it’s a delightful experience.

Charan Ranganath
Yeah. And I think it’s like in the current age of the internet, you have to be careful because it’s like, I know for me, I’ve seen enough stuff now where it’s like people sell a book and they say “Everything you used to know about this topic is wrong.” And I think there’s a little bit of fatigue that you get from reading those kinds of things.

But to the extent that you can highlight a genuine counterintuitive or a genuine gap that people just hadn’t actually thought about, I think that’s going to be effective at triggering curiosity. And your example actually brought up something else, which is another point I talk about is making things concrete.

So, your example of the AI companies, if you’re talking about these very abstract concepts, it’s really hard for people to remember that stuff. But if you give people a concrete story or a concrete example, they’re going to be much more likely to remember that. And, in fact, it’s going to dominate their judgments about whatever it is you’re telling them about because it’s going to be so memorable.

So, when I wrote my book, this was a big challenge because, in science, we’re often in our heads in this very abstract world, and we’re trying to make these arguments about things that are very not tangible. And I had to come up with stories, which you try to write from your experiences, so there are stories from my life all through the book that talk about all these crazy things. But those stories make concrete some point that I’m trying to convey.

Or they open up this question that people wouldn’t have necessarily thought about it and again trigger their curiosity. But either way, that concrete story, especially if it’s emotionally engaging, it will plant itself in people’s memory. And then anything that you attach to that story now becomes more memorable too.

Pete Mockaitis
And it also helps explain why I can binge watch TV shows because the gap is “What’s going to happen to this character?” And I’m situated, I’ve got the scene, I know the context, the environment, the stakes, what they’re trying to accomplish, but what I don’t know is how it’s going to turn out. And I might just have to watch many episodes to satisfy that.

Charan Ranganath
And that’s why if you’re watching it something with commercials, they always stack the commercials towards the end because, by that time, you’ve built up enough knowledge about what’s happening that you’re really urgently trying to figure out what’s happening. And so, if you put a gap there and you have a commercial break, people are in the state of curiosity, and, in some sense, they’re going to be more receptive to that commercial.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, Charan, before we hear about some of your favorite things, any key things you want to make sure to mention or put out there?

Charan Ranganath
I would say one big one is, since we’ve been talking about AI, humans are very different in the way that we learn and remember relative to machine learning. And I think I like to get this point out, I don’t get enough opportunities to say it because there’s just so much hype and, frankly, a lot of bullsh**.

There’s so much bullsh** out there about AI and this concept of artificial general intelligence, which is a very dumb concept. Because, essentially, if you look at the kind of constraints on machine learning and the constraints of human learning, they’re very, very different. And, realistically speaking, humans are dumb in many ways that machines aren’t, and machines are really dumb in ways that humans aren’t.

And I realized that you need to have a lot of humility when you talk about where technology is going because there’s lots of stuff we haven’t been able to foresee. But the thing is that the human brain basically evolved to get certain things done, basically to propagate our genes, to keep us alive long enough to propagate our genes, and to get the offspring protected and so forth, and be able to help us find a mate.

Machine learning doesn’t have those constraints. So, machine learning doesn’t have the same resource limitations. I mean, if you look at like ChatGPT, it can take down an entire power grid. I mean, the carbon footprint is huge. My brain is using less power than an incandescent light bulb. It’s just orders of magnitude different.

And people will say, “Oh, that’s because we just need neuromorphic computing and everything will figure itself out,” and that’s just not true. The principle of human learning is we try to get as much information as possible from as little information as possible. And so, there’s this kind of sense in AI where it’s like we just dump enough training data and these machines can do everything.

And humans are like constantly reducing the amount of data that they get, the amount of data they process and work with, but we’re doing it in a way that’s fairly intelligent. It’s optimized for the information that’s new and surprising. It’s driven by things that are biologically significant to us. And so, you can hook up a camera to a kid and train, like use the video information to train like a state-of-the-art AI system, and it’s going to do all sorts of interesting things.

But that’s because the kids done the hard work of looking at everything that’s important. So, ChatGPT can do a lot of cool stuff but that’s because humans reasoned about all these things, put it in writing, and then it’s just memorizing what we’ve given it, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, “You don’t get the credit for all that.”

Charan Ranganath
Exactly. Now, that doesn’t mean that algorithms, in general, are consistent, and they can have a memory that is more faithful to what it’s been trained on than humans can be. And humans have all sorts of biases because, I have a whole chapter talking about this, that there’s a lot of learning that happens under the hood in our brain that we’re not necessarily aware of. And that learning can bias us in a lot of ways.

It can make us go for things that are very familiar. Like, if you hear the word Budweiser over and over again, it’s going to seem like it should be a better beer than some beer that you’ve never heard of before, because, like, if it just is a generic store beer. And, of course, for people who are into beer, they might not think Budweiser is good. But the point is that Budweiser advertises, even though you’d think everyone knows what Budweiser is.

But Budweiser advertises because if you say that, you get that name out in front of people and you put some image in front of people enough, maybe you’re going to be 5% more likely to pick out Budweiser than Miller Lite at the grocery store, and that translates to huge amounts of sales. So, I think that’s something where humans are really susceptible is in our biases.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Charan, this is fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for sharing the time with us. And I wish you many happy memories.

Charan Ranganath
Thank you. Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun and it was a memorable conversation.

Oct 21
0

1004: Seth Godin on How to Maximize Your Impact and Deliver Work That Matters

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Seth Godin shares insightful stories and perspectives to help us think strategically and create meaningful change in a complex world.

You’ll Learn

  1. The mindset that makes you indispensable
  2. Why to embrace that you’re an impostor 
  3. Three questions to ask with every project 

About Seth

Seth Godin is the author of 22 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He’s also the founder of the altMBA and The Akimbo Workshops, online seminars that have transformed the work of thousands of people. 

He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. You might be familiar with his books Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip and Purple Cow. His book, This Is Marketing, was an instant bestseller around the world. The newest book, The Practice, is out at the end of 2020 and is already a bestseller. His newest project is leading a worldwide group of volunteers creating The Carbon Almanac. 

In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. His blog (which you can find by typing “seth” into Google) is one of the most popular in the world. His podcast is in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide. 

In 2018, he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame. More than 20,000 people have taken the powerful Akimbo workshops he founded, including thealtMBA and The Marketing Seminar. 

Resources Mentioned

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Seth Godin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, welcome back.

Seth Godin
Thank you for having me. It’s good to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I am excited to dig into some of your insights and wisdom and stories and fun that you got cooked up in your latest book, This is Strategy: Make Better Plans. Could you kick us off with a particularly fascinating, surprising, counterintuitive nugget that you’ve come across as you’re putting this piece together?

Seth Godin
Potatoes.

Pete Mockaitis
Potatoes. That’s surprising.

Seth Godin
There were no potatoes in Europe until 1500 or so. They evolved and were hybridized in Peru. Well, when potatoes arrived, it’s worth noting that potatoes are twice as efficient at creating calories and food for humans as any other food that you can grow.

But when potatoes took off, Dublin, in the 1800s, was the most densely populated place on earth and has never retained, become that densely populated since. So, potatoes are the key to all of this. Anyway, because the people in Europe were colonialists, they looked down on things that were strange, it wasn’t high status. Potatoes came close to being banned in England, and they were banned in France.

And a guy, an entrepreneur, wanted to get potatoes into the diets of people who were starving and who needed food. He had access to the court, so he got Marie Antoinette to wear potato flowers in her hair, just as a little signal that maybe potatoes would be okay, but that wasn’t enough. So then, he rented some farmland a few miles away from Versailles and planted a whole bunch of potatoes and hired armed guards to stand watch over the plot all day but at night, he sent them home.

So, of course, the peasants, seeing that this high value item wasn’t guarded, stole potatoes, ate them, discovered that they were just great. And that’s how France was saved. The lesson of this is strategy is your philosophy of becoming. What moves will you make? What tasks will you take on to change the system, to see the system, and then change it? And it’s all about status, and affiliation, the freedom from fear. It’s time all woven together so that we can do the work we’re proud of.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful, and there’s a lot there. I want to maybe get a contrasting story. Tell us the tale of your hot take on how organ donation should work.

Seth Godin
Well, a relative needed a kidney and so I got to learn a lot about the system. It turns out, in the United States, kidney donation is opt-in, and it turns out that every year millions of kidneys are buried that could go to somebody who needed them, and this leads to a shortage and a waiting list. The problem with the waiting list, of course, is that people are dying to get on it, and they’re dying when they’re on it.

So, lots of things have been suggested. Most of them are horrible, like paying poor people to donate their kidneys when they’re dead. And I got to thinking about the game theory here, the strategy that you could bring to the system, and Dr. Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein, a well-regarded cardiologist, worked with me. We wrote a paper, published it in Transplantation Journal. We did everything right, and even though my idea is correct, it didn’t get adopted. And in the book, I outlined exactly what we did wrong.

But the short version is this. Right now, opting in to donate a kidney has some fear associated with it because you have to acknowledge you’re going to die, and you have to think about how your family is going to engage with that. If we just added one shift to the rule set, which is your priority on the wait list is based on how long you have signed up to be a donor because now there’s no moral issue, right? If you’re not willing to be a donor, you shouldn’t be willing to be a recipient.

If that is the case, that there’s a priority to people who donated early, everyone’s going to get on the list as soon as they can because you would be afraid of being left out. Tension, and status, and affiliation. As a result, the shortage would go away and we wouldn’t need a list. But – and this is the lesson – the people who are in charge of the list are risk averse. The people who are in charge of the list don’t want to go first. The people who are in charge of the list, the worst thing they can imagine is screwing things up.

So, in order to get them to say, “Yes,” I would have needed to spend four years on the road, going to conferences, writing papers, going to meetings, dealing with committees, doing tests, and I wasn’t willing to do that sacrifice. And that is a key lesson in how we make change happen, which is don’t try to start a log on fire if the kindling you have is too small.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. And what it’s hitting home for me here is that your kidney idea and potatoes are both fabulous. I love them both. I’m a good Lithuanian boy. We love our potatoes. And it’s intriguing, I think, and this might be sort of a no-duh for many, but I think a number of professionals who strive to be awesome at their job, kind of get a rude awakening at times that just being great, having a fantastic idea or product or offer or solution or skill set isn’t adequate to make it happen.

Seth Godin
Correct. Well said. And that’s why the first two ideas that I just shared with you are not about your job. They’re about projects. But most of us have a job and we have a choice. Either our analysis is, “My job is to do my job, to wait for instructions, just like I did in school, and to do the tasks that are put in front of me.” The alternative is to view my job as a series of projects where I go to people and I enroll them in working with me to make the change I seek to make.

The problem with the first path is, while it might give you peace of mind in the short run, particularly in a changing world with AI and everything else, you’re going to be a cog in a system that doesn’t care about you. Whereas, if you can adopt an awesome mindset to say, “I want to be a contribution. I do projects. I make change happen,” the doors are wide open.

And the CEOs I talk to from companies big and small, that’s what they want from their employees. Unfortunately, they act in a way that doesn’t signal that. They act in a way that makes it feel like third grade and you’re just trying to get through the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you zeroed in on a few of these key principles, difference makers, status, affiliation, fear. And, yes, I think there, I think I see them front and center in terms of, “You know, if I stick my neck out and do this kind of weird thing that nobody else seems to be talking about, so maybe it’s not important, then I could very well look like a total idiot here, and so my status could be down, my affiliation could be down, people not asking me, inviting me to cool stuff anymore, and I’m just afraid of that. Ultimately, you know, getting fired, losing income, got to sell the house, got to downsize, all the things that could unfold.” So, help us, how do we kind of navigate through those core issues?

Seth Godin
So, you’ve nailed it. And the one thing you left off the list that people are motivated by is the freedom from fear. Not actual risk, but the freedom from feeling like we are taking a risk. And it turns out that work has amplified our fear. That’s how they get us to comply and it’s a trap because, the people who get the joke and are willing to encounter the feeling of fear, actually have the most stable and resilient jobs.

So, my first job, I didn’t know any better, I was 23 years old, I was lucky enough to be working with Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Michael Crichton, I launched a whole line of science fiction adventure games, and it was a job, I wasn’t the boss. And the packaging was absolutely beautiful but I needed a way to seal the package for the stores because Target and Lechmere and other mass merchants didn’t want this fourfold gate thing open.

So, they said, “You have to shrink wrap it,” and I didn’t want to shrink wrap my beautiful packaging. So, I ordered 10,000 little tiny Velcro dots to hold it shut. The problem is that 10,000 little tiny Velcro dots do not adhere and stick to coated cardstock. And as a result, my peers happily made fun of me for months. And the thing about it is the 10,000 tiny little Velcro dots probably cost the company $400. And because I was willing to dance with that, I launched more than a dozen gold or platinum level pieces of software in the time it took my colleagues to launch one or two middling products.

Because my posture was the best surfers find good waves. Here’s a wave and it’s not fatal. I can lean into possibility. I can do projects that could be generous if they work and aren’t about my ego but are about making a change. And I knew that the downside was, yes, maybe I was going to get fired. I came within a day of getting fired.

But if I was going to get fired, it wasn’t going to be because I was timid and it wasn’t going to be because I was selfish. It was going to be because I was bringing possibility to the table that made people uncomfortable. But I knew that that’s the definition of being awesome at your job. We don’t need you to comply more than everyone else. I can go to Upwork for that. I can go to Fiverr for that. What we need from you is to push and to imagine because that’s what’s worth paying for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really powerful. And so, zooming in on, I guess, the fundamental mindset that you had cooking with regard to the dots is whereas, others in that same position say, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess shrink-wrapping is the thing that we do. So, hey, that’s a shame, but, okay, shrink-wrapping, here we go.” So, they might just go down that pathway.

But because you’re willing to take the occasional oopsie and embarrassment, you are liberated and emboldened to charge ahead and do a lot of great stuff and get way more big wins than a couple of little scuff losses along the way.

Seth Godin
Yeah. So, here’s one way to think about it, and I learned this accidentally at business school. A business school professor has a challenge where they’re teaching a case. They’ve got 60 people in her class, and she has to call on people to move the conversation forward. And I showed up at business school, I was one of the younger people there, and it became clear to me that the spreadsheets and the two-thirds of the case that was about crunching the numbers, it was going to make my eyes bleed. I was never going to be good at it. I didn’t want to be good at it.

So, I decided that I was going to invest all my effort on reading about the personalities and the situations, and not even open the spreadsheet that came with it. And I made it clear through my actions that if a professor wanted that kind of analysis, that’s the day to call on me. That if they wanted to embarrass me and ask me about the numbers, they were welcome to, but that would ruin the… that gets old. They don’t want to do that. They don’t want to set me up to fail. I want to set them up to succeed.

So, if you earn the reputation at work that you’re the person who does interesting things with energy, that you’re the person who contributes and raises the quality of conversation, if you’re the one who asks hard questions, you can hire a boss that wants you to do that, and now you have job security forever. Whereas if you are, you can pick anyone, and I mean anyone, trying to fit in all the way, the minute they can find someone cheaper than you, I promise they will.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a hard reality check, a true one. I’m reminded, we have a conversation publishing shortly, with Duncan Wardle who worked at Disney, and he developed a reputation for making impossible things happen, which was so fun because they just kept giving him these super cool out-there jobs, and he just kept getting to do them and getting cool results and building a career reputation, and now consulting practice and books and all those things.

And so, that’s quite beautiful how you get a bit of a, the word personal brand feels a little shallow for this. It’s a reputation, it’s an oomph, it’s an ethos, it’s a vibe, it’s a thing that you carry within you and is recognized by others and that perpetuates more phenomenal opportunities.

Seth Godin
But let’s be very clear, this is not about talent and what you are born with. You begin this by being the person who orders lunch better than anybody else, because ordering lunch is hardly fatal, and the people who order lunch and always order the same thing, boring thing wrapped in the shrink wrap and everything else, those people, you can count on them for boring lunch.

But if they come to expect that you’ve done your homework and you realize that two of the people are vegans and one person is gluten free and you found this place, and dah, dah, dah, and lunch was great, you haven’t pigeon-holed yourself as an admin. You have pigeon-holed yourself as someone who cares. And from that, you will get better at caring and being seen as caring.

And so, it’s not that, you know, “Seth started doing this at the beginning of his career, so I will never be able to do it.” It’s, I just was lucky enough to be present with people who challenged me to be challenging. And once I got a little better at it, I could do it more. And so, that’s what we seek to do. And I don’t think I tell this story in the book, but one of the key bits of development I had in my career, it’s the first day of work at Spinnaker Software. It’s my summer job. I am the 30th employee. The company would grow to have hundreds of people and then get acquired and stuff like that. But I walk in, there’s no voicemail, there’s no email, the fax had just been installed, and on the receptionist desk, is this plastic carousel with 50 slots in it and a Dymo label maker to put each person’s name on one slot.

So, you would walk in after lunch or you would walk in in the morning, you’d spin and spin and spin this thing until you found your name and then there’d be the pink message slips. You had to do this three, four, five times a day. It wasn’t in alphabetical order. It was in the order people had been hired. That makes sense because otherwise you’d have to rebuild the thing every time you hired someone. And I walk in and I look at this thing, and I go, “I’m going to have to look at this thing five times a day spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, so does everyone else.”

So, I reach over to the receptionist desk, and she has a one of those magnetic things filled with paper clips, and I pull out a paper clip and I put it next to my name. So, now all you got to do is spin to my paper clip and I’ll be able to find my message, and the people who know they’re near me can spin to my paperclip and save time. Well, within 24 hours, it was festooned with different-colored paperclips and pipe cleaners, everyone had a little flag over their thing.

I saved the company many, many, many hours of spinning. It wasn’t fatal. It was awesome, and no one told me to do it. No one said, “You’re the senior vice president of paperclip affixing.” Instead, I saw a problem and I solved it. I didn’t have to take credit for it. I didn’t have to send out a memo. I just took responsibility, and if someone had said that was stupid, I would have taken my paperclip out.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful and very resonant. My mom ended up becoming the CEO of the local credit union because she noticed the former CEO was vacuuming after everyone left, and she’s like, “Well, I know how to vacuum.” And so, to your point, she did not get a reputation for, “Oh, Jan can clean.” It’s like, “Oh, Jan cares. She’s invested in this facility and what we’re about. Well, okay. I’m going to give her some more responsibilities,” and then one thing leads to another.

Seth Godin
Go, Jan, go.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely. So, let’s talk about this fear business. Freedom from fear, it’s interesting because I’m thinking about Dr. Casey Means makes an interesting point about feeling safe. She’s like, “To be incredibly clear, you and everyone you’ve ever loved will die. So, in one way, none of us are really safe.”

Seth Godin
Correct, not to mention the asteroid. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-oh. Now I’m fearful, Seth. So, in a way, none of us are really safe. However, feeling safe is associated with all kinds of wonderful benefits. There’s creativity and health and freedom from chronic disease and all these things. So, likewise, with regard to freedom from fear, none of us are truly free from all risk. Like, we may very well get fired and someone may very well say, “That’s a very stupid idea and you’re not allowed to come to these meetings anymore.” That can happen. But if we have freedom from fear, boy, we unlock a lot of goodness. So, do you have any pro tips on getting to the other side of that?

Seth Godin
Well, we need to talk about resistance, but first I just want to do a small asterisk about fired, which is, I remember a few decades ago when Ford Motor Company saw that sales of the Ford Explorer were slowing down and they fired 10,000 people in one day. Here’s the thing. If their union had been smart, the UAW, a year earlier, would have said, “You’re making junky cars. We’re going on strike until you design a better car.”

Because the fact is those 10,000 people didn’t deserve to get fired. They got fired because other people designed a lousy car. That’s the risk we face, actually, when we show up at work; the risk of complying, not the risk of leading. So, this freedom from fear. If you talk to people who run the marathon, the first thing you’ll discover is that some people quit at mile 20 and other people finish.

And the difference between quitting at 20 and finishing is not how fit you are. It’s, “What are you going to do with the tired?” because they all get tired, but the people at 20 don’t know what to do with the tired so they have to stop, and the people who make it to mile 26, their coach didn’t teach them how not to be tired. Their coach taught them what to do when they feel tired. And the same thing is true with the fear.

Resistance, the thing that holds us back, writer’s block, Steve Pressfield’s great term for it, makes us feel like an imposter. And imposter syndrome is real, that when you get asked to do something, where you are confronting the future, something that hasn’t been done before, you will feel like an imposter. And so, the question which you just asked is, “How do I make imposter syndrome go away?” And the answer is, “You can’t.” And the reason you can’t is you’re an imposter, and so am I.

If you are making assertions about the future, you can’t be sure. You can’t guarantee that you are right. So, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re simply pretending that the future will be the way you say. And so, when we feel that show up, we can’t make it go away, but we can dance with it. We can welcome it. We can invite it to sit down for tea. We can use it as a marker and a symbol that we might be onto something. And if I don’t feel afraid when I’m doing my work, then I know I am not trying hard enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Can you expand on that a little bit because that shows that you care, that you’re trying something new and challenging on your edge, outside your comfort zone, like these kinds of things?

Seth Godin
Yeah. Well, how long does it take to type a 200-page book? And the answer is a day, maybe four days if you’re Robert Caro, but not that much longer. So why does it take so long to write a book? And the answer is, “You don’t know what the next sentence is supposed to be.” That the work you’re getting paid for is to explore what the next sentence is, not to type.

But a whole bunch of people signed up to do a job where they’re in the typing pool. And the problem is the typing pool is no longer filled with employees. That the miracle of AI plus outsourcing is that if I can write down a job, I can get someone to do it faster and cheaper than you.

Pete Mockaitis
If I can write down a job. Yeah, I could chew on that for a while. What is write-downable and what is not?

Seth Godin
Correct. So, I can say to somebody, or to an AI, “Please read this 100-page document and highlight 20 of the quotes.” And if all I need is the quotes, that’s mechanical. I can write that down. If it’s, “Please highlight the 20 most important quotes,” that’s worth paying a human for. Because the decision of what are the most important ones, the choice to leave the other ones out, that’s risky. There’s no guarantee you’re right. Fear arises.

And so, where I get into trouble with AI, where I get into trouble with Upwork, is if I ask someone to do a job where I can’t write down all the steps, because then, inevitably, I get disappointed. But if I can write down all the steps, I would be a fool to hire an expensive human to do it when I got a computer that’ll do it all night for free.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, pick the best quotes, or the most engaging quotes, or the most viral quotes, or the most thought-provoking quotes. So, if someone on Upwork were to say, “Okay. Cool. Sure thing, Seth. How do I determine which ones are more thought-provoking than the others?” then that is supremely not write-downable.

Even if you could write down, it’s like, “Well, you know what? It might have, like, an interesting contrast, like ‘Ask not what your country can do, but what you can do for your country.'” You know, so it might. So, any document or guidance you could produce would be incomplete, and, thus, in your parlance, not write-down-able.

Seth Godin
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Yeah, that’s juicy. Okay. So, we’re all impostors, so we dance with it and it’s not going to disappear. And, in fact, we could hopefully learn to embrace it as an indicator of something good and positive and exciting.

Seth Godin
Yeah, that’s our job. That is actually what it is to be awesome at your job, is to do things that are not write-downable, and this doesn’t mean you have to be a super fancy executive. So, there’s a fancy hotel chain in the US and the chambermaids are the lowest paid people in the organization. They’re the people who make up your room every day. Every one of them gets a $250 per guest budget to spend any way they want to please a guest.

So, they’re the front line. If they discover a couple really upset about something, they can just interrupt while they’re making the bed, and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. Why don’t you just go have lunch? It’s on us.” And they just made a decision that is not write-downable in the moment, and this is somebody who’s getting paid minimum wage.

If you don’t trust your frontline people to do that, you’ve decided to make a commodity and to race to the bottom. The alternative is to race to the top, is to stand for something and to trust your people to understand the strategy and help you get there.

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, I love that so much. My very first W2 job-job was at Kmart, and Pantry Pete, they called me. And when I learned in the training video that I had “the power to please” you know, like, “Oh, sorry, we’re out of the Pepsi 24-pack, but I can give you two 12-packs for the same price as the 24-pack,” I thought that was the coolest thing ever. And I even wrote down in my schedule, “not work, but exercise power to please,” or EPP because I was dorky.

But it really was the funnest thing I did in terms of, I guess it was the autonomy and pleasing people feels good and I think that’s just a thing that I wish every team, organization, had more of, that capacity to do that.

Seth Godin
And Kmart closed its last store last week, and the reason is because they took that piece away and raced to the bottom. They tried to out-Walmart Walmart, out-Amazon Amazon, and that’s really hard to do, because if you race to the bottom, you might win.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I love that language, out-Walmart Walmart, out-Amazon Amazon, and they sure didn’t out-Target Target. Sorry, Kmart. I mean, I’m a loyalist, got the apron, but, yeah, Target really wiped the floor there. So, let’s talk about you have a great quote in your book, “We mistakenly spend more time figuring out how to win the game we’re in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place.” I think there is just loads of wisdom in this. Can you unpack that a bit for us?

Seth Godin
Well, so we’re surrounded by games. Social media is a game. How many followers do you have? Whichever project you’re taking on is a game. Your career is a game. How much money do you get paid? These are scoring mechanisms that imply what the game is for, that there are people, billionaires, who think that what the world is for is for them to make as much money as possible.

And the thing is, if you confront a game that you cannot win, that is making you unhappy, trying harder to win that game is probably the wrong path. And so, the smallest viable audience gives us the freedom to pick who we are working with and for, and to ignore everyone else. And that gives us the responsibility to pick a game we want to be responsible for, as opposed to just saying, “Well, I’m playing the same game everybody else is.” Everything goes back to high school.

When you were in high school, you could have played the game of “How do I become Homecoming King or Queen?” or you could have played the game of “How do I get on the football team?” or you could have played the game of “How do I become first chair clarinetist?” Those are totally different games. And if you’re playing one of those games really, really hard, but the only reason is because you need to win it, you haven’t thought about which game is good for you and your world, you’re probably making a mistake.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, in the professional context, I’m just thinking about folks who just ran down the path, “Go be a doctor. Go be a lawyer. Go be an engineer. Oh, shoot, I hate this. Uh-oh.”

Seth Godin
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us some more examples of folks who have made this mindset paradigm shift and it’s been transformational for them?

Seth Godin
Well, one of the keys to the shift is to ignore sunk costs. Sunk costs are all the things you’ve invested in – a law degree, building something, buying something – and defending them going forward. You’re 35 years old, you’re a dentist, you hate being a dentist. It’s not going to get any better. You’re still going to hate being a dentist, but you keep doing it because you’ve already invested 10 years of your life and all this money in being a dentist, which means you’re sacrificing the next 40 years of your life to defend a choice that might’ve been a good one in retrospect when you made it, but it isn’t a good one anymore.

And the response is, “All sunk costs are gifts from your former self.” The Pete of yesterday, or 10 years ago, did something for me today, and you are allowed to say, “No, thanks.” You don’t have to accept the gift. Now you can make a new decision with new information. I could take this gift of a dental practice and this dental degree, or I’m going to say, “No, thank you,” and I could go become a tree farmer.

And shifting like that turns out to be good-decision science, but it’s also great for our heads, because every day you go back to your job, every day you go to work, you are re-signing up to accept the gift from yesterday. But if the gift isn’t helping you, don’t do it. So, yes, I know people who graduated from Harvard Law School but are now podcasters and life coaches. I know people who had a really good run doing something in Silicon Valley, but now they’re busy building boats because they didn’t give up, and they’re not retired. They’re creating value. They’re just playing a different game.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Some gifts need to go to Goodwill, and that’s totally fine. That’s acceptable.

Seth Godin
Yeah, it’s critical, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
A lot of this rich thinking we’re doing here seems to only exist, from my perspective, outside the realm of the urgent, the here-and-now next action. How do you think about dealing with urgency and getting the headspace to think wisely and strategically?

Seth Godin
So, you either live in the last minute, the next minute, or the best minute. Those are the three choices. So, what does it mean? The last minute is whatever is the highest on my urgency list is what I’m going to do right now, because there’s always going to be something that’s the highest on your urgency list. That lets you off the hook. You don’t have to be responsible for any of your choices because the urgency list determines it. That’s doing everything at the last minute.

The next minute is offered to everybody, every day. We get the next minute. What will we choose to do with it? And the best minute is yesterday you had one minute that was the best minute of your day. Everyone did. How can you make it so that your best minutes stack up? How can you make it so you have more of those? Because very few people who spend their life working at the last minute have many best minutes to report.

The short order cooks don’t usually have a lot of highlights from their day because all they know is someone ordered some eggs, they made some eggs, and then they went back to the next thing. And the power comes from taking a deep breath, leaving the urgent alone, it will take care of itself, and focusing instead on “How do I make this a best minute?” And you can’t work enough hours to defeat everybody because there’s only 24 hours in a day, but you could work less hours and make a bigger difference if you did the right thing with your time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Seth, I love that question, “How do I make this the best minute?” Your book, This is Strategy, is filled with useful questions. Could you share a couple of them that you think might be the most frequently useful and transformative?

Seth Godin
Well, the ones I keep coming back to are “Who’s it for?” “What’s it for?” and “What’s the change I seek to make?” Because “Who’s it for?” makes it very clear who my client is, who my boss is, who my customer is. Ignore everyone else. “What’s it for?” is why do they need this from me? What are they dreaming of when I show up? Where’s the empathy of what I did for them?

And the third question is, “What is the change I seek to make?” because if you’re not making a change, then you’ve just signed up to be a cog. You are here to make a change. Our work is actually projects. Our job is getting paid by somebody to consistently do projects, but your projects are here to make a change happen. Can you point to the change you are making?

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

Seth Godin
I would say the single best thing people can do, if any of this has resonated, is to find someone not related to you, and meet with them once a week by Zoom to tell each other the truth, to answer these questions together because what you will discover is, knowing the meeting is coming, you will change your behavior so that you can report in the meeting that you’re onto something. And just having that sounding board can open the door to make a difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Seth Godin
In the classic self-help book, Dune, the Bene Gesserit say, “Fear is the mind-killer,” three words probably worth tattooing somewhere on your body.

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

Seth Godin
I think that understanding what the marshmallow test really measures is really helpful. The marshmallow test has been seen as saying that if a three-year-old can sit for five minutes with a marshmallow so they’ll get two, that self-restraint leads to 20, 30 years of happiness. So, therefore, people who are “born” with self-restraint are destined for greatness.

And some of that is correct, but it’s worth understanding that a kid who grows up in a household that’s under stress, where there’s trauma, where there isn’t dinner on the table, where parents are doing their best but can’t always keep their promises, those kids understandably eat the marshmallow because who knows if you’re going to come back with two marshmallows. You probably won’t.

So, I think we need to give people a little bit more grace and a lot more support because we don’t all win the birthday lottery. And what we can do as a culture is create the conditions for people to become resilient and to find self-restraint so that we can all maximize the joy we have and that we create for others.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Seth Godin
You know, it’s really fascinating to me that you’re not supposed to talk about your own book, but I listen to my own books all the time, because if I’m headed to a meeting or I’m feeling stuck and I put on The Practice, it gets under my skin again. But if I have to pick another book, I think if you haven’t read The War of Art by my friend Steve Pressfield, you need to do that right now.

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

Seth Godin
You might not have a spokeshave at home, but a well-sharpened spokeshave is your first choice for woodworking. And for my job that involves typing, Claude.ai is so much better than ChatGPT. It’s harder working, it’s kinder, it’s not arrogant, and if you’re not using it every day, you’re being left behind because the future is arriving very fast.

Pete Mockaitis
If I may, I do have a ChatGPT premium subscription, and I’m thinking about switching. Have you looked around to all of them; the Gemini, the Perplexity, the dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and Claude’s your winner? Or you just found Claude and said, “Yep, I’m sticking with you”?

Seth Godin
I use Perplexity every day. If you’re using Google, you’ve made a mistake. Perplexity completely defeats Google. I’ve tried Gemini a little bit. It’s really fun if you want to tweak Google, to ask Google to compare things. Like, type in “Pop-Tarts versus Doberman Pinschers,” and it will give you a little essay about the difference between a Pop-Tart and a Doberman Pinscher, as opposed to say, “That’s a stupid question.” Claude would say, “Why are you asking me that?” and do it in a kind way.

So, I haven’t tried all of them. What’s magic about Claude is they spent a lot of time trying to create something that will challenge you to do even better with the next time you interact with it. Whereas, ChatGPT, to me, feels like it’s always doing me a favor, it does the minimum amount, and it argues, it really argues with you when it’s wrong, and that just pisses me off.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s like, I say, “Hey, give me this answer,” and it tells me what I would do to get the answer. It’s like, “Yes, I know. Go do that now, please.”

Seth Godin
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Seth Godin
I would say that my favorite habit, if people know me, is that I have habits. That I have intentional habits. That I eat the same thing, I get up at the same time, but most of my habits are about wearing an actual uniform and having a practice when it comes to my job. I do not wait to be inspired. Tomorrow, there’ll be a post on my blog, not because it’s the best post I ever wrote, but because it’s Friday. And knowing that these are things I do, frees up my mind to make a different sort of decision. And we all have habits, but if they’re not intentional habits, I think they’re probably getting in the way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to especially resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often, they Kindle book highlight, they retweet to the high heavens?

Seth Godin
My most successful blog post is also my shortest. What a surprise. You don’t need more time. You just need to decide.

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

Seth Godin
Seths.blog, there’s 9,000 blog posts, one a day for a very, very long time. And if you go to Seths.blog/TIS, you’ll find out everything you need to know about this new book.

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

Seth Godin
You’ve already done the key thing, which is listening to Pete’s podcast, which is showing up and announcing you want to be awesome at your job. The challenge is, “Can you actually say what it would mean to be awesome at your job?” Because if you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going there.

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, thank you. This was so much fun. I wish you much luck with your book, This is Strategy, and I hope you have many excellent plans well-executed.

Seth Godin
Thank you, Pete. Keep making this ruckus. It matters.

Jun 13
0

970: The Top 12 Presentation Mistakes to Avoid with Terri Sjodin

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Terri Sjodin discusses how to avoid the common pitfalls that diminish your persuasiveness.

You’ll Learn

  1. What your audience really wants to know 
  2. Three reasons why your presentation is boring—and how to fix it 
  3. The key mistake people won’t tell you you’re making

About Terri

Terri L. Sjodin is an international leading expert on persuasive presentations. With more than 25 years of experience, she has built an impressive client list that includes Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, national sales teams, industry associations, and even members of Congress. Terri has appeared as an expert on sales presentations on the Today Show, Bloomberg News, CNN, CNBC, and Fox Business, as well as many industry podcasts.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Terri Sjodin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Terri, welcome.

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m excited to be talking about being presentation ready, and you’ve been researching and teaching on persuasiveness and communications and presentations for decades. Tell us, any particularly surprising, fascinating, striking discoveries you’ve made about us humans and communication, and how we’re persuaded that really stick with you?

Terri Sjodin

Yeah, so as you know, my background is in speech and debate. I was highly competitive in high school and in college on the speech and debate teams, and so I’ve always had this awareness of the power and the impact of public speaking and persuasive presentation skills. And so, so fast-forward 20 years plus later, when we launched into this research study that did a deeper dive on the topic of persuasive messaging, we asked people, “Look, do you think that making a presentation mistake matters? Does it impact you getting a win or a deal or an opportunity?”

And 94% of our participants in the research study said yes, and that’s statistically a very high number, which I think is quite surprising. Secondarily, over 55% of the participants in the survey said that they had little to no presentation skills training over the course of their career, which means over half of the professionals in the market today are really doing the best they can with what they know through trial and error.

So, the goal behind the book and the research study was to help people build and deliver more effective presentations, whether they’re one-on-one, small group, or large group, whether they’re in-person, virtual, or hybrid, and then, what we know is that on some level, most people want to improve their presentations, but they just don’t know where to start, and that can be costly. So, in the book, and in the research, we identified the 12 most common mistakes, and help people course-correct faster so that they can get where they want to go.

Pete Mockaitis

Now, what’s really cool is your book is in the context of sales presentations, but the wisdom is applicable to all sorts of persuasive communications presentations. But what I love about sales is we’ve got numbers, we’ve got results, money dollars associated with them.

Terri Sjodin

Me, too.

Pete Mockaitis

So, can you share with us maybe a story of just what kind of a transformation is possible? If you maybe walk us through a situation where someone was doing some things wrong, they corrected it, how they did it, and then what they saw on the other end of it.

Terri Sjodin

Yeah, so I think one of my favorite stories is a confession of my own. I personally have made all 12 of the mistakes that we’ve identified in the book, and I try to take the reader or the listeners back to the beginning. As I mentioned, I kind of cut my teeth in this subject area when I was on the debate team. And what you learn early on when you go to a tournament is that it’s a pretty level playing field.

There are no matching uniforms if you compete in speech and debate. Everybody’s just given a number. And then six or seven competitors will go into a room, they deliver their presentation, and at the end of three preliminary rounds, the individual with the best overall scores prevails. They move on to semifinals and finals.

It’s pretty cut and dry, for better or for worse, you know if your talk was decent. But here’s the rub. I would stay, even if I didn’t win, and I didn’t always win, I wanted to, but I would stick around. I would go to the semifinals, I would go to the finals, and I would watch to see what was landing, what was working for that specific presenter, what made the judges or the audience lean in, and then I would go home and I would kind of tweak it and fix it and make my best guess at what I needed to do to make it better.

And the takeaway here is really very simple. You just don’t go back to the next tournament with the speech that didn’t win, but business people do it all the time. They go back out into the field over and over and over again. And I love that you made the reference to the fact that everybody sells something because I believe that to be true.

Even though we don’t always love the S-word, sales, whether you’re selling a product, a service, a philosophy, an idea, when you’re selling yourself even in a job interview or for a promotion, everybody sells something. And so, I hope that by helping people to understand what the most common mistakes are, then they can avoid them and again accomplish whatever their outcome is that they’re shooting for.

Pete Mockaitis

Terri, I love this so much. You’re bringing back fond memories for me of high school speech team. But what was interesting was I love that lesson right there in terms of learning, observing, turning everything into a source of wisdom there, because those who did not break, they did not get to the finals, they usually chose to go to the room where they were doing the original comedy finals.

They always rent the largest spaces for the original comedy, or OC, as they said in the biz, because that’s just funny, that’s entertaining. Like, “Let’s watch the funny guys since we’re stuck here until the bus leaves after the award ceremony.” And you’re saying, “No, I’m going to go see what are winners doing, and see what I can learn from them.”

Terri Sjodin

And isn’t that the takeaway for all of us? When we learn from the people who beat us out at whatever it is that we’re trying to achieve, then we can course-correct. But most people are moving so fast, Pete. They’re just, “I’m super busy. I don’t have time.” But what is it costing you if you don’t take the time to reflect and make those changes?

Pete Mockaitis

I hear you. Well, so you’ve got 12 mistakes. We’re not going to cruise through all 12, but maybe give us the overview of the three categories here.

Terri Sjodin

So, there are three main categories. The category of case development, “Did you build a persuasive and compelling case?” And then the second category is creativity, “Did you create a thought-provoking message, something that makes people lean in and go, ‘Oh, you know, I’ve heard this before, but the way you’re saying it, it’s landing in my mind in a different way’?” And then the third category is delivery. That includes your eye contact, your body language, but also everything from verbal missteps to the way that you deliver using visual aids. And in each of those three categories, there are four mistakes that live underneath each one of those main categories.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’d like to jump into the ones I found most intriguing.

Terri Sjodin

Okay.

Pete Mockaitis

And one of them, in terms of case development is, you say, being overly informative versus persuasive. Aren’t facts good, Terri? How is that a mistake to be overly informative? What’s the scoop here?

Terri Sjodin

So, in the overall study, there were over 5,000 participants, and this was based on individuals whose livelihood is dependent on their ability to build and deliver a persuasive message. And so, we said, “Looking back over the last six to 12 months, is there anything that you think cost you that win?” And data dumping or being overly informative really came up over and over and over again. It was in the top three. So let me kind of give you the top three and then we’ll kind of circle back to being overly informative versus persuasive.

So, the top three biggest mistakes that most people self-identified included being overly informative versus persuasive, winging it, and failing to close the sale. And you might think, “Well, do those kind of overlap?” And in a way that they do. However, being overly informative sounds like this, “We do this, and we do this, and we have this, and we’re number one, and we really care,” and it sounds like this very long laundry list, if you will, of attributes. But it doesn’t pass the “so what” test. It doesn’t feel compelling to me.

And so, you might feel very well-intended, like, “It’s my responsibility to go out and give a presentation that is incredibly informative, and then the individual will be able to make a decision.” But in today’s compelling market, what would help you and serve you better is if you can craft a clear, concise, and compelling message that answers the questions, “Why do I need this? How are you going to save me time? How are you going to save me money? How are you going to save me mental sanity?” The list goes on and on.

And so, when I’m helping someone, it’s because I’m helping them to understand, “Do you hear how you’re giving me more of a list of attributes versus compelling arguments that want to make me move towards action?” And when they have that aha moment, again, they can tweak their presentations and really focus in the brief amount of time they’re given into a place where they can go, “Oh, shoot, I can be more compelling.”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. As we’re talking a little bit in the context of sales presentations and demos, I’ve been on the receiving end of many, because it’s very easy for people to get email addresses of podcasters. So, it’s right in the RSS feed, and so I get a lot of them. And then a fair number of them are cool software startup-y things in the podcast world. And that is, I would say, something I do see again and again and again. It’s, like, we hear about, like, “Oh, this is the history and the founder’s story.”

Terri Sjodin

“When you really care, and we have a lot of choices.”

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, the background of something like the technical architecture, yadda, yadda. And so, what I really want to hear is, “This thing is awesome at delivering this benefit to you,” in terms of like, “Hey, these nine podcasters quadrupled their audience size once they started rocking and rolling with our platform for a few months.” Like, “Oh, yeah. That’ll do it.” As opposed to, “Look at these cool graphics.” Like, “Okay, those graphics are cool, but I’m not seeing how this helps me accomplish the things I want to accomplish.”

Terri Sjodin

And brevity is your friend. So, again, that kind of moves us into the creativity section, but we have such a finite amount of time, and so you have to ask yourself, “How can I creatively share my most compelling talking points so that I’m creating a rock-solid case?” and pairing that with an interesting story or anecdote that makes people go, “Oh, that was good, good nugget.”

And then when you pair those with speaking in your own authentic voice and delivery, that’s when people go, “Oh, that was good. I enjoyed that. You seem authentic. I feel like you did your homework. Your arguments make sense to me.” And in that course, people feel better about making a yes decision or a moving-forward decision or, “Yes, let’s make our next appointment time decision.”

And so, in the context of your entire presentation, I mean, the intention of this podcast is to help people to get where they want to go faster. And, allegedly, if we understand and respect the fact that people buy people, then how else do we communicate our people skills, if not through our verbal communication skills?

Pete Mockaitis

That’s well said. And I liked how you conveyed, when we’ve got a compelling case delivered creatively with a strong, authentic delivery, it just feels delightful, so we’re more likely to offer a yes. And even if you don’t, I’ve had this happen before. I’m on the receiving end, and I get something that hits all those boxes, like, “You know, my takeaway is, like, this is really cool, and I like you, but it’s not for me. But I am really pretty stoked to be able to start providing referrals in terms of, like, because I feel like I’m going to look good.”

It’s like, “You got to check out this. I think you’re going to love it.” It’s like, “It doesn’t work for me, but I think it’ll work for you, and Terri’s just the best.” And so, I think it’s beautiful that, even if you don’t get the immediate yes you were seeking, when you check those boxes to deliver a delightful experience, you’re developing goodwill and an asset of a stream of good things coming to you.

Terri Sjodin

I liked your use of delightful experiences. Let’s pivot on that for a moment. I thought you might find it interesting that when we were working with our survey respondents, and we asked them, of course, “What are the most common self-confessions?” but on the opposite side, we said, “Who better to judge business and sales professionals and other business and sales professionals? So, when somebody comes in to present to you and you’re the listener, is there anything you’ve observed that cost them the winner the deal or the opportunity?”

And the number one answer was none of the three that I just mentioned that were self-identified. The number one answer that people noticed in others is that their talks were boring, boring, boring. So, don’t you think it’s interesting that most people self-identify as overly-informative, but other people are boring? And so, we call that the third person effect because, even when we’re presenting, we don’t always see ourselves in the same lens that we see others.

And so, having that dual perspective of, “How do I see myself as a presenter? But also, what do I expect when I’m in the role of the listener?” That gives us a different way of constructing our message because we’ve looked at it from both perspectives, and that can be a winning combination.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s great, and I did want to talk about boring, boring, boring. Terri, tell us, what makes something boring? And how can we be not boring?

Terri Sjodin

So, all three elements can be tied up in a boring presentation. You can have a really flat boring case where you’re like, “Oh, I’ve heard this all before. There is nothing new here. I’m bored, bored, bored, bored.” It can also come from your creativity like, “Wow, you know, you made some really great arguments, but your stories, your illustrations, your evidence, boring, boring, boring. Old, flat, too much text on the screen. It just doesn’t work in the creativity standpoint.”

And then in delivery, it could be a flat, boring, monotone voice. It could be word redundancy. It could be the fact that you just don’t seem very enthusiastic about your own content. And then, even worse, one of the new things that’s come up is, if you’re in a hybrid environment, meaning you might have two or three people that are in front of you on a presentation, but maybe you have six or seven people that are offsite and they’re participating via Zoom or Teams, and so it’s hybrid.

And oftentimes, the presenter will forget the people that are online or offsite. They forget that they’re even there. So, they’re only presenting to the people that are in person in front of them, and so it’s super boring for the people that are offsite. So boring can be impacting all three elements of building your message.

Pete Mockaitis

I hear you. There’s a lot going on there. It could be a number of culprits to get after. Is it possible, Terri, that we can zoom in on a major offender in terms of, “This is a frequent and pervasive and intense cause of boredom that needs to be rectified”?

Terri Sjodin

The easy go-tos are when somebody uses way too many PowerPoint slides in their presentation and they’re text-driven, and they’re ultimately reading you their slides. That’s just horrifying, and it happens all the time. And when we ask people, “Why do you do that?” And they’ll say, “Well, Terri, I have to get through the material.” And my question is, “What’s the point of getting through the material if nobody’s really listening to what the heck it is that you’re saying anyway?”

Or, they’ll say, “It’s not my fault. I have to read these slides because legal requires us to be compliant.” There are all kinds of lovely excuses for it, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t serve the listener. And our job, our responsibility as presenters is to always put ourselves in the seat of the listener, “Do I want to hear this? Do I think it was interesting?” all of those things.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s true, yeah. It’s funny, I recently had to read a legal disclaimer as part of a podcast ad, which doesn’t happen that often, but it was a financial service-y thing, it’s like, “Okay, this is required, so I get it.” And I think, I got a kick out of it, it even said, and you’ve probably heard this before, maybe on the radio or somewhere, in the talking points, it said, “Double speed recommended if possible.” I was like, “All right, at least you know, at least you know people don’t want to hear it.”

And I even flagged it, like, “Oh, we got a little legal disclaimer here.” And so, you’re right, I think those excuses are maybe technically true, but there is often a creative way around it, it’s like, “Oh, and we’ve got a legal disclosure. You’ll note that investment results can vary, and this is risky, and those sorts of things. Feel free to read it afterwards as well.” And there you go. You handled it in five seconds and onward to the fun stuff.

Terri Sjodin

And to your point, I know it really does come down to the individual presenter. It’s our responsibility And no one illustrates that better than the Southwest Airlines flight attendants that give you the safety announcements in their own authentic voice, or in some sort of clever and fun way, because they know that most people aren’t paying attention. But if they put a little creative spin on it, then, all of a sudden, people are like, “Oh, I wonder where they’re going to go with this.” And they can take even the most boring and mundane and make it lively and entertaining.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. Well, now in the zone of delivery, can you tell us what are some of the top verbal missteps people make? And how should we fix them?

Terri Sjodin

So, the surprising thing about verbal missteps was that it was an area that most people did not self-identify, but it was highly recognized in others. And the other frightening thing about that particular issue is that it is rarely something that another individual will communicate to you. So, for example, if you’re saying “um” or “like” or “you know” every other word, it will be highly irritating to the listener, but nobody will tell you.

Another issue that comes up is when somebody mispronounces a word, we just let them go. But in the back of their mind, they’re thinking, “That person has no idea how to correctly use that word,” and it undermines your credibility.

Or, if they use just too simple or basic of wording, again, that’s not something that people will tell you. If you swear in a presentation, you might think, “Oh, well, I’m just being, you know, familiar. Like, it’s cool if I swear. It’s not a big deal. They could see that I’m really down to earth.” But we found in the research that people find it off-putting, and they’re just not going to tell you.

So, all of these little things, or if you’re a close talker, and you’re just talking, it reminds, brings memories back of a Seinfeld episode where people are speaking, and you’re like, “You’re impacting my spatial relationships.” All of these things, kind of fall under that category of verbal missteps. If you’re speaking too quickly, you’re speaking too slowly, the list kind of goes on and on.

But, again, if you think about it, when was the last time somebody really spent an hour thinking about the way that they speak, the way that they articulate a word, to focus on vocabulary variance, to think about pausing instead of using a filler word, all of those graceful, beautiful elements to take your presentation to another level? You can still be in your own authentic voice. We’re just dialing it in so that your own authentic voice lands with the greatest amount of efficiency and effectiveness.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Terri, that’s so much fun. So, it’s perfect because, you’re right, you’re not going to learn about those without asking. And even if you ask, you still might not get it. Like, you’ll need to videotape it and have like a trusted person really review that with you in order to get it, and you won’t know. And it’s so funny the assumptions that we just make, which is, “Of course, people like the swearing.”

And maybe some people do but, I mean, it sounds like, generally, we’re better off not doing that. Maybe that didn’t need to be said but we’re, generally, better off not doing that. And maybe, I don’t know if you know, if our counterpart is swearing, are we well suited to match them, or are we still better off not swearing?

Terri Sjodin

Yeah, it’s better to not. It’s, when in doubt, leave it out. The other issue is… kind of bleeds into strange body language and gesturing where you might have your hands in your pockets, or you’re fiddling with a pen. There are all kinds of little weird, strange, and incredible things. So, the takeaway here is people say, “What can I do?” You have a couple of choices.

So, one is just do a scrimmage. If you have a big meeting coming up, you have a presentation opportunity, sit with a friend, a colleague, a spouse, somebody in your industry, and say, “Look, will you just kind of do a run-through with me, and take out your cell phone, and just hit the video button, and leave it on a stand.” And then later on, kind of talk it through, and then watch the playback so that you can see and hear yourself as the listener will. And that will give you some of the insights that you need to be able to course-correct.

Now, try not to be too hard on yourself. We all flip out when we hear our own voice. We don’t sound the same to ourselves as we do in a recorded scenario. Just to give you an example, did you feel comfortable the first time you heard your playback on your outgoing voicemail message or recording? You probably are fine because you have such a beautiful voice, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m honored, but I’m not. Well, part of it is microphones. Don’t get me started because I won’t stop. But part of it is microphone quality and voicemails are horrific, and I don’t know how to fix it. I’ve Googled this before, Terri. But then even beyond that, it’s just sort of surprising. It’s like, “Oh, is that what I sound like?”

Terri Sjodin

Right. Or, “Oh, I didn’t like the way that I sounded.” And most people re-record their outgoing voicemail message over and over and over again until they feel like they get it right. And what does that tell us? It tells us, once we become aware of the way that we speak and present, what do we want to do? We want to perfect it. We want to improve upon it. We want to make it better, and we don’t want someone to have a negative impression of who we are, even based on our outgoing voicemail message, so much so that many people don’t even have an outgoing message on their voicemail.

But we know that when people hear your voice, when they hear you speak, that they connect with you, and so avoidance is not helping. What will help is to embrace it, lean into it, let’s fix it, let’s have fun with it, figure out how to make your own style and personality and authenticity really come to life. And remember that it doesn’t have to be perfect to work.

I’m not perfect. I’ve made all mistakes. I make mistakes all the time, but I’m consistently trying. That’s all. I’m trying to level up. I’m trying to make it better. And in the course of that, look, we’re all going to have wins and losses, and it doesn’t have to be perfect to work, but you do have to try. That’s really the takeaway.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. I want to get your take on visual aids. You say one mistake is just way too much text and reading it, bad news. Any other top do’s and don’ts there?

Terri Sjodin

I’ll give you some do’s. One of the things that really works beautifully is if we just step away from your PowerPoint deck. So, think of all of the other beautiful ways that you can augment a presentation that don’t require a PowerPoint. Maybe you just use the actual physical item and hold it up, or maybe you use other sensory modalities: sound, sight, smell, that feeling, a texture of something. Things where you’re asking yourself, “Well, how can I allow the listener to engage in my presentation with other sensory modalities that don’t require a PowerPoint slide?”

And that, in and of itself, will set you head and shoulders above your competition. They’ll say, “Well, that was clever,” and you’re like, “Really? Because I moved away from a PowerPoint slide, and I used the real thing?” But it’s just those nuances make a difference and show people you care enough to make a unique kind of presentation rather than doing the same old, same old.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s super. And when it comes to really forming a connection with listeners, any top tips there?

Terri Sjodin

I think it starts with really genuinely caring about the outcome of that conversation. Even when you and I were having our pre-call before we jumped on the interview, I just like to take a couple of minutes and say, “Hey, what would make this a great experience for you? What would make it great for your listeners?” And you said, “Well, that’s a great question. Most people don’t ask me that.”

I think it’s just showing people that you show up caring, and that really helps to build connection from the get-go. Now, different people will lean into different aspects of your talk. Some people will lean into the evidence. They want to know that you can provide ROI, and they want to see the numbers. Other people are looking at your pathos, your heart, your storytelling. Others will want to know that you have the credibility, the street cred, the experience, that you’ve got your degree, or that you’ve got 30 years of experience.

So, there are a lot of nuances that speak to credibility or driving connection, and it really will depend on who you’re speaking to. But I think, from a nice general perspective, opening with a real clear intention to make a connection, not just for the sake of doing it to get the job done, but because you want to have a good personal experience with those people, that will come through, I think. And I don’t know that you have to try so hard. It doesn’t have to be that hard. I think we probably overcomplicate that part of the process.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

I appreciate the time today. And I say this to people all the time, people ask me, “Gosh, Terri, what’s the hardest product or service to sell?” And the answer is, “The one you don’t believe in.” So, I can give you the greatest tips in the world for crafting a persuasive and compelling message but the first requirement is that you sell and represent something that you believe in at your core. And then after that, try to have fun with it.

I think, on some level, everybody wants to improve their presentations, and so I hope that this book, Presentation Ready, will help you to do that just a little easier. And if you’d like, maybe books aren’t your thing, that’s okay, you can watch the course. I have a course on LinkedIn Learning, so it’s free if you’re a LinkedIn Premium member, and that also covers the 12 mistakes. But my intention is to just get people to think about the gift of using your voice to make things happen.

There’s a beautiful quote that we often think that it’s comfort and luxury that are the chief requirements for happiness in life, when all we truly need to be happy is something to be enthusiastic about. And I’m hoping that I help people get just a little bit more enthusiastic about their next presentation opportunity, because the more fun you have delivering it, the more fun the listeners have receiving it, and that’s how you create a win-win, presentation-ready opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, now could you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Terri Sjodin

Well, of course, the State of Sales Presentations Research Study I did in cooperation with my alma mater, San Diego State University, and if you would like, your listeners can access all three of the reports, the pre-pandemic, mid-virtual, and then the post-pandemic study, if they go to my site at TerriSjodin.com, they can download the studies for free. There’s no cost. They can get the research study reports.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. And a favorite book?

Terri Sjodin

My go-to would be Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I’m an entrepreneur at heart, and so I really believe in the gift of entrepreneurial freedom and being able to contribute. I think we all have our own unique ways that we want to contribute on the planet. And so, I honor everyone’s right to use their voice, create, and to monetize that.

Pete Mockaitis

Alrighty. And a favorite habit?

Terri Sjodin

So I have this weird thing that I do. My friends tease me about it all the time. But when I have a dinner party or a lunch gathering, and everyone sits down, I say, “Okay, everyone, let’s do two-minute updates.” And I go around the table, and I ask everyone to give a two-minute update of what they’re doing personally and professionally so that everyone only has to share that nugget once with all of the people that are at the table, and then it stimulates really lovely dialogue. It gets people talking about things that are near and dear to our hearts, which is what’s going on with my friends and family.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks that they quote back to you often?

Terri Sjodin

There are so many little isms, I suppose, that I say, but I say, “It doesn’t have to be perfect to work but you still have to try.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And if folks want a little more to get in touch, where would you point them?

Terri Sjodin

If people would like to learn more about my speaking opportunities or about Presentation Ready, please visit our website at SjodinCommunications.com, or the easiest way is to just go to T-E-R-R-I, Sjodin, and that’s spelled S-J-O-D-I-N.com, and you can access all kinds of information, including the research study, information about Presentation Ready, and much, much more.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

There’s a beautiful adaptation to a Shakespearean quotation, which reads, “All the world is a stage, and business and sales professionals play to the most discriminating audiences of all, their clients and prospects.” So, I encourage you to just take a little extra time to craft an engaging and persuasive message, and go make your dreams happen. That’s, really, it’s all up to you. I don’t know anybody who has a magic wand, so we have to kind of put our boots to the street, craft our messages, and go make it happen.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Thank you, Terri. This is fun. I wish you all the best.

Terri Sjodin

Thank you, Pete, for having me. I appreciate your time.

Jun 10
0

969: How to Make Better Decisions by Wisely Evaluating Claims with Alex Edmans

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Alex Edmans shows you how to think smarter, sharper, and more critically so you can make better decisions.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How our biases are holding us back 
  2. The ladder of misinference that mucks up our thinking 
  3. Why we end up mistaking statements for facts 

About Alex

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. Alex has a PhD from MIT as a Fulbright Scholar, and was previously a tenured professor at Wharton and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and given TED/TEDx talks with a combined 2.8 million views. He was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021.

Resources Mentioned

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Alex Edmans Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Alex, welcome.

Alex Edmans

Thanks, Pete, for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m so excited to dig into your book, fantastic title, May Contain Lies. Could you please open us up, perhaps, with a wild tale about a story, a study, or a statistic that exploited our biases and the mayhem that erupted from that?

Alex Edmans

Certainly. So, one example is the link between breastfeeding and child development. So, everybody tells you that breast is best. They even give the impression that you are not a good mother if you’re not breastfeeding your kids, if you’re taking the easy option of using the bottle. And so, this is based on some evidence which is cast iron, pretty clear that breastfed kids do better than bottle-fed kids across a range of outcomes. This might be physical development, it might be child IQ, it might even be a maternal-kid bonding.

However, the concern here is that whether you breastfeed or not is not random. It’s driven by other factors. So maybe mothers with a more supportive home environment, they are able to breastfeed because breastfeeding is tough, and it could be their supportive home environment is what’s causing the improvement in child IQ or child health.

So, when you control for that, when you strip out the effect on IQ, of parental background, you actually find no effect of breastfeeding on child development. And so, this is striking. Why? Because everybody tells you that breastfeeding is pretty much the only way to go, but once you have a more careful look at the data, you rule out alternative explanations, you find that the evidence there is much weaker.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, Alex, so right from the get-go, busting myths. Okay. I was fed with a bottle, and I turned out pretty well, I think, and so I’m intrigued. Some studies, it seems, take the care to carefully explore potentially confounding variables and rule them out, and zero in on what’s really driving the variation, or the impact, and others don’t. And most of us are not, in fact, digging into the details of every scientific study that’s referenced in a news article. So, I guess if we don’t get into that level of depth, we may very well find ourselves with some misinformed views of the world.

Alex Edmans

That’s correct. And sometimes we don’t want to get into that level of depth. Why? Because if we see a study whose conclusions we like, then we accept it uncritically and don’t even bother to ask whether there’s alternative explanations. So, it’s a bit like if you are a police officer and you think that a person is guilty, then you might interpret every piece of evidence as being consistent with his or her guilt, even if it’s also consistent with some other suspects going on.

So, this is something known as confirmation bias. We have a view of the world and we will latch on to anything that supports that view of the world, even if the evidence is actually pretty weak. And so, what might this be in the breastfeeding study? We believe that something natural is better than something artificial, that’s why natural flavorings are better than artificial flavorings, and that’s why the idea that breastfeeding is better than bottle-feeding, it just sounds good. It seems to accord with our view of the world, and so we don’t think, “Is this a correlation but no causation?”

Pete Mockaitis

Like, “Processed food is bad. It’s, oh, so beautiful to see a picture of a mother and baby in that intimate moment.” So, there are a number of things that point us in one direction, so we’ve got the confirmation bias in action. We’re going to dig into some real detail about cognitive biases. I’d love it if, first, you could share anything that really surprised you as you were putting this together. Like, you’re pretty well-versed in this stuff, did you make any new discoveries that made you go, “Whoa”?

Alex Edmans

Well, I think that one thing that surprised me is how much I fell for this myself, because my day job is as a finance professor to think carefully about data and evidence. And then when I went to parenting courses myself, before my son was born, I believed all of this. It wasn’t until I looked into the data much more carefully that I found it was something quite different, but despite me being somebody who should do this for a living, I fell for that.

There are also other cases where I described in the book of things that I taught to my students without, again, looking deeply at the data. So, one thing is Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule, which people argue claims that you can be an expert in anything if you just put in the hours. And that’s something professors like to give that message because we like to say, “Yes, you might not like finance but if you just, yeah, put a lot of effort in, you can really change the direction of your life,” and again without looking at the evidence really closely, which is what I did for this book. I was duped into this myself.

And in my defense, it’s not just me. What the evidence tends to suggest is that more intelligent people, or more sophisticated people, will fall for misinformation more. Well, that’s surprising. You might think, “Well, isn’t it the case that the smarter you are, the more you’re likely to defend against misinformation?” But the answer is no, because the smarter you are, you deploy your intelligence selectively.

So, if there’s a study you don’t like the findings of, you’re able to come up with reasons to dismiss it, to knock it down, but then when there’s a study whose findings you like, you selectively choose not to use your discernment and to accept it. So, given you use your intelligence selectively and in a one-sided manner, this might actually lead to you becoming more misinformed rather than less.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s intriguing, and it makes sense when you put it in that context there. So, I’m curious, what’s the big idea then behind this book? And how is it helpful and relevant for professionals looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Alex Edmans

Well, the big idea is that the solution to misinformation is to look within you. So, we often think misinformation is somebody else’s problem, that the government should prosecute people for producing misinformation. But that’s a problem for a couple of reasons. So, number one is that misinformation is produced far faster than the government can regulate, and, number two is that many forms of misinformation are subtle.

So, they are not the case of somebody flagrantly lying or coming up with a deepfake. So, the statement that breastfed kids have higher IQ than bottle-fed kids, that is a correct statement. You can’t be prosecuted for making that statement, but the implication that this means that breastfeeding caused the high IQ, that’s where the problem is. And so, given that often statements aren’t incorrect, they can’t be prosecuted, the costs of misinformation might be ourselves making incorrect inferences from correct facts.

So, what I’m doing in the book is to highlight our own biases that lead us to make incorrect interpretations, and then come up with a simple set of questions we can ask ourselves to make sure that we’re not being misinformed.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Do you have any cool stories about a professional up-leveling their game in this domain and making superior decisions with superior outcomes as a result?

Alex Edmans

Well, unfortunately, you don’t hear the cases in which situations were avoided. You hear about situations where bad decisions are made because those are the things that make the news. So, if somebody did something which avoided a disaster, that’s not going to make the news because if there’s no disaster, there’s nothing newsworthy. But you do know of cases in which people did not heed this and there were disasters.

So, one big disaster was Deepwater Horizon. So, that was a case in which the oil rig; they ran some tests to see whether it was safe to remove the rig. All these tests failed, but because the people were so smart, they came up with an excuse. They were able to fabricate a reason for why the tests failed. They called this the bladder effect. And because of this bladder effect, they gave themselves an excuse to run a quite different test. That different test passed, and so they thought the well was safe, and this led to the disaster.

Now, in the inquiry afterwards, the government found that this bladder effect was completely made up, that it was a fiction, but it was because the engineers were so desperate to finish this job, and because they had a strong bias, because Deepwater Horizon was the best performing rig, then they went ahead and made up this reason, and then they thought the well was safe.

So, there’s certainly cases in which we have these disasters which are a result of these biases. The cases in which acknowledging the biases led you to not make mistakes, they’re much harder to come by. Why? Because if a mistake was not made, then this is not something as newsworthy.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, fair enough. That’s so meta, really, Alex, in terms of even there’s a selection bias at work in terms of the cases we hear about on bias.

Alex Edmans

Unfortunately, yes, because what makes the news, what do we hear about? We hear about when things go wrong. So, if, indeed, correct application, correct inference leads to things going right, we would not be hearing about that because of the selection.

Pete Mockaitis

Sure thing. Well, I mean, there’s a huge career benefit in an extra dose of disaster avoidance, both for the poor creatures of the ocean and our own careers and colleagues and customers and products, etc. So, break it down for us, you mentioned we got two big old biases that are largely to blame for us getting snookered, fooled by misinformation. Can you unpack these for us?

Alex Edmans

Certainly. So, one that I’ve alluded to is confirmation bias. So that applies when we have a pre-existing view of the world, and then we interpret evidence as always supporting that view. And notice here that this pre-existing view need not be deeply ideological. So, one might think, “Okay, maybe confirmation bias applies to things like gun control or abortion or immigration,” but it applied to something more subtle like breastfeeding.

And even though I don’t have a particular ideology about breastfeeding, something as subtle as me thinking that something natural is better than something man-made that led me to fall for that trap. So, that’s confirmation bias and that kicks in when we have a pre-existing view of the world, even a subtle one.

But what happens when we don’t have a pre-existing view of the world, if we think we’re open-minded? So that’s when a second bias comes in, and this bias is called black-and-white thinking. So, what is that bias? So even if we have no preconceived view, if we view the world in black and white terms, we think something could be either always good or always bad, then we will be swayed by misinformation which is extreme.

So, let’s give a practical example. So, the Atkins Diet was about carbs. Now, that’s something where people don’t really have strong views. So, protein, people think protein is good. You learn that protein repairs muscles, that’s why you’ve got all these protein supplements that you can want to buy. Fat, we think it’s bad, it’s called fat because it makes you fat. But carbs, they’re not so clear-cut, so many people might not have had strong opinions on carbs until the Atkins Diet, which demonized carbs. It said try to have as few carbs as possible.

That played into black-and-white thinking. There were no shades of gray there, and that made the diet really easy to follow. Well, you didn’t need to count your calories and figure out are carbs within 30 to 40 percent. You just looked at the carbs label on nutritional information and if it was high, you avoided it. But notice, if Atkins had had the opposite diet, saying try to eat as many carbs as possible, he might have also gone viral because that suggests, also plays into black-and-white thinking, it’s easy to implement.

So, what this means is that to be famous, to have an impact, you don’t necessarily need to be right. You need to be extreme, and, indeed what we typically see here are lots of extreme statements, “No bottle feeding at all. Exclusive breastfeeding,” “Don’t eat any carbs. Maybe eat as many superfoods as possible.” These things leave no potential for nuance but they become successful because of this black-and-white idea.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Alex, that is well said. You don’t need to be right. You need to be extreme, and that’ll do it.

Alex Edmans

Yeah, and if you could put it in 280 characters then that’s something which will be really easily shared, and people want to share things which sound simple. And why people share misinformation is they’re not bad people. They want to share useful practical tips. And so, if the tip is, “Just avoid X or eat as much as Y,” that’s something that people share because they think it’s useful information that people can implement. It’s much easier than saying, “Make sure that X is between 30 and 35 percent of your daily calories.”

Pete Mockaitis

While we’re talking about biases, I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to overconfidence. It seems like that can just sort of make everything a little bit worse. People are fooled, and then they seem quite certain about their point of view being correct, or true, or “This is the way. This is the only way.” Any thoughts on overconfidence?

Alex Edmans

Absolutely. I think it’s tied to my early comment about how more sophisticated people, or more intelligent people, suffer more from misinformation. Why? Because their biases are stronger, and potentially overconfidence plays into this. How can it play into this? Is that overconfidence can make the confirmation bias stronger? How?

So, one of my fields is sustainable finance. That’s the idea of companies that do good for the world, perform better in the long term. And I might think, “Well, why did I go into this field? I could have looked at many, many areas of finance.” The reason that I’ve chosen to go into sustainable finance is the evidence on this must be really rock solid. There must be rock solid proof that sustainability improves performance.

And so, if, indeed, there’s a new study which comes out, saying, “Well, actually, the evidence for sustainable investing or ESG is less strong than people believe,” I might be even more stringent in rejecting that. Why? Because I know that my field is sustainable investing, and the fact that I’ve chosen to be in this field means that I know more than anybody else, and it must mean that I chose to be in this field because the evidence is strong, and so that’s why I might choose to ignore people on the other side.

Pete Mockaitis

Yes, understood. Okay. Well, you’ve got a really cool tool, your ladder of mis-inference, and a few steps along that ladder. Could you walk us through these and give us some examples?

Alex Edmans

Absolutely. So, why did I come up with this ladder of mis-inference to begin with? It’s to provide a practical solution to the reader to try to figure out how to be awesome at their job by spotting misinformation. Now, you might think spotting misinformation is hard because, “There’s like thousands and thousands of types of misinformation out there, how can I remember all of them and put them into practice?”

So, I wanted to categorize them into just four. And so, I illustrate this into what I call the ladder of mis-inference. Why do I use the ladder as the graphic? It’s that when we start from some facts and then we draw some conclusions, it’s like we’re climbing up the ladder. And why I call it the ladder of mis-inference is that we actually make missteps up the ladder. We are drawing conclusions that are not valid.

So, the first misstep is a statement is not fact, it may not be accurate. So let me unpack that, and, again, with an example as you suggested. So, one big piece of evidence which supported the over-prescription of opioids in the US, which led to the opioid epidemic, was an article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics.” That has been cited over 1,650 times.

Now, that is a statement and there’s no misinformation there. The article was truly called “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics.” It was truly in the New England Journal of Medicine. But if you click on the article, you find it’s just a letter to the editor. So, there was no study behind it, there was no science, just somebody wrote in to the editor, and so people just cited this article without reading it, without seeing the context, which was this was a letter to the editor rather than a scientific study. And this was seen to be one of the reasons why opioids were so readily prescribed, obviously with then fatal consequences.

And even if you think the letter was completely accurate, and it wasn’t made up, the letter considered patients in hospital. And maybe if you’re in hospital, you won’t get addicted because you’re given narcotics on a prescribed basis. That’s quite different from giving it to an outpatient who might take it whenever he or she wants to. So, again, a statement could be not flawed, it could be not made up, but it’s still inaccurate if you don’t see the context. This was a letter, not a study, it only looked at hospitalized patients.

So, you might think, “Well, the solution is just to check the facts. Let’s go to the original source, read the full context, and that’s enough.” But that’s not enough because of the second step up the ladder. This is the idea that a fact is not data, it may not be representative. So, again, let me give an example. So, one of the most famous TED Talks of all time led to a book called Start with Why by Simon Sinek. This argues that if you have a why, a passion, a purpose, you’ll be successful. Again, those are things that we want to be true. We believe in the power of passion.

And he gives the examples of Apple, clearly successful, that’s a fact. Wikipedia, clearly successful, this is the world’s founding for knowledge. The Wright Brothers, clearly successful, they got the record for the first test-powered flight. But those are just cherry-picked examples. There could be hundreds of other companies that started with a “why” and then they failed, but Simon Sinek will never tell you about them because they don’t support his theory.

So, even if the facts are correct, they might only be a small part of the picture. They’re not giving you the full picture and, therefore, they’re misleading. They’re not data.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing.

Alex Edmans

So, you might think the solution is to get the full picture. It’s not data, it may not be representative.

Pete Mockaitis

So, when you say a fact is not data, I mean, I suppose, not to mince words here, a fact could technically be data, but it’s incomplete, non-representative data. So, I guess an isolated fact is not the whole relevant universe dataset. That’s not as pithy though, Alex.

Alex Edmans

Correct, yeah. No, but you’re absolutely right. You could say it, technically, counts as data, but it’s selected data, so what you want is a full representative sample, a representative data sample, rather than just something cherry-picked and selected.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Alex, is starting with “why” not a good move? Is that not a research-backed approach to success?

Alex Edmans

It doesn’t seem to be research-backed. So, there were a couple of companies which have been successful, but actually Apple never even started with “why.” So, if you look at Simon Sinek’s book, it says Apple had this “why” which was “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo” but Apple never said that. And, again, this is something that I wanted to look at in the research for my book, as I thought that was a fact but it was never said, it was never in any of Apple’s documentation.

And also, Simon Sinek says, ‘Well, people don’t buy what Apple does. They buy why they do it. They buy the iPhone because they believe in Apple’s wanting to change the status quo.” Really? Don’t we buy Apple because of its functionality, its apps, its usability, the fact that it’s got great after-sales service? Do people really think about the higher purpose of Apple when they buy the products? No. What they will go for is how useful it is. But the idea that a “why” is what leads to success, that’s empowering. Why? Because anybody can come up with a “why.” If you have enough brainstorming sessions or market bends or flip charts, that is a nicer message to give than you need to produce an awesome product.

Not everybody can produce an awesome product or be really innovative, and so that’s why that book and that message has been so successful is it’s empowering. It tells us that the secret to success is in our own hands, and it’s something easy to do rather than something much more difficult, hard work in designing a really good product with great functionality.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s intriguing. And then as we’re thinking critically about these assertions, it seems like a lot of times the conclusions are more nuanced. Like, “Having a clear ‘why’ can result in increased motivation that boosts results. However, having a great ‘why’ is by no means a proven success principle that we can hang our hat on, as this will undoubtedly massively increase our odds of victory.”

Alex Edmans

You’re absolutely right, Pete. So, what causes success? There’s lots and lots of factors which contribute to the success of a person, a company, and there’s also luck which comes into it. But a book is never going to lay out all the different things that a company or a person needs to do to become successful. Books, typically, have one idea. And I know this through having tried to publish books, is that whenever you have a pitch, they say, “What is the big idea? Not the 10 ideas, what is the one idea in the book?”

And so, this is why a lot of books try to highlight this one thing which is the secret to success. So, this could be starting with “why” or it could be grit, to take Angela Duckworth’s book, or it could be ten thousand hours to take Malcolm Gladwell, so they focus on one particular thing, and say that’s the one thing that drives success, when it might not drive success. There might be lots of other factors which are driving success. And even if your one factor works, it might not work in every circumstance. It might work when combined with a lot of other stuff.

So, maybe a “why” does matter, and indeed some of my work is on the benefit of purpose, but it also needs to be combined with flawless execution, also discipline, and knowing what “why projects” to turn down, no matter how purposeful they are, maybe they’re pie in the sky, but those messages are much more nuanced. Instead, the simple black-and-white message, which plays into black-and-white thinking, that why will always lead to success in every situation, that’s something which sells, and this is why a lot of books with that message have been very successful.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, we got a statement is not a fact, a fact is not data or the whole dataset. And next, we got data is not evidence.

Alex Edmans

Correct. And so, when you get the whole dataset, so you might think, “Ah, this is the solution. Let’s get the whole dataset. Companies that started with ‘why’ and failed, and companies that succeeded even though they didn’t start with ‘why,’ and we have the whole dataset, can we not then just claim a conclusion from that?” And, the answer is not, but why? Because of the third misstep, because data is not evidence, it may not be conclusive.

So, what do I mean by evidence? Because people use the terms data and evidence interchangeably, but the word evidence, let’s think about a criminal trial, that’s where we often hear that word. And evidence is only evidence if it points to one particular suspect. So, if the evidence suggests that Tom or Dick or Harry could have killed Emma, that is not evidence because it’s with multiple suspects. And the problem with lots of datasets is, even though they look at the full picture, they could point to multiple conclusions.

So, if I go back full circle to the breastfeeding example at the start, “Breastfed kids have better outcomes than bottle-fed kids,” is it breastfeeding causes the higher IQ, or is it parental background leads to some parents to breastfeed, and that parental background also leads to the higher IQ, so that could be a correlation without causation? And, yeah, everybody knows, in the cold light of day, that correlation is not causation, but often we forget this if we like the story being paraded. Due to our confirmation bias, we switch off our discernment and just don’t ask that question if we like the conclusion.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. So, data is not evidence. In the incidence of a crime, we might have data in terms of “The window was shattered.” It’s like, “Okay.” “The window was shattered with a hammer.” “Okay, so that’s some information that we know, yep, that window was shattered with a hammer.” But it’s not evidence because any number of people could have done that window-shattering with a hammer. So, these are just kind of facts that we’ve collected as opposed to things that are really strongly pointing in a particular direction.

Alex Edmans

That’s entirely correct. But if you’re a police officer and you already have a particular suspect in mind, you might interpret all of these facts as consistent with your suspect, even if there were alternative suspects going on. So, then what’s the practical tip to the listener or the reader? Is, “How do we know that we have the correct interpretation of data and are not being blind to alternative explanations?” It’s to consider and assume the data has the opposite result.

So, let’s assume that the data have the result that we don’t like. So, let’s say the data found that breastfed kids perform worse. Now, that goes against our biases because we think that something natural should have a good outcome. So, then we would try to appeal to alternative explanations, or alternative suspects. We might say, “Well, maybe the women who can afford formula are wealthier. They can afford to buy it, and maybe it’s their wealth which leads to the better outcomes of bottle-fed kids.”

So, now that we’ve pointed to the fact that there’s an alternative suspect, which is parental wealth, we have to ask ourselves, “Does that alternative suspect still apply even though the result is in our direction?” And the answer is, yes, it could well be that the parents who are wealthier are able to afford to breastfeed because it’s so exhausting, they might be able to afford home help as well, and maybe it is that income which is also behind the high IQ and other outcomes.

And so, what is the idea of imagine the opposite so powerful? It’s because it unlocks the discernment which is already naturally within us. So, when we hear about misinformation, we might think, “Oh, this is so difficult for me to tackle. I’m a time-pressed, busy person. I don’t have time to dig into the weeds of a study, and I don’t have a PhD in statistics.” But what I’m trying to highlight is we already have discernment.

Whenever I see a study posted on LinkedIn that people don’t like the findings of, there’s no shortage of reasons as to why this is correlation but not causation, why the dataset is not the full complete dataset. So, what the idea of imagine the opposite is, is to try to trigger and activate the same discernment when you find a study you do like and are just tempted to lap up.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. Okay. And then the fourth and final step, evidence is not proof. Lay it on us.

Alex Edmans

Yeah, absolutely. So, let’s say you found a perfect study which has perfect causation, that is evidence, but it’s not proof. So, what’s the difference? A proof is universal. So, when Archimedes proved that the area of a circle is pi times the square of the radius, that was not only true in the 3rd century BC in ancient Greece, it’s true in 2024 around the world. But evidence is only evidence in the setting in which it was gathered. So, if the evidence pointed to Tom killing Emma, and Tom was the husband, this doesn’t mean that in every case when a woman dies, it’s always the husband that did it. So, evidence has a particular setting.

So, I go to the 10,000 hours rule. Malcolm Gladwell claims that in any setting, from chess playing to neurosurgery, you need to put in 10,000 hours to be successful. But the evidence he cited was just on violin playing, and what leads to success in violin playing might be quite different to what leads to success in neurosurgery. Violin playing, this is a very predictable environment. You play the sheet music. You can practice that same sheet music 10,000 times.

Whereas, with neurosurgery, one surgery might be very different from another, there’s lots of other factors going on. So, what works in one setting might not work in others. But if you want to sell a bestselling book, you want to say that you’ve identified the secret to success in every situation. Had Malcolm Gladwell claimed the 10,000 hours rule for success in violin playing, he would have not had the same impact that he did.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right, much smaller audience, the violin. Yes, those who are ambitious violin virtuosos in training is a much smaller market size than the broader sales group of customers for that book.

Alex Edmans

Absolutely. So, we want to claim a theory of everything, a secret to success in all situations, and so the broader we make the claim, the more impact we’ll have, but often these claims are over-extrapolating from evidence gathered in one specific targeted setting.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so then, to recap, we got a statement is not a fact, a fact is not data, or the whole dataset, data is not evidence, and evidence is not proof. Well, Alex, it would seem to follow then we have not a lot of proof, not a lot of things are proven then, based on all the ways that this could fall apart. Is that fair to say?

Alex Edmans

That’s absolutely fair to say. And what this means is that while we think, well, this is really shocking because we don’t know anything, it actually means that we can live our lives in a more relaxed way, because often things are said to us as if they’re definitive proof, “You are a bad mother if you ever breastfeed your kid,” “If you want to lose weight, you should never eat any carbs,” “If you want to train for a marathon, you should never drink any alcohol.” Often the reality is much less black and white than these prescriptive statements say.

So, by be discerning with evidence, rather than this being exhausting, because we need to question everything, actually it’s less exhausting because if we question stuff, we realize that some of these dictums and rules we’re given are not as well-founded as people claim, and this allows us to live a freer and more relaxed life.

Pete Mockaitis

Now, Alex, I’m loving the way your mind is working and processing, and sometimes I go here in terms of, you know, being curious and skeptical and exploring, “Well, hey, could it be this or could it be that, and maybe it’s not fair to interpret this or that way?” Alex, do you find that when you do this in practice with teammates, colleagues, collaborators, they just get annoyed with you? Like, “Oh, my gosh, Alex, you’re slowing us down. You’re making this much harder and longer than it needs to be.” How do we deal with some of these interpersonal dynamics when we’re vigorously pursuing truth?

Alex Edmans

Yeah, thanks for the question, Pete. And I think people can sometimes get annoyed if you’re doing it in the wrong way. So, what do I mean by the wrong way? So, sometimes if you oppose an idea based on the evidence, they think you have different goal from them when, in fact, your approach might be different. So, let’s give an example.

So, some of my work is in diversity, equity and inclusion, and I would love the evidence to be overwhelming, that diversity pays off. I’m an ethnic minority myself but I point out that actually some of the research on this claiming that DEI improves financial performance is much flimsier than often claimed. So, people can get annoyed and say, “Oh, you must be racist or sexist if you’re anti-DEI.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow, that’s hardcore.

Alex Edmans

But what I’m claiming, well, that is pretty hardcore, and these are the reasons why sometimes, on these issues, where there’s strong confirmation bias, it is hard to speak out. But what I’m saying here is I absolutely am pro-DEI, but my concern is the evidence, and the evidence here on DEI might not be as strong. Why? Because all they look at is gender and ethnicity. So, they whittle down the complexity, the totality of a person, to just their gender and ethnicity.

That gives the impression that if you’re a white male, you can never add to diversity even if you’re the first in your family ever to go to university, even if your background is humanities rather than sciences, which is what everybody else is doing in your company. So, what I’m saying is that the problem with these diversity studies does not mean that diversity is not a bad thing, but if we are to put in a DEI policy, it needs to go beyond gender and ethnicity, and look at socio-economic diversity. It needs to look at diversity of thinking, also not just diversity but also equity and inclusion.

So, by trying to say, “Hey, I’m not going to try to debunk the whole DEI movement,” but to say that if we want to implement DEI, it has to be broader than these rather reductive measures analyzed by these studies, then that’s the way hopefully the message is more positive message rather than being seen to nitpick and to get in the way of people.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s helpful, Alex. You’re sort of sharing where you’re coming from, the context, your goals, and what’s going on there. And, well, while we’re here, a brief detour. Alex, my understanding of the DEI research is that in jobs that require creativity and kind of novel thinking and approaches, that the DEI research is pretty robust in terms of having diversity in these contexts, sure enough, does result in more better ideas and good outcomes. Since you know, and I don’t, is that an accurate snapshot of the state of the support of DEI research?

Alex Edmans

That is the claim, but even that claim is not particularly backed up by data. So, let’s take one famous datapoint or one famous study. This is the TED Talk which initially was called “Want to be more innovative? Hire more women.” So, what this argued is that in an innovative setting, the more women we have, the better the performance is.

But why was the evidence incorrect? Well, number one, the measure of diversity looked at six different measures of diversity, not just gender diversity, but age diversity, lots of other forms of diversity. So, even if the results were correct, it could have been any of those diversity metrics, but they just honed in on the gender diversity because that’s the one which gets a lot of popular support.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s a good title, Alex.

Alex Edmans

Well, it was, and it was actually a good title but a misleading title. So, there were so many complaints to TED about that title that they were forced to change the title. So, the title of that talk is now “How diversity makes teams more innovative.” Now, but even that title isn’t accurate because how did they measure innovation? What they looked at was the percentage of revenues which were generated by products which were invented in the last three years. And so, that’s not necessarily a measure of innovation. That could be just a measure of obsolescence of your prior products, so maybe you’re just doing a bad job of maintaining your prior products.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, your old products sucked.

Alex Edmans

It might be, yeah, they all just suck. You’re just not able to maintain them, and it could be that the new products that you’re developing in the last three years, they’re just incremental changes over what you had previously. There’s nothing there which captures the magnitude of innovation. And, also, number three, it could be correlation but not causation. It could be that a great CEO, both hire as more diverse workers, and that same great CEO is also more innovative, so it’s not necessary that diversity causes innovation, something else causes both.

So, those are really basic errors. You measure diversity incorrectly, you measure innovation incorrectly, and also there could be no clear link between the two, but because that’s a nice message that people want to hear, this is something which has been well paraded. So, again, if I go back to, “How do I then approach this?”

Well, my goal is shared as the same as everybody else, I want high functioning organizations, and I’m a supporter of diversity. So, the reason why I’m raising objections is not I’m anti-DEI, but my approach to this is to look beyond just gender and ethnicity, and look at these other forms of diversity. And when you look at more careful research, then you’re right, Pete, in innovative settings, then these broader measures of diversity, such as socio-economic and cognitive diversity, they do lead to better outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Alex, what you’re showing here is proof, and even evidence, is hard to come by. But, lay it on us, some of your favorite tactics and strategies for smarter thinking. I love that notion of that suspect. Let’s pretend the data came out the opposite way. What would we conclude? Or where would we be pointed to in terms of suspects? Well, now, how does that inform how it did come out? So that’s a lovely approach. Can you lay on us a few more tools like that?

Alex Edmans

Absolutely. And what I’m going to do to do this is to go beyond just analyzing specific studies because how we want to be smarter-thinking is you want to get just different information more generally not just from studies. So, in an organization, where will these different viewpoints come from? From our colleagues. But often, we have an environment in which people might be just unwilling to speak out. So, what can we do to actively encourage dissenting viewpoints?

So, there was a time when Alfred Sloan was running GM, and he concluded a meeting by saying, “Does everybody agree with this course of action?” And everybody nodded, and then Sloan said, “Well, then we’re going to postpone the decision until the next meeting to give you the opportunity to disagree with me.” So, he recognized that no decision, no course of action that he came up with was going to be 100% perfect. So, if there were no objections, it was not because his proposal was flawless, but simply because people didn’t have time to come up with objections.

And, more generally, what can we do within an organization to encourage dissent, to encourage people to speak up. Again, going back to diversity, people think a lot about just demographic diversity, but it’s not sufficient to bring in a mix of people. We need to make sure that they feel safe to speak up. And one example could be in a meeting where you propose a strategy, and most people agree, and then one person, let’s call him David, comes up, and says “Hey, I actually have some concerns with this strategy ABC.”

Now, despite David raising the concerns, you still go ahead. Then if the chair of the meeting at the end goes to David privately, and says “You know, I really appreciate you speaking up. Even though we ended up going with the strategy, we will take all of your concerns into account.” So why is that useful? Because in the absence of that, then David might have felt, just like the question you asked me earlier, Pete, “It’s costly for me to raise a dissenting opinion. People might have seen me as being annoying, and maybe the next time I have some concerns, I’m not going to speak up and say anything because it made no difference anyway, and I just annoyed a lot of people.”

But here, if the chair just takes five minutes to say, “No, we really value in this organization people who come up with dissenting opinions,” then maybe next time, the equivalent of the Deepwater Horizon disaster would have been avoided, because then somebody like David would have said, “Hey, we have failed this negative pressure test three times. We need to take seriously the possibility that this rig is unsafe to be removed.”

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Any other top strategies?

Alex Edmans

Yeah, so, in addition to this, one thing that you can do is try to assign a devil’s advocate in particular situations, which is somebody to critique a particular course of action. So, this happens in academia, my field. So, whenever a paper is presented at a conference, after the presentation, a discussant comes and comments on this. And the discussant is somebody who’s assigned to read the paper in advance and to come up with critiques, particular blind spots that the author might have.

And so, the analogy of this in a situation might be if there’s an investment management firm where some team is proposing a particular deal, is there’s somebody who might be assigned to poke holes and to scrutinize the deal and highlight all the things that can go wrong. Now, ideally, you might have a devil’s advocate emerging anyway, the culture might be such that people are willing to share their concerns, but if you’re not at that stage, if the culture is still developing, maybe just assigning somebody to find some flaws in this, this is a way of getting different viewpoints.

So, this is something that John F. Kennedy came up with when faced with the Cuban missile crisis. The immediate response to seeing these missiles being installed in Cuba was to bomb the missile sites and have a full-scale invasion, but he created this executive committee of the National Security Council, where he had two teams, one proposing the invasion, another proposing the blockade, and each team was critiquing each other’s proposed course of action so that he was able to see both sides of this difficult situation.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Alex Edmans

It’s just to highlight that this misinformation is really important. So, you might think, “Why do I need to listen to an academic who goes through life reading and scrutinizing academic papers?” In my job, I never read a single academic paper. But what I’m trying to highlight is that whenever we make decisions, they are based ultimately on research. So, if we choose to breastfeed or bottle-feed our child, we are doing this on the basis of research.

When we’re trying to invest in a sustainable way or implement particular DEI policies, those are ultimately based on research, and so it really matters whether we use the best research, and to discern whether the research is best, we don’t need to be a scientist. We don’t need to scrutinize every footnote in a paper. We just need to ask simple, common-sense questions.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, now could you see our favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alex Edmans

Yeah, so it’s from a Columbia finance professor, called Laurie Hodrick, where she was asked in the Financial Times, “What is your greatest lesson learned?” And she said, “You can do everything you want to and be everything you want to be, but not all at once.” So why do I like this? It’s that way because there’s loads of things that we want to do in our life, and lots of people just like to be spread really thinly and just do so many things that they just get burnt out. Instead, we have like different chapters to our career.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And could you share with us a favorite book?

Alex Edmans

Yeah, so The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey was something that I was given as a teenager. I didn’t read it because, as a teenager, I was busy doing other stuff. But then I read it about ten years later, and I wished that I had read it back then. There are some new books which are trying to play theme and variations on this. Books like Atomic Habits or Deep Work, and they’re not bad books, but I think the original authority on questions such as time management and discipline and focus were in the Stephen Covey book.

Pete Mockaitis

And do you have a favorite habit? Perhaps one of the seven or something homegrown?

Alex Edmans

Yeah, so it’s to try to just immerse myself without any distraction, to engage in deep work. So, there will be certain days where I will have zero meetings the whole day. So, that was yesterday, I had no meetings yesterday, no meetings all tomorrow, so that I can get really immersed in something. I’ll try to work without my phone near me. I’ll try to have my internet blocker on, which is not distracting me with email, so that when I am doing some writing, which I’m going to do tomorrow, I can do this and be in full flow.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Alex Edmans

I think it might be from my first book, which was on purposeful business, and actually the TEDx talk that that book was linked to, it’s to reach the land of profit, follow the road of purpose. And so, why is that sometimes a quoted phrase? It’s that often when people think about purpose, people claim it’s about being woke and saving the dolphins and saving the coral reefs, but a serious business person should not care about this.

I’m going to highlight that a purposeful business is not just one that is good for wider society, it’s good for the ultimate long-term success of the company as well. And so, this idea that there’s a business case for purpose, a commercial and financial case, not just a moral and ethical case, is something that resonates with people, particularly those who would otherwise be skeptical of purpose.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Alex Edmans

So, my website, AlexEdmans.com, where Edmans is E-D-M-A-N-S. I’m on social media, LinkedIn and X as @aemans. And my new book May Contain Lies, there is a website attached to that book, MayContainLies.com, where, if there were instances of misinformation that I learned about after I finished the book, I do simple blog posts on that.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Alex Edmans

I’ll say, just question stuff. So, if you want something to be true, just to apply this idea of imagine the opposite and think about how you would shoot this down, I think it’s just really important to try to be discerning and try to overcome our biases, these are so strong, these are things that I myself suffered from, and I think if we can overcome these biases, we will significantly improve our performance at our job.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Alex, thank you. This has been a lot of fun and I wish you much truth in your future.

Alex Edmans

Thanks so much, Pete. Really enjoyed the interview. Thank you so much for having me on.

Mar 07
0

942: How to Reach Better Team Decisions with Less Drama with Janice Fraser

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Janice Fraser reveals her secrets to team decision-making with less drama.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to get to the root of any argument
  2. How to know if your decision is good enough 
  3. Why a low consensus isn’t a bad thing 

About Janice

Janice Fraser has coached teams and delivered workshops to organizations around the world, including startups, governments, non-profits, mom-and-pop shops, venture firms, and top business schools.

She built a storied career as a Silicon Valley startup founder, product manager, and confidante for entrepreneurs and enterprise executives alike. Her hobbies include healing generational trauma, challenging the patriarchy, and icing migraines.

Janice and her co-author husband Jason split their time between San Francisco and Minneapolis, where they live with a derpy dog, a bitter cat, and a very tall college student.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Janice Fraser Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Janice, welcome.

Janice Fraser

Thank you so much for having me. I’m so glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, me too. I’m excited to be chatting about Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama. And I’d love it if you could kick us off with a tale of a time you were enmeshed in a whole lot of drama.

Janice Fraser

Oh, boy. Well, you know, honestly, life will throw drama at you no matter what. I mean, we’ve all just lived through a whole bunch of drama, whether it was the pandemic or, you know, what have you.

So, you know, I’ve been through, let’s say, 3 economic meltdowns in my professional life. So we had going way back, we had 2000 when the dot com bust. I live in San Francisco, so the dot com bust ruined everything. And then, you know, 2008 was another time of total, like, right? Everyone thought the sky was falling, and it was.

I was raising money for a startup company that year. And I’ll tell you, I had no idea how I was ever going to hold my head up again because let’s see.  Get heavy for a minute, in February, my father died.

And then in May, my brother died, same year. And then 3 months later, the economic meltdown happened. And here I have this team of people who have come to help me build this company, and there was not gonna be any money. And I had to lay them all off and close the company.

I handed back a check to one of my investors. It was a really hard time.  And, you know, I was just crushed, and I thought I would never recover. I thought that this is it. Like, my career’s over.

You know, I was, what, 30 something, 35, and my career felt like it was over. And you know what? You put one foot in front of the other. And, you know, you cry in your beer to your friends and you keep going. And I, as an independently employed person, right, as a startup founder, I got a couple consulting gigs, and I connected with some friends, and I made some phone calls, and I reached out.

And it took a lot of courage to stand up. And then I started another company. It was the best one I ever did. And I sold it to a bigger company. And, you know, careers were made and life was happy again.

But, you know, when I say, like, less drama, the world has so much complexity to it. I want us all to be able to be as effective as we possibly can be, not in a, like, hustle culture kind of, you gotta work yourself to the bone kind of way. But, like, I just think it should be easier to get more done because you never know what’s going to happen, and there’s enough drama coming from the outside we don’t have to make our own. So, the idea of Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama is about just letting the easy things be easy, helping us to move with flow so that we have more resilience when the unexpected comes down the pipeline.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, that sounds like some great outcomes we would all love to have. Can you tell us any particularly surprising means by which this is done?

Janice Fraser

So, I think that the surprise for a lot of people is how simple it all seems. I’m often taken, my attention is grabbed by methods that feel easy to use, easy to repeat, easy to adapt and pick up, but then they’re kind of under the surface, they’re hard to practice. It’s kind of like if you think about meditation. Well, what is meditation? So, we all do yoga or whatever, and you think, “I’m just going to sit and be quiet for a minute,” and that’s easy but meditation is actually hard because you’re doing it mindfully.

So, here’s an example, point A, point B. From the first job we have, we’re taught about goal-setting, “You have to set a goal. If you don’t set a goal, you’re not going to get where you want to go.”

I absolutely believe that, and we have lots of ways to do goal-setting but no one has ever mentioned or taught, at least not for me, that you have to start with understanding where you are right now, and no one has given me a framework or a tool for understanding, “Here’s where we are right now,” so that we can all reach that goal together. So, in business, you hear a lot of words like alignment, or buy-in, and “How do we get buy-in for something?” and all of that is about we want to get someplace together, so we want to reach that goal together.

But let’s say my team, half of my team is Denver, half of them is in Miami, and I need to get everybody to Albuquerque. Well, I live in San Francisco. If I give them driving directions from San Francisco to Albuquerque, my Denver and my Miami people aren’t going to get there. We’re not in the same place, so even though we know our goal, Albuquerque, we have to start by knowing where are we together, what is our starting place.

And so, I’ve developed and adapted some techniques for defining point A and getting alignment around point A, “Where are we starting from?” It goes like this. Situation, complication, then question, and answer. So, the situation, “We all need to get to Albuquerque.” Complication, “We’re in different cities starting out.” Question, “How do we get there?” Okay, now we can tell the answer.

So, situation, complication, question, answer, I did not develop that. That was developed by this wonderful woman in the ‘60s, her name is Barbara Minto. I think she’s an unsung hero. She was in the first graduating class of women coming out of the Harvard Business School, so she was in the first graduating class of women, and she went on to work at McKinsey Consulting, and really defined how they do strategy communications. And it’s called the Minto Pyramid Method.

So, situation, complication, “What is true right now? And what makes this moment complicated such that it’s a work to achieve our goal, our point B?” So, point-A-point-B thinking can help you have better meetings, it can help you with your project planning, it can help you manage your career, it has helped me be a better whatever, parent, partner, human.

So, point-A-point-B thinking, super, super simple and straightforward but you avoid so much drama if you just take a moment and say, “Are we all driving from Denver to Albuquerque?” “No, some of us are in Miami.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, we talked about driving from different locations to Albuquerque. Could you share with us how this situation, complication, key question, answer stuff can unfold in a real-life situation and be useful for folks?

Janice Fraser

Sure. Well, there’s an example that I like to use because it’s so relatable. I started a company with seven founders. This is going back 20 years. And we started that company at a time when our service offering was in great demand, it was a services company. We have more inbound interests than we could possibly handle. And I was the CEO and lead salesperson of this company, and I was just drowning.

Our close rates were really high, and others were involved in sales meetings here or there, but for the most part, I was kind of running the process. And I went to the partners and I was like, “I need to buy a printer,” $300, we were an all-virtual company, so they didn’t really see that I was drowning, but we’re all a virtual company. And I said, “I just need $300 to buy a printer. Are we all cool with that?”

And I’ll tell you, we argued for 10 minutes for six months why I want to buy a stupid $300-printer. It was excruciatingly painful.

Pete Mockaitis

Ten minutes for six months, like 10 minutes a meeting?

Janice Fraser

Ten minutes at our partner meeting every Tuesday because it was on the agenda. So, here I am like clawing my eyes out, like, “Ah, just let me buy a printer.” And, honestly, if I had to do it over, I would’ve just bought the printer.

Pete Mockaitis

And you’re the CEO with seven partners.

Janice Fraser

Yeah, but we were equal partners, and it was a CEO role and I didn’t get to wave my magic wand. Anyway, the problem there was that I had framed it up so the situation was I did not define the situation for my partners very well. I asked the wrong question, and I asked the wrong question because I hadn’t teed up, “What is the situation? What is the complication?”

The situation is lots of inbound interests. The complication is I was having trouble keeping it all straight, and juggling all of the big piece parts. The question that I should’ve asked is, that I should’ve brought to my partners is, “How can we support this level of sales without burnout forever? I have a suggestion. The suggestion is blah, blah, blah.” Suggestion is, “Other people should be participating.” Suggestion is, “I want a printer,” suggestion is whatever.

And so, the framing of the question led to the wrong debate. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis

So, framing the question, just like, “Just let me buy a printer.”

Janice Fraser

“Can I buy a printer?” Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Just like you want one.

Janice Fraser

“Janice wants a printer because she’s a prima donna.” Right. Like, whatever the story was that they were telling themselves in their head, rather than, “How can we make our sales operation more sustainable?” And probably there were two or three other things that could’ve been done to make it a more sustainable operation.

Pete Mockaitis

So, this is so fascinating to me. What sorts of objections does one hear to, “I want $300 to buy a printer”?

Janice Fraser

So we were a consultant company, so it was a low-margin business, and this is me, I’m with my business person’s hat analyzing why people were doing what they were doing, which is always easier in hindsight than in the moment. And, literally, like one person was highly motivated by wanting to be a paperless company, absolutely from a kind of philosophical standpoint, they were just simply opposed to printers, whatever.

Another person literally said the words, “One-seventh of that money is mine.” Yeah, right?

Pete Mockaitis

“You can have one-seventh of the printer when we’re done with it.”

Janice Fraser

“One-seventh of $300 is not going to make or break you.” But people are motivated by different things. Some people thought that we just shouldn’t need it, “We didn’t have an office because we were an all-virtual company, and we’re going to put a printer in one person’s office? That doesn’t make any sense.” Again, these were dumb things. Like, I said, none of these makes any sense in retrospect.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it is dumb, and yet I think it is richly instructive for us to dig into this in incredible detail, which might sound odd. But it’s like, in all of our organizations, there’s dumb stuff that’s going on.

Janice Fraser

Yes, and it’s so human. It’s just so human. Everyone’s point of view here was legitimate to them.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, thusly, if you’ll indulge me to go in tremendous detail about this printer discussion, I think it can be illustrative for us all. So, your opening was just, “Hey, I want a printer,” as opposed to sharing how that could be an enabler. If you could give us an example of that, “Hey, this will enable the sales and such”? Can you spell that pathway for how having that printer will enable the sales team to be more effective?

Janice Fraser

Sure. So, the sales team, remember, so this is, at this point, was an eight-person company. We had employee number one. So, it’s seven co-founders, so equal partners in a partnership, and one employee, and no professional salespeople, like I was the sales lead, and we had a couple of other partners of those seven were participating in sales operations based on me setting up meetings, inviting them to the meetings.

And so, we had all these inbound interests, and I was spending as much time on our losses as our wins. And you can imagine, I’ve got, let’s say, four to six customers at any one time running through the sales process, with four to six participants on the customer side. So, now you’re at 24 to 40 people, humans, that I’m keeping track of in my mind, that I’m interacting with.

Now, I’ve got 40 people living in my head, as many as, living in my head all the time on a rotating revolving door basis. How do we keep that straight? And so, for me, what I wanted was to have kind of a stack of folders, physical folders, where my most important, most recent notes were on top. And so, for me, I would, like, be on a sales call, and I would type, type, type, type, type. At the time, I was doing this myself.

And I would summarize that stuff, and I would want to print that out so that the most relevant information was always at the ready so that if I needed it, I could context-switch simply through physical manipulation of stacks of paper.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood.

Janice Fraser

So, that’s what I wanted.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you just got to print notes, “So, I could stick them in folders and move them around. That’s what I want.”

Janice Fraser

Like, I just needed a way to keep my brain straight. I was, like, my brain was coming out of my ears.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right. Okay. But you didn’t offer that kind of context or path. It was just sort of like, “Hey, I want a printer. Can I just get a printer?”

Janice Fraser

Yeah, I didn’t.

Pete Mockaitis

And you probably didn’t think it was going to be that hard, “I need a printer. Can we just do that? Okay. Oh, we can’t. Oh, really? Oh.”

Janice Fraser

Exactly. I thought it was a trivial ask.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you had to bring the big guns in terms of laying out the pathway. So, then did you ever get that printer, Janice?

Janice Fraser

I did. I did eventually get the printer. And like I said, if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have asked permission. I’d just go buy the printer.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, totally, “The receipt is in the reimbursements. Are we going to fight about it now? Well, I got the printer.”

Janice Fraser

Yup, live and learn. Live and learn. Live and learn.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Lovely. Well, I think that is instructive in terms of if we frame up the situation, complication, key question, and answer in a way that is resonant for the different stakeholders and the different things that they value and care about, that’s really cool, and then that’s a compelling story, like, “If I have this printer, we are going to significantly increase the revenue that can come through this because I am, in some ways, a bottleneck as the single sales professional in the midst of overwhelming demand.”

So, there we have it. All right. Well, that is just one of many tools that you share in your book. Can you lay out a couple more with us? You say you’ve got one tool to rule them all. It’s a two-by-two. What’s this one?

Janice Fraser

This is another one that if you’ve done any work time in consulting companies, you’ll recognize it. We call it the two-by-two. It goes by many names, and it is, I think of it as a virtual or physical sorting grid. And the way that I prefer to use it is, at a blank wall, I literally stand at a wall, and I take blue painter’s tape, and I make a big plus sign. So, there are four quadrants, and the way that I organize it is a little different than kind of you may have heard of before.

I choose two different criteria, one for each axis. And on the vertical axis, it’s whatever the criteria it’s an obvious yes-no, “Is it important? Is it not important?” Like, if it’s not important, I don’t want to think about it. So, find whatever my criteria that’s a yes-no, I put that top to bottom, yes on top. And then, on the horizontal axis, I think of, “What is the criteria that is a yes-maybe?” And I put the yes on the side, on the right side, and the maybe on the left.

And if you construct your two-by-two sorting grid this way, you can take whatever your ideas, your options, you can plot them into these four quadrants based on, “From one perspective, this is an absolute yes. But from another perspective, that, I’m not sure.” So, I think an easy-hard. So, let’s say you’re building software. You have 20 product features that you know would be great additions, or you think would be great additions, that everyone has requested.

So, a product manager has the job of prioritizing, “Which ones are we going to build and not build?” Well, from one perspective, it’s easy to do but from another perspective, it’s not that important. It doesn’t help the user or the business at all. So, you’ve got easy but unimportant. Well, that’s going to fall down to this one quadrant, this bottom right quadrant. And even if it falls in the bottom right quadrant, this is the stuff I call seductive distractions.

From one perspective, it is, “Yes, it’s easy to do.” From another perspective, it’s a, “No, it’s not important. Why would you bother?” You’d be shocked to know how many unimportant things end up in a product backlog and waste your time, waste your developer’s. And so, these are the things that cause people to argue.

Imagine that you’re in a product prioritization meeting, and you don’t have a tool like the two-by-two that makes this very obvious that there’s a no. You could easily get into a 30-, 50-minute discussion, argument, debate about whether or not to include this feature, “Well, it’d be easier to do, we should just throw it in there.” But you shouldn’t do it because it’s not important.

And so, what a tool like this does is it puts the real depth of conversation on, “What are the decision criteria that we agree to?” So, rather than having the real conversation be, “Should we build this feature?” That’s the wrong question. The right question is, “How should we choose which features to build?” Well, it’s only, “Build the ones that are important.” Okay, that sounds like a no-brainer, “Okay, let’s build the ones that are important.”

So, now if you’re using this two-by-two diagram, this sorting grid, is what I call it, then you’re only going to have a debate about the ones that are an obvious yes from one perspective, but a maybe from another perspective so you eliminate 75% of the discussion required because it’s just so obvious the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. So, what’s distinctive about this is one of the axes is pretty much binary, and so it in terms of like, “That’s it. Almost no user cares about this feature. Ergo, it’s not important so we just don’t even need to, or put our little heads about it for a minute, or not even a minute.” So, you can get right into it. Now, can you share with us some other contexts where this can be illuminating?

Janice Fraser

So, we use this in pretty much every aspect of life, and I’m not kidding.

Pete Mockaitis

“What should I eat for lunch? Is it delicious and nutritious?”

Janice Fraser

“Is it delicious? Do I have the materials? Can I make it?” We’ve done two-by-twos for everything. Everything from kind of disruptive strategy at very, very large companies. Or, actually, I did this with the Navy Seals training command. 

So, I taught this, I led a workshop where I could not actually physically see any of the two-by-twos that they were creating. I simply coached them through the steps and answered their questions as they went because it was a highly secure environment. So, it can apply to any situation where there are many choices, and you have to be able to reveal which choices makes sense, and which ones do not.

And so, in the preparation for one of these kinds of high-stakes facilitations, I worked with my clients to figure out, “What is the body of ideation that we want to do? What is the range of ideas that we want to generate, or thoughts that we want to elicit from our participants?” And then, “What are the choice criteria that will help us to know which ones are the correct ideas to move forward with and which ones we ought to let go of?”

And, usually, I can find a way to layer in three or four different criteria. So, it could be importance, easy-hard, urgency, what have you. And so, if we want to go from a wide range of ideas represented down to, let’s say, four or five things that we intend to do that we’re actually going to do, in one hour I can get 20 people to generate 200 ideas and come down to six using this two-by-two method.

And the way that you do it is you say, “All right, I’d like everyone to come up with 10 ideas, one idea per Post-It note. And in 10 minutes, you’ve got 200 ideas, and then you spend the next 50 minutes reducing that from 200, to 100, to 50, and we do that using the two-by-two.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, that’s cool. And I think it’s nice because you really put a spotlight on, “What are the criteria that we’re using here?” And if that is left beneath the surface, poor criteria can rule the day, “It’s easy. It’s fun. I’m really just interested in this kind of project. This seems cool.” And so, it’s like, “All right. Well, that’s notable but what’s the goal here? Is the goal just for you to enjoy yourself? Or is the goal more of an economic profits-minded kind of a thing?”

And so then, you can recognize whether it seems cool and fun and easy and interesting is a valid criterion that we should utilize here, or if we should say, “Oh, I guess we actually have to be disciplined grownups and put our personal preferences to the side on this particular context.”

Janice Fraser

Well, so much friction and wastes results from people arguing over something that they’re not actually explicitly saying.

So, we end up with this proxy that the friction and the waste and slowness often is the result of a proxy argument. You’re arguing over something on the surface but, really, there’s something underneath that that’s more of the issue. And if you could just have that conversation, you could resolve it. So, for instance, you could say, one of the yes-no axis is, “Does it cost more than $100 or not? Like, if it costs more than $100 that’s an obvious no because we’re broke.” You see.

So, instead of arguing over the thing that’s the proxy, you can have a meaningful conversation to align on the things that really matter.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s super. And I’m curious, do you have any favorite words, or phrases, or means of going deeper there? Because if folks aren’t surfacing their real concern, they may very feel kind of sensitive about it. How do you recommend we go there?

Janice Fraser

So, I think a lot about, “What are the prompts?” When we ask a question that inspires people to come up with new thinking, that’s what I call a prompt. I actually think a lot about prompts. I craft them very deliberately because I want to elicit information from the people that I’m collaborating with. So, putting this back in a work context, what we’re talking about here is collaboration to make progress.

And when I write the prompt, I’m thinking about, “What is the underlying question?” again, we’re back at point A, “What’s the underlying question that will help us orient honestly in the present moment?” And that’s why I ask questions like, “How will we know, how might we recognize the right thing to do? Like, what are the things that matter most in making this selection?”

And I value those conversations, and sometimes it can feel, to people who aren’t familiar in working with me, it can feel a little bit slow at first, but then the wrap-up happens so easily that we make up for all that time. So, if we spend 10 minutes having a conversation about, “What are the decision criteria? How will we recognize something that is the right answer?” we’re going to get our heads on straight together and that’s going to make it easier for us to recognize the right path forward, the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Okay. Well, so you mentioned this waste. In your book, you highlight two pernicious kinds of wastes. It sounds like we hit one. What’s the other?

Janice Fraser

Yeah, okay. So, when it comes to decision-making, there are really two big ways that we waste. There’s the kind that happens before the decision is made, and the kind of happens after the decision is made. So, there’s before a decision is made, we end up with these slow decisions, and it sounds like, “Oh, they’re never going to make a decision. We’ve been talking about this forever. Six months, we’re talking about a freaking printer. Are you kidding me?”

So, when a decision is taking a really long time, it’s often because we’ve set the wrong kind of standard, and it’s like, “Is this the right thing to do? Is this the best decision? Do we all agree?” Those three sentiments all set this very, very high standard for the quality of decision and the amount of support that the decision has. And what that leads to is deliberation. So, that’s how you get extensive talking.

So, with the printer example that we talked about earlier, it was, “Do we all agree this is the right thing to do? Is it really necessary for seven people to have complete agreement, and that is unequivocably the right thing to do?” “No, no, this does not rise to that level of importance.” Compared to like, “Do we all agree it’s the right thing to do to pull the plug on grandma?” Like, “Okay, now, we should probably all have consensus, and we should all know that it’s right, unequivocably.” So, that’s the first kind of way, is setting the wrong standards for the quality and alignment of our decision.

After a decision is made, the other kind of waste is the waste that happens if a decision is like a snap decision that’s made by fiat or that’s made by gut instinct. Have you ever been on a call and on a Zoom meeting, and you’re watching all 25 talking, all 25 heads, and a decision is made, and you could just see the looks on their face. They’re going to go back to their desks and do whatever they want because they don’t agree with whatever, but nobody is going to say anything.

So, if a decision is made in too-cavalier a fashion without sufficient attention being paid to building support and depth of understanding, then what you end up with is decisions that are reversed, or they’re reversed and nobody talks about it so now there’s chaos. And what happens there is that you erode trust and belief in the quality and nature of the decisions that get made in your organization.

And so, that breeds resentment, and lack of trust, and a lot of churns, and people doing things in conflict with one another because person A doesn’t believe in it, so they’re going to go off and do their own thing, person B is going to do the same thing but without talking to person A about it, so you end up with this entropy chaos-type of situation.

So, what we want instead is to think about decisions, like as, “What could a middle ground be?” And I ask two questions. One, “Can we all live with it?” because if no, if you can’t live with it, that’s important to know. If your lawyer is like, “I cannot live with that. That exposes us to too much risks.” That’s super important information. So, “Can we all live with it?” is a really helpful thing to ask.

And, “Does it move us toward our point B? Does it obviously help us make progress?” because if a decision is something that everyone can live with, that obviously makes progress, it’s probably a good-enough decision.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s nice in terms of good enough as opposed to…

Janice Fraser

Right or best.

Pete Mockaitis

…striving internally for optimal, universal acclaim by consensus may be a fool’s errand in certain contexts.

Janice Fraser

Right. I just can’t, I can’t even. It really drives me nuts when people are, like, debating, as if continuing to talk will actually give us new insight. Sometimes we need to just stop talking and move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like that. There’s a time and a place where we want to raise the bar. I think about my conversation with Greg McKeown here in terms of essentialism, in terms of if you’re clearing out your closet, “Might this ever be useful someday?” is a very low bar, and you’ll not get rid of very much stuff. Just everything might be useful someday. Versus a Marie Kondo question, “Does this spark joy?” Okay, now there’s a very high bar. Not a lot of things are going to go there.

And so, here, we’re sort of playing it in reverse. It’s like there’s a time when we want to have a very high bar for this decision, and the consensus, and everyone jazzed about it, and then there’s a time where we should have a lower bar, and there’s a little bit of an art of leadership there in terms of making that determination for where this falls along the continuum.

Janice Fraser

And you mentioned the spark of excitement, and one of the things that keeps us in a really boring middle ground is not being willing to take risks. And sometimes, I think, when we start to see organizations shifting how they frame up decisions, and, “Do we all agree this is the right decision to make?” like, if we all agree it’s the right decision, we’re never going to take any risks.

I made a highly controversial decision at one point in my career. Again, I was a leader of a company, just a small company, but it was tiny but mighty. And we made a product, and we ended up selling it to Google within a year of developing the product. It was such a cool outcome. And shortly after the transaction was closed, and we returned a nice big check to all of the shareholders in the company, everyone was excited, one of the shareholders was very upset, and said that it was the worst decision the company had ever made. The worst decision the company had ever made because it put us at such risk.

And it really landed with me because I was feeling so proud of what we had accomplished, and I was so pleased with the decision-making acumen of the board of directors that allowed us to take that decision, even though one of the shareholders was so risk-averse. Because if we all have to agree that something is unequivocably the right thing to do, we’ll never do anything bold.

So, I’m still really proud of that product, and that set of decisions, and that way of bringing something new to market, and helping everyone make good-enough decisions that kept the company safe enough that we could take a calculated risk.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Janice, that’s really a beautiful perspective that you have as you reflect on this because I think myself, and others with some people-pleasing tendencies, might look back on that, and sort of wonder, “Oh, I don’t know, is that person right? And did we make the wrong call after all?” Whereas, you said, “I love the fact that we went after this, and one person was really upset. That’s really cool of us.” So, I love that perspective.

Janice Fraser

And, honestly, like he took home a cheque for like $400,000.

Pete Mockaitis

There you go.

Janice Fraser

Like, “Dude, it’s fine.” I’m not happy that he was upset. I’m happy that we were able to have a vision and move forward even without consensus. So, there was some research done about the best venture capital investment decision-making. And what turned out to be true was high conviction, low consensus led to the best outcomes in venture funds.

So, that means that, at the partner table, all the people that are sitting around, debating whether or not we should invest in XYZ company, what you needed to really have good outcomes was somebody had to see outrageous potential, outrageously positive potential. And even though everyone couldn’t see it, if somebody saw that there was outrageously possible potential, then there was a capacity, like that potential could be realized.

So, high conviction but low consensus means that it took a leap of faith to believe in it. And I look at the challenges that we have as a planet right now, whether it is war in multiple places, or economic uncertainty, high inflation, climate change, political divisiveness, these are really big challenges. This generation, I think a lot about, my son is 22, my daughter is 35. So, she’s peak Millennial, he’s peak Gen Z, and I think about these young professionals that are coming into the workplace, and we need them to be bold. We need them to help us through some really difficult challenges.

And so, I want us to embrace high conviction, low consensus opportunities to explore big leaps forward in our culture, in our world.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s intriguing that low consensus is advantageous, like, that is better than high conviction, high consensus. Can you unpack this pathway for me a little bit more? Is it that it’s because of VC funds, and VC funds tend to prosper when they have a few bets that pay off massively as opposed to the majority of their bets do pretty well?

Janice Fraser

They don’t tend to. They only prosper.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like that’s the way of the VC fund, as opposed to a mortgage lender. It’s a different risk gain.

Janice Fraser

So, I’m going to say it’s not just the way of VC funds. It is the way of anything innovative, actual innovation, all innovation across. And this is something that I spend a lot of time looking at. The numbers are in, the math works. If you’re trying to disrupt the status quo, then you will be taking risks, and a small number of those risks will pay very high returns. And I don’t just mean financially. I mean, in whatever.

A lot of the organizations that I work with are, like I worked with the Air Force, like they’re not necessarily profit-making contexts. It’s about creating disruptive results. And the thing about disruption, and I mean this in a sort of business school sense of disruption, like there’s a guy, Clayton Christensen, who developed disruption theory.

The thing about it is that is a fundamentally optimistic act. Our innovators, whether they’re economic innovators, political innovators, they are imagining a world that is different and somehow better. And that imagination, we need to have ways and methods for harvesting the insight and imagination of people who imagine better, and who are willing to wrestle with the status quo in order to make improvements in the world.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, I guess, in a way, low consensus is, in a way, an indication of the innovativeness of the thing. Because if everyone says, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. Everybody, all loves it.” Well, odds are, if everyone feels that way, it’s probably already done, or it is so obvious that it is not disruptive.

Janice Fraser

Well, if it’s so obvious and it is disruptive, there’s some reason that it’s not been done, and so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I guess I’m just thinking for listeners, like a takeaway is, “Hey, everyone thinks this is a terrible idea but I’m really gung-ho about it, and Janice said that’s exactly what I want.” Is that the takeaway? Or how should we view high conviction, low consensus?

Janice Fraser

No. So, it’s not “I want.” It’s “What if this were true, how good would it be?” So, the framing, again, it’s, “What is the framing? If this were true, how good would it be? And then, what would we need to learn in order to find out whether it’s true, whether it’s possible?” And that’s where you get things like, there are terms like MVP, where it’s the smallest thing you can do to test out the critical path idea, that kind of thing.

So, it’s not “I believe in this, therefore, I’m going to shove it down everybody’s throat.” It’s, “I believe in this. What’s the smallest thing we can do to figure out whether it’s right?” So, it comes with a degree of humility, that high conviction, conviction doesn’t mean blind faith. Conviction means, “I’ve seen some indicators that there’s real potential here. Not everybody sees it yet, but I do.”

Pete Mockaitis

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

Janice Fraser

So, there’s actually a quote from my book that I sit with a lot and I pay a lot of attention to, and it goes something like this, “We no longer believe in work-life balance. It’s all just life. And what we want is to make it a life filled with confidence, security, love, and meaning.”

And it’s not because I believe in hustle culture, and I think that you should have no boundaries between work and the rest of your life. It’s actually kind of the opposite. It’s more that I want life to infect your work. Who we are at work, what happens to us at work, the pains and joys that we experience at work, the kinds of decisions we make at work, they alter who we are as people.

And if we can be really attentive and mindful to being ourselves wherever we go, we will end up building a life that is so much more fulfilling and satisfying. And if we have a planet filled with people who have fulfilling satisfying lives, I believe we’re going to make better decisions on that global geopolitical kind of scale.

So, I think that that is the thought that I would want to leave people with, is that you’re allowed to have a life filled with confidence, patience, security, love, meaning. These things really do matter, and they matter at work as much as at home.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Janice Fraser

Well, my favorite tool that helps me be awesome at my job is Google, Google Docs, the Google Suite. I have a long, long, long list of tools, and the one that I could not live without is G Suite. And I’m surprised by how few people notice how powerful it is. You could do everything on G Suite.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Janice Fraser

When I get up in the morning, I sit for one hour and do something I love.

Pete Mockaitis

For example?

Janice Fraser

Usually, it’s I drink coffee and I read a book, and I pet my cat in a favorite chair with the curtains open and the sun shining in, but I spend one hour every morning doing something I love, sometimes it’s social media, let’s be honest.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Janice Fraser

Yup, figure out the truth. Figure out what’s true and make it a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Janice Fraser

JaniceFraser.com. J-A-N-I-C-E-F-R-A-S-E-R.com.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Janice Fraser

Well, the call to action is I would love it if you would take a look at the book. If it looks interesting to you, give it a try. I read the audiobook, so if you want to hear me talking in your ear, that’s the best way to do it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Janice, this has been fun. Thank you. I wish you much speed and little drama.

Janice Fraser

Thank you so much, Pete.