KF #19. Cultivates Innovation Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

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

Charles Conn
It’s great to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom and the book, The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times and general problem-solving wisdom you have to share with us but, first, I’m curious, so you’re the board chair of Patagonia. I’m imagining that you’re an outdoorsy person then. Is this fair to say?

Charles Conn
Yeah, my big passion is to spend time outside.

Pete Mockaitis
Are there any particularly memorable tales of outdoor adventures that leap to mind?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I have explored on several occasions the very upper regions of the Skeena River in British Columbia which runs almost the entire length of the province, and goes from these incredibly beautiful mountains, all the way down to the sea. That one is deep in my heart.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And have you ever had any brushes, close encounters with death in your adventures?

Charles Conn
Yes, on several occasions, once involving a landslide and also, in northern Canada, this time on a lake called Mistassini in northern Quebec, and a couple times in boats.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog. And what does that do for you, like, internally and how you view the world and your priorities?

Charles Conn
That’s a good question. I think it sharpens you up on what’s important and makes you focus on not all the little things that are the day-to-day but on the bigger things that actually matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’re talking about something that matters a whole heck of a lot in terms of strategic mindsets and problem-solving. Could you kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about mindsets and problem-solving and such while putting together The Imperfectionists?

Charles Conn
I think perhaps the one that’s hardest for people to get their own heads around is to be comfortable with the idea of collective intelligence or outsourcing wisdom, whether that’s outsourcing it to ancient wisdom, or outsourcing it to artificial intelligence swarms. It’s very hard for people to think that they don’t have everything inside themselves. But, of course, we don’t and we can’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, what I find counterintuitive is that people find that counterintuitive, that’s so meta. Maybe I’m humble or just a dummy but I’m thinking, “Of course, I don’t have the answers.” And, in a way, that’s kind of a relief. I’m not on the hook, on the spot, expected to. Can you dig into this mindset a little bit?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think what happens in big organizations, and you’ve worked for fancy consulting organizations, people, over time, sort of overcome that natural humility that you just described and begin to think that their organizations can do remarkable things. And it’s that idea that… you remember Enron, they thought they were the smartest guys in the room.

And that kind of idea, like the arrogance of thinking, “We’re the smartest guys in the room, and, therefore, all of the pieces of the solutions to the problems that we’re trying to solve can be found here,” is a fundamental delusion that especially talented people tell themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, good to know that that is widespread. And I guess that kind of hits me interestingly because I’m thinking about, boy, there was a quote. I got to get this guy on the show. I think he was in the Bush cabinet, he said, “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” That is exactly how I feel all the time because people will say things with such definitive language and tone of voice and use the word obviously, it’s like, “Oh, it’s obvious.”

And I was like, “I don’t know. I’m not so sure that that’s the case.” And, occasionally, they’re just dead wrong. And so, I’ve sort of had to, in my mind, mentally attach a disclaimer to all things being shared in general casual conversation.

Charles Conn
And don’t you find, as we get older, that instinct to humility should get stronger and often it doesn’t?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think so.

Charles Conn
And that’s what makes someone boring, right, that they’re confident that they know everything there is to know and they’re not open to new mindsets and new ways of seeing things, new lenses.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I think about just how many times I’ve been dead wrong about things, so it’s, like, I have evidence to suggest that it’s quite probable that I may be mistaken about something, especially with my first impressions pre-research.

Charles Conn
When we’re young, we often have that kind of confidence, never in doubt, occasionally correct. Hopefully, the world gives us the evidence that you just described. Usually, it does.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay, so there’s something surprising that popped up. Could we maybe zoom out and hear kind of the big picture or the thesis behind the book The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times?

Charles Conn
Yes. So, here’s 30,000 feet on it. There’s always this sense that the world’s getting faster and faster, and now it really is. There’s objective evidence with the amount of new data that’s being produced every day, the impact of artificial intelligence, computational biology, robotics. It’s a blur. And no young people today can look at their parents or their grandparents’ careers and think, “I will have something like that.”

This idea that you could gather a body of knowledge, in high school or university, and then put that to work over 40 years, if it ever really did hold, certainly doesn’t hold now. And that creates a feeling of anxiety and anomie, and you see this a lot in young people. There’s an epidemic of anxiety and also depression because of that sense that we’re unmoored.

And my sense is that, instead of looking for perfection so that we know all of the moving parts and we can confidently solve the problems in our lives, that we should actually let go of that idea, and we should lean into the risk and uncertainty that the world is delivering up to us by using some mindsets that actually tame that or make sense of it for us. So, that’s the 30,000 feet of what the book is about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, there’s so much great stuff to dig into here. So, let’s hear about the anxiety and depression coming from a sense of being unmoored. Can you expand on that?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the way we’re all taught to think about our lives, and companies are taught to think about strategies, to think that there’s a structure out there that you can understand, markets have structures, lives have structures, and that there are agents that operate within this structure. And if you do some thinking about what their incentives are, you can actually deduce what the right strategy for you is. That’s a very standard model of strategy sometimes called structure conduct.

And I think the world that we operate in now, that structure is changing so quickly that understanding the rules or dynamics of how agents will behave in those fluid structures has diminished or gone out the window. And that leaves many people who are looking for structure conduct rules feeling anomie. And in the businesses that we all operate in today, compared to the past, you don’t even know who the disruptive entrant is going to be to your nonprofit or to your business. Maybe one of these super competitors like an Apple or an Amazon who you don’t even think of as operating in your sphere.

And I think that creates a kind of a feeling of uncertainty in a world that’s changing quickly that makes many people freeze, paralyzed, or makes other people leap before they look, both of which are pathological responses to uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And just a definition check for anomie. What does this word mean?

Charles Conn
So, anomie is this sister to entropy, the idea that we’re lost in a world where there’s no meaning and no touchpoints or milestones.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I can see how depression or anxiety, might be in the sense of, ‘Oh, this is solvable but I just can’t so I guess I’m no good” is one direction versus anxiety, like, “Ahh, there’s nothing to hold on to.”

Charles Conn
“I don’t know what to do.”

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s freaky. Okay.

Charles Conn
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, you say if we let go of this notion and that there are structures, this is solvable, etc., that we can feel liberated from that.

Charles Conn
That’s right. It doesn’t mean we just sort of lean into anomie. It means we actually have some tools that are well within our capabilities to make sense of this faster-moving world. The fact that we don’t have simple structure in conduct doesn’t mean there isn’t structure in content. We can actually learn the game that’s being played. It’s just the rules are changing and it’s unfolding quickly so we need an orientation toward uncertainty and change, which helps us gather information to make good decisions and to be successful even when things are changing quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so this sounds super beneficial, we can let go of some of that anxiety and depression. And what are some of the other benefits associated with mastering these skills and mindsets?

Charles Conn
So, I think you said mastery, and I think a feeling of mastery, even in a world when things are changing, a feeling, a quiet confidence that even when things are changing, you can actually chart a course that makes sense, not a course without mistakes because mistakes and learning from mistakes are a critical part of this framework for getting comfortable operating in this world of change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a cool maybe case study of someone who felt some of these challenges and adopted some new approaches and saw cool results?

Charles Conn
So, I think the very most important mindset will sound incredibly obvious but I think it’s actually really profound, which is curiosity. Humans are pattern recognizers when we’re young. We look for patterns that help us make sense of the world. And then, as we get older, we become pattern imposers so that we can make sense of confusing things.

The problem with pattern imposition is we often get it wrong. This is what Daniel Kahneman wrote about when he wrote about all the cognitive errors that humans do in Thinking, Fast and Slow. If we can stay curious even as we get older, we can actually be open to learning in this world that’s going faster and faster. And I’ll give you two little case studies.

One is Nespresso. So, everybody knows what Nespresso is. It was created by Nestle, which is one of the world’s biggest food companies, the biggest producers of coffee. Nestle had a young engineer, his name was Eric Favre, and he happened to be with his wife visiting Rome. And he was standing there thinking he wanted a coffee, and he noticed that there were a whole bunch of coffee shops in Rome, and only one of them had a queue out the door.

And instead of thinking, “Well, I don’t want to stand in that queue. I got to go with this one,” he said, “I wonder what’s going on here? Why are people queueing outside the door?” And the name of the coffee shop was Sant’Eustachio, so he waited in the queue, and he went inside. And there was this whole barista in there called Eugenio. And he thought the machine was broken so he was pumping the espresso machine and putting extra bars of pressure into everybody’s coffee.

And the result was this incredible thick crema on the top of everybody’s coffee, and that’s why people were waiting. And Favre’s curiosity didn’t stop there. He obviously enjoyed the coffee, but he went away and he thought, “I wonder how we can make that, give people that experience, that actual experience of being in a Roman coffee shop in their home?”

And he tinkered and experimented, he was actually a rocket scientist, and he figured out how to create pressure via the machine, what we now think of as a Nespresso machine and a Nespresso capsule, so that you can produce that wonderful thick crema in your coffee at home. It took eight years to do it. Nestle gave him the time and the space to do it, and he created a business that does about 10 billion a year in revenue, all from curiosity.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And I think that line, that really is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to curiosity. It’s like, “Are you impatient, in a rush, need to do what’s latest and loudest and now, now, now? Or are you like, ‘Hmm, what’s that about? It’s going to take more time and maybe be kind of annoying but let’s go with it, see what happens here’?”

Charles Conn
Right. And in this world, this feeling of anxiety that we’ve got to just to keep our nose at the coal phase, we often let those experiences pass by, and those are the experiences that give us insights that actually give us that feeling of mastery and confidence when things are changing quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, when it comes to the mindset of curiosity, what do we do with that sort of actionably, “Just be more curious”?

Charles Conn
Well, yeah, so that doesn’t sound right but the truth is we can put it into practice by stopping to notice. And that thing, as kids, we always ask the question “Why?” In fact, there’s all this research, kids ask something like a hundred questions an hour. It’s incredible. And what they’re doing is trying to find patterns that make sense.

And when they eventually learn how to tie a shoelace with a double bow, that problem is solved and they become a pattern imposer after that, “This is how we tie a shoe,” they learned an experiment of how to tie their shoe. How can you leave open that childlike way of asking why. Eric Favre stood there on the cobblestones of Rome, and asked, “Why?” And I do think curiosity can be as encouraging, or spurring curiosity can start with putting questions when we see phenomenon that we don’t immediately impose a pattern on.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, we just ask why about anything and everything that pops on up.

Charles Conn
Everything, especially stuff that’s anomalous. So, we tend to look at things that are anomalous, and we put them into the bucket of not an important datapoint because it doesn’t confirm something that we wanted to confirm or that’s natural to confirm. Or, we bucket it very quickly into, “I guess they’re short a barista there, and that’s why there’s a queue.” We use the wrong framing because, and you said it, we’re impatient creatures.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, once we ask why, I guess then the next step is to try to see what’s going on.

Charles Conn
Yeah. Another great case study, which I wouldn’t go into in detail, is how instant photography was invented. Edwin Land, now a famous chemist, was walking around Sante Fe, New Mexico, with his daughter, and he was taking pictures with his conventional film camera. And his little daughter, Jennifer, pulled on his sleeve, and said, “Let me see the picture, daddy.” And he knelt down and he said, “Oh, well, that doesn’t work because we’re exposing a film emulsion to light, then we send that to the drugstore.”

And he stopped himself, and he realized, like, “No, why can’t we see the picture?” And it was his curiosity, instead of just brushing his daughter off, that led him to spend the rest of the day walking around Santa Fe, thinking, “I wonder if I could make the pictures appear instantly.” And he was working with a patent attorney that night, that very night, to develop what we think of as the Polaroid instamatic camera.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. So, we got curiosity. What’s next?

Charles Conn
So, the next one, I think, is really important. It’s kind of a sister idea is one we call occurrent behavior. Occurrent behavior means what actually happens in the world as opposed to what you wish would happen or think will happen, and for us it means an experimentalist approach. You can see why that’s a cousin to curiosity.

It means instead of accepting existing datasets, you actually create your own data. When you were a Bain consultant, and I was a BCG consultant, one of the first things that they tell you when you started a new piece of work or study or a case, it’s called different things in different places, is you’d look out for the existing datasets that you could purchase or rent so that you can begin to immediately draw insights, but everybody has access to those purchasable datasets, and they don’t represent whatever current reality is because they were collected before.

And an experimentalist or a current behavior mindset says, “I wonder if we can test or taste the market ourselves,” and you can do this in any part of your life, rather than accepting what exists to see if you can generate your own perspective. So, occurrent behavior is trying it. And I think we think of that a lot when we think of internet companies.

So, in internet companies, we think, “Oh, you can just try interface B or interface A, and you can see which one generates more traffic or more revenue.” But you can do this kind of thinking in any business. One of my favorite crazy examples is SpaceX. Whether you’re a fan of Elon Musk or not, what he’s done in only 15 or 20 years with SpaceX is incredible. You had NASA for 60 years sending parcels into space, including people, and during that entire time, they didn’t drive down the cost curve.

In a period of only 15 years, because he was willing to relentlessly experiment, going from sending three or four missions into space a year, which is what NASA was doing, to sending 15 or 20 missions into space a year, which is what SpaceX has been doing, and each time trying something new, including using technologies from the automotive industry, like heat shielding, using innovations like using a basket or a net to catch the nose cone, which is an expensive part that you might otherwise lose, they’ve been able to drive down the cost curve by about 95%, so cutting the cost of sending a kilogram into space from 50,000 to just over 2,000.

It’s remarkable. And it shows that even in the ultimate of heavy industries, experimentation can lead remarkable results.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And when you say experimentation, I’m thinking SpaceX, they’ve had a number of things explode, and I guess that’s part of it.

Charles Conn
Right. And I think this is part of imperfection. Obviously, unplanned disassembly, which I think was the term that they used in a hundred-million-dollar mission is an extreme example of what sometimes comes at a cost. Experiments come with a cost. But there were 20 different things, according to the commentary by SpaceX at the time, that they were trying to experiment with in that launch, and that they learned from, and that they’ll improve from.

In any of human enterprise with relative low cost, in this case, it was relatively high cost, we can generate new data that gives us a better sense for how the world is actually unfolding.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is sparking some cool connections. We had Suneel Gupta on the show talking about being backable, and he said one thing that makes you phenomenally persuasive is you have an earned secret. It’s, like, you know something that other folks don’t know, and one of the best ways to do it is just do those experiments.

And then it speaks to fundamental problem-solving process, whether we’re in uncertain times or not so uncertain environments, just that hypothesis-driven thinking approach that we’re into in consulting, is so huge. It’s like, “What must be true for this to be a good move or workout? And then how do we test that?”

And so, just for funsies, could you share with us a couple really cool examples of means of experimenting and testing that are accessible to the typical professional in the midst of problems they bump into?

Charles Conn
So, one is an old story from some friends of mine in McKinsey, which is another firm that I worked at, who were trying to solve a really difficult problem when they were working with the Federal Reserve, which is, “How do you count money?” And this is in the days before counting machines, so in the late ‘70s, they were actually counting money by hand, and they would double and triple count the big bundles of hundred-dollar bills and twenty-dollar bills, if you can believe it, and they thought that that was a far more accurate approach than any other approach.

And one of these clever consultants said, “Hmm, seems like a slow and error-prone approach,” because they would often do tests and find that the counts were off, “Why don’t we weigh the money?” which was a crazy idea. But with a very accurate scale and money at a particular humidity, so specific gravity, weighing is much more accurate than counting, and they were able to demonstrate that.

And I think that’s just one of those really cool little examples, which is exploring your curiosity by doing a mini experiment, in this case, weighing the money, led to kind of a breakthrough how the Federal Reserve thought about counting money. Later on, that was bypassed by great counting machines, but I just think that’s one beautiful example.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun and it reminds me of my favorite TV show ever, Breaking Bad, in which they all have to weigh the money, the stacks of it in the storage facility.

Charles Conn
Oh, dear, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a good one. I’d also love your take on experiments about if we have to predict the future. And so, for example, one of my favorite encounters of one of my failures in using good hypothesis-driven thinking was I was exploring making an investment – this was back in the day – in a magazine that went to producers of TV and radio shows, because I wanted to sell a book and associated speaking services, but the price tag for that ad was sort of substantial for me at the time, and I was like, “Oh, is this going to work out?”

“At the end of the day, am I going to recoup more money than I invested in this thing?” And that’s all based on the responsiveness, both of the producers and the consumers listening or watching? I was like, “How can I even know?” And so, I went in the wrong direction, as a consultant, I was like, “Well, let’s just assume this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and make a spreadsheet.” I’m just making up numbers, and I was like, “Well, those numbers seem reasonable. Let’s go for it.”

And it was a total bust, I very much regret that investment. And then months later, I got a phone call from someone, who said, “Hey, Pete, I noticed your ad in this publication. Can you tell me how that worked out for you?” I was like, “Oh, not well, but what I should’ve done is what you’re doing. I had a whole content info of all these people who bought the ad and I could’ve just given them a ring, and say, ‘Hey, how did this work out for you?’ and then I would’ve known and saved some money.”

Charles Conn
And that’s one of those great problem-solving techniques, which is called Occam’s razor, which is a 15th century idea, which is the best solution to the problem is usually one that requires the least assumptions. And you could’ve started with that approach, which is the simplest one right in front of our nose.

And we often, especially clever people, and I think that’s what’s amazing here, is that these techniques are not to help ordinary people behave like clever people. These are techniques that help clever people even more because we’re the worst pattern imposers, the people who are very confident about their abilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Occam’s razor or with this book, I think it was called Obvious Adams, the idea was, “Hey, just do the obvious thing in business and it will take you really far,” which, in some ways, is I think is best about AI. And there was a Wall Street Journal article about AI coming up with creative business ideas more so than ten MBAs.

I’m a little skeptical but, either way, I’ve heard elsewhere, it said that AI tends to give you the most obvious answer because it’s like picking the words that are next to other words around this thing, large language models. But that in of itself is super helpful, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, let’s do that obvious thing. That’s pretty handy. Let’s go ahead and do that.”

Charles Conn
I think that’s right. Basic large language models that are trained on the internet, which is the junkyard of HTML that is the internet, are likely to give pretty obvious and not creative solutions. I do think AI trained on better databases, and particularly the kind of underlying databases, can actually generate surprising and sometimes creative outcomes because it isn’t looking to impose a particular pattern. It isn’t working with a set of assumptions the way you and I often do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay. Charles, well, we talked about curiosity, occurrent behavior, experiments. Is there another key mindset or piece we should dig into?

Charles Conn
So, the other mindset that we think is really powerful, we call dragonfly eye. And the analogy of the dragonfly eye is because they have these incredible compound eyes that have all these different lenses, more than 30,000 lenses, and a couple of different types of receptors that allow them to see almost 360, and also allow them to see spectra of light that no human can see.

We don’t really know how that insect experiences the world but we like this idea, when you’re problem-solving, of making sure to test different perspectives than your own. And sometimes people will call that perspective-taking, so maybe that would be a simpler way of putting it. When you’re solving a problem, remember to step out of your shoes because your shoes are the shoes of the organization that you’re working in, and your particular set of beliefs about how your organization competes in the world.

So, what we’d encourage people to do is see the problem through the eyes of others. So, that might be your suppliers, it might be your employees, it might be from one of your existing competitors, or it might be a perspective like an incipient or potential competitor, and we think that’s a particularly useful lens. So, trying your problem on through the perspective of others, which is a relatively straightforward thing to do, you can workshop this, gives you insights that other people just don’t have. And I’ll give you an example, this one that I love, and done by a friend of mine, is Invisalign.

So, you’re familiar with Invisalign, which are these clear braces that have just taken the orthodontic world by storm over the last 20 years or so. Were those invented by an orthodontist?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m guessing not, but I don’t actually know. Lay it on us, Charles.

Charles Conn
You got it. So, why not? There had been various forms of braces around since actually the time of the pharaohs but the kind of metal tracks that we have today have been around for something like 70 or 80 years. Why is it that orthodontists who get paid so much money to put those tracks on didn’t think of these clear progressive teeth corrections that Invisalign thought of?

It was thought of by two students at Stanford Business School. One of them was a kid who didn’t have the money to get braces until he was in his mid-20s, actually at business school. He was noticing how awkward it felt to have braces as a mid-20s person. He also noticed that, when he got his braces off, that if he forgot to put his retainer in for a couple of days, when he put it in, it hurt, and then it stopped hurting.

And what he noticed, therefore, was that his retainers were also moving his teeth, and he and his colleague, who’s called Kelsey Wirth, thought, “Huh, I wonder if you could do 3D printing, using a hard clear plastic like this retainer, that would move people’s teeth just like the ugly braces do.” They were taking the perspective of a brace patient, or braces user, not the perspective of an orthodontist who was just looking for the technical teeth correction.

With a different lens, they ended up creating a business, a very difficult to do because no one wanted to support them in dentistry, but eventually they got a school of dentistry to help them do the engineering. They got some engineers at Stanford to help them do the 3D printing, and they created a business that’s worth $20 billion market capitalization today, and have totally democratized orthodontics. It used to be just a small group of people who made that money. Now, any dentist can fit it.

So, I think it’s an incredible insight. It came from seeing things through a different perspective that other people didn’t think, and it’s one of the most powerful ways that you can improve your own life, which is to stop and see things through a different perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I get with the Invisalign story that it was an atypical perspective that we wouldn’t expect it to come from. And so, in practice, if we’re trying to take other’s perspectives, how do you recommend we do it? We just ask, “Hey, any ideas for how to correct teeth?” Or what’s the process?

Charles Conn
I love workshops and maybe you do, too. I love getting people in a room. One of the most powerful things you can ever do is get your customers in a room. Never understand why people don’t do that, and whether you work in a nonprofit or for-profit organization, you can bring the people into the room who you’re trying to provide services to, and ask them, “How do you see my product?” and listen to what they’re saying.

Now, sometimes that doesn’t work when the products super breakthrough. In this case, they wouldn’t have told you that they wanted Invisalign. What they would’ve told you is how awkward they felt getting braces, how painful it was getting braces, how they couldn’t wait to get their braces off. So, imagine the original Sony Walkman. A focused group wouldn’t have created the Sony Walkman, they didn’t have it in their minds to do so.

But asking people how they wanted to consume their music, which was increasingly mobile, actually could’ve created the Sony Walkman. And I think that’s the kind of insight that comes from stepping outside your own pattern imposition framework, and thinking about whatever the problem is from the eyes of others.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s well said there. What is the Henry Ford quote – “If we ask the customers what they wanted, they’d say they wanted faster carriages,” or something like that. And so, some would say, “Oh, well, customers don’t know. You’ve got to figure it out for them.” But I think that what you’re saying is, within that, it’s like, “Well, you’re getting at something. If the customers say that, then, well, that can spark some things to go forth and innovate.”

Charles Conn
Customers know their pain points and customers know their druthers even if they couldn’t conceptualize the Walkman or Invisalign. So, I’ll give you one more example. The biggest player in cloud computing isn’t IBM, and it’s not Microsoft. Why? Because they didn’t get the idea first. Someone else got it first. And the people who got it first was Andy Jassy at Amazon, and he got it first because he saw something they were doing internally for their own computing power.

And he realized, “What if we could offer this by the minute or by the byte instead of having people have to create their own server farms? What if we rent this capacity?” And, of course, that’s where the idea of cloud computing came from. He saw things through a different perspective. They developed something internally, and then he thought, “Huh, I wonder if there’s a business here?”

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s exactly what happened with me, as well with podcast production. So, that’s cool. All right. Well, then can you give us some views on when it comes to the notion of being an imperfectionist, or embracing imperfectionism? Can you talk to us maybe a bit about the emotional hang ups? Or how do we make that journey, so it’s like, “Oh, yeah, now I’m just totally cool making lots of mistakes, and being totally imperfect”? That could be quite a leap for some.

Charles Conn
Yes. So, I think the overarching mindset is imperfection or imperfectionism, and that really brings together all of the mindsets, two we haven’t talked about, or we talked about briefly, collective intelligence and show and tell, together with the ones that we have talked about. The overarching idea is to go ahead and lean into risks, and I think this is the emotional thing that causes people either to freeze, “I better wait till things are more stable,” or to just like, “Ahh, jump,” and you could look at Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and think, “Hmm, he probably should’ve thought about that a little harder.”

I think the way to get over the emotional either paralysis or impetuousness is to think about what things you can do – so curiosity, dragonfly perspective-taking, or experimentation – that you can do that are relatively quick, relatively low cost, and relatively low consequence when it goes wrong.

So, if you had those three things, “I can get feedback quickly, it doesn’t cost me too much to make this experiment, and the consequences of it going wrong are relatively modest, I can lean in and learn more about the game that’s being played, see the structure,” and, again, we can’t count on some historical structure, “see the structure that’s in the current game, and look at the behavior of the players that’s in the current game. That gives me information and allows me to be more confident about my next step even if what I did originally has some failures in it.”

I’ll give you an example because it’s always better to bring things to life, and it’s another Amazon example. So, Amazon is now a big player in what we call consumer financial services. They have something like a 24% share of all the transactions that occur online because people use Amazon Pay even when they’re not on the Amazon site. How did that happen?

Well, did Amazon use its giant balance sheet to buy a huge bank or consumer finance company? Nope, they didn’t. Well, why? So, what they did instead is, starting around 2008, they made a couple of little investments in fintech companies, they hired a team from a failed fintech company, they tried to build their own version of what was then called Square, which was a little payment device, which is now called Cube, and they bought some IP.

Almost all of those specific steps that I’ve just described ended in failure, meaning they no longer exist today, but each of those things built their understanding, built their skillset because they brought in people, and built their capabilities, ultimately, to become a competitor. And that allowed them to climb kind of an invisible staircase to be competent enough to begin to do the things in consumer financial services that they’re now known for, ultimately including an Amazon credit card and Amazon Pay. They did small low-consequence steps that, when apparently failed, actually helped build their capabilities and their confidence to become a real competitor in the space.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, Charles, I really geek out at all the stuff. I love problem-solving and decision-making stuff. I think it’s just massively leveraged powerful skill that makes a world of difference in terms of if there’s a thing to learn, or to really invest in, it’s probably this and several organizations said, it’s like, the top skill for the decade or century that we’re in.

What I find interesting and intriguing is that sometimes in episodes where we’ve covered this, I see the data that my dear listeners aren’t as jazzed about this as I am, or so it seems, in terms of, “Huh, I thought this was one of the most killer episodes ever,” and then the download and engagement numbers are, like, modest, like, “Oh, yeah, it’s all right.”

And so, I scratch my head a little bit, but my leading hypothesis is that people say, “Well, yeah, I know I got tons of problems solved. I got lots of answers, and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere when I share them with my collaborators and colleagues in the organization.” So, I’d love to hear, you got Chapter 6: Show and Tell, Storytelling to Compel Action, what are your pro tips for when we’ve got a great solution ready to pop into the world, make its debut? How do we lead other people on board with that?

Charles Conn
What a great segue and setup. Yeah, no matter how good a problem-solver you are, on your own, you won’t make any change in the world. And I think it’s almost an icon, the brilliant person laboring by themselves without recognition or understanding, and I think that exists for a reason, which is the independence that allows some people to come up with brilliant ideas and solutions that are out of the norm doesn’t necessarily make them compelling to others.

And we love to go back to this very simple concept you did as a kid, probably in kindergarten or first grade, which is show and tell. And the way to bring people on board with your idea is to, literally, think about, “How would I show and tell this?” And sometimes smart people think, “Well, I’m going to give them the data. I’m going to give them a graph that tells them what the output is.”

What we’ve learned is, in a world where there’s more and more data produced every day, in a world of polarization that we live in today, that people don’t trust information the way they used to anymore. So, to break through with your idea, is actually much more difficult than it’s ever been before. And the critical insight here is to speak to people’s hearts, not just their minds. So, when you construct your stories, think about what people’s values are.

And I’ll give you an example here, which is if you’re in the nature conservancy, you want people to change their behavior about how they interact with the natural world. You could do that just by pointing out that we’re destroying the world, the temperature is going up, and species are dying. But people often don’t pull their Subarus over to the side of the road and change their behavior unless you talk about something they really do care about, which is, for example, their kids.

And even people who have very different political perspectives love their kids, and you can use something like that as a common ground to begin to build the story for change, which people will actually sign up for. And one of the reasons The Nature Conservancy has been quite a successful conservation organization is that it has incentives when it comes to telling stories that speak not only to the facts but also to the values that people care about.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that story can sound like, “Don’t you want your children to be able to enjoy these beautiful spaces? Or you want them to not live shorter lives because of pollution?” like that sort of thing?

Charles Conn
Better yet a demonstration. Sure, what you just said makes sense but what about a demonstration? So, I’ll give you a physical demonstration done by The Nature Conservancy. They were trying to convince wealthy donors that they should invest in building shellfish reefs in estuary areas because estuaries are where fresh water comes out, but there’s often pollution in that fresh water. And when it gets mixed with the saltwater, this is where a lot of creatures grow up in estuaries. This is where we create some of the biggest environmental crises.

If you put in oyster reefs, for example, or rather shellfish reefs, those tiny creatures that are inside the shells actually are filter feeders, and they filter out a lot of the toxins and pollution that comes out of estuaries. What the Conservancy did in one famous presentation in Australia is they put 17 10-liter buckets at the back of the room stacked in a beautiful pyramid.

So, everyone came into the room, and the first thing they noticed is these 17 beautiful green buckets stacked in a pyramid. Even before they said anything, they had the audience’s attention, the philanthropists’ attention, “What’s going on here?” And they said, “Do you know that each oyster filters 170 liters of water a day and cleans that as much as those 17 10-liter buckets holds each day?”

And by using that physical demonstration and tying it in, again, with values that people cared about, clean water for their kids, that demonstration opened up people’s wallets in a way that a PowerPoint presentation never could.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s fun, as I imagine the philanthropists, which I’ve done on a very tiny scale, is you get excited, like, “Wait, one oyster and all that water? Well, that sounds just like a kill on return on investment. Where do I write the check?”

Charles Conn
Exactly. So, here’s another example. Richard Feynman, he’s speaking before the Space Shuttle Disaster panel, and he thinks that the problem is with the O-rings because the launch was done at a low temperature. And he could’ve presented a table of data showing that O-rings fail at lower temperatures, which is true. What did he do? He had a glass of ice water on the desk in front of him, and an O-ring in his pocket.

He took out the O-ring, held it in the water with a little clamp that he purchased at the hardware store next door, and then he twisted the O-ring to show that it deformed and then cracked at that lower temperature, the temperature of ice water. Well, no one will ever forget his testimony. Even though he had a Nobel Prize and could’ve used all kinds of data, what he did was a short demonstration that grabbed people.

And if you want your ideas, after you’ve done your clever problem-solving, if you want your ideas to have currency, if you want your ideas to break through in the world that’s a blizzard of ideas, think about how you would do show and tell.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Well, if you could just give us a few rapid-fire bullets of examples. So, we’ve got the ice water O-rings. We’ve got the big buckets of water. What are some other ways that we show stuff visually that’s powerful?

Charles Conn
Well, there are some famous graphics in history that I always go back to. So, you know that there’s a famous nurse called Nightingale, Florence Nightingale. Very few people realize that Nightingale was also one of the best statisticians of her day, and she drew this thing that’s now sometimes called a rose crescent diagram to show the impact of, basically, the filthy conditions during the Crimean War in the middle 1800s.

And she showed that way more soldiers were dying from the bacterial infection of their wounds, or bad water, than were actually dying from bullets. And she did that by showing this amazing graphic that’s famous to this day, that grabbed everybody’s attention. She could’ve written 150-page or 250-page finding but that single graph convinced the British military that they needed to upgrade the public health facilities that were in the hospitals in Crimea, which eventually led, by the way, to a public health revolution back in the home country, Britain, because Queen Victoria paid attention to what was going on in Crimea.

And we don’t know this for sure, but apparently met Florence Nightingale. That’s a person who figured out show and tell, and she changed the world. That’s how we get public health. Not just a nurse, someone who changed everything.

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

Charles Conn
Yes. So, I’ll give you one more, which I think, in the world we live in today, we talked about it very briefly at the beginning, but think about collective intelligence whenever you’re trying to solve a problem, and where you can outsource incredibly great ideas that will help you solve your problem. There are platforms like Kaggle which allow you to bring in other people’s ideas for a small amount of price money, maybe an AI algorithm, maybe an AI swarm.

The Nature Conservancy used that very effectively to create a program called FishFace that allows computer recognition aboard boats to identify which fish are endangered species and should be put back in the water, and which fish are okay to eat. They didn’t have that capability internally at The Nature Conservancy so they outsourced it for $150,000 price via Kaggle.

That’s just one of thousands of good ideas that come from bringing other people’s expertise inside your organization even when you’re full of clever people. And so, that would round out the six mindsets that I think will give people confidence that despite the pace of change, and all the terrible things that are happening in the world, that we can step into that risk and confidently navigate our way.

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

Charles Conn
Einstein is famous for saying if he had an hour to spend solving a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the nature of the problem, and five minutes solving it. So, he was a predictably clever guy, I think we can all agree, but there’s so much benefit that comes from thinking through your problem from different perspectives before you run off and try your favorite technique. So, that’s one of my favorite quotes.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the research behind the book called The Selfish Gene, which was a book published by Richard Dawkins in the late ‘70s, is the most concise encapsulation of how evolution works, which is this powerful engine that’s behind everything in the world today, including how humans compete with each other.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Charles Conn
I think my favorite book is probably E.O. Wilson’s Biodiversity which sort of naturally flows from the Dawkins book. Biodiversity comes from the impact of how evolution works.

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

Charles Conn
I actually love old-school woodworking tools. So, my personal favorite tool would be a woodworking plane. I think it’s amazing. They’ve been around for 3,000 years.

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

Charles Conn
Climb the stairs.

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, they retweet it, they Kindle book highlight it?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the thing that I’m hearing back now is around curiosity, which is people are thanking me for awakening them to their own curiosity and to the wellspring that comes from asking the question why.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn, or you can find both the books I’ve published on LinkedIn, or you can find them on Amazon, or any other great booksellers. We also have a website which is called TheImperfectionist.org, or BulletproofProblemSolving.com.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah. So, don’t be afraid to lean into risks using relatively low cost, relatively reversible moves. You may make some mistakes but you’ll learn tons.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Charles, thank you. This has been so fun. I wish you lots of fun problem-solving and imperfection results, and, yeah, thanks for taking the time.

Charles Conn
It’s been terrific. Thanks so much for having me, Pete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Do tell us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

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

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josh Linkner
Truly appreciate it. Excited for our conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me, too. Me, too. Now you’ve had a lot of cool innovative moments across your career. I’d love it if you could share with us one of your favorite eureka aha moments that have happened to you.

Josh Linkner
Well, one aha moment is that I realized that human creativity is not born as much as it’s developed, and the research bears this out. In fact, Harvard came out with a study that shows that human creativity is as much as 80% learned behavior. And many of us think that you’re either creative or you’re not, you’re born that way or you have to suffer. And the truth is that it’s more like, I would say it’s more like your weight than your height. Try as I may, I’m not going to be a foot taller by next month but my weight I can control. And creativity is very much the same. That was the big moment for me.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And so, I want to talk a lot about exactly how one learns to become more creative. But, first, if we could make the case for creativity, innovation, particularly for listeners who are like, “Hey, you know, I’m in the middle of the organization, and my job isn’t creative per se in terms of I’m not doing design or new product stuff. I’m a program manager, maybe.” And so, can we make the case for those professionals? What do they have to gain, personally and professionally, by sharpening their creative skills?

Josh Linkner
Yeah, awesome question. The truth is that the way that we get ahead in organizations has really changed in the last few years. In the past, maybe it was your knowledge of hard skills or whatever, but nowadays, those would become outsourced, commoditized, and automated. And what allows us to really soar in our professions, to be awesome at our job, if you will, is to bring inventive thinking and creative problem-solving to the game. When you really unpack, “Why does somebody get promoted? Why does somebody achieve more in their career?”

Most often these days, it’s tied to their ability to use, get inventive thinking and solve problems in fresh ways. So, I think it’s really become mission critical, in fact, and especially as automation and robotics and artificial intelligence, that’s the one thing that’s uniquely human about us all.

The other thing I’ll just quickly say is that, too often, unfortunately, we attribute job title with creative needs. Like, for example, people in marketing should be creative and people in accounting should not. But the truth is that there’s room for creativity in every single aspect in an organization, every single box in an org chart. We can be creative in our own ways whether you’re selling or running a customer service team or, yeah, doing finance. So, I think it really applies to us all, and I think that’s the one thing that we can truly harness to get ahead in our careers.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Thank you. Okay, I’m sold. So, then let’s hear it, with your book Big Little Breakthroughs, what’s the big idea here? And, particularly, what are micro-innovations and why do they matter?

Josh Linkner
Yeah, so the book Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results so the big little idea is that it sort of flips innovation upside down. And, too often, we think of innovation, it’s got to be a billion-dollar idea, it’s got to change the world, and it feels risky and out of reach, and just inaccessible for most normal people.

And this really flips it upside down in that it’s cultivating small daily acts of creativity as opposed to these wild swing-for-the-fences things. It’s taking the small bites of creativity, which are way less risky, way more within the grasp of us all, they build critical skills, and they add up to big things. So, that’s the premise of the book.

I like to think about it as innovation for the rest of us. It’s kind of helping everyday people become everyday innovators. And a micro-innovation is just what you might think of. If a big innovation is inventing penicillin or the assembly line or something, that’s awesome. Nothing wrong with that. But, again, most of us won’t do that. Those happen once every generation.

On the other hand, all of us can generate micro-innovations on a regular basis everything in our personal lives. An example would be you can chill a glass of white wine by using a frozen grape in that way you don’t dilute the wine with an ice cube. So, that’s a micro-innovation. It doesn’t change the world but it’s helpful.

In a professional sense, a micro-innovation might be something as simple as how you greet a customer, or how you prospect for a new client, or how you interact with the boss, or how you conduct a job interview. And so, these are things that don’t change the world in and of themselves but they add up to big things and they do create meaningful outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m not one to get too nitpicky over definitions here, but it’s interesting with that white grape example in white wine. It’s interesting. Well, now I’m going to try it. And, in a way, that’s an innovation in that I wasn’t doing it before but I didn’t invent that. I just heard it from you and thought it was pretty cool, and I’m going to try it, and it might just enhance my life that little bit. But it feels like innovation is happening in my world as a result of trying it. Can you noodle on that with me?

Josh Linkner
Sure. Well, first of all, you don’t have to invent something to take advantage of it. I love borrowing and sharing ideas that’s awesome. How great is that? Every time I get to learn a new way to do something that’s better, that’s an aha moment that can be savored. But when we’re taking advantage and noticing them around us, it actually encourages us to come up with them ourselves.

And so, it’s funny, the best way to get creative is just the same way that I learned to play a guitar. I’ve been playing guitar for 40 plus years. I put myself through college as a working musician. I still play today. The way you don’t play a guitar is one day you wake up and say, “Eureka! I’ve got a lightning bolt from the heavens and, all of a sudden, I’m a master musician.” Of course not. The way you play a guitar is you practice day in and day out. And the more you practice the better you get.

Same thing is true with creativity. So, when we think about we want to create our Mona Lisa’s in our lives, or things that we want to be remembered by, you don’t start there. I mean, Da Vinci’s first painting wasn’t the Mona Lisa. First, Da Vinci had to learn to paint, and he had to paint bad stuff, and he painted every day. And, over time, his Mona Lisa was revealed. So, for us, even cultivating small ideas like putting frozen grapes in wine is a wonderful step along the process of unlocking your full creative potential.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what’s so funny is that that can just sort of take you down a path in terms, “Oh, I can do the same thing for Gatorade. I have a frozen chunk…” or just insert beverage. Or, then you can extract is a little farther in terms of, “Oh, if I put a modified version of the like something on a something, it can be enhanced in some way.” I don’t know. Like, “I could extend my Post-it note by taking the same color sheet, I don’t know, and put it to the top of where the adhesive is,” whatever. I think there are some bad ideas along the way to good ideas, right?

Josh Linkner
Well, really, to go with that, I really like because you’re doing pattern recognition. You’re saying, “If this applies here, can I apply it there?” And that’s actually a wonderful technique to come up with creative ideas. We don’t need to be imbued by the gods with some original thought every 10 seconds. We can borrow from all these things around us. A lot of times innovation comes from borrowing from one part of life and applying it to another. So, that’s not a cheat. That’s actually a really productive approach.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, I dig it. Well, so then you talk about a number of particular simple habits that some creative folks like, Lady Gaga, Banksy, Lin-Manuel Miranda, have adopted that helped paved the way for their creative success. What are some of these habits?

Josh Linkner
Well, so you focused on helping people become awesome at their jobs, and if you want to be awesome at anything, I feel like you got to examine the mindsets, the habits, and the tactics of people who are awesome at something, and then you can replicate and follow their lead. So, that’s what I tried to do in the book.

I covered the eight core mindsets of everyday innovators, I covered a lot of tactics, which I’m happy to talk about with you, but I did, also, really examined, “What are the habits? What are the daily habits of people like Lady Gaga all the way down to normal people like you and me?” And what I really examined was a few different things.

First of all, people do work at it on a regular basis. There’s a real sense of habitual repetitiveness to it. And people are always changing those habits. It’s not like you just have to adopt one habit forever. It’s always in flux. What I do actually, I keep tweaking my own. I have a five-minute a day creativity habit that I do. It’s sort of like taking a shot of espresso for your creativity and it lasts me for the rest of the day. But even that, like since I wrote the book, I’d modified it a little bit and that’s kind of healthy. But I’m happy to give some, a really beginning entry. I know we’re not talking about tactical things on your show, but try this.

First of all, do an experiment 14 days. Instead of worrying about, “I’m going to do this forever for the rest of my life,” don’t over-commit. Try to for 14 days. Try this – two minutes a day. Two minutes, 14 days. Here’s how it goes. Minute number one, I call it guzzle inputs. In software engineering, they always say, “If you want to change the outputs of something, you got to change the inputs.” So, take one minute a day and just absorb the creativity of others. Maybe watch a YouTube video of a concert. Maybe you stare at a painting. Maybe you read a poem out loud. Nothing to do with you or your work, just guzzle creativity of others. And it’s sort of like priming the pump.

The second minute of your two-minute a day routine is try riffing on an unrelated problem. Pick up any problem. Look at a news source and just find any problem that has nothing to do with you, your life, or your career. So, maybe you see plastics pollution in oceans. So, okay, that’s nothing to do with you. And here’s what you do. Spend one minute, seeing how many small ideas you could think of that won’t cure it but will help it.

When we try to cure a problem all at once, it has to be so perfect that we just get all caught up and it’s hard to be creative. Don’t do that. Instead, say, “Can I come up with five little ideas that might help plastic in oceans? Can I come up with 13 little teeny baby things that might make a teeny little difference?” And so, here’s what happens. That’s like Jumping Jacks for your creativity. It’s getting your mind going on something that you’re not responsible for, it’s not going to impact your life. So, again, two minutes a day, one minute of inputs, one minute of outputs on an unrelated problem. Do that for 14 days and people will text me how crazy creative they feel.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting. And just to be clear, like it’s okay if your idea happens to be big, right? You shouldn’t be like, “Oops, no, that’s too big. Never mind. I did it wrong,” because as I’m thinking about plastics, I was saying, “Well, what are the plastics that actually dissolve over time into something that was healthy for the oceans? Or what if we had ships that already trans-oceanically moving have some nets and it gets some governmental subsidies?” So, those are kind of big but that’s okay. That’s not what we’re shooting for but if that’s what we land on, I mean, count it, it’s all good. Or, how do we think about that?

Josh Linkner
Fantastic. It’s great. By the way, I love those ideas. There’s creativity in action right there. Yeah, you don’t have to restrict yourself at all but here’s what happens. The risk is when we try to solve something that big all at once, we freeze up. If our goal is getting a Nobel Prize, or becoming a 10X billionaire, or something, it’s too complex and our mind is just locked, it’s deer-in-the-headlights. Whereas, if you start with little ideas, then, all of a sudden, you’re right, big ones come.

And just really quickly, since we’re talking about that, plan that question. So, here’s a perfect example from the book that I just love. There’s a problem in oceans that’s actually bigger than plastics. And the problem is cigarette butts. So, cigarette butts, I guess, is the bigger issue in ocean than plastics, and it also is a big problem in major cities. It’s a terrible environmental challenge when people discard their cigarette butts on the ground, and most major cities spend millions of dollars a year, no luck cleaning it up.

So, enter a guy, who I interviewed for the book, named Trewin Restorick. Trewin lives in Central London, he’s not a famous guy, he’s not a celebrity billionaire. He’s like a normal dude. Anyway, he was faced looking at this problem of cigarette butts, and none of the solutions had worked so far. So, he invents something called a Ballot Bin. A normal guy just had an idea. And a Ballot Bin works like this.

Let’s say you and I were having fish and chips at a London pub. We walk out into the street, we’re about to throw our cigarette butts on the ground but, instead, we see a glowing metal yellow box 10 feet away, maybe mounted on a pole. So, you walk a little closer and realize that this metal yellow box, the front of it is glass, and at the top, there’s a two-part question, like, “Which is your favorite food? Pizza or hamburger?”

And underneath each of those is a little slit where you can vote with your butts. In other words, you drop your cigarette butt in there and it falls in. There’s a divider so it’s almost like two bar charts, and you can instantly see which of these two selections is in the lead. And the thing is totally low-tech and it didn’t require a billion dollars, and it didn’t require six PhDs or regulatory approval, but the Ballot Bins work. And when these Ballot Bins were installed, Trewin told me, they reduced cigarette litter by up to 80%.

So, this guy, who just had an idea was like a normal guy, starts a company, now has 55 employees, and these Ballot Bins are in 27 countries, reducing cigarette litter. So, you’re exactly right, man. He came up with an idea. He just started riffing on small ideas, and that small idea actually became a really cool big idea, changed his life, changed his career.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s so fascinating is that gets me thinking, like, huh, what was so darn appealing about the Ballot Bin, I guess, it’s sort of like there’s maybe a bit of fun in terms of, “Ooh, I have an opportunity to cast a vote with this thing and I’m not going to let it go to waste.” I don’t know what’s going on in the psychology of the smoker.

Josh Linkner
Part of it is you’re not shaming the person into compliance. You’re involving them, it’s an optional thing, and everyone likes to express themselves and so they sort of capitalize, you’re right, on this human psychology of things, but it’s this really fun simple thing that any one of us could have come up with.

And it’s funny, like to me, that is the perfect example of what the book is all about and what a big little breakthrough is all about. Again, most of us look at SpaceX, and like, “Yeah, that’s pretty awesome. But who’s going to do that?” Most of us cannot. But most of us can come up with the Ballot Bins in our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. So, you mentioned we got mindsets, we got habits, we got tactics. When it comes to mindsets, you’ve got eight of them and you also call them obsessions. Can you tell us why the word obsession? And can you give us a quick overview of what are those eight?

Josh Linkner
Sure. So, just to give you a little backdrop. This is borne out of utterly 20 plus years of research on my own but in practical experience but, for the book, I interviewed people all over the globe. Some were people like Trewin that you’ve never heard of. I also interviewed billionaires, and celebrity entrepreneurs, and Grammy Award-winning musicians, and people from all walks of life.

And I tried to extract from these amazing people what are the commonalities, how do they think and act on a daily basis. And I kind of discovered these eight core mindsets. I call them obsessions because a mindset is sort of like, yeah, you think about it when you think about it. But an obsession is sort of like it’s ever-present. It’s a stronger word. And that’s how these people sort of live. These are ever-present guidelines as they think and act and perceive.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, what are they?

Josh Linkner
Well, I’m happy to share as many as you like but I’ll share a couple to start. And, by the way, most of these are counterintuitive. They’re the opposite of what we’ve been taught. So, one of them is called start before you’re ready. And, truthfully, most of us, we see an opportunity or a problem, and we wait, and we wait until we have a directive from the boss, or till we have a bullet-proof gameplan, or till we have ideal conditions, and the risk is that we just miss the opportunity altogether.

So, innovators of all shapes and sizes do the opposite. They just say, “Okay, I’m going to get started,” recognizing full well they don’t have all the answers. They recognize full well they need to pivot and adapt and adjust to changing conditions, and figure it out as they go but they don’t wait. They just get started and find their way.

Another one, again, most of these are counterintuitive, fall in love with the problem. A lot of times we’re all solution-oriented. We see a problem, and we’re like, “Okay, what’s the fastest idea that I could think of to solve the problem?” But then we become fixated on our solution rather than the problem itself and it may or may not be the best way to solve it.

The best innovators do the opposite. They become fixated on the problem they’re trying to solve. They bathe in it. They study it from all different angles. They look at it from all different lenses, and they are willing to quickly forego one potential solution in favor of a better one. So, they remain committed to solving the problem by whatever means necessary and that allows them to actually discover more innovative routes in doing so.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool.

Josh Linkner
One of them, there’s a couple fun ones. One of them is called don’t forget the dinner mint. And the idea behind the dinner mint, I’m sure you’ve been to a nice dinner, and at the end there’s, “Oh, here’s something, chocolate. Compliments of the chef.” And if you had ordered it, it would be nice, but because it was unexpected, it made all the difference in the world. And as a proportion of the restaurant’s overall cost structure, it was negligible, but that little dinner mint made a difference for you.

So, the translation for us as innovators, as everyday innovators, is when you ship a piece of work product, when you send an email, when you give a presentation, you say, “Okay, now that I’ve done what’s expected, what can I add? What’s a dinner mint that I could add? Maybe it’s a new fresh idea. Maybe it’s an extra formatting. Maybe it’s an over-delivery or a time saving.” But the idea is plus-ing it up with something unexpected to make it transcendent.

The root issue is that competence is not a competitive advantage with organization or a person. So, if you’re trying to get a promotion, you’re competing with four other people, just doing the job well and doing it on time and being pleasant, that’s table stakes. So, if you really want to get the promotion, you want to beat people to the punch, you have to look for what’s that little extra creative edge that you can add, extra little dose of creativity that can make you separated from the competitive pack.

And one other fun one, while we’re talking about fun ones, it’s called reach for weird. Most of us tend to gravitate toward the obvious tried and true approaches. Reach for weird is challenging us to find that bizarre, unexpected, unorthodox approach because sometimes those make all the difference in the world.

There’s a really fun example of that. There’s a little town in Iceland, and they were facing a problem in that traffic incidents involving pedestrians had risen 41% over a 10-year period. That’s people getting hit by cars. And so, how do you normally solve that? Well, you install more traffic lights, you hire more police officers, you issue bigger fines. The reach for weird approach, instead, is here’s what they did. They painted the crosswalks as an optical illusion.

So, as people are driving their car up, it looks like there’s slabs floating in thin air. And so, it completely encourages people to slam on the brakes instead of barrel through the intersection, solved the traffic problem, and it’s pretty fun for taking selfies. So, the little weird solutions that we may discard at first can ultimately lead to great gains.

Pete Mockaitis
That also reminds me of Katy Milkman. In her book, It’s somewhere in Europe, they wanted more people to take stairs instead of the escalator. And so, they turned the staircase into a piano, so like you’re making notes, and now it becomes just a whole lot of fun. You’re like do, do, do, do to utilize those. And that’s weird, no one had done it before, but it made the impact in terms of folks naturally think it’s now more fun to use those stairs because it’s a piano.

Josh Linkner
That’s a perfect example. I love her book, by the way. It’s a wonderful book. So, the other thing is the minds just interact. So, another one is called use every drop of toothpaste. So, the notion there is around being scrappy and resourceful. Even if we’re in a resource-constrained environment, because most of us don’t have billions of dollars to play around with, we can still be creative. And sometimes being that every drop of toothpaste can combine with being weird.

A quick example of that, you probably had this dilemma, I certainly had. You go to the market. You want to buy bananas. So, what do you do? Do you buy the yellow bananas or the green ones? If you buy the yellow bananas, they’re good today, four days later, the rest of the bunch is all mushy. You buy the green bananas, you have to wait like a month for a decent banana.

So, anyway, if you were in the banana business, what can you do about that? Not much. Well, this is the kind of fun one, it was a reach for weird approach, also using every drop of toothpaste because it cost them zero. They basically took the bananas off of the bunch and put them in a package organized by ripeness. So, imagine seven bananas next to each other, ranging from bright yellow to green. And as each day goes by, they’re perfectly timed, so your banana for that day is ripe.

And so, here’s the deal. First of all, they crushed the competition in terms of sales volume. Second of all, they’re charging three times per ounce of banana compared to the competitive set. So, really, it’s amazing. Weird is fun but weird simply works.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Josh, what’s so funny is I have actually plucked bananas across multiple bunches to get that same gradation from green to yellow, and never in my wildest dreams did it occur to me that, “Oh, they should just do this for me and charge me more.” I maybe even communicated that instruction to an Instacart shopper, or maybe I censored myself, it’s like, “This poor person already has enough on their mind. I’m not going to make their job any harder with my weird banana preferences,” but I thought about it.

So, okay, cool. So, those are some obsessions, some mindsets. And as you adopt those, and play, and role with those, it seems like you just get more ideas naturally because that’s what’s going on. I think, in particular, fall in love with the problem resonates because if you find that it’s enjoyable to explore and play with, as oppose to get rid of the darn thing as fast as possible, then you get more kind of reps or more minutes on engaged in the thing than kind of hurry up and find the answer and knock it out now, now, now, now.

Josh Linkner
That’s exactly right. And so, if you think about it, again, these three things, you got mindsets, we talked about a few of them; habits, we talked about a couple habits; and then we start to move into tactics. And, for me, I wanted this book to be a very pragmatic guide. It’s not just about your head in the clouds, go do be creative, draw all over the walls with crayons. It’s not that. It’s really saying, “Okay, how can we harness a skillset, human creativity, and deploy it for effective results?” And so, you get into tactics. Most of us, when we get together to come up with ideas, what do we do? What is it called?

Pete Mockaitis
Brainstorming.

Josh Linkner
Brainstorming. Here’s the problem. Brainstorming was invented in 1958, and I’m sorry, a lot has changed since 1958. And so, I kind of view brainstorming as outdated technology, an outdated tactic, because, actually, brainstorming is wildly ineffective. We tend to share our safe ideas; we hold our crazy ones back because we don’t want to look foolish.

So, the whole dynamic of brainstorming, where you’re spitting out ideas and everybody else judges them simultaneously and shoots you down and tells you, like everybody else becomes the idea police, and then you’re responsible if an idea doesn’t work out. It really, at best, yields mediocre ideas.

So, over the last many years, and I’ve interviewed people all over the world, I’ve developed a toolkit of 13 way-better techniques to generate ideas. I call them idea jamming because I don’t like brainstorming. And I’d be happy to share a couple of them. They’re actually really fun and they’re way more effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty.

Josh Linkner
Here’s one that works beautifully. It’s called role storming. So, role storming is brainstorming but in character. In other words, you’re pretending that you’re somebody else. Here’s a thing, if I’m in a normal brainstorming session and I’m brainstorming as me, and everybody else is judging me, again, I’ll share my safe ideas, hold my crazy ones back out of fear. But if I’m role storming, in other words I’m pretending I’m somebody else, I’m free.

Here’s an example. Let’s say I’m playing the role of Steve Jobs. No one’s going to laugh at Steve for coming up with a big idea. They might laugh at Steve for coming up with a small one. So, now I’m liberated. I’m playing Steve Jobs, I’m not responsible, I can say anything I want.

And it’s funny, man, I did this with a group of executives one time at Sony Japan. I met this guy. He was the stiffest human being I’ve ever met – dark suit, white shirt, his tie is strangling him. Anyway, we got him role storming as Yoda.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Josh Linkner
I’ve never seen personal transformation like this. This guy’s jacket is off, his tie is undone, he’s like leaping around the room, and the whiteboards were filled with ideas. And I didn’t teach him to be creative. He had that inside him but we needed to liberate him. He was in a role that forbid it.

So, the technique is actually really simple. Everybody in the room gets to choose anyone they want. You can be a hero. You can be a villain. You can be a movie star or a supermodel. You can be a sports legend or a literary figure. Anyone you want but you got to stay in character. And when you stay in character, attacking a real-world problem or opportunity, you’ll be blown away with the creative results.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Well, so let’s hear a tactic or two.

Josh Linkner
Sure. Another fun one, I recommend people trying, this is called a bad idea. It’s a bad idea brainstorm. So, presumably, we get together, we got a problem to solve, we’re responsible for coming up with good ideas. But the problem is, again, all this pressure, we get consumed with incrementalism. So, instead, here’s a way you do it. It’s a two-part brainstorm.

Step number one, set a timer for like 10 minutes and everybody in the room starts by coming up with bad ideas. What’s a terrible way to solve the problem? What’s the worst thing you can think of? What’s immoral or illegal or unethical? Again, you’re not going to do them. You’re just coming up with bad ideas.

Now, part two, crucially, is you then stop and examine the bad ideas, and say, “Wait a minute. Is there a little kernel? Is there a nugget in the bad idea that I can flip around to make it a good legitimate idea?” And so, what happens is you push your creativities so far to the limit, way beyond what you would ordinarily think, then, yeah, you need to ratchet it back to reality a bit, but it’s better going all the way and having to ratchet it back than trying to push spaghetti up a hill. So, that’s a fun one.

One that’s really simple, I call it the judo flip. So, let’s say, again, you’re trying to seize an opportunity or solve a problem. Start by taking an inventory. What have you always done before? What does conventional wisdom dictate? What is traditional thinking? How are things have normally been done in our industry on a problem like this?

Then you draw a line down the page, and next to every previous entry you simply ask the question, “What would it look like if I judo flip it? What would it look like if I did the polar opposite?” And what happens is that oppositional thinking can unlock really fresh ideas and help you break free from traditionalism.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, so I’m curious, those are some great things to do. What are some things we should stop doing?

Josh Linkner
One thing we need to stop doing is, really, the ideation process. Again, I call it idea jamming, really needs to be separate from the executional process, and we tend to squish them together. As mentioned, I come up with an idea, and the first thing you say, if you’re in the room, is, “Oh, that’s not going to fit in the PowerPoint slide. And, Jim, the boss, is never going to support it. That’s going to break the budget.” And so, we get so focused on the executional challenges that we extinguish our ideas prematurely.

A better approach would be to send your analytical brain out for Starbucks and let the ideas really fly. One of the things I like to do is I call it idea spewing. So, in other words, if you have an idea almost, or even call it idea sparking sometimes. An idea, it sort of means, “Oh, it’s an idea.” So, that merits scrutiny. But a spark or a spew, that implies that it’s early version. It’s the clay that has yet been molded to perfection.

And so, that helps us prevent the premature extinguishing of a good idea because, often, it’s not the first thing that comes to mind. It’s the idea that leads to the idea that leads to the next idea that’s the killer. And if you extinguish it prematurely, you can really cut yourself short.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. Well, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Josh Linkner
Sure. The core thing I would really reinforce to people is that every single person on this planet has creative capacity. Period. And, again, I’ve researched every academic journal neuroscience up and down. We all have the ability to be creative. And we can do so in our own ways.

Like, I play jazz guitar pretty well. I can’t draw a stick figure if I try. So, just because, if you’re listening, you can’t paint on canvas, doesn’t mean you’re not a creative person. You might express your creativity in the way you interact with a colleague or the way you solve a problem on a project. But, truthfully, we can all harness and build this.

And I always like to think about it like this. If you’re outside your home had an oil well, like you just learned that, oh, good news, in your backyard, on the property that you own, there’s a billion dollars of oil sitting under there. Pretty sure you wouldn’t be like, “Nah, forget it. I don’t really have time for that.” You’d be like, “Yeah, I’m going to go buy a drill and suck that, get that resource to the surface and use it.”

Well, I would suggest to everybody listening that we have that oil well and it’s inside of us right now. That’s dormant creative capacity. I have it, you have it, we all have it. And so, that’s our oil well. It’s waiting to be tapped. And when we bring it to the surface, we can unlock fresh possibilities which manifest in terms of winning more customers, and getting the promotion that you want, and making more money, and pursuing your calling, and driving impact. All those things that we crave, gaining competitive advantage, etc.

So, I just feel like if that dormant capacity is there, and we know we all have the ability to bring it to the surface, why not learn the mindsets, habits, and tactics to fully deploy it so that we can enjoy the results?

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

Josh Linkner
One of my favorites is a Chinese proverb, “Man who says it can’t be done, should not interrupt man doing it.” I’ve always loved that. It’s just so impactful.

And I have my own quotes, and I don’t really boast or anything. I say this with humility, but I’ve said this again and again as I was building my own company so much that my people got sick of hearing it, is that, “Someday, a company will come along and put us out of business. It might as well be us.” And that applies to us personally, too. Like, I feel that someday, like the Josh of tomorrow is going to put me out of business. Might as well be me.

And the notion there is that challenging ourselves and our organizations to proactively reinvent, to rethink our approach, to be the one to put ourselves out of business rather than waiting for someone else to do it. And that also ties to another quick quote, “If you don’t like change, you’re probably going to like irrelevance even less.” That’s from General Eric Shinseki.

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

Josh Linkner
One thing that’s so cool to me is that the littlest adjustments can actually unlock the biggest gains. So, there’s one study that I read about out of a university in Italy, where they brought people together, same demographics, age, education levels, divided them in two, and they showed each group a video, and then asked them to take a standardized creativity test.

The only difference was the video they were shown. One group was shown a really boring video, like sheep grazing in a meadow. The other group was shown an awe-inspiring video, majestic, cliffs, and soaring eagles, and all kinds of stuff. That was the only difference. They gave them the same test. The awe-inspired group outperformed the boring group by 80%. And it wasn’t like they learned a new skill in that three-minute video. It’s just that the brains that we have, we are hardwired to be creative, and the slightest adjustments can unlock fresh possibility as evidence in that example.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that makes me feel better about paying more for the office space with a great view.

Josh Linkner
Totally. I mean, think about that. Artists, musicians, playwrights went to inspiring places for years to do inspiring work, but most of our offices look like a sensory deprivation chamber, and then we wonder why we’re not delivering great creative work. So, yeah, you’re right. Environment matters for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Josh Linkner
Recently, I thought Adam Grant’s new book Think is excellent. Jon Acuff’s new book Soundtracks is excellent. One of my all-time favorites is by Robin Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari which is excellent and spiritually inspiring to me. So, it’s always hard to choose one. I guess one that I’ll just add to the list is Grit by Angela Duckworth which is also incredible.

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

Josh Linkner
Yeah, my favorite tool, I think, is really having a guitar in my hand. And I think the nice thing is we all can have our own muse. But the notion is whatever your muse is, whether it’s a painting or music, it’s just like having it nearby. So, when I’m stuck on a problem, I like grab my guitar and start noodling. And, of course, the guitar doesn’t solve the problem but it helps me solve the problem.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share, you already did one, that really seems to connect and resonate with readers and they quote it back to you frequently?

Josh Linkner
You know, I hear a lot about this concept of judo flipping, taking the traditional approach and flipping it upside down. I’ve had people come. I’ve been sharing that nugget for years and people come up to me years later, and like, “Hey, I was just in a board meeting and we couldn’t figure out what to do, and we judo flipped it.” So, that’s what I do hear frequently.

I think the other one I talk about often is this concept of option X. The general idea is that when we make decisions, when we’re trying to solve a problem, we very quickly go from unlimited possible ideas to a very short list. I think about it as A, B, and C. Somehow it becomes a multiple choice. And your A, B, and C choices are based on historical reference, they’re generally really safe, and we pursue those.

And I always just say, before you choose A, B, and C, just pause for one second, and say, “Wait a minute. Is there a D? Is there an E?” Or, I say, “Is there an option X?” which is that bold and provocative and unexpected idea that might make all the difference in the world.

One other quick add, I’ve written about this and I’ve gotten a lot of feedback, speaking of letters, reminded me. So, most of us pursue a career, and often it’s pretty safe, like we’re taught to play it safe. And then we build a secondary plan called a plan B, which is what happens if everything goes wrong, then that’s your plan B.

I would encourage people not to discard their plan B but have an extra plan, and it’s not what happens if everything goes wrong. It’s what happens if everything goes right. I call it your plan Z. So, the plan Z is expecting a good outcome instead of a bad one. And it’s like, “What would you do if you couldn’t fail? What would you do if you had a magic wand? What would you do if you’re pursuing your true calling?” And I’m not saying we should throw caution to the wind. Have a plan B. Awesome. But let’s not do that at the expense of also having a plan Z.

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

Josh Linkner
I would suggest you check out BigLittleBreakthroughs.com. Certainly, you can learn more about the book. But even if you don’t choose to buy the book, there’s a lot of free resources. There’s a free creativity assessment you can take, there’s a quick start guide, there’s all these downloadable worksheets on habits, mindsets, and tactics. So, it’s a good place. It’s a resource library, really, if you want to get your creativity on and take your game to the next level.

If you want to reach me, I’m on all social channels at my name Josh Linkner, and my personal website is just JoshLinkner.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Josh, this has been a treat. Thank you. And I wish you all the best in your creative adventures.

Josh Linkner
Thank you. You as well. I really appreciate the impact that you’re creating for everybody listening.

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

Susan Robertson
Thank you. I’m really excited to be here. Looking forward to our conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. Well, I’d love to get started by hearing, I understand you love salsa dancing. Can you draw the connection, has dancing helped you be more creative, and how?

Susan Robertson
I think, in many ways, yes, because I’m a social dancer, not a competitive dancer. So, competitive dancers learn and practice a routine, but social dancers, you are improv-ing in every moment. So, a leader is leading and a follower is following, and together you are creating the dance as you go. So, it’s a completely creative act in every dance. So, I do think that’s helped me be creative and allowed me to be more spontaneous and sort of let things flow.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so let’s talk about being spontaneous and creative and letting things flow. Can you, first of all, maybe make the case for why the typical professional should care about creativity or being creative in terms of like the tangible benefits? I think some folks might say, “Oh, you know, I’m not a designer or a musician. Why do I have to follow these processes that are quite spelled out at work?” So, can you lay it on us for why creativity is useful for everyone to have more of?

Susan Robertson
Yes, because when you’re a more creative thinker, you can more effectively solve whatever challenges appear in your life and you can more effectively seize whatever opportunities appear in your life. When you’re not a creative thinker, your thinking is limited in many ways that you are not aware of. There are a lot of neuroscience-based reasons behind that, but the bottom line is your thinking is limited. So, when challenges or opportunities arise, if you’re not familiar with some creative-thinking tools, your tendency is going to be, “I have a fairly limited set of ideas or reactions in response to those challenges or opportunities.” And if you have some creative tools at your disposal, you’ll have a broader range of possible ideas, actions, possibilities, outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you make that all the more real for us by maybe sharing an inspiring story of someone who upgraded their creativity and saw really cool benefits as a result?

Susan Robertson
I will, actually. This is someone who happened to take a workshop of mine, it was a multiple-day workshop. And she, at the time, was working in a huge corporation. And she was working in a job that she was technically trained for, that’s what her degree was in, but she was bored. She’d been there for 15 years and she was just tired of it. And she was seriously thinking about having to leave her company because she didn’t think there were any other options within her company for her.

So, she happened to take this workshop of mine on creative thinking, and about three months later, she called me and she said, “As a result of the creative thinking tools that I learned in your workshop, I went back to my office, I explored what it was I really wanted to do, and I looked around at what the company actually really needed, and I made a match between what I wanted to do and what the company needed. I created a new job title and a new job description, and I sold it into management and I now have that job.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go. Very cool. All right. Created the job and now you’re enjoying the job. I love it. Well, so you’ve got a big toolkit when it comes to boosting creativity. You said that particular person used some of the tools. Could you maybe give us some of the greatest hits right away? What would you say are maybe one of the top one, two, three tools from that toolkit for boosting creativity?

Susan Robertson
So, I’ll give you a couple. One that’s sort of easy and quick to describe and a couple others that maybe might take a little bit longer to describe. So, the first one that’s easy and quick to describe is one of the best ways, you know, to increase your creative thinking is to make a conscious separation between what’s called divergent thinking and convergent thinking.

So, divergent thinking is when we are looking for new ideas, exploring the blue sky, reaching, stretching, seeking newness. Convergent thinking is when we are evaluating ideas, deciding which ones are the best or have the most promise, and then optimizing those ideas and then choosing from amongst them. So, we do divergent and convergent thinking every day. All of us do both of them. But we don’t very effectively separate them in our everyday life. What we tend to do is mix them. We’re not aware that that’s what’s happening but that’s what’s happening.

And if you’re in a meeting, for example, here’s what it often looks like. Somebody says an idea and someone else says, “We don’t have time for that one.” And then somebody else says an idea, and somebody says, “That one will cost too much.” So, there’s an attempt at divergent thinking because there’s one idea and there’s an immediate convergent thinking, an evaluation or a judgment, and quite typically it’s a negative judgment. And if people are willing to continue to throw out ideas, like, “Okay, here’s another idea,” somebody else says, “Well, that won’t work with IT.”

So, we mix these convergent and divergent thinking all the time and it’s a bit like driving a car and having your foot on the gas, the break, the gas, the break, the gas, the break. You don’t really go anywhere very efficiently. It’s all kind of stutter-stop. And if what we can do instead is diverge for a while, meaning come up with many ideas with no judgment, neither negative nor positive, and then when we have a lot of ideas, then we start the convergent thinking phase which is evaluating which ones seem to have the most promise, optimizing those, and then deciding amongst them.

So, again, that’s making a conscious separation between divergent thinking (generating ideas) and convergent thinking (evaluating, optimizing, and choosing from ideas). So, that’s a foundational principle in creative thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s a foundational principle, and so we’ve got an analogy there in terms of the car, you’ve got your feet on the gas and the break at the same time. In terms of how that plays out, let’s say we’ve got a meeting, so what would be the expected impact of, let’s just say we have a 30-minute meeting? If we have 30 minutes that went divergent, convergent, divergent, convergent, divergent, convergent, you know, the shift off that happens a lot versus 15 minutes divergent, 15 minutes convergent, I mean, in a way, you might say, “Hey, we’re spending the same amount of time on each mental function, why does it matter if we have it together versus separated?”

Susan Robertson
Because you will actually get many, many more ideas if you do a conscious divergent phase, you will get more ideas. That’s been proven through research, and there are many reasons for it. But one of the reasons is because you’re go, go, go, go, go, go and you don’t have to stop and evaluate. If you have an idea then you evaluate, you have an idea, you evaluate, it’s a slower process.

A second reason why you’re going to have more ideas is because we know, again from both research and experience, that there’s something in creative thinking that’s called the rule of three. And what it really means is you have to sort of attack something three times before you get to the really good stuff. The best ideas come out later in a divergent thinking process. The most blue-sky ideas come out later.

What tends to happen early is the easy thought-of-before, tried-it-before, sort of tweak-on-what-happens-now ideas come first. And if those are constantly getting yes-but-ted, “Yes, but we don’t have time,” “Yes, but that’s not what IT wants,” the group will simply shut down. They’ll just stop generating ideas because no one has the wherewithal to just keep going at it when everything gets shut down. So, you won’t get as many ideas and you won’t get to the good ideas because you don’t get as many ideas.

So, when you make a conscious separation between divergent and convergent thinking, you’re going to get, one, more ideas. And, as a result of more ideas, you’re going to get, two, better quality ideas because it takes a while for the top-of-mind ideas to get spit out, and people have to dive deeper, think harder, to get to the newer and better ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s interesting in terms of the dive-deeper, think-harder, if you’ve established for 15 minutes for generating ideas and then, I don’t know 4 minutes in, “I’ve got a few ideas,” and then there’s just the silence, that’s just kind of uncomfortable for people.

Susan Robertson
Yes, it is.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re going to think of something else, if nothing else, but to escape this discomfort for the remainder of the 11 minutes.

Susan Robertson
Right. And can I explain to you kind of the neuroscience of what’s going on when that silence happens?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, let’s hear it.

Susan Robertson
Because there is a reason for it. So, in our brain, we have two systems of thinking called system one and system two, sometimes known as fast thinking and slow thinking. And system one thinking is the sort of quick everyday intuitive thinking that most of us do most of the time. System two thinking is deeper thinking, it’s harder work, it literally takes more calories for our brain to do system two thinking. So, as a result, our body tries to stay in system one thinking as much as it can because that’s an energy conservation principle, so we avoid going into system two thinking.

So, what you just described happens all the time. People throw out a few ideas and then they think, “I’m done. I don’t have anymore,” and the silence happens, that’s because all the system one ideas got exhausted, and those are the ones that I said they’re the easy to think of, tried-it-before, just a slight tweak on what exists today. Those are the ideas that come from system one thinking and you have to spend enough time and work hard enough to get your brain into system two thinking for the better ideas to come.

So, when that awkward silence happens, and people say, “I don’t have anymore ideas,” whoever is facilitating the meeting needs to, at that point, do something to help people stimulate more ideas that sort of forces them into system two thinking. Because if you just say, “Okay, people said they’re out of ideas, so I guess they are,” they’re not out of ideas. They’re only out of system one easy ideas and you have to go longer, work harder to get to system two ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s a nice explanation and it rings true. That’s just not what happens very often unless you’re really aware of it and consciously thoughtful about doing it. And so then, well, let’s hear that. You mentioned there’s a silence, and then something needs to be done to get them fired up again. What is that something?

Susan Robertson
Well, some sort of stimulus activity that prompts people’s brains to sort of turn back on, and they can be easy or complicated. But an easy one would be, “Okay, how would a submarine captain solve this problem, or what ideas would they have? Or what ideas would Oprah Winfrey have? Or how would a kindergartener solve this problem?” And any of those kinds of prompts will help people start to come up with new ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s so funny, I’m on a board and we frequently reference another nonprofit, it’s like, “So, what’s FOCUS doing here?” And it has served us well again and again. But it need not be sort of a direct corollary analogue. It can be kind of whacky like Oprah or something.

Susan Robertson
And, actually, it probably sparks more creative ideas if it’s not sort of a direct competitor or a similar industry. If it’s something actually radically different, will spark more creative thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so let’s have some fun and play that out in practice. So, let’s say we’re trying to figure out how to reduce costs, let’s make it real broad, and we’ve had a couple ideas, like, “Oh, we can print double-sided on the printer, and we can switch to a cheaper caterer for the team lunch,” whatever. Okay, so we’ve got some lame ideas. No offense if you just proposed that idea, anybody. And so then, we’re kind of stuck, so you might throw out a stimulus. And can you play it, a demo, how would that unfold then?

Susan Robertson
Okay. So, will you play along with me?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it, yeah.

Susan Robertson
Okay. So, this is one of my favorite types of stimulus, and this is called a get-fired idea.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Susan Robertson
All right? So, I want you to think of an idea that would solve the problem, in other words, it would dramatically reduce costs. But if you actually did it, you would get fired. So, again, I’m going to repeat the instruction. It would solve the problem. But if you actually did it, you would get fired because it’s so ridiculous in some way. It’s either illegal, it’s dangerous, it’s immoral, or it would cost us a million dollars before we got to the cost saving so it would solve the problem but it’s completely ridiculous. So, can you think of an idea like that to save costs?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. We cancel the lease on the building, and say, “You know what, no thanks.”

Susan Robertson
Okay, excellent. That’s perfect. Cancel the lease on the building. All right. So, now what you need to do is you need to go through a process, which I’m going to describe, that helps you extract something interesting from that idea so that you can take the interesting piece and lose the problematic piece, all right? So, now this process I call GPS thinking.

And GPS stands for great problem solving, and it’s a three-step process. G, great, you have to first list everything about that idea that is potentially great. What’s potentially great about that idea? You make a long list. Step two, you articulate the problems in that idea but with one critical difference. And that critical difference is you need to articulate the problem in the form of a how-to question. And then step three is you solve for those problems by modifying the idea but keeping something you thought was great. So, we’re going to play that out on your idea.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Susan Robertson
So, the idea is, “Cancel the lease.” So, G, great, what’s potentially good about that idea of cancelling the lease?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, the rent on the office building we inhabit is a pretty significant recurring expenditure, so we’re striking at it. It’s a big pie that we go after. That’s something good about it.

Susan Robertson
What else? What else might be good about it?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, right now, in COVID, landlords have less bargaining power and negotiating power. In a corporate lease office space, I don’t know how it works. But, like, there’s eviction clauses that say you just can’t kick people out for not paying. There’s more interest in people working from home, so there’s probably less overall, there may be, to be determined, less interest in office space to be leased, so you might have a strong negotiating position to work from.

Susan Robertson
Yup. And let’s broaden it out even besides things that might not be solely cost-related. Like, if we let people work from home, they might have a better quality of life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Susan Robertson
They might be able to spend that one hour that they typically commute doing a little extra work. We might be able to find better employees that are in a remote city that we, otherwise, wouldn’t have been able to hire. So, you want to come up with a divergent list of lots of things that are potentially interesting about that idea, not just the one sole thing, okay?

All right. So, now we’ve got a list of potentially good things. So, now let’s go to the P, problem, that’s step two, but, again, we’re going to articulate that problem in the form of a how-to question. So, instead of saying, “We can no longer work effectively,” instead you would say something like, “How do we continue to work effectively without our offices?” Are there other problems in that idea that you see?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. How do we escape a lease that is legally binding?

Susan Robertson
Yes. What other potential problems might you see in that idea?

Pete Mockaitis
How do we continue looking legit to clients and customers without a proper office?

Susan Robertson
Uh-huh. And do you see what I’m doing? I’m pushing you to continue to diverge because in divergent thinking you want to make a long list of ideas or, in this case, of questions. So, in the interest of time, I’m not going to keep pushing you, but if you were doing this in reality, you actually would. I would’ve pushed you harder on what else is great about it, and I would’ve pushed you harder on more questions. But in the interest of time, let’s move on.

All right. So, let’s move to step three, solving. So, which of those problems do you think is the most urgent or the biggest one that we would have to solve for first before we would ever kind of begin to move forward on a modified version of this idea?

Pete Mockaitis
How can we escape a lease that we’re legally bound to?

Susan Robertson
How can we escape? All right. So, let’s now start solving for that idea by changing the original idea but keeping something about it you thought was great. So, for example, instead of simply abandoning the lease, we could renegotiate with the landlord for we would sign on for more years at a lower rate, might be one potential idea, right? What other potential ideas might you see?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. We take an underutilized wing of our floor and convert that into a hip coworking space that we rent out, earning revenue to offset some of our lease bill each month.

Susan Robertson
Excellent. And that makes me think of another idea which is we renegotiate with the landlord for a smaller space and we desk rotate. So, today, I work in the office and you work at home, and tomorrow you work in my office and I work at home.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Susan Robertson
So, this process of taking a crazy idea and then working it to extract the interesting parts and to let the bad parts fall away is exactly what you want to have happen in creative thinking. And when I said earlier that you want to do divergent thinking first and then convergent thinking, part of convergent thinking is improving and optimizing ideas. So, we were doing some divergent thinking in what’s good about it. We did some divergent thinking on what are the questions or problems we have to solve. And we’ll do now a little bit of both divergent and convergent thinking in optimizing.

So, we’re optimizing that original idea. And if we were to continue to do this, we would probably come out with several potential ideas that we thought were viable. Now, not that that’s the end. Obviously, we’d have to go explore whether they really are viable or not. And that fact-finding piece that sort of developed the idea is another part of the creative problem-solving process. But to stimulate ideas, that get-fired idea, which is where we started, is one of my favorites. And then you have to go through a conscious process to extract the interesting parts and solve for the parts that are not working.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And before we go into that GPS process, we’re going to get lots of ideas before we even start on one of them.

Susan Robertson
Exactly. We’re going to get lots of ideas, we’re going to diverge on lots of ideas, then we’re going to converge on a few, which ones we think hold the most promise or going to make the biggest dent. And, as you said early on, rent is going to make a huge dent because it’s one of our biggest costs. So, that would probably be one that would stay on the list when we converge. And then we’d go through that GPS process on the short list, on each of them individually.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Lovely. Well, so it seems like we’ve kind of gotten into it, but you’ve got “10 Rules for Brainstorming Success.” I have a feeling we’ve hit a couple of them already. Can you lay it out, quick time, 1 to 10?

Susan Robertson
So, the first rule is freedom from the fear, and that is the fear of saying a crazy idea. Because, in a group, people are very afraid of saying a crazy idea so you have to make it okay to do that. And the easiest way to make it okay to do that is to pull aside, in advance, the most senior person who’s going to be in the room and tell them, “Your job is to throw out the craziest idea you can possibly think of early on so that people know they have permission to do that.” So, that’s the easiest way to free them from the fear.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Susan Robertson
The second thing, use the power of the group. And what I say use the power of the group, that means you want to build and combine ideas. Don’t just have a bunch of people, they’re all doing something individually. You want to have them working together, working in pairs, and saying, “Oh, that idea made me think of this,” or, “What did you think of when you heard his idea about the cookie?” That’s numbers two, use the power of the group.

Number three, get some outside stimulus. And that’s like, I talked about, what would Oprah do, or what would a submarine captain do. That’s outside stimulus. But outside stimulus can also be, literally, leave your office, go somewhere else, go to an art museum. Those kinds of things also make a big difference. Talk to your customers, that’s also outside stimulus. You have to let some crazy in the room.

So, I often hear people say at the beginning of an idea session or a brainstorming session, “We don’t need a lot of ideas. We just need a few good ones.” Yeah, we know. But the research shows us that in order to get to a few good ones, you have to have, one, a lot of ideas and you have to have, two, some completely ridiculous ideas, like that get-fired idea we just talked about. Like, getting out of the lease on the building. Because if you don’t have some crazy ideas, you’re never actually going to have newness. You’re only going to have tweaks on what you do today or what you know today. So, encourage the crazy, that’s number four.

Number five, it’s a numbers game so it is about quantity. Quantity will lead to quality. And that’s, again, because we know we have to get past those system one ideas to get into system two. That’s where the better ideas come so you need lots of them. Number six, laugh a lot because humor always helps and stimulates creative thinking.

Number seven, homework is required. There’s a lot of research that proves that if people are warned in advance what the topic of the meeting is, and they have some time to incubate it in advance, they will come to the meeting prepared and better ideas will come. So, do tell people the objective of the meeting, ask them to start thinking of it in advance, and it will happen.

Number eight, it’s not for amateurs. I am giving you tips to do this on your own, but actually if you’re going to do it on something truly significant, it’s better to hire a facilitator, and even if that means pulling in someone who’s not working on the project. What I really mean is the owner of the project, the one who’s ultimately responsible for the result should not be running the meeting because it divides their attention too much.

They’re having to pay attention to the content or the ideas but they’re also having to pay attention to the time and, “Is lunch coming?” and, “Who’s late?” and, “Do we need a bathroom break?” And if you have, if you can separate the content and the process, you’ll have a much better result. So, when I say it’s not for amateurs, hire a facilitator. It does mean hire a professional facilitator if you can. But if you can’t, you need to get someone in to run the meeting who has nothing to do with the content. They’re going to manage the process.

Number nine, if it looks like a duck but doesn’t act like a duck, it’s not a duck. Meaning, if you’re not going to follow the rules for good creative thinking or good brainstorming, don’t bother because it’s not going to be effective, and people are going to realize in the moment that it’s not effective. And if you want to invite them back another time to do it again on another topic, they’re not going to come if they know it wasn’t effective, so you need to follow the rules for good brainstorming.

And, number ten, you’re not done until you decide, meaning you have to have the convergent thinking, and I recommend that you have it in the same session, that you don’t postpone it for later. So, that’s why I said the rule is 50% diverge, 50% converge. Don’t postpone the convergent thinking for multiple reasons, because often it just gets postponed indefinitely, but also because people feel no sense of closure around it.

If you leave with a hundred ideas and no closure, people, again, feel like it wasn’t effective and it then becomes much harder for someone to make a decision on which ideas are best, and, also, the people who participated in the brainstorming should also participate in the converging so that they have some say on which ideas go forward so that they can tell why they think this idea is a good one or not, as opposed to some individual person reviewing all the other ideas later and making a decision. So, those were the 10 rules. That was really fast.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I like it. I like it fast. Well, I think one of my favorites is right toward the beginning in terms of eliminate the fear by having a senior person, told quietly in advance, to say an outrageous idea. I think that’s probably a lot of fun for everybody, especially if that someone is pretty reserved and they don’t do that, they’re like, “Well, we can hire a bunch of convicts from the prison to do this at a great price.” It’s like, “Whoa,” it seems like that can just instantly say, “Okay, this is what we’re doing right now.”

Susan Robertson
Yeah. And sometimes if that senior person is a little bit more hesitant or a little bit more introverted, you might have to seed the idea.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Susan Robertson
Like, you tell them an idea and just say, “Just say this idea.” That will help them make it easier for them, too. So, what you’re trying to do here is make it as easy as possible for everyone, including that person.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. That’s great. Well, so we’ve got so much to hear. Let’s talk about the curse of knowledge. What is it and how does that make things tricky for us?

Susan Robertson
The curse of knowledge is the phenomenon that any topic that you have some experience or some expertise in, you actually have a curse of knowledge, meaning your thinking around it is limited in ways you don’t realize. So, again, I’m going to play a game. Will you play along with me?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Susan Robertson
Okay. All right. So, give me some new ideas for salad dressing, as quick as you can. Whatever comes to mind.

Pete Mockaitis
They have to be new, huh?

Susan Robertson
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, I’m just thinking of old ones. Ranch. Caesar. Italian. Okay, I could use one as a salad dressing, it’s pre-existing. I could use fish oil and pepper. Zesty.

Susan Robertson
Oka. All right. That’s good. That’s enough. So, you actually went a little more divergent than many people often do. So, I’ll tell you what typically happens when I have people do that exercise. Typically, what people do is name flavors, and you sort of did that. I mean, you named unusual flavors, I’ll give you that, but you basically combined some flavors in a liquid, which is what salad dressing is.

And here’s the reason why our thinking is limited and it is the curse of knowledge. So, what happened in your brain when you heard me say salad dressing is you made a bunch of subconscious assumptions about salad dressing and also about salad. And they were things like, “Well, salad dressing is liquid. It comes in a bottle. I put it on lettuce. I probably store it in the refrigerator, and I probably eat the resulting salad from a bowl or a plate with a fork.” Right? You probably made some or maybe all of those assumptions about salad and salad dressing, and that is the curse of knowledge because that is your experience with current salads and salad dressing.

But if you could say, “All right. Let’s take one of those assumptions and say, ‘How can we make that not have to be true?’” So, let’s take you don’t eat salad with a fork. How can we take the idea of salad dressing and to make it so you don’t eat salad with a fork? Now, give me an idea for a new salad dressing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, what’s funny, what I thought you’re going with that is this is one to take away would be a lettuce, “Oh, it could be a fruit salad, it could be a taco salad,” then that changes everything in terms of what you think you want to stick on it. But if I don’t eat it with a fork, I guess if I eat it with a spoon, well, now I’m thinking about those quinoa bowls. It’s not a salad per se but it’s salad-esque. There are some veggies mixed in with quinoa or beans with a spoon.

Susan Robertson
But can you think of something to make salad dressing enable that?

Pete Mockaitis
The salad dressing enables it.

Susan Robertson
Yeah, for example, salad dressing is no longer liquid. It now comes in a skewer and you skewer the vegetables onto this edible stick which is the dressing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s definitely innovative.

Susan Robertson
Right. And that’s the point, right? That’s the point. I said I want new ideas for salad dressing. New. Really new. Truly new. So, when you’re looking for truly disruptive ideas, like radically new ideas, you have to get out of your curse of knowledge. And we all have a curse of knowledge around anything we have experience in, but we have even more curse of knowledge around something that we’re very expert in. Because when we’re very expert, we have many, many, many of those subconscious assumptions that we’re not aware that limit our thinking. And you have to break out of those to get to truly disruptive ideas.

I’m going to tell you a story about the curse of knowledge, actually, about my grandmother. So, my grandmother was an excellent bridge player, the card game bridge. I don’t think anybody plays anymore of it, but my grandmother was really…

Pete Mockaitis
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, they play bridge.

Susan Robertson
Yeah. My grandmother was really good, I mean, to the point that other people would ask for advice, and they would say, “I had this hand the other day and it was like this. What should I have done?” and she would give them advice. Anyway, one year at Christmas, my brother, my sister-in law, and I decided to ask our grandmother to teach us how to play bridge because that seemed like a good idea. And she attempted it and it turned out to be a disaster. She was a terrible bridge teacher.

And, in hindsight, I now know the reason why. It was because she had this curse of knowledge. And the exchange I remember the most vividly was she was trying to explain to us the concept of a singleton, which is a single card in a suit, like you only have one diamond in your hand. And we said, “Why is that good? Why is a singleton good?” And she said, “Because it’s a single card in one suit.” And we said, “Okay, but why is that good?” And she said, “Because it’s a singleton.” And we said, “But why is that good?” And she repeated, “Because it’s a single card in one suit.”

And, obviously, she wasn’t explaining it because she didn’t understand what we didn’t understand because her knowledge was so high, she didn’t even understand what we didn’t understand. And my aunt was sitting off to the side laughing as she’s listening to all this, and she finally said, “It’s good because you can play it early. And once it’s gone out of your hand, you’re now allowed to play a trump card when you no longer have any more of that suit.” And my grandmother actually said, “Well, everybody knows that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, everybody knows that.

Susan Robertson
Like, “No, you know that because you’re an expert.” And do you see how it truly limited her thinking? Like, she couldn’t even understand what we didn’t understand. So, the more expert you are, the more curse of knowledge you have around your own topic. So, one of the things you can do, in a creative session to get around the curse of knowledge, is bring in people into the session who are not experts, which is counterintuitive.

Most people think that when you have a brainstorming session, what you need to do is gather a bunch of experts and have a brainstorming session, and that’s not exactly true. You do need some expertise, yes. Absolutely, you do. But you also need some people who aren’t experts because they don’t have the same curse of knowledge.

And the other thing you can do is very specific tools, like the one I just showed you, that help break our curse of knowledge. And the one I just showed you I call assumption busting. So, in our salad dressing example, I said, “Okay, here are the assumptions you were making, right? You have to surface those assumptions and then consciously break them to get to the breakthrough ideas.”

And there’s a way to help people surface their assumptions because they’re not conscious of them at the beginning. And the way to help people surface their assumptions is to give them some sentence starters, like, “Well, in our industry, we always…” fill in the blank. Or, “Well, of course, we can’t…” fill in the blank. Or, “Our customers would never…” fill in the blank. Or, “We can’t…” fill in the blank.

And when they fill in the blank, they’re going to be listing those assumptions that were before subconscious, and you’re making them conscious. And then you do that exercise that I just did, “So, what if we can make that not be true?” And that’s how you break them, and then you come up with more disruptive ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I guess with salad, it’d be like, “Hey, salad is typically…” blank, or, “Salad is always…” blank, or, “When I order a salad, I expect it to be…” blank. And the surface is we lose the things.

Susan Robertson
Exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And that stick, it really does kind of bend my brain, the stick. I’m thinking about, well, it’s a sponsor, Athletic Greens. It’s a delicious green fruit-vegetable powder supplement you typically drink with water, you blend it in. But I’m thinking about what’s the Lick Em Dip Em sticks with the sugar. Like, if you can have a dressing for that salad that complements the flavors of the green powder which is kind of wild.

Susan Robertson
Exactly. Or you just sprinkle it on the lettuce and it’s active. The flavor is activated by the moisture of the lettuce.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure, yeah. Activated flavor. Well, let’s talk about that fear point. So, you shared, “Hey, if you’re facilitating the meeting, here’s the easiest thing you can do to bust fear.” If you’re not facilitating the meeting and you feel some internal fear, how do you recommend we just kind of push past that psychological resistance so that we are bold and proclaim what we have to say?

Susan Robertson
Well, I think it’s less about an individual pushing past it and it’s more about creating the climate. So, it is about the group. It’s very difficult for an individual to push past it particularly if the rest of the group has a tendency to do that quick convergent thinking that shows up as yes-but, “Yes, but it won’t work,” “Yes, but we don’t have time,” “Yes, but it costs too much.” If that’s the environment, it’s very difficult for any individual to step out of that. It almost requires too much. So, it is about the group.

So, if you’re in a group, even if you’re not leading the meeting, theoretically, and you see this phenomenon happening, the yes-but-ting happening, what you can do is very gently suggest, “Hey, how about if we just try throwing out a bunch of ideas without responding to any of them, and then when we have a bunch, then we can respond?” So, what you’re doing is encouraging them to diverge, give a bunch of ideas before they converge because that converging is almost always negative when it happens in the moment.

If you want the neuroscience behind why that is, we can go there. But it is really more about a group than an individual just…I mean, you can as an individual say, “I’m just going to ignore whatever everybody else thinks, and ignore what anyone else is saying, and ignore when I get yes-but-ted.” But it’s hard to persevere in a yes-but environment on your own.

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

Susan Robertson
I do want to mention the reason why that initial reaction to most ideas is negative.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, yeah.

Susan Robertson
Because it’s really also a foundational principle in creating thinking and it’s important to understand. So, I mentioned earlier a little bit about neuroscience, like we have two systems in our brains, system one and system two, and our brain tries to stay in system one to conserve energy. And one of the challenges that arises from that is a set of things called cognitive biases. And you already mentioned the curse of knowledge which is one cognitive bias.

But another cognitive bias that really gets in our way is called the negativity bias. And the negativity bias is the phenomenon that negative experiences have a more powerful impact on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors than positive experiences do. And as a result, we are highly motivated to avoid negative. We’re much more motivated to avoid negative than we are motivated to seek out positive. And that’s the reason why the gut instinct response to any new idea is, “Yes, but…” and here’s the problem.

Because we are trying to avoid the negative, and we’re more motivated by that than we are motivated by looking for the positive. So, one of the things you can do to set a climate that helps get past this negativity bias is teach everyone that GPS method that I already talked about.

And the way we used it as a specific tool to evaluate an idea, but it is also, and probably more importantly, simply a mindset to adopt when you’re generating ideas. So, if you can teach people that GPS thinking as a mindset and as a climate that you’re going to adopt when you’re generating ideas, you will automatically reduce the fear because people are going to see, “When I throw out a crazy idea, everybody is going to respond to it in this more positive way by saying, ‘What’s potentially good about it?’ and then they’re going to help me solve for the problems in it, instead of just saying, ‘Yes, but…’”

Because when you say an idea and somebody else says, “Yes, but…” it makes you feel like you were stupid for saying the idea. But when you say an idea and other people say, “Here’s what’s good about it Here’s what we might need to solve for,” then you feel like, “We’re collaborating now,” instead of, “They just judged me and found me stupid.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. And then that momentum is just flowing in that place.

Susan Robertson
Yup.

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

Susan Robertson
“I can’t control everything that happens in life but I can control how I respond to it.”

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

Susan Robertson
There was some research that they did with kids. They gave a bunch of kids some tests of creative thinking, and 95% of the kindergarteners scored in what would be termed highly creative. And then they gave the same kids in fifth grade the same tests and the results had nearly reversed. Now only about 5% of the kids scored in what was highly creative. So, the moral of the story is we un-learn our creativity. But the good news is we can re-learn it and regain it and leverage it to our benefit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite book?

Susan Robertson
Actually, instead of a book, can I give you a TED Talk?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Susan Robertson
I love Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on “Do schools kill creativity?” It’s an excellent, excellent talk. He makes amazing points and it is a powerful learning.

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

Susan Robertson
I use a website called Stormz, and it is designed specifically for brainstorming and creative thinking sessions, and it makes it so easy. And it’s enabled for online so you can have a remote brainstorming session, everybody working remotely, but they put all their ideas in one place. It’s a brilliant tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Susan Robertson
Yeah, you’re probably familiar with the idea that some people are people-oriented and some people are task-oriented. And I find that I’m very task-oriented in particular when I’m writing or responding to emails. So, my habit has become when I write an email or respond to an email, I type whatever it is I think I need to say, and then I pause before I hit send, and I read it again, and I make sure to change it to say something like, “How are you doing? How’s your son? Did he pass that test you were talking about?” because, otherwise, my emails are, very…they sound very cold because they’re so task-oriented, and I warm them up with some people orientation as an afterthought.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks quoting it back to you frequently?

Susan Robertson
“Let some crazy in the room.”

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

Susan Robertson
My website SusanRobertson.co.

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

Susan Robertson
Start keeping track of how many times you say or hear, “Yes, but…” in a day, and it will motivate you to stop doing it and start responding more creatively to ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Susan, this has been a treat, and I wish you lots of luck in your creative endeavors.

Susan Robertson
Thank you.

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

Stephen Shapiro
Well, I’m very excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to have you. And I, first, want to hear a little bit about your childhood dream of being a gameshow host. What’s the story?

Stephen Shapiro
Growing up, I would watch The Gong Show which was one of my favorite shows because it was just so ridiculously goofy and, in particular, Chuck Barris, who was the host, was just, I mean, I loved how animated he was and how crazy he was, and I just became so fascinated with him. And, in fact, I got to meet him at BookExpo one year, which, to me, was sort of a weird dream come true.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Do you have a particular game show host voice or style that you would engage in, and could we hear a sample?

Stephen Shapiro
Oh, I think it’d probably be Chuck Barris, like, “Oh, man, this is like just the craziest act I’ve ever seen.” I just loved his physical animation, his voice animation, the craziness, the antics. It was, I don’t know. I just thought it was a lot of fun.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I think that in high school I actually won the award for, you know, the senior superlatives, like, “Most likely succeed, yadda, yadda,” Most Likely to Host a Gameshow, which was very specific and a peculiar category that they had. It’s not a game show but, sure enough, I’m hosting a show. The seniors were right.

Stephen Shapiro
Well, that’s awesome. So, if you were to do a gameshow, I’m just curious, what gameshow do you love? Like, if you were to be a gameshow host, which one would you want to be a host of?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, I’m not an aficionado by any means, but I thought the most ridiculous concept, which was cracking me up, was Awake, it was on Netflix, it’s newer. And it’s about people who are sleep-deprived and have to tackle these challenges because I’m a big fan of sleep. It’s a recurring theme on the show. And I think that that just very much resonates, like, “Yeah, I can’t do jack when I’m sleep-deprived,” and neither can many of these contestants.

Stephen Shapiro
Oh, that’s awesome. I’m going to have to check that one out.

Pete Mockaitis
They have to like count quarters, like, all night. It’s a goofy concept but it provides a powerful, I think, reminder for being awesome at your job is get enough sleep. So, that’s one tip. But I want to hear, you’ve got more than one, nay, 25 lenses that reframe and help solve difficult business problems in your book Invisible Solutions. And so, I’m intrigued because, wow, that’s a lot of lenses. I like that. So, lay it on us, you’re an innovation expert. What’s the big idea behind this book here?

Stephen Shapiro
Well, we’re always trying to solve complex problems and, unfortunately, the biggest mistake we make in trying to solve problems is to focus on the solution, because if we’re solving the wrong problem, we’ll never get the right answer. And we don’t take enough time to step back and say, “Am I asking an important question? Am I solving an important problem? And have I reframed the problem in a way that will allow me to get better or at least different solutions?” And so, it really comes back to the question. The questions we ask are going to drive the solutions that we get.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so that makes sense to me. Could you perhaps make it come to life for us with a vivid example in terms of a person or a team banging their head against the wall, making minimal progress, because they weren’t asking a great question and then the transformation they experienced when they started doing right?

Stephen Shapiro
Sure. So, one which I really like because it demonstrates a really great thought process is a team of dental experts who were trying to create a whitening toothpaste. And pretty much all whitening toothpaste uses abrasives or bleach and they decided they wanted to tackle the problem, “How do we create a whitening toothpaste that doesn’t use abrasives and doesn’t use bleach?” and they spent a lot of time and spent a lot of money trying to come up with complex chemical compounds and new formulas, and they didn’t find anything until somebody shifted the question. And it’s a really profound question because it’s only two words, it’s, “Who else?”

And so, when they shifted it to instead of saying, “How do we, the dental experts, solve this particular problem?” they asked, “Who else has solved a similar problem?” And so, they asked, “Who else makes whites whiter?” and in this case, they realized it’s laundry detergent, and the company that was working on this problem, in addition to having a dental care division, also had a laundry detergent division, and they found the solution by talking to the people in laundry care…

Pete Mockaitis
Convenient.

Stephen Shapiro
…which is a completely…and it was a totally different solution, a crazy solution, but it actually worked.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Ooh, what do you know, we’ve got laundry experts in our same company.” That’s really handy. So, okay, “Who else?” that’s a handy question. So, then let’s talk about just that. So, you say, in many ways, it starts by asking better questions. So, what are some of the best ways we can go about doing just that?

Stephen Shapiro
Well, the first step is to recognize that we have a lot of assumptions in the questions that we’re working on. We do tend to limit our ability to find new paths because we tend to do what’s worked in the past. So, the first thing is to just really question, like, “We’ve always done it this way. We’ve never done it this way.” Once you start hearing people say that, that really, to me, should be a red flag to say, “Hmm, are we really moving in the right direction or are we just moving in the direction we’ve always moved in the past?”

And then, once you acknowledge that our questions tend to be not well-formulated, then you need a process of deconstructing the problem. So, in a lot of cases, for example, we’ll ask big broad questions, like, “Okay, how can I improve the business?” Well, that’s a big question. If I asked a thousand people who worked for a company to give me their ideas on how to improve the business, I’d probably get 10,000 ideas, of which almost none of them will really be valuable. So, we need to go through that process of stepping back, and saying, “What are we really trying to solve here?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. So, then that’s so broad. We might zoom into, I don’t know, well, now my strategy consulting hat is coming on, it’s like, “Well, hey, there’s either, financially speaking, increasing revenue or reducing costs.” And then you could talk even more broadly in terms of like environmental, stewardship, corporate responsibility. Like, improve business, I hear you, has many, many different lenses or layers to it. So, I guess what is the right level of broadness or breadth? Because in your example, I can see it’s too broad but I think you might get maybe too narrow in the sense of, “How can we increase our toothpaste revenue by 4% or more?” I feel like you’re probably going to be missing out on some real gems if you get that narrow.

Stephen Shapiro
Well, exactly. I mean, I call it the Goldilocks Principle because sometimes they’re too soft, the bed is too soft, or they’re too broad, too abstract, and sometimes they’re too specific, they’re too hard. And so, we need to just make sure we’re asking questions that are just right, and that takes practice. Like you were saying, there are some fantastic examples of where a problem was framed to assume that the solution came from a particular area of expertise, and by opening it up, new solutions were developed.

So, my favorite story is actually the Exxon Valdez oil spill back in 1989. For 20 years, for nearly two decades, they were trying to solve the problem of, “How do we prevent an oil water mixture from freezing?” and couldn’t find a solution. And when they shifted the question to something that was less specific that had nothing to do with oil or temperature, but it was actually a common food dynamics issue which is called viscous sharing, which basically means a dense liquid, if it’s put under force or acceleration, it will start to act like a solid. They found a solution in six weeks by somebody working in the construction industry working with cement. So, there’s that little art of being able to ask better questions, not too broad or too specific.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so lay it on us, it’s an art but for us non-artisans, how can we start to do a little bit better right away?

Stephen Shapiro
Well, the first thing is to ask yourself, “Am I assuming that the solution is going to come from a particular area of expertise?” And if it is, well, then try to broaden it. If it’s too generic… so I’ll give some of the lenses. That’s probably the best way to go. So, if I’m asking the question, “How do I improve revenues?” One of the lenses that I might want to focus on is what is called the leverage lens. The leverage lens is the first one, and it basically says, “If I could only solve one part of this problem, what would it be?”

[09:07]

So, you might ask, “Well, where do we get our greatest revenues right now? Who are our most profitable customers? Where are our most profitable geographies? What are our most profitable products? Wherever it might, how we maybe focus on that.” So, that might be the first step is to find the leverage point. Or you can use the second lens which is to deconstruct it, to say, “Well, I don’t even know what’s most important but let me break it down.” Like you did. “Well, revenues could be made up of a combination of a number of different factors. There’s financial factors, there are social factors, and so how do I break it down to smaller parts and figure out which one to solve?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, hey, let’s keep it running. Let’s hear about reduce, eliminate, and hyponym. I don’t know if I’m saying that right.

Stephen Shapiro
Oh, yeah, that’s perfect. So, the reduce lens basically says, “If we’re trying to solve something that’s too big, how do we sort of reduce it down to something smaller?” Let’s talk about the eliminate lens first because I think it’s a really good one. We, so often, ask ourselves, “What can we add? What features can we add? How can we make something better?” But we rarely ask, “What can we remove?”

So, like right now, everything is meeting on Zoom at this time because we can’t meet in person. Well, what most people have done is just automated the meeting. But what if you started eliminating meetings? What aspects of meetings could you eliminate? So, what can we remove from the solution that will, in many cases, give us a much more elegant solution? So, those are two.

But let’s talk about the hyponym and hypernym. Basically, what these are, are lenses which are about abstraction. So, if I want to make something more specific, what I’d want to do is take a word. So, for example, if I’m trying to solve a transportation problem, maybe I need to break it down into vehicle, which is a more specific version of transportation, and maybe from vehicle I could go down to car or motorcycle or bicycle. So, by changing those types of words, we now start shifting the language because the important thing is we could change one word in a problem statement and get a completely different range of solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I guess hypo and hyper just mean less than or more than, or below or greater, I believe. Latin or Greek roots here.

Stephen Shapiro
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I guess you’re just suggesting that we have, as artisans practicing this art, we have the ability to choose specifically as opposed to like a synonym or antonym, meaning the same thing or the opposite thing, something that means the thing more narrow or more broadly speaking.

Stephen Shapiro
Right. So, for example, I wrote a book. If I look at a hypernym for a book, which is a higher-level thing, well, offering…

Pete Mockaitis
Media.

Stephen Shapiro
Media, yeah, or product, or offering. I mean, these are all higher-level words.

Pete Mockaitis
Content.

Stephen Shapiro
Yeah, exactly. But if you think about it, “How do I create a great book?” is a different question than “How do I create a great offering or a great product?” And so, we started to look at, “Okay, well, if it’s a product, what are the range of products we’re going to include with the book?” and that’s how we started getting into multimedia and a number of different tools that go along with it. So, you can just change one word and get a completely different range of solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I’m hearing you there. And then, by doing this, all those five lenses there give us an approach to reducing the abstraction and getting clear on, “Hey, what do you mean by book, or whatever word, or problem that you’re after?” So, then let’s just keep it rolling from your table of contents, if we may.

Stephen Shapiro
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Then on the flipside, if we want to increase abstraction, I guess the benefits of that are that we get a broader array of potential solutions that fit into there but, again, if you’re too broad, then you just might be kind of all over the place and not grabbing onto something. So, what are some of the best tools or lenses for increasing abstraction?

Stephen Shapiro
Well, so we talked about the analogy lens, which is the toothpaste example. And, by the way, the solution to the toothpaste example, I think, is actually pretty cool, because when the toothpaste people went over and asked the laundry care people, “How do you make whites whiter when you’re not using bleach?” They were told something interesting. They were told, “We don’t? We don’t make whites whiter. We actually make whites bluer. Laundry detergent is blue for a reason because it creates an optical illusion that prevents the reflection of yellow.”

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Stephen Shapiro
And so, the toothpaste they created actually has a blue dye in it that is the same blue dye that’s in laundry detergent. So, the analogy lens is all about, “Who else has solved a similar problem but in a different place?” And I think that’s just always a fun one to use.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s talk about a few more examples of analogies there. So, we’ve got the toothpaste whitening versus laundry whitening. Lay on us a few more examples for how we might draw analogies.

Stephen Shapiro
Sure. So, probably one the more powerful examples is how an oil pipeline engineer helped a cardiologist solve a medical problem. Basically, this cardiologist was talking to an oil pipeline engineer, he said, “Look, one of the problems we have as human beings is we get clots. We get clots in our body. And if the clot goes up into the brain or the heart, we’ll get a stroke or we’ll die. And we’ve not figured out a way of preventing that from happening and when it does happen, how do we remove it?”

And the oil engineer said, “We have that problem all the time. We call it sludge, which is basically dirt and muck that gets in the pipelines.” And he created this filter that goes in pipelines to filter out and break up the sludge. And the two of them worked together to create a product which actually goes in the body that does exactly the same thing, and it saves thousands and thousands of lives. And I think it’s just so fascinating that an oil pipeline engineer found the solution to our health problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool. Well, what do we call that thing? I think I’ve heard of it before. What’s the medical device called?

Stephen Shapiro
It’s called the Greenfield Vena Cava filter.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, there you have it. That’s nifty. Well, then, I’ve heard of these stories and they’re kind of cool and fun in hindsight, like, “Well, how about that, that these different disciplines got together and then made something cool.” But I wonder, sort of when you’re in the heat of it, how would you go about getting those analogies flowing? Like, it probably wouldn’t occur to you, “You know what I got to do is I got to call a petroleum engineer or a pipeline?” You’d say, “Who else has solved a problem like this?” So, that’s one way to start triggering some of that. Although, if you’ve got no familiarity with oil pipelines, you may have no idea that they’ve solved problems like that. So, maybe can you walk us through perhaps a thought process by which we’re utilizing analogy to spark new promising pathways of exploration?

Stephen Shapiro
Sure. So, the first step is to pause and just say, “I never assume that I have all the answers, so maybe somebody else has the answer.” And when you ask, “Who else?” sometimes  you can just reframe it in a lot of different ways. So, for example, I focus on innovation. Okay. Well, who does innovation? Well, that’s a little broad. Then I start thinking about, “Okay. Well, I’m trying to solve difficult problems or I’m trying to make impossible things happen?” It’s like, “Okay. Well, who else makes impossible things possible?” And it’s like, “Bingo! Magicians.”

And so, I spend a lot of my time hanging out with magicians, studying the way they create their magic tricks because I learn as much from magicians about the thought process of solving a complex problem as I would with a fellow innovator. And it’s just that inquiry into, “Okay. Well, who else could it be? Who else could it be?” And it’s like if I’m trying to deal with something with speed, I’m trying to make something faster, okay, maybe I’d talk to a racecar team, or I might be talking to anybody who deals with speed and movement. As you start thinking about it, things become obvious pretty quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s fun. And this reminds me, when you said speed, we had a previous guest who said that, “Ideas are feats of associations.” That was a nice little quotable gem. When I think about speed, I’m reminded of the book The Goal if you’ve read it about his theory of constraints and how his epiphany, aha moment, about how to make his manufacturing plant better occurred when he was leading his Boy Scouts on a hike. And there was one Boy Scout who had way too many items in his backpack which was weighing him down, slowing him down, and they could only move as fast as Herbie, the slowest-moving person. And he’s like, “Aha, one of the Herbies, the slowest-moving elements, the bottlenecks, in our plant,” and then away you go.

So, what I think was nifty about that is that, I guess, on the outside looking in, when you start going down that pathway of talking to a magician, “You know, let me talk to a magician or a race car team,” you have no idea yet what they’re going to say and how it may be applicable. But I imagine, is this far to say, once you get into the details of, “Oh, yeah, but we do this, or the wheels for that reason,” then it may very well be that that next level down that you’re starting to get those sparks of aha. Is that fair to say?

Stephen Shapiro
Absolutely. So, for example, an insurance company, their customers were complaining that when somebody filed a claim it’s like filing a claim into a black hole. They they didn’t know who their adjuster was, they didn’t know how much money they were getting, when somebody was going to show up to look at their house. And they’re working on this problem, and I love the way they found the solution, which was, having the question in their mind, “How do we create transparency in the claims process?” And it wasn’t like they sat around and they brainstormed.

Actually, as it turns out, they were sitting around and brainstorming, didn’t come up with an answer, somebody went off to order dinner, and came back and said, “I have the answer. It is Domino’s Pizza. Because if you order a pizza at Domino’s, you got the pizza tracker which tells you basically every single step of the process. Okay, the pizza is in the oven, it’s being made by a certain person, it’s out of the oven, it’s in the box, it’s out for delivery, it’s at your house.”

Well, they modeled what Domino’s did for the pizza tracker and created a claims tracker. So, it’s just amazing sometimes how the solutions can come from totally different industries. Pizza delivery and insurance, you would never think of having anything to do with each other, but actually you can get some great solutions when you start thinking that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very cool. So, that’s the lens of analogy. Can you share some of your other favorite means of increasing abstraction?

Stephen Shapiro
In a lot of cases, you just need to start thinking more broadly. Again, it could be broader words. You can use hypernyms which is what we talked about before. To me, sometimes the best thing to do is just ask, “How do we make this less specific?” And that tends to be a very simple way of getting to a higher level. We can talk more about the lenses specifically, but I find sometimes those two lenses are pretty straight, those two categories, the reduce abstraction and the increase abstraction lenses are relatively straightforward. You just need to give it some thought. It’s the other ones that become a little more interesting because then they’re really starting to twist and turn the questions a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s hit those in just a moment, but I’ve got to know. Number seven, result. What is this lens?

Stephen Shapiro
So, the result lens is asking, “What is the outcome?” So, instead of focusing on the process, which is what we often do, and the process tends to be maybe the solution, “We need to focus on the results.” Let me give you a quick example of two lenses, one that increases abstraction and one that reduces abstraction for the same problem. So, some work that was being done in the UK around the education system, so the question was, “How can we improve the education system?” What they realized was that the education system was actually a means to an end. The goal, the result lens, would be, “Why do we have an education system? It’s to improve a child’s learning.”

So, when it was changed from education system to child’s learning, they then used the leverage lens, and they asked, “Okay. Well, if we’re trying to improve a child’s learning, what does science tell us in terms of the factors that have the greatest impact in a child’s learning?” And the greatest impact in a child’s learning, based on many studies, is actually positive parental involvement, not helicopter parenting the way some people do it, but like really getting actively involved in the child’s learning. And so, when that question was asked, the solution was found very quickly that there was an experimental school that had a 100% positive parental involvement. So, we focus on the result first and then we focus on the leverage lens and got a very elegant solution.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, we got to know, Stephen, what was the elegant solution? Tell us the story.

Stephen Shapiro
Well, the elegant solution was the school in Bogota, Columbia, of all places, where people are super busy, is they actually had parents come into the classroom and sit in the chairs that the students would sit in, and actually go through the process. It didn’t take a lot of time, but going through that experience gave the parents a deeper appreciation for what the children went through when they were in the classroom. And then, when they went back home, they were given some tools to help them engage the child during the learning process. I mean, here are people who are busy, they don’t have a lot of money, but they got 100% of the parents involved in that process.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s so powerful in terms of there’s a world of difference in terms of hearing, “This is what the lesson was about,” versus, I don’t know how long they were in the seats, they’re probably kind of small.

Stephen Shapiro
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
They were in small seats for 15 minutes squirming, “Uncomfortable,” is to say, “Oh, okay. I see exactly what that experience is like in doing so. So, all right. Well, thank you.” Yeah, let’s talk about some of that changing perspective stuff. How do you recommend we go about making that happen?

Stephen Shapiro
Yeah. So, a lot of times, the best thing to do is look at the problem from a different angle. So, one of my favorite lenses is the re-sequence lens. And the re-sequence lens basically says that if your problem or even your solution assume some level of timing, how do we shift the timing on it? So, how do we predict or how do we postpone? How do we do something earlier? How do we do something later? So, for example, paint. If you go into a hardware store, it used to be that if you wanted green paint, you would walk down the aisle and you would grab a gallon of green paint. Now, if you want green paint, they ask you, “Well, what color of green? What tone of green?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, there are hundreds of greens.

Stephen Shapiro
Yeah. And then they mix it for you there. So, they postponed the mixing of the paint. They actually create the color of the paint after you know what color somebody wants. And that’s just a great way of getting lower levels of inventory, for example, greater customization for people’s needs. So, it’s like if you go into McDonald’s, if they make it to your order, well, that would be postponing it. They would wait until somebody comes in, but during the busiest times, they might have to predict, they actually might have to make 20 Big Macs so that if somebody walks into the store, they’ve got a Big Mac ready and they know that 15 people in the next hour are going to order Big Macs so we’ll have it ready for them, and it gives us a lot greater efficiency.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And let’s hear about the emotion lens.

Stephen Shapiro
The emotion lens says that we tend to ask questions that are very analytical, but what if we add some emotion to it? In many cases, positive emotion is really one of the goals. So, for example, instead of saying, “How do we engage our customers? Or how do we get our customers to like us?” “How do we get our customers to feel like they’re at home when they’re in our stores?” They actually have some emotion to it. Or maybe we can ask the question, “How do we create a wow experience for our customers?” Or if it’s our employees, instead of saying, “How do we increase employee satisfaction?” maybe it’s, “How do we get a five out of five on our customer surveys?” And so, it’s more of a positive spin and a more emotional spin rather than just numbers and facts. But you can also go on the negative side too which is pretty fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
I liked the way you articulated that in terms of because, frequently, the difference between something that I really kind of get and resonate with versus just sort of like, “Hmm, okay,” it is the emotion element. So, if we’re talking about, I don’t know, employee engagement, okay, so there’s a term and a tool and a metric and best practices and all that associated with it. So, if you ask a question, “How can we improve employee engagement?” you’re going to get a very different set of responses than if you asked the question, “How can we make a work experience so awesome folks never want to leave?”

Stephen Shapiro
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And they’re like, “Ooh, well, I’ll tell you,” and so things can really fly in terms of, “Well, I never wanted to leave this workplace because this manager really cared about my development and invested in all these things. I never wanted to leave this workplace because they had kegs of…” I don’t know, whatever, “…delicious beverage.” So, yeah, I really dig that. I think, there’s probably good science on the brain, neuroscience here, in terms of you are tapping into different part of the brain straight up when you are posing the questions in that way.

Stephen Shapiro
And what’s interesting is the way you originally framed it as, “How do we improve?” Anytime you say improve, you imply there’s something wrong. And so, the brain now starts processing the information differently, “Okay. Well, I’m trying to fix a problem rather than elevate and lift something up.” Even those very, very subtle words can have a huge impact.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think what’s intriguing about this is it’s almost like, maybe we’ll zoom out for a bit in terms of just how our brain works, I don’t think this is just me. Stephen, you let me know. Once a question is posed, it’s like, I’m just off to the races in terms of generating answers for it, and it’s just like, “Away we go sprinting forward. Like, I’m answer-generating machine.” And so, it follows that almost like…I’m thinking, I’m imagining like a compass here in terms of like 360 degrees. If you have a subtle difference in your question, that might be off by like just three degrees from the other question, I am effectively pointed in a new direction for my answer-generating brain that can lead to a wildly different final destination.

Stephen Shapiro
Spot on. Spot on. In fact, I think it’s useful for us just to step back, and since we’re talking about the brain, look, the brain’s primary function is survival. And so, if you think back to the way that we’re originally wired, we would, especially in times of a crisis, run quickly away from the threat. But the problem is if we run quickly, we might be running in the wrong direction which means we’re moving further away from the ultimate goal. And so, even though we’re wired to, as you said, identify the problem quickly, find a solution quickly, and move as quickly as we possibly can, that doesn’t mean that’s going to give us the best result.

And so, when you can put the pause button on it, it’s like Einstein reputedly said, “If I had an hour to save the world, I’d spend 59 minutes defining the problem, one minute finding solutions.” And I just think that’s…he never actually said exactly that but I love that, metaphorically speaking, as a mindset of saying, “Look, if we’re going to move somewhere, let’s move in the right direction.” But in order to do that, we need to make sure we know what the right direction is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Einstein, I mean, if you compare that to Justin Timberlake and Madonna, was it four minutes to save the world in the song? Well, that’s pretty impressive work, Einstein.

[30:02]

Stephen Shapiro
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Now, back to business, Stephen. So, that’s a bit about changing perspective. Let’s hear a bit about how you switch elements. What does that mean and how do we do it?

Stephen Shapiro
So, switch elements have some really great stories. I’ll give you one. So, one of the lenses is called the flip lens. And the flip lens is basically saying instead of solving for this, we solve for that. And the short version of a story that I love is an airport that had its passengers complaining that the bags took too long when they were waiting at baggage claim. So, they spent a ton of money trying to solve the problem, “How do we speed up the bags?” And they basically cut the wait time, they cut the amount of time in half from about 15 to 20 minutes down to 8 to 10 minutes. And so, they thought, “This is a 50% improvement. This is awesome. People are going to be excited.” But passengers were still complaining. They were still waiting too long. And they realized they couldn’t speed up the bags anymore. Then they had an epiphany. It only took the passengers 1 to 3 minutes to get to the baggage claim so that’s why they were waiting.

So, instead of speeding up the bags, they slowed down the passengers. They literally reconfigured the airport so that it would take, on average, 8 to 10 minutes for the passengers to get from the plane to the baggage carousel. And now they get to the baggage carousel, their bags are waiting. We experience wait time differently than we do walk time. And I think that’s just a really fun example of how solving a different factor, like, wait time is actually the speed of the bags and speed of the passengers, and they were only looking at one aspect of it.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve heard that software user interfaces will do this too in terms of what they are displaying so that you feel as though you’re waiting less even though the actual stopwatch time between when you’ve, I don’t know, clicked the thing and when you get what you want is unchanged. So, you could see that in the reality of physical space as well as digital spaces. So, that’s flipping. Tell us what’s the lens of pain versus gain?

Stephen Shapiro
Well, pain versus gain is basically saying that most people will take action to eliminate a loss, prevent a loss, or to eliminate a pain rather than trying to get a gain. So, if one of the things you’re trying to do is, let’s say you’re a bank, for example, and you’re trying to sell people financial wealth, and that might be a nice gain, but if people aren’t able to pay their bills right now, maybe the focus, the pain that you want to solve is, “How do you make sure that, even in a time when people are out of work, their bills are still being paid?” So, it’s flipping it so if you can be the aspirin for somebody’s pain, that will typically get greater reaction and adoption from people than it will be if you give them something nice to have.

Pete Mockaitis
And that financial bank example reminds me, I don’t know who said this but I think it’s so true, like about sort of about financial planners, financial advisors, they say, “Oh, if you call your client and wake them up at 3:00 a.m. to tell them about an investment opportunity that’s going to make them $20,000, then they’re going to fire you, and say, ‘Don’t wake me up.’ But if you can wake them up at 3:00 a.m. to tell them what they’ve got to do to avoid losing $20,000, they’re like, ‘Wow, this guy is amazing. I’ve got the ultimate financial planner on my team.’”

So, that’s handy in terms of sort of getting urgency. I wonder, we talked previously about positive emotions triggering happy things in terms of results of creativity ideation. I don’t know, when we focus on brainstorming about removing pain, is there a sense of constraint that happens on us mentally?

Stephen Shapiro
Well, you say it like constraints are bad. I’m actually a big fan of constraints. I think, in fact, constraints are the key to good problem-solving and innovation. So, we always say, “Think outside the box.” But come back to those first of lenses we were talking about, when we have a big broad abstract problem, well, we tend to just come up with a lot of boring, obvious, and irrelevant solutions. So, I say, “Don’t think outside the box. Find a better box. Shift the question.” Instead of speeding up the bags, how do we slow down the passengers? We could shift it from, “How do we reduce the wait time?” to, “How do we improve the wait experience?” We could change just a couple of words and now, all of a sudden, people don’t mind waiting if it’s a great way to experience. So, it’s really shifting the language, shifting the box and the constraints, but we still have constraints and those are valuable constraints.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. You know, that reminds me, I’m thinking about one of my favorite restaurants, Bakin’ & Eggs here in Chicago, and it doesn’t seem that hard at all, I don’t know why all restaurants don’t do this. You can get a mug of coffee started and going and sipping as you’re chilling and waiting for your table, and it’s like I don’t even mind waiting for my table, it’s like, “This is part of the experience of Bakin’ & Eggs, is we’re over here with our coffee, chatting away with my party, comfortable. And, oh, here’s the table.” We feel great about it even though we still had to wait but the experience was awesome.

Stephen Shapiro
Yeah, that’s a great example. Another one, which is maybe more about distraction rather than great experience, but you think about Uber and Lyft. You get off the plane, you’re standing outside. What is everybody doing? They’re staring at their phone. So, what are they looking at? They’re looking at this, like, microscopic car that’s moving infinitesimally slow on their screen, yet somehow it gives them a sense of comfort to see it move like a millimeter every minute.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, it’s working, it’s happening, it’s in process.

Stephen Shapiro
Something is happening, so we feel movement, and that’s also a way. So, we can distract people, we can engage people. The point is there’s never one solution because there’s never one question, and the more we question our questions, the more we’ll be able to find better solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, then the final set of lenses is about zeroing in. Can you regale us with this?

Stephen Shapiro
Sure. I think these are a great place to start. So, you have, for example, the real-problem lens, which is just to make sure, “Am I solving the right problem?” One of my favorite ones though is the real-business lens, and it’s to really even just question, “What business am I in?” So, for example, if you asked me, let’s say, a year ago what business am I in. I would say, “I’m a keynote speaker. I give speeches. I talk about innovation but I’m a keynote speaker.”

And then what I realized was, well, especially now where we can’t meet in person, being a keynote speaker, there are no stages to speak on. And if you’re so focused on being a keynote speaker, if that’s your business, you’re in trouble. But if you shift things, so I think of myself as a problem-solver and an innovator, so I help companies solve their problems and help them be able to solve their own problems. Well, that’s shifting my business. And by really asking, “What business am I in and what problems am I solving?” as a result of that, it helps me identify new opportunities.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, if I can put you on the spot, Stephen, could you give us a kind of a capstone finale story or example in which we are utilizing multiples of these lenses to get from stuck to somewhere really cool?

Stephen Shapiro
Well, let me give you a story that I think really wraps it up nicely. It only uses one of the lenses but it’s one we haven’t talked about and I think it really makes a powerful point. I lived in England for five years, and, of that time there, I worked for a Formula 1 race car team for three years. So, if you don’t know Formula 1, they’re basically fast cars. And the thing which I loved were the pit crews that would be able to change the tires, and back when I worked for them, fuel the car, do minor maintenance in a matter of seconds. And so, I would watch them and I was always amazed.

And I remember having a conversation with somebody from the Formula 1 team, I said, “How did they get them to go so fast?” And so, the way they would typically do is they’d sit there with a stopwatch and they would tell them to go fast, and they would time them over and over and over, and no matter what they did, no matter how hard they tried, there was a point that they couldn’t go one one-thousandth of a second faster. They decided to try a number of different techniques, and the one that they landed on that was quite interesting was they told the pit crew members, “You’re not going to be timed, but rather we’re going to be evaluating you on your smoothness, your style. And so, as you’re changing the tires, think smooth.”

Back when I worked with them, they’d fuel the car, think smooth. And they, of course, were timing them but had them go fast but thinking about their movements. And they found that they were able to shave off two-tenths to three-tenths of a second off of their best previous time. And the pit crew, when asked if they thought they were going faster or slower, felt they were going slower. And I call this the performance paradox which is one of the lenses, which is paradoxically sometimes the more we focus on a goal, the less likely we are to achieve that goal. And I think the same thing is true with solutions. The more we focus on the solution, quite often, the less likely we are to find a solution. But if we can stop, pause, and ask a better question, and make sure we’re reframing it and moving in the right direction, we’ll find better solutions faster paradoxically than if we just jumped and try to focus on the solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Was it Coach John Wooden who said something like, “Move very quickly but don’t hurry”? Something. I’m butchering it. But that notion that really does resonate. And I think maybe in terms of, hey, if you’re keynote speaking, if you’re dancing, if you’re doing any number of things that have some precision and elegance to them, fixating on, “I got to nail this. I got to crush this. I got to knock it out of the park. I got to go fast, fast, fast,” can be just the opposite of what you want for that smooth flow, and then that can carry over. Share another one, please, if you could with the performance paradox. So, there’s the notion of speed. What would be another place where we overfocus on performance in a work story detriment?

Stephen Shapiro
One of the other examples which someone told me once, which I thought was just really fascinating, was he worked in a home for people who are the elderly. And one of the concerns that everybody had was that if you were to fall, you would break a hip or break a bone, and it’s one of the leading causes of trauma and death and everything else. And so, what they initially started doing is trying to get people to not fall. And the problem was when people started focusing on not falling, they would actually fall more and they would hurt themselves more.

So, what he did was he actually decided to totally do exactly the opposite. And he said instead of getting them to worry about not falling, he’s actually going to get them comfortable with falling. And he created classes around people falling, and “How do you fall?” and having fun with falling. And the second that people stopped focusing on not falling, they stopped falling. And so, it’s just interesting to just see, and a lot of it has to do with stress.

If you’re thinking about creativity, we know that if I put you under a stopwatch, and I said, “Come up with a thousand ideas,” or however many ideas, you would really struggle because the stress associated with the time will cause you that. And that’s why a lot of times when we’re goal-oriented in companies, we’re less likely to achieve those goals because we get so focused on the goal that we stop actually focusing on the process and the whole creative endeavor that takes place beforehand.

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

Stephen Shapiro
I think that the most important thing for me just to say is that being able to ask better questions to question your questions, I found to be one of the more important skills. I know in a lot of companies, people will tell you, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” My perspective is I don’t want solutions. I want better problems, well-thought out problems, reframed problems. And if you become a master of problem-solving and problem-reframing, according to the World Economic Forum, that is the number one skill that people in organizations need right now in order to stay competitive. And so, I think that’s hopefully just proof enough to keep focusing on that.

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

Stephen Shapiro
There’s one which is from Mark Twain, I won’t get it exactly right, but basically he said, “There’s nothing new. It’s impossible because basically everything is just old-color pieces of glass that get twisted and turned around and create something new.” And I love that perspective because I’m inspired to think about, “How do I, instead of trying to invent something every time, how do I connect new ideas in new ways?” And I think that’s just a great way to look at it.

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

Stephen Shapiro
For me, anything having to do with confirmation bias. Basically, anytime we have a strongly-held belief about something, we’re only going to find evidence to support that belief. And so, for me, that’s a really fascinating part of business and life is understanding that.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Stephen Shapiro
Probably, my all-time favorite book is Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a great title.

Stephen Shapiro
It’s a great book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued. I’ve heard of the legend of Richard Feynman but I haven’t read the book. So, thank you. And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Stephen Shapiro
One which just keeps me sane is something called SaneBox, which is an email tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I use it too.

Stephen Shapiro
It’s just like I look at my inbox and it’s very, very little, and then my SaneLater folder is like humongous, it’s like, “I won’t worry about it till later.” So, that definitely keeps me sane.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Stephen Shapiro
Hot tub. I try to, when I can in the morning, wake up, just sit in the hot tub to just meditate, quiet my brain. I find it just prepares me for the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate and gets quoted back to you often?

Stephen Shapiro
When it comes to innovation, the one which a lot of people resonate with is my expression, “Innovate where you differentiate.” So, not all problems are important, but if you can focus on the problems that actually help your organization stand out from the competition, and you put more energy into solving those problems, that really has a huge impact.

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

Stephen Shapiro
To learn about the book, InvisibleSolutionsBook.com. And there’s videos and tools, you can download the 25 lenses and everything from there. That’s probably the best place to just learn more about me and the book.

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

Stephen Shapiro
I think the challenge really is to, coming back to something you said earlier, we are solution machines. If we can just stop focusing on our ideas and actually put the pause button and make sure we’re really focused on what will create the greatest value, what will move us forward in the best way, what will create the most elegant solution, that will always give you a better result than if we just run with our top-of-our-head ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Stephen, this has been a treat. I wish you all the best.

Stephen Shapiro
Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.