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Feb 20
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841: How to Get Creative on Demand with Baronfig’s Joey Cofone

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Joey Cofone says: "Creativity is not about creating. It is about combining."

Joey Cofone shares what it really means to be creative and why everyone can be creative in any role.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why creativity isn’t just for the “creatives”.
  2. Why we shouldn’t shy away from our fears.
  3. How to come up with ideas on the spot.

About Joey

Joey Cofone is the Founder & CEO of Baronfig, an award-winning designer and entrepreneur, and author of The Laws of Creativity.

Joey has designed and art directed over 100 products from zero to launch. His work has been featured in Fast Company, Bloomberg, New York Magazine, Newsweek, Bon Appétit, Quartz, Mashable, Print, and more. Joey was named a New Visual Artist and, separately, Wunderkind designer, by Print magazine. He is also a 1st place winner of the American Institute of Graphic Arts design competition, Command X.

Joey strives to make work that appeals to curious minds—work that’s beautiful, smart, and communicative. He believes that design is the least of a designer’s worries, that story is at the heart of all tasks, and jumping off cliffs is the only way to grow.

He lives in New York City with his wife, Ariana, and his dog (and writing buddy), Luigi.

Resources Mentioned

Joey Cofone Interview Transcript

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

Joey Cofone
Hello. Hello. I am psyched.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m psyched too. I want to know so much about your insights, creativity, Baron Fig. I have one of your notebooks on my desk.

Joey Cofone
Surprise.

Pete Mockaitis
It was there before I knew I was talking to you.

Joey Cofone
Watching it the whole time.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I wanted to ask you about your hobby of playing video games but then I learned that you almost died in Tennessee, so I think we need to hear both of these tales. What’s the story here?

Joey Cofone
I did almost die in Tennessee. We discovered this before recording when I said, “Where are you?” and you said, “Tennessee,” and I said, “I almost died there.” And that is because I went hiking the Appalachian Trail when I was 20 maybe, 21. I was in phenomenal shape. I’m not in bad shape now but I was in killer shape then.

And so, it was just me and a buddy, went on the mountain, not underprepared. I will say we did our homework. However, we missed a spring, did not get water, the sun started going down, we became disoriented mentally and then, of course, disoriented because we couldn’t see anything, started not making sense, and we literally had to hang on to each other.

Two very large dudes, walking hand in hand like we were walking down the aisle, all the way through the mountains until we found water. And then we had to sit there and watch it boil before we could drink it. It took, like, 30 minutes to boil this on this little tiny thing. Anyway, I did almost die because I was about to lie down and give up.

And my friend, who is now the COO of Baron Fig, Jay, was there to give me his last little bit of water, and say, “We got to keep going, man.” So, I almost died in Tennessee, but here I am today with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, what a guy.

Joey Cofone
He did. It was his last sip of water and he gave it to me.

Pete Mockaitis
That is beautiful.

Joey Cofone
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also thinking about Jeff Boyles, how you could’ve cut that 30 minutes way down.

Joey Cofone
Oh, man. You talk about waiting for a pot to boil, man, I thought it was a lifetime, and then it was the best-tasting water I had ever had in my life even though it was scalding hot.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s good stuff. Good stuff.

Joey Cofone
Yeah, it was good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad you’re alive and made it out of Tennessee.

Joey Cofone
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And I also wanted to hear about you and video games. Some say they’re a waste of time. You, well, I want to know what you think, but that’s what you like to do, and you are a thought leader in the realm of creativity. So, I’d like to guess that there’s some sort of a connection between video games and creativity, but you tell me.

Joey Cofone
Sure. I would consider myself a thought leader in video games, as a consumer. I’ve been talking about video games and pro video games since I started Baron Fig, and have been interviewed all over the place, and that’s about just over a decade now. So, gaming has become significantly more mainstream in that time but, in my lifetime certainly, gaming has been viewed as a nerdy guy who sits in his parents’ basement type of activity for quite a long time. And only in the last, let’s say, five-ish, seven years has it become really, really mainstream, so I’m glad about that.

I personally prefer XBOX but I’ve owned them, played them all, and I think what’s beautiful about games is that it is, to me, and I’m going to say this, I think it is – ooh, it’s going to hurt too because this is going to come hard – but I believe it is one of the pinnacles of creative expression. And I say that because in a video game you have music, you have visual art, you have programming, you have storytelling, you have a host of other practices, cinematography, all coming together to not only tell you a story like a movie would or a book would, but put you in the center of it.

So, yeah, I love gaming. And if you’re going to sit in front of the TV, you might as well interact with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I don’t find that statement to be controversial to me at all. Once, I took a look at what’s really going on in terms of was it the Unreal engine or some of the cutting-edge stuff, it is spectacular what is now possible visually. And then I saw, in the pandemic, I was watching, this game is called “Detroit: Become Human” which is fascinating. Fascinating stories.

And I was just watching the game play because I didn’t have my console yet and I was sick with COVID and nothing else to do. And then I saw some of the making of it, and it was nuts. This composer was just talking about how he invented new instruments in order to get the sounds he was going for, for each of the key characters, to really capture the emotional essence. And it’s, like, wow, that is hardcore.

And those millions of dollars spread across a huge staff really is exceptional in terms of many layers of creativity. So, yeah, that makes sense to me.

All right, we’re talking about creativity. You’ve learned a whole lot about it in your years in your career. Can you share with us any particularly surprising, counterintuitive, extra-fascinating discoveries you’ve made about creativity during this time?

Joey Cofone
Oh, my goodness. It is a boatload or, I should say, a book-load, there are so many. I can start with one of the most profound things that I discovered. Before that, let me tell you why I think creativity is so radically important and where it originated for me.

In the introduction to my book, I explained where creativity entered my life. So, it was first grade, seven years old. I walked into the classroom thinking it’s just any other day. Teacher hands out a worksheet. It has a cartoon worm on it. All you got to do is color it, cut it out, put it on the board. No problem, like every other Monday. But this Monday was different because I decided I wanted to have the best worm in the class. So, I get down, I put my arm around my paper, I take out my big-ass box of crayons, and I go to town. And I am thinking, “This is the greatest creation of all time.”

I cut out my worm, I walk up to the board, and I stopped dead in my tracks because, as I look there, on the board, all the other students who have put theirs up, even though it’s different, they color little dots here, maybe one is a little more red, a little more blue, they all feel the same. And so, now I’m like, “I can’t put my…” Little Joey is like, “There’s no way I’m putting my worm on this board. I cannot be one of many.”

And I don’t know where that came from that day but I went back to my desk, and I sat down, and I was about to cry. And I had my head in my hands, I was hiding because I didn’t want anyone to see how upset I was. When I looked down, and what do I see, but the shards of paper that I had cut out the worm. So, I’m taking a look this, crying, and a lightbulb ticks, and I realized I can use them.

So, I draw a microphone, a boombox, and a necklace, cut them out, put them on the worm, put that on the board. Now, the whole class walks up, the teacher gets up behind me, the assistant teacher comes up, and everybody is looking at my worm, and they go, “This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen,” and they’re all shocked.

It was in that moment that I became addicted to creativity. Literally, that feeling, I just wanted it all the time throughout my life. And so, now as I got older and I started Baron Fig and we made all this cool stuff, and then it became time to write a book, and I thought to myself, “You know what, that’s my personal experience. But how can I inject something really profound and extremely objective into the book?”

And so, I discovered what became the cornerstone of my desire to pursue this, which is NASA did a study that found that 98% of five-year-olds are creative geniuses. Okay, 98%. Take a guess what percent it goes down to by the time we hit adulthood.

Pete Mockaitis
Two percent.

Joey Cofone
Two percent. Nailed it.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent.

Joey Cofone
Somebody did his homework. And so, I realized that, “Wow, this is not an accident.” We are systemically doing a very good job at reducing creativity where it goes from 98% to 2%. And so, now I have my experiences, I have a reason to write this book, put them together, and here we are. And so, that was the very first thing that I encountered about creativity that I thought was incredibly interesting and profound.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so creativity, it seems like a cool good thing. Like, sure, yeah, better be creative than not creative. I’d love to get your hot take in terms of, for your average professional who’s interested in being more awesome at their job, let’s say they would assert, “You know, I’m not really in a creative role. I don’t sort of invent new stuff. I don’t have to come up with catchy ad campaigns. I just manage projects and interact with folks and go to meetings, and make my PowerPoints and do my analyses, and keep things humming along, and, hopefully, get some improvements in our operations here and there.” What’s the case for why creativity matters to such a person?

Joey Cofone
Well, for two reasons. Number one, everything you mentioned actually requires creativity.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Joey Cofone
The idea that creatives are people who make visual pictures or music or something is a common belief but is totally absurd. Creativity is simply the practice of ideas. And when you take and use your ideas, it’s self-expression. So, anytime you’re working on a spreadsheet, or you have to give a presentation, or you have to do a little project management, you are exercising your creativity. This is not a robot. This is not an automaton. You actually have to think about it and come up with a result, and that’s creativity. It doesn’t have to be some grand expression of it.

Every day, we have over 6,000 thoughts, for example, and the idea is that if you are…How do I say this in a way that doesn’t sound silly? If you are an intrepid person, which I hope you are, working on those 6,000 thoughts to make them even better is not only a good idea, it’s kind of a no-brainer to me because, to answer your second reason, is because, as an adult, it is proven that you are, number one, more happy if you involve creative exercises in your work, and, number two, you make more money. Like, statistically, you make 13% more than people who do not integrate creativity. And that’s just for adults.

Organizations, because I want to tie this all together, organizations who integrate creativity are more productive and they have higher revenue growth. So, as an individual and as a group, it is a no-brainer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s say we say, “Ooh, I’d like to be in the integrate creativity camp, and see that 13% pay bump and more cool benefits,” can you paint a picture for what that looks like during the course of my work day of, “I’m a person who is integrating creativity” versus “I’m a person who is not integrating creativity”?

Joey Cofone
Yeah, it depends on what it is you do, and what it is you feel challenged by in your experience. For example, I’m a designer so that’s a little bit more obvious, but I don’t do design things all day. The last three weeks, for example, I set up a really complex notion series of documents that basically tracks out the company’s operating and how everybody is related to the projects that are going on. No one would look at that and go, “That’s some traditional creative stuff, bro.”

But it is, of course, creative because you have to problem-solve. So, day to day, it depends what you’re doing. But if you are taking in inputs and then assessing an optimal way to execute something, that’s creativity. It doesn’t have to be any more complex than that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s what integrating creativity looks like, the 13% bump up camp. And then how does one live their work day without integrating creativity?

Joey Cofone
That’s a good point. It’s when you just take what’s given to you and you don’t do anything with it. You just are literally, as someone would call it, a paper-pusher, or you are not trying to make this better, you are not trying to improve in any way upon the processes or the deliverables or the requests that are handed to you. You simply process as if you were a fax machine or a typewriter or something. You get an input and you put an output. The only thing you’re there for is to execute it rather than assess and optimize and then execute.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess I’m thinking about some roles…it’s funny, these are the very jobs I don’t like in terms of I have a spreadsheet of somebody’s hours, and I need to turn that into an invoice to say to somebody, “Pay me. Okay, so there’s, I guess I have to copy, paste, double-check, email.” Okay. Although, I could certainly integrate some creativity there in terms of, “Surely there’s a way I can get some automation going with this.”

Joey Cofone
I was just going to say that.

Pete Mockaitis
“Maybe I can do a research if there’s a software program that can do this, or a little bit of Visual Basic replications, VBA code to accelerate this. Do I want to use a sort or do I want to use a filter in terms of amending these spreadsheets?”

Joey Cofone
Precisely. And now you’re getting it because when you say it that way, it is a no-brainer, of course, that folks who do the latter, and say, “How can I automate this, or optimize it, or change it in a way where it actually takes work later even if it’s a little bit more work now?” they get paid more. It’s obvious. But, believe it or not, a lot of people don’t do it. The majority, unfortunately.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, I can’t believe it. Ooh, geez, when you say majority, it sounds like you’ve got some hard data. Bring it, Joey, what’s the state of the world in terms of folks integrating creativity?

Joey Cofone
I mean, 98% of folks don’t. That’s where we’re at.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, they’re not geniuses according to the NASA situation.

Joey Cofone
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you mentioned the part about us systematically crushing the creativity and folks just they age. Do you have any idea for what are some of the drivers, the forces, the principles behind that?

Joey Cofone
Yeah, I do. It’s unfortunately the way we educate our youth is the systematic destruction of creativity. So, it is no wonder that, at five years old you peak, and then you go down. And five years old is when you start school. There are three reasons, primarily, that creativity decreases, things that we teach our kids.

First is that authority, like teachers, principals, deans, and so on, that they’re unquestionable. Well, that’s just not true because those people weren’t always in charge. There are other folks in charge, and those people had to supplant those folks, and so on and so forth. And so, it teaches us that you have to do number two, which is man-made rules have to be followed to a fault. And that means that whatever someone says goes, and you are taught not to question it.

And then the third and the most damaging of all is that the end is visible from the start, Pete. And this is terrible that we teach our kids this, but we teach the end is visible from the start. Now I’ll bring that down to earth. When you are given a book in third grade, and you have to read, I don’t know, Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. And then you know, in two weeks, on Friday, you have to hand in a five-page paper about the plot and my thoughts, including a synopsis.

Cool. Okay. Well, I know everything I have to do before I do anything. Same thing in math, “Solve these ten proofs, hand them in.” Same thing in science, “Read this chapter and build a volcano.” Whatever it is, we are always taught to know the end before we start. Then we go to work, and then in work, our bosses tell us what to do and lay it out so that we know what we have to do before we start.

The problem is we are never taught to deal with the unknown. We are never taught to start without knowing where it could end up. And because of that, people have, unfortunately, more anxiety than ever before, and can’t deal with the curve balls of life. And that’s just a metaphor for creativity, was to make something you have to not know exactly where you’ll end up.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, this anxiety, can you unpack that mechanism or link there? Because we see the end before we start, we are more anxious…

Joey Cofone
Because we don’t, yeah. So, essentially, the modern society right now – what did we have – we had the agricultural age that lasted a long time. Then we had, fast-forward to the industrial age, the information age. Those happened fairly quickly. However, our human instincts, our programming, lags behind by tens of thousands of years. We don’t just evolve, unfortunately, as fast as society changes.

So, what happened back in the day is that when you had fear, ten thousand years ago, 20,000 years ago, that was because it was your body and your instincts making you move away from something that could kill you, the unknown, “Don’t go into that cave because you could die. Don’t go into this unknown land because we don’t know who’s there and defending it.” Fear was a tool. We still have fear but we don’t have life-threatening experiences anymore.

So, this fear, that is a natural part of our programming, is making us move away from things it thinks we can die. In reality, we cannot die in that regard. What happens nowadays is, instead of death, it’s just your ego is bruised, or you’re embarrassed, or you screw up. And so, because of that, this fear that is still a part of our lives, in this totally evolving social structure and the way we go about doing things nowadays, we still feel fear.

And that leads to a ton of anxiety because we have fears, “But I don’t know what to do with them. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” And then we’re taught not to know what the unknown is. And so, when you combine all that, it’s a beautiful recipe for a ton of anxiety.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So, in a world full of unknowns, when we’ve only been trained and built up our capabilities in a world where the outcome is known in advance, we are sort of ill-equipped for the realities that we are in.

Joey Cofone
Exactly. And then you combine that with the fact that our instinctual reaction, fear reaction, is not really serving us the way it used to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. Well, let’s get some more creativity flowing. I’m curious, when you mentioned assigning, I think about work in a way that the end is not known before you start, with the difference when you’re making a request of someone, or of yourself, instead of, “I want to find a specific app that does thing,” so we’ve sort of narrowed it to we’re looking for a software application, to, “I need to find a solution which will enable me to pull off this outcome.” Is that sort of the idea, is we keep it open-ended, like, “It could look like any number of things that delivers the goods”?

Joey Cofone
Sure. You’re even already moving probably too far down the line in many cases, where someone comes up to a problem that they haven’t encountered before, and they haven’t even sussed out that they need to find a piece of software to solve it. It is just a bit of a shock and an anxiety-inducing moment, and that’s where we get fear.

And so, actually, fear nowadays is a positive rather than a negative. Thousands of years ago, fear was something that said, “Danger! Danger! Don’t go that direction.” Today, fear, if you are tuned to it, is a, “Hey, man, go in that direction.” Because you’re afraid, you have identified a boundary, “If you go in that direction, you’re able to break a boundary.” Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Joey Cofone
When I was, I think it was 13 years old, I was sitting in a parking lot, McDonald’s, with my uncle, and we always used to go in together, and have a Big Mac each, and it was a wonderful time. On this particular day, Uncle Ralph decides, “Joey is going in alone.” And I said, “I can’t do it.” And he said, “What do you mean you can’t do it? It’s right there. Just walk in. Order it. You’re a big kid.” I was six foot.

And I said, “I’m afraid.” And I was honest with my uncle. And he grabbed me by the shoulder, and he looked me dead in the eye, and he said, “Because you are afraid, now you must do it.” And sure enough, I went in and I did it, and I never forgot that. And it took me a long time to parse what he meant, but it meant that my fear was showing me a limitation, and when I was able to overcome it, I was able to expand the boundaries of my capabilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good stuff. And I don’t think it’s that uncommon. I remember, in high school, there would be times when you meet a group of people, it was like, “Oh, should we order pizza?” And maybe a third of the people in the group were genuinely uncomfortable picking up the phone to call the place to order the pizza. You don’t even have to look at them in the eye. And I found that it’s probably worse now, I’m guessing, in the year 2023, as compared to back in the day for me.

Joey Cofone
Pete, it is bad now. It is bad now. I don’t want to call anyone out but I have experienced people who are close to our age who still won’t pick up the phone and make a call for something simple. Just like saying, “Hey, what time are you guys open to?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Maybe this is why DoorDash is really doing so well because you don’t have to interact with a human but you still get to eat what you want without moving. It’s a winning offer. All right. Well, let’s talk about this book here, The Laws of Creativity: Unlock Your Originality and Awaken Your Creative Genius.

You got 37 of these laws. Can you list some of them, maybe the top three, four, five that you think are just transformational for a professional who wants to be more awesome at their job, things you can do that don’t take a whole lot of time, effort, energy, pain, and sacrifice, and yet liberate a lot of good creative juiciness?

Joey Cofone
Oh, sure. I can name 37 of them that are really damn good but, since you’re limiting me to a few, I will, I suppose, choose. I’ll tell you right now that Chapter One: Be weird, it’s the law of expression. And it is chapter one for a reason. And it is simply stated, embrace the parts of you that’s called weird. Don’t hide what makes you different. Allow them to flow to the top and be seen.

Now, what does that mean, Joey? That means that, you know how when you grow up, and your parents tell you that you’re really a unique butterfly. And then you get a little older and you realize everybody tells their parents that, and then you don’t feel so unique when you have the same problems and the same challenges that everyone feels, and you kind of feel like you’re not unique at all. Well, actually, you are incredibly unique. They were right.

As what my geometry teacher in high school, Mr. Allen, would say, “Right answer, wrong solution.” They were just saying it because it’s an encouraging thing to say, but, actually, you are incredibly unique. So, Pete, give me three interests that you have. Give me a favorite book, a favorite movie, a favorite video game, or just a…Now, if I say favorite, it might be too much, so just name one you like of each of those three things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, sure thing. For a book, well, right now I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which is thrilling.

Joey Cofone
So am I.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Joey Cofone
How about that? That is wild. That is the book I’m reading.

Pete Mockaitis
I encountered it in an episode of “Wishbone,” the dog, if you watched that show. When I was 12 years old or so. I was like, “Well, that book is awesome.” And so, now, decades later, I was like, “Maybe I’ll go ahead and read that.” And so, that’s fun, about halfway through. No spoilers. So, that’s cool. For a game, boy, from my childhood, “Master of Orion.” You conquer the galaxy. Very strategic kind of form, the way I think, actually. So, we had book, game. And what else?

Joey Cofone
I would say movie.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s go with Batman, “The Dark Knight.”

Joey Cofone
Ooh, okay. So, we have “The Count of Monte Cristo.” What was the second one?

Pete Mockaitis
“Master of Orion.”

Joey Cofone
“Master of Orion.” I never heard of that one, man. “Master of Orion.” I’m writing these down. Good stuff. And then “The Dark Knight.” Okay. Cool. So, these are three things that you like. And now you have a lot of interests, we’re just going to take three. And let’s say, in each of those categories, we limit it to a thousand.

There are, just in those things, there is a billion permutations, okay? If there’s a thousand options of each. That means that, right away, if you can combine “The Count of Monte Cristo,” the “Master of Orion,” and “The Dark Knight” into something you create as really strong influences, you go from one in eight billion to one in one billion, okay? To one in eight, I’m sorry. My wife always says…

Pete Mockaitis
So, eight humans on the planet who…

Joey Cofone
That have this combination. You go from, I’m sorry, one in eight billion, to one in eight. Pretty interesting. Now, let’s add a fourth thing. Let’s say, what’s a TV show you like?

Pete Mockaitis
“Breaking Bad.”

Joey Cofone
“Breaking Bad.” Walter White.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it kind of dark, I think. It’s like I’m really a friendly person.

Joey Cofone
Oh, all these are like dark. Okay, so with the fourth added, permutations go up into trillion, and now you have 127 times the population of earth. When you put those four things into what you do, you become incredibly unique, and you’re way more than just four things, and there’s way more than just a thousand options. So, you can imagine the actual permutations, and when you get the stuff you like into what you’re doing, it is incredibly unique.

So, let’s take me, for example. I really like philosophy, I really like writing, and I really like the blank page. So, what did I do? I took philosophy, I took writing, and I added narrative, and the blank page, aka notebooks, and I combined those into a brand called Baron Fig that didn’t do notebooks the way I did before, and put it on Kickstarter, looking for 15Gs. We did $168,000 in 30 days, and this was 10 years ago before Kickstarter was a big deal, and that is rise and fall. And people loved it.

And to this day now, Baron Fig has, from that one product that we started with, the notebook, we now have made over 115 products, we ship in 95 countries, we have hundreds of thousands of customers, and we partner with incredible people like Netflix, James Clear, Roxane Gay to make wonderful things. And it is because I started by taking the things that I really liked and figuring out a way how to meld them together.

And anybody could do that, and you could do it on a big scale, like creating a company, you can do it on a small scale, like creating a presentation. But when you put yourself into your things, and as cliché as it sounds, when you be yourself, it becomes incredibly unique.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that makes sense mathematically. And I guess the holdup is just that people feel uncomfortable being weird, they think they’re going to get a social reprisal of some sort, like, “Ugh, okay.”

Joey Cofone
Pete, well said, dude. Well said. That is the chapter one, is that the problem is weird, the word itself has been weaponized. When we think about it, you are in grammar school, and, “Hey, don’t eat with the weird kid,” or you’re at work, “Don’t have lunch with the weird person.” “Okay, cool.” It’s literally weaponized and it ostracizes the folks in our bubble, in our everyday life, who are different than the rest. And the message it’s saying, the subtext is, “Be like us and conform.”

Now, here’s the really crazy thing though, and this is why the chapter is titled “Be weird” is because inside our bubbles, we force everybody to conform. However, outside of our bubbles, we absolutely celebrate and worship weird people. And I’m going to name a few people, these are not necessarily that I worship or care about but they’re good examples. Lady Gaga, weird, not in my bubble. We love her. Johnny Depp, weird dude. Jack Sparrow, super weird. Freaking love that. Elon Musk, Kanye West, so on and so forth. We celebrate weirdness as long as it’s not in my bubble. And so, when I say…

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re making me uncomfortable now that I have to live within you, but you’re being amazing in this in  the world that I’m enjoying consuming from afar.”

Joey Cofone
Right. So, I’ll end this by saying those folks inside our bubble that people are going, “Hey, don’t sit with that weird guy. Don’t talk to that weird guy,” what I see is the bravest person in the room because they’re the ones, despite being ostracized, are letting themselves be themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very beautiful. And I do love reading about the weird things that folks do. I heard Bill Gates when he was a youngster, he’d just be in his room for a long, long time. His mom would say, “Oh, Billy,” I don’t know what she called him. Let’s pretend it’s Billy, “Oh, Billy, can you come on down,” and he’d say, “Mom, I’m trying to think,” like he’s just faking for a long time. He still does. He thinks weeks or think weekends, where, “I’m just going to be completely silent and read a bunch of things that are stimulating and useful for my creativity.”

Or, the dude. Hey, you’ve been a game guy. This guy in Japan, I forgot his name, he is one of the geniuses behind Mario and many other super franchises.

Joey Cofone
Miyamoto.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go. Apparently, he just carries around with him a tape measure, and has people guess the length of different objects, he’ll say, “Hey, how long do you think this is?” Like, “I don’t know, seven inches.” They probably use metric over there, centimeters. And so, you check it out, and you thought, “Boy, that’s weird.” And yet there is a little bit of a connection, it becomes like, “Oh, well, so part of your whole genius is representing things in a confined space, the dimensions of a screen or a video game.”

And so, that kind of fits that, it goes down like that. So, it is really fun for me to see the weird things people do. One weird thing I do…Look at you, Joey, you’re already liberating me.

Joey Cofone
Go for it. Let your weird out.

Pete Mockaitis
As soon as I will think of just the most wildly inappropriate thing to say or do in a given situation…

Joey Cofone
And see how people react?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And, in a way, that really does support my strengths in terms of I am pretty good at formulating words that work and people respond to because I’m also good at identifying the exact wrong thing to say. But someone walks in the steam room, I don’t know, this is weird. Let’s say I’m in a sauna or steam room, and so when I’m about ready to get out, if someone just gets in, and I think, “I don’t want to get out immediately because I don’t want to hurt their feelings.” I guess I’m really considerate, not that they care. But the weird thing I’ll do is I’ll think of the exact opposite of that.

Joey Cofone
You scoot next to him?

Pete Mockaitis
And, like, they walk in, and I just sigh, and say, “You know what, F this. I’m out of here.” So, that’s weird and ridiculous.

Joey Cofone
That is ridiculous. I like it.

Pete Mockaitis
But in doing this all of the time, one, it keeps me amused and lighthearted and entertained, but, two, it does kind of hone one of my strengths, which is communicating stuff to folks in a way that’s effective, in terms of I’m effectively trying to learn something with interview questions or I’m effectively trying to persuade, and that’s just, I think it’s funny. Like, the weirdness often, but not always, has relationship or overlap into strengths, genius, giftedness.

Joey Cofone
It does. It does. I like to acronym things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, let’s do it.

Joey Cofone
If you’re like, “Hey, I’m going to go to the store,” I’ll be like, “H-I-G-T-G-T-S,” and I try to do it as fast as I can, and I have no idea why, but I used to be really good when I was a kid. I would go to bed, acronym-ing every sentence I did. And, lo and behold, like I became an English major, and then I wrote a book, and I think it all kind of ties together the ability to dance around words and letters, and be comfortable with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. Well, that’s just one law, be weird.

Joey Cofone
Yeah, let’s do another one. I think there’s a powerful one that people are always like, “Man, that makes so much sense.” So, creativity, what is the…? I forget, what are they called? What is the base word of creativity?

Pete Mockaitis
Create?

Joey Cofone
You got it, but you don’t create in creativity. It’s a complete misnomer. It’s ridiculous. Unfortunately, people do think that creativity is creating. It’s not and it sucks because that means people don’t think that they are creative when, in fact, they are. It’s just expressing yourself. So, the law of connection addresses this.

And it says, base concepts can neither be created nor destroyed. They simply merge to form new combinations. Creativity is not about creating. It is about combining. And then I give some examples, and I’m going to give you a few examples right now. The iPhone combines a computer and a phone. The Avengers combine the allure of the gods and the relatability of everybody people. Pokemon, the number one franchise on planet Earth, combines our love of pets and our fascination with fantasy worlds.

Pete Mockaitis
And I would say in collections, too. We like to be collectors.

Joey Cofone
Absolutely. It’s multidimensional for sure. I just base it down into something that you can parse. When you ask…now, I call it the grandparent test, which is when you say, “Hey, grandma or grandpa, what is Tesla?” And they say, “Oh, those are those cars with batteries.” Well, you just figured out exactly the two things that someone combined to make this new thing. Or, Instagram is photography and messaging, so on and so forth.

And so, the number one thing to take away is that when you are being creative, really, you are taking things that exists and just mushing them together. And it’s a much more palatable way of saying, “Hey, maybe I am creative. I do that all the time,” rather than thinking you are creating from scratch because that’s not real.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that sinks. Well, I’ll put you on the spot, Joey. So, your notebook, I’m holding one. What was the genius of combination that went down here?

Joey Cofone
Great question. The genius of combination is that I did not care about the question you just asked. So, it’s the first thing people say, “What’s so special about your notebook?” I don’t know, Pete, what’s so special about Starbucks’ coffee? Does anybody care? No. It’s the brand. It’s the differences, the story that a brand is telling.

So, when I started back in 2013, and all these notebook companies were telling people about the GSM of the paper, and how hard it was pressed, and if it’s soft – what do you call it – textured or smooth. I didn’t say any of that stuff. What I said is, “We made a really damn good notebook because it’s really, really important that you have a place that you can trust to put really important thoughts, because we all put a lot of really treasured ideas into our notebooks.”

When we’re journaling, our deepest thoughts go in there. When we’re brainstorming on a project, something that we’re really excited about, and that we cherish, and that we can see the future, goes in there. A notebook holds so much that’s important. And when I started Baron Fig in 2013, that’s what I spoke about.

Sure. Sure, I made a high-quality notebook. The paper is better than any other notebook. I made a binding that I actually patented that opens totally flat. And I made a cover with cloth that no one had done at the time, and the bookmark is much more high quality. But who cares? At the end of the day, no one is like, “Man, look at that. Look at that bookmark quality.” Doesn’t matter.

I made them good, but the point is I want you to go to our website, I want you to see that the product and the people who created the product speak to you as a human being that puts important things down on paper, that you care about, and that respects it. And that’s what we did, and that’s why we’re still here 10 years later selling notebooks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Joey, I’d love to also get your take, let’s say you’re in the heat of battle, it’s time to create, there’s a proposal to write, a thing to make, and you’re just hitting a wall, you’ve got “writer’s block,” or artist block, or just things aren’t firing the way you’d like them to be and have fired historically. How do you get into the groove, the mode, the mojo, the vibe, the flow to make it happen?

Joey Cofone
Good question. I do 50s or 100s. What are they, Joey? Another good question. Fifties or hundreds is you list 50 or 100 ideas about something pertaining to the thing you’re trying to solve. And now here, the real twist is you’re going for quantity. You don’t judge. If it makes sense, you do it. So, I don’t know, if I’m writing or if I want to do a limited edition pen, I just got to write down 50. I don’t care if one is…I’m just coming up with it now.

A green pen, it’s called the pickle edition. Oh, a TV remote control edition. It has a sticker that’s a remote control that you slap on your forehead. Oh, let’s do the forehead edition where you roll the pen on your forehead and it creates really smooth feeling. They’re ridiculous ideas but they solve, even if they’re not good. And so, what happens is you detach yourself from the expectations of the outcome when you do these.

Pete, you’ve heard of the phrase quality over quantity?

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Joey Cofone
Now, very common and it makes sense. You want one nice thing over a bunch of mediocre things, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Joey Cofone
Totally fair. Problem is that phrase speaks to the destination, to the end. That’s like me saying, “Hey, Pete, go to the gym. Be strong.” And you’re like, “What do I do at the gym?” It skips over the middle. So, I’m going to rephrase it for us. Quality over quantity but quantity begets quality. And so, when you do a lot, you end up getting good. No one ever does their first shot on the court, or their first swing of a golf club, or their first chapter of a book, and says, “It came out perfect.”

Yet, when a lot of people who are uninitiated with doing some type of expression like that jump in, they get really upset that they didn’t succeed on the first shot, and that’s just ridiculous. Focus on doing a lot and the good stuff will come.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you.

Joey Cofone
Thank you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Joey, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Joey Cofone
No, I am an open book, man. How do I like to say it? I’m at your service.

Pete Mockaitis
You open and you stay flat.

Joey Cofone
I do stay flat. Patented, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Fashion. All right. How about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Joey Cofone
Favorite quote is without a doubt, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates.

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

Joey Cofone
Favorite study is, huh, probably Schrodinger’s cat comes to mind just because it’s so misinterpreted. When he pulled that exercise, he was actually proving a point how silly it is that you could think that the cat is alive and dead at the same time. It was like a joke. But now people use it to prove that it’s a possibility, which is so ironic.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Joey Cofone
Favorite book, besides The Laws of Creativity, is The Phantom Tollbooth. Are you familiar with it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Joey Cofone
The Phantom Tollbooth is a kids’ book, and it is about a kid who goes into a world of total creativity and playfulness, and the language and the pictures, and it’s absolutely great. You should read it once a year every year so it reminds you in 120 pages what it’s like to think with a kid full of wonder.

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

Joey Cofone
Coffee. Is that fair?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Joey Cofone
Love coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Joey Cofone
Favorite habit is I do at least one pushup every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m intrigued. Does it often turn into more than one?

Joey Cofone
It does often turn into a lot more. But the idea that I only need to do one is great. Then I do pushups, then I do some squats, then I do some lunges, and then I do some pullups on the pullup bar. And then, huh, wow, that pushup turned to a lot.

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

Joey Cofone
Well, I gave you my favorite one, which is quantity begets quality, so I’m going to stick with that.

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

Joey Cofone
Go to JoeyCofone.com, and you will find all that you need.

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

Joey Cofone
Well, actually, yeah, I have a call to action. If you go to my website, you could take my free email course which will give you nine of the laws that you can judge for yourself whether you think you have it right about creativity or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Joey, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and creativity.

Joey Cofone
Pete, thank you, man. It’s been a pleasure. And, everybody out there, thank you for listening. I hope you have a beautiful day.

Feb 09
0

838: How to Listen and Solve Problems Like a Master Innovator with Mark Rickmeier

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Mark Rickmeier says: "Fall in love with the right problem before you get too attached to a solution."

Mark Rickmeier shares the specific approaches product innovators use to develop breakthrough solutions.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The double diamond framework for more effective problem solving.
  2. How to quickly generate new, original ideas in two ways.
  3. A handy tool to help you select the most resonant solution.

About Mark

Mark Rickmeier is the Chief Executive Officer at TXI, a boutique strategy and product innovation firm that specializes in UX research, design, and software development and closes the gap between ambition and reality. Over the past 20 years, he has created more than 100 mobile apps, custom-built web applications, and intuitive user experiences.

Resources Mentioned

Mark Rickmeier Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Do tell us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

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

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec 12
0

824: Thriving amid Information Overload with Ross Dawson

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Ross Dawson shares battle-tested strategies for excelling in a world of massive information.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The five information superpowers 
  2. How to consume information optimally
  3. How to discern the good sources from the bad ones 

About Ross

Futurist and author Ross Dawson has focused for over 25 years on the challenge and opportunity of how to thrive on unlimited information. The initial offering of his first company Advanced Human Technologies was helping financial market leaders and company directors develop their information capabilities. He shared early insights in his prescient 1997 article Information Overload: Problem or Opportunity? 

For over two decades Ross has applied and consistently refined his frameworks for enhancing information capabilities. As a leading futurist, keynote speaker and advisor he has travelled around the globe helping business and government leaders envisage and create positive futures for an immense array of industries and issues.  

Resources Mentioned

Ross Dawson Interview Transcript

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

Ross Dawson
Wonderful to be talking to you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom about Thriving on Overload: The 5 Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information. But, first, could you tell us a little bit about your knack for musical instruments? I understand you can play many. How did you learn how to play them all? Any tips and tricks, or any special performances that really leap to mind?

Ross Dawson
Well, it’s just at the age of 14, I said, “I just want to play guitar,” so I gave a little money to my dad, he bought me a guitar, and I actually, at the time, had some cassette tapes and a little book, and I taught myself. So, I teach myself just about everything, and so it was the guitar included, and then I sort of worked out, “Okay, well, that note on the guitar, is that a note on the piano?” And so, I looked out on how to play the piano, and learned a couple of other instruments. It’s all self-taught.

Sometimes it’s useful. Often, it’s useful to have teachers but I think there’s so much we can discover ourselves in the way we find our own ways of doing things if we do them ourselves. And that’s certainly been my musical journey where I just do what I want to do, and I enjoy it, and not necessarily following what anyone’s suggesting to me I should be doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Fun. Okay. And were you in a band at some points along the way or any noteworthy performances?

Ross Dawson
Yes, just lots of bands along the way, mostly pretty early on when I was at school, when I was university, and then after that, yeah, a number of other bands, and playing guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion. And I’ve been certainly keen to get back to it for quite a while, and it’s a bit harder when you have kids and you got busy and so on, but working on some ways to use technology plus instruments to be able to create my own one solo show live.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, fun.

Ross Dawson
So, working it too.

Pete Mockaitis
Looking forward to it.

Ross Dawson
So, see you if I actually get on stage at some point.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. Well, one final question on the music scene, did any of your bands have funny names? Band names are our favorite.

Ross Dawson
Nothing that I…well, funny, I don’t even remember them all. Platinum Blues was one of the sorts of bigger bands that I was in. So, this idea of those blues but we were sort of gilding it. So, that was, I suppose, one of the steps along the way.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, Ross, now tell us a little bit about Thriving on Overload. Any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made along the way on this stuff?

Ross Dawson
Well, I suppose, in a way, Thriving on Overload is counterintuitive in the sense we live in a world of overload, but we can thrive on it. I think this is a fundamental belief that our brains are not adapted to the world that we have created. Incredible inventors that have made, among other things, a profusion of information, and screens, and always on, and this is something is what we have brought ourselves, but it is not something that our brains are ready for, so we are overloaded. We are overwhelmed. It’s just natural. It’s impossible not to be, in a way.

But I do believe that it is possible to thrive on that. And this is, I suppose, a way where we can become, you know, learn, change how we do things, what we do, our attitudes, practices. And that, in a way, means we can transcend who we have been to be more adapted to the world that we live in. So, this is a journey, we can learn things, we can progress, and so that’s something which is not obvious but I think this really is our most important capability that we need to develop.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then can you paint a picture for, if there’s any cool studies or data or research, which really reveals just what’s possible in the realm of thriving on overload? Like, what’s the typical level of thriving/floundering in the midst of overload versus what can really be possible if you master this stuff?

Ross Dawson
There’s a whole set of capabilities to develop the capability to thrive. So, the subtitle of the book is, The 5 Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information. Those five powers are purpose, framing, filtering, attention, and synthesis. So, we need to be able to dig into each of those and how all those fit together. But if we want to distill this, I suppose, to research and some data and some one frame, one piece of research or sort of now what is compounded research is into multitasking.

And some people think they’re good at multitasking, and the reality is that now more recent studies on what’s actually happening in our brain shows that when we think we are multitasking, as we think we are doing two things at the same time, our brain is actually switching from one thing to another thing, and then back to the other thing, and then back to the other thing.

Now, if we’re simply listening to a podcast while we’re cooking dinner, that’s probably achievable. That’s not too hard to go back and forth. But if we’re doing something which is contemplatively taxing, and we’re then checking our email, or trying to watch TV, or whatever it is, it’s simply not functional. So, studies have shown, in fact, that those people who think they are good at multitasking actually underperform those people that don’t think they’re good at multitasking because they’re trying to do something which is literally not possible. Our brains cannot multitask.

So, this is where we are put in a world with so much wonderful things going on, and we try to pay attention to multiple things at the same, and it’s simply, yes, you can do it by switching your attention, but you will perform less than you’ve done before. Now, taking research at the other end of the spectrum, those who are trained in the single practice which takes our attention the most sustained is meditation, which is simply the practice of keeping our attention sustained on one thing for a period of time where we can continue to be on attention on one thing for a period of time.

And you don’t need to be a meditator to get there. There are other ways to be able to get there, and there are people who switch everything off, and for three hours at a time, aside from getting up and stretching and having a drink of water or whatever they need along the way, will be focused on task for a period of hours.

And the reality is that it’s only a very small proportion of people that are able to and do take that time and capacity, develop that three hours of attention, spend it on one thing in which they can achieve incredible things. Whereas, the vast majority of people, it’s literally, their attention is not on one thing for more than literally a few minutes at a time, at best, because they’re just strayed by thoughts or notifications or alerts.

And those are the two poles. One is eternal distraction, eternal attention watering all over the place where we can never achieve that much. And those people that demonstratively can keep their attention on one thing achieve extraordinary amounts of things in quite limited periods of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that does sound exciting in terms of what’s possible. Now, to zero in on that three-hour figure, I’m thinking about ultradian rhythms and just what’s possible for the human organism. Is that three hour like three hours but with, like, a couple minute bathroom and beverage break? Or, how does that unfold, that three hours?

Ross Dawson
Yes. So, to your point, the basic rest activity cycle is generally understood to be 90 minutes, where our brains do go through cycles of, amongst other things, ability to be more focused and less focused. And so, we do need to take that into account, and our brains are different, we could be more or less tired, those all sorts of different factors, but 90 minutes is a reasonable guideline.

So, three hours is something where it is very possible for anybody to spend three hours in reasonable degrees of focus but that’s probably more than as much as most people would want to achieve in a day. The way I put it is that everybody should, for at least 90 minutes, at least once a week, have a complete focus time.

And that’s something which, again, is already challenging for most people. Most people don’t take 90 minutes out where there’s no distractions, nothing interrupting them, where there’s only one thing, they can’t escape from it, and they do get on with it. It actually takes practice to get into that but you can still achieve a lot as you get to that 90-minute period and I think that’s a good starting point for most people.

If you’re used to just being distracted and checking your email all the time, whatever it may be, make sure you have a time of 90 minutes, no distractions, no notifications, nobody’s going to interrupt you unless it’s the end of the world, and you have one task to get on with, and you just do that for 90 minutes, and do that once a week. That’s just incredibly starting point. And from then, you can start to build it.

So, in terms of some of those cycles, one of the most famous is the Pomodoro technique, which you spend 25 minutes of focus, five minutes break, 25 minutes of focus, and five minutes break, sometimes a bit longer break, and then you do that three times, which basically takes you to 90 minutes, have a little bit of a longer break, and then you do that three times again, 25 minutes plus five minutes break. And that works for a lot of people.

Personally, I think that the more flexible approach, as in if you feel you’re in the groove, then why suffer 25 minutes, or if you just feel a little bit of a break first that’s earlier. So, we can let our…some people work to that structure, having a time run, 25 minutes and five minutes break, that works for them perfectly. Other people, I feel that 25 minutes, often I’ll just want to keep on going, I won’t want to stop. But when I’m ready, I can take a stop, wander outside, pick up the guitar, whatever it may be.

So, I think if we get into this practice, what we do need is find our practices, find our routines that work for us, find what times of day is the best time to do this, but just making sure that you are starting with at least carving out some time, which is this what I call deep-dive time. That’s when you can achieve an incredible amount in very limited periods.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then so we’ve got a sense for what that means with regard to minutes of focused attention, which is handy. Could you share a cool story if there’s a particular case or poster child, if you will, that really illustrates what that can mean in practice for one’s results, career, productivity when they get there?

Ross Dawson
I think the reference point for, certainly for me, and I think for a lot of people is writing books. There’s pretty significant proportion of people say they aspire to write a book at some time in their life. You are never going to get there unless you have the focused time and you’ve blocked that out. So, that’s where anybody can say, “All right, I would love to write a book.” It could be a fiction book, it could be a memoir, it could be about this big idea you’ve have, it could be to show you’re the expert in your field, whatever it may be.

And, yes, when I wrote my first book, before I wrote my first book, I said, “I think society overweighs the value of a book. Being an author is an incredibly wonderful thing and society gives a lot of value to authors and, yeah, it’s a good thing but it’s…so I’ll play that game, if that’s what it is.” I have to say that after writing the first book, I say, “Well, actually, probably authors do deserve some respect.”

But it is something where you do need to carve out the time. So, anybody who writes a book will have an incredible accomplishment, it doesn’t matter how many books or copies are sold, you will have achieved something of value, something to point to, one which will advance your reputation, your career, your abilities, you’ll learn a lot through doing that. So, I think it is a wonderful endeavor, and that is something which can only be done with focused time that is blocked out, it’s simply for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, there it is, it’s kind of binary, on or off. Certain accomplishments such as writing a book are just impossible without the ability to have that focus for an extended period of time that is 90-ish minutes or thereabouts or even greater. And then I think in this age where there are different media and creations, we could maybe think of the book as a proxy or a representative for any sort of, I don’t know, magnum opus or great work of sorts that they’re not cranked out in 15-minute break in between Instagram sessions.

Ross Dawson
Exactly. To your point, if you want to be a YouTuber, today the bar for YouTube videos is pretty high, as in it’s a very high quality. If you want to do X videos on a particular topic and show you’re the expert, you’ve got to be pretty good because there’s a lot of other really good people out there. And, again, that’s not going to happen by itself.

You’ve got to say, “All right. Okay, I’ve got to work out. All right, what’s my topic? What’s my script? Where do I get my video assets? What are the overlays that’s going to be?” This is, again, going to take focused time. It’s not going to happen just by filling in in between other things. And what you can do, for example, in 90 minutes of focus will far exceed what you can do just trying to do bits and pieces while you’re interrupted along the way.

So, this is a way of amplifying your productivity, but it’s also a way of just being more…creating more value from the world we have. And I think that this fundamental equation for almost all of us are input as information. It’s what we read. It’s what we experience. It’s our conversations. It’s what we see in the world. It’s what we live, what we notice. It’s what we make of the world. It’s our knowledge. It’s our understanding.

And then it’s sharing it. it’s creating value with that. It’s building a startup. It’s applying it to our work. It’s making better decisions. It’s seeing opportunities. It’s creating YouTube videos. It’s creating blogposts. It’s creating articles. It’s having more intelligent conversations that add value to more people. It’s the input and the output. And both of those require this structure to how it is we bring our information together and building knowledge. And the structure in our work lives and to how it is we create something of value from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you mentioned these five powers: the purpose, the framing, the filtering, the attention, the synthesis. Can you expand upon those in terms of, I guess, a definition, and maybe some top do’s and don’ts for really developing each of these powers?

Ross Dawson
Certainly. So, just at a high level first. Purpose is simply knowing why. Why is it that you deal with information, do what you do in the first place? Second is framing, which is being able to literally build frameworks for your knowledge, for your understanding, for your information so you can piece together how they are connected. Filtering is being able to look at the information source that you have, and to be able to discern what it is that serves you, that serves your purpose, and what it is that doesn’t, and being able to make sure that you leave the ones, the information, that’s not useful.

The fourth mode is attention. So, we’ve been talking about this idea of deep diving. We have extended focus for a period of time, but that’s not the only attention mode. For example, we might have scanning, we might say, “All right, there’s a period of time when I’m just going to look at all my information sources. I’m going to stop and then move on to then perhaps reading and taking that in,” so there’s different attention modes.

And the fifth one is synthesis. And this is, in a way, pulling everything together so that it’s rather than just be lots of information, we can make a body of knowledge, we can understand the system, we can be able to have the foundations to build something of value. So, these are the five powers, and we can sort of perhaps flip over the year digging into specific questions. I can obviously go into greater depth on any of those, but I think laying those out as the five is critically important.

So, where would you like me to dig into from those topics?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I’d like to hear what sorts of practices enable us to develop and deploy each of these powers well versus what is the antithesis, the kryptonite, of each of these powers that are to be avoided?

Ross Dawson
So, we have to start with purpose, and the way I frame that in my book Thriving on Overload is around our relationship to information. So, we have a relationship with money, we have a relationship with food. In the same way, we have a relationship with information, there’s a lot of parallels with our relationship with food and relationship with information where we can have a not very positive relationship with food where we snack on chocolate all the time or eat when we’re stressed and so on.

And, in fact, there are some quite similar habits, sometimes, which people have with information. But we can also have a positive relationship with food, where we eat healthy food, and we feel that is sustains us, and we don’t have too much food when it’s not something that we truly want. So, with information, the same thing, where we can have a positive relationship with information, which is formed by going to what actually is good for us, which makes us feel happier, which inspires us, which informs our ability to achieve what we want to achieve, and is something which we’re not always indulging and snacking in all the time.

And so, I propose this idea of intermittent fasting information diet. So, some people, for food, they say, “All right, I’m not going to eat for a period of time. Come back and eat a meal, whatever, but I won’t eat anything at all in between.” And I think that’s a very valuable approach with information as well. We can say, “Well, I’m not going to check social media, I’m not going to check the news headlines, I’m not going to indulge in those things because, for a period of time, there are things that I want to do. I want to play with my children. I want to read something which is important, which I’ve decided is something I want to spend my time on, and I want to be able to write my book,” whatever it may be. So, we can vary those things.

But this all comes from purpose in the sense of understanding what it is we want to achieve, what it is we think is worthwhile, and, as a result, being able to determine the information that’s not useful. And the antithesis of that is simply not knowing, “Oh, that’s interesting. A bit about the celebrity news,” or, “Oh, see this horrible thing about what’s happening in politics, and spend some time looking at that.” And none of that serves us because we’re not clear on our purpose.

And so, having that purpose is an absolutely fundamental starting point to simply being able to prosper and know what it is that is valuable to us in a world which is often overwhelming.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Ross, I’d love to expand on that notion of purpose in the specific context of reading the news. Sometimes, when people read the news, they say things like, “I want to be informed.” And that strikes me as a little bit vague as far as a purpose or a goal goes because, in a way, there is infinite news one might be informed or not informed about. And so, it seems kind of thin in terms of, “My goal in reading this news is to be informed.”

And sometimes I wonder, maybe just because I don’t like reading a lot of news. I guess my purpose, the way I go into this is say, “I’m going to spend approximately 40 minutes scanning the headlines of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal so that I have a general clue as to the happenings in the world so I am able to converse with people,” as opposed to going, “Huh? What?” And so, that’s my purpose when I’m going to the news.

And it doesn’t take that long, and I find that if I spend too much time on the news, one, I’m pathologically curious, which is great for a podcast interviewer but not so great for a news consumer because, like, two hours later, it’s like, “Okay, I’ve read all about the chess cheating scandal, but how does that serve me?” I found it very interesting and I know I can comment a lot about it, Ross, if you have any questions, but it’s not really enriched me much.

So, can you share with us some example articulations of what might be some rich, useful, best-in-class articulations of purpose when it comes to approaching information of the news?

Ross Dawson
So, a couple of points just with what you’re saying. So, I think that’s wonderful in the sense of, first of all, you mentioned you take 40 minutes, and that’s exactly what I say. We need to have a period of time when we say this, “I’m going to scan the headlines and no more.” But news is one category, in a way, of information. It’s what I framed in the book as society, in a sense of, “What do we want to know about what is happening in society at large?”

And we said, the purpose is, “What is our purpose for it? Why is it that I read the news?” And you articulated, again, a quite clear purpose, so you can have intelligent, or at least, somewhat formed conversation with people, and you only need the headline for that to be able to not know…or, to actually know what’s happening as opposed to having the idea of what’s happening. And that’s entirely valid.

So, some of the reasons why you would want to go in the news is to be an informed voter. Now, that’s something which you probably can catch up with just before you need to vote. You don’t need to be constantly…

Pete Mockaitis
The day before, binge.

Ross Dawson
You don’t need to be constantly reading the news all year round in order to be able to vote, whatever it is that you vote. But that’s one valid reason. Another is to be able to have intelligent conversations with your friends you want to have conversations with. Another is to be aware of the things which are changing in your community, and so that gives you a geographic for this, “All right, I would like to see news about my local community.”

Another is to say, “Are there any things which are going to impact my children’s opportunities?” I might say, “All right, if they’re at a particular age, I might be looking at developments in university or college admissions,” or something like that. So, these are things which you would start to be focused. But this comes back to the domains for our relationship with information.

And one of the first ones, one of the most important ones is expertise. We do have to choose our area of expertise to be clear, “This is what I am an expert in, or I’m aspiring to be an expert in, or something which I think I’ll be useful to be an expert in in a few years from now,” and being quite clear around that, writing that down, “I will become…” or, “I am an expert in a particular area,” quite clearly defined, and that gives you clarity on what information, what sources you need to take in, what you need to distill so that you can become that expert. If you’re just skimming across the surface, you’ll never be an expert in anything, and that is not very useful in the current state of the world today.

Another is in wellbeing, “So, what is it that I’d want to know about my own wellbeing, well, the wellbeing of my loved ones? What is it that’s going to help me to have a better diet to be able to help support the conditions of people in my family?” So, it’s perfectly valid to have some passions. All right, so sports teams or there’s nothing wrong with celebrity news as long as you don’t let that expand to take over all of your news.

So, I think there’s different categories around helping you decide what your purpose is. There is information you can look for. You can look in your expertise, your ventures, whether that’s a startup, or whether it’s a community garden, whatever it is, in terms of your wellbeing, in terms of your relationship to society. These are all things that we can think through in order to become effective.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Ross, what you really are crystallizing for me is, and this is so helpful. Thank you. Hopefully, it’s good for listeners too. But I find, internally, I have a response of frustration or irritability when I see a news headline or blog article, or whatever, it says, for example, “Topic: What you need to know.” And I’m thinking, “There is no possible way you know what I need to know because our contexts are so wildly different.”

Like, the person running the political campaign for this politician needs to know way more and way different things than someone who may or may not vote for that person months down the road, or someone who’s managing the budget or employees in that industry. I guess maybe because I’m a content creator myself, I’m prickly or snobbish about the quality, but it’s like, “What you need to know, there’s no way one article can provide what everyone needs to know because everyone’s contexts are so different and their purposes that they establish are so different.”

So, Ross, thank you for clarifying what was simmering under the surface for me. And is it fair to say you’re going to have a hard time writing a piece of content that’s what you need to know for all peoples in one fell swoop?

Ross Dawson
Well, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I just wanted to make sure. Thank you, Ross.

Ross Dawson
But what it comes back to is saying we need to know it is health, and we don’t necessarily know that. So, what I described is we need to develop our own personal information plan. So, to complement the book, I’ve created some software or course where it takes people through that journey of identifying their purpose, and their expertise, and their areas, and their sources, and how they can use that, and the times they’re going to use that and do that.

You don’t need the book or the course, though they’re obviously designed to be as useful as possible. But we all need to decide, “What is my own personal information plan? What is it that matters to me? What time am I going to spend on that? What time am I not going to spend on the things that don’t matter? How am I going to structure my day? How am I going to structure my time? How am I going to spend time to be focused? How am I going to make space to synthesize this and pull this together?”

Information is the core and the value, I would suggest, of almost all of your listeners, and it’s something which most people haven’t spent the time to think about, is to, “How can I do this better?” And we can all build our own personal information plan, and that starts with this idea of, “Why? What’s important to me?” And from that, a lot of that starts to flow into, “What are the structures and the habits and the practice which will enable you to achieve what you want in your life, and be happier because you’re not drowning in the things that somebody else thinks is important to you but actually isn’t?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Well, you got me thinking about email outsourcing, but we’ll move on in terms of thinking about what’s important to me, and what’s not important to me, and what’s important to other people that land in your inbox, and how can you navigate that effectively, whether it’s software or helpers or different levels of support. So, we’ll just let that percolate in people’s heads for now. But let’s hear about framing next.

Ross Dawson
So, framing is building a framework. So, we got lots of information, but that’s all just bits of information. It only becomes knowledge and understanding when we connect that, when we say, “What are the relationships between these ideas? How does this fit together? What are the foundations of my understanding of this area of expertise that I’m developing?”

So, there’s a number of tools, a lot of visual tools that we can use. So, we can use things like mind maps. We can use things like concept maps. We can just sort of just draw things on a piece of paper and draw lines with them. And there’s now more and more software which helps people to not just note, “Ah, that was interesting. Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, that’s a really good study there,” and then to actually make links between them.

So, there’s a whole new generation of software tools, including around research and obsidian, but also other ways of just using simple software tools, such as note taking tools and so on, that enables us to practice this way of framing by drawing connections in, building a lattice of knowledge which is the foundation for how it is we can become an expert, to understand things, to be able to know what the reference points and the researchers that supports what are valid ways of thinking about these spaces.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you paint a picture or give us an example of what a frame looks and sounds like?

Ross Dawson
So, on RossDawson.com/frameworks, I’ve created a whole set of what I find is useful frameworks about the future, but any mind map. I think mind maps are one of the most people are most familiar with, where you have one idea and you lay that out as a kind of visual representation of some of the ideas and how those fit.

So, one of the good things about a mind map is it combines a hierarchy. You have a central idea and then subsidiary ideas, and then subsidiary ideas, but also being able to lay that out to be able to show some of the potential relationships between these ideas. So, these are forms of structuring, and it’s different for every person as to what is most useful for them and the way in which they think.

And some people like putting things in a linear document but we’re trying to move beyond linear. So, how do we draw connections between things? And I think, often, just being able to sketch things on pieces of paper, write down ideas on a piece of paper, draw lines between them as to what the relationships between those ideas are, and then you can start to literally build a picture of an area of expertise, of what it is you’re looking at.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And now let’s hear about filtering.

Ross Dawson
The filtering requires, first of all, understanding what information sources you’re going to go to. And this is not just going directly immediately. You might be using feeds, or you might be using aggregators, or you might be using different tools, but it’s building more and more this discernment of what it is that serves your purpose. So, clarity on your purpose, being able to guide that, and what it is that you need to discard.

And more and more, this is around being able to make sure that we are not succumbing to our confirmation bias, that we are not just looking for things that affirm what we want to know, but we are looking for things that complement our knowledge. So, one of the, I suppose, ways of shifting our thinking is to say, rather than being certain about things, whether that be in politics, or society, or in our area of expertise, is to start attributing probabilities to things.

So, we can say, “I think it is 90% likely, or 60% likely, that this is the case,” and then you can start to look for evidence that either increases or decreases the probability of you being right. So, there is a study of super forecasters, these people that are very good at predicting the future, and they have this implicit way of thinking about the future, or thinking about what it is they know as a probability. They’re never 100% certain on anything, because you can’t be.

But what you can do is to say, “I believe this. This is what I understand. This is the probability I attribute to that,” and then being able to look for evidence that will make your assessment that more accurate. So, this is a way of being able to actually go to the most surprising information to you and assessing that, and whether that’s valid so that you can then start to incorporate that into your mental models, or your ways of thinking, or your hypothesis around, for example, what will be a successful business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then, I’m curious, when it comes to arriving at what sources you think are winners versus ought not to be delved into, are there any core criteria or questions that really helps separate the wheat from the chaff?

Ross Dawson
So, it’s context. So, I frame this as, first of all, thinking about yourself. So, what is it that you want to be true, for example? Or, what is it you’re looking for? Or, what are your ideas already around this? You need to be thinking about yourself first, in a way. Second is the source, and you say, “Well, is this generally reputable, to generally other people consider this to be worthy? How much research did they do?” And being able to assess.

And no source is completely accurate. The most credentialed scientific journal in the world, Nature, has had 50 retractions in the last 10 years of things where they published it, and then they say, “Oh, actually, no, that’s not right. Ignore it.” And so, we can go to the most reputable sources and then we can’t actually be completely confident. There are certain sources where you can say, “Well, okay, there’s not much credibility,” but it doesn’t mean that any source is completely off the table either, but we need to have an assessment of that.

And the third one is actually looking at any specific piece of content, one of the most important things to do is to go back to its sources in whatever way to be able to corroborate that, “Is there anything which would suggest this was also true?” And it’s incredible, when you skirt into practice of going back to original sources for what it is you read, how often it is distorted or, in some case, a complete misrepresentation of what it is it says to be reporting on, or simply just misleading.

So, the single best practice is not to take anything at face value, but to then go back, and, of course, only if it’s important enough to you to warrant that, to go back and to do your research, to delve back, to say, “Well, let’s see, where does this actually come from and how do I assess that?” So, I think this requires a curiosity.

Yes, you are trying to say, “Yes, this is a more likely to be true source, more or less likely to be a true source,” concentrate on the ones which are more reputable, of course, but also to take everything with a grain of salt, and to dig back and to build your own reference point just what you believe is true, and be able to find the evidence you can to support that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, could you give us any top do’s and don’ts in the zones of attention and synthesis?

Ross Dawson
So, attention, there are six modes that I identify in my book. So, the first, which we discussed, is scanning, so just looking across existing news sources. Second is assimilating, where we assimilate, and we say, “This is worth spending time on.” It could be a book, it could be an article which you identified, and just rather than being distracted, you spend time and you take that into your body of knowledge.

Seeking for knowledge, explore, and I think it’s important to spend time where you’re deliberately trying to find things you would never normally find. Deep diving, which we discussed from the outset, that way of just spending focused time for a period of time. And the critical one, and one of the most ignored and most important really of the attention modes, is regenerating, which means stop doing, taking in information. And going out in nature is the most powerful way to do that.

It doesn’t need to be a forest. It can be a single tree in a park or whatever it may be. Just getting out in nature is a form of regenerating our attention. So, the best practices, the time box, let’s say, “This is the time I’ll spend on this. This is when I’ll do it. This is the time I’ll spend on that, and I’ll do that.” And to make sure that you’re spending your time deep diving each day, you’re spending time scanning each day, you’re spending your time assimilating each day, and you are spending time regenerating each day.

And the don’t is simply just to go from one thing to another all the time, just continually distracted by the next thing, “Oh, I should be doing that. Oh, I should be doing that. Oh, I might do this instead,” and you never get to a fraction of what you could achieve otherwise.

In terms of synthesis, it really is about getting to a state of mind where you can pull all of the things which you’re exposed to into understanding, into knowledge, into something where you have insights that other people don’t. And that requires this going between the intense focus but also the breath, giving your mind the space in which it can piece together all of the different elements in order to build that understanding.

So, in my book, I describe some of the different ways in which we can get to the state of mind where insights happen, where we can synthesize the ideas, where can come up with insights. And I suppose the don’t on that thing is simply just to burrow down all the time and not give our mind the space which it needs to be able to do what humans are incredibly good at, uniquely good at, is to pull together, connect the dots, and make sense of the whole.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Ross, tell me, any final thoughts before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Ross Dawson
Simply that this is the foundational capability for success today, is this ability to deal well with information and create value with it. And I think that anybody, whether you’re a beginner, as it were, or an expert, everyone can get better on it. And I just believe that we can all and should be spending time trying to get better at our information capabilities because that’s what will drive our abilities to create what it is we want in our lives.

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

Ross Dawson
So, one of my very favorite quotes is from James Carse, and it is “Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.” And it’s from his book Finite and Infinite Games, and that’s so many things. People are so much stuck in their boundaries, and so we need to play with the boundaries of our life and work.

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

Ross Dawson
One of my favorite bits of research which studied normal people and then meditators, and they put on a metronome, and the metronome started ticking. And for normal people, the first tick, they had this strong brain response, and then, quickly, it went down and they just didn’t notice it anymore. The Zen meditators, the first tick, they noticed. The second tick, they noticed it, and they keep on noticing it. They are continually seeing the world afresh. They are not becoming habituated to it as almost all of us do. So, this shows that we can continue to see the world afresh even as it stays the same, or seems to stay the same.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Ross Dawson
One of my favorite books I’ve read recently is The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, pointing to the infinite potential we have as the human race.

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

Ross Dawson
Favorite tool, well, just in terms of information access, Techmeme is just one way, one place where I can just quickly get on top of all of the important technology news of the day. So, just a quick, easy, and simple tool, and makes me informed in that area.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a habit?

Ross Dawson
The habit which I am developing more and more is when I feel like a break, is doing one of two things. One is picking up my guitar, and the other is rather than browsing through things, is turning to a book just to read for a few minutes, and then turn back.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they Kindle book highlight it and retweet it and such?

Ross Dawson
Simply that we have to believe that we can create a better future in order to be able to create it. And I think a lot of people are very negative today. There’s a lot of negative news reported, people getting some poor states of mind, but I think the first thing is we need to believe that a better future is possible. And it doesn’t matter whether we think that’s highly probable or not very probable at all, as long as we believe it is possible to create a better future, that gives us the foundation to say, “Well, what is it that I can do in order to be able to create that?”

So, I think that’s, in a way, the foundation of my work, and I think it’s a lot of what resonates with people is this starting with this potential, this belief that we can create something better to drive the action, which means that we can work towards that.

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

Ross Dawson
For my work, in general, RossDawson.com but for the book, ThrivingOnOverload.com. There’s a wealth of resources there, there’s free parts of the book, the exercises, the introduction, there’s the overload course, there’s a podcast, there’s a whole set of resources. So, ThrivingOnOverload.com is a wonderful place for those people who want to go further on this journey.

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

Nov 28
0

820: How to Embrace Tensions for Better Decision-Making with Marianne Lewis

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Marianne Lewis shows how to turn tensions into opportunities for growth.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why to never ask yourself “Should I…?” 
  2. How to find and benefit from the yin and yang of everything
  3. The three steps for better decision-making 

About Marianne

Marianne W. Lewis is dean and professor of management at the Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati. She previously served as dean of Cass (recently renamed Bayes) Business School at City, University of London, and as a Fulbright scholar. A thought leader in organizational paradoxes, she explores tensions and competing demands surrounding leadership and innovation.

Lewis has been recognized among the world’s most-cited researchers in her field (Web of Science) and received the Paper of the Year award (2000) and Decade Award (2021) from the Academy of Management Review. She enjoys her three children and two grandchildren from her home base in Cincinnati. 

Resources Mentioned

Marianne Lewis Interview Transcript

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

Marianne Lewis
Oh, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. We’re talking about Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems. I like so much those words. So, can you kick us off with maybe a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about problem-solving from all of your research and teaching here?

Marianne Lewis
Pete, I’ve been studying tensions, competing demands, that tug-of-war we feel in our hearts, whether it’s dealing with strategy, dealing with our lives, dealing with teams, for about 25 years. And I think the big aha and the reason I spent two-plus decades doing this was early in my career when I realized that our default is to this either/or thinking, that we get into this challenge, and we say, “Geez, do I spend my energy on work or life? Do I think about my performing and hitting my current targets or do I need to step back and learn and look around?”

And in this either/or approach, we weigh the pros and cons of these two sides and we make a choice and we think we can move on. Sometimes that can work if these are really simplistic issues but most times, either/or thinking is really limiting. It’s, “Are we really limited to only two?” Or, worse, when you start to kind of play that out, you go down this rabbit hole of saying, “Well, wait a minute, if I put all my energy into hitting my current targets, that would be great. I would excel, I would have lots to show on my resume, I would’ve proven my worth. But then life could change around me and I wouldn’t be ready. I’d be flatfooted.”

“But if all I did was…” So, let’s go to the other one, “If I really focus on learning, and I’m in higher-ed and I love learning, but if that was all I did, would I really make an impact? Would I make sure I’m applying what I’m learning in process?” And so, you get into this, you get stuck because what you really need is you need both. And so, what my work originally kind of focused on and the aha was we’re limited in our thinking, in our default. The good news is there’s a better way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that is good news. And so, if that is our default, I imagine it’d be quite possible that we’re doing it and we don’t even notice that we’re doing it. That’s what often happens with defaults.

Marianne Lewis
That it’s really automatic.

Pete Mockaitis
So, could you maybe give us a few rapid-fire examples to shake us out of it a little bit? It’s like, “Here’s what I mean by both/and versus either/or, and just notice that there might be more to things than first meets the eye.”

Marianne Lewis
Yeah, I’ll give you a classic example. We talked to people who’ll say, “Boy, I’m not crazy about the work I’m doing right now. So, do I stay or do I go?” And you’re kind of seeing a little clash as you’re thinking about that. But, again, you don’t really have to decide black and white, “Do I stay or do I leave this job?” You could also say, the both/and approach is, “Well, what do I like about what I do? What do I not like about what I do? Are there ways that I could either, personally and/or with my supervisor, talk about I need more of this and less of this? And how do I have those kinds of conversations?”

Or, vice versa, if I say, “Boy, what I don’t have this in job is what I’m starting to realize is what I truly want in life.” Well, it’s not just then going. It’s getting much sharper about what you want. If not, you’ll be in this grass-is-always-greener. You’ll get there and go, “How did I get…? Wait, this isn’t it either.”
And it’s kind of a constant flipping.

So, to us, both/and is about really diving into both sides of the equation, and saying, “At its best, what does each side bring? And at its worst, if that was all I did, what’s the problem there?” Because it’s through that kind of thinking you realize, “Okay, I could get more creative here.” And now it’s not a stay or go. It’s, “Let’s really dig into what do I want in my work.”

So, I use that example, Pete, because I think we’ve had, in some ways, kind of a global existential crisis during the pandemic. We’ve got a lot of people thinking, “Is this really what I want to be doing?” and questioning, and sometimes questioning in two simplified a way of, “Do I just leave?” you know, the Great Resignation. And then you find, I mean, we’re seeing this already in research that the Great Resignation has a lot of people not any happier in their second one because they haven’t thought through that fully what they want and what they don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you, that’s powerful, Marianne. And I was just about to challenge a little bit in terms of, “Well, ultimately, aren’t you either staying or going?” I mean, you could, of course, optimize, and finetune, and change, and have some good conversations about how to improve where you are, although that’s sort of a subset, I would say, if we’re going to nitpick about definitions of staying. But I guess what you’re putting forward here is, just by framing it that way, you’re missing out.

Marianne Lewis
Yeah, I think framing, that’s what…Wendy Smith is my co-author in the book and long-time research colleague. We think framing is hugely important, and it starts with really both/and thinking, starts with changing the kinds of questions we ask. That classic either/or question starts with, typically, a word like “do,” “Do I…?” “Do I stay or go?” versus a more typical both/and question that starts with “how,” “How would I make the most of what I like and where I am? And what am I missing? And how would I find a new combination?” because there are lots of combinations possible.

And you’re right, it still could sound like stay or go, but let me give you a couple of examples because Wendy and I worked with a variety of people who have gone through this one. It could also decide, “Well, maybe what I’m going to do is I’m going to stay for now, and I’m going to build a three- to six-month plan so that leaving means a much better view of what do I really need. And how do I leave in a way that doesn’t leave my team in a lurch or feel like I’ve been disloyal?”

If you unpack that stay-or-go challenge, you find that there are lots of other challenges within it that are going to make us lean towards one side or the other, and we’re going to have to deal with those if we’re going to really make a decision that has some lasting power and some creativity to it, for that matter.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really powerful because I think we could really feel the urgency and the, well, tension associated with, “Oh, well, I need to reach a decision, and, ultimately, these are the only categories that we could fall into.” And, yet, by taking that pathway of either/or, we miss out on surfacing what’s really most important, what are some cool options beyond that, and then how do we get there.

So, I really like that notion of just check yourself if you’re asking a question “Do I…?” as opposed to “How…” that puts you down some different pathway. So, can you expand upon those in terms of what are some either/or-style questions or things to be on the lookout for and their both/and counterparts?

Marianne Lewis
Well, I’ll give you an interesting version of this. Sometimes people can ask, “Do I focus on the financial benefits of my job or the work that I’m doing, like grow the money, grow the profit, grow the margins, or do I focus on the social responsibility, my impact, how do I better the world?” Do you have a business school? I can’t stand that question because they should be synergistic and we’ve seen amazing leaders learn how to do both. But they changed that question to, “How can I grow my profits through social responsibility?”

That was a question posed by Paul Polman when he was turning around Unilever, and his goals were to double the profits while having their environmental footprint, and people said, “You’re crazy. That’s not how it works. The bigger you are the more damage you do.” And he said, “No, we touch two billion consumers a day at Unilever. We can’t afford that.”

And I actually just had an executive in my office who ran Gerber clothing, for children’s clothes, and he said, “Clothing is notorious for being unsustainable. We throw away billions of pounds, let alone tons of wasted clothing.” Unilever and Paul, who’s such a both/and thinker we study and write about him in the book, but this leader was talking about at Gerber, too, is you start to realize, actually, by being sustainable, you reduce wastes, you’re more efficient. By the way, that means you reduce costs which increases profit.

And, by being socially responsible, you have a whole host of customers who say, “I have choices,” and you will have customers say, “I’m going to choose, I would rather choose a firm that’s sustainable.” And, by the way, as we’ve seen from lots of these same firms, we actually have investors who will eventually, and this is happening increasingly, say, “I actually want to invest in more sustainable firms.”

And so, here are these questions of, “Do I focus on the financial and my social responsibilities?” and maybe not as quickly as we like, but it is becoming a moot point. The leaders of Toyota were saying this with quality and costs. In the ‘80s, they practically put the American auto manufacturers out of business because we were sitting there, going, “Oh, no, it doesn’t work that way. The higher the quality, the higher the costs.” And they said, “No, the higher the quality, the lower the rework, the more efficient,” right? And then you see Toyota and Honda take off.

I just gave you two strategic examples but we ask those similar types of questions in our lives, both in our work and our decisions about the work that we do in our own values. And I’d like us to open our minds a bit and reframe, as you said.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, when it comes to our minds, you’ve got an interesting term – the paradox mindset. What is that and how can it help us?

Marianne Lewis
Yeah, a paradox mindset. So, when we think about either/or, we think about tradeoffs. Picture, like, a scale, and you’re doing this weighing between the sides. When we think about a both/and thinking, we put those opposing decisions into a Yin-Yang, which is such a beautiful symbol of paradox. So, if you can picture the Yin-Yang, you have kind of a black-and-white sliver, and so you’ve got two sides to this. But there’s also this dynamic flow between them where you see that they actually define each other. It’s only together that you see this whole of the circle.

And if you can kind of picture the Yin-Yang in your mind, as you move higher into, say, the dark, there’s actually a pin prick of white. And the view is, as you get higher and higher into one side, you actually feel more pull in this ebb and flow into the other. This is night and day. It’s love and hate. It’s trust and distrust, self and other. I’m being more philosophical here, but those play into the way we think about challenges.

Why is a financial responsibility and social responsibility opposites on a scale versus Yin and Yang? And how could they work together more synergistically? So, that was a way of sharing. The reason we use the term paradox is to start to change our views from a tradeoff to this Yin-Yang mindset. And a paradox mindset means two things, we have two dimensions, and we’ve measured this now over thousands of people. It’s in multiple languages.

We started in three. We started in Chinese, Israeli, and then in the US, an American. I guess I did geography. This is where we did the study. But what we found is there are two dimensions. One is some people are more sensitized to see and feel tensions. Now, that could be because you’re in a particularly stressful conflict-laden time so there are a lot of tensions around you, and it can be you’re somebody like me who sees them in their sleep. I pick them out very quickly. And the more you practice paradox thinking, actually, the more sensitized you become regardless of your work.

So, there’s the, “How much do you experience and see tensions.” And then the other side is, “How much, when you see them, do you see tensions as just a problem to either ignore, work through, and move quickly? Or, do you see them as an opportunity that in that tension there is this creative friction and an opportunity to learn, innovate, grow?”

What we found is people who have this paradox mindset, they see tensions as opportunities, they think about them as this Yin-Yang, are much more likely, according to their supervisors, to be more productive and more creative, and, according to themselves, to be more happy, to be more satisfied. So, what we’re finding with the paradox mindset is, especially if you’re dealing with tensions, that ability to move into them, seeing opportunity, benefits for learning, and working toward a both/and, will pay off in really powerful ways for you as an individual and probably for your organization given those benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us several examples of individuals who, they saw some tensions and then they considered them with a both/and perspective, or paradox mindset, and cool things emerged as a result?

Marianne Lewis
Yeah, I’ll give you a few of some leaders that I’ve enjoyed studying over the years. Muhtar Kent is fascinating. He was the CEO and chairman of Coca-Cola, which is an interesting example because one of the tensions we see quite a bit is global versus local. And you could think about this also as kind of centralized/decentralized is another way to think about it. But Coca-Cola is actually the best-known image in the world, even better than Mickey Mouse. People just know the red can anywhere.

So, you have this huge global reach and scale. Scale provides you incredible opportunities, really well-coordinated impact, reach, etc., and you’re talking about Coca-Cola. You’re talking about something you drink, taste, as differentiated locally as imaginable. And so, Coca-Cola, and particularly Muhtar, would always say, “Look, we have to be the best-known global brand, and leverage that scale, and have this tremendous value appreciation tapping into those local differences as possible. We have to be both if we are truly going to be a global brand.”

And if you go to the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, you will see they have lots of variations based on local differentiation of taste. So, even as a global brand, it also has local differences. Even that it has a global reach and scale of like the Walmarts and Amazons of the world, they also are really good at tapping into very local supply chains, retailers, because, depending on where you’re going, sometimes big boxes, let alone Amazon, they’re not there. So, that’s just a different kind of view of the global/local.

Another one I would share is a fun discussion I’ve had recently with Rocketbook. We wrote about it in Fast Company. But Rocketbook is dealing, like everybody else, with hybrid work, what do you do home versus away. And one of the reasons we started working on this with Fast Company, and we ended up going at Rocketbook, is that people might think that hybrid work is a win-win, but most often, it’s actually experienced as a lose-lose because you’ve lost the boundaries between work and home.

So, you go into work and you’re sitting on Zoom calls. That doesn’t exactly feel like a value to me. You’ve just on the commute and everything else. Or, you’re at home and you still got all of life and home, family, other things distracting and challenge around you, and you’re feeling like you’re really not at your best in either location.

So, talking with Jake and Joe, the co-founders of Rocketbook, Rocketbook does sustainable notebooks. They do reusable notebooks. It’s a really cool technology. I highly recommend it. They said, “Pre-pandemic, we were already hybrid.” And I said, “Well, why?” And they said, “Because we believe in the power of work-at-home, or work-non-office, as deep work, that work that you really need solitude, focus.” And they have a lot of designers, engineers, and they said, “We want them to have that opportunity to be at their best selves.”

And, on the other hand, we knew, and we still believe this wholly, that the best creativity will always happen around a table with a whiteboard, with all these, and that takes in the office. And so, because they had already believed in the power of hybrid work, they came out of COVID really strong because they kind of perfected why you come in, when you come in, how you come in, and when you would work at home.

And they learned this creative way to be both/and, to think about those synergies in ways that made people keep the differences, value separation, they used lots of cool ways to use technologies that we all use, like Outlook and other platforms, to respect people’s deep-work time and, while they’re at home, also have times that you say, “Now, I’m going grocery shopping.” They really got creative in how they use both.

But I think that’s a very different way than a lot of firms saying, “Is it three days or two days?” There’s a very basic approach to hybrid that isn’t how are you deeply making the most of the time together and the time apart. So, I would note those two because I love both options, and I think we’ve lived them in our lives, not just at an organization level.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So, the Rocketbook parameters then, for whether you work from home or from the office on a given day, is not just blanket two days, three days, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, but rather, “What is the nature of what you’re working on, and then, please, freely come into the office so we can do that better, or stay at home so you can do that better?”

Marianne Lewis
Yeah. And the other way I would say that, Pete, is we talk about in the book one of the key assumptions to moving to the both/and mindset is moving from thinking about your resources as scarce to abundant, and that an abundant mindset matters. And so, it was interesting talking to the folks at Rocketbook because time is a classic resource.

And so, you could say, “Well, yeah, but there are only 24 hours in the day, or eight hours in a workday,” whatever. And what Jake and Joe would say is, “Yeah, but every hour isn’t created equally.” Like, I’m a morning person, I like it super early, okay, then I’m going to work from 5:00 till 10:00. It’s going to be my deep-work time. I don’t want to be bothered from 5:00 till 10:00. But I want you to know I’m on it. And, by the way, I’m then going to take a break because I’m going to be really low, and then I’m going to come in for a few hours.

And so, they figured out ways to make that, and then, at the same time, they have people who are super late-night owls and they’ll even have office times, like at 11:00 o’clock. But my point with the abundance mindset is it’s not that they’re using more time or less time. They’re using time better, and they’re using it in a way, to your point about, yes, it’s the home versus work, but it’s also time that they’re playing with, to say, “What is the kind of work you’re trying to do? When are you at your best?” versus, “When do we get people together, whether it’s on Zoom or in the office?”

It’s a more nuanced approach than the, “Is it three days or two days? And, by the way, is it 8:00 to 5:00?” And I like that. I think that really is empowering to people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Well, tell me, Marianne, anything else you want to make sure to mention, any top do’s or don’ts about both/and thinking or embracing creative tensions we should cover before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Marianne Lewis
I think I would just, as a key takeaway, and, obviously you can do dive deeper in the book, we talk about kind of three key steps. You need to change the question you ask from this either/or to an “and,” “How do I accommodate my opposing, my competing demands?” The second piece is, instead of just weighing the pros and cons, and we say, “You need to separate and connect. You need to pull apart that Yin-Yang, think about really what you value on both sides, and then think about how you’re going to hold it together with a higher vision and some key guides.”

And then the third piece is you start to change the way you think about your solutions. Because, again, with either/or, the end result is a single choice. But with a paradox, when you’re dealing with these kinds of tensions, they don’t really go away. I might decide today between work and home, but I’ll have to decide again tomorrow, or I may have to decide between, “Am I really going to focus on current targets or learning for the future? But I’ll have to make that decision again.”

So, we think about one of the most kind of key decision-making modes that we see of people who are really good at both/and thinking, is think about it as tight-rope walking. You’re continuing to move forward but you’re making these kinds of micro decisions on an ongoing basis between challenges, between work or home, between social and financial, between learning and performing, between self and others, where your focus is.

But you don’t let yourself lean so far to one side that you fall because that’s really hard to get back up, and it takes some intention to know that you are holding them together. You need both elements and you’re moving forward. So, I do think that’s key to think about kind of three steps, in some ways.

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

Marianne Lewis
A quote that Wendy and I often return to was by Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues at Stanford, they’re psychologists. And the quote is, “The problem is not the problem. The problem is the way we think about the problem.” And, to me, that’s key to this decision-making. It’s actually the way we thought about the problem has limited our solutions.

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

Marianne Lewis
I think my favorite study was by Rothenberg. It was in 1979, I think, and Rothenberg was studying creative geniuses. He was studying Picasso, Mozart, Einstein, Virginia Woolf, and he was reading all their journals and different things. And what he’s finding was that the genius of these creative individuals came from valuing tensions, seeing them as opportunities; Picasso seeing light and dark; Einstein seeing things in movement and in rest; Virginia Woolf, it was life and death; Mozart was harmony and discord. He called it Janusian Thinking.

That was Rothenberg’s kind of finding. Janus was this two-faced god, looking in two directions simultaneously. But his point was that these creative geniuses found real value in the tensions. They sought conflicts for their greatest works, and I think that is a huge takeaway of instead of viewing these as problems, as in things that we want to avoid, work through as fast as possible, we should seek them out because they have potential, fodder, fuel, for really great creative opportunities.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Marianne Lewis
I think my favorite book is probably The Tao of Physics by Frank Capra. This is just a fascinating book. It goes back to Einstein. I really think Einstein and all the individuals that developed quantum physics were in this paradox mindset in a way that was really cool. But The Tao of Physics basically talked about how they turn to Taoism and insights from the Yin-Yang and ancient philosophy because they were literally thinking, “I’m going to go crazy because I don’t understand how something can be a particle and a wave. Which one is it? How can something be in motion or at rest?”

It was just one of those books. I kind of like a book that makes my head hurt sometimes because it’s really straining, and, at the same time, it’s kind of beautiful. And you realize, “Well, yeah, it was rocket science, it was quantum physics.” They went through some very simple powerful philosophy to get through it, keep themselves sane, but also get to a solution that was really remarkable with quantum physics.

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

Marianne Lewis
Probably my favorite tool is the Polarity Map by Barry Johnson. It’s this really cool, simple approach to when you have a tension, a conflict, competing demands. You put it on this two-by-two grid. And on the one side, you put the highs and lows of that side, like, say, “I love a leadership. I’m a leader and I love to be innovative but I also like to be really disciplined.” Well, at your best, what does your innovative self look like? At its worst, if that’s all you did, like you’re really risky. And then, at the same time, you do, “At my disciplined best, and my disciplined worst, am I a real pain?”

And the point of Barry’s Polarity Map is, “How do you stay in the top two quadrants? How do you let the tight-rope walking? You’re probably not disciplined and innovative at the same time but you’re iterating between the two. And how do you avoid going down into the depths of the negative?” But I love the Polarity Map. It’s just a great tool.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Marianne Lewis
I’m not always good at this but I think meditation is a really powerful habit because I think our minds can get in our way, and meditation is just a powerful practice to just kind of clear out the mess and have some calm so that we might not jump so automatically to a place that isn’t always in our best interest, and listen to the voices that might be taking us the wrong direction in our heads.

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

Marianne Lewis
I think a key nugget is probably just the power of a paradox mindset, to say, at our best, let’s not get stuck in these vicious cycles of either/or thinking, which we think of as rabbit holes, wrecking balls, interfere, and really look for more creative lasting solutions. And that’s what I’m hoping our work is doing, taking it out of a more academic realm and thinking more about people’s lives and how do you deal with the tensions because they are human. That is what the world we live in, and it’s natural. But I also think tensions are beneficial.

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

Marianne Lewis
I’d point them to BothAndThinking.net. They can find out more about the work we’ve done in media, more about the book, other places to hear and see us, but, also, there are lots of places you can buy it, and so we just try to put it at one-stop-shop over there.

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

Marianne Lewis
Boy, I think this is a challenging time. I think a lot of people are stepping back and kind of saying, “What do I want?” I hope people use both/and thinking to make those decisions because I know we can feel we want impact. We want meaning. We also want flexibility and finances. We want a lot of things from our jobs that can feel like they’re pulling in us in opposite directions. I think this is the time to be more creative and think differently about what we really want and need out of our jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you, Marianne. I wish you much luck and cool results from both/and thinking.

Marianne Lewis
Thank you. I wish you all the best, Pete. Thank you for this podcast.

Oct 20
0

810: How to Get Stuff Done inside Bureaucracies with Marina Nitze

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Marina Nitze reveals what makes bureaucracies tick and how you can work your way through them.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why bureaucracies can actually be great
  2. Six favorite bureaucracy hacks
  3. What not to do when trying to challenge a bureaucracy

About Marina

Marina Nitze, co-author of the new book Hack Your Bureaucracy, is a partner at Layer Aleph, a crisis response firm specializing in restoring complex software systems to service. Marina is also a fellow at New America’s New Practice Lab, where she improves America’s foster care system through the Resource Family Working Group and Child Welfare Playbook. Marina was the CTO of the VA after serving as a Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House. She lives in Seattle.

Resources Mentioned

Marina Nitze Interview Transcript

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

Marina Nitze
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear about your wisdom but, first, I think we need to hear a little bit about your job as a 12-year-old making fan sites for General Hospital.

Marina Nitze
Well, it was the best way to learn HTML back then. It was the days of AOL keywords, and I loved my General Hospital soap opera couples, and it was a great way to learn technology, and that was absolutely the start of my tech career.

Pete Mockaitis
So, at 12 years old, you’re loving General Hospital?

Marina Nitze
Yes, it was our neighbor’s grandma watched it, and I got to sit and watched it with her. And then you get hooked, right? Friday cliffhanger, you got to see what happened Monday, and then you’re running home from the school bus every night.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun. That’s fun. I have a feeling that in your childhood you probably had a lot of fun conversations with “grownups.” Is that fair to say?

Marina Nitze
I was really bad at being with kids, so, yeah, I mostly just talk to grownups and tried to have my own businesses. Yeah, being an adult is more fun.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m intrigued to hear you’ve got a cool specialty. We’re talking about your book Hack Your Bureaucracy. You’ve worked in some in your career in your days. Could you share with us, any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about bureaucracies in general? Is there something most of us have wrong about bureaucracies?

Marina Nitze
I think so. I think bureaucracy is often a four-letter word. We think of them as things that you need to blow up, you need to move around, you need to get rid of. And, for me, the most surprising thing as a Libertarian joining the Federal Government, believing that the whole thing should be blown up, and it totally did not work, was that bureaucracies actually work quite effectively and you can do a lot of effective things to get them to change for the better. And so, learning those techniques was really the impetus behind writing the new book and sharing those with others.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so tell us more about that. Bureaucracies, in fact, do work effectively. Can you give us some data or evidence or examples there?

Marina Nitze
Well, we kept seeing, when I was in the Federal Government, we had a program called the US Digital Service, which recruited top-tier technologists to come into government for tours of duty. And, repeatedly, kind of the pattern was always the same. They wanted to come in and the first thing they thought was the path to success was getting a waiver or an exception to the rules, or going around the rules, and that worked zero percent of the time.

But what did really work was learning what the rules were, and then not only using them to your advantage, but sometimes changing the rules of the game themselves so that the next thing the bureaucracy was doing was the right thing and the thing that you wanted them to be doing consistently even after you left.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, they were able to accomplish what they were hoping to accomplish by doing things the way that they say are to be done, and that was fine.

Marina Nitze
Yeah. I had a great story there around trying the normal way first, which was one of our bureaucracy hacks. When we wanted to use cloud computing because, at the time, all the websites for veterans were literally operating on computers that were like under people’s desks or, in one case, in a mop closet. And even if you don’t know a lot about technology, computers and mop closets and water should never the twain shall meet.

But one of the big objections that we got to doing this was from the inspector general, who said, “Well, wait a minute. You can’t use cloud computing because you can’t put the cloud in an evidence bag.” And so, by actually going through this process and working with them and understanding how they conducted their investigations, which was they would walk into your office, they would pick up the computer, and they would put it in an evidence bag. They didn’t know how they could do that in a world where cloud computing, and you can’t actually touch the computers anymore.

So, we had to work with them to help them see how they could actually conduct their investigations more effectively.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, you don’t have to truck it over to the mop closet.

Marina Nitze
Exactly. You don’t have to lift anything, you don’t have to put it into bags, your back won’t be strained anymore. And then, in the course of following up with that, we ended up hitting the IT approval paperwork had questions, like, “Marina, do you pinky-swear that you jiggled the doorknob to make sure that it was locked on the cloud?”

And you can’t jiggle the doorknob of the cloud either, so you had to actually change the paperwork itself. But in the course of changing the paperwork, now you can say, like, “Hey, is this server in a mop closet?” And if it is, then it doesn’t get approved, “Does this server have backups?” And if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t get approved. “Does this website have business hours?” And if it does, then it doesn’t get approved. And that’s how you can make a really systemic change in a bureaucracy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I just need to follow up. So, there was actually an official form somewhere that had the phraseology pinky-swear and jiggle the handle on it? Is that accurate?

Marina Nitze
The pinky-swear is my color, admittedly, but the jiggling the handle was actually literally a security control. We had to promise. I had to swear and sign on a piece of paper that I had jiggled the doorknob to make sure it was locked.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, this is fun. This is the way I love it, it’s the detailed insight scoop. All right. So, maybe let’s zoom out a bit. What’s the big idea behind the book Hack Your Bureaucracy?

Marina Nitze
Yeah, it’s really the Frank Sinatra test. So, in Frank Sinatra’s song “My Way,” he says, “Hey, if I made it here in New York, I can make it anywhere.” And so, the bureaucracy hacking tactics we learned in the White House, when I was at the VA as the chief technology officer in Department of Defense, when they worked there, we then found, my co-author Nick and I, that when we left, now he’s in venture capital and at Harvard University, I now do IT crises consulting for Fortune 500 companies and I work in state and local governments on foster care, and the bureaucracy hacking tactics still keep working.

And then we tried them in PTAs and Homeowners Associations, and they still keep working. So, the idea is, “Here are some hacks that work in some of the toughest bureaucracies, and they’ll also work in your everyday bureaucracies.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us an inspiring story of someone who, indeed, successfully hacked their bureaucracy and got something cool done which others may have said is impossible?

Marina Nitze
Absolutely. So, at the VA in 2013, there was a horrible backlog of healthcare applications from veterans that were trying to access VA healthcare, 800,000 of them waiting, pieces of paper waiting in a warehouse. And it was in the news that the inspector general had determined that 100,000 of those veterans had died waiting for the VA to process that paperwork.

And so, the VA was going to do what the VA always did, which was, “We’re going to do more mandatory overtime and more data entry.” But my team believed that there was a different way to go about that, “What if we could bypass the paper and get digital instant enrolment for veterans?” And what unlocked that was actually sitting down with a real veteran whose name was Dominic and, with his permission, we recorded him trying and failing to apply for VA healthcare 12 times.

He called; we hung up on him. He tried to open the website; it wouldn’t load. He tried to open another website; it wouldn’t open. And up until that point, the VA’s belief had been that veterans don’t use the internet because the numbers of veterans that apply online were so small. When, in fact, it was that the websites didn’t work.

And so, when we had this video of Dominic trying and failing so many times, and then it turned out he was actually absolutely eligible, and we were able to enroll him the next morning. We gave him our new mobile form, which is not rocket science, it’s not machine learning. It’s literally a form that was under on your mobile phone. He was able to enroll instantly, and we’ve since enrolled 2 million veterans instantly in VA healthcare through that mobile form.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Okay. So, taking a step back and parsing some insights from that story, it seems that the leadership has a mistaken view of what things are really like on the ground, it seems to be my takeaway there.

Marina Nitze
Yeah, and so our tactic here is you got to talk to real people. No matter where you are, if you’re a brand-new hire, if you’ve been in your role for 30 years, if you’re the leader or if you’re like an entry-level employee, going out and talking to the real people that are really experiencing your service, whatever your company may offer, is the way that you’re going to find those disconnects that you’re not going to find if you never leave the office.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is a grand story. Well, so you’ve got 56 such approaches for hacking. I don’t imagine we’d cover all 56 in the time we have here today. But could you maybe give us some of your greatest hits in terms of, and here’s my criteria, how I define greatest hits, that’s widely applicable in terms of it covers many kinds of bureaucracies; it is widely effective in terms of, “By golly, there’s a high percentage of the time this thing gets it done; and it has a good return on effort, if you will, like a little bit of time here can give big returns?” So, I’m putting you on the spot, Marina, if you could give us a few of your favorite bureaucracy hacks that meet these three criteria, what leaps to mind?

Marina Nitze
Absolutely. It would definitely be the space between the silos. So, the bigger your bureaucracy is, the more specialized it gets, the more that there’s different departments, it may even be that your company interacts with other companies through the course of a process. And while there’s tons of defensive antibodies that don’t want to change inside a silo, there’s often absolutely nobody paying attention at the handoffs between the silos. So, it’s a really awesome opportunity to make a really big change.

And I’ll tell you a quick story around this. I was helping a state trying to shorten its foster parent application processing time. And this is really important because, while grandparents, or aunts, or uncles have kiddos in foster care in their home, they’re not getting paid, they’re not getting any financial support until they complete this really byzantine paperwork process. So, it’s really important to get it down.

So, I’m following the claim in this case from start to finish, and this is the advice that anybody can use. If it’s a claim, if it’s a case, if it’s a customer, whatever it may be, follow up from start to finish. When it goes through the fax machine, you go to the other end of the fax machine. When it goes to the mailroom, you go to the mailroom.

And so, I was following this one foster parent application through the office, and I get to this woman, and she says, “Well, now I have to request the applicant’s driving record from the DMV,” and she pulls out the carbon copy triplicate paper, you know the kind you have to like press really hard and it’s different colors, and she says, “Oh, I hate this step so much. The DMV lives in the 19th century. I don’t even have stamps. Like, it takes forever. This sucks.”

And I walked over to the DMV because I’m following the real application, and I say, “Hey, can you show me how you’re processing the driving record request?” And the woman there says, “Oh, yes. We use this electronic system, and the request come in, and we process them same day.” And I said, “Well, wait a minute. I saw a carbon copy paper. Where does that come in?” And she said, “Oh, you were at child welfare. Those people are in the 19th century. They keep sending this carbon copy paper. Why the heck won’t they use my electronic system like everybody else?”

And so, I was able to connect those two individuals and, overnight, shaved 32 days off a process, removed a cumbersome step that nobody wanted to do, and make everybody’s lives easier simply because, in most bureaucracies, nobody ever sees or owns the end-to-end process. And so, if you can just crawl through it, follow your person, you will be shocked at the amount of insights and improvements that you can make.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Marina, this is the first time someone has made government work sound exciting to me. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh, what a huge value-add,” sorry, consulting language stuck with me. That’s like a huge amount of value for what sounded somewhat easy. Marina, maybe you did a lot of work over many days to pull this off, but that didn’t sound too hard. And, yet, that’s a huge improvement in people’s lives that’s quite touching. And those opportunities exist when you’re inside big bureaucracies.

Call me optimistic, but that almost sounds like a positive, “Oh, I’m in a huge bureaucracy.” “Oh, lucky you. There are so many improvement opportunities you can probably just grab that make a huge impact for not a lot of effort. That’s kind of a cool place to be.”

Marina Nitze
I would agree with you. I’d agree with that. The bigger the fire, the more interested I am. But even if you’re at a smaller bureaucracy, there might be handoffs you do with other outside partners, or maybe you’re interacting with the government as a nonprofit or something. Go follow that application process through and see if there are inefficiencies to be had.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Okay. So, we talked about the space between the silos, and following from start to finish. What are some of the other approaches?

Marina Nitze
Picking up the pen. So, I first learned this one, at the VA, for a while, we were missing one of our senior leader roles. We hadn’t hired for it yet and so we were kind of distributing that role’s tasks among the staff. And one of them involved having to go to the White House for a meeting, which sounds really exciting, like everybody would want to do it, but that means waiting in the security line for two hours in the hot sun.

So, I, as the new person on the team, got tagged in to take on this meeting, and I was supposed to write the President’s management agenda, which is a pretty big deal in Federal Government, and one of the tasks of that meeting was, “Hey, can someone write a technology goal on a slide?” And so, I’m looking around figuring other people showed up with their ideas, but, no, here was the blank slide, and so I said, “Oh, I’ll do it. I’m going to write down that the VA should have the first agency digital service to this team, and it should have 75 employees reporting to the CTO,” which was me.

And I assumed someone would come along and edit my slide or delete it or modify it, but, nope, it kept moseying along through the process, and then, lo and behold, the President is announcing the President’s management agenda that includes the goal of having 75 technologists assigned to this CTO of the VA, which is me.

So, then I got to take that slide that I had written because I had picked up a pen and take it and justified hiring these 75 teammates that I really, really needed. And that was a great way in the Federal Government but I since used it all the time to include…we have a story in the book of someone using that to change their condo’s pool policy because there was a lot of bickering around, like, “Is the Homeowners Association going to let us have the pool opened during COVID?”

And I said, “Well, why don’t you write the policy that says it’s open, because then the person that wants to keep the pool closed, they’re going to have to also write a policy and shows up and like get counter votes, so you’re actually raising the bar and effort for them, and making it easier for everybody to do what you want.” And this worked pretty consistently among everybody that I knew that was having this pool problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool. And what’s funny, because there was a bit of resistance there, so it’s like, “Ugh, writing a pool policy, that sounds kind of boring and lame. And what do I know about pool policies? I’ve never written anything like this.” But, at the end of the day, everybody just makes it up. Someone just makes it up. You just made it up and you got 75 employees. That’s pretty cool.

And someone else is just making up a pool policy. It’s unlikely that they’re consulting with someone with a tremendous deep expertise in pool matters from an insurance company or law firm, but that’s conceivably possible. But the most parts are like, “Oh, I guess this makes some sense when it comes to having a pool, so it’s the policy. Any input, feedback? Okay, here we go. This is the policy.”

Marina Nitze
Yeah, if you look around, no offense to your particular Homeowners Association, but if you’re looking around it, it’s just made of other regular humans that are just like you and me so there’s no reason why you can’t write a pool policy. And, yeah, maybe somebody will have an edit to it, but if you want the pool open, pick up the pen, draft the policy, see what happens.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I dig it. Marina, this is awesome. Keep going.

Marina Nitze
All right. I’d love to share a Harry Potter analogy here because I think this is a really, really effective one if you’re ever working with technology. So, there’s a concept called strangling the mainframe, and it’s the idea, like, say you’ve got an old, old system. Everybody’s got one in their company if it’s around long enough, and everybody thinks that the goal is to shut off the old system.

But the old system ends up powering a little bit of everything. It’s going to power HR, IT, something maybe, and everybody’s trying to have this magic huge perfect plan to turn off the old thing and one day magically turn on the new thing. And I’ve never, in the history of time, seen that worked. Like, in all of Western civilization is actually powered by these mainframes.

And so, my best analogy here of how to actually fix this problem, if it’s something you’re facing in your workplace, is a Harry Potter one. And this is a spoiler alert, so if you don’t know how Harry Potter ends, you should skip ahead 60 seconds. That is Voldemort is the mainframe and Harry and his family and the whole wizarding world are trying to destroy the mainframe head on, and it doesn’t work. The mainframe gets more powerful than ever. And after six and a half books, Harry’s lost most of his family, there’s billions of pounds of Muggle property damaged, and Voldemort is stronger than ever.

But what does work are finding the Horcruxes and slowly peeling off bits of the mainframe’s power one bit at a time. So, if you think about it in your organization, maybe you could pull off a little bit of case management, maybe a little bit of claims status tracking, maybe a little bit of HR, such that, at the end, you have a small enough of a puzzle that you can actually replace it in, say, six months or one year.

And so, this is a technique that we use all the time. Even if your company is working, frankly, off of like a really advanced spreadsheet, you still often can’t turn it off overnight. You got to peel off piece by piece. And this can be a really amazing bureaucracy hack and tactic if you’re trying to make change because there may be some new innovation that you want to have seen.

One example here would be around the unemployment claim backlog. In a lot of states, they had a strangle a mainframe tactic of helping stand up a claim status tracker because that’s what everybody wanted to know, “Did you get my claim? When is it going to get paid?” And the mainframes couldn’t support that, but many states stood up and, literally a week, a claim status tracker where everybody checked their status just from their mobile phone by building this little piece off to the side that just syncs to the mainframe once a night.

So, just want to encourage folks to think creatively about how they might strangle their mainframe and what their first Horcrux might be.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. That’s really cool. What comes to mind is I was in a Facebook group all about professional speakers, and this was only like four years ago, and someone took a photo of a dot matrix printer at a rental car location, and said, “Dot matrix printer is still holding town at the rental car agency.” It’s like, “Yes, that is so weird that those still exists there.” And then that’s intriguing, if you think about it, in terms of…and I don’t know the rationale for why those are still there.

Marina Nitze
They’re all in airports, too. Airport manifests are printed on dot matrix printers.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and maybe that is or is not relevant but if we’re genuinely waiting, I don’t know, an extra 30 seconds per person in line for the dot matrix thing to go through that, then it sounds like it needs to be replaced. But if it’s plugged into a mainframe, or a bigger computer sort, then I guess it’s quite possible that you have an alternative means by which the information is sent to a different printing thing.

As I zoom into these conversations, how I imagine they would go, it’s like, “Oh, well, we can’t change that because it’s connected to the thing. And that thing runs everything, so just don’t even touch it, don’t even think about it. Just forget about it and move on.” And then most of us are not so persistent, shall we say, or stubborn, however you’d like to phrase it, as to dig in a little deeper and further. But if you were to do so, peeling off a little bit at a time is likely to get us a lot farther.

Marina Nitze
Absolutely. That’s the message.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. Let’s hear another.

Marina Nitze
So, if you’re kind of a staff-level person, a recommendation that we have here is really think about tailoring your pitch to who you need to persuade to your way of thinking. And one of my favorite bureaucracy hacks here was done by a colleague. We needed a bunch of IT executives to approve an API policy. An API is an application programming interface. It’s something that lets two computers talk to each other.

But if you don’t know what an API is, that just sounds like a huge security blackhole, like, “Wait a minute. I’m going to let another computer connect to my computer and take data out of it? Like, that sounds like everybody’s going to hack it and take all the private data out of it. That doesn’t sound safe.” And so, people were pretty opposed to it.

But because they were senior leaders, they had no safe place to ask basic questions about what an API was. They were too senior to ask the basic questions. So, we had to set up a space for them to learn, so we had a session called APIs for Executives, and we held it in a fancy room and had some fancy speakers and fancy invites, and invited them to come.

And at the beginning of the presentation, it said, “You know, hey, we know everybody here knows what APIs are, but just in case,” and then gave a basic 101 review of APIs so that it gave those executives a safe place to learn so they could actually engage in the conversation. And if we hadn’t done that, they would’ve just blocked our policy from day one from a place of fear.

Pete Mockaitis
It feels really brilliant in terms of so you knew exactly what your roadblock was. It’s like, “These folks don’t understand what an API is and they’re afraid to ask. And I can’t just say, ‘Listen, bud, I know you don’t know what you’re talking about, so let me lay it down for you.’” You knew that wasn’t going to fly in this environment.

And so, I’m curious about how you presented that, it’s like, “Oh, wouldn’t you know it? Like, crazy coincidence, this event is happening,” because you had agency in creating the event. So, how did you play that game?

Marina Nitze
Well, it was just about framing it in a totally respectful way. So, like, yeah, it does sound a little bit manipulative. I fully acknowledge that but we had to find a safe place to get them to learn. And having an event called API 101 wasn’t going to do it because they were going to be afraid of, like, being seen in front of their direct reports, potentially, as not knowing. So, we had to create a place that they would feel safe.

And we had a little bit of an advantage. We could also invite them to a fancy White House office room for the event, but you probably have an equivalent wherever your organization may be of creating some sort of safe space for people to learn without making them feel dumb. Because if people feel dumb or threatened, they’re not going to engage with you in a constructive way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. All right. Marina, you can just keep going all day. More hacks. Lay it on us.

Marina Nitze
Something that I think is really overlooked that we really encourage is when you’re understanding how process works or when you find a change that you want to make, you have to understand the internal employee impacts of that process the same as you understand how you may want to change it for that end-user or for your customer.

So, often your internal employees have particular risks or incentive frameworks, like their position description said they have to do this or that. Their practice manual says they have to do this or that. They have more steps to do in a day than they can possibly do. So, if you show up with your, like, bright, fancy, new idea for outside customers, that you’re going to have a new customer support model or you’re going to have a new product that makes the internal people have to do seven more steps on their already-over full plate, they are going to resist you, and they are going to fight you.

But if you can understand kind of like my story earlier about the DMV, like neither of those women, they were both busy. They didn’t want to fill out carbon copy paper and mail it to one another. Like, they were happy to take that step off their plate, but you had to acknowledge that it existed in the first place to understand how you could kind of trade, and say, “Okay, I’ll get you two more internal efficiency gains and, in exchange, I need you to do this one extra step that’s going to help my actual project goal.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, now, could you tell us a little bit about what not to do when it comes to hacking a bureaucracy? If we want to make something happen, we’re inside a bureaucracy, we’ve got some really cool things that we should do, what are some things that we absolutely should not do?

Marina Nitze
Yeah, this is a mistake I see people make all the time, and I made it myself a lot in the beginning, which is you can’t try to make the bureaucracy care. Bureaucracies do not have feelings. They have decision criteria. And something I see a lot, and I see this especially in IT, where you want a new IT application approved, or you want to be able to use a spreadsheet software because it’s going to make you more efficient.

But the argument that, like, “Hey, if we don’t get this, there’ll be foster children that are homeless, or there’ll be veterans that don’t get healthcare.” Those are not approval criteria on the approval form. They’re not part of the decision matrix. So, you can beg and plead and make the emotional arguments to the end of time, but if you don’t actually fill out the approval form and meet what it needs, you’re not ever going to get to the goal that you actually want.

So, a big mistake I see people make is trying to make the bureaucracy care. And what, instead, you should do is understand what the bureaucracy cares about and meet those needs even if it may be frustrating and not feel particularly emotionally fulfilling in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, what’s interesting here is we’re talking about the bureaucracy, it’s like an entity because I’m thinking of it like The Borg. It’s like an entity, a person, a corporate thing unto itself and that doesn’t have feelings. I get you. Like, if we defined bureaucracy as a series of steps or processes, then maybe, first, we should get your definition of bureaucracy. I guess individual humans within the bureaucracy might care, and that could maybe motivate them.

It’s like, “Wow, you’re right. This is a big problem and we need to do something.” So, you maybe even enrolled them and you’ve gotten them on board with some emotions, but you’re not really going to get any traction in terms of making it happen until the actual steps of the form or process or whatever are getting adjusted. Is that a fair synopsis?

Marina Nitze
Absolutely. You might win them over to pay attention to you first, to take your form first, but you’re not going to win them over to allow your half-filled out form to get approved.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And then since we’re saying the word bureaucracy a lot, could you define it for us?

Marina Nitze
Yeah. In the course of writing the book, we actually tried to find something that wasn’t a bureaucracy. And this quest took us even to, like, a co-op grocery store in Brooklyn, California. It turned out it was still a bureaucracy. It’s any organization of any size that’s run by a series of processes and rules, both written and unwritten. And unwritten I think is really important, too, because, at the end of the day, like if there is a process, if you have to go through Bertha, and Bertha considers your form in a particular way, and she is the gatekeeper there, it’s important to understand that as an unwritten rule.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you for that. So, anyway, more don’ts. What else should we not do?

Marina Nitze
Yeah, my other one is beware of the obvious answer. I, literally, have a TextExpander keyboard shortcut on my computer, where if I typed the word just, it will delete it, so it will not let me type the word just because that word is what gets tons of people in trouble, especially if you’re new to a problem or to an organization. Do not show up and say, “Well, why don’t you just do X, Y, Z?” because the odds are that hundreds of people have had your idea before, and there are some reason why it is not been done already.

So, before you say, “Why don’t you just do this?” it’s really important to kind of, first, keep that idea to yourself, but dig in, try to find people who had that same idea, see who has tried what, where didn’t it work, because maybe that the solution is not impossible. That’s not all what I’m saying, but it’s a lot more complicated than the obvious answer that it may seem like you have.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And articulating the word just out loud can, I imagine, enrage some people, like, “Who do you think you are? Oh, I guess we’re all just idiots, Marina. Excuse us for not having just made an online form. Pardon our foolishness.”

Marina Nitze
Correct. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve often coached people, like, “Don’t say the word obviously ever. It doesn’t help you out.”

Marina Nitze
That should be a TextExpander shortcut, too. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, just is in that same category in this context. So, okay, any other don’ts?

Marina Nitze
I think those are my two main ones.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And I want to talk a little bit about the emotional component here. I think some folks have a feeling that if they try to hack it through the bureaucracy, their bosses might think that you’re trying to undermine their authority, or you’re trying to circumvent them or their system, or you’re going over their head, like you’re committing some kind of a no-no. Can you tell us, to what extent are these fears real? And if we have them, what should we do about them?

Marina Nitze
Yes. So, my approach there would be to build a stakeholder map, and that’s something we recommend in the book. And a stakeholder map is usually such a valuable tool that we explicitly recommend that you never share it with anybody and that you don’t put it anywhere that somebody else can find it, because everybody’s got those different perspectives, like you were just saying.

You may have a boss that is threatened by you shining. In which case, if you really want to see your initiative take hold, the way to do it might be to give your boss credit for having done it. Or, you may have a boss that is really like a rule-follower, and so the way to get around that is to follow the rules. You may have people that are very motivated by getting a promotion and, therefore, you have to understand what is the criteria for them getting that promotion, and how do you help them achieve that in the course of helping you achieve your initiative.

So, by mapping out kind of who each person is, what their resources or power structure is relative to the decisions that you need made, and what are their risks and incentives, you can start strategically figuring out how to move forward so that you can get your initiative done, whether that means, again, giving some people credit, distracting some other people with a different shiny toy, and then maybe even changing some position descriptions themselves so that people’s motivation to do their regular work is shifted to help support what you’re trying to get done.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s so much wisdom here, Marina. Thank you.Okay, so when you’re making this map of things with the stakeholders and what they want, I’m curious, are there a few key categories of drivers, of things that people tend to really want or not want that we might tick through as we’re trying to fill out that map? Because we might say, “Huh, what does Paul want? Hmm, nothing’s leaping to mind.” Could you give us a few starter categories to help get those ideas flowing?

Marina Nitze
Yeah, absolutely. I think we have, like, two pages of bullets in the book as additional brainstorming exercise. But people think about what their recognition is. Some people, for example, actively avoid the limelight, and some people really want to be seen in it. Money, which could be tied to promotions or raises or getting more budget line item for their own program.

Some people want to be perceived as innovative, and some people want to be perceived as rule followers. And then it’s also important not to overlook the literal lines of like, “What is this person supposed to be doing? And what are the lines, whether they’re grey or bright lines, of what they’re not supposed to be doing?” And how might you need to adjust those to accommodate the kind of different kind of work that you might need them to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Marina, it seems like as you described this, you sound like such a master, and, hey, you’ve got a lot of experience in some organizations, you’ve learned some things the hard way, and you’ve codified some of it. So, beyond simply reading your book Hack Your Bureaucracy, do you have any tips on how we can, generally, become all the more savvy and hip to this skillset?

Marina Nitze
Yeah, I think this is one that anybody can learn. I don’t think you have to get a bachelor’s degree in it by any means. And so, I would start with just identifying a problem in your space of, again, whether it’s you’re annoyed by a Homeowners Association rule, or since this podcast is about being awesome at your job, something in your immediate department, or maybe at a slightly higher level on your organization that you want to change.

And then I would go about trying to change it. Talk to your peers. Enlist other people in the journey of making the change. Try the normal way. Understand and ask why, “Is it the way that it is? Is there some law or policy, or is it just that a CEO, three CEOs ago, said that it was the case, and no one has ever questioned it since?”

And then you can build up your skills there. I would definitely recommend picking problems, if at all possible, that don’t involve life or death as your first bureaucracy hack. Pick something a little bit lower stakes. And then as you build up your bureaucracy-busting muscles, you can take on harder and harder problems.

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

Marina Nitze
One last thing I’ll just say is it’s also a lot of this sounds like you’re really in the weeds, and it definitely is, but it really helps to hold a north star. And that was something that I built early on when I was at the VA. But literally, it just started with a bunch of Post-It notes, but saying like, “What could the VA be? If we get through all these bureaucracy hacks, like what is the VA at the end of the rainbow, as it were?”

And, actually, so the Federal Government has an equivalent to the Grammy’s or the Emmy’s called the Sammy’s. And the VA won the Sammy for the whole Federal Government for customer service two weeks ago.

Pete Mockaitis
Congratulations.

Marina Nitze
And that was such an incredible vision, that from ten years ago, that it wasn’t even on my vision board. So, I just encourage you, it’s nice to have a north star, and it can also motivate you through the dark times to know, like, what the big picture you’re working towards is even if you have to make a lot of concessions along the way.

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

Marina Nitze
Absolutely. It’s Lily Tomlin, and it’s, “I always wondered why somebody didn’t do something about that. And then I realized, I’m somebody.”

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

Marina Nitze
I love re-reading Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, and the research that you’re just kind of as happy as you were before no matter what bad things happen to you, or no matter what decisions that you make. That helps make some decisions feel a little lower stakes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Marina Nitze
Well, a book that I really modeled our book off of is The Success Principles by Jack Canfield because I love that you can just open to any page and get like a little mini dose of inspiration without having to commit to reading a 300-page book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Marina Nitze
Definitely the stakeholder maps or the journey maps, that it would be like when you’re mapping out a process from end to end, all the different steps, all the people working at the steps, what the error rates are, what the volume rates are, what the wait times are. I love those immensely. And maybe, as a meta toy, it would be my enormous dry erase board sticker because it takes up like my whole wall, and it’s where I draw all my maps.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so it’s a dry erase board but it’s like a Post-It, or you say sticker?

Marina Nitze
Yes, it’s from 3M. Yeah, it’s like six-by-twelve feet. You can buy them in different sizes. And mine, I’ve had it for five years now, and it’s held up perfectly, but I accept I’d have to replace them.

Pete Mockaitis
But you could reposition it with the adhesive.

Marina Nitze
I had never tried that. So, yes, you could reposition it, but most of my vision was if I got it…you know how you dry erase something for a while and you’d kind of have that red hue that you can’t get rid of? I envisioned, I could just, “Oh, great. I can just unstick the board and put up a new one.” But I haven’t even had to do that yet, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Then you get it done.

Marina Nitze
Yeah, I use it all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Marina Nitze
Inbox zero. It took me many years to get to that point but now I get super anxious if I even have, like, five unprocessed emails.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Marina, maybe we need to have you for a whole another episode to discuss that.

Marina Nitze
It took a lot of work to get there.

Pete Mockaitis
So, a quick follow-up, what have been some of the most game-changing insights, or approaches, or tools, or hacks to pulling this off?

Marina Nitze
One, definitely, the snooze feature in Gmail helped a lot because some email it’s a hotel reservation one, or something about a meeting agenda for next week. I snooze it till one minute before I need it so it gets out of my inbox but I know it’s going to appear when I need it. Another piece is really from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which is I just have to make a decision about what to do in the email.

I don’t have to do the thing, so that reduces the friction of like, “Oh, my God, I don’t have time to write a 20-page report.” But I don’t have to. All I have to do is capture it in my to-do list that I have to write a 20-page report, and then I tag the email as having a task, and then I can get it out of my inbox. I’m also a pretty merciless un-subscriber, and I love apps like Matter, for example.

Anytime I get an email newsletter, something I’m supposed to read, that automatically gets forwarded to Matter and delete it from my inbox, so that when I’m in the mood to read, or David Allen, in the context to read, I can just pull up my Matter app and I get all my reading material in one place so it’s not in my inbox.

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

Marina Nitze
Yes, it’s the idea of cultivating the karass. Karass is a concept from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, which is that, in the book, that God has hidden other people on the planet to help you accomplish a goal. We use it in a little bit more of a secular way, which is imagine if, instead of thinking that all people in your agency or your department are out to get you or out to slow-roll you, imagine that there are people that are out to help you, and they are just hidden around as security guards or secretaries or accountants. And how can you find them and then band together to get your goal accomplished?

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

Marina Nitze
HackYourBureaucracy.com. We have a blog where we’re continuing to share more bureaucracy-hacking tactics and stories. And then you can follow me on Twitter at @MarinaNitze, N-I-T-Z-E.

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

Marina Nitze
Yes, find your karass. I mean, the best allies I had when I was in government trying to get through some of the hardest projects were literally the security guards and the executive assistants. And so, you just never know who your best allies are. So, go out there, meet as many people as you can, and hack your bureaucracy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Marina, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you many successful hacks.

Marina Nitze
Thank you so much. You, too.