KF #8. Manages Complexity Archives - Page 2 of 3 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
We’ll get a few seconds of silence for the audio engineers and away we’ll go. John, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

John Petrocelli
Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into the wisdom of your book The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullsh*t and we’re going to be ducking the S word a bit just so that the podcast will not be censored and unavailable in certain countries. So, BS or bullsh*t, that’s what we’re talking about. And you say you’ve come from a long line of bullsh*tters. What’s sort of your backstory here?

John Petrocelli
Well, I think everybody does actually. When I tell people what I do and my work, most people have readily available examples of how their friend or their colleague or their Uncle Larry is the world’s greatest bull artist, or half the time it’s Maurice on the second floor in marketing in their company, and people usually have these ready-made examples, and they’re convinced they all seem to know the same person.

So, I’m convinced that we are constantly surrounded by BS artists and, in general, I think most people are, I wouldn’t call most people BS artists, but the average individual, I think, generates their fair share of BS themselves. So, it’s everywhere, it’s in every walk of life, and it’s something that I think is not as harmless as we like to think. Usually, we kind of say, “Oh, Pete’s just BS-ing us,” or, “We’re just sitting out here on the porch BS-ing.”

But we often think that it doesn’t have the devastating effect that it can actually have for our wallets, or for our career decisions, for our interpersonal decisions. Really, all over the place, you’re going to find this insidious communicative substance that we often refer to as BS.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I want to definitely hear about the impact and the damage and what’s at stake here. But, first, you’ve got a bit more of a precise definition than I think most of us do. So, how precisely do you define what is bull? And how is it distinctive from just straight up lying or fraud?

John Petrocelli
Yeah. So, I use Harry Frankfurt’s original definition. He was a philosopher at Princeton University. And, in 1986, he wrote a book, or actually in 1986 he wrote a small article-turned-book 15 years later, and the title of the book was called On Bullshit, and that’s where he defined BS and the definition that I use, which is simply a communicative substance that emerges when people communicate about things that they know little to nothing about, and in which they have no regard or concern for what we would call truth, genuine evidence, or established knowledge.

And so, the behavior of BS-ing is often characterized by a wide range of rhetorical strategies designed to communicate without any regard for truth, evidence, or established knowledge. And that might come out in the form of exaggerating one’s competence or their knowledge or their skills in a domain, or it may come out in the form of trying to impress others, fit in with others, influence or persuade them, or to embellish, or to confuse, or to simply hide the fact that they really don’t know what they’re talking about.

And that’s a pretty broad definition but the core of it, again, is simply talking about things that one really doesn’t know much about, and doesn’t have any regard for truth, evidence, or established knowledge. And that’s very different from lying because, when we lie, to do it successfully, we have to know what the truth is. If I wanted to detract you from the truth, it’s a good idea to know what the facts are. So, the liar is usually concerned about the truth or they know the truth, whereas the BS-er doesn’t care. They pay no attention to truth and they could care less.

And, in fact, by definition, what the liar says is categorically false to the extent that they do know the truth, and they successfully tell us something that’s false. But if the BS-er is truly BS-ing, they may, by chance, accidentally say something that is correct. But even the BS-er wouldn’t know it because they’re not paying any attention to truth, established knowledge, or evidence.

And the social reaction, too. The social reaction that people have towards BS-ing and lying is completely different. So, usually, if a friend or a colleague lies to us, and we find out that they’ve lied, we respond with anger or great disdain, and they’re going to have to tell quite a few truths in the future to gain our trust back. But, with BS-ing, often we let it slide. We give the BS-er a social pass of acceptance because we often think it’s harmless.

Rarely do we say, “Oh, we’re out here sitting on the porch lying to one another,” or that Pete is lying. Because lying oftentimes is associated with fighting words, but BS-ing is we assume that it doesn’t have the same kind of negative effect.

But not only my own research but certainly lots and lots of examples where people have lost money, they’ve made very poor decisions in their life, in their work, in their interpersonal relationships, that are truly grounded in BS. And I’m convinced, I’ve got treasure troves of data now, Pete, in my experiments from thousands of participants, and looking at what they write about no matter what types of events I ask them to write about and explain why they have the opinions and attitudes that they have.

I’m convinced that the personal, interpersonal, professional, and societal problems that we have are often rooted in indirectly or directly in mindless BS reasoning and communication, and being so closely married to BS preferences and so adverse to truth comes at a great consequence to decision-making.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so then let’s hear it then if lies or fraud really does sound a lot worse than BS, but you’re saying there’s a lot at stake. Can you share with us some of the most hard-hitting data points of studies that show, “Hey, this is actually really damaging”?

John Petrocelli
Absolutely. So, what I’ve focused on in my own research is what people believe to be true because truth, what you believe to be true, is fundamental to the decisions that you make. So, in my experiments, I’ve used very simple statements that can be readily recognized as true or false, and demonstrated as true or false. And I give people false statements like, “Sydney is the capital city of Australia. How interesting is that?” “Steinbeck is the author of The Agony and the Ecstasy. How interesting is that to you?”

Now, both of those statements are false. And when you mix those with a lot of other statements, what you will find is what we call an illusory truth effect. So, people will overestimate how true something is just because it sounds familiar.

And what we find is when we say that, “Well, the author of those statements that you read, the author was told to lie on some of them. They were told to write half of them that are true, and half of them that are false. All right? Now, we want you to determine whether or not these statements are true or false.”

And another condition, what we do is we say, “Well, the author of these statements, they were asked to write half of the statements that are true, and then the other half not to really worry about truth and not to worry about fact-checking, how true these things are. You can really just write whatever comes to mind.” And then we looked at the illusory truth effect in that case.

And what we find is that when the author is BS-ing, you get a stronger illusory truth effect, so people are much more likely to tag things as false if they’re told, “Well, some of these things are lies.” But they do treat the BS differently. It’s tagged as potentially true or potentially false. It’s not categorically tagged mentally as false as we do lies. Like, if I tell you, “Hey, I just lied to you about a fact,” well, then you know that it’s false. But if I said, “Hey, I just BS-ed you on that,” it’s possible, to the extent that it sounds feasible and plausible, it could be true. So, people treat those things differently.

Then we also find that in some cases the conditions are right, that BS can be quite persuasive even in comparison to strong arguments for an issue. So, we have compared what we call evidence-based communication with BS communication. So, evidence-based communication is the exact opposite of BS. It is grounded in truth, genuine evidence, and established knowledge.

Now, if I give you two arguments that are strong, and in one case I tell you, “I’m concerned with the evidence. I’ve actually looked this up. I’ve actually considered what the data looked like, what the readily available data looked like.” That’s the strongest strong arguments that you can produce. But if I said, “I don’t care what the research suggests. I don’t care what the data is on this issue. This is what I believe,” and I say the same exact thing. Now, I’ve weakened the strong arguments, so that makes sense.

But with weak arguments, I could say, “Yeah, I think we should have comprehensive exams at our university as a requirement for graduation for these reasons. And one of the reasons is, well, Duke University is doing it.” That’s a weak argument. Now, if I give you evidence-based cues to that same argument in comparison to BS-based cues of the same arguments, there’s no difference. There’s no difference in evidence-based and BS-based cues and the potency that it has on your attitudes.

So, BS tends to weaken strong arguments, but if anything, it strengthens weak arguments. And we think that this happens because people tend to shut down. When you know that someone is BS-ing you, they’ve given you enough cues that they don’t really know what they’re talking about, and they really don’t have any interest in the truth, people tend to shut down. And, if anything, they will change, their attitudes will be influenced by what we call peripheral cues, how attractive someone is, maybe how tall they are, how quickly they talk, what their authority position is, their perceived credibility.

That’s not where people recognize the difference between strong and weak arguments. So, BS tends to get people in a perspective or in a mode of thinking in which they’re really not thinking very well, and they’re not thinking very clearly about the strengths of arguments, and they don’t even recognize the difference between the strengths of arguments. So, those are really big problems.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess therein lies the danger, is that because we’re susceptible to this, weak arguments plus a lot of BS, results in many, many suboptimal decisions being made everywhere and at all times that discourses is occurring and, thusly, it’s a whole lot of damage accumulatively. Is that kind of your take?

John Petrocelli
Yeah, and we’ve studied this also in a procedure that we call the sleeper effect. So, if I tell you really great things about an attitude, what we call an attitude object, in our studies we’ve used a pizza, a gluten-free pizza, and we tell you all these great things about this gluten-free pizza and how great it tastes and how healthy it is.

And then we tell you, “We want to know what your attitude is.” Well, we’ll see that people have attitudes about Ciao’s pizza that’s rather positive. But then we say, “Oh, you know, there’s a consumer protection agency that did a study and they found out that Ciao’s pizza marketing team, well, they lied. They lied on three things, and here they are.”

Now, over time, you have two pieces of information now. So, initially, the attitude was positive but then you’ve been given a discounting cue. They tell you’ve been lied to. So, immediately people reduce their attitude, they say, “All right. Well, Ciao’s pizza is not so great then.” But, two weeks later, when we survey people’s attitudes about Ciao’s pizza again, what we find is sort of a rebounding effect, which is the attitude becomes more positive, closer to the positivity that it initially was. And the idea is that people forget the discounting cue faster than they forget the initial information that was positive.

So, now, if I tell you, in the same paradigm, “Oh, consumer protection agency found that Ciao’s pizza marketing team was bull*, and they don’t even know if it’s true that most people loved this pizza and has all of these great qualities.” Again, the attitudes are reduced, but two weeks later it’s even stronger and actually at the same level than a control condition who had never gotten the discounting cue in the first place.

So, here now, we have a case where what discounted the initial information is completely forgotten and it’s no longer worked into the attitude. So, people will say to you, “Well, you’ve got to hear these false things maybe 16 times,” I used to believe that. Well, it’s not true that you have to hear it 16 times to believe it. You only have to hear it one time.

The same thing happens in the illusory truth paradigm. You only have to present these falsities one time for people then to confuse them, either confuse them as true because they sound familiar or they forget the false piece of the information, and the part that sounds true remains. And it comes back to shaped attitudes. And, again, what we think is true would be devastating to decision-making.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, so that paints a really clear picture then in terms of just given how we interact with information and conversation, how we can form perspectives on what is true that are not at all appropriate or actually true, and that can sort of have all kinds of cascade negative impacts. So, then what do you recommend we do in terms of as we’re navigating life, doing research, making decisions, to as much as possible become immune to the negative effects of this BS?

John Petrocelli
Yes. Well, one of the first things I think that is critical to that is accepting the possibility that we are susceptible to BS and the unwanted effects of BS. So, that’s one of the biggest problems with BS is that people feel, one, that they can detect it, and that, two, it really isn’t harmful and it doesn’t affect them very much. But my research suggests they couldn’t be more wrong.

So, the first step would be accepting some susceptibility to it. And, in fact, there’s a lot of research, we call it the Dunning-Kruger Effect that has been studied for over 20 years now, that suggest that the people who are most confident in their abilities in a particular cognitive domain are oftentimes the most susceptible not only to BS but, also, they’re most likely to overestimate their actual skills. So, the cognitive skills that you need to be competent in a domain are the same cognitive skills that you need to recognize competence.

So, often the most confident people, sort of they think that they’re protected against BS and deception, often those are the easiest people to dupe with the BS. So, that would be the first thing. The second thing, I think, is recognizing the difference between explanation and evidence. Explanation and evidence are two totally different things. If you asked people why they believe what they believe, oftentimes they will go into explanation. They’ll give you reasons why they believe what they do. They’ll talk about values, they’ll talk about things that are rather abstract, and sort of the heady things. They’ll talk conceptually.

They won’t give you boots-on-the-ground hard evidence demonstrating the process as to how they came to the conclusions that they’ve come to. So, evidence is something that verifies or demonstrates or supports a claim or an assertion. And people often treat the two things very similarly but they are very different. So, recognizing the difference between those two things.

And then I think the third thing would be to ask questions, to simply just ask questions. I cannot tell you how much money I’ve actually saved myself showing that asking these basic questions actually work. And they’re really basic critical-thinking 101 skills. And the first question that I would ask, when you suspect, “Well, I may have just been exposed to some BS,” is to ask the communicator, “What? What exactly is the claim?” to clarify the claim.

And what you’ll often find, and my research shows this and my own personal experience, I can tell you that people will often take a couple of backpedal steps, and they’ll start to clean the bull up immediately because they see, “All right. Someone is interested in my claim, and maybe they kind of want to hedge it, they want to qualify it in some ways.” So, clarification is a strong antidote to bullshit, so just ask, “What?”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you clarify the claim, can you give us an example? Is that as simple as saying, “Wait a second, John. So, were you claiming…?” precise sentence. And then they say, “Well…” You’re saying that’s all it takes?

John Petrocelli
Well, oftentimes, that’s all it takes. If they tell you, “Well, there’s going to be some changes in this company but no jobs will be lost.” “Well, what do you mean? At what level? What exactly are you talking about? Are you talking about this month or this year or what?” And just to ask clarification, “What?” questions just to get people to talk about it, to clarify the claim.

And once you get through “What?” which is nice because you can immediately expose yourself to less BS if they are willing to clean that up for you, then you’d ask, “How? How is it that you have come to this conclusion? I’m really interested in your claim or your assertion. How do you know?” So, if you ask, “How?” what people will usually do is they will provide for you a more concrete level of abstraction, and they will talk about actual evidence if it is readily available, or if they can recall some from memory, or if they can access it.

Now, a lot of times they’re not able to do that. If they’re truly BS-ing, they probably haven’t really thought through or gone through a logical rational process to come to their conclusion. So, you just ask “How? How do you know this?” or, “How is it that you know this?” And then the third question would be to ask, “Well, have you considered any other alternatives? I hear you saying X, Pete, but what about Y? Don’t this conflict? How do you reconcile these differences?”

And all three of these questions are essentially designed to diagnose the communicator’s actual interest in truth, genuine evidence, and established knowledge. If they’re unable to answer these questions, people are very reasonable when they’ve got enough information. Now, if they rely on what they usually rely on, which is just their own personal or professional experience, they’ll often ignore the fact that personal experience is often very, very messy. It’s a very, very messy data collection method. It provides data that’s random, that is unrepresentative. It’s ambiguous. Oftentimes, it’s incomplete or inconsistent, indirect, and often surprising or counter-attitudinal, not something that we necessarily want to think or want to believe.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

John Petrocelli
And that’s not a good way to collect data.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And I love that example associated with, “Hey, there’s going to be some changes. No jobs will be lost.” The distinction between BS-ing and a lie, it’s a lie if he knows darn well that dozens of people are going to get laid off within a few months, versus BS-ing which is like, “Hey, he’s got a general sense that we’re probably going to be okay.” But if you’re considering your own job opportunities and economic situation, that’s not good enough.

And so, with those questions, the “What?” and the “How?” and “Have you considered?” I could really just kind of imagine what a great answer versus a poor answer. It’s like, “Are you saying that no jobs will be lost over the next year?” He’s like, “Well, yeah, we’re pretty sure there probably shouldn’t be any.” It’s like, “Oh, that’s a bad answer,” versus, “Yes, we’re absolutely certain that there’ll be zero jobs.” “Okay, that’s a commitment.”

And then, “How have you come to know this?” This is like, “Well, hey, we’ve taken a look at our cashflows, with our reduced revenue situation that we’re at from the pandemic or whatever, a negative event, and we’re still cashflow positive, so we have no trouble making our payroll over the course of the next year.” And then, “Have you considered, well, hey, what happens if it gets a little bit worse?” Like, “Yes. Well, we have a couple years of reserves in savings to work with so even if it gets a little worse, we should be okay.” Now, those are great answers versus, “Yeah, we’re feeling pretty good about this. Hey, this thing should turn around any week now, really.” Like, “Oh, okay. You don’t actually know.”

And then, yeah, that kind of makes it all clear for me, the distinction between the lying and the BS-ing is that’s where it is. And then, in some ways though, John, what would be your take on this? If someone sort of acknowledged upfront, like, “Hey, I’m just speculating about this but here’s my read on things right now,” it seems like that could diffuse a good amount of the dangers of BS. Is that fair to say?

John Petrocelli
Absolutely. I’m totally agreeing with you, Pete, because in that case, you have communicated that you are actually interested in the truth and in reality but you don’t actually know for sure. You haven’t given this vague, ambiguous, pseudo-profound kind of answer that everyone is hoping to hear, and you’ve been specific about your interest in the truth. And so, exactly, if you say it, if you qualify, “I’m only speculating. I don’t actually have the data. I haven’t consulted other available sources yet and I don’t know this for sure, but here’s my sense, here’s my opinion so far but it’s not well-informed.”

That’s one of the problems with BS is that the people are often so ready to offer BS because our communicative culture, there’s an underlying implicit assumption that we are supposed to have opinions about everything but it’s impossible to have a well-informed opinion about everything, and everything is so large now, especially since the dawn of the internet. We’re supposed to have opinions about seemingly countless things now or, otherwise, we don’t sound interesting, we are non-factors in conversations, and that doesn’t bode very well especially with people with a high need to belong to the various groups that they do belong to.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, the need to belong, to appear competent, and like you must have an opinion on these things. It’s funny, as I’m imagining if someone asked me…you’re changing my worldviews, John. Good work. If someone asked me a question, I don’t really know the answer to, I think it might be refreshing if I were to say, “You know, I can only offer you speculation on that. Would you like to hear it or not?” And then it’s like, “I’m not going to be offended if you say, ‘You know, no, I don’t want to hear your speculation.’” And I’d probably appreciate being asked if I’m on the receiving end of that.

John Petrocelli
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, tell me, any other? I love those three, they’re very prescriptive questions, the “What?” the “How have you come to know this?” and the “Have you considered?” Any other key words, phrases, questions, scripts that you find super helpful as you navigate this, both as the BS-er or the recipient of the BS?

John Petrocelli
Yes, I gave you examples of when you can communicate directly with the potential BS-er but there’s lots of cases where we’re exposed to BS where we can’t communicate directly with them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, just on the internet.

John Petrocelli
And there’s another basic critical-thinking skills, 101s, three-point question, and that is, “Well, who? Who am I getting this information? Who is telling me this? Or, who is the claim coming from? What is their expertise? What is their credibility?” So, you start with “Who?” Well, then the next question is now, you’re back, “Well, how? How do they know? How is it that they possibly came to this conclusion? Is there anything in their presentation or their assertion, their claim, that they have communicated that would hint at how it is they would know this given their credibility, their level of expertise?

And “What?” back to “What?” But this time it’s “What agenda might they have? What are they trying to sell me? What are they trying to sell us?” So, now, instead of “What?” “How?” and “Have you considered?” you can sort of just mentally go through, “Well, who’s telling this? How do they know? And what are they trying to sell me? What’s their agenda?”

And it’s also useful to turn these kinds of questions onto ourselves because one of the most potent BS-ers that we’ll ever meet in our lives is ourselves, it’s the BS that often goes unchallenged, it’s the BS that we tell ourselves things that we would like to believe, that just ain’t so half the time, probably half the time.

So, it’s good to turn these questions onto the self, and say, “What level of evidence do I actually have? And do I have any? What am I basing this on? Do I have anything conclusive that actually leads me to this conclusion? And what about other people? What about my friends and colleagues? Do they have the same beliefs? They have an important perspective too. What about asking them?” Collecting more data instead of just remaining in one’s box and one’s head can do wonders for the types of data collection that are needed to combat the BS that we hand ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
What this brings back for me is I remember I needed to get a new roof and I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was having trouble getting someone to show up, so it’s like, “To heck with it. I’m calling every roofer that I can.” So, I called like 20 and, sure enough, I had like five show up, so I was like, “Hey, that worked. Nothing succeeds like excess.”

But then they were telling me contradictory things, like, “Oh, you got to tear this off,” “No, you don’t need to tear it off. You can put another layer.” And then it’s like, “Oh, you can just put a coating on the top. You don’t need to do more material at all than a coating.” And so, I was like, “Well, how the heck am I…? I don’t know anything about roofing. You’re the roofing masters and you’re telling me completely different things. How do I get to the heart of this?”

It was tricky, it’s sort of like…but I guess I followed your principles in terms of what was their agenda. And so, when someone told me, like, “Hey, I can’t work on your roof until you’ve fixed this masonry situation over there because you’re just going to have leaking.” I was like, “Okay. Well, this guy is walking away from perfectly good money, so I think that’s probably true.” So, looking at the agenda part of the story.

And then someone else actually offered evidence, like, “Hey, do you see how this is sagging and do you see from this side angle there’s already three layers? Well, the Chicago building code only allows for this thing.” I was like, “Okay, now that’s some evidence.” And it was funny how in hindsight…

John Petrocelli
It’s a picture of your roof not someone else’s roof.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. It’s funny how, in hindsight, like that’s what cuts through the clutter, but because I felt overwhelmed and it was a large expense and these are the experts who are contradicting each other, I find it very stressful. But by following your guiding lights there, I probably could’ve been like, “Okay, I’m disregarding what you say, and you say, and getting the mason and we’re tearing it off and, hey, that was easy. Could’ve been a lot quicker.”

John Petrocelli
Yes. Well, I would say, Pete, you did 100% exactly the right thing in that situation. And it sounds like you asked a lot of follow-up questions, and that is another antidote to BS, because only through follow-up questions are you going to reveal the inconsistencies and are you going to reveal other things about a person’s personality and their agenda that will come through if you follow up with as many follow-up questions as you can.

I had a similar instance recently where I had to have a breaker box to our AC unit switch, and I had two separate electricians come out. The first one said it was basically a $2,000 repair, so they wanted to replace the entire two-breaker panel, and I thought, “Wow, gee, that’s really expensive. I’m going to have to definitely get a second opinion on that.” But I went out with him and we looked at it, he explained everything, and I asked him so many questions, Pete, by the time he left, he was coaching me on how to speak with the home warranty representative on the phone on what to say and what not to say because it ended up being really a minor repair that cost $80 with the second.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay

John Petrocelli
There was no damage. The breakers were actually a mismatch. They were sort of apples and oranges and we discovered this, but there hadn’t been any damage to the box itself. So, I could suspect that with something that I thought, “Well, this probably won’t be more than a couple hundred dollars of repair,” and, all of a sudden, it’s 2,000. My detector went off and I just asked questions. Again, I said, “Well, show me what that looks like,” because he said there was damage.

But when he pulled them out, they looked brand new to me so it was harder for him to then kind of continue following down that path because there didn’t appear to be any burning or there didn’t appear to be any kind of any marks. They looked brand new. And so, just asking questions. We did the same thing with what I’ve called the masters, the well-trained artists, the BS artists of all time must be people who sell timeshare agreements for vacations, hotels.

Pete Mockaitis
“It’s a marriage insurance, John. Can you put a price on that?”

John Petrocelli
So, these people are highly-trained BS artists. So, they will bring you in to maybe Myrtle Beach for two nights, they give you free two nights to stay, and they’ll say, “All right. Well, on Saturday, all you have to do is agree to watch a one-hour presentation that we’ll give you. It’s a marketing presentation and dinner is on us and all of this stuff.”

Well, what they do is they’ll bring you in at 10:30 a.m. because they know you’re not going to have lunch before 10:30 a.m. and they sit you in the waiting room until about 12:30 so now you are starting to get hungry for lunch, and then the presentation starts at 12:30, and then that takes an hour, and then they want to show you some of the properties. And then they want to BS you on how great all this whole package is going to be. Before you know it, it’s 5:00 p.m. and then they want you to make a decision. So, you’re exhausted.

And people, we know, are less likely to detect BS if they are fatigued, if their what we call the self-regulatory resources that are the resource, the mental resources that you use to maintain, to change and maintain your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And when people are depleted of those basic psychological resources, they don’t always make the best decisions, they don’t always behave in the ways that they normally would if they are full of these resources. And detecting BS, and even producing BS, are affected by these resources.

And what they do is they drain them, and then they ask you to make a decision.

But even in those cases, if you ask enough follow-up questions, people will usually come to reasonable decisions if they’ve got good information. When they don’t have good information, or incomplete information, they often make very poor decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, John, this is a lot of great stuff. I want to shift gears and hear about a couple of your favorite things. Could you now tell us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

John Petrocelli
Yes, my favorite quote actually is by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he says, “When you know how to think, it empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.”

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

John Petrocelli
It’s got to be Harry Frankfurt’s On Bull, but I think a close second would have to be anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Just beautiful. The writing is just beautiful and that’d have to be a close second.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you a lot?

John Petrocelli
Well, I would say that what I’ve been trying to do with the book, too, is just to normalize calling BS. And when I think people have commented that, well, some of the things I’ve talked about in earlier talks, and in my research that they’ve read, they said, “You know, this actually works,” and you don’t have to use the word BS.

You can do it in a very considerate way and maybe even in a private way such that people don’t feel uncomfortable being called on their BS because, as you probably know, that calling BS can be a serious conversation-killer, and perhaps fighting words in some parts. So, I would think that doing it in a considerate way works best and maybe even in private.

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

John Petrocelli
Yeah, I’m available on Twitter as @JohnVPetro or you can look me up at Wake Forest University Psychology, you’ll find me there.

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

John Petrocelli
I’d say call to action would be to, I think, this would be for leaders and for managers especially, to try to create a communicative culture that is open to asking questions, one that is open even to possibly challenging. One of the most frequently used BS words in all of the workplace is best practice, to challenge things like that, and to just create the sort of atmosphere to make that kind of thing okay. And I think decision-making will be much more optimal in that type of communicative culture.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. John, this has been a pleasure. I wish you much success and BS-free exchanges.

John Petrocelli
All right. Well, thank you. Thanks so much for having me, Pete.

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

David Komlos
Such a pleasure, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve got a book Cracking Complexity. What’s the story here?

David Komlos
Cracking Complexity is basically a book about 18 years of experience on how to get after big challenges quickly, whether you’re a manager, a director, a vice president, somebody who’s writing policy, someone who’s an analyst, someone who’s an up and comer, a high potential. There’s ways in which to get after the defining challenges that move you forward in your career, that make you a big contributor, that make you a great leader. And there’s actually a formula for how to get after big challenges. This book chronicles the formula and gives examples and cases along the way to make it interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’m thinking back to my strategy consulting days, complexity was almost like a dirty word for us in terms of if a business has a lot of complexity, that usually meant that a lot of mistakes and suboptimal resource allocations were happening. So, when you use the word “complexity” what do you mean by it?

David Komlos
We mean something specific. We mean a multidimensional, lots of moving parts, human challenge. We, actually, borrowed from Dave Snowden from his Cynefin framework where he says there’s a difference between complicated challenges and complex challenges. So, simple challenges, people solve on their own every day by connecting the dots, whether they’ve seen the challenge or not. When you’re dealing with a complicated challenge, it might be new to you, but it’s a solved challenge. It’s challenge that’s been solved many times before.

For example, a simple challenge is driving a car. A complicated challenge is fixing a broken car. You may not know how to do it, but there’s lots of mechanics out there that’s all they do 24/7, 365, right? So, the right approach is to take your broken car to the expert, the mechanic. Same thing when you’re also implementing an accounting software system. Don’t try to figure that yourself, bring in the experts who do that for a living.

Complex challenges are always the defining challenges, whether it’s turning around a product, or saving money, or figuring out a new policy for government, or figuring out how to grow faster as an organization, or gel better as a team, or understand your customers better and deliver a great customer experience. All of those are complex challenges which if there was a playbook, if there was a recipe, if there was a mechanic, so to speak, that you could just take this challenge to, he or she could just fix it like they fix all those other situations, that’d be great, but that doesn’t exist.

So, complex challenges are typically the headscratchers, the ones that you have to figure out fresh each time, and where it’s not just enough to solve with a really good solution, a really good plan, you really need a big group of people bought into the solution if you’re going to see sustainable execution happen, if you’re going to see people change their behavior, do what they’re supposed to do, you need them bought in. You can’t just tell them what to do. You need them bought in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Sure. Well, could you maybe rattle off three or four or five examples of a complex challenge for us just so we’re really thinking about the same thing here?

David Komlos
Sure. You might be trying to figure out how to stem the opioid epidemic in your state, or you might be trying to figure out how to deal with mental health challenges in your hospital, or you might be trying to figure out how to grow your product faster, capture more market share, or what will customers notice in the customer experience, and how do you get your company or your team to deliver a unified customer experience. Those are examples of complex challenges that are really common whether you’re in a small company, a medium-sized company, a large company, whether you’re in the government. You’re always trying to figure out how to do better more effectively, more efficiently.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good deal. Thank you. Well, so then, you say that leaders often handle complexity the wrong way, or the linear way. So, could you kind of orient us to what would sort of the linear approach look, sound, feel like versus a non-linear way?

David Komlos
Yes. Well, I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re a car company, and you decide that you are going to stand out from all the other car companies by delivering an exceptional experience for people who are buying cars, people who are coming into the store to get their cars maintained or serviced, and that’s the way you’re going to stand out from the crowd, because quality is not necessarily that big a difference these days, right? Many cars are made well.

The linear way to approach this would be to do a lot of research first, and maybe strike a taskforce and have them do research, or call in a market research firm to figure out, like, “What do customers care about in the car-buying process? Or what do customers care about when they walk into a dealership to have their cars serviced?”

You would interview a lot of people. You might take different approaches to interview young people who are buying cars, older people who are buying cars, people who’ve never bought a car, and just ask them to think about how they’d buy a car. You might do a lot of synthesis around what’s going on out there, who the competition is, what kind of new car companies are coming out, what kind of new car companies are allowing you to test cars differently, buy them online, etc.

And then you’d start to get to the point where you’re making recommendations, and level setting other people in your organizations on what you’ve discovered, and then going back to the drawing board to make better recommendations, and doing readouts, and more interviews, and then postulating like, “Well, here’s what I think we should do.”

And then, when you’re done, you would have a persuasion campaign on your hands. Basically, now it’s time to convince everybody who wasn’t involved in my research and interviews and synthesis and thinking, and recommending, and going back to the drawing board. Now, I’ve got to get people on board with what my recommendations are, what my taskforce recommendations are, what my consulting companies’ recommendations are.

And those recommendations would’ve taken a long time to get to, and they may be excellent recommendations. They probably are excellent recommendations but the linear approach to solving basically takes a long while, places the onus on a small group of people, whether it’s an internal group of people or an external group of people, your team or your consulting firm. And by the time you get to the brass tacks, “What should we do to drive a better customer experience?” you have to persuade a lot of people who are not brought along for the ride.

The more novel way to do things, the better way to do things in the face of complex challenges, the non-linear way, is to involve all those people who you would contact for the research, involve all those people you would interview, involve the people who are going to make the decisions, involve the people who are going to make the recommendations, and so on and so forth, all together, all at once.

And by involving them all together all at once, you would basically help them get to a shared understanding of what really matters, what’s really going on, what doesn’t matter so much about customers and what they care about in the car-buying experience, the car-service experience. You’d have a lot of people challenge their assumptions together all in the same room, eyeball to eyeball.

And it would take a fraction of the time where people could collide with one another, if you will, interact with one another, so that by the time they finish coming up with what they think will really move the needle on the car-purchasing and car-servicing customer experience in a way to help your company stand out from the pack, they would not only have cracked the nut, but actually have bought into what they’ve solved, the solution they put in forth.

Pete Mockaitis
So, now, you say all the people, all together, all at once. Now, could that be hundreds or thousands of people?

David Komlos
It could be. Generally speaking, though, from my experience, you want to be working in groups of 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 people all together all at once, and sometimes you have to work with several groups of that size to spread. But, generally speaking, when you bring together a cross section of the organization, and experts, and advisors, and stakeholders from around the organization all together, it takes 30, 40 people to really be representative of the culture and of the system that you’re trying to solve for.

And so, you can actually get to a solution with far fewer people. Then the challenge is, “How do you get all those other people aligned?” And there’s ways to do that that are also faster than what we’re accustomed to by having people interact together in smaller groups but spread across your organization.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess I’m thinking, in this car example, so there could be multiple customers and multiple dealers and multiple sales staff at headquarters and multiple marketing people and then so…

David Komlos
And then people like yourself who used to work at management consulting firms or who are in management consulting firms, people who work for car research companies, you might bring someone in from Google, you might bring someone in from a completely different industry who has also shaped a specific customer experience and learned along the way what could work and to spur the innovative thinking.

There’s actually an important concept for your listeners called requisite variety. And what requisite variety says, “Only variety can destroy variety.” That’s really, really important and it’s not buzzword yet. It’s really important, something for the rest of your careers. When you’re dealing with a big challenge, it’s typically a multidimensional, lots of moving parts, kind of challenge. Like this car company trying to improve the consumer experience. You have to be as multidimensional as that challenge if you’re trying to really crack the nut on that challenge. And the way you do that is by tapping into the right variety of people.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. I guess what I’m just sort of imagining here is I think that we could have 20 to 60 dealers alone, or 20 to 60 customers alone. But you’re proposing in this world that we get 20 to 60 people which is everybody across all stakeholders.

David Komlos
Yup, you could. And, again, you don’t have to look at this as something exotic, right? “I’m going to bring together 60 people once and never again.” You could bring together 60 dealers; they want to do better. You can bring together 30 dealers and 30 company people. You can bring together 20 dealers. You know, the nice thing here is that when you’re solving for something important and complex, typically people have a stake in the outcomes, right?

They may see things differently. People may see the car-buying and car-servicing experience and what to do about it differently, whether they’re an owner of a dealership, or the car company, or the sales force, or what have you. But they all share a stake in getting it right. And when you bring a group of people together, they can determine what are the things they have to do together to make a change. They can also determine what are the things they should try.

And when you try different things, when you commit to trying new things, and actually tracking how those new experiments are doing, you can actually double down on the ones that are working, and get rid of the ones that aren’t. And when you double down on the ones that are working, you can spread them to other people who didn’t necessarily have a hand in coming up with that experiment in the first place, you only brought together 50 or 60 people, or 20 or 30 people, or on small teams 10 people. But now that the 10 people have solved for something, and tried something, and it’s worked, that’ll spread much faster.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I’m still just visualizing the room. I have 20 to 60 people in this room all together all at once, but I could also have 20 to 60 people who are all the same, like all dealers or all customers. So, how is this working?

David Komlos
Yeah, you would want to have, again, the right variety of people. You’d want to have a diverse group of people. So, as a manager, or as a leader, trying to get after a challenge, or if you’re the car company leader who’s tasked with figuring out, “What should the customer experience be?” you should be looking at, “Who are some of the dealers I’m going to bring together? Who are some of the sales folks, some of the marketing folks, some of the folks who’ve done research on buying patterns, and so on and so forth, all together?”

You wouldn’t want to just keep it at just dealers, or just company people, or just sales folks. You’d want to have a diverse group of people who can see the challenge of delivering a better customer experience from every angle.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess what I’m imagining here is if I have a dozen different kinds of stakeholders, then I might only have one, two, three, four of each. And that’s fine?

David Komlos
That is fine. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

David Komlos
Absolutely, Pete, because to solve the challenge, you don’t need 30, 40, 50 people of each particular constituents. You need a handful of individuals. In our book Cracking Complexity we talk about the 12 zones of variety, and all the different characteristics that inform those 12 zones. And when you go through the 12 zones, whether I’m bringing people together from functions, or geographies, or business units, people from the board, or strategy folks, or operational folks, or outside folks, folks like consultants, advisors and so forth, it allows you to think through, “Who should I be bringing into my meetings?” Even in small settings. And you don’t need, as you say, 15, 20, 30. You can have a handful of each constituency to really get after the challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, maybe let’s zoom out a little bit. So, you got a 10-step process here. Could you kind of give us the one or two sentences per step overview of how this goes down? And then we’ll dig into some more.

David Komlos
The first step is to acknowledge the complexity. So, a lot of people would rather not acknowledge that something is multidimensional, is a human challenge, it’s going to be a difficult one. It can’t just be solved the normal way. And so, they go down the wrong path in the approach they take. One thing that we like to say is it’s not the problem you’re solving, it’s how you’re solving the problem.

And so, you have to know what kind of challenge are you up against. And when it’s a complicated challenge, you should bring in the experts. When it’s a complex challenge, you have to take a different approach. That’s the approach that I’ll talk through now. But the first step is to acknowledge that you are dealing with a complex challenge. Same old, same old won’t work on it. You need a different approach.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

David Komlos
The next step, once you know it’s a complex challenge, let’s say it’s about growing faster. You’d want to construct a really, really good question. That’s the second step in the formula. And so, your question could be, “What must we do, starting now and over the next six months, to grow by 15% over the next two years?” Or you could have a different question but it would be a growth-oriented question. And the question serves as the invitation and as the guideline to the people that you’ve invited who we spoke of just previously, those different constituencies.

The third step is to say, “Well, if this is the question that I’m trying to answer, ‘What do have to do over the next three months to grow by 10% or 15% over the next 18 months?’ who are all the right people, who are all the right solvers, what’s the right variety of solvers that I need to target?” And so, when you think through, “Who are all the people I need to target?” you want to think about the usual suspects.

But you also want to think about the non-usual suspects, those people who are inside your organization who don’t necessarily get called into these conversations, like people from the field, for example, or someone who worked for a competitor, or people from outside your organization, like a futurist, or a consultant who may not necessarily have been in that conversation with you had you not thought about targeting all the right variety of people.

The next step is to localize the solvers. So, localize them, bring them together. There’s a lot of really good technology out there to have conversations in small groups, but what we find is face to face on the really important challenges is really important.

And then, the fifth step, is to eliminate the noise. Before you bring people together, you’ve got make sure that you circulate some sort of a fact base, some sort of level-setting language to get people as far as possible even before they get together. You can do that with pre-reads, you can do that with videos, you can have a conference call to level-set folks, you can send out a glossary of terms, you can do all of the above, you can do none of the above. It’s really important though to think about, “How can I get a diverse group of people who don’t necessarily see things the same way, who speak different languages? How can I eliminate some of that noise before we get together knowing that I won’t be able to eliminate all the noise?”

Now, the next step is, once people are together and they know what the question is, they know they’re going to talk about, “What can we do over the next three months to grow faster?” the next step is really important. Don’t pre-determine the agenda. Let your team, whether it’s 6 people, 16 people, 26, 36, 56 people, agree on the topics they think they need to talk about, they think they need to explore in order to answer your question about growing faster.

When you let the people themselves, having brought the right group of people together, when you let them determine what they have to explore, the ownership starts right away, and the engagement starts right away in contrast to pre-determined agendas, which can often bias the outcomes. Then we say, “Put people on a collision course.” What that means is when you bring 20 people together, Pete, or 60 people, or even 10 people, you really have to make sure all of those people are going to interact with each other many times.

So, if you bring together 20 people, you don’t want five people who are really keen on figuring out how to grow faster or how to deliver a better customer experience. You don’t want the five keen people to be talking to each other constantly with the rest of the others checked out pretty much, whether it’s because they’re just not engaged, they may be introverted, not feeling very comfortable contributing in that particular way, for whatever reasons, hierarchy may be dominating, the loudest voices may be dominating.

To put people on a collision course means to make sure that everyone is bumping into everyone many times in conversations. Because if you take a few steps back in the formula, you targeted the right group of people for a specific purpose. You said, “I need these people, the usual suspects and the non-usual suspects if I’m going to solve this fast.” And if you brought them together, if you went to lengths to bring them face to face, make sure that they’re all engaging with each other many times.

Now, another step in the formula is once they’re engaging with each other many times, you want to make sure that you are giving them a kick at the can a variety of times on the same subject. So, if Dave said, “We got to talk about X. We got to talk about Y. We got to talk about Z,” make sure they’re talking about those topics three, four times. Not just one kick at the can, many kicks at the can.

And then we don’t just make sure that people are bumping into each other many times, we don’t just make sure that we’ve got the right group of people talking about the right topics that they’ve identified as the right topics to discuss on a question they all care about, you want to make sure that they’re having really, really candid dialogue. So, what we do and what you can do very easily, whether you’re doing it this way or in small meetings, we assign people to teams on topics as members and critics and observers. And those people play those roles an equal number of times so it’s a fair approach on a variety of topics.

Members, their job is to really advance the topic as far as they can. Critics are in the room. You can think about it as a round table where the members are at the table, there’s a panel of critics sitting right behind them, listening very carefully, and then giving them critique, helping them to do better. And then you can imagine a group of observers at the back of the room just listening, not being able to contribute.

And what we’re really trying to create is a purposeful deliberate controlled explosion amongst all these people, an explosion of brain power. People listening differently, people contributing differently, people hearing each other differently, learning differently, and much more efficiently and effectively having very transparent dialogue, very candid conversation about the things that matter.

So, when you acknowledge the complexity and you form it in the form of a question, and you bring together the right people, you bring them together, you eliminate the noise, you get them telling you what they need to discuss to answer the question, you put them in meetings where they can collide with each other many times, and you have really good dialogue amongst them while they’re colliding, you get clarity and insights and action basically.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s good stuff. Now, let’s see, there’s a few things I want to follow up here now. So, we say construct a really, really good question. What makes a question really, really good? And what are some things to watch out for in that are kind of inadequate when it comes to your questions?

David Komlos
That in itself is a great question.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you.

David Komlos
Yes. So, you want your questions to embed one or more goals, so, “What do we have to do to hit 20% growth?” It could be, “What do we have to do to hit 30% growth profitably?” It could be, “What do we have to do to double the business while remaining a great place to work or a top employer of choice?” It could be, “How do we ensure all Americans have access to safe and affordable healthcare?” The adjectives that you use have to be very deliberate when you talk about the “we” in the question, “What must we do?” You have to be very specific about who the “we” is. Is it the team? Is it the business unit? Is it the enterprise? Is it the society? You want to be very specific about that.

A good question has a well thought-through time horizon. Is it, “What do we need to do now and over the next 18 months”? Is it, “What do we have to do now and over the next 90 days to get the full benefit out of the merger”? The time horizon is really important because the recommendations that you get is going to be geared towards the time horizon.

And then a good question has stretch goals but not unreasonable goals. A good question has stretch goals that make people feel that they can hit those goals when things have changed in contrast to unreasonable goals which just sort of deter people from wanting to even start to answer the question.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, when it comes to the you’ve got the member, the observer, and the critic, so how does that kind of play out with regard to, okay, you have a sub-topic, sub-committee? Like, could you sort of spell out just sort of how many people are talking about something? And how do you divide those numbers and people into those roles?

David Komlos
Yeah, let’s say you’re in a meeting, you’re having a meeting with 10 people. I would say, “Assign five of them as members, assign three of them as critics, and then assign two of them as observers.” And, of course, those people will change roles when you go to your next topic, right? But on this topic, talking about cost structure, or brand, or message, or segment, or whatever you’re talking about, have five members at the round table, three critics sitting just behind them, listening intently, and two observers near the back, not saying a word, listening very, very carefully.

Let the members have a 15-, 20-minute conversation really digging into the topic, whatever they’re talking about, and then ask them to pause, and then invite the critics for a minute or two each to provide their critique, and they can critique the process, “John seems to be dominating,” or, “I’d like to hear more from Jerry or Mary,” or, “I disagree with that recommendation,” or, “Did you know that?” or, “This worked really well in…” That’s the kind of critique you’re looking for. And make sure you’re not letting the critics become members. You just want them to give the members what they need to hear in order to advance their own conversation when they take the conversation back.

And you want the observers taking notes in the back because they will be given speaking roles, they will be members or critics of other topics as the day progresses, or as your next meeting progresses. And what you’ll find is that the members really, really dig in, they listen really well to what the critics have to say. The critic role is always a very powerful role to really sway the way a team is going always to the positive. It allows the team to sort of step back. It allows people to say, “You know, you’re at 100,000 feet. You need to get down to the ground.” Or it allows people to say, “You went right to detail before stepping back and really understanding the full breadth and depth of the challenge.” The critic role is really important.

And one thing I want your listeners to know is that when you start to assign people as members, critics, and observers, organizations get used to this, you’ll run much more effective meetings, and they’ll become very self-managing. The members are going to want to hear from the critics. The observers at the back will be bursting, waiting for their turn to get to be a member or a critic. It’s a very, very effective way to structure a half-hour meeting, a two-hour meeting, a two-day meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
And when we get the collision course going, I’m curious, people have a natural tendency to sort of just talk to people that they know and they are sort of affiliated with already. What are the means by which you get the collisions to happen?

David Komlos
Okay. So, Pete, I will say at the commercial level, so to speak, the most sophisticated version of the formula, we use algorithms. So, we literally use algorithms to solve for N times, N minus 1 connection points, where N is the number of people. So, if there’s 20 people, there’s 20 times 19 connection points, and we let an algorithm assign people to teams in a way that makes sure that not only are they on the right teams, but they’re going to bump into other people on the other teams as they iterate.

When you don’t have an algorithm, you want to pay attention to who’s on which team as best as you can, and you want to rotate people through a variety of topics during a three-hour meeting, and you want to have a variety of meetings on those same topics. So, I would recommend to your listeners that, let’s say you have a five-point agenda to talk about a specific challenge that you’re trying to address or seize a big opportunity, if you have five topics, cycle through those topics at least twice. And feel free to cycle through those topics three times.

So, you should meet on them one through five, one topic through five, and then do that again, and do that again. And with different people playing member, critic, observer roles on the different teams and rotating, you will have people bumping into each other in the right way, or approximating that as best as possible. And you’ll see a real lift on the cross-pollination and the learning that’s happening from one discussion to the next.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so, understood. Now, there’s a few approaches here that are different from the norm. Could you share a word for the skeptic in terms of some of the eye-popping results that have come about in terms of getting the job done well and more efficiently than traditional approaches?

David Komlos
Yes. So, skeptics deserve to be skeptical.

Pete Mockaitis
And the observers are observing, the skeptics are skepticking.

David Komlos
Yes, exactly, and they deserve to be. I mean, there’s a lot of different mouse traps out there that profess to have solved, you know, for how to go about solving things and just don’t live up to that. Speaking from experience, I would say the good news here is you can try this yourself. So, the next time you’re planning to solve something, you’re planning a meeting, start by inviting some of the non-usual suspects. And, of course, the other people will say, “Why is Bob, or why is Terry being invited to this meeting? They have nothing to do with what we’re talking about.” Invite them nonetheless and be open about that.

Take an iterative approach to the agenda items in your meeting, even if you’ve pre-determined the agenda. If you don’t feel comfortable leading the agenda up to the group, pre-determine the agenda, have a finite number of topics, five, six, seven topics that you want to discuss to get after a challenge, and go through two cycles of meetings, and assign a portion of your people as members, and a portion of them as critics, and judge for yourself. And that’s doing it in a very sort of grassroots brass tacks way.

It only takes two hours or an hour of meeting to see the difference between your normal meetings. And then you will have experimented with something that’s not costing you money to do that you can decide to amplify and do more of if it works. And then if you’re really, really interested, read more about the formula and use it on a larger scale. The only way to get skeptics to not be skeptical is to try something on a small scale and then scale it up.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you’re in the midst of some of these conversations, do you have any favorite prompts or questions or scripts that you find yourself kind of reaching for again and again and again?

David Komlos
Yeah, we counsel people in a few ways. I like that question about prompts. And so, if you don’t have customers in the room, what would your customers say? If you don’t have the regulator in the room, what would the regulator be saying? If you don’t have any naysayers in the room, what would the naysayers and cynics would say? If you don’t, for some reason, have the implementation angle or the PMO in the room, what would they be concerned about, or what would they be saying?

And then one other prompt that we give all the sponsors of the sessions that we do which are usually a day and a half minimum, we say, “It’s okay. It’s totally okay and very, very welcome, in fact, the job of the people who have been convened here is to speak their minds and open their hearts and say everything that needs to be said. The only thing that will be looked down upon is if you don’t say something here, and say at the water cooler two weeks later. Put everything on the table here, not in two weeks. We’re all here. We’re all here together to solve something and get after it, say what has to be said here not later.”

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

David Komlos
Just that for your listeners, many of us have been conditioned that solving big challenges, whether at the team level, the business unit level, higher up, and getting people to change, that’s an arduous, long life cycle, long task. And what I want people to know is that solving and change can be incredibly fast when you’re approaching the challenge the right way.

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

David Komlos
Well, I love the movie The Matrix and I like it when Morpheus says to Neo, “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”

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

David Komlos
I really love two books, and I don’t know if you’d put them under the guise of research. But I do love Crossing the Chasm and learned a tremendous amount from that book, Geoffrey Moore, the author. And then Jim Collins’ Good to Great is also one that I refer and reflect back on regularly.

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

David Komlos
Something that helps me be awesome at my job is a full floor-to-ceiling whiteboard.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And how about a favorite habit?

David Komlos
Intermittent fasting.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’ve done that before. Tell me about it.

David Komlos
Well, basically, I eat between noon and 8:00 at night, usually finish around 7:00, and then I don’t eat. I just drink water. And I find that that gets me up in a really good place. The body gets used to it. I’ve got the right level of energy in the morning. I can get a lot of great work done. I’m not wondering about what I’m going to eat. Not even thinking about it. I get right to work or focus on my family. And then when noon hits, I eat.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with readers and listeners?

David Komlos
Yes, requisite variety. Only variety can destroy variety. That really resonates with people.

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

David Komlos
I’d point them to CrackingComplexity.com.

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

David Komlos
Bucket your challenges for the rest of your career. For the rest of your career, look through the lens of requisite variety, “Who are all the right people that I need to bring to something, not just the usual suspects?” And when you look through the lens of the right variety of people, you will more often than not bring the right people to the challenge. And that’s half the battle.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, David, thank you for this. I wish you lots of luck with all the complexity you’re cracking, and have a good one.

David Komlos
Thank you, Pete. You, too.