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

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Charan 

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

Resources Mentioned

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Anna Dearmon Kornick Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Charan, welcome.

Charan Ranganath
Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec 09
0

1017: How to Reclaim Your Creativity and Unlock Innovation with Duncan Wardle

By | Podcasts | No Comments


Disney legend Duncan Wardle shares keys for tapping into your creative side.

You’ll Learn

  1. What blocks our creativity
  2. How to hone your ideas with a “naive expert”
  3. The trick to surfacing your best ideas

About Duncan 

As Head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney, Duncan and his team helped Imagineering, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar, and Disney Parks to innovate, creating magical new storylines and experiences.

He now brings his extensive Disney expertise to audiences around the world using a unique approach to Design Thinking, helping people capture unlikely connections, leading to fresh thinking and disruptive ideas.

Delivering a series of keynotes, workshops and ideation forums, his unique Innovation toolkit helps companies embed a culture of innovation into everyone’s DNA.

Duncan is a multiple TED speaker and contributor to Fast Company, Forbes & the Harvard Business Review. He teaches innovation Master Classes at Yale, Harvard, and Edinburgh University. 

Resources Mentioned

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Duncan Wardle Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Duncan, welcome.

Duncan Wardle
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I am so excited to talk creativity and The Imagination Emporium. And, first, I’d love it if you could kick us off, no pressure, but I’d love to hear a super riveting high-stakes story that’s also instructive and behind the scenes related to a Disney classic masterpiece that we’re all familiar with. Just no problem.

Duncan Wardle
Any particular masterpiece you had in mind?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy, it’s not hard enough. Let’s make it more specific. I’ll keep it open. I’ll keep it open. I mean, I’m thinking my kids love Moana, but we can go anywhere you think there’s a juicy story.

Duncan Wardle
So, I started, I finished as Head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney. Didn’t start that way. I started as the coffee boy in the London office. I used to go and get my boss six cappuccinos a day from Bar Italia on Frith Street. And about three weeks into the role, I was told I would be the character coordinator, that’s the person who looks after the walkaround characters, at the Royal Premiere, for “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” in the presence of the Princess of Wales, Diana.

I was like, “Ooh, what do I do?” They said, “Well, you stand at the bottom of the stairs, the Princess will come in along the receiving line, Roger Rabbit will come down the staircase, the Princess will greet Roger, she’ll move into the auditorium.” How could you possibly screw that up? Well, that’s the day when I found out what a contingency plan was, because I didn’t have one.

But a contingency plan would tell you, if we were going to bring a very tall rabbit with very long feet down a giant staircase towards the Princess of Wales, one might want to measure the width of the steps before the rabbit clips on the top step and is now hurtling like a bullet, head over feet at torpedo speed directly down the stairs towards Diana’s head. Whereupon he was taken out by two Royal Protection officers who just flattened him.

There’s a very famous picture on Reuters of Roger going back to the air like this, two secret service heavies diving towards him, and a 21-year-old PR guy from Disney about going, “Oh, shit. I’m fired.” So, I thought, “You know, there’s no point going to work tomorrow.” So, I got a call from somebody called a CMO. I didn’t even know what that was at the time. I thought, “Oh, he’s going to tell me I’m fired. He goes, “That was great publicity.” I said, “Who knew? I could make a career out of this.”

And so, for the next 20 or 30 years, to be precise, I got to have some of the more mad, audacious, outrageous ideas for Disney, Pixar, LucasFilms, etc. and I was like a kid in a candy store. I always liked the ideas that I had no idea how to pull them off. When I sent my son’s Buzz Lightyear into space, I had to convince NASA to take Buzz Lightyear into space. He’s the world’s longest serving astronaut on the International Space Station.

I built a swimming pool, a full-size Olympic swimming pool down Main Street, USA for Michael Phelps to swim down. I really only ever liked the ideas that I had no idea how I was going to pull them off once they were approved.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that sounds like a ton of fun. I’m just taking it all in. Wow! So, basically, you had nothing to do with the tripping, and had you thought of it, you would have prevented it, and you would not have had this beautiful serendipitous pathway of fun, creative goodness, unfold for you.

Duncan Wardle
So, basically for 20 years, I got to do the more mad, audacious, outrageous ideas, and about, oh, God, 2009, 2010, I got a call from the boss who said, “Listen, you’re the guy with all the mad ideas who seems to get them done inside a very large organization, you’re going to be in charge of innovation and creativity,” to which my response was, “Well, what the hell is that?” He said, “Well, I don’t know. We just want to embed a culture of innovation and creativity into everybody’s DNA.” I said, “Okay.”

So, I tried three or four models, I hired outside consultants, we did accelerator programs, we created innovation team. But what we failed in, actually, our overall goal, which was “How might we embed a culture of innovation and creativity into everybody’s DNA?” So, I set out to create a toolkit, one that has three principles: takes the BS out of innovation and makes it more accessible to normal hard-working people; makes creativity tangible for a 50% of us who are uncomfortable with ambiguity and grey; but far more important, make it fun, give people tools they’ll choose to use when the boss isn’t around. That’s when you know you’re changing a culture.

And we ended up having, I think it was like a three-year waitlist for what was a two-day voluntary training course. So, we must be doing something right.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. Well, I’m intrigued then, with all this study and practice and teaching and experiencing in the zones of creativity and imagination and innovation, is there a key surprising discovery you’ve made about us humans when we’re trying to do this stuff?

Duncan Wardle
Yes. Close your eyes. Where are you usually and what are you doing when you get your best ideas?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m often in bed or in the shower.

Duncan Wardle
Okay, there we go, so we’ll go with those. So, you can open your eyes. I’ve done this with up to 50, now 20,000 people in the audience, and used either here, in bed, in the shower, jogging, running, commuting, playing with the children, out walking, and nobody ever says at work. Not one person. Well, that’s a bummer, isn’t it, because we’re paid to have our big ideas at work.

So, close your eyes again. Picture that last verbal argument you were in with somebody. A bit of a shouting match. Your voices are raised. You’re angry. You turn to walk away from that argument. Now you’re five seconds away. You’re 10 seconds, you’re 20 seconds away from the argument. And what just spontaneously pops into your head the second you turned to walk away from that argument? What was it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, a smarter thing that I should’ve said.

Duncan Wardle
Yeah, the killer one-liner, the one perfect, beautiful comeback you wish you’d used during the argument but you didn’t, did you? No. Why? Because when we’re in an argument, our brain is moving at a thousand miles an hour. defending ourselves, and when we’re in the office, it’s the same for meetings, emails, presentations, and I hear myself say, “I don’t have time to think.” But the split second you gave yourself time to think, came up with a killer one-liner, came up with a big idea.

But we don’t give ourselves time to think. And how do you get there? By being playful. Why is that important? Because when you are in the argument or at work you, and you hear yourself say, “I don’t have time to think,” you’re in the brain state called beta, where you only have access to your conscious brain. Well, that’s only 13% of your brain; 87% of your brain is subconscious. Every meeting you’ve ever been, every creative problem you’ve ever solved, every innovation you’ve ever seen, it’s back here. It’s unrelated stimulus but you don’t have access to it.

How do I get access to it? By being playful. What do I do? Sixty-second exercises deliberately designed to make you laugh. Why? Because the moment I hear laughter, I know that, metaphorically, I placed you back in the shower where you are when you have your best ideas. When you ask, Pete, I often hear people say, you know, you ask, “What’s the barriers to being more innovative and creative where you work?” People say, “We don’t have the resources, you know.” “Oh, okay. All right. Well, who are the most creative people you’ve ever met?” “Children.” “How much money they got?” “None.”

There is a correlation there. The challenge is this. I believe that the most employable skillsets of the next decade are being killed through Western education. Why do I believe this? Because I was doing some work recently with Google on their DeepMind project, and I asked the engineer, that’s their artificial intelligence program, what she believes will be the most employable skillsets in the next decade. And she said the ones that would be the hardest for her to program, and we agreed on what they were. The ones that which we were born with.

We were all born creative. We were all born with amazing imagination. We’re all born with empathy and intuition, but then we go to school, and the first thing our teacher tells us to do is “Don’t forget to color in between the lines. Well, stop asking why because there’s only one right answer.” So, by the time we’re 18, we identify as not creative and we’re not curious anymore. And yet with AI coming into the marketplace, these will be some of the most employable skillsets for the next decade.

So, I am on a mission. I believe everybody is creative. I don’t believe it’s just some people. I define creativity as the ability to have an idea, and I define innovation as the ability to get it done. That’s the hard part. But here’s the thing, we train our lawyers, train the IT team, train marketing, train sales, but when it comes to innovation, we just tell people to get in a room and have a big idea with no training, no equipment. So, I thought, “Right. I’m going to create a toolkit.”

So, let me ask you a question, actually, before I describe the toolkit. When you’re in your office, or anybody else’s office, for that matter, and you see a business book, where, physically, where is that business book? Where is it in the office?

Pete Mockaitis
On a bookshelf.

Duncan Wardle
Yeah, bingo. Do you ever read it? “No, I’m too busy. My boss needs this by three o’clock. I’ve got a weekly report to do, so I don’t read the books.” I thought, “Okay, what nonfiction book have I ever read, where I could only read one page, don’t have to read the whole book, but I get exactly what I want?” A cookbook. You want Shepherd’s pie? Go to page 67. And so, I’ve designed the book exactly the same way.

So, there’s a contents page for the left-hand side of the brain, and there’s a contents page for the right-hand side of the brain, and it says, “Have you ever been to a brainstorm where nothing ever happened? Go to page 67.” “Fed up with your boss shooting your ideas down? Go to page 12.” “Don’t know how to find an insight for innovation? Go to page 47.” So, I’m trying to make it accessible for people, and then I want it to really make it tangible and fun.

Because the more expertise, the more experience we have, the more reasons we know why the new idea won’t work, so we constantly shoot it down. And I call it our river of thinking. And, basically, in the last four years, we don’t get to think the way we thought four years ago. We’ve got climate change, we got artificial intelligence coming into the marketplace, we’ve got Generation Z that doesn’t want to work for us, and we’ve got global pandemics, so we don’t get to think the same way we always have. So, I want to give people a set of tools that stop you thinking the way you always do and give you permission to think differently.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, it’s a lot of goodness to dig into. We’ve got the creative side, getting ideas, and the innovation side, the hard part, making them happen. So, let’s talk about each of these in succession. On the creative side, you said you want to get us into a playful zone, and you’ve got some 60-second exercises that make us laugh. I would love to be able to laugh within 60 seconds regularly, just in general, as a life skill for joy and happiness. So, how do I pull that off?

Duncan Wardle
Well, let me see. Experts, okay. I’m going to give you an occupation. You’ve worked in this occupation for the last 25 years. Therefore, you are the world’s leading guru on this particular topic. I will play the role of a news reporter and I’ll interview you about how you get your job done. So, Pete, for the last 25 years, you are the world’s leading guru as a designer of parachutes for elephants. I will now interview you about your job.

So, Pete, I’m just curious, is there a difference in how you design the parachute for an Indian elephant versus an African elephant, given that their ears are totally different sizes?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Given the aerodynamic qualities of the ear, we make sure that the shape of the parachute can accommodate them effectively and slow things down just right, compensated for the fact that we’re getting some ear help along the way.

Duncan Wardle
And the airplane, do they go up to 30,000 feet? Or, do they go up to a thousand feet? Do they have to go to a higher altitude because of the weight of the elephants versus a human?

Pete Mockaitis
No, same height works just fine.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. And are the elephants, the Indian elephants more intimidated than the African elephants? Is one more bold and loves throwing themselves out of planes? Or is it sort of a joint fear factor?

Pete Mockaitis
They both hate it.

Duncan Wardle
And how did you get into this line of business in the first place, I’m curious?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I met this charming podcast guest and he inspired a whole career journey.

Duncan Wardle
All right. Well, thank you very much. So, I walk into a room and ask people, “Hands up if you think you’re creative,” and less than 3% of the audience will put their hand up. And then I’ll give them this exercise, and you just hear a huge laughter, and they realize that they’re far more creative than they thought they were. And I think that’s important.

The other one that I do, because I think it’s really impactful, is this one. So, you and I are going to brainstorm an idea for a birthday party. We’ve got $100,000 in the budget. And so, would you like it to be a Star Wars party or a Harry Potter party? What would you like?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I can’t help but going meta, so we only have two choices, huh?

Duncan Wardle
Well, we’ll pick a theme. What do you want?

Pete Mockaitis
I was thinking Superheroes, broadly speaking.

Duncan Wardle
Okay, superheroes. We’ll go superheroes. So, I’m going to come at you with some ideas for a superhero party. I want each and every response, every time you respond, I want the first two words out of your mouth, if you would, to be “No, because” and then you’ll tell me why we shouldn’t be doing that idea. So, I was thinking, right, we’ll get all the superheroes together. We’ll get the DC heroes, we’ll get the Marvel heroes, and we’ll even put Disney characters in there with capes and masks.

Pete Mockaitis
No, because we don’t have the intellectual property rights to do DC. This is Marvel country.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. All right. Okay, I’ll tell you what then, we’ll just do a cosplay party using all the…wait, no. Actually, superheroes, we could do a crossover party between Star Wars and Marvel, and all the tall people could come as like Darth Vader, and all the little people can come as Ewoks.

Pete Mockaitis
No, because that’s offensive to people who suffer from disabilities.

Duncan Wardle
No, a fair point. So, what if we do a Guardians of the Galaxy party because that’s got superheroes from all different, a very diverse background, and we just show the movies back-to-back-to-back, and we’ll have a playlist where we can actually all set ourselves back into, oh, LP 1970s. We’ll look good in the ‘70s.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I want people to really connect and engage with each other as opposed to seated and watching films.

Duncan Wardle
Oh, well, okay. So, we’ll stop there. So, let me ask you a question. When you’re throwing out ideas and somebody’s constantly “No, because-ing” you, how does that make you feel?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s really deflating. It’s just like, “Oh, no, no.” I was like, “I regret starting this conversation. Hmm.”

Duncan Wardle
And do you think our idea, where we were going there, do you think we were heading in a much bigger direction or were we getting smaller? Which direction were we heading?

Pete Mockaitis
Smaller.

Duncan Wardle
So, let’s try it again. Pick another theme.

Pete Mockaitis
Another party theme?

Duncan Wardle
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, sure thing. Let’s go with the ‘90s.

Duncan Wardle
The ‘90s, okay. Man, what do I remember about the ‘90s? Not much, but that’s okay. Who cares? So, I’m going to come at you with some ideas for a ‘90s party. Unlike our colleague, the other Pete, who started with the words “No, because,” I’d like you to start with the words “Yes, and” in each response, and we’ll just kind of build it together.

So, I was thinking we could, oh, yeah, a David Hasselhoff lookalike party. It’d be great.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and we’ll have cars that are like KITT.

Duncan Wardle
Ooh, yes, and we could have Transformers and the cars could actually turn themselves into Transformers, and everyone gets to take one home, and it could be sponsored by Ferrari.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and we’ll have ChatGPT in the cars so they could actually talk back and forth to us.

Duncan Wardle
Ooh, yes, and we’ll have ChatGPT in all different languages around the world. And then we’ll bring in holograms of ABBA from the ABBA Live Show in London. And then we could actually all be holograms, so we’re not actually in the party at all, but that we are.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and we’ll have 3D headsets to make it a more immersive experience for the people who are there remotely.

Duncan Wardle
Oh, yes, Apple Vision Pro, so people could actually join us from around the world. So, we’ll stop there. So, a lot more laughter, a lot more energy. This time around, if you were to describe that exercise in one word, what one word would you choose?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun.

Duncan Wardle
Fun. By the way, why shouldn’t work be fun? This time around, bigger or smaller?

Pete Mockaitis
Bigger.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. Far more importantly, when we work inside big companies, we’ve got bosses and colleagues and constituents to bring on board with our ideas. When we just finished building that idea together, whose idea was it by the time we finished?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s a team. It’s both of ours.

Duncan Wardle
It’s ours. So, just using “Yes, and” has amazing powers to turn a small idea into a big one really, really quickly, but far more importantly, allows us to transfer the power from my idea, which we know never goes anywhere inside a large organization, to our idea and accelerate its opportunity to get done. But the more experience, the more expertise we have, the more reasons we know why the new idea won’t work.

So, we start, “No, because we tried that last year,” “No, because that won’t hit our KPIs,” “No, because that’s not the way we do it here.” Just remind yourselves and the colleagues who tend to start with the words “No, because,” “Look, we’re not green lighting this project for execution today. We’re merely just greenhousing it together using yes and.” You can change your culture overnight with “Yes, and.”

Pete Mockaitis
Greenhousing, that’s fun. And even just imagining a greenhouse puts you in a good mood, with the water mists and the sunshine and the plants and the flowers.

Duncan Wardle
Actually, whilst I’ve got you, I’m going to grab a pen and a piece of paper. Have you got one? I know I should have probably mentioned that in advance. I want to talk about the power of diversity in innovation, because everybody talks diversity and then nobody does anything about it. So, I want to prove to people how diversity drives innovation.

We’ve been designing a new retail dining and entertainment complex for the Hong Kong Disney Resort, in the room that day were, the Disney Imagineering team, a team you would expect to be there, but on that particular day, I was faced with 12 white male American engineers, all over 50. That’s called groupthink.

So, I invited in a naive expert. Well, what’s a naive expert? A naive expert is there because they don’t work in the industry in which you work. Well, how can they help you solve the challenge? Well, they can’t but that’s not why they’re there. They’re there because they will say or do something to stop you thinking the way you always do and give you permission to think differently.

So, I brought in a young chef from China, a female. Why? She wasn’t male, she was female. She wasn’t American, she was Chinese. She wasn’t over 50, she was under 20. And far more importantly, she wasn’t an architect or an engineer, she was a chef, and I knew she would say or do something to get us out of our river of thinking and thinking differently.

So, I gave them the same challenge that I should give you now, pen and paper. I’m going to name an object. You have seven seconds to draw it, and then I want you to hold it up. Are you ready?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. Please, would you draw a house? Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Share your genius, if you would, please. Let’s take a look. Let’s take a look. And, ooh, can’t see, it’s fading in and out there a bit. Okay, so hands up if you drew one door.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, one door, yep.

Duncan Wardle
How many windows?

Pete Mockaitis
I have one window, but I ran out of time. I would have had two.

Duncan Wardle
Did you draw bars over the windows?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. And what shape is the roof?

Pete Mockaitis
A triangle.

Duncan Wardle
Shocker. So, all of the Disney Imagineers drew exactly what you did because they were constrained by their river of thinking. But the young female Chinese chef, she drew, hang on let’s just see if I can’t sketch this in 10 seconds, she drew a dim sum house with some dim sum on the top of it, a chimney. And so, it never occurred to her to draw the house the same way we would because she wasn’t stuck in our river of thinking.

And on the way out the door, a Disney Imagineer slapped a Post-it note over her dim sum house, and said, “Distinctly Disney. Authentically Chinese.” Seven years later, the strategic brand position that guided the entire design of the Shanghai Disney Resort, “Distinctly Disney. Authentically Chinese.” The point is this, diversity is innovation.

If somebody doesn’t look like you, they don’t think like you. And if they don’t think like you, they can help you think differently. And so, the next time you have a leadership meeting, the one person that you could do within that meeting room is not a leader, “Oh, we can’t do that.” Well, why not? Have some young 25-year-old superstar in the meeting. They’re not there to solve the challenge for you. That’s not why they’re there. They are there to challenge the way you think and to help you think differently.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Duncan, I’m loving this so much. And this reminds me when I was consulting at Bain, we had a giant department store client and I was new to the case, I was naïve. And the partner was talking about size packs, which is something I was not familiar with, but, apparently, there are garments that are sent to department stores, at least at that time, that you don’t get. You don’t say to the supplier, “I want three smalls, five mediums, ten larges.” No, you buy different size packs which have a certain preset number in there.

And I said, “Why do we have size packs? Like, aren’t we a big deal retailer who could ask for and receive from our suppliers the exact sizes that we wanted, and they would need to play ball, and would nicely meet the inventory needs and demands of how many different people of different sizes are in different stores?”

And it was funny because the partner looked at me, he’s like, “Are you kidding?” He genuinely was not sure. He wasn’t trying to be offensive or dismissive, but he was not sure if I was joking about the size pack question, because size packs are just part and parcel with what he’s been dealing with and thinking about, an industry norm forever. And so, so for me to say this is just, like, shocking.

And I don’t know, it may or may not be a wise idea with logistical efficiencies to have size packs in department stores. But I think that just by shaking it up, we are at least able to consider some new ideas and the implications of, “What if we didn’t have size packs? Maybe smaller players could work with us and we could have more fresh interesting offers in our stores. Hmm.”

Duncan Wardle
“What if” is a great tool. It was designed by Walt Disney for Fantasia. He was very frustrated that he couldn’t pump mist into the theatre or heat into the theatre during the movie. So, the theatre owners, so step one, you list the rules of your challenge. Do not think about them. If you start thinking about them, you’ll think of all the reasons you can’t break them.

So, Walt simply listed down the rules of going to a movie theatre, “I must sit down. It is dark. I must go at a set time. I can’t take in my food and beverage. I must pay to get in. I can’t control the environment.” Just list the rules. Don’t think about them. Then pick one and ask the most audacious, provocative, outrageous “What if.”

So, Walt chose the environment, he said, “Well, what if I could control the environment?” Well, he couldn’t, he didn’t own the movie theatres. Besides, that wasn’t provocative enough. So, he said, “Well, okay, if I can’t control the environment, what if I may take my movies out of the theatre?” If you know how to do it, you’re iterating. If it scares you, you’re innovating.

So, somebody said, “Well, how are you going to do that, Walt? They’ll be two-dimensional, they’ll fall over. People won’t be able to see them.” “Well, what if I made them three-dimensional?” “Well, how are you going to do that, Walt?” “Well, what if I just put people in costumes like in princesses and cowboys and pirates?” “Yeah, but, Walt, you can’t have Cinderella standing next to Jack Sparrow. People wouldn’t be immersed in her story.”

“Hey, what if I put each of them in a different themed land?” Boom, it’s called Disneyland, and that’s how he came up with the idea.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful.

Duncan Wardle
So, let me ask you a question. Did you used to go to Blockbuster Video?

Pete Mockaitis
I did.

Duncan Wardle
Did you used to pay late fees?

Pete Mockaitis
Not much, because I was broke, and I really tried to be on time.

Duncan Wardle
Well, you were one of these people who took them back on time? Wow, okay. Well, clearly, you didn’t. Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, but, occasionally, I did.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. So, Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, very fed up of paying late fees, walked into a Blockbuster Video, sat down, observed the process for a day, and wrote down the rules. “I must drive to a physical store. I must go during opening hours. They have a very limited stock. I can only take out three at a time. I must return it. I must rewind it. And if I take it back later, I must pay a late fee.” Listed the rules.

So, he took one in 2005, he took store, he said, “Well, what if there was no physical store?” What a stupid idea in 2005, or was it? YouTube was already seven months old. YouTube was only streaming professional content. So, he said, “Well, hang on a minute. What if I just did a deal with a major movie studio? I’ll stream professional content. Huh. Nobody would have to drive to a physical store. I’ll be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Everybody gets the one they want. I’ll have unlimited stock. Nobody would have to return it or rewind it. I’ll cut the rental off at 24 hours. Nobody pays a late fee. I’ll call it Netflix. I’ll take my ideas to Blockbuster five times. They’ll turn me down five times. I’ll take them out of business in less than five years.”

Now, a lot of your listeners are going to be sitting there saying, “Oh, but we don’t have the resources.” Uh-uh, that’s not fair. This tool works for everybody. There was a very small company in Great Britain in the late ‘60s. They used to make glasses that we drink out of, and they found too much breakage and not enough production as the glasses were being packaged and shipped.

So, they went down to the shop floor and they watched the production, and they broke down the rules. “Twenty-six employees convey about 12 glasses to a box, six on the top, six on the bottom. Glasses separated by corrugated cardboard. Glasses wrapped individually in newspaper. Employees were reading the newspaper.”

So, somebody took that one and said, “What if we poke their eyes out?” Well, that’s against the law and it’s not very nice. But because they had the courage to ask the most provocative what-if question of all, the lady sitting next to him immediately said, “Well, wait a minute, what if we just hire blind people?” So, they did. Production up 26%, breakage down 42%, and the British government gave him a 50% salary subsidy for hiring people with disabilities.

So, list the rules of your challenge. Don’t think about them, just list them. Pick one and ask the most audacious what-if question. You’ll be amazed how it gets you out of your river of thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right, Duncan, so we’ve hit a few guidelines for the creative, getting ideas part of things. Now let’s talk about innovation, implementing them. It’s funny, sometimes I think I have so much curiosity and love playing in the world of ideas and brainstorming and imagining and what-if and how might this work, that it’s actually a little bit tricky for me, personally, at times to hunker down. It’s like, “Okay, let’s do the things to get this going.”

Duncan Wardle
Yeah, very true. Analysis paralysis. Welcome to corporate America. So, let’s say, hang on, I’m just drawing something out here. Strategic brand fit, consumer truth, bucket load of money. Can we get it in the marketplace in the next 18 to 24 months? And is it socially engaging? I just made that up. So, this is called Stargazer. It looks like a starfish, right? And so, as you’re evaluating, let’s say, to your point, we’ve got 47 ideas up on the wall. Well, how do you know which is the right one for the consumer, for the business, etc.?

Well, so I’ve just created this and people can create their own criteria but, let’s say for today, criteria number one, “Is this embedded in our strategic brand fit? Is this aligned with what we stand for as a company? Is this embedded in consumer truth? Is the product or service relevant to the target market we want to go after? Can we actually get this into the marketplace in the next 18 to 24 months? Is it socially engaging? Will it get everybody sharing it on social media? And will it make us a bucket load of money? Obviously, you’ll have a fiscal goal.

And what you do is – I don’t have colors with me today – but you just go around each of the little criteria has three little marks on it. Does it do a poor job of meeting this criteria, a good job of meeting the criteria, or does it knock it out of the park? And all you do is you go around, let’s say it’s now idea number 13, and I’m just going to score it here on the notepad, and then I’m going to join, literally just like we were when we were kids, I’m going to join the dots.

There’s idea number 13, so it’s not really aligned with our brand, not really embedded in consumer truth but, yeah, we can get it in the market in the next 18 to 24 months, yes, it’s very socially engaging and we think it’ll make us a bucket load of money. And so, then you go around with idea number 47, I’m making it up, and you do exactly the same exercise. And very quickly, one idea rises to the top as to meeting your criteria the best, not the idea you like the most. And that’s the problem.

Ideas are very subjective, and this tool allows you, very quickly, to make an objective decision. When we were doing an event for Disneyland Paris, the CMO at the time decided it would be a really good idea to do a cowboy festival for the 25th Anniversary of Disneyland Paris. Well, if you look at consumer truth, our average consumer was a mum with toddlers who was aged 32.

And when he got to that criteria, he realized that mums didn’t know how to spell the word cowboy, let alone knew what they looked like, so he himself had to kill his own idea. So, again, make the tools simple, make them powerful, make them fun, and people will use them.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, there, it seems like a lot of that you can do just right there, moments after you have your ideas, and other pieces, you might really need to do some extra research and to figure out, “Well, will consumers love it and share it? Well, I don’t know. I guess we’ve got to go talk to them.”

Duncan Wardle
Well, bingo, see, focus groups. We’ve stopped doing focus groups. It’s in a meeting room with no windows and no doors, and the consumer knows you’re on the other side of the window, and so it’s not a very relaxed environment for getting true insights for innovation. And our market segmentation teams tell us, “Well, we need to get in 14 different individuals.” No! Individuals don’t tell the truth.

If you ask a bloke, “Hey, what do you do when you go to Disney?” “Oh, I’m a manly man. I ride the thrill rides.” But if he’s sitting next to his husband or his wife and they go, “No, no, dear, actually, you did Small World 17 times about last year. You really loved it,” you get insights out of couples that you don’t get out of individuals. And the real insight comes from looking where your competition isn’t looking. It’s in their living rooms.

When was the last time anybody listening to this podcast actually spent a day in the living room of one of your consumers? So, we were tasked by Disneyland Paris to get more people to come more often, spend more money. The classic. Data told us who could afford the brand, who had an affinity to the brand, who’d been shopping online, who’s a 10 out of 10 every year around coming this year. Well, they hadn’t come, so my intuition told me these people were liars or procrastinators. Let’s go find out.

So, we went to go. And our going, in hypotheses, was the classic “If we build it, they will come.” Why? Well, because that’s the way we’ve always done it. We just build a new attraction, people will come. Our data tells us that. So, we went off to live with a consumer for a day, each of us. Now, I’m curious, do you have children, by any chance?

Pete Mockaitis
I do, yes. Three.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. Could you close your eyes for me, if you would? And I want you to picture a favorite photograph of your children, the one that you can already see in your mind’s eye, because you can see it. It’s a physical one. It’s somewhere in your house or your apartment. Tell me which room is that one in that you can see right now?

Pete Mockaitis
Where is the photo? It’s taken in the backyard.

Duncan Wardle
So, the picture was taken in your backyard. And can you describe the photograph to us?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure, yeah. We’re wearing white shirts, and we’re in the backyard and looking happy.

Duncan Wardle
And who’s the we part?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the whole family.

Duncan Wardle
Oh, and can we name them or is that…?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Myself, Katie, Johnny, Mary, Joey.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. And which ones are the children?

Pete Mockaitis
Johnny, Mary, and Joey.

Duncan Wardle
And how old were they the day that photograph was taken?

Pete Mockaitis
About five, four, and a half, years old.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. And how old are they today?

Pete Mockaitis
They are now approaching seven, six and two.

Duncan Wardle
So, that photograph is, give or take, three years old. Give or take.

Pete Mockaitis
In the ballpark, yeah.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. All right. So, you can open your eyes. And here’s what we found in each of the houses we went into, I saw this photograph above the mantelpiece, and I asked the mum, I said, “Oh, how old are your children, love? Four or five?” She goes, “No, love, 14 or 15.” I said, “Oh, okay. Well, write it down. It’s one individual observation. It doesn’t mean anything.”

When we got back together, we all had the same insight. When we asked the mum how old the children were in reality versus the photograph in her living room, they were anywhere from three years older to 25 years older. Well, does that mean we don’t print photographs of our children anymore? Yeah, of course, we do. Graduations, promotions, etc. And so, why did you pick one that was three years old?

Actually, let me just try another one because your children are quite young. So, close your eyes again. Picture your parents’ house and that really dorky photograph of you from 15 or 20, 25 years ago, where you looked like a complete dickhead. Tell me which room is that photograph in?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s in a downstairs bedroom.

Duncan Wardle
Bingo. So, it’s still there, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Duncan Wardle
You wish they burned it 25 years ago, but it’s still there. Right, so you can open your eyes. So, I was like, “Why is the photograph still…why do all the mums have photographs of their children from 20 to 25 years ago? Why don’t they have more recent ones? Why did she pick that one?” And so, we dug a bit deeper, asking why, why, why, why, why, because the insight for innovation comes on the fourth or fifth why, not the first way. And, by the way, our data only goes to the first why today.

And each of the mums told me about three moments in time, I label them bittersweet transitions, that take place between a parent and a child through which you must cross. And, Pete, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to break your heart now because you haven’t gone through any of these but you will. I remember where I was when my son was 10 years of age, he came around the corner, Christmas Eve, and his eyes were half full of tears, he says, “Papa,” I said, “Why?” He goes, “Are you Santa Claus?” Boom. Imagination, gone. Spider-man, history.

But what hurt was so much was behind what he had said, was, “I’m not your little boy anymore, Daddy. I’m grown up.” Now, do you have a daughter, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Duncan Wardle
Okay. How old is she?

Pete Mockaitis
Six.

Duncan Wardle
Six. So, you probably got about another six or seven years left, and one day you’re going to be walking down a high street, and I was outside Panera, Adriana was on my left-hand side, I was in Kissimmee, Florida. It was a Tuesday morning. It was my left hand she dropped in public for the first time because she didn’t want to hold Daddy’s hand in public. Every time you put your hand back now, you know she’s going to grab it, but, well, in one day, she won’t, and it’ll hurt.

And then, the last one was the day where we sent her off to college for the first time, and we put her in her dorm, made the beds, made friends with the roommates. Then it was time to turn around and say goodbye for the very first time. And we hugged and laughed and cheered and told her how much we loved her, and then we walked out to the car park and cried our eyes out like everybody else. And our mums described each of the same three moments in time.

So, what we realized, despite what our data hoped has told us, which was, “If we build it, they will come,” there isn’t a mum alive today who wakes up in the morning, wondering about whether or not Disney is going to build a new attraction this year. But there are, every mum, wakes up every morning, as your wife does today, worried about how quickly her children are growing up and how she wants to make special memories for them “While they still believe, while they still hold my hand, while they’re still here.”

That’s a segmented communication campaign, another capital investment strategy, one that drove the doors down to Disneyland Paris and turned a very product-centric culture into a genuinely consumer-centric culture. It’s now mandatory for every Disney executive to spend at least one day a year cleaning the streets of Disneyland, Walt Disney World, or Disneyland Paris, or serving popcorn, and one day every two years in one of the living rooms of one of our consumers. It’s about looking for insights for innovation where your competition isn’t looking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Lovely. And so, then the focus groups aren’t doing the trick. You really got to get kind of intimate and up close and personal in the natural environment, and seeing what’s going on.

Duncan Wardle
Look, I don’t discard focus groups, but I just think there are more insights to be found in people’s living rooms than there are in a room with no windows and no doors, because it’s not just what they tell you. It’s what you see and notice in those living rooms that will confirm or deny your data, or you may just find an insight for innovation your competition couldn’t find because they weren’t looking there.

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

Duncan Wardle
I genuinely believe everybody is creative. I just think education is killing you, and I’m on a mission to prove it. It’s as simple as that, and make it fun, why not?

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

Duncan Wardle
“If you’re going through hell, keep going,” Winston Churchill.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And favorite book?

Duncan Wardle
Virgin by Design by Richard Branson, or Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, or The Imagination Emporium, that’s coming out on December 10.

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

Duncan Wardle
“If you do what you love, you’ll be good at it.” It’s amazing how many people fail to recognize it. When I was at school, I did eight subjects. I failed at seven. I got an A in one. Why? Because I loved it. If you apply that principle to life, if you do what you love, you’ll be successful. It doesn’t matter what it is. I don’t care what your job is. And so many people, I see them so miserable in their jobs and they’re not successful at them. But, particularly young people, my advice is do what you love. You’ll be really good at it.

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

Duncan Wardle
DuncanWardle.com would be the easiest place, I think.

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

Duncan Wardle
Think about some of the tools we talked about today, what-if. List the rules. Pick one and ask the most audacious what-if? Or, naive expert, having a naive expert in the room. Think about some of the things we’ve talked about or how why playfulness is so important. And write down three “I wills.” Three things you say you’re going to do in the next 30 days as a result of what you may have heard today, and just put it away in a drawer and take it out 30 days from now. And, hopefully, you’ll have done all three. And if you haven’t, hopefully, it’ll remind you of some of the things you’ve heard and you can go use them now.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Duncan, thank you. This is fun. I wish you many delightful imaginations.

Duncan Wardle
Cool. Thank you very much, indeed. Lovely to meet you.

Nov 11
0

1010: Getting the Most Out of Generative AI at Work with Jeremy Utley

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Jeremy Utley reveals why many aren’t getting the results they want from AI—and how to fix that.

You’ll Learn

  1. The #1 mistake people are making with AI
  2. ChatGPT’s top advantage over other AI platforms (as of late 2024) 
  3. The simple adjustments that make AI vastly more useful 

About Jeremy 

Jeremy Utley is the director of executive education at Stanford’s d.school and an adjunct professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering. He is the host of the d.school’s widely popular program “Stanford’s Masters of Creativity.” 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Jeremy Utley Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jeremy, welcome.

Jeremy Utley
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to chat, and I’d love it if you could kick us off by sharing one of maybe the most fascinating and surprising discoveries you’ve made about some of this AI stuff with all your poking and prodding and playing.

Jeremy Utley
I’ll poke the bear right from the get-go. My observation is most people are what I call prompt hoarders, which is that they’ve got a bunch of Twitter threads saved, and they’ve got a bunch of PDFs downloaded in a folder, marked, “Read someday,” but they aren’t actually using AI. They’re just hoarding prompts.

And I think of it as empty calories. It’s a sugar high. And what a lot of people are doing is they are accumulating, for themselves, prompts that they should try someday, but they’re never trying them, which is akin to somebody eating a bunch of calories and then never exercising.

And my recommendation, like, here, I’ll give one simple thing that somebody would probably want to write down. Hey, when you’re jumping into advanced voice mode, isn’t it annoying how ChatGPT interrupts you? Well, did you know that you can tell ChatGPT, “Hey, just say, ‘Mm-hmm’ anytime I stop talking, but don’t say anything else unless I ask you to”?

Everybody who’s played with advanced voice mode one time is like, “Oh, my gosh, I got to do that. That’s, oh, it is annoying.” And I guarantee you 95% plus, people who even think that, will never actually do it because they think it’s more important to listen to the next 35 minutes of this conversation than actually hit pause and go do that. And my recommendation would be, stop this podcast right now, go into ChatGPT and actually do that. That would be like going to the gym.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking I’m doing that right now. Is that okay? Is that rude?

Jeremy Utley
Yes, of course. No, it’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
I think I’m following your suggestions. So, in ChatGPT, iPhone app, I’ve got Pete Mockaitis, I just issue the command, like, “Remember this”?

Jeremy Utley
I would open a new voice chat. So, from the home screen, on the bottom right, there’s kind of like a little four-line kind of a button. If you hit that, that’s going to open a new conversation in Advanced Voice mode. And the first thing I would say is, “Hey, I want to talk to you for a second, but I don’t really need you to say anything. So, unless I ask you otherwise, would you please just say, ‘Mmm-hmm,’ one word only and let me keep talking.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Hey, ChatGPT, here’s the thing. When I’m talking to you, what I need you to do, if I ever stop talking for a moment…there, he just did it.

Jeremy Utley
Isn’t that hysterical? Yeah, that’s hysterical.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Amber, when I’m talking, I need you to remember to only interrupt with just the briefest mm-hmm, or yes, or okay until I ask for you to begin speaking. Do you understand? And can you please remember this?

Amber
Be as brief as possible with confirmations and wait until prompted to speak further.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. It’s done.

Jeremy Utley
Now what you need to do is you actually need to continue the conversation. And you need to see, “Does ChatGPT respond with mm-hmm?”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that. And I love those little tidbits in terms of, “Hey, remember this and do this forever.” Sometimes I like to say, well, I have. I have said, “Give me a number from zero to 100 at the end of every one of your responses, indicating how certain you are that what you’re saying is, in fact, true and accurate and right.”

Now, its estimates are not always perfectly correct, but I know, it’s like, “Okay, if he said 90, I’m going to maybe be more inclined to do some follow-up looks as opposed to if I get the 100.”

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, I think that’s great. I think there’s all sorts of little things. The problem is, right now, people are accumulating, or they actually aren’t even accumulating, but they think they’re accumulating for themselves all these tips and tricks, but they aren’t using any of them. And so, to me, what I recommend folks do, I actually just wrote a newsletter about this just yesterday, it went out this morning.

What I recommend folks do is take 15 minutes per day and try one new thing. It requires two parts. Part one, a daily meeting on your calendar that says “AI, try this.” And that’s it. It’s just 15 minutes, “AI, try this.” And thing number two, you need an AI-try-this scratch pad, which is just a running list of things that you heard.

So, like everybody’s scratch pad right now, if they’re listening to this conversation, should include, one, tell ChatGPT to only say mm-hmm unless you want a further response. That’s not forever, but at least in a one interaction, right? And, two, they should tell ChatGPT to always end its responses with a number, an integer between zero and 100, to indicate its conviction of its response.

Everybody literally what? We’re 10 minutes into this conversation, not even, everyone should have two items on their scratch pad. The problem is most people are going to get to this, to the end of this interview and they aren’t going to have a scratch pad and they aren’t going to have any time blocked on their calendar to do it.

And the next time they use ChatGPT, it’s going to be mildly disappointing because they’re coming off a sugar high and they think the treadmill’s broken, basically. So, I mean, obviously, there’s a ton there that we can unpack, but I think for most people, what most people fail to understand is the key to use is use.

And just like a treadmill doesn’t help you combat heart disease unless you actually get on it, AI is not going to unleash your creativity or your productivity unless you use it and learn how to use it. And that, to me, that’s pretty much my obsession these days, is helping people be good collaborators to generative LLMs.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. And I suppose we could dork out about so many tips and tactics and fun things that you can do. But I’d love it if you could just orient us, first and foremost, in terms of, if there’s research or a powerful story that really makes the case that, “Hey, these things are really actually super useful for people becoming awesome at their jobs for reals as opposed to just a hype train or fad.”

Jeremy Utley
I’ll tell you about my good friend, let’s call him Michael. It’s not his name. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. But Michael was a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. and he and his family wanted to move back home to Tennessee.

And he was looking for a job, and he got a job offer from a firm. And he reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’m kind of bummed because I feel like this firm is low-balling me. But my wife really just wants me to take it because she wants to be back near family in Tennessee, and I’m really struggling with knowing ‘Should I push back?’ because I know that I deserve more, but I don’t want to screw up this opportunity to get close to family.”

And I said, “Well, have you role-played it with ChatGPT?” And he said, “What do you mean roleplay with ChatGPT?”

Pete Mockaitis
Of course, the question everyone asks.

Jeremy Utley
Right. And I said, “Well, you can roleplay the negotiation and just kind of get a sense for what the boundary conditions are.” And he’s like, “Okay, wait. What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, open ChatGPT and tell it you want to roleplay a conversation. But, first, you want ChatGPT to interview you about your conversation partner so that it can believably play the role of that conversation partner.”

“You want it to start as a psychological profiler and create a psychological profile of your counterpart. And then once it creates it, you want ChatGPT to play the role of that profile in a voice-only conversation until you say that you want to get feedback from its perspective and a negotiation expert’s perspective.” And he’s like, “Give me 15 minutes.”

So, he leaves, texts me in 15 minutes, “Dude, this is blowing my mind. What do I do next?” I said, “Well, Michael, the next thing I would do is tell your conversation partner that you want it to offer less concessions, and you want it to not be nearly as amenable to recommendations because it’s had a bad day or it’s slept poorly or something, okay? I want you to get a sense for what does it feel like if the conversation goes badly, right?”

He goes, “Okay, I’ll be right back.” Comes back, “Dude, this is blowing my mind.” And he did a series of these interviews, and I touched base with him. And a couple of days later, I said, “Michael, what’s up?” And he said, “Well, three things. One, I didn’t know what my leverage in the conversation was until I roleplayed it a handful of times. Two, I didn’t have clarity on what my arguments were until I roleplayed it a few times, what the sequence of my argument should be. And, three, and most importantly, I’m no longer nervous about going into this negotiation.”

And then a week later, he dropped me a note saying, “By the way, we’re moving back to Tennessee, and I got a much better salary than they had originally offered me.”

It turns out one of generative AI’s unique capabilities is imitation and taking on different roles. As an example, you can go into any conversation you’ve ever had with ChatGPT and just say, “Hey, would you mind to recast your most recent response as if you’re Mr. T?” And, instantaneously, “Yo, fool, I can’t believe you didn’t believe the last thing I said,” just immediately starts doing it. It doesn’t take much.

And the power, actually, emotionally and psychologically, of having roleplayed with a very believable conversation partner has a profound psychological and confidence boost effect to the person who’s engaging the roleplay.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s perfect in terms of, yes, that is a top skill that the AI has, and about the most lucrative per minute use case I can think of a typical professional doing. And you’re right, that confidence, I have actually paid a real negotiation coach, and he suggested we do a roleplay. And I had the exact same experience, like, “Oh, you know what, I guess I don’t feel so silly asking for what I wanted to ask for now. It seems fairly reasonable for me to do so. And I’m going to go ahead and do so.” And it worked out rather nicely. And so, to know that you can do a decent job for near free with AI instead of hiring a phenomenal negotiation coach is pretty extraordinary.

Jeremy Utley
It’s remarkable. And so, we actually, my research partner, Kian Gohar and I wrote a weekend essay in The Wall Street Journal about this topic. But think about a salary negotiation as a flavor of a broader thing, which is difficult conversations. Maybe it’s a performance review. Maybe it’s a termination conversation. Maybe it’s talking to a loved one about the fact that you’re not going to come home for the holidays.

There’s all sorts of scenarios where roleplaying the interaction increases your confidence, strengthens your conviction, helps you, perhaps, exchange perspectives. Perspective taking is a really important thing, to understand, “How did this land to the perspective of my conversation partner?” That’s actually something that’s really hard for humans to do but an AI can read it back to you in a way that’s really reflective of your conversation partner, and, in a way, that you can understand.

So, we wrote a whole article about this but that’s just one class of activities. But the point is it really helps when you actually do it. Again, the tendency is for somebody right now to go, “Oh, cool, roleplay.” But if they don’t pull out their scratch pad, and say, “Ask ChatGPT to be a conversation partner in this upcoming salary negotiation, or my quarterly performance review, or my conversation with my loved one about our care for our kids,” or whatever it is, you just won’t do it.

I’ve even built, and you can link it in the show notes if you want, I built a profiler GPT, which is basically, it’s a version of ChatGPT which remembers who it is, unlike Drew Barrymore in “50 First Dates” where you have to remind ChatGPT who it is every time. A GPT is just like a Drew Barrymore who has memory, right, and like a real human being.

And what this GPT is instructed to do is interview a user about their conversation partner as a psychological profiler would, and then create an instruction set to give the user to copy-paste into a new ChatGPT window of instructions to GPT to perform the role of the psychological profile that it created. So, that’s totally free, but somebody can just open that up and you can say, “My significant other, Sherry,” and all of a sudden, this GPT will just interview you, ask you a bunch of questions, you answer them, and then it spits out an instruction set to a new GPT to play the role of Sherry in the scene that you have told it about.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. And it also illustrates one of your core principles to effectively using AI is to flip the script a little bit and say, “No, no, you ask me questions.” Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Jeremy Utley
I mean, why is our default orientation that I’m the one with the questions and an LLM is the one with the answers? That’s how everybody approaches it, right? Because that’s how Google works, right? We never think, “Google, ask me a question.” It’s like, “Uh, what are you talking about?” A language model is not a technology, it’s an intelligence. That’s how I would invite people to think about it.

And you can get to know another intelligence, in a weird way, that sounds kind of crazy, but one of the things you can do is another intelligence can help you get to know yourself better. And the simple way to think about it is, here’s another thing for your AI-try-this scratch pad, folks. Get ready to write this down.

Think of a difficult decision you’re trying to make in your life, “Okay, should I take this job? Should we make this decision? Should we move? Should we put our kid in this other school?” whatever it might be, think of that decision, and then go to ChatGPT and say, “Hey, I’d like to talk about this. But before you give me any advice, would you please ask me three questions, one at a time, so that you better understand my perspective and my experience?”

Well, that is right there. If you say you were trying to figure out whether you’re going to send your kid to a new school, I have four children so it’s a very realistic kind of decision for me. I can Google and learn all about the school. But should I send my child to the school? I’m just going to get their marketing material and it’s not going to be contextualized to me at all. But if I go to ChatGPT, and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about sending my child to this school, I’d love to get your advice. But before you tell me anything, would you please ask me three questions?”

All of a sudden, well, it’ll… “Tell us about your child’s favorite subjects.” I’ll tell it. “Tell us about any weaknesses or difficulties that your child has had in school thus far.” I’ll tell it. “Tell us about your child’s favorite teachers.” I don’t know, but an LLM will ask questions like that. And then it will say, “Based on your answers, here’s how I would approach this conversation.”

That’s what I mean by turning the tables on an AI, is put it in the position of an expert that’s getting information from you rather than the default orientation, which is you’re the expert and you’re getting information from the AI.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, we’ve been saying the words ChatGPT a lot. I’m curious, in the world of LLMs, we got your ChatGPT, we got your Claude, we got your Perplexity, we got your Gemini, we got your Grok.

Jeremy Utley
Don’t forget Llama.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you think of them as having different strengths and weaknesses? Or are they kind of all interchangeable for whatever you want to use them for?

Jeremy Utley
I don’t think they’re interchangeable, but I don’t think it’s necessarily because of the underlying model. I think a lot of it is a UX thing. I think that the best AI is an AI that’s available to you that you will use. Again, the key to use is use. So, which is the best AI? Well, it’s the AI that you’re going to use. So, where are you? Most of the time you’re on your mobile. So, I would say it’s probably the AI that’s got the best mobile experience.

And what’s your default orientation? My belief is that the far better orientation towards AI is voice, not fingers. If you think about how you typically interact with a machine, you’re typically typing stuff into a machine. And I like to affectionately refer to my fingers, like as I wiggle them in front of the screen, as my bottlenecks. These are my communication rate limiters right now.

Notice you and I aren’t typing to each other. Like, that sounds absurd, right? And yet that’s how we talk to most machines. I’m typing into the terminal. Well, now, I mean, OpenAI, besides developing the world’s fastest growing consumer application, they created the world’s best voice-to-text technology. And furthermore, now they’ve got AIs that actually just process voice, don’t even go to transcription.

But the point is AIs are now capable of understanding natural language. We talk about this phrase, natural language processing. You probably hear that phrase, natural language processing. And that means something technically. I think to humans, the important thing about natural language processing isn’t what happens technically, but it’s actually you as a human being can now use your natural language, which is your spoken word with your mouth instead of your fingers.

And I would say to anyone who’s listening to this, if your default orientation to any AI, ChatGPT or otherwise, is fingers, you are limiting yourself. You’re trying to run with crutches. It’s, like, you’re in a sack race, okay? Use your voice, lose your thumbs, and watch the level of your interaction skyrocket.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, as we speak in late October of 2024, as far as I know, having played around with the apps, it seems like, indeed, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has got the voice natural interaction thing down the best, as far as I am aware of. Is that your experience?

Jeremy Utley
In my experience, it is. The only other comparison I would say is Meta’s Llama has voice as well, which you can access via WhatsApp or anything like that. The caveat, I would say, is, you know, I was doing a demo. I had a reporter at my place yesterday, kind of I was doing a demo of how I how I use AI in my personal workflow as a writer. And one of the things that I was showing was I’ll use OpenAI ChatGPT voice mode, but then I’ll often grab all the text with my cursor or with my mouse, and I’ll drop it into Claude, and I basically will parallel process ChatGPT and Claude.

So, the fact that Claude doesn’t take voice input isn’t a hindrance if I’m on my computer. When I’m on my mobile device, which, I’m probably on my mobile more than I’m at my computer actually, Claude doesn’t handle voice input, and it’s a little bit unwieldy to go back and forth in apps on your mobile relative to toggling between windows on your computer. So, it’s not to say that means ChatGPT is the best, but when you say, if you have to choose one, right now the model which is most optimized for voice interaction in a – intuitive interface. That, to me, is the way that you should prioritize, is, “What’s intuitive? What can handle the widest range of human input?” And ChatGPT’s got great vision and great voice recognition. And, therefore, I would use that. I’ll give you another example. I’m taking Spanish classes with my kids, okay, and we’re doing these lessons and we have a tutor talking to us on a bi-weekly basis.

And I get this assignment. I’ve got to conjugate a particular verb, and she wants us to write it down. We got to take pictures of it right now. Write it down in my notebook. I’m trying to conjugate this verb, and I kind of get stuck. And I’m thinking, in my mind, like, we only get her twice a week. I’m not going to be able to talk to her until Thursday. It’s Tuesday afternoon. And I thought, “I wonder if ChatGPT can help me.” And I just take a photo of my notebook and my crappy chicken-scratch handwriting, okay, in Spanish, by the way.

I take a photo, I say, “Hey, you’re my Spanish tutor. Can you tell me what I’m doing right now?” “Oh, it looks like you’re trying to conjugate the verb “estar,” and it looks like you’ve missed seven accent marks. If I were going to correct your paper, I would do this,” and rewrote all of the statements that I just made, but properly. “I made this change because of this. I made this change because of this. I made this change…”

And I go, “Dude, it read…” I mean, if you see my handwriting, it’s abysmal. But I did miss all the accent marks, it got that right, because I’m not an accent marker. But, anyway, the point is, the vision capabilities are spectacular too. And when you start to think, again, right now, write that down on your AI scratch pad, people.

Like, people are listening, and the thing is it’s like popcorn at a movie, and we’re just like, “Nom-nom, that’s so interesting. Oh, photos of AI should do that.” You will not do it if you don’t write it down. I’m obsessed with this idea. As you probably know, I’ve got this AI podcast called Beyond the Prompt, which we have amazing kind of experts and lead users and things like that.

We had a guy, who’s former dean at Harvard, 30 plus year learning scientist veteran named Stephen Kosslyn, recently. And he’s kind of the father of the school of thought called active learning. Maybe some folks have heard of it. Active learning, some people mistake as, you know, learning by doing, which isn’t exactly correct, but doing what you learn is an important step.

And what he says is he would contrast what’s typically known as passive learning, which is just consumption, but he would say it’s not actually learning at all. It just happens to you. It’s like you’re renting it. And that information has a very short shelf life and a very short expiration window. Any information that you consume but do not use, you effectively did not consume it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yes, well said. Well, I’d also love to get your pro take here. It seems like we’ve got a whole lot of cool things we can do that are very handy. What are some things you recommend that we not do, or some limitations like, “No, no, you’re not prompting it wrong. It’s just not going to do what you want it to do right now”?

Jeremy Utley
You know, I’m not a fanboy, I’m not a stockholder, I don’t have any secondary shares. I have yet to butt up against the limitations of use, to be honest with you. I think, right now, most people’s primary limitation is not the technology, it’s their imagination. I would say, like, one way that I’ve put it to students at Stanford is, “The answer is yes. What’s your question?” “Could it…?” The answer is yes. The problem is, for most people, they don’t actually have a question.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Jeremy, if I could put you on the spot a little.

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, please, please, please, by all means, but the challenge is actually finding a question worth asking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. One thing I’ve tried every which way I can to say, “Yo, here’s a transcript of a podcast interview. What I want from you is to give me 10 options for titles that would be great, that are kind of like these dozens of title options I’ve written for you right here, I previously selected, or teasers.” And then whenever I do that, I get 10 or 20 options, and I go, “Hmm, not one of them am I like, ‘Yes, that is intriguing. That is awesome. That’s a phenomenal title that I want to use.’”

Now, it can nudge or steer me in some good directions, like, “Okay, that was a good phrase there. That was a good word there.” And maybe that’s sort of good enough in what I should expect from it in terms of, yeah, you can have a back-and-forth dialogue, it’s not going to spit out the perfect thing the first time, and be grateful for that. But I don’t know, since you are the master, any pro tips on how I can make it do this thing it just doesn’t seem to be able to do?

Jeremy Utley
So, this is great. What I’m hearing you say is actually a great case study of what we observed in our study, which got published by Harvard Business Review and Financial Times and NPR. We studied teams trying to solve problems, and you could call “Titling this podcast” as a problem that you’re trying to solve. We studied teams and individuals trying to solve problems with generative AI and studied “What do they do?”

And one of the kinds of natural problems that people have is they treat an LLM like it’s an oracle. Like I give it a question and it just magically gives me the right answer right off the bat. And what we would say is teams that treat AI like an oracle tend to underperform. But that’s not to say that everyone who uses AI underperforms. There’s a small subset of folks we studied who actually outperform.

The difference is they didn’t treat AI like an oracle. They treated AI like a co-worker, like a collaborator, like a thought partner. And so, what that interaction might look like is you ask for, say, 10 or 20, “Make it like this.” And then you get the output, and what it looks like to…let me ask you this. If an intern gave you 10 titles that you thought were mediocre, what would you do? Would you fire the intern?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, I would say, “Oh, hey, thank you for this. This is my favorite. This is my least favorite. That kind of what I’m looking for is, generally, more actionable, more intriguing, based on the needs of our listeners,” da, da, da, da.

Jeremy Utley
Do you do that to ChatGPT?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve tried it sometimes.

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, you got to kind of, you got to critique the model’s output. You got to give it feedback. And I had that experience, actually. I had a hero of mine, Ed Catmull on my show a while ago, founder of Pixar, and I wanted the perfect title, of course. It’s, like, got to be the best title ever, right? And I asked for 10 and then I immediately always asked for 10 more.

I don’t even read the first 10. I asked for 10 more and never had ChatGPT say, “Dude, come on, you didn’t read my first ones, you know.” And they’re mediocre, you know, they’re okay. And I said, “Hey, I like one and three in the first set. I like seven and nine in the second set. Can you give me 10 more like those?” What do you think, are they better or worse?

Perfectly the same. Like, not any better, not any worse. And I was like, “Huh, but why? Why didn’t I like one?” I said, “Huh, okay,” I had to think. And what’s funny is, in our study, people who underperformed, AI feels like magic to them. It’s, like, they don’t do as well, but they’re like, “Wow, it just happened so fast.” People who outperform, who use AI to get to better work, it doesn’t feel like magic. It feels like work.

And that’s actually, that’s kind of a fundamental tension. I think we expect it to feel like magic or it sucks. And the truth is it’s just like working with another collaborator, and you do get to better outcomes if you’re willing to put in the work. And in this case, for me at least, the work was, I like number one because I’m a nerd and it has like an obscure movie illusion. I like number three because there’s a pun, and I’m a punny guy. I like number seven because there’s a movie reference baked in and I like number nine, whatever it is.

Then I said to ChatGPT, “Would you leverage that rationale as design principles for another 10, please?” six of the 10 were better than anything I had thought of. But the point is, it does require that collaboration. Now, that being said, that’s as a one-off interaction, Pete. I think what you should do in this case, if that’s it, and what anybody should do is, if there’s a routine workflow, like, how often do you title a podcast?

Pete Mockaitis
At least, twice a week.

Jeremy Utley
Okay. So, to me, that’s kind of square in the crosshairs of a task that it’s kind of a creative challenge, probably takes some amount of time. There’s a potential, you know, so there’s, call it, there’s a two-by-two somewhere that you would hire BCG to spit out, right? But you got a two-by-two, and this probably falls in the top right corner in terms of, like, it’s in GPT’s wheel housing capabilities, and there’s enough regularity that it would meaningfully impact your life or productivity. Great. Okay, there’s your two-by-two. I think that that’s a prime candidate for making a GPT.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll just make a full-blown GPT?

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, why would you not make a podcast-naming GPT? And then you would put in its knowledge documents, all of the titles and your rationale. And then, importantly, it’s not that you make a GPT and you’re done. You make a GPT, then you try it, and then you see where it’s deficient, and you work to get it right, and then you reprogram, you iterate the instructions to the GPT relative to the work that you had to do in addition.

And what’s the process for that? I would say probably you’re going to instruct the GPT, “I want you to analyze the transcript. I want you to find what are the key points of emphasis in the conversation. I define emphasis as we spent more than two minutes on it or whatever,” I don’t know, right? “I want you to find wherever there is more than five back and forth, that’s evidence that this was particularly engaging.”

Or, furthermore, you might develop a protocol where, after your calls, you have a two-minute Zoom call with yourself, where you say, “Hey, here are the four things I thought were interesting.” And you load that into the GPT as well. I don’t know, “Consult the transcript and the follow-up call transcript that I’ve provided for you. Look for these points, then distill these into these brand guidelines, perhaps, or whatever it is. Then do this, then do this.”

You’d kind of walk the GPT through, you would actually articulate and codify that workflow. And then you would test it, and then you’d iterate it, and you’d test it, and you’d iterate it. And you’d get to the point, I would say, probably, if you’re doing it twice a week, by the end of the month, you’ll probably get to the point where, if you really take it seriously to iterate the GPT’s instruction set, over the course of a month, you’ll have something that’s really great.

Now, the problem is most people aren’t really systems thinkers and they just want to do like a one-off kind of like band-aid solution, which is fine. I’m probably more that way myself, unfortunately. So, I’d rather just, it’s less painful on a one-off just to do the work again myself. Systematically, it’s much more painful to do it one-off every time by myself. And so, you kind of got to decide.

And to me, that becomes a function of “What is a task whose output you would refuse to settle for less than exceptional?” That’s a great task for a GPT because you’re not going to be okay with anything less than a really good GPT. And it summons the requisite activation energy required for you to continue to invest in iterating it.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. So, it starts with a mindset of, “Okay, don’t talk to it like it’s an oracle. Expect we’re going to need some back and forth, some collaboration, some iteration, some refinement.” And then it’s your bullish take that, at the end of the day, it’s going to cut the mustard and deliver the goods.

Jeremy Utley
Unequivocally.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful.

Jeremy Utley
That, to me, is it’s unfathomable that it can’t deliver on that use case.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. You heard it here first.

Jeremy Utley
I mean, really and truly, and I’d be happy to workshop with you if you’d like. But, to me, that is absolutely a use case that GPT can shine with.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we talk about use cases. You’re real big on idea flow. It’s getting a whole lot of ideas, a whole lot of creative options generated. Tell me, how do you use AI in that endeavor well?

Jeremy Utley
Well, the easiest thing to do is, which you did well in your example, is request options. I think, for most people, they ask one question, they expect one answer. And with a probabilistic, non-deterministic model, which means LLMs are probabilistic in nature, every time you ask a question, you’re going to get a different answer.

And sometimes the answer is there’s a higher degree of overlap, sometimes they’re radically different, even within the same instruction sets. You could say it’s a bug. I actually think it’s a feature because I believe in variability of thinking is actually what drives creative outcomes. And so, when you realize that, then, “Wow, I could hit regenerate and it will reconsider the question again?” “Yeah.” “Well, why wouldn’t I hit regenerate five times?” Great question. Why wouldn’t you?

And most people go, “I’ve never hit regenerate.” I think it’s actually probably the most important button on the screen. Because you have a collaborator, you and I are going back and forth, and I say, “Hey, Pete, what do we do about this?” You go, “Well, here’s an idea.” And I go, “Okay. Well, what else?” And you’re like, “Okay, let me dig deeper,” and then you say something. I go, “Okay. Well, what, like five more ideas?” And after a while, you’d be like, “Dude, I gave you all my ideas.”

But ChatGPT is not like that. AI is not like that. And so, one of the simple tricks for idea flow with AI is recognizing you’re not going to tire itself out. In fact, you need to recognize your own cognitive bias. I mean, it’s one of my kind of nerd obsessions is what’s called the Einstellung effect, which is the tendency of a human being to settle on good enough as quickly as possible, demonstrated since the 1940s by Abraham and Edith Luchins, where they’ve kind of documented, very clearly how human beings kind of get in a cognitive rut, and they just want a good enough answer, and they don’t actually get the best answer. They just get a good enough answer.

And so, to me, the key to maximizing idea flow with an AI is recognizing that the creative problem in that collaboration is actually your human cognitive bias, not the AI’s bias.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Oh, boy, Jeremy, I could talk about this forever. But before we hear about some of your favorite things, could you share any other top do’s and don’ts?

Jeremy Utley
One thing, I think, is a really simple thing that you can do, and it’s not unrelated to your idea of asking ChatGPT or whatever, for a number, kind of saying how confident it is. One thing that you can often do is ask it to evaluate its own work, “Scale of zero to 100, how great was the previous response? Be like a tough Russian ballet instructor, give me critical feedback.” And it’ll go, “Oh, it’s a 60 out of 100 for this reason.”

Well, then you could say, “Okay, based on that feedback, can you rewrite it as 100 out of 100? Rewrite it as 110 out of 100. Now, regenerate it. Now, regenerate it again. Now, grade that one. Is it really 100? Bring in another Russian judge. What does the second Russian judge think?” So, one thing that you should definitely do is get AI to evaluate its own work. It’s far better at being objective.

Like, as a simple example for me, and then I also want to mention chain of thought reasoning, so make sure I come back to that. But one thing I’ll do is I’ll do kind of parallel processing between ChatGPT and Claude, and I’m having both work on something. I take their output and I feed it to the other, and I ask, “Which one is better? Is Claude’s work better or ChatGPT’s work better?”

You would think that they both advocate for themselves. They don’t, but they almost always agree. It’s fascinating, actually. There are times where ChatGPT is like, “I actually prefer Claude’s response for this reason, this reason.” And if I go to Claude, it goes, “I think my response is stronger for this, this, this.” And half the time, it’s the other way.

But it’s actually exceedingly rare that they disagree. They often will say the other’s is better, but they almost always agree with the other’s assessment too, which is fascinating, which is to say you can have models evaluate one another’s work. The other thing, the other huge do, probably the single greatest empirically validated finding is that the best way to get better output from an LLM. is to prompt it with what’s known as chain of thought reasoning, which is to say, tell the language model to articulate its thought process before answering.

And so, humans have this tendency, so do AIs, of what we all know as ex post rationalizing. So, if I ask you, “What’s your favorite color?” You say, “It’s blue.” “Well, why did you say blue?” You go, “Oh, well, I like the sky, and I like the ocean, and da, da.” But if instead, I say, “Hey, tell me how you think about what your favorite color is,” and you go, “Well, I probably think about my favorite things.”

And then I go, “Well, what are your favorite things?” You go, “Well, my wife, obviously, and I think about her eye color, and they’re green. You know, green’s my favorite color.” “Well, is it blue or is it green?” Actually, and for me, even as I think through that thought exercise, green, emphatically. I take my wife’s eyes any day over the sunset. That’s a no-brainer, right?

Well, similarly, language models do the same thing. If you ask it for an answer, and it says blue, and then you go, “Why did you say blue, ChatGPT?” it will ex post rationalize. And blue is very subjective, but even with things that are objective, more objective, it will ex post rationalize its answer. If, however, you say, “Hey, before you answer the question, would you walk me through how you’re going to think about solving this problem?” It will articulate its answer and it arrives at, from a research perspective, empirically better, more valid, more cogent, etc. responses.

And the reason it does so is because of how language models work. They aren’t premeditating their answers. So, what it’s not doing, as Pete asks a question, and then it thinks of its answer and writes it out. That’s not what happens. What happens is Pete asks a question and it reads the question and says, “What’s the first word of the answer?” and it says it.

And then it reads your question, and the first word it thought of, and says, “What’s the second word?” And then it reads your question and its first and second word, and thinks, “What’s the third word?” So, it’s not premeditating responses. It’s, literally, only predicting the next token. And so, when you ask it for an answer, the only thing it’s predicting is its answer.

If, however, you ask for reasoning and then answer, it first next token predicts reasoning, and then it incorporates the reasoning that it has articulated in its response, which results in a much better response because it’s not only considered your question, but it’s also considered reasoning first. And as a user on the other side of the collaboration, what that enables you to do is not only, one, get better responses, but, two, you can interrogate its reasoning too.

And you can say, “Actually, it’s not that I have a problem with your answer. I have a problem with how you approach the question. I actually think you should do this.” And then you can guide its reasoning path because you’ve asked it to make its reasoning explicit. Those are the two probably biggest do’s, I would say, when you ask for do’s and don’ts.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And it sounds like the key is that you ask for it in advance as opposed to, “How did you come up with that?”

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, exactly. That’s ex post rationalizing. It will give you a great answer. It’s a sycophant. LLMs have been programmed to be helpful assistants. And when you realize what that means, it’s a euphemism for suck up. So, if you ask it what it thinks, it’s going to say, “I think that’s a really great idea, Peter.” But if you say, “I don’t want you to compliment me. I want you to be brutally honest. Don’t pull any punches,” like, you got to really ask an AI to level with you to get honest feedback.

When you’re aware of that, it influences how you collaborate with the model, which goes back to the question earlier about idea flow. It’s recognizing your own, I mean, there are limitations to the technology, but a lot of times the truth is we want a suck up. I don’t want to hear how my first draft sucks. I want to hear, “Actually, you don’t need to do any more work. You go have a coffee.” That’s what I want to hear.

And if I don’t realize that the model has been trained to be a suck up, I ask it, assuming I’m getting the truth, and then when it tells me I’ve done great work, I say, “Well, let’s take a break, boys. We’re all done here.” Whereas, if I realize, “You know what, unless I really push it to give me straight feedback, it’s probably going to tell me I’ve done a great job. And I know my human cognitive bias is to overweight the response that I did a great job, and to underweight…” So, you have to understand yourself. In a way, the key to good human-AI collaboration is to really understand our own humanity.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Thank you. And now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jeremy Utley
One is Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, who said, “No matter how heroic one’s imagination, a man can never think of that which would never occur to him.”

The second quote that I love is Amos Tversky, Danny Kahneman’s lifelong research partner, who died prior to receiving the Nobel Prize. But Amos Tversky was once asked how he and Kahneman devised such inventive experiments. And he said, “The secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed.  You waste years when you can’t afford to waste hours.”

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

Jeremy Utley
I think there’s a great one that I always come back to called the creative cliff illusion, which is conducted by Nordgren and colleagues at Toronto, I want to say. You can look it up, creative cliff illusion. But the basic idea is when they ask participants what their expectations of their creativity over time were, there is an illusion that one’s creativity degrades to a point that reaches a cliff where it almost asthmatically falls off. And people’s, their expectation is, “I’m just going to run out of creative ideas.”

The paper is obviously called the Creative Cliff Illusion because then, when they test people, it’s not true. They don’t run out of creative ideas. They, actually, their creativity persists. And my favorite part of the study is the shape of the creativity, over time, the variable that it’s most highly correlated with, i.e. “Does creativity dip or does it increase?” because it does increase for some people. The variable that determines the shape of your creativity over time is actually your expectation.

So, if you expect that you will keep having creative ideas, you do. If you expect you will cease having creative ideas, you do. And so, that to me is just totally fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. And a favorite book?

Jeremy Utley
I love Mark Randolph’s book about the founding of Netflix called That Will Never Work. It’s a fascinating story about entrepreneurship, about grit and perseverance, and about ideas. And there’s a lot of very practical takeaways about the importance of experimentation in finding product market fit and succeeding.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Jeremy Utley
I’ve got an electric chainsaw, and I love tromping around the woods, just chainsaw in hand, like, just in case I need it. It’s just so fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. And a favorite habit?

Jeremy Utley
NSDR, non-sleep deep rest protocol, Andrew Huberman. It’s, basically, laying down and becoming totally still, not for the purpose of sleep, necessarily. It’s okay if you do sleep, but it’s not in order to sleep, but to facilitate neurological replenishment, connections between neurons, and codification of memory. And I try, if I can, to NSDR once a day.

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

Jeremy Utley
I talked earlier about the value of variation in one’s thinking. And the truth is ideas are naturally occurring phenomena, which is a nerdy way of saying they’re normally distributed. So, you got some really great ideas, very small, it’s a bell curve, right? You got a lot of ordinary ideas and you got some stupid ideas. Steve Jobs called them dopey ideas. He regularly shared dopey ideas with Sir Jony Ive.

Taylor Swift says, “It’s my hundreds or thousands of dumb ideas that have led me to my good ideas.” You got dopey or dumb on one side of the spectrum, you got delightful on the other side of the spectrum. The quote that I often say that people remember and resonates, and they take with them is, I tell people, “Dopey is the price of delight.”

The only way you get good ideas is by allowing yourself to have bad ideas. And the reason most people don’t have better ideas is because they won’t allow themselves to have worse ideas.

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

Jeremy Utley
JeremyUtley.design And LinkedIn, I’m happy to chat with folks on LinkedIn. My website, JeremyUtley.design, I’ve got a newsletter folks can subscribe to. I’ve also got an introductory AI drill course where you get two weeks of daily drills for, you know, they say you need 10 hours of practice with AI to start to become fluent. This gives you daily practice to get your first 10 hours under your belt.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a final challenge or call to action for folks who want to be awesome at their jobs? Sounds like we just got one.

Jeremy Utley
To me, it’s very simple. Do one thing you heard here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Jeremy, this is fun. This is fascinating. Thank you. And keep up the awesome work.

Jeremy Utley
Thank you. My pleasure.

Oct 21
0

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

By | Podcasts | No Comments

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Seth

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

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

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

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

Resources Mentioned

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Seth Godin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, welcome back.

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

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

Seth Godin
Potatoes.

Pete Mockaitis
Potatoes. That’s surprising.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Godin
Go, Jan, go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Godin
Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Godin
Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Godin
Yeah, it’s critical, actually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Godin
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jun 13
0

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

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Terri

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

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Terri Sjodin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Terri, welcome.

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

Me, too.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

Okay.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. And a favorite book?

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

Alrighty. And a favorite habit?

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Terri Sjodin

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