Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast SuperCreativity Podcast with James Taylor | Creativity, Innovation and Inspiring Ideas
Plongez dans la liste complète des épisodes de SuperCreativity Podcast with James Taylor | Creativity, Innovation and Inspiring Ideas. Chaque épisode est catalogué accompagné de descriptions détaillées, ce qui facilite la recherche et l'exploration de sujets spécifiques. Suivez tous les épisodes de votre podcast préféré et ne manquez aucun contenu pertinent.
Rows per page:
50
1–50 of 171
Titre
Date
Durée
Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts: How Environments Shape Innovation with Professor Jonathan Feinstein #364
09 Dec 2025
00:34:52
Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts: How Environments Shape Innovation with Professor Jonathan Feinstein
#364
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, James Taylor speaks with Professor Jonathan S. Feinstein, the John G. Searle Professor of Economics and Management at Yale School of Management, and one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the science of creativity. His acclaimed new book, Creativity in Large-Scale Context, explores how creative ideas don’t emerge in isolation—they evolve within complex networks of people, places, experiences, and guiding principles.
Feinstein shares why pure inspiration is rarely enough in today’s interconnected world, and how individuals and organizations can navigate vast creative systems by using “guiding conceptions” and “guiding principles.” From Virginia Woolf’s literary maps to Indigenous Australian painter Clifford Possum’s dreamings and Steve Jobs’s design insights, this conversation reframes creativity as a dynamic process that connects the individual imagination with its wider context.
Whether you’re leading innovation, designing strategy, or nurturing creative talent, you’ll learn a framework for creativity that is structured, scientific—and profoundly human.
Notable Quotes
“We create in context. Every creative act is shaped by the world we’ve built around ourselves.” – Professor Jonathan Feinstein
“A guiding conception is your creative compass—it points to what’s exciting, even before you know what form it will take.” – Professor Jonathan Feinstein
“You can’t connect everything; there are infinite possibilities. Guidance helps you find the fruitful paths.” – Professor Jonathan Feinstein
“Artists are far more conceptual than we give them credit for—they’re constantly modeling ideas in their minds.” – Professor Jonathan Feinstein
“Each of us follows our own unique path of creativity, but within a common human framework.” – Professor Jonathan Feinstein
Creativity happens in context — Every idea is shaped by our networks of experience, people, and place.
Guiding conceptions provide vision — They define what’s worth exploring before the specific idea arrives.
Guiding principles provide structure — They help us recognize and refine the key missing piece that completes a project.
Artists and scientists share the same process — From Virginia Woolf to Albert Einstein, the most creative minds balance openness with rigor.
Context builds confidence — Mapping your influences helps you understand where new connections can emerge.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
00:00 – Introduction to Professor Jonathan Feinstein and his work at Yale
01:19 – Why context—not just inspiration—drives creativity
02:33 – How network models explain creative development
04:23 – Economics meets creativity: viewing ideas as systems of value
06:25 – From The Nature of Creative Development to Creativity in Large-Scale Context
08:01 – Defining “context” in the creative process
10:48 – Virginia Woolf and mapping the creative mind
14:42 – Place as context: Indigenous artist Clifford Possum and the art of mapping dreamings
18:19 – The need for guidance in large-scale creative systems
21:01 – Guiding conceptions: vision before ideas
24:16 – Guiding principles: Steve Jobs, Einstein, and the “missing piece”
26:54 – Teaching creativity at Yale: why artists and engineers think alike
28:54 – Creative pairs and his mathematician brother’s influence
31:25 – The Kandinsky cover: visualizing the network of creativity
32:18 – His upcoming third book and the trilogy’s big vision
TRANSCRIPT
James Taylor (00:08)Today's guest is Jonathan S. Feinstein, the John G. Searle Professor of Economics and Management at Yale School of Management. And one of the thinkers redefining how we understand creativity in complex settings. His new book, Creativity in Large Scale Context, argues that in a world of sprawling social systems, cultural norms and shifting markets, pure inspiration often fails us unless it's guided.
SOM Broadcast Studio (00:08)
Today's guest is Jonathan.
and one of the things redefining how we understand creativity in complex settings. His new book, Creativity in Large Scale Context, argues that in a world of sprawling social systems, cultural norms, and shifting markets, pure inspiration often fails us unless it's guided.
James Taylor (00:33)
He introduces a network model
SOM Broadcast Studio (00:33)
He introduces a network
James Taylor (00:35)
of context and tools like guiding conceptions and principles to help creative leaders navigate the thicket of possibilities. Jonathan has taught creativity for decades now, led courses at Yale that have been spotlighted in Fast Company and Business Week, and now brings rigorous economic and organizational thinking to creativity. If you're working in big systems, organizations, or trying to lead creative efforts with impact, not just ideas, then this episode is for you.
SOM Broadcast Studio (00:37)
and principles to help creative leaders navigate the thicket
James Taylor (01:02)
Jonathan, please welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.
SOM Broadcast Studio (01:05)
Thank you so much, James, for that very welcoming introduction. I'm so pleased to be here.
and spend a few minutes talking with you and for listeners about creativity and how it works in today's world with very large context.
James Taylor (01:19)
One of the first questions, I've been enjoying this book, I'm traveling at the moment, I've been enjoying this book as I've been traveling around. So one question I wanted is, in previous work you've done, you've often focused on the individuals who are doing creative work and some of the kind of processes. But in this book, you decided to take it a slightly different perspective. You kind of looked more really focused on context. So what was the thinking behind this original decision to move your work in this way?
SOM Broadcast Studio (01:47)
Well, I think as I began to delve deeper and deeper into the creative process, which is what I study, you just more and more begin to realize that people are navigating through their lives, through the world around them, through their context. And that is the way in which they're finding their ways to great discoveries or artistic ideas or ⁓ policy ideas that are going to change the world. So for me, it was about
really try to bring those two things together, the individuals process, because we're all on our own life path and what are we learning and experiencing, and then understanding how we have to model the context within which people are moving to really understand how they make good decisions and can be inspired and creative. So it was a natural progression, I think. I would say a big challenge was how do I model that? How do we model our context? Think about your context.
all the different parts, the people you know, the places you go, you're traveling right now, I'm sure you've been to hundreds of cities around the world, all the books you read, there's a lot there. So the question is, how do we organize that context ⁓ and do so in a way that's going to be productive for creative development? So I think that was a challenge. And I think the huge step for me was to understand we can use a network perspective.
to understand how these contexts are organized. We self-organize our context. So we could talk more about that. It's also related, of course, to the movement of AI today, which is all about network context, actually. Those are large-scale networks, different than our human networks, I believe. But it's interesting to think about the interplay between them.
James Taylor (03:33)
Now often when we have guests on the show talking about creativity as a topic, the academics tend to be more from education, psychology, departments of universities, not so much actually from the economics side. think we had someone on a guest recently from the University of Chicago talking who took an economist view of looking at, I think it was called Young Masters and Old Masters, think was the.
was the term that he used. And he took an economist view about why certain artists achieve success at different points in their lives. So what do you feel as someone that has the background that you have, what kind of different perspective does it give you that perhaps someone that comes at it from an education or a psychology perspective doesn't have?
SOM Broadcast Studio (04:23)
It's a great question and it's been one of the great sort of tension points of my own personal creative development over these years because I am trained as an economist. Economics gives us a lot of tools to think about policy and ⁓ practices around education or organizations.
When I got into this, I'm going to be honest with you, my original thought, still the one that I believe in is every individual follows their own unique path and makes their own unique contribution. And they do so in a common framework, right? A common world. We're all living in this world together, but somehow we're each following our own unique path to get to where we get to. That's really what I study, where the modeling comes from.
⁓ that actually has roots very deep in economics. John Stuart Mill is someone who come to mind ⁓ and a variety of other liberal or classical liberal thinkers that we would imagine who talk a lot about how individualism is one of the principles of a free market society or economy. Freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech, freedom of discussion.
It's all about individuals bringing their unique perspectives into a common framework and debate. So I always knew that I had roots in economics, but as I pursued that theme, that principle for myself of individual paths, I had to go pretty far outside of standard economics. We don't, don't think we, yeah, go ahead, please.
James Taylor (05:55)
Yeah, I was just going say, on that, you mentioned also in the book, difference between problem finding and problem solving. I was interested when you went into the book, was there a definite problem that you were trying to solve? If you gave it a problem definition, what was the problem that the book was trying to solve? Or did you kind of go in it from a slightly different perspective? We're going to talk maybe about conceptions. And so was there a different kind of conception that you went into the book with?
SOM Broadcast Studio (06:25)
Well, actually I have published two books and the first book was published a while ago called The Nature of Creative Development. And then this book published two years ago, almost exactly two years ago, actually. And I would say the challenge was from the first book where I understood about these life paths that people follow and their creative development process with lots and lots of examples in that book. Some people just love that book because it's filled with examples of
both famous people, Albert Einstein, Walt Disney, ⁓ William Faulkner, John Maynard Keynes, but also filled with lots and lots of people I interviewed about their creative process. The challenge from that book going forward was how do I develop a formal model to help me really clarify exactly what is happening? Because trained in economics, I do believe in the power of modeling to help us understand our own thinking and also generate some predictions and ways to guide some policy.
that that was the big challenge and it took some years before i was able to kind of mentally break through to the network approach my brother by the way helped a bit with that we can talk about if you like but but i would say that was the real breakthrough what's ahead the framework which is developed in this book of i'm still developing further as you said ⁓ to me just before we started this academics love to talk about their car work and their future work and for me
for me it's about developing the model even further ⁓ for a third book ⁓ but that was the challenge was the formal model structure
James Taylor (08:01)
Now we're going to get into some of these models, some of these ways of thinking about it. You start one of the chapters in the book with this phrase, we create in context. so tell me, you talk about it in the book about how this idea of context is not being written about or researched or spoken as much about in the world of creativity. for those that don't, know, to get this word context is going to mean different things, but...
In the case of this book and your work, what do you actually mean by context, the context that someone creates in?
SOM Broadcast Studio (08:36)
That's a great question. Context is everything that you have experienced, that you have learned, and that you have organized into structures for your own thinking process. That includes your memories, as well as problems, or solutions, or theories, or examples, ⁓ conversations. It's all part of your context, which is incredibly rich. The two things I'd say about that was the first thing is you're absolutely right.
Psychologists have taken often a different approach to creativity and the external, I think about my work as where the internal, the inner world meets the external world. That's really where the action is, right? Where your own thinking, your ideas, your interests connect with the opportunities that are around you. Think about entrepreneurship, that would be a way to think about that. ⁓ And psychology of creativity maybe hasn't often been as focused on that.
The other thing I would say is the new world of the large language models of AI, it's all about context. They feed into it an infinity of context, right? It's organized, I think, differently in those models, not the way we as humans organize, probably not in a way that right now is as aligned with creative potential or creative development on its own, but it is all about context. So that's another way to think about this.
but insured it's everything it's everything you've got and how do you organize it
James Taylor (10:02)
One of examples you give and you can put throughout the book, I think it's four or five key individuals you talk about. And one of the ones, for me, the one that resonated the most was Virginia Woolf. Someone that lives, I live in Hampstead in North London, Bloomsbury is very close to where I live. And so she was part of the Bloomsbury group, Bloomsbury set. So in the case of her, there was a lot about Virginia Woolf, I didn't really know so much about in terms of her background and kind
context that you describe in the book, and actually there's some wonderful maps where you kind of just lay out some of the context. So for someone to get their understanding of this idea of context, talk to us about some of the context in the case of Virginia Woolf and how this informed the creative work that she did.
SOM Broadcast Studio (10:48)
Yes, she's a wonderful example I've studied for years. I do love the visual maps. Anybody can do this. You can develop a visual map of your own context. It could be anywhere from a few dozen elements showing the big breakdown. For example, her in her case, doing a simple schematic, I had her reading on one side, all the people she knew, and then places just as a general breakdown. Then you go down to the details. Who are the people you know, right? The family, the friends.
the teachers feet the peers of the colleagues the children lots of different people celebrities you might know about ⁓ you could break that down as far as you want to go some of the visual diagrams i did in the book have a few hundred elements actually virginia wolf just to give you an idea about that thinking about her reading for a minute that we could talk a bit about her family i estimate i did some personal workers i estimated by by the time
she was a young adult she had read at least two thousand books and probably a lot more she was a book reviewer she made her living for years as a book reviewer we know a lot about that also because a lot of the books she've read as a young person came from her father's library he would actually bring books to her that she would read and she also wrote a lot in her journals and other places about lists of books that she had read
It's an encyclopedic knowledge of literature that she had, Victorian literature of course, but other cultures, Russian, Italian, French. She loved ancient Greek. She learned ancient Greek. was one of the challenges, intellectual challenges she set herself. And of course, the Blue's Berry Group also brought a lot of more current work to her attention. If you looked at her, you know, if you look at Virginia Woolf's, we don't have to talk all about her. Of course, people can read the book or read other things about her, but.
Her mother, her father, those are two critical elements for her own creative development. Not so unusual, I think, for a lot of us, our family is important. Virginia Woolf's mother died when she was 13. I think it was arguably the most important event of her life. Her mother had been the center of her universe as a child and left a huge gaping hole when she died. In fact, her great work to the lighthouse is really a
about her mother, the central character, Mrs. Ramsey, is modeled on her mother. And in the middle of that book, ⁓ Mrs. Ramsey dies. And you really then in the last part of the book see the other characters trying to, I think, sort of pick up the pieces after the mother has died. Her mother was super important. And then her father, she had a very contentious kind of love-hate relationship. She talked about how one minute she'd be arguing with him in her head, and the next minute revered him for his scholarship.
⁓ He was super important too because for her he represented the old world, the old order. And she talked about how that was such a stifling, rigid, very masculine, male-dominated world. And she wanted to break out of that. So you put those two things together and that is the gist of what became her guiding conception, which we could talk about. But... ⁓
You have to understand to understand someone's creative development. You have to understand as much as you can about their context. And then the Bloomsbury group and all the people she knew there. ⁓ Those were all the things that fed into what she eventually created and not just all at once over probably 10 years or 20 years. Luckily with her, her diary, her journals, her letters, her essays, we know more about her.
thinking her development than we do unfortunately for some other people where they might not have left as much material for us.
James Taylor (14:42)
And something you talk about in her, the context for her, but also actually for some of the other individuals, creative individuals you talk about is place. Place is a context, how different places, different points in their life, how that can have a pretty profound impact on their creativity. We had a guest recently, a professor from the UK, who was talking about biophilia, that places themselves have their own creative, you know,
the Romans would call it the genius loci, the places that have their own creative genius, and how this feeds into our creativity as well. When you were doing the work, so we have the books, what they're reading, the people that they're spending their time with, things that they're thinking about there as well, was there any in particular that had a sense where that actually place had a key impact? It was a key context in how they arrived at the work that they did.
SOM Broadcast Studio (15:30)
Yeah, that's again a great question. And if you've looked at the book, one of the people I do highlight in the book is an Indigenous Australian artist. His name is Clifford Possum. I spent quite a bit of time both in Australia, but then also studying the Indigenous art movement there, which has been so phenomenal. It's all about place for him. His ⁓ context is laid out in somewhat more detailed ⁓ diagram in the book. But one whole piece of it is place.
his dreamings as we call them which were places that he would thought of himself as the custodian of those places for his group and they're often tied to what you think of as totems or sacred creatures from the dreaming he's his name was possum so of course a possum was one of them but many many others water dreamings lightning all all kinds of things honey ants at he had an encyclopedic knowledge of place as many of the indigenous people did and
actually his big thrust forward for him his guiding conception was it was a time when the indigenous people were trying to sort of claim back their rights to some of the land in australia that they felt they also were entitled to and he had his father also important him as adopted father had been a ⁓ guide for tourists and clifford i think was well aware of maps western maps that we used to identify places and he thought
I'm going to show our title to land. I'm paraphrasing, but this is what we think of. We're going to show our title to the land by not drawing Western maps, but by drawing maps that show the dreamings that center around any particular place and showing our knowledge and our cultural depth of tradition of these places through these dreamings. He actually jumped up the whole sense of the indigenous art there at that moment because people had been just doing
They take a dreaming and draw a painting of a dreaming. He said, no, we're going to center on a place and show every dreaming that's going on around that place as a way to establish in a sense that this is our claim to this place.
James Taylor (17:43)
lovely. I love that you said that the map is not the territory about how there's different, move things around. The other obviously there's the other writers that written in the past about context and the importance and the impact upon context upon someone's creative process. But probably the big, I guess, jump away you're kind of taking it in a different place is this idea of guidance. So we should explain, you talk about different two different main types of guidance. So we should explain
what does guidance mean in relation to someone's creativity? And then maybe we can just go a little bit deeper into like the two main types of guidance you explained in the book.
SOM Broadcast Studio (18:19)
If you're trying to create in a very large scale, rich context that has sort of too many possibilities, too many places you can go, then I think to make your way forward in a fruitful way to something that's going to be productive that you're going to be happy with or that's going to have impact, you're going to need some guidance. You can't just try things randomly because there's an infinity of possibilities to try. It's like a combinatoric problem, right? We think of creativity.
as making new connections, as connecting elements together that have not previously been connected or related. That happens all the time. Artists do it all the time, but scientists or problem solvers do it all the time, because if you solve a problem creatively, you are right there connecting a problem with a new solution, and that is a creative connection. To make those creative connections, you can't just do it at random. There's too many. So you use guidance to find your way forward. And I think a key
understanding, Virginia Woolf being a great example, is that you don't need to hit on the exact creative idea at the first moment. You start first with a guiding conception which says, in a more general way, this is like my vision or my dream or my theme. This is where I'm going to look. These are the kinds of interconnections that I think might be fruitful. And I'm going to give myself a chance to just say in a general way what they are.
and then I'll begin to explore in depth. One thing that's really important about a guiding conception in that sense is a lot of people out in the world, I think they get very anxious and they think I have to have a great idea right now and I have to jump to the great idea right now. I don't have time to fool around with intermediate things. That's not how people really create. People create by following a path and a key part of the path is earlier. I like to think of it as sort of behind the scenes.
creativity, you know, form your vision, your creative vision, your guiding conception earlier, and then you work on developing it. And that development could take time. Virginia Woolf formed a wonderful guiding conception in a short story she wrote called The Mark on the Wall in 1917. She spent two and a half years exploring that conception with short stories, actually. And finally, two and a half years later,
She hit on a way to develop it creatively and that is what led into her great modernist literary period including Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway to the lighthouse. It was two and a half years of experimentation. So, Guiding Conceptions.
James Taylor (21:01)
She was
kind of feeling her way a little bit on this. was just trying to, it was maybe difficult to put into words initially at that stage, but she was just, there was a sense, as we would say today, there was a vibe. But she was trying to feel out what that was and what is that conception of what I'm trying to do.
SOM Broadcast Studio (21:21)
Yeah, definitely not fully flushed out at that time. In the book, I've got that. I talk quite a bit about it's beautiful. Regarding conception is itself beautiful. But at the same time, she has a little note when she wrote it. This is frustrating, essentially. I don't know what to do with this. So even for her at that time, she thought, well, I've got the conception. But now what am I going to do next?
The guiding conception, one of the exercises I do in my class is ask students to work out their own guiding conception. With organizations, I've done that as well. ⁓ People maybe aren't used to doing that. I think of it as give yourself the freedom to just daydream a little bit and think about what would be great to explore, the kind of thing to create if I could create it. Don't force yourself right this minute to have the idea. Just think more generally, what's exciting?
I think students love it. think people feel sort of liberated by it. Sometimes I have to push them because sometimes they're a little too narrow. I think a guiding conception should have enough breadth that you're going to be able to explore it for a year or two to find your way to what's going to work, right? So there's a little bit of an artfulness to what it looks like.
James Taylor (22:35)
Before we move on to the other type of guidance you talk about, as I was reading the book, I was reading the book, reading a few chapters, and then I would watch a movie on this flight. One of the movies I was watching was called very different. It was called The Materialist or Materialist with Dakota Johnson. It's a story of a New York City matchmaker who's matchmaking all these people in finance. As I'm reading it, I'm seeing some of the connections and ⁓ the guiding conception which he talks about.
finding that perfect partner. And I guess if you think about it, in a bigger sense, creativity is finding that relationship, that person you're be with the rest of your life or a child or as well. And she said one of these kind of guiding conceptions which she gave to her would be clients was, you don't wanna just find someone that you're gonna fall in love with. And this was her expression. You wanna find someone who you're gonna be happy and willing to...
to change each other's diapers when you're 80 years old. And I thought that was because many of these clients were coming to them with the, which we'll talk about now, the kind of principles. We want them to be this height, this income level, this weight, whether they would want to be doing these things, going very in the detail. And she was trying to like pull them back a little bit to like say, okay, this is maybe going to feel a little bit uncomfortable for you. It's not an immediate tick box thing, but this is in your case.
SOM Broadcast Studio (23:34)
if
James Taylor (24:01)
This is a guiding conception. You want someone that at 80 years old, you're gonna be spending time with them in maybe ways that you're not gonna be spending time with them in when you're 30s. ⁓ Which kind of brings me to this idea of your other side of guidance. we have conception. And then have the other one is principles.
SOM Broadcast Studio (24:16)
That's a what, yeah.
That's a wonderful example because of course finding a life partner is a creative connection, isn't it? And it's a great example too because people don't always understand what is the best way to form a guiding conception. We trip ourselves up sometimes. In the world of creativity, I think sometimes just wanting to be more too specific and not being ourselves freedom to explore more broadly.
Also, that's about your own experiential learning. By learning more broadly, you can form a great guiding conception that ties some different parts of the world together. And in a way, she's trying to do that, right? Extend somebody's thinking. Yeah, the other kind of guidance is called a guiding principle. Lots of examples in the book. Steve Jobs was an incredible with his design principles. was a master at using them. He was very strict with them. He made great creative connections with them.
There's a story about his team was struggling with the design of a computer and he went out one weekend went to a shopping mall walked into the appliance section and saw a Cuisinart and he thought wow the shape of that Cuisinart the base of it is just perfect Brings it back to his team and says this is your this is going to guide you forward to get the shape We want for this computer beautiful creative connection
Albert Einstein, the principle of relativity, is a guiding principle. Again, he was very strict with it, far more than a lot of other people, and he was incredibly creative with it. Just to give it a nutshell what a simple version of the model is, your guiding conception, once you form it, kind of generates seed project ideas. It'll generate little clusters of possibilities, little nubbles that you can go and explore and see if they work.
Even if you get a seed that's going to work, a guiding principle will help you see if you think it's going to be consistent with your principles. But then a guiding principle is really great at helping you go out into this huge, rich context and find the critical missing piece that will make the project work. So the simplest way, the guiding conception might spawn a seed of two elements, and the guiding principle might help you find the key third element to make it all come together and work. ⁓
Steve Jobs finding the Cuisinart's a great example. One I give in talks is Shel Silverstein's wonderful children's book called The Missing Piece, where the whole story's about someone trying to find a missing piece. They work together and I think to be a great creative, if we look at them, great creative people, they usually have both of them working together and that's how they're able to create.
James Taylor (26:54)
And I would imagine when you teach at Yale and you've been doing this creativity course for over 20 years now, I would imagine this approach to thinking about creativity, which is quite a top-down approach, would resonate very well with those who come from a world of engineering or the sciences, because it has a little bit more of that feeling of the pedagogy of something that's happening. It feels less... ⁓
you know, something just happens by chance, I guess. There is actually a thought, there is a process that's going on here. And it helps someone think about how they layer these, as you say, conceptions and guidance together.
SOM Broadcast Studio (27:36)
Yeah, actually I will tell you that the artistically minded students often generate the most wonderful guiding conceptions. Something I've learned across my career is that artists are far more conceptual about what they're doing that sometimes we give them credit for. I think sometimes they don't want to say that they're like that. Picasso didn't really want to tell you all the thinking he was doing. But we know from something written by his mistress early on, she said, her comment was,
He's thinking about his art all the time from the moment he wakes up until the moment he goes to sleep at night. ⁓ And she may or may not have been happy about that, but that's what he was doing. So I think actually the artists also do it. I will say as well though, as we model it as a path, of course it is top down and also bottom up because as you have new experiences, they trigger an evolution of your guiding conception and they trigger your ability to find these key missing pieces.
So it is a very rich process and we don't want to underestimate how complex or rich it is. But we also, I think it's great to make progress in frameworks for understanding what the process is. And it also opens up creativity to so many people in the world who might be a little anxious about being creative. They're not intuitively doing these things. And it's really just wonderful for me, rewarding to teach people about it and see them be able to use it.
James Taylor (28:54)
And before we start to finish up, you mentioned something a little bit earlier about your brother and his impact upon your work as well. We often have guests on the show that talk about this idea of creative pairs or creative pairings, someone that's different but complimentary to the work they do. They push each other. Yesterday I was talking to an audience, I was talking about Linus Pauling and the Nobel Prize winner. was talking about ⁓ many people believe the second Nobel Prize he won or he's awarded should be jointly awarded to him and his wife, Ava, because
her contribution was different and they combined each other. So tell me with your brother, what did he bring to your thinking on this area?
SOM Broadcast Studio (29:31)
Well, my brother has pushed me ⁓ in my life, definitely. He's a mathematician. So he loves the math part of things. And I'm a little bit on the, you know, I do both things. I love the conceptual work. I love the great writers and artists, but I also love the math and the formal modeling. And actually our father died about 11 years ago now. And my brother and I had not actually been talking that much. We've had our own issues. After our father died, for whatever reason, it brought us closer together.
and we started talking regularly. talk to him right now pretty much every week on the phone. And I was trying to work on this next step for this book and kind of stuck. And he was so excited about some modeling he was doing. He really inspired me to kind of go back and say, yeah, I can do this. I do have a model. Let me just push it a little further. And then when I did that, wham, it worked out.
So I give him lot of credit for that. He's been an inspiration in that regard. Maybe unwittingly, he has his own thing going on, right? But we need those inspirations around us. People can be so important for us. When we get stuck or when we need a different perspective, that's where we can get it from.
James Taylor (30:46)
I'm also interested on, for those who don't have a copy of book yet, on the front cover, there is ⁓ a beautiful artwork, which it kind of, feels like it has the feel of the book in some ways. obviously it's Kandinsky, the great artist Kandinsky. I would love to know, first of all, how did you get the rights to be able to use that painting? Cause that's a pretty like amazing thing to have on the front cover.
And why did you use this painting? obviously the book is in the form of words and thoughts, but you obviously were very thoughtful as to why you chose that particular piece of art to be on the front cover of the book.
SOM Broadcast Studio (31:25)
well i i gave a guiding conception if you will about what i wanted on the cover but there's actually ⁓ book designer we hired at stanford university press did this book stanford business books they worked with him and he's the one that identified that are the image and and got it for us so i give him a huge amount of credit i did work with them then on some of the details but i think it came out beautifully the the production is beautiful so i give them a lot of credit for that
James Taylor (31:52)
And as we mentioned earlier, academics, you're often thinking, you know, the book takes a year, however long, much more than that to do the research for it. But whenever I talk to writers, always almost more excited about the next thing that they're working on. Usually the thing that they're researching, maybe it's not been written at this point. So where do you intend to go next with this area? Is it going to be a completely new area within creativity or are you working on a completely different field?
SOM Broadcast Studio (32:18)
Well, I do want to complete a third book to have a trilogy, kind of like the Twilight Saga. I'm going to have a trilogy of three books. ⁓ That's the goal, if I can get it done. It's going to continue with this. This book, as you said, a very, it's kind of a snapshot of a key phase of the creative process, forming a guiding conception, using the guiding principle to complete a project. I really want to go back and look at the life paths and how people build up.
to get to the point where they could actually form these guiding structures. And I think about that a little bit in terms of certain elements stand out for you, become salient, whether because you learned about them from a very charismatic teacher or it was a moment in your life when you were open or just something very exciting. So I'm working now on this process of how people build up exciting elements that they eventually bring together to form the guiding conception.
and then some of the iteration around that process. So I'm excited to do it. And again, my ultimate vision is to show a world in which each individual follows their own unique path to whatever contribution they make. But it's in a world in which we're all in the same common framework. And so I can see the different people. We can see them each following their own path. And in a way, that's a vision of how our society could work.
James Taylor (33:42)
Where is the best place for people to go if they want to learn more about your work, your research, your other books we've spoken about as well? Where should they go? We can explain that.
SOM Broadcast Studio (33:51)
Yeah, these books are sold on Amazon in the US, but also around the world. ⁓ Stanford University Press also sells the book. I have a website, which you can quickly pick on my name, JonathanFeinstein.com. ⁓ If anyone's really interested, they can always send me an email to my Yale email. And I do respond if it's something that's thoughtful and interesting for a dialogue, of course.
James Taylor (34:14)
Absolutely, well, Jonathan, thanks so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast. And thank you for writing this book, Creativity in Large Scale Context is out now. We're gonna have a link here if you'll go into the show notes. Jonathan, thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.
SOM Broadcast Studio (34:30)
Thank you so much, James, for the invitation and the wonderful interview discussion we just had. Thank you very much.
The World of Creativity: Lessons from 75 Countries with Fredrik Haren #363
21 Oct 2025
00:43:48
The World of Creativity: Lessons from 75 Countries with Fredrik Haren #363
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, James Taylor welcomes back Fredrik Haren, the globally renowned Creativity Explorer and author of The World of Creativity: A Journey Across 37 Countries to Discover the Secrets of Creative Minds. Over the past 25 years, Fredrik has travelled to more than 75 countries, meeting everyone from artists in Afghan villages to innovation leaders in global corporations — all to answer one question: What is creativity?
In this fascinating and deeply human conversation, Fredrik shares the most powerful lessons he’s learned from creative people across cultures — from Thailand’s idea naps and Finland’s love of questions, to Japan’s Kaizen and America’s “move fast and break things.” Together, they explore how curiosity fuels creativity, why we must fall in love with the process (not the outcome), and how to un-alienate people to bold new ideas.
Whether you’re a leader, artist, or lifelong learner, this episode will help you see creativity not as a skill reserved for the few, but as a global language of exploration, humility, and connection.
Notable Quotes
“You can’t master what you don’t understand — and most people don’t understand the creative process.” – Fredrik Haren
“If you want to be more creative, become more curious.” – Fredrik Haren
“Don’t be a developed person; be a developing one. Stay soft, stay adaptable.” – Fredrik Haren
“Sometimes the smartest way to innovate is to make the alien familiar.” – Fredrik Haren
“Creativity isn’t about speed or slowness — it’s about knowing when to go fast and when to be patient.” – Fredrik Haren
Creativity loves process, not product — The most creative people fall in love with the how, not just the what.
Curiosity is the fuel of creativity — In languages like Finnish and Bulgarian, the word for “curious” literally means “love of asking questions.”
Developing vs. developed mindsets — Declaring yourself “developed” kills innovation; true progress means staying open and unfinished.
Un-alienate new ideas — To introduce radical change, make the unfamiliar feel familiar through gradual storytelling and empathy.
Balance exploration and reflection — Fredrik’s creative rhythm alternates between global travel (inspiration) and quiet solitude on his private island (reflection).
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
00:00 – Introduction to Fredrik Haren and The World of Creativity
01:31 – What it means to be a “Creativity Explorer”
02:55 – Why so few people actively develop their creativity
04:22 – Loving the process: the German brewer’s lesson
06:18 – Creativity as practice, not performance
07:56 – The student mindset and the power of curiosity
09:52 – Cultural biases in creativity and the danger of “developed” thinking
11:50 – Why progress stalls in the most advanced countries
13:43 – The psychology of complacency and lack of imagination
17:04 – “Un-alienating” ideas: how to make the new less scary
19:45 – Lessons from Thai “idea naps” and Sabai Sabai philosophy
22:35 – The neuroscience of rest and creativity
24:20 – Fredrik’s creative process: selective seclusion and exploration
26:10 – Globalization and why sameness kills creativity
29:46 – Cultural fusion vs. cultural flattening
31:32 – Kaizen vs. “move fast and break things” — two creative speeds
32:33 – Profound patience: creativity lessons from Afghanistan
36:12 – AI, safety, and the speed of innovation
37:04 – How to explore creativity without leaving your city
39:30 – Storytelling, curiosity, and human connection
40:29 – Inspiration vs. respiration: why ideas need to be acted on
41:51 – Fredrik’s current book recommendation: Breath by James Nestor
43:05 – Where to find Fredrik and pre-order The World of Creativity
TRANSCRIPT
James Taylor (00:09)Today's guest is Fredrik Haren known to many as the creativity explorer. Over the past 25 years, Fredrik has traversed more than 60 countries to uncover the hidden rhythms of creative life, from artists in remote villages to tech innovators in global capitals. His book, The World of Creativity, a Journey Across 37 Countries to Discover the Secrets of Creative Minds, is not a how-to manual, it's a map of how creativity actually lives, breathes and adapts across cultures.
Fredrik's own story is creative. He built and sold a company, then pivoted to a life of storytelling, exploration, and keynote speaking, shifting continents and mindsets along the way. So whether you're curious about how to take ideas from local to global, or how your environment can become your creative teacher, then this is a conversation I think you're really gonna enjoy. Fredrik Haren, please welcome, I welcome you to the SuperCreativity Podcast.
Fredrik Haren (01:01)
Thank you so much. So happy to be here.
James Taylor (01:04)
Now you've been on this show before and so I will put a link for people who want to listen to that and we talked a little bit more about your background, your story, but I remember when I met you at an event or we were a conversation recently and I was asking you kind of how you describe today what you do, how you think of your identity, what you do today. So if someone come up to you at a party or you're sitting on a plane sitting next to you, how do you describe what you do?
Fredrik Haren (01:31)
Well, then I would describe myself as the creativity explorer, as you just did. But then what does it mean to be the creativity explorer? the more I basically, to explore means to venture into unknown territory in order to learn more about something. And that's what I do about creativity. But the way what I realized is what I really enjoy is meeting with people around the world from all walks of life and to discover
what they can teach me about creativity. So it's this meet, it's this encounters with other creative people and the lessons they can teach us. The more people I interview, the more I realized that that's where the interesting stuff.
James Taylor (02:16)
I remember watching one of the very first videos I ever saw of you and you asked a question to the audience about how many of you consider yourself creative. And I'm interested, as you've traveled around the world, does that number differ? Does that percentage in the room differ or does it differ more by industries that you're speaking for?
Fredrik Haren (02:36)
It does differ through industries. It also differs through countries. So I was in Cannes on Friday and I interviewed, I did a speech for lawyers and lawyers tend to be more confident than the average profession. But on the hand, they were from Finland, which is slightly above average, but not super high. So we got around 70 % there. So countries and cultures and professions both affected how people answer. But recently I've...
James Taylor (02:55)
Yeah.
Fredrik Haren (03:05)
I've added another question. So I've asked this question. Do you think you are, do you think creativity is important in your job? And then I asked the second question, do you think you are creative? I've started to ask, and that I've been asking over a million people, but recently I've asked, I added another question and that question is, do you think you're doing enough to develop your creativity? And the funny thing is that almost no one says yes. Not the people who don't think they are creative.
But also not the people who raise their hand and say they are creative. They also don't think, they usually don't say, yes, I'm doing enough. Or basically they are saying, I could do more. And that's the thing that fascinates me the most right now. Like how do we get people to want to become a little bit more creative or a lot more creative?
James Taylor (03:49)
So if we think we had a guest on the show, Professor ⁓ Anna Abraham, who from the Torrance ⁓ School of Creativity in the US, and she was talking about this idea that creativity being like a muscle is something you can improve ⁓ on over the ages. So why do you feel most people...
don't have a sense that is like working out and going to a gym something that they can improve on over time. Is that the issue they just don't think is possible or is the issue that you know it's just not something that's just not on their radar at all?
Fredrik Haren (04:22)
I think it's that we don't think about it enough as a process. so I, one of the first sentences in the book that's coming out now, I'm so sure we're going to talk about it. One of the sentences in the book is you can't master that which you don't understand. And most people don't understand the creative process. So that, and that's, that's what I want people to understand, to become better at, to understand them. And I, one of the people I mentioned in the book is a German
brewer, like a student of, he went to a brewery school. He's a German. It's the oldest brewery school in the world. They've been brewing beer in the same location for 700 years and they have a brewery school there. So it's super cool. But he said there are two kinds of people who apply to the brewery school. Half of the students love beer. They just love drinking beer, right? And they say, maybe I should work with beer and make beer. And the other half, they love like chemistry. They like the process of making beer.
And he said it's a two year course, but after one year, half of the students have quit. Almost all come from the same category. Which category quit?
James Taylor (05:29)
This first group is the ones that just like drinking beer.
Fredrik Haren (05:32)
Exactly. So they get super bored when they have to study all that. They just don't want the beer to come out at the end. But the people who love the process, that's like, oh, I wonder why this happened. And it doesn't matter what creative process we're thinking about. If we're thinking about delivering a speech, like you and I do, or brewing beer, or painting, or whatever it is, the truly creative ones are the ones that are in love with the process. And if we can learn to master the creative process, learn more about how the creative process works,
we will become more creative. So that's the mission I'm on right now.
James Taylor (06:08)
It's almost a little bit like those that think that Scott Adams, the artist who said, ⁓ you should focus on ⁓ process, not outcomes. I think that was the way that he said it. So, you know, he said, if you're going, if you wanted to get fit, rather than focus on, I wanna lose a stone, you say, every day, I'm gonna walk.
Fredrik Haren (06:18)
Mmm, yeah, exactly.
James Taylor (06:28)
you for 10 times, you I just, kind of, you turn it more process driven and then it allows a little bit more flexibility and a bit more fun perhaps with it. We had a guest on the other day, just talked about tiny experiments. You know, sometimes we get overly fixated on these big things, but actually if you take it from the perspective of you're like a laboratory technician, a scientist going in, like, what can I explore today? Like, what can I test today to see how this process is going to change? Then I guess you kind of, you,
fall in you can fall in love with that process even if the end outcome is not maybe the thing that you thought of like a scientist, no.
Fredrik Haren (07:00)
Yes.
It's not even the most important thing for most
people. I mean, that's a lot of people contact me and say, oh, I want to become a keynote speaker. And I say, usually say, so why? And the people who say, oh, I love being on the stage. I are the ones I'm the most skeptical about. I mean, and I like, you know, I really like you as a speaker because you are very focused on the process, both the speaking process, the writing process, the selling process. You're a process guy and you're very successful in it.
James Taylor (07:28)
Yeah.
Fredrik Haren (07:31)
It's the people who, and I just interviewed a musician in Indonesia. He writes all kinds, he's in a band, he writes movie music, all kinds of stuff. He's been doing it for, I don't know, 40 years. But when I asked him to introduce himself, he didn't say, hello, I am a musician. He said, I am a student of music. And I think that was so beautiful. Because when you're a student of music, you're never dumb.
James Taylor (07:56)
student.
Fredrik Haren (07:58)
You always just want to continue to learn and you want to know how does that work and how does that person do that and why is it that way? And if you approach it that way again, you're loving the process of it and if you fail it's just an interesting learning experience, right? It's part of the process.
James Taylor (08:13)
So it's almost like, know, that going back almost like one step before the creativity bit, I think like is almost the curiosity bit, the fuel that you put in. that's the, know, by saying you're a student of, it's also that kind of ends that beginner's mind, that kind of Zen beginner's mind of like, I'm a student, I'm curious, like what's this gonna be? And then maybe what you do is ends up being creative in the process, but that's not necessarily the key driver.
Fredrik Haren (08:20)
Hmm. Yes.
Yes. And I just learned it yesterday on Friday because I was doing a speech for Finnish people. And I speak about curiosity because I think curiosity is the number one thing for creativity. It's the one, it's the strongest trigger. If you want to become more creative, become more curious. The Finnish word for curious, if I remember it correctly, is Utteleas. And Utteleas means the love of asking questions. Someone who loves asking questions.
And the student of music, I mean, that implies that you go and ask them, like, how did you do that? And so I love the curi... It's also the same in Bulgarian, if I'm not wrong. It's lupiten, which means the same thing. It's the love of asking questions. So I love those languages that where curiosity means loving asking questions. I want to more, I want to keep finding out more. I'm going to ask one more question. Before you go, one more question. That is the essence of curiosity.
James Taylor (09:39)
Curiosita, as they say in Latin. So you speak of, in the book, rigid processes, kind of blocking innovation. So in your travels, you travel to all these different countries, look at creativity in all different kind of ways. Yeah.
Fredrik Haren (09:52)
I have to correct you though.
The internet is not always right. It's not 60 countries, it's 75 countries.
James Taylor (09:58)
75, okay, we're gonna add, you can never trust Wikipedia in this thing, but as you've looked, you've traveled around these countries, where have you seen kind of creative systems fail or kind of formalize processes for creativity and innovation where it hasn't worked and where maybe structures kind of suffocated?
possibilities and how did those creatives, how did they kind of navigate structures so they can actually get to the thing they actually want to get to? Which examples did you see where there was some blockers up there to ⁓ innovation creativity and how did those individuals try to overcome some of those blockers?
Fredrik Haren (10:42)
Yeah, it's important to understand that the book is not about how creativity, like how one culture looks at creativity. I'm not an anthropologist. This book is about how I meet with creative people around the world and what they teach me about creativity. But in some cases, like for example, language will affect how we think and so on. But to answer your question, I wrote another book a few years ago, actually many years ago now, 2010 maybe?
and it's called the Developing World. And the essence of that book is that it's very dangerous to call yourself a developed country because when you call yourself a developed country, you define yourself as being done. the developed means done, right? That's what it means. While developing means I'm still growing. So developed cement is solid, but developing cement is still soft. You can still change it. So I think the biggest mistake the Developed World did was
by defining yourself as being developed, meaning we are more or less done. Because of course we're not done. Like 500 years from now they're gonna look at us and say how on earth could they ever think they were done? they were so, sorry.
James Taylor (11:50)
They
weren't going around in flying cars. How could they possibly have gone... I just need to go to Dubai for that.
Fredrik Haren (11:53)
Oh, flying cars we have already. Come on. We don't even imagine what they are going to look at. are they going to... So
I did a speech. I do speeches in Norway, the most developed country on earth, the richest country, one of the most peaceful countries. They have all the potential. And you ask Norwegians, do you think Norway will be better tomorrow than it is today? 90 % say no. They're like, oh, we've reached, we can't get better than this. I said, come on.
That's like looking at someone who's going to Harvard with a rich parent and say, my life can't get better than this. Of course it can. When you go to a developed country where people are much less fortunate, but they look, yeah, of course my life will be better. And so the idea of looking at your side, and I'll give you a very sad example, Sweden, where I left Singapore and moved back to Sweden. Sweden still doesn't have a single airport that has an automatic passport machine reading capability. It's not a single, not even a trial.
Okay, Singapore has only that. Like there's a hundred percent have that. And then if it doesn't work, there's one person sitting there to help you. And I was recently coming into Sweden. I had to queue up for like 20 minutes because a human had to look at my passport and they don't have enough humans. And I finally come up and I say, why don't you have this in Sweden? They have this in Singapore since 10 years. And the person there says, that's cute. And then I got so angry. So I went back and I Googled it. It turns out Mongolia has it.
How on earth can Mongolia have a technology that Sweden doesn't have? It blows my mind. And the only reason is we think we're so great. So we need to constantly challenge how we do things. And we also have to understand that nothing is not even close to being done. No technology, no process, no procedure is even close to being perfect yet. And we need to stop that mentality.
James Taylor (13:43)
So that
mentality, where is, do you have a sense? Because obviously you've gone around different countries and obviously Norway has this going on, I'm in the UK just now, Sweden, we often have this, in the UK we call it that'll do syndrome, that'll do. It's good enough, that'll do. And then I look at...
They've just built the highest bridge ever in China, and I used to live in China as well. Unbelievable feat of engineering, and they've done it in kind of record time. And I wonder, okay, well, why in these supposedly developed countries has that mindset got in, saying, you don't need to be more creative, that'll do. Where does it stem from? Because I don't think it's maybe just a Western thing. Obviously, you travel into different parts, you go to different parts of Asia, and you see it in other parts of the world as well. What's going on there?
Fredrik Haren (14:35)
No, I think I said it is a mindset more than anything else. It's partly the fact that we think we're so advanced versus others, which and then it's partly ignorance thinking we're so much better than they are. And then it's lack of imagination. They can't get better than this. Of course, of course. Like I saw an interesting, interesting graph of the largest ship ever built through hundreds of years. And I don't remember the statistics now, but roughly, let's say every hundredth year.
the largest ship ever built is twice the size of what it was 100 years ago. Here's an interesting fact. Every time when they built that ship, people have said, that's the biggest ship we can ever build. And then 100 years later, we have doubled in size. And now recently, they released the biggest ship ever built, which is like twice as the size that it was X amount of years ago. And people go, yeah, and now we've reached the limit. We can't build bigger than this. Yeah, right. Yeah, probably. Right now, we've reached the limit of ship building.
So the lack of imagination is a huge problem.
James Taylor (15:31)
But I-
But I guess
there is also something obviously within the psychology of people as well about...
being reticent to change, reticent to kind of applying creativity, reticent to the big jump forwards. There was an event I did, I actually did two events recently, I spoke at them and one of the other speakers was a guy called Zach Cass. I don't know whether you've maybe spoken on similar events with him and Zach from, used to be at OpenAI. And he tells a story which I think is quite an interesting story, which is when they first brought in elevators. he said, up ⁓ until that point, no building was taller than three stories, I think it was.
whoever invented the elevator, I'm not sure who invented the elevator, but they put the first elevator and the problem that they had is no one would get into it. They thought, why would I go into a box? So they had to do two things. They had to put an attendant.
Their sole job was just to press the buttons, which floor do you want? And then the other thing they had to do, which was like a psychology thing, they had to put mirrors inside. So when you went in, the first thing you did was look at yourself rather than look at the room. And then gradually they could remove the attendant and then maybe gradually they could move that. But then after that point, it was possible to build buildings taller than three stories.
And that, previously people, you can't go higher than that because it's going to take too long to walk up the stairs as well. So it feels like sometimes you have these inflection points a little bit, but have to find clever ways, creative ways to take people on that journey with you.
Fredrik Haren (17:04)
Yes. And one of the people I interviewed in the book is she introduces the concept of un-alienating. So when you see something new, like something that's new to you or something that you think like, we can't build bigger, higher buildings than this, like Burj Khalifa. Now Saudi Arabia is going to build something that's twice as big as that. Like, how is that possible? whatever, this is actually, she works with the marketing.
James Taylor (17:22)
Yeah.
Fredrik Haren (17:31)
marketing director as a sausage company and they were going to introduce a sausage with no meat in it, like a totally vegetarian sausage. And everyone there said, oh, come on, can't, like we've been doing meat sausages for a hundred years. It's no way that you can make a sausage that tastes good, that doesn't have meat in it. It's not possible. So, and then, but of course they did. And, but the process you call it unalienating is when someone introduced something that is so different than what we're used to, we look at it as literally an alien. It's like, ah, that it's simple, like,
And then the process is how do you get people to be befriended? So think of ET. We do the analogy in the book, thinking of ET, you know, the alien. So the first thing you see is, oh, what is that scary thing? And then slowly you befriend it and after a while you're friends with it. That's a process. You can actually, if you're introducing a really novel idea, you can actually ask yourself, how do I, what is the process I need to use to unalienate people to this idea? And you can't just suddenly take an alien and just put it in front of you. You're going to scare the shit out of them.
So you need to slowly do in the process of the sausages. It's ⁓ too long to share here. But basically, they did a process. How do we get people used to the idea of a sausage with no meat in it? And we can do that with any new idea. We can un-alienate people towards it. And that skill is rhetoric. You need to develop a rhetorical path to get people to accept your new idea. Apple was very good at that when they introduced new products.
They get us to feel like this is totally new at the same time it's not scary.
James Taylor (19:04)
Yeah. And actually, you talk about sausage making, they say that there's two things you never want to see what goes into the making of. One is making sausages, the other one is making loaves. So you're dispelling that, you're actually showing how the sausages, vegan sausages perhaps, or as I'm told now, you have to say plant forward, not vegan, because some people get a bit funny about the word vegan. ⁓ So you're kind of stripping back that. And all these people you interviewed in the book, ⁓ small scale creators,
Fredrik Haren (19:13)
You
James Taylor (19:32)
Artists, in innovation and organizations, whose story shifted your thinking the most when it comes to your conception of creativity, what creativity is and how it operates?
Fredrik Haren (19:45)
Well, they're actually, like you said, it's 37 countries, but I've introduced thousands of people in 75 countries. You could say that these are the 37. Why 37? It's the 37 that changed the way I look at creativity. So every single one of them somehow changed the way I look at creativity. Did we talk about the Thai, the Thailand, the Sabai Sabai last time? I don't remember. Okay. So this is one of my favorites because it's so useful for us.
James Taylor (20:09)
No, I don't think we did.
Fredrik Haren (20:14)
for my own personal development as an individual. So I met this origami artist in Thailand, her name is Kai, and she does beautiful origami paper flowers. And I was interviewing her in her studio, and I asked her, so for some reason we started talking about creative block. And I said to her, what do do if you have a creative block? And she looked at me, didn't really understand the question. So like when you get stuck, what do you do? And she goes,
I go to Starbucks. Okay, so what do do when you're a Starbucks seller? Are you thinking of the problem? What are you doing? And she said, I'm thinking of what coffee to drink. Oh yeah, of course. But then what do you do? Then I drink my coffee. And I realized talking to her, I realized she had no concept of creative block. Like she hasn't no understanding of creative anxiety. So she called it an idea nap, which I think is so beautiful. It's like when you're tired, you take a power nap.
And when you have a creative block, you take an idea nap. You just leave the idea and go do something else enjoyable, but you don't need to have anxiety about it. She like, OK, I'm stuck. can't do anything. But she's just enjoying her coffee. And then after 30 minutes or an hour, she goes back and she just continues. So the creative process can be done without anxiety. And after meeting her, my creative process is way less anxious.
And that is connected to the Thai mentality, the Thai culture. They have something, as you probably know, they have something called Sabai Sabai. And Sabai Sabai means like, don't worry, be happy. It means it's like you're ordering a beer in Thailand and it hasn't come in 20 minutes and you go, where the hell is my beer? And they go, Sabai Sabai, don't worry, the beer will come when the beer will come. So when you have that Sabai Sabai mentality and you get stuck.
and it created work, go, okay, sabai, sabai, let's go to Starbucks and drink some coffee and enjoy ourselves and then go back. It's beautiful. It's simple, but it's beautiful.
James Taylor (22:14)
I love that idea.
I love that. I love that idea. ⁓ An idea nap as well. And I guess the other thing, just thinking about that is we had a guest on the show a few weeks ago called Gibelli, Professor Gibelli, and his book is called The Brain at Rest, where he kind of talks about the neuroscience, so he talks about the neuroscience of... ⁓
Fredrik Haren (22:19)
Yes.
James Taylor (22:35)
what happens to our creativity and other functions when we allow our brain to rest. And there's some fascinating stats he was sharing about when we're out in nature.
what they're only just now getting to understand, they knew there was something about the color green that has an effect upon our creativity, our ability to relax. What they didn't know was the chemicals that the trees and the plants send off that you as a human receives that kind of relaxes you and it's kind of, it's part of what it does and he said, know, people that do this and in this kind of way, their creativity increases by this amount.
Fredrik Haren (22:58)
Okay.
James Taylor (23:10)
because of that, it's like the rest part, the idea naps, the rest part as well, and also the kind of changing of the physical environment that they're operating in as well. seems to be like how these things can link together in some way.
Fredrik Haren (23:19)
Yes.
Yes, that's great. That's why my office is a 360 geometric dome. So I'm always in nature.
James Taylor (23:28)
You're in a dome. So we should explain to
people that don't know you, I was sharing with an audience the other day.
about you and I was saying, I was interested, this is my friend Fredrik Haren, he's a wonderful keynote speaker, author, storyteller and he's a collector but not of watches or cars but of islands and so I share that you have Ideas Island which I think is wonderful and people just love this idea as well, so share with us in terms of your own creative process because you've traveled but...
There's something about a sense of rootedness, I think as well, that gives some stability in the creative process, at certain times in the creative process. Where you are today, is your home, where you are most of the time, what does that space, that environment do for your own creative process?
Fredrik Haren (24:20)
Yes, I think it's very, it is crucial. It's essential for people to figure out their own creative process. So you and my creative process, it took me a while to figure out because I'm an introvert, but I like to meet people. So my creative process is that half of the year I travel around the world and I want to go to 50 to 50 to 30 countries per year and meet hundreds of people every year and interview them. And then the other half of the year I sit on, I live on a private island. So this is my island.
And there's no neighbors because I'm an introvert and I don't like people intruding on me when I need to be alone. But so it's selective, selective inclusion. is seclusion? What is the word in English? Seclusion. it's selective seclusion. Yeah, selective seclusion is what I practice. So when I sit on my island, I am mentally disconnected from the rest of the world. It's just me on my island and I'm totally in nature.
James Taylor (25:03)
seclusion. Yes, yes, seclusion, selective seclusion.
Fredrik Haren (25:17)
trees and water is very important for creativity. So I do that. And so I'm either doing that. And that's where I do my writing and my thinking and also my downtown, my relaxing. then, or I am on a plane somewhere and the more exotic the better. And I need both. If I just live on the island, I would not be as creative. If I travel all the time, I would not be. And a lot of people might say, that sounds very stressful or that sounds very lonely. And it's fine. But for me, this is the perfect creative process.
James Taylor (25:47)
Now, when you're traveling a lot, you're seeing different cultures and different things. And one of the things that you obviously benefit from is globalization, traveling around the world, being able to do what you do. But it sometimes feels like globalization can flatten novelty.
it feels like certain grays are in just now, suddenly every coffee shop you go into kind of feels the same ⁓ now, regardless of where you are. Did you ever feel like some of these creative traditions that you were meeting, or these differences were getting flattened out by a more global way of looking at how things are designed and how things should function?
Fredrik Haren (26:10)
Hmm.
Yeah, OK, that's a good question. I don't like the word global because it has been globalist kind of means someone who is not an interesting in supporting their own culture or something. I like it. So, you know, they're saying think global act local. I yes, I like this. I like the think human act humane. That's my that's my slogan. And what I mean by that is there is so many different ways to do things in the world.
James Taylor (26:45)
HSBC, yeah. Tightline.
Fredrik Haren (26:58)
And a lot of the things that are done elsewhere are done better than what we are doing. And if it's better done than what we are doing, we should incorporate it. As you know, I married a woman from the Philippines, right? So Swedish way of raising children is very different from Filipino way of raising children. And suddenly now we will have to have a discussion. Are we going to use the Swedish approach or the Filipino approach when it comes to, for example, hitting our children? In Sweden, we don't hit in the Philippines, they hit. So which one should we do?
And I was like, okay, well, this clearly not hitting is better. That's what I think. But I was able to convince my wife or not even, she was, okay, I mean, she was already on board on that. But in the Philippines, they have more respect for the elders. And in Sweden, we don't have respect for the elders. So now we are teaching the Filipino way to our children. So you need to show respect for the elders. So we're taking the best of each culture and we're creating something better. From that perspective, I don't see a negative aspect of it. If you look at it, humanity is getting better.
by incorporating the best ideas that are out there. And that is kind of the purpose of this book is to, if you are interested in creativity, you should look at how everyone innovates around the world. And now you have more tools that you can use. The fact that everything becomes the same, I think is a negative side effect of the fact that we're not incorporating things properly. I don't think every cafe looking like Starbucks is, I don't think Starbucks has the best cafe. So.
When I lived in China, forgot everything, almost not everything, but they forgot a lot of things they were doing in China. They took everything from the West. But now lately they said, you know what, let's look at if what they are doing is better, we should take it. If what we were doing were better, we're going to go back to how we did it. So they went a little bit overboard. They were so excited about learning from the West. They took everything.
James Taylor (28:48)
I think you see that in quite a lot of cultures more recently as well where maybe the West or certain countries in the West were held up to be the gold standard.
and other countries are kind of now figuring out actually that is not appropriate for what we're about, know, our way of doing things, there's great things we want to learn from these different places. And I always, one of my things, I guess this is maybe a criticism someone's going to maybe level at you, does by talking about creativity and all this thing, does it not create a separateness, a kind of... ⁓
what would you call it, ⁓ a jingoist kind of thing of saying well you know we do this type of thing the best and other people, what would your what would your ⁓ defense be for someone that says like that really creativity is just as purely as a human thing and actually the cultural things ⁓ shouldn't be as relevant.
Fredrik Haren (29:46)
No, okay, so let's do the analogy of food because food is a way of expressing creativity, right? If you're really interested in food, you're not gonna forget about, if I'm a Swedish chef, I'm not gonna forget about Swedish cooking and learn only about foreign cooking, but I'm gonna be super interested to learn about how do they cook in Japan? How do they cook in Thailand? What can I learn from the French? And now you take the best of that and you combine it with the best of Swedish cooking and now you are enjoying cooking more.
It's not forget about Swedish food, it's about let's learn about human cooking. It elevates us all and we can do that on any creative aspect. So I don't think that is a problem.
James Taylor (30:25)
Yeah, and so I wish my
hope, my hope just now is that we do have some owners of airports and I've spoken to some, you've probably done it as well because I often think, ⁓ you your book is sharing lots of examples of creativity and like innovation in different parts of the world.
and I think you agree, it's like picking the best from some of these places and learning from all these places and thinking about how it incorporates, because sometimes it's not gonna come in the pure form from that other place. And it feels like a lot of time you go to airports, they've taken the worst from all this, which I guess is one way of doing things.
Fredrik Haren (30:58)
The words.
But you know
as well as I do that the best airport in the world is in Singapore. And I worked with Singapore, Changi Airport, and I used it a lot. And they go around the world and look at all the other... When they built Changi, they went to look at the best airports at the time. They went to Charles de Gaulle, went to JFK, they went to Heathrow, and they took the best of each. And they took it and they built Changi Airport, which is now the best airport in the world, while Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, and JFK sucks at airports because they haven't done the same thing. So it's about picking up the best thing.
James Taylor (31:09)
Yeah.
Fredrik Haren (31:32)
And more importantly, it's also to understanding that when you do that, it's not, our minds are not limited. So for example, in America, we have this thing called, like what the quote from Mark Zuckerberg, you have to go fast and break things, right? It's about dramatic innovation and we need to ruin things and break things and go fast and shoot for the stars and all of that. And that's the American way of approaching creativity. The Japanese way is kaizen. It's like small improvements all the time.
Now, I'm not saying we should pick between the two. I think we should learn both ways. And now we have two tools in our toolbox that we can now choose. Should we do the American way or should we do the Japanese way? So the more we learn about how people approach things, the more we have ways of choosing what is best right now. Which tool should we use today? There's even an example in the book from Afghanistan. What can we learn about creativity from Afghanistan, which is the utterly opposite of the American way?
James Taylor (32:20)
Yeah, I think... Sorry, please.
Fredrik Haren (32:33)
It's a painter who paints the old traditional Afghan way, when Afghan was a cultural superpower, not anymore, but then hundreds of years ago. And she would literally cut down a tree to make her own paper. Then she will grind the gemstones to make her own paint. Then will she cut the hair of the back of the cat to make her own brush. It takes her months to create the material needed to do a painting, which means for months,
she can't paint what she wants to paint, but she can think about it. And she says, I'm thinking about it, and she called it profound patience. It's this idea of not, she goes, you go to Amazon, you order it the next day, you have the stuff you start painting. Like where's your process? She thinks about it. She said, whenever she starts to paint, what she paint is never what she thought she was gonna paint, because the idea has changed in her head while she's doing the material. That doesn't mean Mark Zuckerberg is wrong. It just means sometimes we can go,
go fast and break things, sometimes we can use the profound patience approach. And now we have another tool to use in our toolbox.
James Taylor (33:37)
I think, and sometimes obviously these things, switch, they switch modes. ⁓ I think with obviously a lot of AI stuff, is stuff I speak about a lot at the moment, ⁓ things are moving very, very fast. And so many countries are purposely saying, we don't want to put any, as much regulation on these tools. We just, need to move fast, because if we don't do it, then this other country over there is going to do it faster than us. And I think my...
can see there's some sense in some of that, where I think will probably happen, and I hate to say this, and I'm, you and I, are kind of, in America we call this motivational speakers, which is always interesting, but, so this is maybe not so motivating, but it's interesting, is I think probably what's going to have to happen is there will be something that will happen very bad, because of AI, and I think where they'll have gone wrong is the thinking of building AI like a
the creativity of doing AI, like a software engineer does it, as opposed to a mechanical engineer. So a mechanical engineer builds first for safety. So if that thing fails, there is always something that sits underneath that stops that thing from failing. And I think about where I'm speaking from today, there's a bridge there called the Dunn, the bridge that goes over Dundee called the Tay Rail Bridge. And it was one of the, it was that great push forward, lots of bridge building that happened in the UK. And then one night,
the bridge collapsed and it killed lots of people in that bridge. And then subsequent after that, they built a bridge which is one in Edinburgh, which takes you from something you can, if you ever go to Edinburgh, there's a famous red, ⁓ fourth road bridge there, which looks incredibly sturdy. It's got every single girder, it's like red, this like ridiculously over engineered. And the reason it's over engineered, over engineered to look like that, is to give people the confidence that the bridge isn't gonna fall.
It didn't need that much structure, but it just gives people the confidence, kind going back to the lift analogy we kind of spoke about as well. And I thought, well, that's great, but that bridge of that quality that's still around today would never have existed probably if you didn't have these other early versions of the bridges, some of which fold and crashed.
So I feel like we're kind of in the AI kind of world, we're in that little bit, there's that kind of feel fast, kind of creativity side of things going, but at some point it's gonna have to switch to using our creativity for safety and security. And we're not quite at that point. The economic forces aren't quite there at this point.
Fredrik Haren (36:12)
Yeah, and the speed one will not slow down. mean, speed of innovation is going to continue to increase. It's a simple math. More people with more education and more access to information and better tools leads to faster innovation. So the speed won't change. It will just continue to increase.
James Taylor (36:33)
So if the listeners are listening to this just now, you travel all the time. If someone wants to...
start one, let's say a creative travel experiment, something to kind of the going journey somewhere, it doesn't even have to be abroad, it could be in their own country, and you kind of want to shift their thinking and use that time, that travel time, ⁓ either the traveling there or the coming home or the when they arrive at their destination to kind of knock their thinking out a little bit and think a little bit more creatively, what advice would you give them?
Fredrik Haren (37:04)
I was recently in Lithuania and I interviewed a tourist guy who does tours of Eastern Europe, like communist from Soviet Union times, takes them to bomb shelters and things like this. And he said, because he takes people, local people, and he shows them their city again through new eyes by showing them things they didn't know about their city. And I said, how do you know? How do you find out these things? And he says,
I go out in the streets and I look for a really old person and I start by giving them a compliment. say, I really liked your dress. And then after, because they are not so used to hearing compliments. And then they say, and then they start talking to me and then I say, Hey, tell me something about this neighborhood. And then they will say these things that they give you all this secret because they've been living there their whole life. And I'm, I'm sharing this with you because we don't have to travel to the other side of the world to learn something new. can learn something new about the place we live by just
Asking a person we normally wouldn't ask, right? Go up and talk to a stranger or ⁓ go in a different, take a different, when I lived in Singapore, a good friend of mine, when he moved there, he took a bus and he took it for 12 stops and then he got off and then he looked around and then he jumped on the next bus that came, took it for another 12 stops and got off with no plan whatsoever. Just forcibly, like forced wandering to get to see parts of Singapore that he had never seen before.
So it is to awaken, if you think about it, it's a waking the explorer mentality to venture into unknown territory in order to learn more about it because when we explore is when we discover.
James Taylor (38:31)
I think... I love that.
And that's why I'm so thankful that there are storytellers and speakers like yourself that because you travel around, you speak to these very influential groups, these different companies, governments around the world. And because you ask when you're traveling to all these different countries, 75, hopefully I've got that number right, when you travel to these 75 countries, you're not just telling your own stories to these audiences, but you're actually telling...
Fredrik Haren (39:02)
Hmm. ⁓
James Taylor (39:10)
You're asking people while you're in those places their stories. And then you are essentially acting as a voice for them as well and sharing their stories with these global audiences. Sometimes I know some of the people you mentioned, the artists in Afghanistan, sometimes these people don't have a voice in that same way. So you are almost acting as that voice for them.
Fredrik Haren (39:30)
Yes, because I want to understand, I wrote in my diary, I want to understand creativity through humanity, but I also want to understand humanity through creativity. And that's why I will interview a tourist guide or a taxi driver or a president or a head of innovation. I want to learn from all kinds of people. But the overall overreaching message of the book, but also in my speeches, is to get people to broaden their perspective of what the world is, the ideas that are already out there.
and also the inspiration that that can trigger to get people to have more ideas themselves. Because these are the two big potentials. One is just to take the good ideas that are already out there and just copy them. And the other one is to be inspired by what people are doing. If I understand, there's one I interviewed the hotel manager, you might know him, Afif. Have you met Afif? Exactly, we're friends on Facebook, yes. So I interviewed him about, and he talked about, I think the English word is respiration. So inspiration.
James Taylor (40:16)
Yes, from Maldives. Yeah, from Lux Resorts.
Fredrik Haren (40:29)
You know everyone your creativity is triggered by inspiration. We see something cool and we're like, this is nice But inspiration doesn't actually create creativity Respiration does so respiration is the act of when you inspire means to breathe in that's the literal meaning to breathe in this to inspire perspire is to breathe out so inspiration is breathing like a It's oxygen for the creative mind right new ideas come in but perspiration
is the act of taking that and turning it into something useful in your body. So it's not just enough to be inspired. You need to do something with, like the key question is what do you do with the inspiration? Especially if you're trying to inspire others, are you giving that inspiration in a way that they can actually do something useful with? It's a skill to inspire people in a way that makes it useful for the other person.
James Taylor (41:25)
reminds me a little bit that the Edison quote was it's success is one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration, ⁓ maybe it needs to be respiration now, I'm not sure. We're going to have a link to your book, to this new book that's coming out, if you were to recommend another book that maybe you've been reading just now, you've been recommending more often, I mean know you're always reading, you're always thinking different things, what would that book be? What book should people be checking out just now?
Fredrik Haren (41:51)
Well, I don't know, because we're just talking about breathing. I'm reading a book called Breed. It's a whole book. I love books like this where they just take a concept that, you know, and then just go all in on it. It's all because I have understood that I'm not doing breathing correctly. So I need to get into that. So, you know, I bought an Apple watch to measure my breathing and all of that. And so I started reading that. So it's one of the...
I like it because it's the last book I'm reading. And it's also about this idea of going deep, down the rabbit hole, the curiosity aspect, what can I possibly learn about breathing? So I'm going to say that one. I think it's called just called, breathe.
James Taylor (42:33)
Breathing.
I I'm gonna recognize that to my wife Alison because I know that she thinks as a singer, she thinks a lot about breathing and she's always pulling me up and getting my diaphragmic breath working properly, my articulators and everything as well. Fredrik, it's always a pleasure speaking to you having you on the show as well. Your new book, The World of Creativity, A Journey Across 37 Countries to Discover the Secrets of Creative Minds is gonna be out and we're gonna put a link to that. If it's not out when this episode comes out, we'll put a link so you can pre-order your copy of the book.
Fredrik Haren (43:02)
the pre-order
is out already.
James Taylor (43:05)
Great, so we're gonna have a link so people at least get it pre-ordered so it's gonna get to you the moment it hits the shelves as well. And Fredrik if people want to connect more with you, learn more about your other writing, your speaking, where's the best place for them to go and do that?
Fredrik Haren (43:19)
I guess just Google the Creativity Explorer, hopefully that will come up.
James Taylor (43:23)
Well, Fredrik Haren thank you so much for being a guest on the SuperCreativity Podcast
Fredrik Haren (43:30)
Thank you so much.
Our Brains, Our Selves: How the Mind Creates Identity with Professor Masud Husain #362
14 Oct 2025
00:41:42
Our Brains, Our Selves: How the Mind Creates Identity with Professor Masud Husain
#362
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, James Taylor speaks with Professor Masud Husain, neurologist, neuroscientist, essayist, and author of Our Brains, Ourselves: What a Neurologist’s Patients Tell Him About the Brain. A leading researcher at the University of Oxford, Husain explores how the brain constructs our sense of self—and what happens when that system breaks down.
Through remarkable patient stories—from a man who loses his motivation after a stroke to a woman whose hand acts with a mind of its own—Husain shows how identity, motivation, and consciousness emerge from the fragile architecture of the brain. Together, they discuss the neuroscience of apathy and addiction, the role of dopamine in behavior, the intersection of AI and neurobiology, and what it truly means to be human.
If you’ve ever wondered how much of “you” is shaped by your brain—and how much you can change—this conversation offers profound insights into the science of the self.
Notable Quotes
“Our brains create our identities—ourselves. And when a part of that function fails, so does a piece of who we are.” – Prof. Masud Husain
“Motivation is not just psychological—it’s biological. It lives in deep circuits that connect desire to action.” – Prof. Masud Husain
“Apathy and addiction are two sides of the same coin—they both involve the brain’s motivation system gone wrong.” – Prof. Masud Husain
“We can still learn and reshape who we are. Even in adulthood, the brain remains astonishingly flexible.” – Prof. Masud Husain
The brain builds identity — Selfhood arises from multiple interacting functions: memory, motivation, attention, and perception.
Apathy and addiction share the same circuitry — Dopamine links motivational cues to action; too little or too much disrupts balance.
Motivation can be restored — Dopaminergic treatments show promise for patients whose “will to act” has vanished after brain injury.
Attention is selective and limited — The brain filters vast sensory input, sustaining focus through the right hemisphere’s networks.
We remain flexible — Even in adulthood, the brain’s plasticity allows for self-directed change in habits, motivation, and mindset.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
00:00 – Introduction to Professor Masud Husain and Our Brains, Ourselves
01:24 – How neurological patients reveal the building blocks of identity
03:18 – Why the self is a neuro function, not a philosophical abstraction
05:24 – The brain as a “controlled hallucination” machine
06:57 – Case study: David, apathy, and the basal ganglia
09:54 – Dopamine, motivation, and recovery through treatment
14:35 – Oxford study on apathy and brain activation differences
16:23 – Apathy vs. addiction: the same motivation circuitry at work
19:02 – Dopamine as the “wanting” transmitter, not the pleasure chemical
21:52 – Attention, distraction, and why focus is so difficult to sustain
24:50 – How Marvin Minsky’s “society of mind” shaped modern neuroscience
27:55 – The illusion of self: from Descartes to Buddhist philosophy
30:12 – Case study: Anna’s “alien hand” and body representation in the brain
33:38 – Phantom limbs, body maps, and how tools become part of us
36:01 – When machines become extensions of the self
37:41 – How adults can retrain motivation and change behavior
39:26 – Why the brain’s plasticity offers lifelong potential for growth
40:05 – Book recommendation: Principles of Neuroscience by Eric Kandel
40:46 – Where to learn more: masudhusain.org
TRANSCRIPT
James Taylor (00:09)
Today's guest is Professor Masud Husain a neurologist, neuroscientist, and essayist who sits at the intersection of brain identity and self. Masud Husain is a leading figure at University of Oxford, editing the journal Brain and treating patients whose neurological disorders cause us to reassess our deepest assumptions about who we are. His new book, Our Brains, Ourselves, what a neurologist's patients talk to him about the brain is a compelling, beautifully written exploration of how identity is wired.
and how it unravels. Through seven rich patient stories spanning language loss, apathy, delusions, and disinhibition, Hussein illustrates that our minds are fragile architectures, but also sometimes repairable. If you've ever wondered how much of you is just a brain doing its job, and what happens when it doesn't, then this is the episode that you've been waiting for. Masud Husain welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.
Masud Husain (01:05)
Thank very much, James. Great to be here.
James Taylor (01:08)
Now in your decades of the work in neurology, neuroscience, was there one particular patient or moment early in your career that you convinced you that identity and selfhood are maybe far more fragile than we assume?
Masud Husain (01:24)
I think a lot of our neurological patients who come to us with cognitive complaints, whether it's about their language, their memory, the fact that they're missing things in the world around them. In total, they made me think that actually we can learn an awful lot from the people who come to see us. We can learn an awful lot about ourselves. So the seven patients you mentioned in the book are...
really, I thought, good examples of how that would occur. But for me, it's actually the sort of whole panoply of the kind of patients we see that make me think that what we're witnessing is how different brain functions really create ourselves. And it's not one of those in particular that I think is particularly revealing about the self.
It's that combination of functions that creates our identities ourselves. And all we need is to lose one of those functions. Then it becomes clear that someone has changed in their personal identity. So you might lose your memory when you think, well, that someone's just amnestic. But it's not just that. It changes the way you are. And it changes your personal identity. It changes how you fit in society, your social identity.
James Taylor (02:49)
and we're gonna get into some of these individual kind case studies as well, but I live part of the time in North London, kind of Hampstead area, and often I walk past the house, I think it was Oliver Sacks used to live in that. So you follow in this kind of, I feel like this traditionally, Oliver Sacks, Ramachandran, but you bring a kind of a new nuance to it. So this identity as a neuro function. What first took you on that path, that particular path of research is identity as a neuro function.
Masud Husain (03:18)
Well, I think philosophers have been talking about identity for a long time and the self, what is the self? And many of those thoughts are thought experiments. They're sitting there thinking about what makes logical sense, about what we would create in terms of how we would think about the self. I just think modern neuroscience has got to a stage where we can start to talk about
what the brain is doing in terms of creating the self. And we can see how the brain is important in creating even simple functions, relatively simple functions, that people might not think of as necessarily contributing to their identity. So, you know, the way you perceive the world, your visual perception, you might think is just a basic fundamental kind of...
computation process that's happening in the brain in all of us. But we see the world differently and the way we see the world has an impact on who we are. So I think it's got to the point where modern neuroscience can try to start to explain what those computations, what those cognitive processes are. And it's also got to the point where we can start to see whether we can modulate
those processes in people in whom a function goes wrong, like visual perception. So one of the cases in the book is someone who is having visual hallucinations and worries that they've become mad. And what I try to explain there is in a way, all of perception is a hallucination. It's just a controlled hallucination. And in this case, it wasn't controlled.
we now know enough about the sort of neurotransmitters involved that we can start to treat people who are having visual hallucinations and see whether we can restore that controlled hallucination rather than the uncontrolled hallucination that some people suffer from.
James Taylor (05:24)
I was also interested, obviously this book really is core, obviously there's the link between the neuroscience and then the identity side and identity politics has become such a, it feels like a huge thing over the past few years as well. I'm wondering as this book's coming, as this book's out now and people are reading the book and responding to the book, did you ever get pushback from any groups of people or were there particular groups of people who kind of are leaning into this book a little bit more?
Masud Husain (05:53)
I haven't had any pushback. mean, I think all we're saying in this book is, well, I'm saying in this book, is that the brain creates our identities, ourselves. I think that's something that many people will accept nowadays. Of course, that's probably how it occurs. There doesn't have to be anything else than the brain. In the past, people thought that there could be something else, the soul, which was different from the brain.
So all I'm saying is that our brains create ourselves and those cells are very different because brains function in a different way. And I'm also trying to show that, you most people think ourselves are personalities, but personalities are created by the brain and even fundamental things, as I mentioned, like visual perception or language or attention or memory are crucial to creating what we would call personality and self.
James Taylor (06:51)
Now you walk through one of the case studies in the book is a patient called David whose kind of apathy kind of took over his life after strokes and I thought this was a really interesting one because so many of our audience, our listeners are very interested in motivation, how to become motivated, how to stay motivated, regardless of the kind of work that they're doing as well.
Masud Husain (06:57)
D
James Taylor (07:13)
So you talk about these kind of lesions in the Basal Ganglia, can you talk about how those lesions map to motivation, personality, and social disengagement, from this case with David?
Masud Husain (07:22)
Yes,
sure. mean, David was a remarkable case. He's a man in his 30s when he came to see me. And he had been a very gregarious, highly sociable, highly productive person at work. He worked in finance and ⁓ he had suddenly lost all his get up and go, his motivation. Now, it turned out that David had suffered a very unusual kind of stroke, two tiny little strokes.
one on each side of the brain affecting parts of the basal ganglia. These are really deep nuclei within the brain and most people up to now have thought of them as being very important for the control of movement because the basal ganglia are also the areas that are affected, for example, in Parkinson's disease. But in David, his movement wasn't a problem. The problem was that he wasn't motivated to act.
So this man who'd been highly productive suddenly did very little work. He got fired from work because he really wasn't doing anything useful. He couldn't be motivated to get unemployment benefit. And he had some nice friends who said, well, why don't you come and live with us? And they really regretted saying that very quickly because he did absolutely nothing. I mean, he literally sat there all day.
When we saw him, he was in a bit of a disheveled state. He wasn't really looking after himself. He wasn't having a shower. He wasn't really looking after himself in any way. And I remember asking him, so what would you normally like to do if you're sitting at home and say, I'd love to listen to music. So why aren't you listening to music now? it would take me a little while to put my music system together. How long would it take? Five minutes.
So he wasn't motivated to put in that effort, five minutes of putting his music system together, to get the reward of listening to something that would give him pleasure. So he did nothing. And his mates would come home, they'd find that he hadn't cleaned the house, cooked, done anything, all those things that we take for granted. So not only had David's personal identity changed, he'd become a very different person, but his place... ⁓
in society's place in the group of people he was with had changed because obviously they got very annoyed with this guy who did nothing and just seemed to be just waiting for them to come and cook, clean the place and all the rest of it.
James Taylor (09:54)
So what was the treatment for someone like that then? Because I'm also guessing, maybe people that are listening to this who have teenagers are thinking, well, that just sounds like my teenager. So what is different? So this gentleman, he had a stroke, a very unusual kind of stroke, I guess. What was the treatment for someone like him? then is there any, are these really exceptions to the rule? There's no real kind of pass or what can others learn from this as well?
Masud Husain (09:57)
Yes.
Thank
Yeah, all very important questions, but I just wanted to explain that he was so rare that I had to go and learn a little bit about the animal literature and what that's telling us about the basal ganglia. And it turns out the basal ganglia are very, very ancient parts of the brain. They go back to the lamprey. These are millions of years old, the lamprey, which is ⁓ a vicious creature if you've ever come across one.
But in the lamprey, all the research suggests that the basal ganglia are linking motivational cues, go and seek food, to the action to go and seek that food. Now in David, these critical notes have been taken out. So that link between a motivation cue, I'd like to listen to music to get pleasure, to the action required, put the system together, the music system together to listen to it, had been broken.
What it turned out is that dopamine is a very key neurotransmitter in the basal ganglia. So we tried David on a drug that we would normally use in Parkinson's disease. It's called levodopa. It's a very standard drug. It's been around actually since the time of Saks because awakenings, that book and the film that you see with Robert De Niro as a patient.
is based on the use of levodopa. And unfortunately, David showed no response to levodopa. And we were about to give up, but we now have newer drugs which latch on to dopamine receptors. They're called dopamine receptor agonists. And with that, within three months, this man who really wasn't looking after himself doing anything came back unrecognizable, came back in a suit. I didn't really recognize him in the waiting area.
He'd had a haircut, he'd had a shower. He had a new job and most remarkably, he had a new girlfriend. He would never have met anybody in the state he was. And so going back to your question, he is an extreme rarity. These kind of patients are reported in the literature, about 12 of them. But what we'd realize in neuroscience is that rarities can be really important examples of how the brain works.
So we'd found these critical nodes in the basal ganglia that are important in linking motivation to action. We'd found that dopamine or dopaminergic drug could restore the motivation that had been extinguished in this individual. And although he's rare, it turns out that apathy, pathological apathy, is really common across neurological diseases, in Alzheimer's disease, in vascular dementia.
in Parkinson's disease, in multiple sclerosis. And you might say, well, what are those things got in common? They all have different pathologies. If you look under the microscope, all those diseases are caused by different things. But if they affect the same part of the brain, if they affect the basal ganglia, if they affect the connections of the basal ganglia, you can also get this problem of pathological apathy. So that makes us think.
where those lessons that we learnt in David can extend to other types of patient and that's why we're doing trials on patients with dopaminergic drugs to see if we can improve their apathy. But it also makes us think James about what you mentioned which is what about what we call normal people? We know a ⁓ range of people who vary in their levels of motivation. Could any of that variation be accounted for by
biological differences. To me that was a startling thing to think about because you know probably like most of your listeners you'd think there are lazy people and there are highly motivated people and this is some sort of personality or psychological trait. But we actually did a study in Oxford students and believe it or not there are apathetic Oxford students as well.
James Taylor (14:30)
I'm shocked, I'm absolutely shocked.
Masud Husain (14:35)
Yeah, so we selected them on a range of levels of apathy, very motivated to very apathetic, not depressed, that's very important, it's very different from depression. And we put them into the scanner and looked at their brain activity when they were doing a task which required them effectively to weigh up whether a particular rewarding outcome, it was a monetary reward in this case, was worth the physical effort.
Would they be willing to invest this much effort for this much reward? And we could parametrically alter the level of reward that was on offer, and we could parametrically alter the amount of effort they had to put in. And to our surprise, what we found were there were differences in levels of brain activity between the people who are very apathetic and those who are very motivated. And the surprise was it wasn't the way we were expecting it.
The surprise was that the people who are apathetic actually activated their brains more in those regions, including the basal ganglia and parts of the frontal lobe which are connected to the basal ganglia, when they're deciding whether something is worth the effort. And the way that we tried to explain this was that actually it's a much harder decision. They're taking up more brain activity to make a decision, which people who are highly motivated make.
without so much effort. And of course, brain activity is effort. The brain requires glucose for its energy. It's expending more effort, consuming more energy in people who are apathetic in making those decisions. The people who are motivated would make just like that. So, yeah.
James Taylor (16:23)
So there's like an
evolutionary, there's an evolutionary perspective to that, I guess then that animal brain or the early brain where we're looking for ways to save energy to reduce that glucose that were taken into the system as well. it benefits us to make that link between idea and action, it's benefits us to make a quicker move then, which I guess is maybe something that also links to like cognitive biases as well, because you have to use...
you have to almost like slow down your thinking, use more energy if you want to understand your cognitive biases that you have.
Masud Husain (16:57)
Yeah, I think that's right. ⁓ this one fundamental ⁓ link we've got is that motivational cues like hunger, thirst, sex in animals, these cues funnel the signals through the basal ganglia to reach the action areas of the brain in the frontal lobe. But it's also this system
which alters our biases, as you're talking about, in terms of choices. And in fact, drugs of addiction hijack this system. So this is really interesting. At one end, you've got...
apathy because the system isn't working as well as it normally should be, as in David in an extreme case. And at the other end, you've got hyperactivity of this system which links the basal ganglia to the frontal lobe. People who become addicted get a high, that huge amount of dopamine surge, the pleasure they get, which means that they seek that pleasure. So it turns out that ⁓ apathy and addiction
are actually using a very, very similar system. We can use that system to explain those behaviors.
James Taylor (18:11)
I'm guessing your research is probably of a lot of interest to those neuroscientists and PhDs that work at social media companies, for example, because what you just described there in terms of dopamine, know, addiction as well, you know, with people that see on TikTok or whatever the tool that they're using is giving those little micro doses of dopamine all the time. And then I also wondered if that starts to have an effect where people buy, let's say there's a
there's a campaign for something that they want to do politically or otherwise and it's quite an easy little dopamine burst to say I like that thing or to reshare that thing. It's a much higher level of motivation to go and say I'm actually gonna go on the streets and campaign against that thing as well and I'm wondering if there's some kind of link that's going on there as well.
Masud Husain (19:02)
Yeah, so I should also say that we've learned an awful lot about dopamine. So although, you know, what most people would think about is dopamine is the neurotransmitter of pleasure, hedonism, if you like, it turns out that that isn't quite right. What it is, is it's the transmitter, the neurotransmitter, the chemical that links those motivational cues to action. So it motivates you to seek that rewarding outcome.
And the rewarding outcome itself depends on other neurotransmitters in terms of pleasure. Many sets of data suggest these are opioid neurotransmitters, which actually give you that pleasure. The dopamine makes you want to seek that pleasure. So there's two slightly different things, but there's no doubt that ⁓ exciting things, whether it's playing video games and
getting to an end result or seeing something that you find fun and attractive, whatever it is, exciting, leads to those ramping up of dopamine signals. what I think you're getting at is to persevere in an action, to continue with an action is very different from that little burst of action and excitement because we know lots of people who start doing things.
button can't sustain it. They don't really follow up and get through to the end. So there is quite a lot of work in neuroscience looking at these phasic dopamine signals. So they come and go, the little bursts. And they might also not only be important for motivating actions, but also in learning new kinds of activities. And then the tonic dopamine signal, which persists.
and may actually ramp up to get you towards that rewarding outcome. So there's quite a lot of detail on dopamine. It turns out to be much more complicated than just the pleasure chemical, and it may be very important for both phasic and tonic activity.
James Taylor (21:15)
If was that research, there's a link then to, we're seeing a of an attention deficit, I guess, is maybe the easiest way to kind of talk about it where, and you're in front of students, you're with students all the time, I'm guessing as well, where I heard a professor say the other day, it used to be very common that over the weekend you would give, on a Friday, would give a student, here's like three major works I want you to read. And these were three big books and they're going, now they're saying, no we can't.
we can't read those over the weekend. So all those things, you're talking about like language learning or instrument becoming a musician, let's say, which does require little bits of motivation along the way. And I guess little kind of levels of dopamine at the same time, but for a prolonged period, longer levels of attention, it can't just be like a Red Bull, like shot of excitement.
Masud Husain (21:52)
Hmm
Yeah, so we talked about motivation being disrupted and we came into this conversation with David, but obviously motivation is only one aspect, one of those modules in the brain that...
is important for our everyday activities. And as you've mentioned, another one might be attention. And attention also isn't one simple thing. It turns out there are, you know, we talk about selective attention, which is how we filter out information. if you're listening to a news program or if you're going to a lecture, if you're a student, you don't take everything in. You select the stuff that you think is important. And that's the stuff you hold on to. ⁓
and our senses are being bombarded on a millisecond basis by information. My visual system is being bombarded, my auditory system is being bombarded.
even the clothes that I'm wearing are brushing against my skin and giving me tactile information. I don't want to keep all that information because it would be ridiculous. I'd have to have a huge hard disk to hold onto that. So what I do is I'm very, very selective about the information I keep. So that's one type of attention and that can go wrong in particular patients with affect, which might, who might have lesions of the parietal lobe ⁓ in humans.
And there's also the ability to sustain an attention. just being able to hold your attention for an hour in a lecture is a very, very difficult thing. And it turns out, you there are brain systems which are engaged when you're doing that. If you look at little kids, it's very difficult for them to sustain attention. They develop this, which is very important in being able to sustain attention. And a lot of the work suggests that
parts of the right hemisphere in humans are very important, not only for selective attention, but for sustained attention. They include the right frontal lobe as well as the right parietal lobe. So these are two other functions which are important in being able to do our everyday lives in a way that is effective and productive.
James Taylor (24:26)
Now, I know in the book you weave in historical kind of neurologists, philosophical ideas about self as well. As you were kind of researching and writing the book, was there a particular thinker or a clinician or a neuroscientist whose work kind of really influenced how you see this idea of identity in the brain?
Masud Husain (24:50)
⁓ Well, I think probably the person who had the ⁓ kind of biggest impact when I was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT was a guy called Marvin Minsky, and he was one of the pioneers of AI. I'm not sure that a of people would know about him now, but what he was, I guess, instrumental in was thinking that...
these brain processes, these cognitive processes, these computations that were being performed in the brain, in a way what we're talking about is that those processes create our society of mind. That's what he called it. Essentially, it's that constellation of computations that are going on in different parts of the brain that are creating our society of mind and for me, the self.
And if you took away one of those computations, if you took away one of those cognitive processes like language, memory, attention, motivation, you have a different society of mind. And one of the things that I wanted to do in this book was to get that across in an accessible way to the readership who didn't know anything about the science and to try then to try and explain the neuroscience of motivation or about concepts.
about attention in a way that people could grasp. So Minsky was very important. The other strand of work here is about philosophy and how philosophers have thought about the self. If we go back to Descartes, he had a very dualist kind of way of thinking about how the self worked. For him, wasn't in the brain, it was something outside the brain.
But others like Hume thought the self was just an illusion. We're kidding ourselves. It's just a bundle of perceptions and things that we consider and we decide that we create a narrative, essentially, about who we are. And that's what we consider to be the self. I just think we've got to that point where modern neuroscience can say, look, we are beginning to understand these computations. We're beginning to understand what's going on in our brain.
We don't need to invoke anything more than brain activity as explaining who we are.
James Taylor (27:15)
As I was thinking about some of the ideas in the book, the first thing that kind of came to me was, struck me was, you mentioned that on the philosophy side was Buddhism, actually, with like selfless, of this idea of identity is a useful construct, but it's not real, this idea of selflessness. So as you were kind of thinking about kind of going back, you know, obviously the Greeks and the ⁓ ancients as well, was there things that we could perhaps
learn from those ideas going way back there that we can kind of pull into or that aligns in some way or conflicts with some of the findings that you had in the book.
Masud Husain (27:55)
Well, think, you know, human thinking about the self is a very rich area. Even if you go back to the Greeks or even think about how Buddhism considers that there is no self in the way that Western philosophers have thought about the self. I don't think...
think we need to necessarily rest on those ideas if we're thinking about this from a scientific point of view. I don't think we need to go back because they just didn't have the information we have now. This is basically what it boils down to. I don't think that we need to rely on those ideas, although the kinds of thought experiments that philosophers conducted were really, really quite prescient.
James Taylor (28:43)
Yeah, the cave,
I would say the cave idea, know, that's something like this.
Masud Husain (28:48)
Exactly. Even in more modern times, people have thought about if we were to take an individual and we were to teleport you, as in beam me up Scotty, Star Trek, what would that person at the other end of the teleporter be the same person or not? Most people would say yes, okay, you've reconstructed this person, but that would be the same person. But imagine now,
that we could duplicate you. We could teleport you to Mars and we could teleport another you to Venus. Who is the real James Taylor under those circumstances? And I think what that kind of problem actually exposes is you need some psychological continuity. You need to have had first-hand experience as James Taylor before the teleportation.
to say that the one on Venus or the one on Mars is the one who is the same James Taylor. And those problems, I think, have been really interesting because they really push people to thinking about it just cannot be the reconstitution of atoms that creates the self. It's the experiences that you've had that create the self.
James Taylor (30:12)
In some cases in the book, you talk about where there was you managed partial restoration, obviously David was one case of that as well. Can you tell us about maybe another patient whose self was altered and then partially reclaimed through your team and yourself working with
Masud Husain (30:28)
Yeah, I think ⁓ in a way Anna is quite a good person to think about because she was a young woman who was assaulted in a London park simply because she was speaking Polish on a mobile phone. And she sustained a very bad head injury as a teenager. Luckily, she got to a neurosurgical unit. had surgery performed, which meant that
actually she did very well. But years later she came to see me with a problem that she found very difficult to discuss because what she was explaining was that she would find that her hand would lose, she'd lose control of her hand. It would do things of its own accord. And that became a real problem because she loved dancing, including ballroom dancing.
And this hand would wander to places that she really found embarrassing because her partners would find that embarrassing. And it turned out that what had happened is although she had recovered from a head injury, she'd grown a cyst over that area. And that cyst was pressing down on the brain and having an impact on her body schema. you know, knowing where our body parts are in space.
is a fundamental thing that we all have. We understand, you know, the personal limits of our space. If someone's coming too close, we recognize that. We recognize when we shouldn't get too close to somebody. But in this case, Anna's hand was effectively autonomous because she wasn't representing it properly unless she looked at it. If she looked at it, she knew where it was. If she didn't look at it, she slowly lost...
position of her hand, she didn't know where it was, and it would do things autonomously. In this case, it turned out there was a simple solution. We could send her to one of our neurosurgical colleagues who could remove that cyst so there was no longer pressure on the brain and her body schema was not distorted.
So this was a very simple solution which didn't require medications. It's an unusual case, but it also reveals to us that part of the brain which is holding a representation of how our body parts are positioned in space. So important for everything we do. doesn't have to be an athlete. It's just somebody knowing where your hand, your leg, your head is in space. These are things we just take for granted.
James Taylor (33:17)
Is this linked a little bit to, you hear people with phantom limb syndrome, where they've lost a limb of some sort, yet they still feel pain from that missing limb? And my understanding is what they often have to do is almost have a mirror to kind of see the other part, the missing part, and it's kind of like reconnecting that part of the brain to understand that that thing doesn't exist anymore.
Masud Husain (33:38)
Well, I mean, that is in a few people and that's, think you're alluding to the work by Ramachandra under there. But it's very related because it's really about how the body is represented within the brain. And there are maps within the brain which ⁓ map the tactile surfaces, but also the angles between the joints.
including the hand. If you look at the hand, this is a really complicated bit of machinery because we've got 17 degrees of freedom and with 17 degrees of freedom you have a very, very complex bit of engineering that the body has to represent. We take that for granted how we would move, how we would shape our hand to pick up an object, but if we lose that representation, as was the case in Anna,
this hand was effectively autonomous, a bit like what we would now call an alien limb. I don't know if you've seen that film with Peter Sellers, Doctor Strangelove. He has a very good impersonation of an alien limb because his own arm, his own hand is choking himself because he has no control over that hand.
James Taylor (34:53)
think actually that work, the work you're doing around there also picks up a little bit where I'm seeing stuff I do, is speaking to companies about artificial intelligence and robotics and what we call centaurs or ⁓ almost like cyborgs where individual humans are now, if you go to the Ford motor factory, you see them wearing exosuits, for example, that becomes part of them. And my father's a guitarist and a jazz guitarist and he has, ⁓ he has synesthesia. So we did something, we did a thing at University of Cambridge.
with Professor Roger Nebo in there, where he was describing what he would call his mind instrument, essentially. So he rehearses, he rehearses, like the guitar is actually in his hat. It is almost an extension of him. So when people say, do you not have to ⁓ practice lots of things? Well, I do, but a lot of it I do in my head. I'm practicing and it's almost become an extension, like you said, that objects become an extension of him as well. So it might be interesting to see where some of that kind of...
Masud Husain (35:37)
and
James Taylor (35:52)
work goes, like research goes, in terms of these extensions that we have, and maybe not born with, but they end up becoming part of us.
Masud Husain (36:01)
Well, funny you should mention that, it has already been done to an extent because, for example, if monkeys are taught how to use a rake or a tool which extends effectively their limb, what you can find in their brains is a representation of that tool. And of course, you know, the thing that happened in human evolution is
tool use, so this hand I was talking about with 17 degrees of freedom, really evolved because we developed these new types of tool from very, very sophisticated, fine instruments to flint arrows and all the rest of it. We learned how to develop tools and how to use them with our limbs. And they do become extensions of your body in terms of how the body represents that tool.
And it's not just tools, it's driving. When you're driving a car, you build a representation of where the edges are. If you're a good parker at least, you need to know what that representation is like. we've become very familiar with the idea that we don't just represent the body ourselves in terms of the limits of the body, we represent beyond the body.
James Taylor (37:21)
That's a fascinating area. If a listener walked away today with perhaps one shift in how they think about their mind identity and based upon the work you've done, what would that one shift that you would encourage them to really think about to kind of reflect on themselves and the work that they do?
Masud Husain (37:41)
So far what we've been talking about are how our cells can change with brain disorders. But I think it's worth thinking about without having a brain disorder, how yourself can change. And there are obviously many examples in terms of how we develop. Our brains develop, we change as we develop, we can learn new ways of doing things as we develop.
But it's also the case, I think, that we can still learn new ways of doing things and new ways of shaping ourselves through thinking about these cognitive processes that I've been alluding to. Motivation is a really interesting one. Can you teach yourself to be different in the way you're motivated, how you allocate your effort?
in some way. Can you teach yourself to persist more in tasks that don't necessarily give you the reward immediately?
and where you're having to put in a lot of effort to get that in the end. It's the kind of thing we would do with children, We're kind of teaching them that you won't necessarily get an immediate reward here, but if you persist, it would be worthwhile. So I think if there was a shift, I think it's worth thinking about how we could change, even though we think we've become very hardwired people. We're very flexible. We still remain very flexible.
So I think that's what I would think about is to consider how if you wanted to, you might be able to change as a person.
James Taylor (39:26)
I think it also provides some hope for some of us a little bit older as well, that there is a potential for change and development and these things, it's not calcified in that way, you're still open to possibility. We're gonna have a link to your book ⁓ here, Masood, but if there's another book that maybe someone that's interested in this general area and they're coming to your book and then they say, I wanna go a little bit deeper, what would be a book that you would recommend to them?
if they want to go a little bit deeper into this area, you've inspired them, you've given them these examples, these case studies here as well. And he said, I want to go a little bit further into this area. What book would you recommend?
Masud Husain (40:05)
Well, if you want to know about neuroscience, probably the kind of Bible here is a book by Candell and Schwartz, Eric Candell and Schwartz. Those were the original, ⁓ it's called Principles of Neuroscience. It's a huge book, so it's not for the faint-hearted. If you want to find out about how the brain works, that's probably the place to go and look. You may want to just dip into a chapter or two to find out about that. Yeah.
James Taylor (40:33)
And if people want to learn more about your other writing, obviously your academic, your research, your talks, I'm sure you're giving lots of keynotes around these ideas as well, where's the best place for them to go and find that?
Masud Husain (40:46)
Well, I have a website. It's massoudhussein.org, Hussein spelt with a single S. And ⁓ you can find out the stuff I write and also some of the videos on talks and podcasts.
James Taylor (41:03)
Well, Masud Husain, Our Brains Ourselves is out now. We'll have a link here. Please go in, go and check out that book. Get the audio version if you prefer the audio. Or if you're old school like myself, definitely go into your local independent bookstore and pick up a copy of that book. Masud Husain, thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.
Masud Husain (41:24)
Thank you, James.
The Creative Brain: Busting Myths About Creativity with Dr. Anna Abraham #361
07 Oct 2025
00:48:30
The Creative Brain: Busting Myths About Creativity with Dr. Anna Abraham
#361
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, James Taylor interviews Dr. Anna Abraham, neuroscientist, educator, and author of The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths. As the E. Paul Torrance Professor at the University of Georgia and director of the Creativity and Imagination Lab, Dr. Abraham has spent decades exploring the science behind creativity and imagination.
Together, they dive deep into some of the most persistent myths about creativity—from the supposed link between creativity and mental illness to the popular idea that creativity is only a “right brain” activity. Along the way, Dr. Abraham explains how creativity actually works in the brain, what makes myths so sticky, and why everyday creativity is just as important as exceptional genius.
If you’ve ever doubted your creative potential because of stereotypes or wanted to understand what science really says about imagination, this conversation will change how you think about creativity forever.
Notable Quotes
“Every myth has a kernel of truth—it’s the way the story gets told that flattens it into something misleading.” – Dr. Anna Abraham
“Creativity is less like magic and more like fitness—it improves with practice.” – Dr. Anna Abraham
“We like outlandish explanations for creativity more than the truth, because they make a better story.” – Dr. Anna Abraham
“The unglamorous part of creativity is the real truth: it’s a craft, and you have to keep working at it.” – Dr. Anna Abraham
Creativity & mental illness — There are links, but they are complex, nuanced, and shaped by vulnerability and environment, not destiny.
Right brain vs. left brain — Both hemispheres play a role; the metaphor is useful, but the science is more complicated.
Everyday creativity matters — Creativity isn’t just about lone geniuses; it’s about building your own creative “fitness.”
Precarity fuels vulnerability — From writers working alone to creative industries hit hardest by crises, uncertainty impacts mental health.
Creativity is a skill — Like fitness, it can be measured, trained, and improved with the right practices and tools.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
00:00 – Introduction to Dr. Anna Abraham and The Creative Brain
01:17 – Myth #1: Creativity and mental illness
06:32 – Why myths about creativity persist in culture
11:46 – Myth #2: The right brain is the seat of creativity
16:35 – The metaphorical power (and limits) of right vs. left brain
18:17 – Creativity and dementia: de novo creativity explained
21:56 – Improvisation, jazz, comedy, and breaking the path of least resistance
25:57 – Training yourself to disrupt automatic thinking patterns
29:02 – Defining creativity for business audiences: creativity vs. innovation
30:12 – The Torrance Test and measuring creativity in children and adults
34:55 – Myth of the lone creative genius: why context matters
39:42 – The most pervasive myths about creativity today
42:50 – Practice makes the performance look “natural”
44:25 – Book recommendations: Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act and Bill Bryson’s The Body
47:51 – Where to learn more about Dr. Abraham’s work
TRANSCRIPT
James Taylor (00:09)
Today's guest is Dr. Anna Abraham, a neuroscientist, educator, myth buster, and the E. Paul Torrance Professor at University of Georgia. She leads the Creativity and Imagination Lab and directs the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development. Anna's work sits at the intersection of brain science and human imagination. She studies mental time travel, the boundary between fact and fiction, self-referencing thought and how creativity works in our minds.
Her latest book, The Creative Brain, Myths and Truths, pulls back the curtain on beliefs we hold about creativity. Ones like the right brain myth, the tortured artist stereotype, or that psychedelics are a shortcut and shows the truths underneath. If you've ever doubted your creative potential because you believed a myth or wondered how science can illuminate what actually helps creativity, then this episode is for you. Anna, welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.
Anna Abraham (01:08)
Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
James Taylor (01:10)
So Anna, what was your earliest encounter with a myth about creativity?
Anna Abraham (01:17)
That's a good one. ⁓ Probably my own. I've ⁓ always been fascinated by creativity, but the first time I got the chance to study it was during my PhD. the main impetus of my study was to try and figure out the link between creativity and mental illness. was my starting point. ⁓ And it's one of the, I'd call them myth truths is the way I kind of handle them in the book. ⁓
of what is really the link between creativity and mental illness. And it's probably the oldest one of all of them, because it's existed since sort of the ancient Greeks thought about it. So that's probably the oldest that I have encountered and really been thinking about for decades now.
James Taylor (02:01)
And I wonder with a myth like that, obviously we have these different myths that have in society and the media, it seems to be one that the media often latch onto, you know, the young rock star that dies of an overdose, for example. So let's do some myth bustings in this episode. What is that? Is there a link, first of all? And if so, what is that link between this?
Anna Abraham (02:29)
So the interesting thing about the myth truth of creativity and mental illness is that there is a link, but it's not really clear what the directionality is, how strong it is. When we think about creativity and madness or mental illness, saying it that broadly is obviously a myth. But when we look closer, ⁓ there are certain types of disorders that are more associated with it. And there are lots of ideas about why that is. Some are sort of saying, well, when you're trying to be creative,
exploring the unknown, you're taking a lot of risks, you're putting yourself, it's quite vulnerable to try and come up with new ideas that may or not, may not be accepted by the larger collective. So it's a, you're in the business of risk taking and potentially getting things wrong, or even if you're getting things right, it may not be actually recognized by others. So you're in a vulnerable position very often, depending on the kind of creative activity it is, it can be a kind of isolating experience. So if you think about writers, they tend to be more.
at risk for a lot of mental disorders. They're the most at risk group. And if you sort of just think about what does it take to write a book, book of fiction, for instance, it takes, it's months and months and months or years sometimes of, you know, getting, being alone with your thoughts, trying to get it out there. And really the most, I think the tricky part is you can't force yourself.
to come up with those lines. have to kind of come out of you. So a lot of it is pretty unpredictable. ⁓ So that's, you're dealing with a lot of precarity ⁓ at all levels from the creation side on one hand, and then the other side, which you have almost no control, which is, will people accept it? Will people like it? Will it bring me my bread and butter? Will I achieve renown through it? And so on. So that's the difficulty with the creative experience. A.
you're putting yourself out there, you're trying to do something that's unusual, stand out in some way. You can't count on it coming in a predictable way, so there's precarity at that level, precarity at level of what you're creating, and then precarity at the level of it being accepted. ⁓ So precarity across these levels is associated with greater vulnerability. You you're much more likely to be more anxious then, ⁓ and so on. And things don't quite work out. There's only so much negative feedback you can get.
without it really affecting you. ⁓ And the final thing I would say is also that creative professions as such are also associated from an economic, socioeconomic standpoint, a lot of precarity. It's the kind of position that's not seen as often associated with full-time employment. ⁓ We saw it at the time of the COVID pandemic. The first jobs to get hit was the food industry and the creative industry, right? Because everything just shut down.
So there's also sort of socioeconomic precarity there. All of these things are vulnerability factors when it comes to mental illnesses. So that's what I mean by we don't know whether it is the process of pushing yourself out there, creating something that is a vulnerable space to be in. ⁓ Is it also just the situation of being a creative person in the world as it is set up now, where there's a lot of unsteadiness in your profession? What is it that leads to it? It might be a combination of both, of course.
But that's, so we know that's related to certain forms of mental illness, but we don't know what's really, which way it goes. Or perhaps it's just way more complicated than we think it is. But so to just say that there's a link is somehow not satisfying because it seems to say like, if you do it, you're going to be more mentally ill or the other way around. That's not true at all. There's lots of people who have all sorts of ⁓ problems in terms of the mental health and wellbeing that don't go on to do anything creative. And there are lots of people on the other side who are pretty stable.
So it's not an all or none phenomenon. And the more interesting story for me is to try to think about what is it about the act of creating, or what is it about the environment you're creating, and that pushes our vulnerabilities in a specific way.
James Taylor (06:32)
Sometimes I remember when I was first getting interested in this and you're reading like the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and you're reading all these other books and all these wonderful books about creativity and it almost felt like there was two camps. There was the ⁓ kind of Elizabeth Gilbert, Julia Cameron kind of woo woo in a nicer sense. I can say that as someone who's lived in California but I love part of that. But it was a very... ⁓
Anna Abraham (06:51)
you
James Taylor (06:57)
emotional kind of almost spirit type of energy way of thinking about things. And then there was the neuroscience folks and the kind of brain science that kind of were trying to bring it down to almost the singular. So you mentioned this one myth and in the book, The Creative Brain, you kind of lay out these seven in total, these myths as well. What made you want to write this particular book? Because you have so much experience in this area. You could have written probably about 20 different books on creativity.
Why was this the book that you felt compelled to write?
Anna Abraham (07:30)
Well, the 19 are going to come as well. But this is the first one to come out. ⁓ Well, first of all, when one gets to a certain level of being a creative neuroscientist, and I don't know if this is true of all of us in the field, but certainly for me, when I started to do a lot more public engagement events, you know, speaking to the general public, I started to notice when you get away from your community and you're speaking to people who don't have a great curiosity about creativity, which
I I've never met anyone who's not. ⁓ And have a lot of notions about what it is. And some things started to consistently come out as things that people held to be true, such as the creativity mental illness link, the link between the right brain and creativity, psychedelics and creativity. And there was something else that fascinated me, not just the questions, but that even if you told people, well, it's not that simple. Well, it's not that, well, it's a little more complicated. It didn't seem to satisfy.
a person's need to know what that was. And I thought, and that actually made me even more interested. Okay, there's a they've heard. I'm sure they've had a lot of myth busting from a lot of people. I'm not the first person to do myth busting when it comes to creativity, but it doesn't, it doesn't, it just falls flat. doesn't seem to, it doesn't even take hold. And I was very interested in why that was. So the book, I think was trying to make a case for, let's examine.
I picked seven myths about the creative brain, myth truths I was always referring to it as, about the creative brain to think we have these specific notions, let's see how they started, let's do an archival troll, so to speak, when did they start, what do we know about it, and what is the best way to understand it? To sort of not see it as a black and white issue, it's right or wrong, it's myth or truth, but to essentially come to the conclusions I did in every single one of them, which is that
Every myth has a kernel of truth in it. And it's about how the story gets told that it becomes flattened and like one dimensional in the telling of the tale. But if you actually explore the stories, it's really interesting what you learn about creativity and how people came to these assumptions about why this works in this particular context, why do psychedelics work sometimes, but not other times. ⁓ The story, the, you know, our
story making brain is such that we highlight the things that work, not the things that don't work. Things that don't work are kind of boring, right? So there's something about our need for storytelling that it's not enough for us to tell people, for people to be satisfied. I said, well, that's not the case, but we don't really know. Nobody wants to don't know. They'd rather go with this is close enough, or it feels good enough, because I know when one of the big questions I always get is children are so creative, grownups grow out of it.
And I'm thinking, why do you think that way? And they're like, well, let's say all eight year olds draw, almost no 28 year olds draw, right? So they're coming from a place of like sort of lived experience. They don't see it around them. They see a lot of children doing a lot of creative fun things. They don't see adults do it. So it's very difficult to misplace that notion and say that's not actually true that adults in general are not creative because it doesn't, and if I don't have a better story to offer in place.
they're going to cling to the thing that's based on what they think to be true or what they know from their own experience or what someone else influential is told, you know, influential, I don't know, critic or whatever's told them. So that's the interesting thing about why we, it's almost a story, it's almost a book almost about why we like these stories ⁓ because a lot of these explanations are pretty magical and there's something about creativity that is so impressive, of course. ⁓ So fills us with awe and wonder that we also want
explanations that kind of feed, you know, our representative are worthy of this thing that you're trying to explain. So we like outlandish explanations more than sort of boring stuff. So that's what the book explores, a little bit about what the myths are, why we think this way, and to get a sense of what the human brain does in terms of why it makes us want good, stories over truth. We like the poetic truth more than the real truth, so to speak.
James Taylor (11:46)
So one of those ones that we often hear people come up to you, if I'm on a plane and they say, what do you do? I said, I speak about creativity, innovation, AI. And they say, yeah, I'm really left brain or I'm really, I think I'm really more right brain. So this is one of the myths that you kind of myth truths that you kind of talk about in the book. So tell us this whole right brain thing when it comes to creativity, is there a kernel of truth in that?
Anna Abraham (12:11)
Yeah.
⁓ There certainly is. ⁓ It's a very old story. It's one of the myth truths that was birthed at the time when ⁓ a lot of exciting work was happening in the neurosciences that were focused on hemispheric lateralization. And it was very clear that from patients with certain types of atypicalities who had to have certain types of surgery that severed communication between their left hemisphere and the right hemisphere to sort of
solve the problem or at least make an intractable epilepsy and think of the past. You know, there were these sorts of surgeries that needed to be done. It's really strange that people were almost like completely themselves, even though this major surgery had happened where large sections of their white matter tracks that allow for the left and right hemisphere to communicate with each other in a way that's really fast and efficient. There are other tracks through which they can do that, but it's a little slower.
people tend to be fine. And then when they did these sort of clever experiments, it became really clear that the left hemisphere was so important for all sorts of functions, right? So the first area, the first, let's say the throne of glory went to the left hemisphere and it came to things like intentional actions, language, and so on, which, and because we're human beings and we use language a lot, we think of it as sort of defining our species in very specific ways. And so,
a really weird thing happened in that the right brain began to be attributed everything that was not, you know, goal-directed, everything that was more passion, thoughtlessness, everything else, almost as a sort of, there must be an area that does this, because there are people who are not as rational, and so on. So the right brain decided to get to be seen as like, it doesn't seem to be that important for the things that really matter, know, logic, communication, and analytical ability.
⁓ And then came along ⁓ the idea that it was the right brain had something of worth came from the original team, the Roger Sperry team who found out about hemispheric lateralization differences. And I think it was because one member of that team, so it came from the group that was very respected as opposed to some random person, know, saying, well, when it comes to creative acts, and again, he didn't really have
the data for it. He was very, very ⁓ articulate person. He said, that, why am I blanking on his name? I am blanking on his name right now. But he said, and which is unforgivable, I'm sorry for that, but he, ⁓ I don't know why I'm blanking.
James Taylor (14:51)
Is that the-
which is- maybe that's the part with the right part is memory. Maybe that's what it is. That's why we're going that way. Short term memory.
Anna Abraham (14:57)
⁓ It's deteriorating in real time. ⁓
Well, he said was that the right and the left are both important. And the right is really important for certain aspects of the creative process, such as when you work away from the problem, the incubation stage and so on. He never said that the left is not important. All he said was that the right brain being delegated as this nothing-y hemisphere is incorrect. And it plays a big role in creative ideation.
And so of course he's not wrong because if you do fMRI studies for instance, and so on, you usually find both hemispheres involved in some way, you know. Depending on the type of task, you might see more left or right depending on if it's verbal or if it's ⁓ a figural task and so on. ⁓ But that sort of revolutionized a lot. ⁓ That understanding that the right brain is really important potentially for creative functions. Again, he didn't really have a lot of data to show this.
⁓ But it didn't really matter. ⁓ That was enough. And over time it went from, in no time it went from the right brain is important to the right brain is the seat. But none of the people who were talking about the importance of the right brain ever said that the left brain has no role. Just over time that that became the sort of, because it was neglected, let's give it a spotlight. The good thing about having that happen, even if it's not particularly correct,
is that it led to real changes in the way curriculums were designed, for instance, because people thought, well, let's cater to both sides of your mind. A more holistic. Yeah, let's not just make everything abstract about something written on a board. Let's think of it as visual and auditory. And let's try and work with more multimodally in the classroom to... ⁓
James Taylor (16:35)
Holistic be a more holistic education education system
Anna Abraham (16:52)
reach out to students, particularly those with issues, right? Have issues concentrating, have issues ⁓ perhaps even with learning and so on. And so over time, the whole right brain, left brain thing, I think at this point, ⁓ it doesn't even matter if it's right or wrong. It serves a purpose as a metaphor, you know? So if you and I were to want to do a collaboration together and we spoke to some company.
It wouldn't matter to the company what's right or wrong. If I say, we want to engage in more right brain thought, they immediately get it. It's because this metaphor, it's just now the way we think about things. So it has become powerful because it's important, but not because it has any particular truth value in its extreme form, ⁓ but because it essentially caused a revolution in the way we think about human thought. And so it's become that placard for
a more imaginative style of thinking means engaging the right brain in some way as opposed to this left brain, logical brain in some
James Taylor (17:56)
there is also even within that let's say there's this kind of plasticity within that I know I remember reading years ago some patients with forms of dementia or Alzheimer's as they get further into their their disease as attacks different parts of the brain suddenly they
become a little bit more creative. They start to paint and it kind of, you know, they're a little bit to the point where they maybe start to take off all their clothes, which can go a little bit maybe too far. so what's going on that that can be attacking, killing the right brain, you know, that just must be going for different, different things in the brain.
Anna Abraham (18:17)
Yes.
Yeah, first of all, it's Joseph Bogan is the name of the man who started this all. Thank you, Joseph Bogan. So in the case of neurodegenerative disorders and many others, it's a, explore that in another chapter actually, because it's more than just the right brain and left brain thing. You see this interesting phenomenon ⁓ in certain types of dementia like frontotemporal dementia, where it was, think, first properly studied.
James Taylor (18:37)
Got there, we got there, we got there. We'll put a link to Joseph as well. work.
Anna Abraham (19:03)
⁓ in the mid 90s it started, where they noticed that ⁓ not all patients with frontotemporal dementia, which is essentially characterized by the atrophy of the most anterior portions of the frontal lobe and the temporal lobe. So the frontal pole and the temporal pole gradually started to deteriorate and depending on which area is more affected, there are different types of ⁓ subtypes of frontotemporal dementia or FDD.
In a subset of these patients, they noticed something really strange. ⁓ In a subset of them, even though they had no prior artistic training or actually any particular interest in the arts, a sub, this small subset, but sizable, you keep seeing this again and again and again, they develop an incredible interest in the arts and start to engage and practice in the arts. It's primarily visual art.
But there have been some cases of musical as well and just a few of literary arts, but it's primarily in the visual domain. ⁓ So it becomes like, ⁓ it's not just a passing interest, it becomes almost a compulsive interest in wanting to engage more and more in it. And it becomes everything that they do. So a lot of these patients, you know, perhaps they can't go back to what they were doing before, ⁓ but start to spend a lot of time painting, ⁓ sketching, doing things like that.
James Taylor (20:25)
Is that also
because maybe other parts language, other parts have been closed down? So they're looking for, almost like the brain's trying to rewire, trying to find an outlet for that, that's already within that person.
Anna Abraham (20:36)
Yeah,
that's great observation. That's exactly what Dalia Zadel from UCLA, who studies this phenomenon of de novo creativity, would say it is, is that as human beings, really have a sort of powerful drive to express yourself and to communicate. And so when your most obvious form of communication, which is to speak or write, shuts down, that needs to...
to express, to communicate, to be yourself, in some way is still there, that drive is still there. And so it becomes, let's say, operationalized through these other mediums that you weren't necessarily particularly exposed to. But after some point, that becomes your only way, because very often in these types of situations, slowly the ability to understand, produce language just slowly diminishes over time. And this continues all the way till the end. ⁓
James Taylor (21:19)
course.
So the
thing that inhibits that, I'm also, wondering, so why anyone, you don't have to get dementia or forms of Alzheimer's to kind of go there. I'm wondering, like, when I, my father's a jazz musician, jazz guitarist, and I noticed something with great jazz musicians and comedians, they are almost able to switch something off in their brain that you and I probably have all the time, which says, don't do that.
don't say that, it's almost like, it's like a train where suddenly all the paths are open and they can just go for good or for bad, because sometimes it can take them down tracks that they can't figure out how to get out of, but is that, is also what's kind of going on there and this creativity in general, is that something that we over time we can learn to just kind of switch off, to switch on, or is it something that's just we, what's kind of going on? Is it a chemical thing, what's happening?
Anna Abraham (21:56)
Mm.
It's a good question. I think it's not studied in the lab and so on as much because it's impossible to. It's so in the moment, it's so unpredictable. Things that are unpredictable are very hard to study in neuroscientific labs. ⁓ as you've just mentioned, if you have any contact with people who are in the business of producing creative acts and so on, ⁓ that's part of who they are. ⁓ They have learned with time.
James Taylor (22:32)
in the moment.
Anna Abraham (22:54)
For one thing, what's really common to all creative people that I've met and I've read about and we live in an age where you can read so many interviews of all these incredible achievers. ⁓ They all differ in terms of their particular practices, but what they do have in common is that they're all incredibly reflective and curious about their own minds and how they operate. So they have what they've, you what you see is this metacognitive ability is
what they have in common. They're really curious about how they do it. There these great interviews with Pat Metheny, who's improvising all, tries to improvise on a nightly basis, it seems, or something. And he creates, he writes extensive notes about, because he's very interested in getting into the flow state.
Just because someone's trying to improvise and be there doesn't mean they're always doing what they think is the absolute pinnacle of what they can achieve. know, they seem to be doing great and we listen to it and it's wonderful, but for them each person has a certain bar. And to get into that state is a little bit outside their control, but they know the conditions that are more likely to lead to it. ⁓ The person who's talked a lot about this rather well about it, not a lot perhaps, is John Cleese actually. When he talks about
the, you know, he's got a little creativity book out that came out, I think, two years ago. ⁓ But he has this very famous lecture now online that he has delivered to, delivered in the 90s to like a business crowd. ⁓ And he identifies conditions that you create. And I think this is what I think all creative, like people who are in the business of trying to be, like, know, it's either their profession or they love to do it, whatever it might be. Recognize that they need to shift something.
intentionally about the way their minds are going down. Because our minds are mind brains if you want.
essentially work on the principle of the path of least resistance, right? So if you want to get out of your room now, you're not going to take a zigzag path, you're going go straight to it. That's just automatic. It's what you're going to do. And that's because our brains are that way. We're just not going to do things that are unnecessary. This is not a problem in our daily life. This is absolutely excellent for our daily lives. When it comes to creativity though, going down the path of least resistance means going to the same boring space. So you have to essentially disrupt
these pathways, these normal pathways that you're on. And most creative people have some way of getting disrupting their own ⁓ ability to take the easy way out. And they do it a number of different ways. And so someone like John Cleese points out, for instance, as a writer, ⁓ what you need to do. You need to sort of try and get into the open mode, the space where it's more playful. It's a little bit.
It's zany and so on, but essentially you have to create a space time kind of, what does he call it? A space time oasis where you understand that there's going to be that voice that tells you don't do this, don't do that, but actually just wait for it to die down. Yeah. And then engage. When I had the opportunity to try and do some workshoppy things with some really eminent creators, composers, writers, and so on.
James Taylor (25:57)
Yeah.
Anna Abraham (26:08)
I tried to like engineer some disrupt some things for them. And they were, I remember one of the feedback I got was just sort of like, had this work for you? They're like, well, you could have, you could have made it really hard for us and we would have still managed to step out of it and do what we do because we literally have to train for this, you know, to not, to just break away from the path of least resistance. If there's noise in the area around you, you still have to work through it. If, ⁓ you know, ⁓ if you have a deadline, you have to, you have to get this composition done by then. You have to finish your writing by then.
You just, you can't create a perfect, ⁓ there'll be lots of situations where you know that something is going to disrupt your ability to do it. And even in like high performance athletes, this is sort of like why they will do a lot of visualization to try and visualize all of the possible things that could go wrong here or change and defer from what you've trained for, ⁓ at least visualize it so that you can get down that different path. it is definitely neuro, I mean, to say it's chemical would be probably too basic, but it's,
It's a behavioral, it's a cognitive behavioral sort of top-down thing you do that just blows things apart. And that can come to you easily when you're with enough practice.
James Taylor (27:20)
You were mentioning John Cleese. I was doing an event actually in Stockholm in Sweden and I was staying at a hotel and I bumped into him because he was staying at the same hotel and I actually had a we had a conversation, I was asking him about it. And one of the things I remember he said, maybe on the well-known videos or something else I'd seen him, was this idea of like a lens focusing and defocusing. And...
Anna Abraham (27:28)
Wow.
James Taylor (27:42)
And something I often talk and I've delivered this, I've mentioned this in Bogota and Colombia and I thought they were gonna kill me on stage when I said it, but there was some great work by Martha Farrar, a neuroscience professor from the University of Pennsylvania, where she said she discovered that high levels of caffeine coffee will reduce the number of insights that you have.
Anna Abraham (28:02)
Mmm.
James Taylor (28:04)
And what I was explaining to the audience, I said, there's nothing wrong with caffeine, coffee's great. And I use it for like the preparation stage and I'll use it for the last stage, like when you're building something. But often in these middle stages, like going back to the John Cleese thing, you actually want to defocus your brain and caffeine works exactly in the opposite. And when you tell the audience, business audiences that, they go, ah, I get it. But what I know, and I don't know, because you have the joy of speaking to all these students every day and they're lit up and...
Often the audience I have to speak, I speak to and I love speaking to are very grounded business audiences that are thinking about KPIs and pharmaceutical companies or whatever the company is. And so my job is to go there and make the case for creativity in an audience that might not necessarily think there's great value, maybe the advertising department or the marketing. So I'm normally going in, speaking of a technical people, mechanics, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers for example.
Anna Abraham (28:42)
sure.
James Taylor (29:02)
One thing I have to do at the very start is I have to define what I mean by this word creativity. Because in the language we often hear it's like artistic or music. say, well that's not what I'm talking about here. That is important. For me and the definition I give, which is one of many I guess, creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world. But without creativity there is no innovation. Creativity is the engine of innovation. So once you're to get them on that, the other one that often they go, they're surprised at,
is that creativity is a teachable or a trainable skill, like a language something can be improved upon. And the thing, and kind of coming back to the work that you do, I talked to her about the Torrance test. And I could have measured all of your creative levels when you came in today using something called the Torrance test, and I'll do a workshop with you, and at the end, we could have measured your creative, and we'll see it increase. And a lot of people are really shocked that there is something that actually, that this is a measurable thing. So,
We should probably first, like you are at the Torrance Center, so we should probably describe, first of all, who is Torrance? And we're thinking about creativity. What is this Torrance test? And does it still hold up today?
Anna Abraham (30:12)
Yeah. Yeah, so I'm at the University of Georgia and my position is of the E. Paul Torrance professor. ⁓ Upon his retirement in 86, his graduate student founded the Torrance Center for Creativity. ⁓ Torrance was an educational psychologist and he realized, and you know, for those of us who aren't necessarily in education, ⁓ he realized that something was being, was not.
being focused on at all when it came to child development and the development of children's skills, which was creativity. People focused on math, on language, science skills, and so on. But there was very little focus on creativity. And he was sort of prescient in realizing that this was something that was really necessary in the time. And so when he started to do this kind of work in the 50s and the 60s, the 1950s and the 1960s.
And again, very prescient of him. was very aware of a lot. That was kind of the golden age of, you know, from the fifties on to the seventies, maybe creativity research, just a huge amount of impetus of work there. And he was very much in touch with all of those ⁓ theories. And I think spoke extensively to all of the big people in the field there. And what he recognized was that for education, the field of education and practice to take something seriously, you're to have to devise a test because they only
you have to be able to pick, ⁓ create something measurable so that they know, we can target something, we can see a skill and we can see it develop. So again, very prescient in realizing that, it's great what the psychologists do in terms of like coming up with tasks and assessing creativity, but he took it a step further to say, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna devise a test for creativity, just like you have a test for anything else. And ⁓ it's still in use, it gets.
⁓ re-normed every 10 years. The last norming happened just last year. And so it's all constantly updated. And he had a range of tests of which only two are really widely used now because they have a lot more predictive value than the others. ⁓ And that one is ⁓ the verbal test and the other one is the figural test. So things like the one sounds and movement and all are not really used as much, not for the testing of creativity. Certainly...
You could use them for the engagement of creative imagination in a big way to use in classrooms and so on. ⁓ So the test is still in use. It's used very widely in the United States and some other parts of the world, Turkey, not in South Korea and so on, where there is a huge amount of focus on creativity as one of the many traits that might distinguish highly capable children ⁓ from others who are less capable. ⁓
James Taylor (32:50)
think Singapore,
I seem to remember, were very big into, because obviously the PISA rankings, all these countries are obsessed about reaching the top of the PISA rankings.
Anna Abraham (32:53)
yeah.
Yes.
Yes, and speaking of PISA, PISA's last variant of PISA essentially added a new component which was critical in creative thinking. So ⁓ it's now part of the PISA measurements as well ⁓ to assess creative thinking. When you said Singapore and PISA, was like, because Singapore is part of that.
James Taylor (33:15)
And
many of these tests then, they're measuring basically what we think like divergent and convergent thinking, your ability to do these different ways.
Anna Abraham (33:23)
Yeah.
So I think what we have to be very careful about is like a lot of these tests, it's not, they measure very specific aspects of creativity. So there's some things that you can't measure through those test batteries because it involves, let's say, engaging in a creative practice in real time. doesn't test for flow. It can't because you have to be doing something to be engaged in flow. And you can ask about something retrospectively, which a lot of flow questionnaires do.
⁓ So there's lots of things that can't be tested in that format. But the things that they do look at are your ability to think, come up with a lot of different ideas, think divergently, think beyond the obvious, beyond the path of least resistance. And the focus is really on children more than adults because that's kind of what is this population, ⁓ especially because the norming goes from like, goes across childhood to adulthood, but isn't.
continue after that. Like a lot of tests, it doesn't matter if you're 18 or 24, how you perform on a test. But there'll be a big difference depending on whether you're 10 or 15, right? So...
James Taylor (34:26)
I
think for lot of these audience, business audiences, they kind of go, okay, realize, where can I do this test? And so then I tell them, you go online, they can take this test. The other one, which I'm not sure if you can have spoke so much about in the book, but kind of links, it's almost the historical thing you spoke about at the start. And I quote this myth of the lone creative genius. And I think it works very well because most large organizations are...
Creativity is collaborative in most work. And one of the things I sometimes do, friend of mine, Frederick Haran, who's a wonderful speaker, speaks on creativity as well. He asked audiences at the start, how many people you consider yourself to be creative? And he said, depending if I'm speaking in America or Europe or South Korea, it's gonna be vastly different. Where it tends to be in Asia and especially South Asia, they tend to vote lower. And...
Anna Abraham (34:55)
Yeah.
James Taylor (35:20)
One of the things that I often talk with audiences about is this idea of this lone creative genius test, which you said at the start, it's a good narrative, it's great. And then, and you'll be able to kind of probably correct me on this, the one I, my understanding of where a lot of that kind of came from, if you go back in many societies, it was always felt that we were...
we were vessels for creativity. That could come from the genius loci as the Romans recorded, the places themselves had their own creative genius or community or your tribe. And then a guy called Giorgio Vasari wrote a book, Lives of the Artists and the Renaissance. And he said, no, Leonardo.
is the genius, it's not that he has genius, but by doing that he kind of painted out all the contribution of the Medici's, the sponsors, the paint, the supplies of all the equipment, all the assistants as well. So this, is this lone creative genius, is that something that kind of comes up or is it really a substrand of like something, this kind of myth that we often talk about?
Anna Abraham (36:02)
Hmm.
Yeah, don't think a lot of the person, the people who've worked a lot on that are people like, you know, um, Simon and Dean, Simon and people like that. So there's.
I think
James Taylor (36:35)
It's more
cultural, isn't it? I guess more than it necessarily is scientific.
Anna Abraham (36:39)
Yeah, I think it's just
in a time where I think a lot of the time you have to think about, were they alone by choice? There suddenly are people who are alone when they did it, or was it just not available? We live in a hyper-connected world, a hyper-social world. ⁓ So it's very hard to imagine the kind of person who would be sort of isolated in some little room.
James Taylor (37:02)
The Zen Master sitting on a mountain somewhere in Japan or...
Anna Abraham (37:05)
But it's there,
right? Like there are certain types of fields for which that sort of solitariness is absolutely key to the, I would say it's not that it's a myth that it's there, it just depends on what type of creativity you're talking about, what field. I would say in the field of math, there's a lot of silence sitting around doing your thing, know, focusing very much on your task at hand. In writing, there's a lot of that. In music, there is not. There's a lot of, it really involves a lot.
a huge set of people and increasingly more and more now as productions get more complex. ⁓ In writing, if you're writing a novel alone or a poem, that's a solitary thing. If you're writing for a show, there's a lot of group writing. So it just depends on the context and some content, you know, an athlete trying to get better and better, there's parts of it that's going to be very isolating, very, very themselves on their own trying to hone their techniques and others that
demand that you are working with other people to hone your skills, to be able to react better and so on. So I think of this loan versus not loan question as a bit sort of, well, it kind of depends. The answer for me is a little bit banal because it depends on what you're trying to do. There are situations in which we would always say you need to get away and get into yourself. And there are others and it might be doing the same process and then other parts where you have to exchange. So
in a scientific lab. There are parts by your way and other parts where you're exchanging with others. And as they say, exchange is oxygen, right? Like, I forget who said that. it is, there is no one part that, and I think anyone who would sort of put forward that there's one part to being creative is going to necessarily be wrong. There are, if anything, many, many routes. If you are going to be entirely on your own, it doesn't mean that you can't be creative. Of course you can, yeah? And so on.
James Taylor (38:56)
I always wanted to have a
t-shirt, I always wanted to have a t-shirt, and you would go to, so I could go to these demonstrations about something, so someone was like very like fixed about, this is the right way, and another group was like, no, this is the right way. And I always wanted to have a t-shirt, which just said, I think you'll find it's a little bit more complicated than that. Sorry, because then, so anyone wants to make a t-shirt? Because it is, but what, I mean, you're teaching, you're around, you're...
Anna Abraham (39:13)
Please make that one.
James Taylor (39:24)
like lots of educated people, incredibly smart women, but what is the most pervasive myth of all these myths that you share in the book? What is the most pervasive myth, even amongst people that you think probably should know better?
Anna Abraham (39:42)
I wouldn't say any one. I think a lot of the problem of how people approach creativity, and I think that's, I will count it as a myth, is that they see creativity on one hand as this magical thing that they don't or don't have, and like, please give me a bullet. Can I take psychedelics and then become more creative? So there's...
A real lack of understanding, I think, of what it is, and that's primarily because we're very, notions of creativity are very much based on what we think of as creative. And for some of us, we will be looking at musicians. For others among us, we will be looking at authors and so on. But just like people are very famous, and that gives you a very skewed understanding of what creativity is. For me, the biggest myth is a lot of our notions about what creativity is are mythical or not completely correct.
because it's based on exceptional creativity. People who've done things that are incredibly important for their fields and have really received the recognition for it, which is like the top 5%. But there is creativity that is most of the things that are more interesting about creativity for everyday regular people is based on, would say, is general creativity, everyday creativity. And things there look slightly different.
actually. And so that, think, is the main reason why they're so mistaken about what creativity is. And the second thing is, I would say, related to that is that people looking at exceptionality think, exceptionality, came to them easy, they're talented. All of that is all wrong, by the way. People at that stage have had to work so, so hard. And so part of looking at things that look amazing and otherworldly,
makes us think that this comes to people easily. They've not had to work hard. And the other side is the unglamorous part of creativity is where the real truth is, which is that it's a craft. You have to keep working at it. It's actually better to think of it as akin to physical fitness. That, you know, we never tell people, well, don't bother running because you can't run as fast as the St. Both. That's exceptional physical prowess. What we're looking at is like normal physical fitness. And it's good for me.
to try and run a little bit, even though they're not going to be the fastest, right? And so that's way to think about creativity is as more like your own creative fitness is about pushing yourself, but only doing things makes you understand what you are uniquely capable of. And that's where creativity is. A lot of bad focus on creativity, I think, comes from understand thinking of creativity as externally determined. Only if someone recognizes that I'm creative, am I being creative. That's also.
very separate from what you create, what you come up with, because that's the starting point. The starting point is not how someone else sees it. The starting point is actually what you come up with. So there's just, for me, it's hard to pick on one because there are so many terrible notions we have about creativity ⁓ that come from a very skewed understanding. We're looking at a distinct few, ⁓ and we think about it as more simple than it is, if you see what I mean.
James Taylor (42:50)
Do it.
The one I
often think about is when someone says, ⁓ of someone who's very, they're doing an amazing job, whatever their field is, you're such a natural. It's so natural. And I think about someone like Nikki Glaser who did the Oscars, I think it was last year, the Emmys last year. And her performance, her opening monologue was so brilliant. And...
but what people don't see is that she rehearsed that 87 times. She workshopped that bit, that 10 minute bit so many times. And someone like Michael Caine said, the practice is the work, the performance is the play. And the audience only ever see that tiny little bit at the front and go, it's so natural. It's obviously so natural. I guess that as a compliment because the person has put in those hours and it's made it like, I mean, I'm sure like when you write that book,
Anna Abraham (43:23)
yours.
Mm-hmm.
James Taylor (43:48)
that is just the smallest part of all that research, all those years you've spent studying as well. As we start to finish up here, I would love to know, we're gonna talk about, we're gonna have links to your book and your work as well, but is there a book by another author just now that you've been, it could be related to creativity or even maybe a bit broader than that, that's really made you kind of rethink?
this field that you're in, or you've come at it and it's just kind of like a breath of fresh air, or you've just kind of reconsidered ⁓ the world and the way you look at it in some ways. Is there a book that's been like that over the past year or so for you?
Anna Abraham (44:25)
book on creativity?
James Taylor (44:27)
It could be on something else, maybe obviously with your kind wide academic side as well.
Anna Abraham (44:35)
There are a few things. When it comes to a book on creativity, would recommend the active, oh my God, no, we're gonna have to redo this. What's his name?
James Taylor (44:49)
We'll put a link to it.
Anna Abraham (44:53)
What's it called? Well, it's Rick Rubin's creativity book.
James Taylor (44:56)
Oh yeah, it's cool. I know it's got the circle on it. I can see it now actually. It's called... Yes, I know the one. I blanked on it. The creative act, that's the one? Yes. Yes.
Anna Abraham (45:02)
Yeah. ⁓
The creative act, the creative, is that what? Yeah, okay. ⁓
I think that is.
For me, I found that just very intriguing ⁓ because a lot of the time when you read interviews or the scientific work can get so divorced from what creativity is that it felt wonderful sort of listening to a practitioner, someone who really is in the business of creativity, but being able to recognize and of course constantly being the business of listening to things that are new, completely new and trying to figure out how this
how it makes you feel and so on. So I just liked the whole experiential nature of how he focuses on the creative act and really makes a case for that internal over the external more than anything else is the starting point. And I think very few, very few books ever do that. ⁓ So I think that was would count because that was maybe in the last year that I read it. ⁓ And more recently,
⁓ In preparation for a class that I'm doing, started to read Bill Bryson's book called The Body. And that's been marvelous ⁓ to really get a sense of how incredible the human body is and how little we know. from what we, know, it's a nice sort of overview of all of our different systems and how much we think we know what we know and how much we get wrong and how sort of the early pioneers.
in these fields, a lot of them were like absolute heroes who died in the cause and then others are just disgusting specimens who stole their students' work. It's just this wonderful sort of outlining of what it takes to build a field of knowledge and all of the remarkable sort of little stories in there, ⁓ including getting a sense of what our bodies are. things like, I don't know, the...
James Taylor (46:52)
Yeah.
Fantastic.
Anna Abraham (47:10)
the brain in your gut, right? Like gut brain. When I started as a neuroscience student, we weren't really taught this, but there's so much now that we know. So it's just wonderful to read that, to have read that, to get a sort of renewed appreciation of how remarkable our physiology is, this thing that allows us to be creative. It all starts from the body, from within you. And that's been wonderful to, yeah, to have that reignited again, that appreciation.
James Taylor (47:13)
Mmm.
Great, we'll put those links here as well. And finally, if people want to learn more about you and your work, we're have a link to the Creative Brain. But if they want to learn more about the research, the other things that you're working on, just now that over there in Georgia, where's the best place for to go and do that?
Anna Abraham (47:51)
Possibly my website is the best place, which is www.anna-abraham.com. ⁓ That's where I keep things updated, but people can always email me if they have questions.
James Taylor (48:05)
Well, Dr. Anna Abraham, it's been a pleasure having you on the SuperCreativity Podcast. Thanks for being a guest.
Anna Abraham (48:11)
Thank you so much for this conversation.
How Curiosity Beats Goals with Anne-Laure Le Cunff #360
30 Sep 2025
00:44:00
Tiny Experiments: How Curiosity Beats Goals with Anne-Laure Le Cunff #360
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, James Taylor speaks with Anne-Laure Le Cunff — neuroscientist, entrepreneur, founder of Ness Labs, and author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.
Anne-Laure shares her personal journey from Google’s hustle culture to a health crisis that sparked a radical rethinking of success. Instead of chasing fixed goals and rigid outcomes, she advocates for a mindset of tiny experiments—low-risk, curiosity-driven trials that build resilience, creativity, and self-knowledge.
We explore her insights on neuroscience, neurodiversity, and how curiosity paired with ambition leads to growth. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, leader, or recovering goal-setter, this conversation will help you embrace uncertainty, cultivate creativity, and design a life built on exploration rather than obsession.
Notable Quotes
“Success is not reaching a goal. Success is learning something new.” – Anne-Laure Le Cunff
“A tiny experiment has no fixed outcome. Your only goal is to show up and explore.” – Anne-Laure Le Cunff
“Curiosity without ambition is escapism. Ambition without curiosity is perfectionism. An experimental mindset is both.” – Anne-Laure Le Cunff
“We don’t need to fix brains. We need to design environments that fit different brains.” – Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Goals can trap us — shifting to tiny experiments fosters learning, joy, and freedom.
Curiosity + ambition = experimental mindset — a healthier alternative to perfectionism or cynicism.
Neurodiversity as strength — ADHD and nonlinear thinking can be powerful in the right environments.
Failure ≠ failure — experiments reframe outcomes as data and opportunities to learn.
Practical tools — “Plus, Minus, Next” weekly review and stop-doing lists can spark creativity and focus.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
00:00 – Introduction to Anne-Laure Le Cunff and Tiny Experiments
01:18 – A health crisis at Google that changed everything
04:08 – Hustle culture, identity, and immigrant family expectations
05:57 – Leaving Google and family reactions
07:34 – Startup life: why uncertainty felt scarier than overwork
09:27 – When startup failure became freedom
10:50 – Returning to study neuroscience out of curiosity
12:40 – Curiosity, ADHD, and neurodiversity as superpowers
14:57 – The first “tiny experiment” and the generation effect
17:42 – Recall, connections, and building a personal knowledge network
21:27 – Systems vs. goals and how tiny experiments bridge the gap
26:09 – Redefining success: not binary, but data and learning
28:53 – OKRs, KPIs, and where experiments fit in business
30:53 – Non-attachment, curiosity, and Buddhist parallels
31:57 – Curiosity + ambition: the experimental mindset matrix
35:32 – The dangers of “one true purpose”
39:54 – How to start your first tiny experiment today
40:47 – The “Plus, Minus, Next” weekly review ritual
42:03 – Recommended book: How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
43:21 – Where to find Anne-Laure’s work and newsletter
TRANSCRIPT
James Taylor (00:09)Today's guest is Anne-Laure Le Cunff neuroscientist, entrepreneur, founder of Nest Labs, and author of Tiny Experiments, How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Anne-Laure has written a book that turns the ambition-driven, outcome-focused language of success on its head, arguing that curiosity, experimentation, and small trials are more sustainable and actually often more illuminating than fixed goals. From leaving a high-profile role at Google to building a thriving learning community,
Her journey has been about reclaiming meaning, creativity, and self-knowledge in a busy world. If you're tired of chasing milestones and want to make choices that feel genuinely yours, then this episode is for you. Anne-Laure welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (00:55)
What an amazing introduction. Thanks so much for having me, James.
James Taylor (00:59)
So I mentioned earlier, were early on in your career, you working at Google, so I'm wondering, working at Google with all that external valuations and what was the moment that you felt something fundamentally inside you kind of changed, that that linear path, those OKRs, those metrics, wasn't delivering what you thought it would?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (01:18)
I loved my job at Google. I loved my team. I loved the projects I was working on. It was exciting work, very intellectually stimulating work. So it took something external. It took a trigger, a big change for me to notice that something was wrong. And that thing for me was a health crisis. So I was working at Google in San Francisco at the time. I was working pretty hard.
I had a very long to do list, lots of projects, but again, just waking up every morning, going to work, and sometimes canceling social plans, but just getting things done. So one morning, like any other, I was in my bathroom brushing my teeth, and in the mirror, I noticed that my entire arm had turned purple. And so I went to the Google Infirmary, because yes, we had an infirmary on campus at Google, of course.
And the nurse there had one look at my arm and said, you need to go to the hospital straight away. So I went to the hospital and the doctor said, we need to operate as soon as possible. You have a blood clot in your arm that is threatening to travel to your lungs. And in that moment, what did I do? I said, one second, let me check my calendar. So I...
James Taylor (02:39)
How?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (02:42)
The doctors were telling me that I needed surgery as soon as possible, but in my mind, what was most important at that moment was to check that all of the projects I was working on were going to be okay, that my to-do list was still going to be taken care of. And I had this almost like out of body experience when you see yourself do something completely absurd. Who is that person who is having this response?
to disinformation. This is when for me, I realized that despite the intellectual stimulation, despite the fact that I was working on very interesting stuff, something was really out of whack in my life in terms of my sense of priorities.
James Taylor (03:27)
So I'm wondering, like, what do you think, I mean, your upbringing was this kind of way of thinking about things, was that something in your family or did you, when you, I used to work in the Bay Area as well and there was obviously that very kind of hustle culture, quite long hours, very entrepreneurial, very driven, it feels like there, it's almost like part of the water when you drink the water there, you're kind of getting that as well. So where did that?
You know, that first, that sense of, okay, no, actually the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to check my calendar and do kind of the business-y stuff before I actually focus on my health and my wellbeing. Was that something that just kind of seeped into your life, that way of thinking about the world?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (04:08)
It's interesting because I've shared that story many times, but I've never really been asked the question exactly in this way. And it makes me wonder, it's kind of a chicken and the egg kind of story, right? Because what kind of people are the kind of people who are going to seek the kind of jobs and this kind of hustle culture that you have in Silicon Valley and then make that culture, that culture is not appearing out of thin air. Culture is made by people, right? But then it becomes this almost
self-perpetrating cycle where because the culture is like that, then people feel like that in order to fit within that culture, they also have to have those kinds of priorities where work is more important than everything else. So to answer your question, I think that because of my background coming from an immigrant family where work was considered a very, very important value, I already had this sense in myself, the sense of identity that I was the kind of person
who gets things done. I was the kind of person that you could count on, that I was not the kind of person who would let their team down, right? So that was really important to me, even if at a subconscious level. And second, yes, absolutely, Silicon Valley is known for its hustle culture. And I think part of me, again, even if I hadn't really articulated that to myself in a conscious way, was scared that people would think less of me.
because I was not able to deliver on the promises I had made at work.
James Taylor (05:35)
Now, at that point, you made a decision and for those people who don't know, getting to work at Google was like one of I know it's one the most competitive things in terms of getting in there as a role as well. so what was that decision and how did your coworkers respond when you kind of told them of your decision?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (05:57)
I decided to leave, which as you've mentioned, getting this job was actually wasn't easy. And especially as someone whose English is not my first language, I didn't grow up in the US. And so I had all of these additional barriers. And a lot of my coworkers were surprised in the sense that, you know, why would you leave such a job? It was, it was such a great job, right? The most surprising, not necessarily surprising,
response though, the reaction that was the hardest for me to manage though was not from my coworkers. It was from my family, from my mom specifically. She thought I was headed for the homeless shelter. She was incredibly worried that I would quit my job. And I can understand, I can understand where that came from. She went from feeling like she had done her job, that I would be safe, that I had a stable career.
financial security to all of a sudden getting the news that I decided to leave all of that behind and to try and do something else.
James Taylor (07:04)
Yeah, I think that story or what you described there will be very familiar to a lot of listeners if they come obviously from immigrant backgrounds as well and their parents who obviously had to give up things in order to get the better for their children and then you make this decision, it's almost like saying, I'm gonna go and join the circus. It's like, what are you thinking? So you made this decision, what did you do next? Did you take some time out just to focus on your health or what was that next stage of your life?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (07:34)
I wish I could tell you that that's what I did, that I took a little break and I focused on my health and I took some time to think about what I really wanted to do with my career and my life in general, but the truth is I was still quite young, inexperienced and more importantly,
I was very uncomfortable with uncertainty. And so the idea of not knowing what I was going to do next was paralyzing, very, very scary. And so instead of taking that time to recharge and to reflect, I directly straight away jumped into the next socially sanctified adventure that...
feels completely so normal in Silicon Valley that when you tell people you quit your job to do that, people say congratulations, which is starting a startup. So I left Google and I started a startup straight away. And again, looking back, I know now that it wasn't for any good reasons in the sense that some people start a startup because they're generally on the mission, generally on the mission to change the world.
and they have this great idea that they're going to implement and bring to the masses. In my case, I started a startup because I was scared of not knowing what I was going to work on next. And I was scared of not having my identity tied to my work anymore.
James Taylor (09:04)
So you had this still this sense of got this goal driven way of kind of looking at the world. When did that change? When did that, as you say, pivot? You know, I'm talking about technology. When did the pivot happen for you to say, actually, this is not the best thing for myself, my health, mental health, and actually it's not actually maybe the best thing for the community that I'm trying to serve?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (09:27)
Again, it took another external event. It's only when my startup failed that finally, finally, after all of those crossroads and wandering and trying to figure out what I actually wanted that I allowed myself to admit that I didn't know what I wanted to do next and I was completely lost. And in a strange way, this was the most freeing thought I had ever had, just...
admitting that I was lost. And so I went back to the drawing board and I asked myself, okay, so you're lost. You don't know where you want to go. But what is something that you're so curious about, so excited about that even if you don't have an end goal, and even if nobody was watching, even if money and success and prestige were out of the equation, you would be happy to explore, to wake up every morning and to study and explore.
just for the sake of it. For me, that was the brain. had always been curious about why we think the way we think, why we feel the way we feel. And so I decided to go back to university to study neuroscience, not with an end goal in mind, not to start a startup, not to plan the next steps in my career, just because I was curious about the topic.
James Taylor (10:50)
So you started to make that transition, you moved into a very different world, although actually I know Google employ lots of PhD neuroscientists because, and many of these like, meta, they all do in terms of how people use their products and services. So as you were going on that journey and you were kind of moving into this different phase of your life, talk to us about which part of, because it's such a big field in neuroscience, was there an area you found that really spoke more to you?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (11:20)
Well, at the time I was starting from scratch. I had never studied neuroscience before. I had no previous degree in brain science or in science in general. So I really started from zero and I was as open-minded as possible in terms of topics. And I just went through the curriculum and started reading books every time. There was something I was a little bit more curious about. It's only when I finished my master's degree and I realized that I actually
Loved it. I loved studying the brain and I wanted to keep going and I decided to do a PhD that I started re-looking into topics that I wanted to dive deeper into. And so I'm currently working at the ADHD research lab at King's College London and I'm specifically looking at the intersection of curiosity and ADHD, which has nothing, almost nothing to do with my current, my first book, Tiny Experiments, although
I've had lots of people email me and say, ⁓ wow, your book is so neurodiversity friendly, which is so interesting because I think even though I didn't really intend on making it so neurodiversity friendly because I was doing this academic research on the side while writing the book, it has somehow seeped through and there is a lot of the tools are useful for neurodivergent people.
James Taylor (12:40)
Now we had actually a guest on the show a little while ago who was a former director of ⁓ GCHQ, the British Signals Intelligence Service in... ⁓
It's Cheltenham, I think, is where GCHQ is. And he was telling me that of the thousands and thousands of people that work there in the intelligence services, doing all kinds of signals intelligence, a third of them would be classed as neurodivergent. So they have ADHD, they have synesthesia, they have different versions of, and he said for them, it's a, an organization, they think of it now really as these kind of superpowers, but also at the same time, but as a manager, they're having to like figure out how they do this. But like that curiosity, and I guess this is the scientific thing.
There's you see time and time again and people that do things very detailed for long periods of time. The sense is a curiosity and almost a little bit where it kind of veers into obsession.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (13:31)
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, this completely aligns with the research, which is really showing that we tend to call these conditions from a medical standpoint, because a lot of people who have ADHD or as you mentioned, synesthesia, tend to struggle. And so we, from a medical standpoint, we treat them as if something was wrong with their brain. When in reality, what we see is a mismatch between their brain and the environment.
So you don't necessarily need to fix anything with their brain. You just need to make sure or help them or support them in finding the right kind of jobs of environments that feel rewarding because the kind of hyper-focus that someone with ADHD can have can be really helpful in some types of jobs. The kind of nonlinear thinking of connecting random ideas that you also see in neurodivergent people can be really helpful in creative jobs.
Equally in some other kinds of jobs where you really need to execute things in order A then B then C and follow a very strict process Maybe that kind of thinking is not a good fit and that's okay, right? It's really more about finding an environment that fits your thinking style
James Taylor (14:44)
Now your book is called Tiny Experiments. So when was the first tiny experiment that you ran on yourself that could show you could shift away from this kind of goal obsession to something different? And what did it reveal to you?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (14:57)
I ran my first tiny experiment when I went back to university to study neuroscience. And ⁓ as part of my classes, we studied something called the generation effect. The generation effect is a psychological phenomenon that shows that when you create your own version of something, you're going to both understand it and remember it better. And creating your own version of something can take many forms.
it can be writing a note in your own words. That's why teachers tell you actually write notes in your own words. I can see that you're doing that while I'm talking to you right now, the generation effect. It can be a blog post, it can be a podcast, it can be having an actual conversation with a friend where you're kind of forced to use your own words. And I thought, that's pretty neat. I want to apply this. I want to apply the generation effect. And so I designed a tiny experiment where I said that
every single day for the next 100 weekdays, I would write a short note and publish it online. And the note would be about something I learned, something I studied in university. And to create a bit of accountability around my tiny experiment, I said, I'm going to have a newsletter also. So every week, I'm going to send the five notes, the five articles that I wrote this week to my subscribers. And...
To me, this was a tiny experiment in the sense that there was no goal. I didn't have a number of newsletter subscribers in mind. I didn't have any kind of metrics in mind. The only action I committed to was to show up every weekday, sit down, write something, publish it, and that's it. And trusting that I would learn through that process of showing up and iterating.
So I completed that experiment and ⁓ at the end of it, I also wanted to keep going. And today I run a business, I have a community, my newsletter has more than a hundred thousand subscribers. I got this book deal for writing tiny experiments with Penguin and all of that came out of saying, hey, what would happen if I just did that one action for that specific duration?
James Taylor (17:16)
And what did you notice in yourself? You mentioned at the start where this often has an impact upon ⁓ memory, for example, we're more likely to memorize something if we've written it down, know, with notes and we all taught this at school, know, to kind of, you know, write down in our own kind of work way. What did it do to your recall? And also I'm also interested to know what did it do with your ability to connect sometimes what we think is random ideas?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (17:42)
In terms of recall, it's absolutely amazing. It's incredibly powerful. I noticed that if I have written an article, even if it's very short, 200 words, 300 words, if I've written an article about a topic, and I'm talking about old school writing where I wrote it myself, not clicking, a chat GPT didn't exist at the time, right? So I actually wrote those articles myself. If I wrote an article about a topic, even if that was five years ago,
I'm not saying that I remember exactly everything the researchers said about the topic, right? But I'll be able to talk about it fairly clearly. And I remember most of the important ideas. And so in terms of recall, absolutely amazing. It also means I can have much more interesting conversations with people because I can remember all of this research that I've actually studied. And I can't, it's so funny talking about recall, but what's the second part of the question?
James Taylor (18:32)
I'm, yeah.
it's actually, no, it's not funny. Funny, as you were talking about recall, I remembered I bought a book once and I was in London on business and I was staying at one of those terrible hotels around the Edgeware Road. They're all probably nicer now, but they were all terrible back then. And I was staying at this hotel, I was at a conference or something, and I went away and I left, checked out the hotel and I suddenly realized a few hours later, I've left the book.
in the hotel. So I called up the hotel sheepishly and said to them, I left a book in the room, could you just check if maybe the housekeeper has picked it up? And the receptionist said, yes certainly Mr Taylor, what was the book called? And it was How to Improve Your Memory by Tony Boozan.
That's not a lie. So I'm in sympathy with you just now. So the second question I was just saying there was, so recall was one thing, but in terms of seeing connections, remote connections between different areas.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (19:33)
So actually as part, just, I think your question is interesting because this is basically how the generation effect works in the first place. By forcing you to use your own words, it also forces you to tap into your long-term memory to go and choose those words. And so it helps you create connections with existing long-term memories. And so add this new knowledge to your long-term stores. If you don't do that, it's just stored in shorter memory and then you forget it as soon as you don't need it anymore.
And so I also try to reproduce that when writing my articles. If you go on Nest Labs and you read my articles, you will see that within the text, I always link back to previous articles as well. So this is something I constantly ask myself when I write something new. How does that connect back to knowledge I already have? How can I add this new piece of knowledge to my kind of knowledge network rather than having it as an isolated node?
that is going to be much harder to recall because I haven't formed a very clear connection with something that is already in my long-term memory. And so by forcing myself to do this, at first it's hard, right? You're looking at your text and you're like, please, I just need to find one connection. But when you write every day and when you do that every day, it's almost like a muscle. It becomes much easier. And now when I write my articles, I almost see it.
in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a paragraph where I just see the connection with something I wrote three weeks before, six months before, sometimes two years prior to this article. And I'm like, yes, that connects to that. So it takes a little bit of practice. It's not easy at the beginning, but I think it's worth it. And it really helps you create this knowledge network that is unique to you.
James Taylor (21:27)
something you said there when you write every day or when you publish every day. So I'm a recovering goal setter and so I am obsessed with setting goals. In if you probably look at my journal just now, there's a whole bunch of goals. There's goals for today, there's goals for this week, there's goals for this month and then there's goals for the whole year and different segments. And I remember reading an article, I think it was Scott Adams, the writer a few years ago, wrote an article about
⁓ Systems not goals. And I remember thinking about this idea that, okay, rather than obsessing about, say, writing a book...
He said, no, you should just think about the process. So the process of rather than get obsessed with the outcome, you should focus instead on, okay, I'm gonna just go and write a thousand words a day. So it's just the process rather than the actual outcome. But I kept finding myself continuing wanting to steer back to the comfort of having those kind of fixed goals. So what advice would you give for someone like myself to embrace a little bit uncertainty, to start perhaps with a little bit, without a little bit of clarity?
and their goals, how do you coach someone who's deeply uncomfortable with not knowing to build tolerance for that space?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (22:40)
I think that's why tiny experiments work so well for recovering goal setters. I love that, recovering goal setters. So what you described, the first kind of system that you described is more akin to a routine or habit in the sense that you're committing to this action forever. You're saying every day I'm going to do this or every week I'm going to do this. I'm going to write those thousand words. And I think...
it's very difficult for people to commit to something that is forever. we change, our life circumstances change, our ambitions change, a lot of things change around us. And so it almost doesn't make sense to commit to something forever. A tiny experiment doesn't have an end goal in the sense that if you say, I'm going to write a newsletter, you don't have the end goal of saying, I'm going to have 25,000 subscribers by the end of the year. But...
a tiny experiment has a specific duration you commit to. So you say, I will write one weekly newsletter until the end of the year. And you can almost think of that as a goal. Your goal is just to show up. Your goal is just to write the weekly newsletter until the end of the year. And if you're someone who does like feeling like you have a bit of control, you have a little bit of visibility, I always tell people,
Do you need a spreadsheet? Go ahead, create a spreadsheet. You can have a spreadsheet and for every week, you have the date, you have the number of words that you wrote that week, and you have your observations. Just like a scientist, how did that feel? Do you like what you wrote this week? How did people react to it? So again, really thinking about the internal and external signals, what you liked about it, but also what other people liked about it. So you can find that nice Venn diagram where you enjoy your work.
but people benefit from it. And you track that for the six weeks or 12 weeks or however long the duration of your experiment. So it's a nice in-between where it's not about, people think sometimes when I talk about developing an experimental mindset that is just about doing whatever and just la-da-da without any structure, but scientists have protocols. There is a little bit of structure. So it's a nice in-between. If you're someone who needs a little bit of certainty,
but you still want to benefit from the openness of trying something without clinging to an end goal, a tiny experiment can be really good framework.
James Taylor (25:07)
Something I tried recently was, of what you're talking about there was thinking in terms of seasons, so winter, spring, summer, fall, ⁓ and saying, okay, I'm just gonna focus, this is gonna be my winter project or my summer project. And then, and that was kind of going well for a little while, until I actually moved to a completely different country. I moved from Europe where I am just now.
to Dubai, and I was like, okay, I'm gonna do my deep project, my deep work project in the winter. And I tried to do that in Dubai, and their winter is basically our summer, winter is when you kind of do everything, summer is when you go inside and you don't go out. So, ⁓ okay, I've got my seasons all wrong. So I had to kind of recalibrate a little bit. When you were kind of working through all this yourself as well,
and working with clients, what mental scripts or cultural expectations perhaps push back hardest when someone tries to live a little bit more experimentally and how do you overcome them?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (26:09)
Mostly it's our definition of success in general. We tend to tie success to a very binary definition where we set a goal and if we reach that goal, this is success. And if we don't, this is failure. What I need when I work with companies, when I help them implement those frameworks, I need to...
encourage them to reset their definition of success to success is not reaching a specific destination, success is learning something new. So just like scientists don't conduct experiments when they already know the outcome, there would be no point experimenting if you know exactly what's going to happen. In real life too, we never exactly know what the outcome is going to be, but it looks
nicer on PowerPoint presentations when we have those KPIs and those OKRs. What then happens, and we've all experienced that, is that we very rarely hit those targets. And then we spend a lot of time and energy as a team trying to craft a nice narrative that explains why we didn't hit those targets. We would save a lot of resources if instead we said, here's a hypothesis.
We're not sure it's going to work, but that's the hypothesis we have. We think this is going to be helpful. Let's give it a try for this duration and let's regroup at the end. Just like you have those scientific debriefing meetings and say, here's what the data is saying. And maybe the data says we were completely wrong, but now we know. And this is great because we can use that data to run our next experiment. But again, for that, you really need to let go of that binary definition of success.
upon which a lot of the way we conduct business and live our lives in general is designed.
James Taylor (28:10)
Often when I think that you see this word like a business plan and as if it's like a focused thing or a forecast or, and often I just think it's guesses really. It's maybe good guesses, not so good guesses because you work also, I guess with your background, you have a lot of clients that are in that.
they're in the tech space, for example, where something like, I know Google, like John Doerr, like OKRs, objectives and key results becomes a very key framework, is what you teach around this idea of tiny experiments, is it the very antithesis of this kind of OKR space, or can actually be layered onto it and work together?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (28:53)
they actually work great together. The problem I have is when we use OKRs and KPIs for everything without questioning it. And OKRs and KPIs can actually work really well in situations where you have a really good idea of what you want to achieve and how to do it. So there are situations where maybe you have a sales pipeline that is very solid and it is really just a matter of picking up the phone, reading your script.
and calling as many people as possible. And then we know that we have an X percent conversion rate and this is great. And in that case, you know what, just do it. Maybe experimenting in this case is going to take more energy than needed when you have something that already works really well. And even then, you could argue that maybe a little bit of experimentation for a small percentage of your clients, of your prospects could be helpful.
The problem is we're treating every single project as if we knew exactly what we wanted to achieve and how to do it. And that's not the case. We know that in today's world, things are changing way too fast for us to have that kind of certainty. And so that certainty we have is just an illusion. So that's what I'm encouraging people to do is to at any given point to have at least one tiny experiment running. That's it for
Projects where you have already a really good system things are working you have that kind of clarity Go ahead use the OKR as use your KPS, but I really challenge you to You know, they're saying that that's the case for everything you're working on I'm sure there are areas of uncertainty and those areas of uncertainty are areas where there's potential for growth You just need to experiment to try and figure out what might work what might not work and again
In those cases, let go of the binary definition of success, accept failure as an opportunity for learning.
James Taylor (30:53)
I'm guessing your book would also resonate with a lot of people who come from maybe a Buddhist background as well, this idea of letting go, not being attached to the outcome, still doing it and giving yourself and being passionate about it, but not getting overly attached. I mean, I think this in the West, this is quite a, I feel it's quite a hard concept.
to get a sense of like this attachment and non-attachment. I remember asking a monk once, a monastery, said, I can't get my head around this idea. And he said, well, it's a bit like when you're driving where, you know, if you hold the steering wheel too tight, you're gonna crash. But also if you hold it too loose, you're gonna crash. So he it's finding that balance. I'm wondering like, as you're in the book, there stories there where you share maybe someone that was maybe a little bit
about this idea, this tiny experiment idea could work for them, but a change happened and what was the shift that happened for them?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (31:57)
A lot of the people I work with are initially a little bit skeptical, actually. And I understand why, especially for people where having this more... So I have a little visual in the book that's very popular. It gets shared a lot on social media and it shows what the experimental mindset is. And this is very aligned with what you were saying. So...
I have those two, it's like a matrix and it's like curiosity versus ambition. And what I explained is that if you have low curiosity, low ambition, that's just cynicism, right? It's just, don't care about anything. You don't even want to try. If you have high curiosity, you want to explore, you want to try new things. You're pretty adventurous, but you don't want to put in the necessary efforts to fulfill your potential.
that is escapism. If you're high ambition and low curiosity, so you're okay working really, really hard, but you almost see curiosity as a distraction from your goals. That's perfectionism. And then an experimental mindset is high ambition, high curiosity. That means that yes, you're very happy to work hard and to really invest the necessary effort to do interesting things, but also you see curiosity.
as part of the equation. And when things don't work out, instead of clinging to control like a perfectionist, you're curious. You ask, ⁓ what's going on here? What can we learn from this? And so what I've seen from people that I work with is that I tend to work with a lot of perfectionists. They're already high ambition. That's rarely the issue. But in their quest for ambition, they have let go of curiosity. They don't allow themselves to explore.
So this is what a lot of people I've worked with finally managed to do with a tiny experiment. It's just re-injecting a little bit of curiosity. An example that I've seen several times is especially startup founders, which is a very interesting type of person because when I start working with them, they will tell me, I'm very experimental. I'm very happy to try new things. But when you start...
poking a little bit at how they experiment, you see that they only do it within very specific frameworks that they've been taught in terms of how to run a startup, the kind of A-B testing or whatever way of experimenting. And so tiny experiments is really a way for them to inject that experimental mindset in areas that they wouldn't have thought to experiment with. The way they communicate with people, the way they show up, the way they ask questions, the way they run meetings, for example.
James Taylor (34:48)
I like that, know, the curiosity and ambition. I've certainly been at lots of dinner parties where you're with people that are highly ambitious, whether that's law or consulting or technology. And they're some of the most boring people, like, uncurious people I've ever met. And actually makes them, for part of their job, actually very successful in what they do, because they're very tunnel visioned in what they're doing. They...
maybe their curiosity is extremely limited to their particular thing, but they have, if you want to have a conversation with them that was outside of that thing, they're just, they're not going to go there as well. And sometimes I look at, and there's this, sometimes I find there's a sadness there as well, that they're losing some of the joy, the juice from life.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (35:32)
Yeah, absolutely. This is also why I have an entire chapter in the book about the tyranny of purpose, which I think is so dangerous. This narrative that we have as a society that you're supposed to find your one true thing in life, the thing you're passionate about that really kind of, you know, devours all of your attention to the point where you can't really think about anything else.
And this is such a dangerous narrative for so many reasons. One of them is what you've just described. It doesn't make for a very rich life in terms of texture. If you only have that so-called only one true passion. The second danger is that a lot of people then end up putting all of their eggs in the same basket. And then they end up having what psychologists call low self complexity, which means that
their entire sense of identity is based on one area of their lives. And when that thing doesn't work out, which is the case for startups, for example, which is typically the kind of industry where we ask people to have that one true passion, when the startup fails, we see a very high rate of depression in those former startup founders because they have nothing else in terms of their identity. And the last danger is how then people who haven't found that one thing,
think that something's wrong with them. And so they feel like, does my life have any meaning if I haven't found my purpose yet? And to me, that's probably the saddest part about it.
James Taylor (37:11)
Just as you're talking about that, I'm reminded of a video I just saw a few nights ago with Brian Cox, the cosmologist, and Ricky Gervais, the comedian, and they're talking about purpose and Brian Cox, Professor Brian Cox was saying, you know, really, if you think on a big scale, purpose is, doesn't make any sense. There's like a trillion galaxies within each of these, there's a billion stars, and so this idea that your purpose has some greater meaning in the cosmos, it doesn't make any sense. He said, but...
there's something that we're hardwired for and I think the term is cognitive closure. We like things to have a nice little bow at the end, and he said often when you look at people who are fundamentalists.
maybe religious or fundamentalist in one area, whatever the area is, often they display this idea of cognitive closure, I think is the right term for it, where this one purpose becomes all-encompassing. I mean, if you've ever had the joy of having to spend any time around these kind of people, they're really quite boring. They're not really genuinely very curious about other people's views, they don't really have much empathy for other people.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (38:01)
It is,
Yeah, no, absolutely. I've actually had personal experience with some people in my family, like, kind of like becoming trapped in that kind of thinking. And the good news, though, is that we also know that cognitive closure is not a fixed trait. And so it's actually something where you can literally reopen your mind again. And you see a pattern here, given the right environment, given the right kind of stimuli.
And so it is really a matter of exposing people to as many diverse perspectives as possible where they realize that although we do have that tendency, you don't need to have this very big bow at the end that closes everything off and ends the story, right? You can just have a nice sense of narrative, which I think a lot of human beings need, but that doesn't mean that you need to have that one big purpose.
James Taylor (39:12)
The one I heard once, which I still often, I sometimes think about is Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, where he says, we're talking about purpose, he said, ⁓ it's a bit like a movie, you you have these individual chapters in your life, these scenes, and as long as each of those have integrity, in a sense, you might not know what the whole purpose of the film is until right at the very end, at the very closing scene, but as long as that individual chapter or scene makes sense, then...
you're kind of living, I guess, I guess, in purpose. If people could start with one tiny experiment today, it could be something low risk, high signal, what would your recommendation be?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (39:54)
I always recommend starting with something personal rather than professional because you can just do it. You don't need to ask anyone's permission. Something really small, for example, could be, I will not bring my phone in my bedroom for the next seven days, or I will go for a daily walk for the next two weeks. So I would start with something really, really, really tiny.
And remember that what you want to pay attention to is the signals that you get back. How does that make you feel? Pretend that you're a scientist, that you're collecting your own data, and based on that data, you can decide whether you want to keep going, whether you want to tweak it, or whether you want to stop.
James Taylor (40:37)
And is there a ritual or a habit or even a tool that you use daily in your life that you find very useful for your own creative life?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (40:47)
I don't use this one daily, but I use it weekly. And it's my template for conducting a weekly review. It's called plus minus next. And it's very, very, very simple. It has three columns. In the first column plus, I write everything that went well this week. In the second column, everything that didn't go so well. And in the last column, next with a little arrow, I list everything I want to try next, what I want to focus on the next week.
And it's been incredibly helpful for me in terms of focus of creativity, productivity, and even in terms of mental health in the sense that it really allows me to celebrate the wins and also to acknowledge any potential areas for growth. And it's not just a static snapshot. The fact that there's this next column at the end really allows me to learn from what happened and decide how I'm going to implement those lessons in terms of moving forward.
James Taylor (41:46)
Plus, minus, next. Wonderful, I love that idea. Which book, not your own, would you recommend that perhaps you've maybe gifted more often to other people or a book you're reading just now that's really kind of got you thinking differently about the world?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (42:03)
One of my favorite, ⁓ I'm just seeing a different one here on my desk. But I would not gift it to a lot of people, it's hard to read. So no, another one would be. ⁓ A book I really enjoyed is called How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. And ⁓ on the surface, it's about psychedelics. But what I really like about it is just the way it's written where the author starts from zero knowledge about the topic.
James Taylor (42:11)
You
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (42:32)
And instead of writing from a place of expertise, I'm an authority, listen to me. He takes you on a journey from not knowing anything to exploring what it means and ⁓ kind of like, you know, his own experience, his own knowledge. I learned a lot about the topic from this book, but I learned a lot about how you can teach and communicate also from this book. So that's why I would recommend it to, and I've already recommended to a lot of people, but I think your listeners will enjoy it as well.
James Taylor (43:03)
I love books, so rather than being that kind of sage on the stage, he's the guide on the side and he's kind of walking you through his journey as well and you're reflecting on it. If people want to learn more about Tiny Experiments, your book and all the other work you're doing, the other kind of experiments, the other research you're doing, where is the best place for to go and do that?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (43:21)
So people can go to nestlabs.com and they can subscribe to my newsletter that I send every weekend where I talk about a lot of the topics we discussed together today. And for the book, just look up Tiny Experiments either online or go to your local bookstore. It's available anywhere books are sold.
James Taylor (43:39)
Well, Anne-Laure Le Cunff thank you for being a guest on the SuperCreativity
Why Subtraction Unlocks Better Ideas with Dr. Leidy Klotz #359?
24 Sep 2025
00:42:03
The Untapped Science of Less: Why Subtraction Unlocks Better Ideas with Dr. Leidy Klotz #359
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, James Taylor speaks with Dr. Leidy Klotz, engineer, designer, behavioral scientist, and author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Klotz reveals why our brains are biased toward adding complexity—and why the smartest solution is often to remove, reduce, or simplify.
From Lego bridges and Jenga-inspired problem solving to organizational strategy and sustainability, Klotz shows how subtraction can fuel innovation, improve decision-making, and create more meaningful lives. Learn why leaders struggle to showcase competence by doing less, how subtraction improves team morale, and why sustainability, education, and design sectors are embracing the power of removal.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by too many meetings, endless features, or bloated systems, this conversation will inspire you to see less as progress, not sacrifice. Soundbytes:
“Our first instinct is to add—but the real breakthrough often comes when we subtract.”
“Subtraction isn’t about less for the sake of less—it’s about clearing space for what really matters.”
“Innovation isn’t always building more. Sometimes, it’s about removing the unnecessary.”
“Great design, great strategy, and even great lives are defined not by what we add, but by what we choose to take away.”
“Subtraction feels counterintuitive, but it’s the hidden lever for creativity and progress.”
Our brains default to adding, not subtracting — but subtractive thinking can create elegant and effective solutions.
Visible subtraction matters — leaders must model it for teams to feel empowered to simplify.
Sustainability thrives on subtraction — less packaging, less waste, less complexity equals more progress.
Subtraction boosts morale — removing tasks or meetings frees up mental energy and creativity.
Simple rituals help — swap to-do lists for stop-doing lists, or remove one recurring meeting to reclaim focus.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
Today I'm joined by Dr. Lydie Klotz, an engineer, designer, and behavioral scientist whose work challenges a deep-seated bias in how we think and act. His book, Subtract, the untapped science of less, flips our default impulse to add onto its head, showing how sometimes the smartest move is actually to remove. I mean, that's a weird way of writing that. Sorry, let me just go again. I'll re-start that. Smartest.
Leidy Klotz (00:36)
I it was good. The
James Taylor (00:38)
It's my move is to remove that's yeah. Yeah, okay. I've got I've got I've got the hit they re on the remove. That's fine. Let me just go again
Leidy Klotz (00:38)
smartest move is actually to... to re-move. You gotta hit the... Well, I don't know, I mean, or you can leave it settle. I thought it was good. Anyway.
James Taylor (00:50)
That's fine. I'll go again.
Don't worry.
Okay. Today I'm joined by Dr. Lydie Klotz, an engineer, designer, and behavioral scientist whose work challenges a deep-seated bias in how we think and act. His book, Subtract, the Untapped Science of Less, flips our default impulse to add onto its head, showing how sometimes the smartest move is to remove. He supports this with experiments from Lego models to freeway demolitions and interventions from Jenga-inspired thinking to stop doing lists.
Subtract is a rare blend of science, strategy, and design perfect for listeners wondering how to simplify systems, sharpen decisions, and lead more intentionally. Lydie Klotz, welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.
Leidy Klotz (01:40)
Thanks for having me, James. That was great. I love the smartest move is to remove. That's like one I haven't thought of it, but that's, it's very memorable. mean, I caught it. So that's great.
James Taylor (01:49)
a bit
of little bit of alliteration there. Now you've come from these different, these worlds of engineering, architecture, behavioral science. tell us what professional or personal moment first made you suspicious that addition wasn't always the answer.
Leidy Klotz (01:52)
Yeah.
And I mean, one of the stories I tell in the book is, mean, I remember my summer job was mowing grass and I would do it. I did it for my parents and then I eventually did it for this guy who owned all the property in town. And I remember that gives you a lot of time to think, right. And about all these deep questions. And one of the questions I had was like, why am I
why is there all this grass here that seems to only exist for the purpose of me mowing it, right? And ⁓ so it's just something that I've always noticed as a ⁓ person interested in trying to change things from how they are to how we want them to be, right? ⁓ And whether that's through engineering or design or education, that's as professionals, all of us are engaged in that in some way. And you kind of see that there's
I didn't conceptualize it as subtracting at first, but I did notice these opportunities where, ⁓ things are actually better because there's less. ⁓ Whether it's the not having to mow grass or whether it's a really neat modernist building that has clean lines and all these examples.
James Taylor (03:18)
you were just talking about that and I'm looking out as I'm recording this just now I'm looking at the grass that I have to go and mow probably after this call but we had a guest on Dr. Joseph Gibelli who was talking about, we had this conversation about boredom and the benefits of boredom sometimes because we live in this know 24-7 like base switched on world and he said you know sometimes we just have to like disconnect and be a bit bored and that's where some of those ideas start
Leidy Klotz (03:34)
Okay, Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
James Taylor (03:46)
bubbling to the surface as well. So in this world that we're in just now, which often has more features, more complexity, more choices, you chose to explore in your work kind of subtle removal. So was there a project or an industrial trend that convinced you that subtraction was actually something that urgently needed to be attended to?
Leidy Klotz (04:08)
I I was seeing these trends the same way you are. And I love how you connected, like, you know, went from the physical world of lawn mowing to the mental world of boredom, right? And, or just, you know, idleness or, you know, I'm sure the people who are listening to this are familiar with the idea that, you know, you get away from your screen and stop trying to do work and you go for a run and that's when the idea comes, right? And, you know, so there are all these examples. I think if, if anything helped me,
crystallized the idea that then became the research in the book. It was just playing Legos with my son. And we played a lot of Legos. ⁓ But one particular time we were
building a bridge and he was three. And ⁓ the basic problem we had was that the bridge wasn't level and the bridge. So one of the support columns was shorter than the other support column. So I'm the dad and I have my engineering background. It's going to come in handy here, right? I reached behind me to grab a block to add to the shorter column. But by the time I had turned back around with the block, my son had removed a block from the, from the longer column and made the level bridge by taking away. And so
Whereas all these other examples, I was kind of like focusing on the end state of like ⁓ streamlined building or boredom. This was like, okay, there's ⁓ a step here. There's an action that has to happen, which is to take away from what's already there. ⁓ And that's subtracting. And, you the Legger bridge has proven such a useful example, because we've we've since done a ton of research to kind of see how our brain thinks about this and
it does is very similar to what happened to me in that moment, which is, okay, we've got this thing that we want to make better, which is in this case, it's a unlevel bridge. In other cases, it's like we want to have innovation. We want to come up with an idea. We want to make our organization work more smoothly. ⁓ And our first thought is what can we add to it, right? To make it better. And then we add and move on without even considering this whole other
class of options and that's why sometimes the the smartest move is to remove. yeah.
James Taylor (06:17)
It's funny because as you were talking about that I was just thinking there was a video I saw a little while ago of the actor Michael Caine and he was talking about the first time he got into ⁓ film making, being a movie star from being a theatre actor and so he would go on he did his first thing and the actor, the director said cut and he just the actor came the director came up to Michael Caine said less, little bit less and he goes next take a gain, try again, stop!
Leidy Klotz (06:24)
Okay.
Yeah.
James Taylor (06:46)
The director comes out, no, less, less. And he does it a third time, no, no, less, less, I want you to do less. And Michael Caine said, listen, if I do any less, I won't be doing anything. And the director said, exactly. So why does it sometimes feel that subtraction is almost kind of harder? it a cultural thing, we glorify accumulation, or is it?
Leidy Klotz (07:00)
That's it, yeah.
James Taylor (07:14)
economic or is it just the way that our brain works we all always want to
Leidy Klotz (07:18)
a little bit of both all and I think so the first part is that yeah that is how our brain works right that our brain immediately thinks to add and that's the default so you know you're we're we have these biases and these mental shortcuts that make it so that you know it generally serves us well to think of adding first and then move on and that just relieves cognitive load to not have to think about subtracting.
Of course, we can think about it. I mean, we're talking about it right now and you can remind yourself to think about it. And then you have this world where it's, really hard to show kind of competence through subtracting, right? It's, it's very often hard to show that you're doing a good job if you take something away. ⁓ and that, you know, that has
roots in just like what we value in society. And, you know, sometimes people will be like, well, this is just an American thing, right? But it's, it's actually very like animal thing. ⁓ Where, ⁓ what my favorite example for this is the bowerbirds. And these are the birds that build ceremonial nests. So the male bowerbird builds a ceremonial nest. ⁓ And then the female bowerbirds go around looking at the nests and decide to mate.
decide which male to mate with based on which nest they like the best, ⁓ which kind of makes sense so far. But then the female bowerbird goes and builds a nest to raise and shelter the young. So the whole point of the first male-billed nest is just to show that this this bird can move sticks around in the world, that they can effectively interact with the world around them. And it's one of the most robust ideas in psychology. I mean from
From male bowerbirds, also applies to female bowerbirds. applies to male and female humans that like we want to show that we can effectively interact with our world. And it's not just in physical ways, but also task completion, just, you know, checking something off your to-do list or sending an email to your boss that is showing you're, you're still there and doing things that that gives us this jolt of.
hey, I'm effectively interacting with the world. ⁓ I mean, of course we can subtract to effectively interact with the world, but when we do so, there's not really evidence most of the time, right? When you take away a meeting or when you take away or when you're sitting bored, I mean, it doesn't look like you're doing things. And so we kind of have to work against that by making subtractions visible.
James Taylor (09:54)
So as you were saying that, I'm thinking in my head of a lot of conferences you go to and you have the, if I'm speaking at a conference, it's maybe there's a CEO up on the stage and he's kind of puffing at his chest like that male power bird, just saying like, we want to add these new features, we're do this new feature and this new feature as well. If you were be able to sit him to the side and say, and trying to convince him of the benefits of maybe,
Leidy Klotz (10:08)
Yeah!
Exactly, yeah.
James Taylor (10:20)
doing less, of stripping back features, of subtraction, of simplification, what is that key argument you would make to that alpha male in the room?
Leidy Klotz (10:32)
⁓ It's interesting. actually, just went to, I did a conference and I mean, that was the keynote. So they were talking about subtracting, ⁓ but they, they totally flipped it around. mean, the, the, you know, alpha male in quotes, they were the ones advocating for this. And I actually think when we're talking about visibility,
those are the people with the opportunity, right? Because if you imagine yourself as a new employee coming in, you're not going to say, look, here's this radical subtraction I'm going to do. It's very critical to show competence. And the safe way to do that is to just kind of keep going with the routine. as the leader, I guess my pitch would be is like, you have this opportunity for this untapped way to make your organization better. And surely there are things that you realize could be subtracted to
the organization better. If you exemplify that then it's going to trickle down into all dimensions of your you know that gives the the people working for you the the freedom or the the inspiration that they can also look for ways to subtract to make things better. So that would be my ⁓ you know kind of logical one. Maybe the more emotional appeal would be you know Steve Jobs right? I mean his whole
thing. said Steve Jobs couldn't think of buttons to add to the iPhone. He made his subtraction very visible. You could see that there was competence behind the subtractions. I think maybe that's another key distinction here. This isn't just about like, we're going to get rid of 35 % of the employees just because I feel like doing it. It's no, here's a way to make the business better.
that's subtraction and I'm going to do it. And it's actually more work, right? We have to design the whole iPhone and then we have to decide which buttons are redundant and we're gonna keep going even beyond that and strip down even more. And that's gonna be our competitive advantage. yeah, you can kind of exemplify that and show, make it visible and lead by example. I have one more small story. I mean, that's like the kind of in the...
You painted a very great picture of the standing in front of the organization. But one of my favorite.
a leader who exemplifies subtraction is Melanie Frank. She's a vice president at Capital One and a friend. ⁓ And ⁓ she just makes it a point every time she goes to her teams and they work on technology projects and she gives them like really ambitious things to do. And when she says, when she assigns something, she says, hey, I'm asking you to do something really big that only you can do and that is going to take a lot of work. What can I take off your plate? Right? ⁓ And so that's...
the puff the chest out leader but it's still kind of leading by example and showing that this is something that can be done in this organization to make it better subtracting that is.
James Taylor (13:39)
Yeah, it's funny, like sometimes all those kind of simple things, there was an event I was doing recently in San Diego, and there was a speaker on the day before me. And I'm always interested, I wasn't at the day before, but I was asking the attendees, like what was the most interesting thing you learned yesterday or the speaker that you heard from? And there was a gentleman who was a former US Navy SEAL, but there was this other speaker that was speaking and...
she got everyone, and these were all very senior people within the FinTech industry, to take their phones out, which is normally a thing the speaker doesn't want the audience to do, but take their phones out and go through their calendar and look at that, maybe that recurring meeting or that thing they have in their calendar that they can delete, they can remove. And then she said, then I want you to take that time and I want you to do like 30 minutes of...
Leidy Klotz (14:13)
Alright, yeah.
that's amazing. Yeah.
James Taylor (14:29)
de-work or go out for a walk or and she gave different things to do and it was interesting speaking to the attendees at that event, that was one of the most simple yet most powerful things that came from that event, from people just saying I'm just, I've got that 30 minutes back in my week that I didn't have before and that was all about what your book is about which is about subtraction.
Leidy Klotz (14:43)
Mm-hmm.
That's a brilliant speaking act. I might have to steal it if it's not copyrighted. I think the, yeah. Well, as you know, it works. mean, because so often the thing there is like, how do you get the idea to action, right? And if you can make the action right in the event and then you're remembering the idea because you took the action. The other brilliant thing about that, it sounds like they left, ⁓ when.
James Taylor (14:58)
⁓ I'm definitely stealing that. think there's no shame in stealing another speaker's idea.
Leidy Klotz (15:20)
when you take something off of your calendar, if you then put like, okay, this deep work time brought to you by the fact that you subtracted is a way to keep that idea front and center and remember that you can use it for future. Whereas if you just kind of free it up and then it's an open spot on your calendar, you might just fill it up with something equally useless later. So I love that.
James Taylor (15:43)
Yeah.
Now, ⁓ when you wrote the book, who in the book, were there any kind of mentors or allies you had and you talked about in the book who became really great exemplars of this idea of subtraction? You mentioned the CEO of Capital One. Were there any other ones that you thought, this is a really good example maybe of a CEO or a leader or civic leader perhaps, or someone from the world of design and obviously architecture as well, that really exemplifies this idea of subtract?
Leidy Klotz (16:14)
I, one of my favorites that comes to mind is Maya Lin. ⁓ And so she's the designer who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. And if you've never been, it's, mean, it's just, it does everything a monument is supposed to do. ⁓ basically it's on the mall in Washington, DC. It's among all these huge.
James Taylor (16:28)
Yeah.
Leidy Klotz (16:39)
big monuments to very important things that have happened, but the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is like it's cut into the ground. ⁓ So it's beneath the earth instead of on top of it. It's also very minimalist design. It's just slabs of, I'm gonna say, I forget what, I think it's just granite, but it's some very simple stone. ⁓ And it just creates this stunning ⁓ effect.
⁓ So it's what I like about that example is, you we're talking about how it's hard to show competence through subtracting or it's hard to kind of make a statement through subtracting. But I think it's that shows that even in this arena where it's like everybody's going bigger and bigger and bigger and trying to make the boldest statement possible. And sometimes the boldest statement can be made by kind of bucking that trend. ⁓ So I love that example. And there's ⁓
I also like it because there's some, know, she, Maya's written about her thinking about that and she was, it's very intentional that she wanted to subtract and she kept kind of stripping things away that could be on that design, but weren't gonna serve this kind of larger vision that she had for it. ⁓ Also, I mean, the last thing I would say about that is because it's such a simple design, she was able to put everybody's name on the memorial who,
died in the conflict and ⁓ I don't know it just seems like a really powerful you know kind of addition and subtraction working together. ⁓ So that's ⁓ that's one from the phys-
James Taylor (18:15)
Yeah,
it's a powerful physical thing. And I often think I was there recently and because on the other side of the mall, on the end you've obviously the Lincoln Memorial, know, the Martin Luther King Jr. And you think I was thinking about it in terms of the storytelling, you know, how you take an idea and project it forward. ⁓
Leidy Klotz (18:28)
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes.
James Taylor (18:41)
or memory as well. I just, I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition of, because that Lincoln Memorial is very big and posing on one end. And then you've got obviously the Vietnam Memorial as well.
Leidy Klotz (18:47)
Mm-hmm.
And I think, I mean, this is something that I try to make sure to bring up in all the times I talk to people. it's, you it's obvious after you say it, but the it's not that these are opposites, right? It's like, it's not that adding is bad and some adding can be a way to make a very powerful statement and so can subtracting, right? And so it's a, you know, the King Memorial makes a statement in one way and the
Vietnam Memorial makes a statement in another way. And so as we're thinking about our innovation and creativity, whatever form that is, to think about these two tools as adding and subtracting as options at our disposal is helpful for me at least. ⁓ I'll give one more example. ⁓ Like Marie Kondo, ⁓ so I...
Every time I told people about this research, they kept saying, well, Marie Kondo. And so then I eventually had to like go learn what she was about. And I mean, you know, the idea on its surface is very simple, right? It's like tidy and get rid of things.
James Taylor (19:47)
Hahaha
Leidy Klotz (19:56)
in a very extreme fashion, but I read her book and I mean, she has this like relentless focus on sparking joy, which I think is really great because, you know, one of the things with subtraction is it's really easy to put it into this mindset of sacrifice. And there are certainly subtractions that are a sacrifice, like, okay, we have to cut 25 % of the employees because we didn't, we need to for the budget. But there are also subtractions that are.
joyful and that can make things better and that's the kind of class that that we're talking about. So I really respect how Kondo kind of helped people realize that, at least in the decluttering arena. And then I'll give one more example because I love how at the beginning you kind of went immediately from physical to the
to the mental world with boredom. mean, omit needless words, right? That's Strunk and White's classic writing advice. And there are all these writers who have different versions of that. I mean, there's Stephen King's Kill Your Darlings. There's Mark Twain and whoever he cribbed it from talking about, you know, I would have written a longer, or would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have enough time. So I love all those examples too.
James Taylor (21:10)
Yeah, it's like often when we talk about innovation and everyone wants to talk about innovation, but no one wants to talk about exnovation, about things you remove. It's like the, it's the unsexy part of innovation. Like, but actually, you know, often when I work with organizations and sometimes what they, you know, they immediately go for the adding the features part. And it's sometimes a bit of a, sometimes a little bit of a struggle to like...
Leidy Klotz (21:16)
Yeah.
Yeah.
James Taylor (21:38)
Okay, just before you go there, because you're actually going to want to go there anyway, what can we strip it back first before we think to add things?
Leidy Klotz (21:47)
Yeah, we did some research on. ⁓
on patents and just it was very kind of surface level, but looking at synonyms for adding and subtracting in the patent applications and, ⁓ you know, subtracting way underused as a way to get a patent. ⁓ Suggesting what you said, right? The default way of kind of innovating is to add. And I know that there are like many forces in the patent system where you need to show ⁓
show novelty, right? And it might be easier to show a novelty through adding, but it does, you know, the data that we have suggests that, you know, the same thing that happens in everywhere else in our lives is also happening in that innovation process. Is ex-innovation a term that is that term used a lot in the US? I've seen it a bunch, like in kind of European writing, but ⁓ yeah, I don't know.
James Taylor (22:44)
Yeah,
actually, I did an article about it recently in a video, which was, I actually got a little bit of hate mail. Not that we get very much hate mail in this, but I was actually talking to it in relation, because I mentioned Elon Musk, because obviously in the US there's a doge thing that's going on. And I was talking about exnovation, which is like removing things.
Leidy Klotz (22:55)
It's... ⁓
Uh-huh.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
James Taylor (23:06)
And
my goodness, I won't do that again. That was kind of pretty full on the messages I got after that one. But I still feel very strongly, I think it was felt... Yeah, yeah. And I think obviously in Europe... ⁓
Leidy Klotz (23:15)
just because they felt, they just felt that it was aligned with his kind of design philosophy. Yeah.
James Taylor (23:25)
you know, he's actually in lots of places, he's quite a controversial character. But the main point was, you know, rather like him or not, that's not the point. It was about the extent of that pulling things away. And actually, I'd be interested to get your take on this, but one area where I do see this idea of what you're talking about subtracting being really thought of very deeply is around sustainability.
Leidy Klotz (23:30)
yeah, yeah, 100%.
Yeah.
James Taylor (23:54)
especially
like food companies, packaging companies, I was talking to companies involved in plastics the other day about this, and when you're now putting this book out into the world, I'm interested like which industries are you getting a sense of resonating with the ideas in the book?
Leidy Klotz (24:11)
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the whole chapter, I think it's chapter seven in the book is basically devoted to sustainability because there's this kind of always been this long standing debate in sustainability about progress and growth, right? And the sustainability people will say growth is the problem. then, of course, that's also growth is.
done a lot of amazing things, right? But subtracting is a way where you can kind of keep innovating, keep making progress, and also not push up against planetary limits, just at a very big, ⁓ big level as you're thinking about sustainability. And then, of course, as you bring it down to the level of like businesses trying to be more sustainable, well, if you can get rid of half your packaging, that's a pretty surefire win, right? It's like making it's more sustainable and it's saving you money. ⁓ So I think that there's that.
angle with sustainability. I wish there'd been more, I mean I've talked to some groups about the sustainability implications. I think definitely medicine, education. I guess most of the groups that I'm talking to are interested in this because they feel like their system is bloated and they want help trying to fix the bloated system as opposed to
Yeah, but then there's, you know, a sprinkling of the sustainability people and then, you know, kind of the people who design slash creativity, you know, see this as an angle for it too. It's been, I mean, it's as you know, it's really interesting going to talk to these groups and learn about their, their little worlds and, how things work in them. And that, you know, informs my ideas. ⁓
But yeah, I would say education, medicine, sustainability, and design are maybe the three or four kind of main criteria, main areas.
James Taylor (26:08)
So let's help our listeners now. They're listening to this, kind of on board with this idea. They're ready. Tell us, there a ritual that's really powerful for this idea of subtraction in terms of how someone could just start to implement it in their own daily work that they're doing?
Leidy Klotz (26:11)
Yeah, yeah. They're ready?
Yeah, well, so get their phone out and subtract that recurring meeting, which, yeah. No, think, know, step one, they've already done, right? And it's like just having this.
James Taylor (26:30)
That beating.
Leidy Klotz (26:36)
I think there is great value in this just as a construct and as an idea and as a thing that you say, okay, subtracting is a thing. I heard it on James's podcast and then now it's more likely to be an option in the ways that you innovate. So you've done that part of it, ⁓ but that's just kind of a reminder and the more that you can practice it, the better. I would say thinking about ways to build it into
your standard operating procedures. So a very simple example is just, know, a lot of us have a to-do list, right? And you say, okay, what am I going to do next week? Maybe you sit down on Monday to do that. When you're doing your to-do lists,
which is a very additive thing, can you also think about some stop doings, right? And I'm not saying you need to do that specific thing, but that's an example of building this into your process. AI, think, I know you do a lot of interesting things there, ⁓ is actually a really helpful tool with this, right? Are you giving any like subtractive AI prompts? AI is really good at taking information that's there and getting, know, stripping it down. So ⁓ can you, you know,
James Taylor (27:38)
Yeah.
Leidy Klotz (27:46)
when you ask it to plan your vacation, then can you say, can you plan my vacation and actually give me some free time in my vacation and have it subtract things? can ⁓ you make this email 50 % as long and look at the results? So building it into your standard processes ⁓ is the next thing to do after listening to this podcast.
James Taylor (28:00)
Yeah.
when you've started to see teams implement the ideas in the book as well, what kind of transformations have you seen with the team? Is it been things like obviously around performance or morale or what changes have you seen happen?
Leidy Klotz (28:15)
Mm-hmm.
I'm usually there for the morale part. And I'm glad you brought that up because it goes back to your ⁓ CEO on the stage depiction, right? And if you can empower people to do this and they can see that they can like take a measure of control over how they feel overwhelmed, I mean, that's the most immediate benefit is just.
on the morale right away. And then the performance things come later after you're kind of operating in that environment for a longer time. But the morale is a huge one. ⁓ I'd also say that you need to, know, adding is our default, right? If we don't change anything, that's what we're going to do. And our research showed, and know, common sense just suggests that the more overwhelmed we are,
the way we tend to solve that problem is by adding more things, right? So if you can help teams relieve this initial overwhelm, then they have more time to think, which makes them more likely to think about all their options, which makes them more likely to implement subtraction. So when they start to relieve their overwhelm, then things get progressively better. And also, ⁓
James Taylor (29:38)
What about,
I'm just wondering in there on, as I'm thinking about that, kind going back to this idea of this leaders and the team side as well, you know, when a, let's say, often you see leaders and organizations, they get really fixated around one particular book.
Leidy Klotz (29:45)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
James Taylor (29:55)
checklist manifesto, for example, is, okay, we need to focus totally on checklists or
measure what matters, know, get completely into OKRs. We're going to get obsessed with OKRs. I saw something the other day where it was, you know, delight, delighting the customer, giving every employee the ability to send two and a half thousand dollars on a customer without having to seek manager approval. So there's all these different kind of ways. So as you start to see, let's say if I am a leader and I'm buying into the idea of the book, this is what we should be doing.
Leidy Klotz (30:10)
really?
James Taylor (30:25)
we've got things that have got too complicated, we're kind of losing sight of really what we're trying to do here. How would they start to waterfall or filter the ideas from the book down into the team to make it not just an idea, but actually a culture within the organization?
Leidy Klotz (30:45)
Yeah, I mean, think leading by example, right, like the Melanie Frank example of asking people what you can take off their plate. I mean, that's the cultural thing. I'd say, I mean, I know there's, it's doing big things, right? Being like aggressive with the subtractions and, you know, so things.
When I talk to groups, I challenge them to say, hey, maybe this is something you don't even think we should get rid of, but just bring it up. I mean, we had a group that we were working with and they brought up getting rid of a whole, essentially like one of their five main business lines. it just led to a useful discussion about why you would want to do that and how that would look if you did do that. ⁓ So I think having...
having bold examples kind of makes it more likely that people are going to ⁓ engage in their own little worlds and again leads by example. I don't know, you probably have ideas too, yeah.
James Taylor (31:50)
⁓
As I was thinking about the ideas in the book, one thing immediately came to mind, I know you have a background as a sports person as well, being a soccer ⁓ player, think, initially in your life. one thing that, I mean, a professional soccer player, you are now probably the first former professional soccer player we've ever had on this show. But it did remind me of...
Leidy Klotz (31:59)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I was a professional player. Now I'm a go ahead. Now I'm a U11 coach under 11.
James Taylor (32:19)
A story I sometimes tell about the Team Sky Cycling Team, which is about this idea of the aggregation of marginal gains, which James Clear, I think, spoke about in Atomic Habits in his book as well, where ⁓ basically if you just break down every component that goes into, in this case, competing on a bike, for example, and you just look to improve every element by just 1%, which sounds like a really small number, it compounds. It's like compounding with investing, for example. ⁓
Leidy Klotz (32:30)
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
James Taylor (32:49)
And one thing I thought would be a nice way you could layer this into an organization is every opportunity, getting everyone that sense of psychological safety, everyone that feels empowered to be looking for opportunities to make these 1 % marginal gains through subtraction. So not adding new things as well. And I would say this especially on larger companies where a lot of the time they're thinking about how to make things more efficient.
Leidy Klotz (33:07)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
James Taylor (33:19)
for example, and AI is obviously amazing and they're thinking about the big, you know, big gains from there as well, but there's so much within that, like just making things more efficient by those 1 % marginal gains. I thought that subtraction could be a perfect thing to sit within that.
Leidy Klotz (33:34)
Yeah, think if you can, again, that's where you're kind of building it into your processes and then it's all of a sudden it's an option in all of these decision points that you may have otherwise been overlooking. So, you know.
Yeah, I think that's another example of that is ⁓ like building it into annual reviews, for example, right? So every annual review you talk about, here are the three amazing things I'm going to do next year. It's like, well, what are the things that you're going to stop doing? And again, by putting it in the process, it's helping people think of it, but it's also helping make it OK and make it part of the culture and make it part of what this group does that then hopefully spills over into all these other things that they're doing.
James Taylor (34:20)
Yeah, I saw it happen recently with an airline. It was a little bit controversial. Some people didn't like this and some people did like this where normally on the airline, everyone gets a bottle of water on the flight. But now what they do is they go around and they fill it from the steward or what fills it from like a large bottle of water. Everyone gets a little cup, I guess.
Leidy Klotz (34:33)
Uh-huh.
Yeah,
yeah.
James Taylor (34:41)
but you have to ask. And they were saying about what that saved in terms of not just plastic, but in terms of the weight. And we think about weight equals fuel, equals cost. And there was like some ridiculously huge number by just making that one little small subtraction. And a lot of passengers were very unhappy about it, I would say as well. So you have to like from a customer perspective as well. But I just thought that was an interesting little subtraction piece.
Leidy Klotz (34:49)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, and think if you can find the ones that the customers don't care about, I don't know if, I think this is a Rory Sutherland example. If it's not, it should be. ⁓ He wrote a piece after looking at our research and then was talking about how.
he then he contended that you don't nobody wants a bellhop at the hotel that if you you could get rid of them and people would be perfectly fine and actually happier and it would be less awkward just carrying your your bag in most of the time and but again i don't know if that's the right or wrong thing but there are these services that we're providing that don't actually make people happier and if you can get rid of those then ⁓ that's a win for everybody
James Taylor (35:47)
Yeah.
Yeah,
I think that example, that was a hotel, think it was a Moxie was the chain of hotels. think certainly when I saw you was talking about getting rid of, they were subtracting a lot of things, but what they did is they put more attention into the communal experience, creating that third place for people to get together because also generational changes, often we're using hotels now to meet people in, to work in.
Leidy Klotz (36:05)
Okay, interesting.
Mm-hmm.
James Taylor (36:14)
it's just kind of bit more interesting
Leidy Klotz (36:14)
That's true, yeah.
James Taylor (36:16)
with to be working from a different type of space than working in a room where you're looking at the four walls of that rather drab hotel room. So let's start to finish up here as well, ⁓ just quick fire questions, is there a quote that kind of guides you or quote you often think about?
Leidy Klotz (36:22)
You
⁓ I mean, it's not related to this, but more to the effect just, you know, life is 10 % what happens to you and 90 % how you react to it. I find that helpful. Is it? Yeah. Yeah.
James Taylor (36:48)
It's very stoic, that's a very stoic kind of line there as well. Yeah, yeah, that's like that, that's great.
And what about tools or, we haven't really kind of spoken so much about, know, tool apps and things, but is there a tool or an app that you find particularly useful for like the creative work that you do? Obviously you're a writer, you're a researcher as well.
Leidy Klotz (37:08)
⁓ It's less about a tool. I mean, it's kind of a lack of a tool or app. I mean, obviously I use word processing. I use AI to help. I mean, all these things, but I also find it really helpful to just force myself to have notebook time every day. ⁓ And again, it's not that I could do everything on a notebook, like a piece of paper and a pen, but that kind of shifting different ways of working often.
reveals different ideas. And we spend so much of our time now, obviously staring at a screen. Yeah, sorry.
James Taylor (37:40)
And are you
one of these people that's really into one of the very fancy notebooks? Are you like a Luchterm or a Moleskine?
Leidy Klotz (37:49)
No, it's like
whatever the free thing is that I got at the hotel. I got a bullet notebook once and then I was like, how do you use this thing? I just used it as a normal notebook. But as long as it really it's about the physical act of moving the thing and the ability to just be outside and do it. And then probably transcribing it back and forth is really helpful and just getting away from the screen basically.
James Taylor (38:06)
Yeah.
And is there one book by another author that you've maybe gifted more often or you recommended more often?
Leidy Klotz (38:22)
⁓ I've got two. I love books, so you're going to have to indulge me. So one is ⁓ Eduardo Galeano. He's just this brilliant Uruguayan author. And he wrote this book called Soccer and Sun and Shadow. And it's basically how soccer explains the world. But it's very poetic, and ⁓ it's really a fun read. ⁓ I don't know that it has much to do with creativity and innovation other than the fact that he's super creative and innovative. ⁓ And then the one that ⁓ is just right up the alley of your audience is the extent
mind by Annie Murphy-Paul. So she's a journalist, I mean the way she wrote it, it seems like she's a professor as she just like went into depth of all the ways that we think outside of our brain. ⁓
And what I tell students, what I tell, I give this to PhD students after they graduate. And I'm like, you don't even, if you, if you have time to read this, it'll be super helpful. If you don't have time to read it, just put it on your desk and use it as an excuse every time you want to go for a walk or go work out because it's like all this evidence that, you know, doing that is so helpful to, to your thinking. ⁓ and so I love that book, The Extended Mind.
James Taylor (39:34)
Great, that's great, and I haven't heard of that book before, anyone's recommended that, so I'm going to go and check that out, and also the one on soccer, I have a friend that's about to go and travel around ⁓ Italian soccer games to go and experience soccer in Italy as well, so I'm going to recommend that book to him, he'll be very thankful of that book before his trip. If people want to learn more about your work and your research, where's the best place for to go and do that?
Leidy Klotz (39:45)
okay.
Okay.
Well, subtract the book has most of the information, you know, all the things we talked about. My parents gave me a good Google name. So L E I D Y K L O T Z. mean, I have a website. I've got another book coming out in April about our relationship with our physical surroundings. Um, and you know, how, how the mind relates to our physical surroundings. Um, and so, um, that's something to look out for too, but you can, you can find out what I'm doing just by just with Google and with my website. Yeah.
James Taylor (40:28)
but we'll definitely have to have you back on the show again talking about that, that new book as well. I think that would resonate a lot with our audience. Dr. Lydie Klotz, thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.
The Creativity Advantage: How Creativity Shapes Our Lives with Dr. James C. Kaufman #358
16 Sep 2025
00:41:47
The Creativity Advantage: How Creativity Shapes Our Lives with Dr. James C. Kaufman #358
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, James Taylor sits down with Dr. James C. Kaufman, one of the world’s leading creativity researchers and a professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut. Known for groundbreaking concepts like the 4C Model of Creativity and the Sylvia Plath Effect, Kaufman’s latest book, The Creativity Advantage, explores how creativity impacts our lives far beyond innovation—enhancing our emotional well-being, self-insight, relationships, and sense of meaning.
Together, they explore:
The science-backed benefits of creativity and how they apply to everyone.
Why process matters more than outcomes in creative work.
How AI is reshaping creativity—both its opportunities and risks.
Practical steps to unlock your creative potential and cultivate openness in everyday life.
Whether you’re an artist, leader, educator, or someone just beginning your creative journey, this conversation will inspire you to see creativity as a powerful tool for growth, connection, and resilience.
Creativity benefits everyone — You don’t have to be a professional artist or innovator to gain its emotional and cognitive rewards.
Process over product — The act of creating often matters more than the final outcome.
Openness is key — Trying one new thing a week can significantly expand your creative mindset.
AI is a collaborator, not a replacement — Use it to augment, not replace, your creative processes.
Creativity fosters well-being — From journaling to micro-creative habits, small practices can have profound effects on mental health and self-awareness.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
00:00 – Introduction to Dr. James C. Kaufman and his work
01:08 – How a personal family experience inspired his research on meaning and creativity
02:58 – Why focusing on process over outcomes changes everything
05:49 – Writing as a tool for self-insight and healing
06:43 – Balancing solo and collaborative creative work
08:47 – The power of creative partnerships
10:34 – Discovering a passion for creativity research at Yale
13:15 – The origins of the Sylvia Plath Effect and its widespread misinterpretation
18:04 – Creativity, neurodivergence, and misunderstood narratives
20:34 – Audience responses to The Creativity Advantage
22:22 – AI, creativity, and the importance of human engagement
23:05 – The next generation of creativity researchers
25:50 – How attitudes toward creativity have shifted in business and education
28:14 – Creativity’s role in healing and well-being in an “always-on” world
30:42 – The risks and opportunities of AI as a creative collaborator
35:41 – Simple habits to nurture creativity: Openness and trying new things
37:25 – A personal mantra for staying grounded
38:03 – Finding your optimal time of day for creative flow
38:57 – Recommended reads for exploring creativity
39:54 – Closing thoughts
TRANSCRIPT
James Taylor (00:08)Today's guest is Dr. James Kaufman, a psychologist, author, creativity researcher, and professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut. James is known for shaping how we think about creativity, from his 4C model to the Sylvia Plath effect. His powerful new book, The Creativity Advantage, asks, beyond being creative, what does creativity actually do for us?
If you're hungry to understand why creativity matters emotionally, socially, spiritually, you're about to hear why it's not just useful, it's essential. James, welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.
James (00:48)
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
James Taylor (00:50)
Now, I know your past research has mapped creativity very widely, from cognition to culture. I'm interested, what has guided this kind of recent work, which is really about why creativity matters rather than just how it works?
James (01:08)
something I first got interested in with this late to meaning. And my father had been diagnosed with stage four bladder cancer. And I kind of had spent the summer with my parents in Athens to say goodbye and had been reading things like man's search for meaning. And in the evenings when I was more in my own time, I began working on this piece on creativity and meaning. And the nice thing is that
my father actually recovered. Usually he was given 10 % and he ended up beating it. He's still around and cancer free. But my interest in creativity and meaning and kind of the bigger picture of life has continued. And it went from meaning to kind of general positive aspects. So how it helps heal you, how it can connect you to other people, the whole idea of legacy, self-insight.
wide variety of different benefits.
James Taylor (02:11)
redefine creativity across these different dimensions as talked about in the book. Which one surprised you the most? ⁓ And obviously I know you from your work, this is a fantastic book I highly recommend anyone who's interested in creativity or theory of creativity called the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity. I remember reading a few years ago in its absolute Bible.
in world of creativity research and it really helped shape my own thinking about creativity, the importance of creativity and how it works. But as you wrote this latest book, has your thinking about creativity shifted? And of those five dimensions that you mentioned, which one has maybe changed the most in terms of how you think about it?
James (02:58)
would say a lot of the way my thinking in general has changed has been to focus in a process instead of the outcome or product. but not often when you say you're interested in the creative process, people kind of assume, okay, well, how can I be more creative? So how can I think of more ideas or how can I make sure I select the best one? And I'm certainly interested in that, but...
More about the fact that almost all the benefits, it doesn't matter how creative you are. So it's not like this helps people who are super creative and the people who are only kind of so-so don't benefit. Pretty much everybody benefits, whether or not they're incredibly creative or whether or not they're just kind of trying it out. A lot of the stuff...
I found out more about but wasn't necessarily shocked. Probably the thing that I knew the least about was the part about stealth insight and understanding yourself. And I'd remembered when I was writing the book, like 15 years ago, I'd heard about the writing cure, where if you write on a regular basis, kind of in this expressive, emotional way, that it leads to positive outcomes. But ever since...
The last 15 years, so much stuff has turned out to not replicate, not really turn out. And when I did my kind of just seeing what's been done, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it absolutely is still true and there's been even more work on it. And it's something that I myself try to do is to as much as I can journal, kind of write down my thoughts. Cause
That's something that really does help and any of us can do, whether it's a blog or a diary. I mean, a lot of times I also do this in my own writing. So the book I'm writing right now, which is I'm maybe three quarters through is it's kind of a fun book. It's on creativity in the movies where I'm writing about all this stuff on creativity, but every single example in case study is about a movie.
And so they're not just movies about creativity, but how they were illustrating a concept. So I write on a regular basis, things that are, you know, both nonfiction, but also a little bit personal. And so not everybody will be writing like a book, but it doesn't matter. All sorts of regular writing helps and is beneficial.
James Taylor (05:49)
And so that immediately makes me think of, you know, we hear that Julia Cameron's, the morning pages, I a lot of people have found that very useful in their process as well. Talking about this idea of moviemaking, and I guess there's an interesting analogy or link there with, when we think about movies, ⁓ so much of moviemaking and the creativity as a team.
efforts, it's not an individual, you might have an individual that's had an initial idea for a concept, but if you think about a writer's room, whether it's a Saturday Night Live or a movie, there's lots of people that are involved in making that final thing happen. So I'm interested, like as you're thinking about that, ⁓ where did you start seeing that shift come from the kind of personal side of creativity to more the collective or the team side of creativity?
James (06:43)
I very much think it can be both. So, I mean, just to give my own self as an example, almost all the work I do is collaborative. So any empirical study is me and usually at least one, if not two or three other people. And a lot of that is that I love the collaborative aspect of research. love talking around ideas and discussions and brainstorming together, but then also figuring out the problems and the
obstacles in the last minute together. And the older I get, the more I only collaborate with people I really like because life is short. If you're going spend time with people, you should like them. But, and yet there's also the personal because I always like having one book that I'm working on that's just me. So,
I like the mix. most of my work is collaborative. And certainly even when I'm writing a solo authored book, I'm drawing on conversations and research with so many other people. And even in this one, ⁓ I'm reaching out to a lot of friends when I talk about their work to get their favorite movie to kind of keep them in the conversation, so to speak. And here's what I love about creativity is that there's so many different aspects and angles that
still have some things that are just you, but then an awful lot that are actively collaborative, really almost regardless of domain.
James Taylor (08:16)
On the collaboration piece, in terms of your own work, we often hear this idea of creative pairs, two different but complementary individuals helping support each other's work and stress testing each other's work as well. your own ⁓ work as a researcher and a writer, is there a key kind of creative pair, another person that you kind of go to that's like that first, you have a concept, an initial idea, you want to stress test something with, who is that person for you in your own work?
James (08:47)
That's an interesting question. ⁓
Certainly, if it's just, if I have an idea and I'm curious about it, I'll often bounce it off first, usually either my wife or my father, so not necessarily a creativity researcher, even though both have actually collaborated with me. ⁓
Probably my most regular collaboration right now, although again, I have many, but certainly the one that I'm also enjoying among the most is every Wednesday I have a ⁓ Zoom with a composer named Dana Rowe, who actually composed one of my very favorite musicals of all time, The Fix, but he's done so many other things. And we published a book on lessons in creativity from musical theater characters.
And what we're doing right now is we're working on a book called So You Have a Theater Kid, which is advice for people whose kids love theater. And it's a mix of life experience, research about creativity, and then we've just been interviewing all these people who are theater professionals. So well-known composers, actors, and so on. And in this case, it's one of those, I don't want to say opposite to track.
But I'm the academic, Dana's the creative, and that's been wonderful. ⁓ But I also have many, many collaborations with pure creativity researchers where they may have much more similar backgrounds, but we often will not be thinking the same, and we will bandy about and discuss different ideas.
James Taylor (10:32)
I guess that's what's so fascinating about this field. I creativity is a very, quite a broad term and it means different things to different people and across cultures and countries as well. You can kind of go in many different directions with the research. Was there a sense like when you first started getting involved in the work of creativity, was an area of this kind of creativity research pulling you, know, felt like it was a stronger pull than perhaps another?
James (10:34)
Thank
So I wanted to be a creative writer growing up. That was my dream. My major was creative writing and I added psychology at the last minute. My parents are both psychologists.
I went to apply to MFA programs and I still remember I got one response, like when you, ⁓ this is back before the internet made everything right there. ⁓ But it said, if you can do anything else but this, do that. And I, and it was probably supposed to be encouraging, like, yes, you must love it. But I thought, well, I thought I could do something else. And I kind of just.
James Taylor (11:38)
You
James (11:46)
applied almost scattershot to a whole bunch of PhD programs in psychology. I didn't know what I was doing. And I was very lucky. I ended up at Yale with Robert Sternberg. And even though he studied creativity, it never entered my mind that I could do that. So the first two years I was doing just not very good work and figuring out what I wanted. And I remember
Finally, I was almost debating, maybe I shouldn't be a graduate student, maybe this isn't for me. And I thought, my passion is creative writing. What if I were to try to study that? And I spent the summer in my parents' basement, almost locked in the basement, just reading this whole stack of books that Sternberg gave me. And that was the first time I ever actually cared about anything that I was really reading. Like, psychology was fine, but in the same way that...
you know, I like watching baseball, whereas all of a sudden this was relevant and it was very personal to me. And that was a turning point. That was when, this is not just what I can study, but this is what I want to, this is what I care about and I'm curious about. And I finally got it because so many of my classmates would say stuff like, ⁓ I like just daydreaming about studies I could do. And I thought, my God, like I don't.
And all of a sudden I got it, which was.
James Taylor (13:15)
I guess where these these two parts come together creativity, research, psychology as well is something I think probably one of the first times I heard your name being discussed was this the Sylvia Plath effect ⁓ and I believe you term this this idea as well and and it's just it speaks to a lot of especially I would say musicians having conversations and
this idea, they might not term it as this, but this idea often comes up in terms of the link between psychology and creativity and the challenges that this comes, we had a guest on recently, he talking about, he worked in the intelligence services and he said a third of the people that work in his department in the intelligence services, ⁓ you know, they're neurodiverse, they, ADHD, ⁓
they have synesthesia, they have all this kind of thing and they look at it as this is a great advantage for us to have these people because they think in a different way. So I'd love to know first of all the origins of how this kind of the Sylvia Plath effect, first of all tell us what that is, how you kind of got into your kind of aha moment I guess of like how you kind of came upon this as well.
And what have been the ripples? Now you put a few many years have gone since you kind of first came out with this concept. What have been the ripples? How have people responded to this idea?
James (14:41)
It's kind of funny. In some ways, it's going be a very unsatisfying answer. ⁓ I was in my fourth year of graduate school, and I was at the Strand Bookstore in New York. And I saw big books saying modern ⁓ creative writers. It was like an encyclopedia. And I had discovered the work of Gene Simonson, who did what's called historiometrics.
where you enter information. And at the time, ⁓ I didn't have any real easy way to collect data. And I thought, well, maybe I'll try that. And I just began entering as much information as I could think of from these little biographies. And then when I went to play with it, I found this little hiccup, which was that female poets were much more likely to show some signs of mental illness than any other type of writer.
And I did another study that found that among eminent women, the same thing. So compared to fiction writers or politicians or actresses or artists, it was the poets who were much more likely to show signs of mental illness. And I actually didn't think it was terribly interesting. Like I published it, it was fine. ⁓ But at my first professor job, they had hired a PR person to try to get
their name out there and the person went through my stuff and he's like, well, this could be interesting. I told him about it. And two weeks later, the New York Times is calling me and it was very strange. I was blib, which now I would never be. And it kind of took off and I realized, A, a lot of people didn't, they kind of misinterpreted it.
where it was a very specific, not particularly interesting finding. And they took it to mean all creative people have mental illness, which isn't really true. And I guess I also realized.
It affected people and sometimes they felt, thank God, but sometimes they were very sad or hurt. And to be honest, that was another reason behind the creativity advantage is that I felt that, you know, yes, I do think that there's probably some type of connection between some types of creativity and mental health. But I don't think it's as simple as they're just linked. I also think.
that perhaps one reason there's this connection is that creativity has so many amazing properties. It makes you feel better. It enhances your mood. It connects you with people that if somebody's struggling, they may turn to creativity to make them feel better. And certainly there's no evidence to suggest that creativity makes your mental health worse. ⁓ So the Sylvia Plath effect is kind of lingered.
And it's not that I don't think it's true. It's just I think it's often misinterpreted. It's overemphasized. And I don't know if it's a terribly good legacy to have, to be honest. I'm.
James Taylor (18:04)
Yeah, I
mean, it's because when I've had discussions with, especially artists and musicians, I would say, about this, some of them feel very strongly on either side of this topic, because, you know, some of them feel, well, of course, that's the case, because we are open more to emotions, we have to invest ourselves emotionally with the work, and that's going to maybe create that as well. And others feel felt very strongly that no, this is, this is just feeding into a
bigger media narrative of this kind of lone creative genius myth of putting something up on a pedestal and it's painting out the contribution of the people that's, were speaking earlier about teams and having people around you, it kind of paints out that picture. So I can completely understand why you're a bit conflicted, mean part of your research is great because it's been, it's other people have seen it but it's often been taken out of context.
James (19:03)
Yes, and I've come to be closer to the second group of people in terms of.
On one hand...
I do think that there probably is notably more neurodivergence in people who are creative, but not because there's no reason. I, I just think.
I don't know, most people I know who are neurodivergent are just more interesting ⁓ and perhaps open to ideas or willing to entertain kind of weirder thoughts and stuff. I don't think there's deep or profound necessarily about it. I don't, and certainly I think...
If it makes people think that they have to have some type of mental health struggle to be creative, then that would be very bad because you don't, you know. And if anything, I think people who have very severe mental health struggles, that can hurt creativity because it makes it so you may not actually produce things if you're struggling. ⁓
And as you mentioned, sorry, as you mentioned other people mentioned, you know, that creativity is so nuanced and rich and involving teams and all these different parts that it's hard to paint it with just one brush.
James Taylor (20:34)
Obviously, with the creativity advantage, you've kind of taken, you've kind of zoomed out and talking about this sense of ⁓ meaning, which so many people were looking, they want the sense of meaning in the life and the link that creativity has to that. As the book has been, as people have been reading the book now as well and giving you thoughts on their feelings from the book and observations of the book,
What have been the things you've been hearing multiple times that have affected people or they found, you know, this is the thing I got the most from reading the book?
James (21:12)
The thing that I love hearing the most is people who've decided to try being creative, sometimes with their kids. So not necessarily in response to any particular thing, but more of a general gestalt. I've also heard from several researchers who've begun wanting to study this. Just again, just positive things in creativity. And that is to me very exciting because I feel like we so often...
focus on the negative or even if we don't focus on the negative, we focus on, how can you be more creative and focus on this outcome and product and not, well, why would you want to in the big picture? mean, creativity is effort. Nowadays we have AI, which is kind of threatening to take over everything. mean, if AI can do creativity better than we can, and I'm not saying it can, but like, why bother doing it unless you're getting something from the process?
So I'm excited to see more work and just more thought and more people trying to be creative based on.
James Taylor (22:22)
There's the link between AI and creativity and AI is obviously something I speak about a lot. That's kind of really mine how these tools can both augment and actually we're seeing more studies coming just now potentially damage or cause problems with ⁓ people's ability to be creative in their work or teams ability to be creative in their work. ⁓ As you look around, obviously, as I mentioned earlier, the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, go and get your copy, but I know you're kind of working on the next version of this book. And as you look out there,
in terms of some of the latest research that's being done on creativity and the researchers out there, who's really inspiring you? Whose work has kind of just kind of lit you up in terms of what they're doing?
James (23:05)
there is a whole younger generation that I think is just doing amazing work. Everything from people who are assistant or just associate professors to even just some postdocs and graduate students. And what's great is they're all over the world. you have Magic Krawowski who is not early career, but a lot of his lab like Ola Zelinsky who just got her PhD.
You have Matthias Benedict, who again, he's not really career, but then his post-docs and graduate students such as Simon C. They're just doing this work. You got Roger Beatty. Again, he's the more senior person and Simone Luchini. And they're doing some creativity stuff. And it's this team of these leaders and then their graduate students who are going to be picking up the torch. And I can't even know the 30 people, but.
people who are so much better than I was when I was in my late 20s, people who are better with methods and stats, who are better with just thinking of interesting things and like looking, well, how about YouTube and Twitter and things like that. So many of the people who I get to work with, I mean, some of these people plus, know, Hansika Kapoor, Krista Taylor, Alex McKay, so many of these people, so many of my former students, Sarah Luria, Molly Hollinger, so many of these.
folks and just getting to see them carving new territory. And a lot of it sometimes in the creativity advantage area, but sometimes doing stuff, creativity AI, it's just, it's exciting. I think we're in really good hands.
James Taylor (24:53)
it feels also there's quite a strong generational shift that's going on as well, this word creativity which I mean I've even noticed as a speaker speaking to, I primarily speak to corporate clients around the world and even when I started speaking on this topic 2017 there was, you could sense the resistance around
creativity as a term in a business context. And so I had to spend a little bit of time at the start, just talking about what that is and how it relates to innovation and the benefits and kind of the ROI, I guess, of the creativity from that perspective. But now with this younger generation that's coming into the workforce, it feels, and I don't know what exactly the data is to support this, but it feels like those younger leaders, those Gen X, those millennials,
are much more comfortable in using that term creativity in a business context. And I'm wondering if what you're seeing is a little bit of that going on as well.
James (25:50)
Certainly, when I first entered the field.
As an academic, there weren't very many people studying this. really weren't. Nobody was looking for a creativity person. When I got my PhD, I sent out 40 job applications and I got nothing. ⁓ Luckily, I ended up getting a position at educational testing service. ⁓ And similarly,
I always consult here and there and there was just a lot less with both education and business. ⁓ Even if somebody was interested, their superior would often be like, well, who cares? Why do we want this? There's less of that now. There's still sometimes that, but I feel like there's more of a general understanding that yes, a creative workforce is better. And I think some of that is, mean,
You need to be willing to think longer term to see real ROI and creativity. Because if you put a whole bunch of resources into helping train and nurture and support creativity, you probably won't make that back the first year. But over a couple of years, I believe you will see the dividends. It's just most people aren't willing to wait that long even now, but at least now it's not a dirty word.
the way it was 25 years.
James Taylor (27:24)
I know we had a recent guest on the podcast, Professor Joseph Gibelli, who wrote a book called The Brain at Rest, talking about the brain on creativity. the basic these neuroscientists talking about the how our brain what we often think we were talking about the brain needs to have these periods of rest.
in order to do creative work and many of the things in our society are always on our hustle culture, our mobile devices that we have with the social media is kind of working against that and is not necessarily as useful for that. So in this world that we're in just now, which of the creative advantages that you talk about in the book do you potentially see as most under siege from this kind of always on culture and how can we begin to reclaim it?
James (28:14)
question. ⁓
of the benefits come from the actual process of being creative. Probably the one that comes most to mind is anything involved with healing or improving your mood or your mental health. So much of this stuff, it happens when you are creative. And I mean, it's my worry with AI that... ⁓
If you have an idea for a story and you plug it into chat, then for a lot of folks, the output may end up being a better story than if they'd written themselves. But most of us aren't going to be publishing that story anyway, or even if we do, it won't be in the New Yorker. What happens is that if we were to actually write that story or draw that picture. We get these benefits. puts us in a better mood.
It just, it does all of these different things from self insight to our own feelings of legacy. If we're not engaged in that process, we don't get those benefits. And.
How do we take that back? I I feel like with AI, the horse is out of the barn. You're not gonna be able to change that. mean, I know a lot of professors that have no idea how to deal with AI out there. Not like I have any great wisdom on that. I think to a certain degree, it's just to try to convince people at the very least if you're gonna use AI to use it as a collaborator and not as a cheat code.
And it's hard because...
people don't like effort. And I mean, I'm not saying this condescendingly. I don't like effort. I mean, there are many things in my life. If I could press a button and have done, I would do it. And now with AI, we have this and I understand why people are using it. I I generally don't, but some of that is I just, really enjoy writing. And so I don't necessarily want to give that up, but it's hard to tell people don't do this easy thing that is everywhere.
and will probably end up being a little better than what you would have done by yourself.
James Taylor (30:42)
Yeah, kind going back to what you spoke about earlier with Dana talking about how she's your kind of creative pair. That's something the way that I think about creativity, I kind of use it as I know what my blind spots are, my weak points from a creative standpoint. And so I tend to use it as a way to help me see those or strengthen those as well. You mentioned the editing and you're a skilled editor. So.
me having someone like that that I can put it into the mind of a great, you know, New Yorker editor or whoever and just say, pretend you are that person. Now, review this. what I'm finding interesting about that is making me ask different kind of questions I perhaps wouldn't have asked if I just can just go on a more straight line and just having on my own. And so the thing I'm quite excited about is
many people that maybe live in parts of the world or don't have a community or those collaborators maybe around them, this is that potential type of collaborator that they can use if they can put in the guardrails. That's one of the challenges.
James (31:52)
Certainly, I do see how it could be helpful. I mean...
I feel like most creativity researchers either are gung-ho excited or a little terrified. And I'm very much in the latter camp, but I respect the people who I know who are gung-ho to acknowledge that there absolutely are these possibilities. the fact that, I mean, it's an interesting question because on one hand, what AI
could be for a lot of people who may not have access to other creative types or to.
just the opportunities. It absolutely could be this thing. On the other hand, if we're thinking
I would feel better if there wasn't already so much capitalism inherent in it, where the best versions are pay and the versions you can get for free are notably worse. One thing that excites me about creativity is there's tremendous capacity for equity there. Because if you look at
things like intelligence or academic achievement, find differences by socioeconomic status and other things for a variety of reasons. But creativity, you really don't see them. Almost everybody has the same capacity to potentially be creative. And...
I just worry about that going away. I worry that AI could make us value creativity more because now everybody can work on it or could make us value creativity less because we can outsource it. And so what does it matter if you could do it yourself? I don't know what's going to happen, you know, but I can see these parts.
James Taylor (33:58)
I'm probably,
I'm guessing maybe I'm in the bit more, I think we'll go through this period where there will be, you know, the hacks and the cheat code versions of these things as well. Where I hope we eventually get to is, you've done a lot of work in terms of talking about this idea of small C creativity and big C creativity. For me, I feel it just, if it helps the general public just push forward towards that bigger C creativity that you talk about.
that's fantastic. And I just see it from the sciences where I look at ⁓ researchers, scientists that working on protein folding and things like that, where this is unlocking huge potential.
for them to discover new drug discovery, antibiotics and other things as well. So I see it there. We're probably a little bit more challenges when we look at maybe marketing and other fields where there's a slightly different usage that's going on as well. So we definitely live in interesting times as well. So if you could, you've got such a breadth and depth of knowledge on creativity. Someone that's listening to this, maybe this is their very first episode that listens
this show and they're interested in creativity and unlocking their potential, their creative potential as well. What is one act or ritual or habit that you've seen people do which has had maybe quite a simple thing for them to do but it's had the most profound impact on enhancing their creativity? Maybe it's kind of going back to some of the things that obviously you talk about in the creativity advantage as well.
James (35:41)
The personality trait that's most associated with creativity is openness. And that can be openness to experiences, openness to ideas. the simplest thing that people can do is just try to do one new thing a week. And I don't mean something new that is shockingly new that will make you terrified, although that would be great. But like, if you have a favorite restaurant,
order something you've never ordered. Or if you have a favorite meal that you cook, tweak it a bit. Try finding a new way home from work or school. mean, maybe not if you're walking, maybe don't get too lost if you're a kid. Try watching something, reading something you haven't done before. that pushing yourself a little bit with trying something new, thinking something new, because that's the first step. And that's something everybody can do.
No matter where you are, you know, that that's.
James Taylor (36:42)
Yeah, wife,
I think very much along those lines, which frustrates my wife no ends because we'll often be in a restaurant and I'll want to try the one thing on the menu that we haven't tried before. And even though she's, that's going to be a terrible decision if you make that decision, we just go for the tried and tested thing. But I said, well, let's go. And she is usually right. I must give a credit for that. But I just feel it's kind of using that part of my brain as well.
James (36:53)
Mm-hmm.
James Taylor (37:08)
As we start to finish up here as well, just kind of quick fire questions for you. Is there one quote that you kind of tend to live by or you find yourself returning to this one quote perhaps more than others?
James (37:25)
If I'm honest, the quote that probably comes back to you the most is from a movie called House of Games, which is, we'll deal with that thing then. And it keeps me from worrying about most things in terms of could this bad thing happen? Maybe we'll deal with that thing then. I have no idea if that's the healthy coping mechanism or not, but it's the one that I actually do.
James Taylor (37:47)
Hahaha
And is there ⁓ a tool or a habit or ritual that you find is very important for your own creative work?
James (38:03)
I think learning what works best for your headspace based on time of day. So like when I wake up, I usually will either do calls or emails. And I find that it's usually around one to 4 PM when I'm at my most creative. And so I try to time it. So that's my time that I can do my writing. If it, to the extent possible, not everybody has the luxury of doing this, but if you know there's certain times that
Your brain is just firing at all cylinders and this is when you should, you can be the most creative. Try as much as possible to allow yourself that time to be creative as opposed to have that time be when you're stuck in need.
James Taylor (38:48)
And if there was one book you would recommend to our listeners, not one of your own books, but a book by another author, what would that book be?
James (38:57)
that's a good question.
Something that's excited me is that.
A lot of the layperson books on creativity are not by researchers, but recently there have been a number of them. And there's books by Scott Barry Kaufman, books by Zorana Idsivic. ⁓ There's a book on curiosity and on kind of defying the system by Todd Kashtan. The fact that we're seeing layperson books by people who are actually experts and any of those ⁓ among others.
Because when I was first entering this field, there were layperson books by like the Holly Chick sent me high and Bob Sternberg and Howard Gardner and they were all legit. And at a certain point, it just got harder and harder for there to be these layperson books by the experts. And now they're kind of, coming back to that. And so that would be what I would.
James Taylor (39:54)
That's great. I I think it's that thing we're seeing in terms of the academics being, know, learning, relearning storytelling in this form as well, which is, you know, kind of going back to, were talking about Man's Search for Meaning, I was thinking about Joseph Campbell as well, some of those key things that often kind of come back to us as well. Well, Dr. James Kaufman, thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.
How Rest Unlocks Creativity: The Neuroscience of Your Brain – Dr. Joseph Jebelli #357
09 Sep 2025
00:49:53
How Rest Unlocks Creativity: The Neuroscience of Your Brain - Dr. Joseph Jebelli #357
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, James Taylor interviews Dr. Joseph Jebelli, neuroscientist and author of The Brain at Rest and In Pursuit of Memory. Together, they explore how rest isn’t laziness but a neural necessity that unlocks creativity, productivity, and mental clarity.
Discover the neuroscience behind the brain’s default mode network (DMN), why overwork accelerates aging and burnout, and practical strategies for harnessing rest to spark creative insights. Dr. Jebelli also shares actionable tips on micro-rest practices, the surprising cognitive power of nature, and why doing “nothing” could be the most productive thing you do today.
Perfect for entrepreneurs, creatives, leaders, and anyone looking to work smarter—not harder.
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
“People often succeed in life not despite their inactivity but because of it.” – Dr. Joseph Jebelli
“Rest isn’t powering down; it’s your brain switching states and forming new connections.” – Dr. Joseph Jebelli
“Nature is full of what psychologists call soft fascinations—things that hold your attention effortlessly and calm the brain.” – Dr. Joseph Jebelli
“The more you rest, the sharper and more creative your brain becomes.” – Dr. Joseph Jebelli
Rest is a productivity tool: Rest activates the brain’s default mode network, boosting intelligence, memory, and creativity.
Burnout rewires the brain: Chronic overwork shrinks the hippocampus, enlarges the amygdala, and accelerates cognitive aging.
Micro-rest techniques work: Short breaks, naps, and even just staring into space can enhance problem-solving and creative thinking.
Nature fuels creativity: Spending as little as 20 minutes in green or blue spaces significantly improves creativity, memory, and immune health.
Cultural mindset shift needed: From hustle culture to embracing rest as a key driver of performance and well-being.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
Today I’m thrilled to welcome Dr. Joseph Gibelli to the Super Creativity Podcast. Joseph is a neuroscientist with a PhD from University College London, postdoctoral experience at the University of Washington, and a writer who brings scientific depth to real human dilemmas. His first book, In Pursuit of Memory, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize and longlisted for the Welcome Book Prize.
His latest, The Brain at Rest, is a thoughtful, counter-cultural manifesto. Rest isn’t slacking. It activates our brain’s default mode network, lighting up creativity, memory, insight, and emotional clarity. He reveals how burnout doesn’t just drain us, it ages our brain, thins critical regions, and fuels a silent global health crisis. Whether you’re feeling stuck,
burnout or just sinking into your smartphone at night, Joseph’s message is resoundingly clear. What if stepping back is the most creative move you could make? Joseph, welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.
Joseph Jebelli (01:16)
Hi James, thanks for having me.
James Taylor (01:19)
Now, in parts you’ve written deeply about memory, the evolution of the human brain, and now rest, was there a moment, professionally or personally, when you realised that rest wasn’t laziness, but a neural necessity?
Joseph Jebelli (01:32)
Yeah, so I had quite an interesting journey discovering the neuroscience of rest. So the first reason was really personal. So I witnessed both my mother and father massively overwork and reached the point of burnout to the point of really ⁓ ill health consequences. So my father now lives with major depressive disorder as a result of overwork. My mother has a blood pressure that’s so high that her GP texts almost daily asking for blood pressure.
readings. And so I sort of grew up with parents who were incredibly hard workers to the point of burnout. And so it took me a long time to really actually appreciate the importance of rest. And so I myself went through that phase of overwork. So when I was a postdoc at the University of Washington, I’d basically spend all day in the lab doing experiments and mentoring students. And then I would
you know, I would finish around six or seven and go straight to a coffee shop and then just sit and work on grants and my first book until like 10 or 11 o’clock at night. And, you know, like, needless to say, it was it was exhausting. And I always felt, you know, I often felt totally wiped out. And it was interesting because I realized I couldn’t sustain that pace indefinitely. And so I started to ease off from my work. And when I started to ease off from my work, these
something really astonishing happened. So not only did I feel better, not only did I sleep better, but other, I noticed other cognitive improvements. So like my memory got better, my ability to think clearly improved, my ability to write more fluidly got better. And I actually ended up being more productive than I was when I was just grinding it out all day long. So even though I was doing fewer hours of work every day, I was achieving more. And so I just thought this is really interesting.
And then I, so I decided to look into the neuroscience of rest, you know, driven largely by that. And what I discovered is really extraordinary. You know, there is this resting brain network, which as you say, is called the default network. And that network only becomes active when we rest, when we do things that are restful to our brains. And we now know just in the last few years that when you activate your default network with rest, you improve your intelligence.
creativity, memory, problem solving abilities, ability to predict the future. It even lowers your risk of developing neurological illnesses like depression and dementia. And so, you know, the message I’m trying to get across in the book is that we have our understanding of work and rest completely upside down. It’s rest, not work, that is the secret to sustained productivity. It’s rest that is the driving force behind all of our cognitive abilities. And as I say in the book, what this new neuroscience is teaching us is that
People often succeed in life not despite their inactivity but because of it.
James Taylor (04:31)
So that almost feels like it’s obviously the opposite end of the hustle culture that we’re living in today as well. It’s saying, you know, just hustle, just kind of keep cranking through there as well. As you were looking into the research of this and you were kind of doing your own research for it.
and obviously you’d had the example with your parents, you could see firsthand, but as you kind of looked for the data to kind of support your hypothesis, was there any key stat or data or research that you discovered in that process that made you end, actually, I think I’m onto something here. There’s something that can, it’s not just a gut feeling, it’s actually something that’s really supported by evidence.
Joseph Jebelli (05:07)
Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of work and overwork, even though working conditions are better today than they were in the past, there’s no doubt about that. When you look at the statistics and you look at the data, we are in a dramatic regression in terms of burnout and overwork. So just to give you a few stats off the top of my head. globally, overwork now kills 745,000 people a year. That’s a 29 % increase since the year 2000.
three in five employees now report a lack of interest, motivation and energy. That’s a 38 % increase since 2019. So, you know, we are in a huge regression in terms of burnout and overwork. And when you look at the brain, what this is doing to the brain, it actually thins the frontal cortex in the same way that aging does. It literally makes your brain older than it is. It enlarges a region called the amygdala, which was responsible for our fight or flight.
reflex, that’s why overworked people often feel very anxious. It also shrinks the hippocampus, a region really important for learning and memory. And, you the really interesting thing is that when you actually look at what overwork is doing to us psychologically and neurologically, it actually falls into a pattern of really interesting phases. So it starts off with basically dissatisfaction, like you’re not happy with your job.
You feel dissatisfied, but it’s kind of a manageable feeling. So you just ignore it. That then moves into cynicism where you just no longer care about your job. It’s just something you’ve got to do. You’ve got to do it to pay the bills. So you just get on with it. That then moves into dehumanization. And that’s the kind of emotional hardening that many people have around their job. That’s what leads to things, a sense of sort of incompetence and productivity guilt. And that then leads to anxiety and depression.
And that’s then when many of the neurological symptoms like a thinning frontal cortex and a shrinking hippocampus start to set in. But the really interesting thing about this science is that some incredible longitudinal studies in Sweden have shown that once the symptoms of overwork set in, it takes your brain up to three years to recover. It takes it three years just to get back to that baseline of good cognitive ability. And so, you know,
All of the data and the statistics bear this out, that things are getting much worse in terms of our work culture. you alluded to it earlier when you talked about the hustle mindset. We do still have this widespread rampant and increasing problem of a hustle mentality, that it’s somehow an aspirational way to live, that the harder you work, the faster you run, the more you’re going to achieve and the quicker you’re going to get to where you want to get. And it’s just not true.
It’s the complete opposite is true. know, rest is the driving force behind sustained long-term productivity and all of your higher cognitive abilities. ⁓ And so, you know, all of the data now bears this out, whether you’re, you know, ⁓ a doctor, a train driver, a student, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, what task you’re doing, you will always perform better on that task if you rest beforehand, precisely because you’re activating.
your brain’s default network, your brain’s resting network.
James Taylor (08:29)
wondering as well, has there been any, I guess it’s probably the span is too short in terms of where this is starting to be studied, but is there anything in terms of the evolutionary side of this? Because we think about 100 years ago, I was watching a video just a few days ago, it was set in the 19th, was from 1930s or 1940s, and it was talking about the average day of work for someone in management. And I looked at it I thought,
if that person had to deal with the same level of stress and the same pace that they have to deal with today, it’s a different thing. I wonder, as it being my research, obviously I realized for the people that living in it now, that having to deal with this kind of change in terms of what we have to do every day, but are we starting to see anything from an evolutionary standpoint that maybe over four or five decades, the human brain starts to adapt and we kind of get used to working at this higher pace?
Joseph Jebelli (09:25)
Hmm so Sorry
So when you look at the history, I think a lot of the overwork mindset that we have, that we’ve basically inherited from the past, a lot of it comes from 16th century Protestant work ethic of just, you know, keep calm, carry on, get on with it. You know, ⁓ this idea that rest is an indulgence, it’s a luxury. It’s something that’s kind of unprincipled, even a bit irresponsible. And that mindset,
has carried on right up to the present. We still think of rest as an unprincipled and even irresponsible indulgence, essentially, not as the driving force of our higher cognitive abilities. And I think that’s what’s basically led us into this culture of what I call in the book untrammeled capitalism. So just capitalism with not enough guardrails, not enough regulations. And we have made some progress. There’s the five-day workday.
there’s the five day work week instead of the seven day work week. There’s progress like, we no longer have asbestos in hospitals and people have to wear their seat belts and you can’t smoke in hospitals. There are cultural landmarks, but the fact is when you look at the science, we haven’t gone anywhere near enough, far enough when it comes to work and overwork. And as I said, all the data shows were actually going in the wrong direction.
you when you just have to look at like the four day work week, for instance, where they did a huge trial of that in Iceland, and they found that productivity either stayed the same or actually improved. And I think, you know, as a result of that large trial, they’re now about to try one, a four day work week in Japan as well. Japan’s really interesting. They actually have a word for working to death in Japan. They call it Kuroshi. And they estimate it’s responsible for 20,000 deaths a year. So, you know, to come back to your question, you know,
You know, there’s there have been some some areas of progress, but we are we are completely moving backwards when it comes to overwork. And I think a lot of that has to do with, again, mainly the cultural mindset of thinking of rest as an indulgence. But more than anything, just a complete lack of understanding about the science of rest. You know, we don’t understand until relatively recently, like what actually is rest for your brain? Like, what is it? Are you just powering down?
Because I think that’s how basically people have thought of it. They thought of rest for the brain in the same way that we think of rest for a muscle, that it’s just powering down. But it’s not, it’s switching states, it’s moving into a different network, it’s activating the default network. Because the really interesting thing about the default network is that it works in competition with another network that we call the executive network, and that’s the work network. That’s the network that’s active when there’s a task to be done. So whenever you’re at your desk and you’re leaning into a cognitively demanding task,
You can feel when the executive network is activated because it’s tiring, it’s exhausting. You start to mind wander and drift away because you’re not really that interested in what you’re doing because it’s so mentally exhausting. When that network is activated, your default network is very quiet because they work in competition with each other. But interestingly, the executive network only occupies about 5 % of your brain, whereas the default network occupies 20 % of the brain.
We need to understand that when you rest, this network, this 20 % of your brain large resting network is not only firing up, but that’s the thing that’s improving your memory and creativity and giving you all of these insights. There’s a reason why you have your best thoughts when you’re just alone in the shower, not really thinking about much, or when you just go for a walk in a park and you just let your mind drift. It’s because your default network is busily
working on all of these problems. And so I think that’s, that’s that to me, that’s the biggest reason that we misunderstand rest. We haven’t understood what the actual underlying neuroscience of rest is and what it’s doing to our brains.
James Taylor (13:36)
So taking from a kind of the neural network standpoint and from a chemical standpoint, you speak about this idea of the default mode network and it kind of lights up essentially when you’re doing nothing. So for listeners that maybe unfamiliar, what’s actually going on in the brain? Like if I was to be looking at a scan of the brain or the chemistry of the brain, what is actually happening when that default mode network is going on?
Joseph Jebelli (14:06)
So a couple of things. The first thing that happens is that blood flow increases, like to a huge extent, to the default network and also to the frontal lobe, which is the seat of your higher faculties. So whenever you think of things like human attention and decision making, our personalities, ⁓ many of our higher faculties are found as a result of ⁓ activity in the frontal lobe. And a lot of the default network is actually found in the frontal lobe.
even though it actually spans out across the brain. So the first thing that happens is that blood flow increases and that delivers more oxygen to your nerve cells. And as a result, they basically become a lot more active. So these are electrical cells that fire electrical impulses. And when they become more active, that’s basically, that’s what underlies your ability to think, to think clearly. And at the same time, they form new connections as well. neurons are covered in
what we call synapses. I’m sure everyone is familiar with what synapses are, but when you activate your default network with REST, you can actually increase the number of synapses on neurons, increase the number of synaptic contacts with other neurons. So it’s quite literally forming new connections, which is then underpinning your ability to come up with new creative insights. it’s a neurophysiological, but also a neurochemical and a neuroelectrical phenomena that…
is allowing you to come up with all of these new thoughts. suppose that’s really what’s happening. I suppose that’s really what we’re happening when you look at the brain scans. it’s worth noting as well that even though the default network, it was discovered in 2001, but it’s only the last few years that we’ve really started to understand it. But the really interesting thing about studying the default network is for many years, neuroscientists ignored it because they thought it was just meaningless background noise.
So what they would often do is they would put someone into a brain scanner and they would say, okay, we’re interested in finding out what certain regions of the brain are doing when you perform a certain task. So they would say, we want you to memorize a long list of words. We want you to, or we want you to name as many words beginning with the letter K. So it would be any type of sort of cognitively demanding task. And then they would look for the brain regions that light up.
And at the time there was this, you when they were just, when the people were just lying down in the brain scanners before the experiment started, so before they had to perform the work orientated task, when they were just relaxing and chilling out, the default network resting brain signal was screaming with activity. And it was, it was so powerful that neuroscientists would actually delete that signal just in order to see more closely what the brain was doing when we perform a task.
And again, I think that comes back to this cultural attitude of like, well, you know, there’s work and then there’s, and then there’s nothing. There’s nothing else. And so they ignored it. They exactly, the void exactly. So, but it’s only recently they’ve actually decided, okay, we really need to figure out what this background signal is. So yeah, I mean, essentially your neurons are becoming much more active, forming new connections. And also I should say as well, getting physically bigger.
James Taylor (17:11)
The void.
Joseph Jebelli (17:31)
in terms of your actual brain. So we know for instance that when you take a 30 minute nap every day, and this was a discovery made only a few years ago by an incredible neuroscientist at University College London called Victoria Garfield. People who take 30 minute naps every day literally have bigger brains than people who don’t. And the difference is really significant. We’re talking about 15 cubic centimeters and to put that into context, that’s the volume of a small plum. And so when you just pause and think about
You know, the millions of neurons and synapses and connections and cognitive abilities that are contained within the volume of a small plum, it’s huge. you know, rest, it’s not just activating your default network. It’s actually growing the network. It’s growing the size of your brain itself. It’s making your brain chunkier and healthier and more resilient to a whole host of things, including neurodegenerative diseases and age-related cognitive decline. ⁓ So there’s all of these…
sort of concrete neurobiological things happening, know, without us even being aware really that they’re happening until you start resting more and then you realize, I feel a lot better and sharper.
James Taylor (18:45)
I mean, what you were saying also about those studies that were done where the scientists would almost, the researcher would kind of disregard the void, let’s say, or whatever the space was, kind of makes me think a little bit of, in jazz music, where I think it was Louis Armstrong, or maybe it was Miles Davis, was saying, actually, the thing is the space, that is the thing. And, you know, we think of the notes, but actually, we don’t think of the space, or we think of…
the stars for example, we think space or we think a table, actually most of this table is the gaps, is the space between the materials as well, so it’s interesting like your book is really kind of focused on that space. One, you’ll be able to correct me on this because I know for years when I’ve been on stages and I’ve spoken about this move that happens,
from what we call the incubation stage in creativity to the insight, the aha moment, the light bulb moment. And I often talk about…
that shower moment, I ask audiences how many of you get your best ideas in the shower and there’s a large number or sometimes it’s in the late evening when people are more relaxed for example and I’ve always had this line that I talk about for the shower thing in the morning and now that I’m actually getting to speak to a proper neuroscientist I can find out if I’m actually saying this right or if this is complete bunk what I’ve been saying up to this point which is I was always led to believe that
In the morning, your brain is fuzzy and it’s unwound, so you’re open to unconventional thoughts. Alpha waves are rippling through your brain, directing your attention inwards to remote associations that emanate from the right hemisphere. Is that correct or have I been talking bunk for a few years in terms of actually what’s going on in the brain here?
Joseph Jebelli (20:27)
No, no, that’s ⁓ can you say can you say that last bit again?
James Taylor (20:30)
So ⁓
the line I’ve often used is, brain is fuzzy, it’s unwound, we’re open to unconventional thoughts, alpha waves are rippling through our brain, directing our attention inwards to remote associations that emanate from the right hemisphere.
Joseph Jebelli (20:45)
Yeah, no that, yeah, that doesn’t, that sounds fairly accurate to me. No, no, no.
James Taylor (20:49)
It’s not completely wrong. But
the reason I mention that as well is I know that West Point Military Academy, one of the techniques that they teach there is a technique called preloading, where they tell people about two hours before you go to sleep at night, let’s say if you’re thinking about a problem at work or if you’re in the military, for example, and a challenge you’re trying to figure out, they say ask yourself a question two hours before you go to sleep at night and then just forget about it.
And your brain overnight when you’re relaxed and just sleeping, it of works and that’s often the reason we get these aha moments in the morning as well. So that kind of relaxation, just kind of letting it go, know, letting it move and just let your brain do some of those, because we think the brain’s not actually doing anything at night when we’re sleeping and I guess that’s not correct.
Joseph Jebelli (21:25)
Hmm.
Mmm.
No, yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, it’s, really like the way you put it as well when you described it as unwound because, you know, when you wake up, your brain is in a phase that we call the hypnopompic phase. So that’s the phase basically between sleep and full wakefulness. You also have a term that people are probably a bit more familiar with, which is the hypnagogic phase.
And that’s the phase just before you go to sleep, just before like, you know, the phase between wakefulness and actually falling asleep. And interestingly, we now know that both those phases, just before you go to sleep and just when you wake up, are periods of really strong default network activity. Like sleep itself is a period of high default network activity, but those phases as well are really important for it. And that’s why I say in the book, you know, before you go to bed,
Don’t please, please for the love of God, don’t just sit doom scrolling on your phone before you go to bed, because that’s not going to activate your default network. The artificial light from the phone is really bad for you. Just as a quick aside, we now think one of the main reasons that cancer is going up so much among young people is because of the artificial light just before people go to bed, because it’s blocking melatonin, the sleep hormone. And we now know that melatonin has a really powerful anti-cancer effect.
It essentially acts as a tumor suppressor. ⁓ So don’t look at your phone because, you know, that’s, it feels restful because it’s a distraction from what you were just doing, but it’s not, it’s a trick. It’s masquerading as rest. All looking at your phone does is it trains your distraction. It doesn’t, it doesn’t allow your brain, you know, the thing that allows your brain rest is the things that allow ⁓ deep inner self-reflective self, self, crucially self-generated thought.
So instead of doing that, know, just stare into space for a few minutes and let your mind wander. you know, even just reading a few pages of like a fiction book that you really enjoy, let’s say something that isn’t cognitively taxing, something that isn’t going to activate your executive network. ⁓ You know, those are the sorts of things you should do, really restful things before you go to sleep. And again, in the morning, don’t just hop on your phone, actually spend a few minutes just staring into space, stare out of the window.
you know, stare at a mark, you know, on your ceiling. You’re like a little, you know, it doesn’t matter what it is. Just let your brain actually decompress. Let it do seemingly nothing. Just stare into space. It feels like you’re doing nothing, but your default network is really active and it’s doing so much. But yeah, unwound is, yeah, I like that. That’s a very good way of saying it.
James Taylor (24:26)
I think there
was another way I use on when there was another a few years ago I was doing an event in Stockholm in Sweden and I was staying at this fantastic hotel which is you might know it called the Grand Hotel it’s where the Nobel Prize winners stay the night before they’re going to collect their prizes and so I’m having
breakfast there in the morning and having coffee and who should walk past me but John Cleese, the British famous comedian. So I actually went up to him, he’s obviously a big fan of his work and ⁓ we got talking, we actually talked about creativity because he did a talk a few years ago where he talked about how, and he was talking about in relation to comedy and writing comedy, he said, you know, our brain is like a camera lens.
Joseph Jebelli (24:53)
⁓ wow.
James Taylor (25:12)
and sometimes you need it to be really focused in focus but often when you have to do more creative expansive work you actually want to purposely defocus the lens you know that kind of relaxation or defocusing of the lens and one of the things you mentioned these two foot the hip I probably got this wrong hypnopompic and hypnogolic face that probably got these wrong but yeah and it reminded me there was a was a study done a few years ago I think it was a professor at Harvard where he
Joseph Jebelli (25:30)
Hypnopompic, yeah. Yeah, hypnopompic and hypnagogic.
James Taylor (25:41)
took comedians and jazz musicians under brain scans and he looked at the bit of the brain that they were able to switch off and it’s the bit that I’m gonna probably massacre the way I’m saying this but it’s basically the bit that all of us have which says don’t say that you shouldn’t really say that you know it’s a little bit of the pause that almost but comedians and jazz musicians are actually able to switch
this part off and it’s a train, it’s something that they’ve been trained to do and if you know a lot of jazz musicians, my wife’s a jazz musician and they said to do what they do well they actually have to feel relaxed.
in the moment to get that sense of flow in what they’re doing to kind of, so it doesn’t feel, they don’t feel that tenseness in that executive part you were just talking about. They have that sense even though they’re in front of people, there’s a confidence and that allows parts of their brain to maybe switch off and to switch on as well.
Joseph Jebelli (26:39)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, overthinking, you know, is not good for the default network, obviously. And as you said, it leads to feelings of anxiety and apprehension. And, you know, all of those things block your cognitive abilities. ⁓ And so, you know, it is basically about, ⁓ you know, seemingly switching the brain off. I mean, I I I often think of one really interesting study where
they found that they got a group of people to perform like a repetitive task, like a really boring work orientated repetitive task. And they found that the people who were allowed to just, you know, feel like they’re switching off and let their minds wander, they always performed better on that task. But interestingly, even when they did that to the point where their mind wandering actually like hindered their performance on the task.
So they had their heads in the clouds for just a little bit too long. It had actually affected the performance on the task itself. Even then, it still ramped up their creativity. Their scores of creativity were much higher in all of the cognitive tests for the time being and in the long run. So that’s the interesting thing. Even if you feel a bit guilty about letting you.
letting your mind rest and doing nothing and you feel like, it’s actually going to hamper my ability maybe in the here and now. It’s not, it’s still going to be much better for your brain in the long run. And so there’s, know, there’s, it’s very sort of counterintuitive and I think it’s something that the more we learn about it, the more counterintuitive and like fascinating it becomes.
James Taylor (28:23)
Now in the book you obviously, you’re not a proponent of doom scrolling and you say there is better ways to rest that brain. In the book you talk about walks, naps, baths, other things as well. ⁓ What have you found has been maybe in your own life, in your own creative work that you do as a research and a writer, what do you find really works for you that allows that brain to really go to rest?
Joseph Jebelli (28:49)
So I think one of the most important things and it’s a small easy thing to ⁓ start as well. It’s just to take ⁓ many more breaks throughout the day. I now, know, every hour I take a 10 minute break. And I often also practice the Pomodoro technique where you have 25 minutes of work and then five minutes breaks, five minutes of rest. And it’s really important in that time to do nothing, just to go for a walk, to sit by a window and let your mind wander.
Or even you can listen to an audio book if you find it restful, you can read something that you find restful. But I think just bringing in many more breaks throughout the day is a really good way to activate the default network and to get it activated throughout the day because we’re so used to just sitting down in this deep focus mode and working for such extensive periods of time that we ignore the resting brain. So I incorporate…
many more breaks throughout my day. I spend a lot more time sort of just, yeah, just like gazing out of the window, going on walks in, you know, in green spaces. That’s really important. There was a huge study done recently on 20,000 people by a research called Matthew White. I think it was at Exeter University where he basically found that, you know, about 20 minutes a day.
of being in a green space is the sweet spot for improved psychological and neurological health. And we know now that when you spend time in green spaces, your brain waves actually shift. They shift from very busy and anxious beta waves into much more calming and even meditative theta waves. And that happens because nature is basically full of what psychologists call soft fascinations.
So these are things that hold your attention in a really effortless way. There’s a reason why when you’re in a forest and you’re listening to the rustling of the leaves or you’re on a beach and you’re just staring at the lapping blue waves, there’s a reason that holds your attention in a very effortless way. And especially when you contrast that to what psychologists call hard fascinations, that’s things like your smartphone, like LED billboards, train announcements, overbearing bosses and…
deadlines and all these things and these things are draining your attentional resources and causing cognitive fatigue. But more than that, when you’re in a green space, we now know that plants actually release this chemical called phytoncides and these are basically oils that protect trees from bacteria. But when you’re in a green space, you breathe phytoncides in and it has an incredible effect on your immune system. can actually, it can raise your immune systems.
ability to fight off infections by 40%. Even just being in a green space has been shown to increase creativity by 50 % and memory recall by 20%. Incredibly, if you’re in a brain scanner as well, and you’re literally just shown a picture of a green space versus a city, your default network will come online and you’ll start to get some of the cognitive benefits of that. you know, our brains are craving nature in a far more profound way than we’ve previously recognized.
And so what else do do? Well, you I spend time exercising as well because active rest is also really beneficial for the brain. Even gentle exercise. So we now know that only four minutes of gentle exercise a day is enough to grow a bigger brain and a healthier default network. Also finding micro moments of play throughout your day is really good for the brain. Because when you think about play, I mean, what is play? It’s unstructured, it’s imaginative.
Crucially, it’s task off rather than task on. And these are all things that the default network thrives on. So, find those moments of play throughout your day where you don’t take things so seriously and you can have fun. And I suppose just leaving work at work as well, like I’ve tried to get better at doing that. We all take work with us now. all, I mean, many people respond to work emails on the weekends and it’s about.
creating a clearer demarcation between work and rest because they’re not in opposition with each other. Rest is the thing that is the fuel for your work and it’s the thing that’s going to lead to much better long-term productivity. So yeah, there’s lots of tools and techniques and different ways to rest.
James Taylor (33:22)
These are great.
And as you’re saying, obviously with the color green, I remember a few years ago, was studies at the University of Berlin and the University of British Columbia, they looked at which colors kind of really are best for creativity. And that color green was the one that both those kind of studies found.
And ⁓ I was speaking at event recently for one of the tribal nations in the US and we were talking about this idea of how the place in which you create has an effect upon what you create as well and David Byrne, the musician’s done a very famous TED talk about that as well in terms of music, how different spaces affect your ability to create. And I was saying ⁓ to these tribal leaders at the time, I said, we know
In Europe, we have this idea of the genius loci. The Romans came up with the places themselves have their own creative genius. This idea that the individual is the creative genius is quite a modern notion. You know, it’s a Renaissance idea, basically. But up until that point, it was always felt that we were vessels for creative ideas, inspiration, it can literally flowed through us. And as I’m talking to these tribal leaders, they’re saying, yeah, we’ve known this for
like centuries, you know, we, when we talk about a lake or a ⁓ mountain range, we talk about it having that effect, it has this kind of genius loci as well and
Joseph Jebelli (34:35)
Hahaha
James Taylor (34:47)
And so, and I know that maybe it’s just the sciences, we’re just finally kind of catching up to something that’s been like the Japanese, I they have forest bathing, which has happened for a long time where they kind of go into the spaces. maybe we’re just finally catching up. One thing I am interested to know though, as someone who spends a lot of time in the Middle East, when I’ve spoken about this idea of like the green spaces, it hasn’t quite ⁓ connected in the same way with some of the audiences there.
something I’m interested to know, this is studies I’ve seen have always been focused on the Western countries and Europe and America. I would be interested to know if those societies are from drier climates, whether that green thing also does the same to their brains. I don’t know if I don’t know if any of those kind of studies have been done if it has a there’s differences maybe it’s blue the ocean and the water is a bigger thing for them.
Joseph Jebelli (35:33)
Hmm
Yeah, that’s really interesting. Because we know that obviously different cultures, you know, practice rest in different ways and certain cultures, some cultures take rest more seriously than others. Like we know, for instance, that rest is thankfully taken more seriously in Europe than it is in America. So there’s no doubt about that. But in terms of, and you know, at the same time, you know, Japan, I think sadly has a bit more of the American corporate
overwork kind of mentality. So there are differences, you know, in terms of culture, in terms of the underlying biology. Even people from like a drier climate will respond in the same way to fight inside exposure from trees and, you know, from being in green spaces. at the same time,
you know, the nature thing is interesting because it doesn’t necessarily, you don’t necessarily have to be in a forest. So the soft fascinations and the things that help change your brain waves and your brain chemistry, you know, it can be from being in a beautiful canyon or on a desert. It’s, you know, there are still soft fascinations there. There are still things that are going to change your brain, your brain’s neurochemistry. know, even though, though, as you said, the colour green and being around greenery is really important.
We know for instance that there’s also what we call blue prescriptions now as well, as well as green prescriptions, because the colour blue has actually been found to change the neurochemistry of your brain as well. That also shifts your brain waves and changes your brain’s chemistry in a really positive, beneficial way. And so there are even researchers now looking at the neurological health of people who live on the beach or live on the coast compared to people that live more inland.
James Taylor (37:17)
The scraping, yeah.
Joseph Jebelli (37:38)
So I think the main message is that it’s nature, like, you overall, that is really beneficial for our brains. It’s precisely because it allows us, it allows true rest for the brain. And, you know, because what we’re getting when we don’t embrace nature in that way is, as I said, things that masqueraders rest, like your smartphone, like binge watching your favorite series on Netflix, you know,
being in this sort chronic urban existence where everything is very, very fast paced and very hustle and bustle. And you you can still find restful things to do in that environment, obviously, but it’s, you know, I think it goes without question. It’s harder basically. So no, I mean, yeah, it would, think that there needs to be more research done on like the geographical differences and like cultural differences. But I have no doubt that
James Taylor (38:25)
Yeah.
Joseph Jebelli (38:38)
The neurophysiological effects of things like fight insides and exposure to greenery ⁓ and blue spaces, it’s so profound, the effect it has on your brain that it doesn’t matter if you live in the Middle East in a very dry ⁓ landscape, it’s still gonna help your brain.
James Taylor (38:57)
funny because when often when I’m speaking to more to corporate audiences and I’ll mention something like this you just took which sounds like a very soft kind of woo type of topic about having this relationship with nature and and
the number of people that come up to me afterwards saying, I’m so glad you mentioned this because, know, this is, and they’ll tell you their personal relationship with nature and how they’ve maybe done something in their office or their work day as well. So I think it’s maybe this is a topic that’s in the same way that maybe we talked about emotional intelligence a few years ago that became more of a thing or resilience and maybe this is now we’re kind of moving into this space our relationship with nature. So your previous books have also covered memory.
Joseph Jebelli (39:35)
Hmm.
James Taylor (39:38)
This book is really covering the brain at rest and what that does for us in terms of our clarity, our creativity, our resilience as well. Where’s your research going next? I’m wondering, is the next book gonna be on how to optimize our brain chemistry to do the like hustle work? Like are you gonna go completely in the opposite direction? Where are you going next?
Joseph Jebelli (39:51)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that really would be a sea change, wouldn’t it? ⁓ Well, I can definitely say a firm categorical no to that. ⁓ I’m very anti-overwork and very pro-rest for all the reasons that we’ve discussed. The next book, you know, I haven’t given too much thought about the next book. So this one’s just come out, talking about it.
⁓ far and wide wherever I can. ⁓ Yeah, I think as well, know, ⁓ having a bit of a rest myself, I suppose, because there was always a kind of interesting sort of irony and paradox to ⁓ trying to be more restful whilst writing a book. But I still managed it by basically just being more intentional about my rest. And as I said, having more breaks throughout the day and practicing all of the tools and techniques that I talk about in the book.
James Taylor (40:39)
⁓
Joseph Jebelli (40:59)
But yeah, at the moment I’m promoting the book, but at the same time thoroughly trying to enact the message of the book with more rest. At least for the time being, we’ve just had a baby boy as well, so I’m taking some paternity leave as well. But yeah, when I know what the next book is, I’ll certainly let you know.
James Taylor (41:24)
Right, so just kind of final quick fire questions as we start to finish up here as well. ⁓ Is there a quote that maybe you reflect on a little bit more often, or something that maybe you keep kind of returning to thinking about this quote?
Joseph Jebelli (41:38)
A quote from something that I’ve written in the book. Yeah.
James Taylor (41:41)
Maybe not to say something,
but maybe a quote from another writer, another thinker, or a scientist that something maybe you often kind of return to, you’re thinking a lot about just now perhaps.
Joseph Jebelli (41:56)
Yeah, that’s-
often think of the ⁓
I’m a fan of the Henry David Thoreau, I love to be alone, I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. I do quite like that and I think about that often because I have a chapter in my book about solitude and all of the cognitive benefits that can come from actually having some alone time. You know, crucially when it’s chosen, when it’s voluntary alone time. Because that’s a period of
not only great default network activity, but a period when you can have a true self-generated inner thought. ⁓ And I think that’s something that we’re sort of slowly losing. ⁓ You know, there’s kind of a heritage to rest that we’re losing. You know, I remember speaking to, ⁓ I was speaking to this really interesting psychologist, Charles Ferniehoe, for the book. He’s written some really interesting books. And he was saying how his daughter,
you know, she’s in the garden, but she’s often on a screen and he has to take it away. And he was saying, you know, he was like, you know, he’s saying, you know, when we grew up, you would just sit in the garden and stare at the trees. And I, know, that’s certainly how it was with me as well. think smartphones and all of that, it was, came around really when I was in my twenties. So, and I think, I just think, you know, there’s that quote on solitude, that idea of just enjoying your own company and your own thoughts and just being alone in nature.
to have that inner self-reflection. That’s something I think about more and more because I think with the rise of digital distractions and social media and the kind of digital culture that we’re in and seems to just be amplifying, I think we are losing that more and more. that’s, you know, that heritage of rest, that ability just to sit in the garden, sit in the park and just let your mind wander and stare at the trees.
It’s something that we need to return to more now than ever before.
James Taylor (44:09)
Yeah, this idea of, I know, I remember a few years ago going to Walden Pond, you know, I think with it, Rhea Thurow wrote that book as well. you can, and the first thing immediately came to mind was, God, this must have been really boring at the time. You know, you were just, there’s nothing to do. They were just kind of going, you know, just going there and sitting. And I think, you know, we think about this word boredom in a negative context, but actually I think it’s quite a powerful thing to do because, know,
Joseph Jebelli (44:17)
Hmm.
You
James Taylor (44:38)
having that space where you don’t have the distractions just to let the mind wander that you were talking about earlier, to think and to perhaps come up with original thoughts as well, something that isn’t coming in from other places, social media, the media, other places as well as, yes, maybe that’s a boredom.
Joseph Jebelli (44:56)
Yeah, well, if
boredom is really interesting, should chat to Dr. Anna Lemke. She’s, she’s written some really interesting things about boredom and how it is a catalyst for creativity and how you should, you should embrace boredom because again, they’ve done studies showing that when you’re bored, it not only makes you more creative, interestingly, it makes you more charitable as well, which, was, which was a big surprise. Cause you look for more meaningful things to do afterwards. And part of that
more meaningful search is also to be more charitable. So yeah, there’s a lot to be said for boredom.
James Taylor (45:31)
Amazing, amazing.
What is one, ⁓ we talk about being anti-tech, but I mean not completely anti-tech here, but is there a tool or an app that you find particularly useful in the work you do as a researcher and as a writer?
Joseph Jebelli (45:46)
⁓ Not an app. ⁓ I’m quite anti the apps. So I, I mean, I think I sort of, I mentioned some of the apps in my book that are supposed to help with productivity, like one called Forest, where you’re supposed to be more productive by growing virtual trees, which I just think is completely nuts.
⁓ And all of these apps that’s, you know, supposedly streamline your work and make you more productive when in actual fact, they just make you end up doing more work and spending more time on your phone. It’s like more screen time, essentially. ⁓ So there’s not really an app. I sort of I try and spend as little time. I only spend time on on my smartphone when I really need to now just because of how bad it is for our brains.
and our resting brain in particular. So not a nap. think I’m more a fan of like the techniques side of things like the Pomodoro technique, your 25 minutes work, five minutes rest or practicing things like taking an extra 10 minutes every hour, know, having a 30 minute nap every day, getting 20 minutes in a green space every day, you know, spending like…
upwards of five minutes when you’re in the hypnopompic and hypnagogic phase of sleep, mind wandering. So it’s more about knowing when to… rituals, yes, that’s what I’m looking for, rituals, more about rituals.
James Taylor (47:11)
rituals. Yeah, yeah.
And if there was one book you would recommend, you’re going to have links to your own book here, but if there’s one book by another author that you often gifted more often than others or you kind of go back to more than others, what would that book be?
Joseph Jebelli (47:27)
That’s a really good question. There are so many. There are so many. It’s really tricky. One of my favorite books recently has been David Robson’s The Expectation Effect. Really, really interesting guy who ⁓ talks all about how, you know, often when you expect things to happen, that expectation in itself leads to the cognitive ability to actually achieve what you want to achieve. It’s a kind of cognitive… ⁓
like the cognitive side of the placebo effect in many ways. But it’s really interesting because the brain is essentially a prediction machine. know, we’re always basically, the brain is constantly scanning its environment for patterns and to figure out what maybe I’m going to say at the end of this sentence. And so expectations come into that so much, even when students, when teachers expect,
⁓ great things from their students. When they have higher expectations of them, they perform better. So it’s a really interesting neurocognitive phenomenon that hasn’t really been explored before and he explores it beautifully in that book.
James Taylor (48:40)
almost sounds like the science of people talk about manifestation or you know going into the mirror every day and saying imagining like these are the five things I’m gonna achieve in my life so great so we’ll put a link to that book as well. ⁓ If people want to learn more about you and you’re writing your books, you have multiple books now, where’s the best place to go and do that?
Joseph Jebelli (49:00)
The best place is to go to my website actually, just drjosephjubely.com. ⁓ You can see my books, you can see any upcoming like speaking events. You can also contact me directly there as well. I try my best to reply to everyone who contacts me. That’s the best place. I’m not on social media. I might eventually go on social media. I’m very, very hesitant. But for the time being, the website is the best place.
James Taylor (49:30)
Well,
Joseph Gibelli, thank you for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.
Why Your Team Isn’t Creative? How to Build Innovation – Dr. Amy Climer #356
04 Sep 2025
00:46:18
Why Your Team Isn't Creative? How to Build Innovation #356
Are you trying to foster innovation, but your team meetings end up being repetitive and uninspired? It’s a common challenge for leaders: you have a room full of smart people, but unlocking their collective creative genius feels just out of reach. If you’re ready to move beyond stagnant brainstorming sessions and drive real results, you’re in the right place.
We’ve distilled the key insights from a powerful conversation with Dr. Amy Climer, a leading expert on team creativity and author of Deliberate Creative Teams. Drawing from her appearance on the Super Creativity Podcast, this guide breaks down her proven framework for building highly innovative teams. You’ll discover the three critical elements every team needs—Purpose, Dynamics, and Process—and learn actionable strategies, like using “creative abrasion,” to transform your team’s culture and output.
Get ready to learn not just why innovation matters, but how to deliberately cultivate it.
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
On Intentionality: “If you want to be creative, if you want to be innovative, you have to be intentional about it. I say it all the time: Be deliberate to be creative. It will not happen by accident.”
On Productive Conflict: “We need what’s called ‘creative abrasion’—the ability to disagree about the work. If everyone in the meeting says ‘that looks fine’ but complains in the hallway, that’s not helping anybody.”
On Problem-Solving: “Many teams jump to solutions without deeply understanding the problem. Research shows that if you just spend five minutes clarifying the issue, you can get dramatically better results.”
On a Common Misconception: “I’ve had CEOs say, ‘I don’t want my team to be creative, I just want them to be innovative.’ They see creativity as frivolous, but true creativity is about generating novelty that is valuable.”
On Making Time for Innovation: “Teams always say ‘time’ is their biggest barrier. But are you still doing things you no longer need to? We all have ‘antiquated bureaucratic remnants’—like a report no one reads—that we can let go of to create space for new ideas.”
Innovation Requires a Three-Part Alignment. Successful creative teams don't happen by accident. They require the deliberate alignment of three key elements: a clear Team Purpose (the 'why'), healthy Team Dynamics (the 'who' and 'how' of interaction), and an effective Creative Process (the 'what' and 'when' of doing the work). When one of these is missing, innovation falters.
Embrace 'Creative Abrasion,' Not Relationship Conflict. Productive teams need to engage in task-based conflict, which Dr. Climer calls "creative abrasion." This is the healthy debate and disagreement about the work itself. It's crucial to foster an environment where ideas can be challenged without it becoming personal, as relationship conflict is always destructive to creativity.
Don't Solve the Wrong Problem: Clarify First. Teams often rush to generate solutions before they fully understand the problem. Dr. Climer highlights that even spending just five minutes clarifying the challenge, asking questions, and digging deeper can significantly improve the quality and relevance of the final outcome.
Psychological Safety is Non-Negotiable. For creative abrasion and honest feedback to occur, a foundation of psychological safety is essential. Team members must feel safe enough to speak up, challenge ideas, and take risks without fear of punishment or humiliation. It's the bedrock upon which all healthy team dynamics are built.
Make Time for Innovation by 'Exnovating' the Unnecessary. The most common barrier to creativity is a perceived lack of time. Dr. Climer advises teams to actively look for "antiquated bureaucratic remnants"—outdated processes, reports, or meetings that no longer add value. By strategically removing this old work (exnovation), you create the space needed for new, innovative thinking.
Creativity is a Skill, Not Just an Artistic Talent. A major misconception leaders have is confusing creativity with artistic ability. Creativity in a business context is the skill of generating novel and valuable ideas. It is a practical, learnable process that can be applied to any field, from mechanical engineering to marketing.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
FREE training video shows you the ten ways to make $1,000,000 from your speaking. The world’s top professional speakers use these exact strategies.
In this first FREE video series, award-winning keynote speaker James Taylor reveals how to become a 7-figure speaker.
CHAPTERS
Podcast Episode Timestamps: Dr. Amy Climer on Building Innovative Teams
(00:08) Introduction to Dr. Amy Climer and her work.
(01:16) Dr. Climer’s personal journey into creativity research, starting in high school.
(03:23) The purpose behind her “Deliberate Creative Team Scale” – measuring team behaviours, not just personality.
(04:22) Introduction to the Deliberate Creative Team model: the three essential elements of Purpose, Dynamics, and Process.
(06:17) A deep dive into Team Purpose and the need for enough space within a goal to innovate.
(08:21) Explaining Team Dynamics, including trust, psychological safety, and the role of conflict.
(08:52) Breaking down the Team Creative Process, using Creative Problem Solving as an example.
(11:41) The power of clarifying the problem first, even for just five minutes.
(14:55) Discussing productive conflict and the concept of “Creative Abrasion” from the work of Jerry Hirschberg at Nissan.
(23:02) The most common barrier to creativity that teams report: a lack of time.
(23:51) How to overcome the time barrier by removing “antiquated bureaucratic remnants” (or ‘exnovating’ old tasks).
(29:47) Dr. Climer’s personal story of letting go of her podcast to create space for new innovation.
(30:30) A teacher who personally influenced her approach to creativity.
(34:02) The biggest misunderstanding leaders have: separating “fluffy” creativity from “serious” innovation.
(35:30) The myth that creativity will just happen by accident, and her core message: “Be deliberate to be creative.”
(39:37) The single most impactful action leaders can take: rethinking and redesigning their team meetings.
(41:03) A creative tool Dr. Climer developed: “Climer Cards” to facilitate deeper conversations.
(44:30) Dr. Climer’s book recommendation for personal creativity: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.
(45:34) How to connect with Dr. Amy Climer online.
TRANSCRIPT
James Taylor (00:08)Dr. Amy Climer teaches teams and organizations how to increase their creativity so they can maximize innovation. She works with forward thinking organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, Stanford University, and the US Department of Homeland Security. Amy is the author of the bestselling book, Deliberate Creative Teams, How to Lead for Innovative Results. She is also the host of another fantastic website which you've got to check out called the Deliberate Creative Podcast.
where she shares practical advice and strategies to help leaders build innovative teams. Amy has a PhD in leadership and change and is a certified speaking professional, CSP. Please welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast, Dr. Amy Climer
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (00:57)
Thank you, it's so good to be here, James.
James Taylor (01:00)
So I love, obviously, there's a huge amount of synergy with the work that you do and the listeners for this show as well. But I want to know, just take us right back to the start, what first drew you to creativity research and was there a kind of personal moment that set you on this path?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (01:16)
been very curious about creativity, honestly, probably since high school. I remember I was the friend who if one of my friends said, no, I'm not creative. I can't draw. And I would just be like, yes, you can. It's just about practice. And you just have to apply yourself. And I would get all emphatic and try to build them up. And I think I just intuitively had a sense that creativity was more than drawing, which of course, as you know, is a misnomer.
get confused about. ⁓ And then right after college, I stumbled upon the book The Artist's Way, which I'm sure you're familiar with and many listeners are, a classic book that really helped me see creativity in a new light. And then later I started teaching workshops, helping other people understand how creativity works. And all the while professionally, I was building skills and facilitation and team building and team development. And so eventually,
Probably not until my 30s, I got really serious about integrating these two things, the creativity and the team development. And then I really geeked out about it and decided to go get a PhD and study this deeply. And I finished that about 10 years ago. But now I have a consulting practice where I help teams and organizations understand how creativity really works.
James Taylor (02:39)
So let's imagine you're on that flight, you're traveling out to maybe facilitate a workshop or give a keynote speech. The person sitting next to you said, so what do you do? How do you normally respond? Because you are a multi-hyphenate type of person. ⁓ How do you describe what you do?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (02:55)
I usually say I teach teams and organizations how to be more creative and innovative. And then they are like, really? You can do that? Which obviously, you know you can, but yes.
James Taylor (03:04)
You
Now you went on this journey, obviously there's the strong academic side to what you do. ⁓ You developed the creative synergy scale based on surveys and real teams. What question or problem were you setting out to solve in the process of kind of working and finding the scale?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (03:23)
Yeah, so just to clarify, the scale is actually called the Deliberate Creative Team Scale now. But the purpose of that assessment is to measure teams behaviors around creativity. And I think that there are some other measures out there that measures how creative someone might be, or there's other measures that are looking at kind of our personality in relation to our creativity and our creative output.
But I really wanted to look at, what are we actually doing? What are those behaviors? And so the scale is actually where I also developed this model called the Deliberate Creative Team model. And it measures these three areas that teams need if they're going to be creative together. And we can get into those if you'd like, but I think what I love about this scale is it's looking at the behaviors and what are people actually doing, which can be really interesting and really eye-opening.
James Taylor (04:22)
So take us there then, tell us about this. You say that creativity comes when teams have purpose, dynamics, and process, and all this aligns as well. So is this a kind of Venn diagram? Do these things overlap? How do they all work together?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (04:36)
Yeah, absolutely. Here, I'll throw up a visual for those of you who are watching this ⁓ video of it, but very basic Venn diagram with that. These are the three elements that I discovered in the research that are critical for teams to be creative together. So there's the team purpose, team dynamics and team creative process. And I know you've talked about these on your podcast before and it was actually through development of the scale that these evolved.
then we're getting all into the statistics and how do you develop these things. But ⁓ what's interesting is, you know, I think that sometimes teams think they're doing certain things really well. Like they think they have a creative process, but when I ask them what it is, they have no idea and they can't actually describe it. ⁓ Or they describe something that just feels kind of convoluted and not very clear.
or they think they have a clear team purpose, but then when you ask them what their team purpose is, they can't actually answer the question. ⁓ And so this scale helps them and this model helps them understand, yeah, here's what we need to develop further.
James Taylor (05:44)
So let's imagine a perfect scenario, which never really exists, but we have a company, we have a team. Let's choose an industry. They're in engineering, mechanical engineering. My wife's a mechanical engineer originally. So let's choose that as a, they're in a mechanical engineering making really super advanced kind of parts. Break down those kind of three elements and how, what is the perfect situation for that team?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (05:47)
Sure.
James Taylor (06:09)
what do they mean to be doing in each of those areas, purpose, dynamics, purpose, and process, sorry, in order for those things to fully align.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (06:17)
Okay, I love this. All right, and I actually love working with engineering teams. Yeah, I've worked with a number of them. Okay, so first off, I think the team needs to get clarity on what's their purpose, and there's different layers to understanding purpose. So first, there's the purpose of the entire organization or company. That might be the mission statement or something along, mission, whatever. But then, what's the purpose of this specific team?
both in the big picture, how does it fit into that organization, but then even more specifically the purpose for this project. Now the challenge with ⁓ understanding purpose in relation to innovation is the purpose has to be, there has to be enough space within that purpose for you to actually innovate. And so if the purpose is super narrow, then you're not gonna have that wiggle room to come up with new ideas and go in different directions.
⁓ In fact, there's some interesting research ⁓ that looked at that purpose sometimes comes later, that sometimes a team is working on their project, whatever they're trying to do, and they don't really know the purpose of it. And it would be for more like emergent innovation, probably not going to apply as much for a team like this, because often they might be working together like, we have this very specific problem that we're looking at and we're trying to solve this problem.
So that's part of their purpose right there and getting clarity on that. Okay, so team purpose. Team dynamics are our ability to trust each other, to feel safe. I know you've talked about psychological safety on the podcast before. That's really important for teams to be more innovative together. So trust, ⁓ psychological safety, put those together. Also our ability to engage in conflict. And there's certain types of conflict that are
particularly useful and some that are not. And then of course our ability to communicate with each other. And this is the one that's overly obvious, but sometimes we gloss over it a bit too much. ⁓ But that trust conflict communication is all a part of the team dynamics. And so then the third piece is that process. And what's the process a team is using to actually innovate together? So.
I think about what happens when the team sits down at a table together or jumps on a Zoom call together. What are their meetings like? How do they start? Are they just a report out where everybody's sharing updates? Because that's not gonna necessarily lead to innovation. In fact, people are probably gonna get a little glassy eyed and zone out a bit. ⁓ But what is that collaboration? And so there are many processes you can use, many strategies and techniques. The process that I teach my clients
most often is called creative problem solving. And it's a very basic process. It's designed based on how we as humans naturally solve problems. And I'm sure if you haven't talked about this process on your podcast, you've talked about other ones. I've heard a couple of your episodes where you're going through like the ideation process. ⁓ But when we have a process, we can be clear about where are we?
What are we doing right now? Like for instance, we start off, let's clarify what the problem is. We need to really deeply understand that problem, which is a spot many teams skip over and then generate some ideas and what are the best ideas to solve that particular problem. And then I often say, you know, when we come up with an idea, it'll like fit on a post-it note. There's nothing to it. It's just a sentence. And so it needs to be developed further. And then once that's developed, we can...
implement it, maybe test it out and see like, right, would this work? Let's try it at a really small scale or, you know, for a mechanical engineering team, maybe like try, you know, let's develop this with a 3D printer first or cardboard or like how basic can we get before we're spending millions of dollars to produce some something big. Anyway, that's a bit of yeah, go ahead.
James Taylor (10:21)
So let's go through,
it's interesting going through some of those, like on the purpose one, you have a team, sometimes people know each other well, sometimes they don't, they're coming together. Do you ever find that initially people kind of think they're coming into that team meeting to ideate, work on, maybe it's gonna be problem, solving a problem, and find that the purpose, when they leave the room after an hour,
they've actually decided that the purpose that they're about is not the purpose that they initially thought when they went into the room.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (10:53)
Yes. And I think that's actually, you just spoke to the value of that conversation. It's like, you think the problem is here, you know, the problem is X, but actually start digging into it it's actually Y or Z or A or B or whatever. It's something different. If you didn't spend time clarifying, then you would have solved for the wrong problem. And I see this happen all the times in Teams. And there's some interesting research by this guy,
Roger Firestein, where he found that if you just spend five minutes clarifying, sometimes that's enough. So it doesn't have to be this long drawn out thing, although sometimes you do need more than five minutes, but even five minutes makes a difference and can get better results.
James Taylor (11:41)
It's interesting, I always try and start those kind of meetings with just asking a whole bunch of series of questions. think MIT, they call it kind of question bursts. use different, we've had a guest on, Gregason, Professor Gregson, that came on the show talking about MIT question bursts. And he said, often when you kind of get it at the start of the meeting and you're asking a series of questions, before you get into thinking about, even thinking about solutions.
He said, you often find out the problem you thought was a problem isn't the main problem at all. There's something that sits behind it that if you just didn't spend those first few minutes just getting all those different stakeholders in the room on the same page as to like, this is really why we're here. He said, you end up wasting a lot of time.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (12:25)
It's, I totally agree with that. Yeah. It's like just let's dig into a little bit. And sometimes one of the techniques that I use, I don't know if you've talked about on this year show, but are you familiar with ethnographic interviews? This technique? Okay. It's very simple. And it's actually a, there's a whole research arm, research methodology called ethnographic interviews, but this is a very light version of it where basically you're just going and talking to the people who have the problem you're trying to solve.
James Taylor (12:38)
I've of this, yes, yes.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (12:55)
It doesn't mean you have to bring them all in the meeting. mean, sometimes that's not appropriate or realistic, but it might be picking up the phone or walking down the street or wherever people who have this problem are, go talk to them and you're asking them questions for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, depending on the situation. But even asking them questions for 10 minutes, you might get...
a completely different perspective of what's actually going on and realize, ⁓ okay, now we understand it better from their perspective and that's gonna change how we idea.
James Taylor (13:24)
Yeah.
You've
just given a very academic fancy label to something I'm thinking I often do where, what's that thing is this expression in America is like a $10 word or there's something like this is kind of that kind of thing. It's like a 10 cent or a $10 word. Anyway, I often think about it when clients come to me and maybe you find this the same when clients book you in for keynotes is the person that comes to you is maybe the HR leader.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (13:37)
you
⁓ like a 10 cent word? I don't know.
James Taylor (13:59)
or the C-suite in the organization or a VP. And I always ask that before we do the event, can I speak to two or three of your team members are gonna be at this event in advance? And I'm always fascinated because sometimes I'm having to triangulate between, well, the CEO thinks this is the problem, the people on the grand floor who are dealing with everything, they see this is the problem, HR sees it from this kind of different problem. And until you kind of start by just putting all that.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (14:09)
Right.
James Taylor (14:26)
out there you don't really find, which kind of brings me to that second point, the dynamics piece. So I'm here in Scotland today and we have ⁓ Edinburgh, which is the home of the Enlightenment period, and they had a phrase they used to have there which was called, flighting. So flighting is the ritual abuse of your opponent by means of verbal violence. That's basically what it is. So we would think of that as, know, sometimes if someone comes from outside and they see
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (14:30)
Yeah.
gosh.
James Taylor (14:55)
two Scottish people or Italians can be a little bit like this as well, having a really deep discussion about something. It looks like they're fighting, but they're not fighting. They're actually just, they're really passionate. Now, in that dynamics part, you talk about the requirements, things that you required to ensure that you're gonna get the best from that team. So can you talk about the dynamics piece?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (15:16)
Yeah, well, since you brought up this idea of flighting or fighting and what looks like fighting maybe, ⁓ one of the pieces is around conflict. And there's a type of conflict and I love this phrase called creative abrasion. so, okay, let me back up first, but I wanna explain what creative abrasion is, but let me back up and say, so there's two main types of conflict. There's that relationship conflict where,
I just don't like you. And for whatever reason, it's like, here goes James again. And I just like check out, right? Like that is never helpful in a team. Or I don't know if it's ever helpful in any context. ⁓ But relationship conflict is not helpful. But then there's task conflict where we're going to disagree about the work or how we approach it or the result, you know, all of that. And in the 1980s, this guy, Jerry Hirschberg,
he was hired by Nissan. And at that point, Nissan was trying to bring meld together the ⁓ Japanese engineering with the American innovation, and they were building Nissan plants in the US to make new cars. So they hired Jerry Hirschberg to like lead this process. And so he gets these teams together of the Japanese and Americans, and they're in Tennessee in the United States.
there was so much conflict. They couldn't even agree on what radio station to listen to in the office, which, you in the 1980s, that's what you might argue about. And eventually he kind of realized this is really good, and maybe not the radio station debate, but these different perspectives coming together were really important. And there were times where the team was so polite with each other that they weren't getting anywhere. And so he started to push them
And he called this creative abrasion that we need to disagree about the work and, you in this case, how they design the cars. And if what happens if the team, like in the team meeting, everyone's like, yeah, yeah, that looks fine. Yeah, the headlight looks great. And then out in the hallway, there's a conversation like, ⁓ my gosh, I can't believe we're going to go with that headlight design. It looks hideous. That's not helping anybody.
And actually, what would be better is like, let's bring that conversation into the team meetings, into the, you know, and you can have a time and a place for it. It's not like you're always in debate, because that's also not helpful. But being able to engage in that creative abrasion can be really valuable. And I would say that's really hard without a level of psychological safety and a level of trust.
James Taylor (18:05)
It reminds me a little bit of there was a few years ago, there was a series of airline incidents, crashes, ⁓ one airline, Korean airlines, I think I seem to remember was the airline. And they played back the tapes, the black box tapes, and they would hear something along the lines of often the way that they had the pilots, that the pilot was very senior, much older, and the co-pilot was usually much younger, much more junior. That was kind of, they had quite a big dynamic there.
And you would hear things like the co-pilot, the junior saying to the pilot, ah Captain, I can see that mountain is getting very close just now. And in a few seconds we go by, Captain, yes, that mountain is definitely getting closer. And so, and it was a cultural thing in terms of seniority and what they had to do when they went through it on the safety side, they actually sent all the pilots to the United States.
do and train again, to teach them, I guess, assertiveness or, you know, just kind of knock some of that stuff out. Now, you know, actually, I quite like that there is something very nice about, you know, parts of Asia where there's a little bit more mellow with things. But yeah, so I love this idea of this creative abrasion. And I think I see this sometimes, I was in a kind of co-working innovation incubation.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (19:17)
Yeah, the saving face is important. Yeah.
James Taylor (19:31)
district of a city. I wouldn't say what the city was. And it had looked like it had been designed by an architecture firm. And it was perfect. It was beautiful. had all the things, know, tick, tick, tick. had in terms of the kind of spaces and that kind of design there. And I just turned to the person I was walking around with it and I said, something, this is not right. It lacks the kind of, that kind of brazen you're talking about of a Berlin or, you know,
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (19:40)
⁓
James Taylor (20:01)
parts of London or parts, if you go to San Francisco, know, Tenderloin or bits, you know, it's a little, there's something that you need a little bit of that rubbing up against each other, I guess.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (20:11)
Yeah, oh my gosh, I love both these examples. Yeah, I do remember reading about the airline pilots and Yeah, I do feel like yeah We need to like bump up against each other and if we're too polite whether it's because of hierarchy or you know culture or whatever it is That can also be a problem now I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to be rude to each other because that's obviously the other end of the spectrum but Your example about you know the city
It totally fits. actually live in a place, I live in Asheville, North Carolina, which is more on that kind of grungier end, you know, like the San Francisco, the Berlin. I mean, we're a small city, only a hundred thousand people or so, but we're known for being a artistic, creative place. And I love that about living here is that, you know, there's sections of town that have a lot of graffiti and murals and...
You know, somebody just like gets an idea and they just go do it. I mean, to a degree, right? And I feel like it's almost like a little bit different than going through this formal process. But sometimes there needs to be space there for just these ideas to evolve. Like, yeah, let's try that. That sounds interesting. Let's see what happens. And maybe it's good, maybe it's not. But you figure that out in the process.
James Taylor (21:38)
Yeah, I think you often see in places with ⁓ high immigration coming in from other places. mean, obviously America has benefited very much from that over the centuries. I was just recently ⁓ in Vienna speaking at an engine, kind of manufacturing conference. And you look at the history of that place and they had these two great golden ages in Vienna. And they both came at the same time where they had massive, actually immigration coming in from different places. One was because one empire was collapsing and then all these people were kind of coming in.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (21:38)
Yeah.
James Taylor (22:08)
And there was tension within that. There was that kind of abrasiveness because you had people with very different perspectives, they different food, they liked different things. But from that, it kind of created this combustion of ideas. And actually America benefited from that because many of those people that ended up moving to, in 1930s and 20s and 30s and 40s, they ended up moving to United States and all those things that we think of as...
American today like a shopping malls, know, they all came from, or kitchens like fitted kitchens, they were all Viennese ideas or modern advertising, scientific based advertising, these were all Viennese ideas that came from that as well. So you've got this team, you know, they're starting to get aligned, but when you're working with different organizations, what are the most common blocks that you see in their people or the way that things are, these teams are kind of formed in different ways, are holding them from back from
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (22:39)
interesting.
James Taylor (22:58)
really unleashing their creative potential.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (23:02)
Okay, so.
I think one of the big blocks, well, when I ask clients, say, what are your big blocks? What are your barriers to creativity? One of the things they always say is time. And I get it, right? We live in this world right now that's just really busy and fast paced and people have this really high expectations and they think if I order something online, I should be able to get it in two hours or at most two days.
So I believe that is true on some level that we do struggle with fitting all the things in in a given day. But I also try to push back a little bit and say, well, are there things that you're doing that you don't need to be doing anymore? Or are there processes in your business that could be changed because they're outdated or, I was talking to one client and turned out there was a...
One of the employees produced a particular report every month. This was just something that they had been doing. They were told to do, know, years ago, they'd been producing this report every month. It took them several hours to do. No one was looking at it. And so in the middle of the meeting, they said, wait, so can I stop creating this report? And everyone was like, yeah, don't do that anymore. And so, and this just had, this conversation just happened to come up.
It wasn't like we went around and all, like, what reports are you producing that you don't need to produce? But I feel like there are things like that that every organization does, every individual does that, ⁓ fact, in my book, I call it ⁓ antiquated bureaucratic remnants, that we all have these things that have just stayed in the company that no longer need to be done. So I think that's one thing is... ⁓
time, but then more specifically is maybe really doing an analysis of how you're spending your time. ⁓ I think another thing which kind of is similar, but taking a look at the processes you're using and how that affects team dynamics, how that affects your innovation. So an example, I'm leading a retreat later this month for a client for their leadership team and they were telling me that one of the challenges they've had is just some respect.
between people in the organization where, for instance, the marketing team will put together a document and send it out to a handful of people, say, hey, can I get your input on this? I just want to make sure this aligns with the work you're doing. And the response back often is really snarky. Like, wait, you need me to look at this? Don't you know how to do your own job? And it's like, whoa, whoa, okay, hold on a second. But when...
when they were describing this to me, I thought, I wonder how that process, that communication process from one employee to the next could be changed and might that change the communication and the conversation? And so like, what's the question that's being asked? Is this being sent via email? Is this being sent with enough time? Is it like, hey, can you read this four page article? I need your response by tomorrow. Yeah, that's gonna probably create a little.
frustration. But it, I don't know, does that make sense where it's just like, if you change the process, we might change the conversation.
James Taylor (26:31)
Yeah.
I remind you as you're saying it, something like that Amazon, the Amazon memo, where, I mean, often we get emails from people asking us to review, to look at things, to review things, not with any, it's either they want us to be included in that loop, or sometimes it's because they want to be able to show off, and they feel really proud about what they've created, and it's a way of just getting some validation for what they've created.
I'm talking to you marketers here, if any of you are listening to marketing. But I always liked what Amazon did, they would, start of the meeting, they would be coming in to discuss something as a team. They would just spend those first few minutes, everyone was given the document, maybe it's a four-page document or six-page document, to read with the thing or the thing that the problem or the something that the marketing team would...
know, created to think about how to solve this problem or the numbers or the report, whatever the thing was. So everyone was literally on the same page. And then they discussed it at the same time. And I think that's actually, I think that's quite a respectful way of using people's time because we're all busy, you we're always getting bombarded with things. But just to say, and I'm constantly amazed getting on conference calls sometimes where there's 15 people on the call. And I have to ask the question, you know,
why is there 15 people on this call? And sometimes it's because of presenteeism, which is not good as well. But I really like what you said about the time piece. And it reminds me, think we had either we had a guest on the show talking about this, or I filmed a podcast episode, solo podcast episode about it, was everyone talks about innovation, but no one really wants to talk about exnovation, removing things. And actually that's often the most difficult thing to do because we...
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (28:21)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
James Taylor (28:28)
We're, yeah, we've always done this, so we've always done it this way. And so what you're talking about is kind of ex-novation there. It's like, why do we need, why are we still doing this report? This is no longer serving us.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (28:39)
Yeah, 100%. I totally agree with you. Like, what do we need to let go of? And yeah, I just had a personal experience with that a few years ago. Well, I have a podcast called The Deliberate Creative. And when COVID hit, my work, it kind of happened organically, but I started shifting. for a couple of years, I was just teaching people how to be more engaging and interactive on Zoom because that's like, kept asking me how to do this.
So I kind of shifted a little bit and what happened is my podcast, like I just didn't have the time and energy for it. So it was kind of almost accidentally put on hiatus. But it actually served me really well and it served my clients really well because I now had the energy to do this other work that they were very specifically asking me to do. And I was able to create some online courses and whatnot. the podcast is coming back now, but I'm...
And there was a period where I'll admit I was sort of beating myself up about that. Like, ⁓ gosh, I haven't recorded a podcast episode in so long. And then I realized, wait a minute, this actually was perfect. I needed to let go of that in order to innovate in this new way.
James Taylor (29:47)
Yeah,
create that space. And I've certainly done it before with projects we've had, which have been like a weekly thing that goes out. It could be a newsletter or type of show we've done. And actually one day I've just said, you know what, let's just stop it and see if anyone writes in and complains and said, I really miss. And if we don't get enough of those, then we're not going to restart it anyway. So you've gone this really interesting journey, the academic side, the writing, obviously the workshop, working with your clients and the keynotes as well.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (29:56)
Yeah.
Yeah.
James Taylor (30:17)
Who has personally influenced you the most when it comes to creativity? So a teacher or a particular client you worked with or a mentor?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (30:30)
Mmm, so many people Okay, I'm gonna go back to when I was quite young I had a teacher who I was fortunate to have three different years in fifth sixth and eighth grade and Her name was mrs. Shar Mrs. Elliott Shar and actually speaking of immigrants. She was an immigrant to the US from Cuba amazing human and I
I just, she was someone who really encouraged all of us to be creative in a way that was aligned with who we were. ⁓ Which meaning, know, she was very good at helping you kind of identify your strengths and what you liked and what you were good at and encouraging those. And I think that gave me some self-confidence because this field...
It's not that not a lot of people who have decided I'm gonna dedicate my life to teaching people how to be creative I mean a little bit more now in the last maybe few years, but You know and and I didn't even know think about this as a possibility until I was at least 30 But I look back and that was quite profound of just watching how she Supported us how she facilitated the whole class and created
really a very psychologically safe space before I knew anything about that, before that was even really being talked about. ⁓ And I feel really
James Taylor (32:01)
power of teachers. I just posted something on LinkedIn the other day about a game I sometimes play on flights, which is, I see how long I can go in the flight, or if I can get through the entire flight, without the person I'm sitting next to knowing anything about me, and me knowing as much as possible about them. ⁓ it's questions, basically, I'm just using my brain to ask questions, listening, trying to develop my listening skills. And ⁓
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (32:28)
the way you're having a conversation
with them or you're just, okay.
James Taylor (32:30)
Yeah, I literally, I
mean, I was on a flight the other day that I wouldn't say which country I was going to, but, and it was actually across the aisle, sending across the aisle for me, there was a lady and we had a conversation back and forth probably for 10 hours on this flight. And I know by the end of that flight, she knew really nothing about me. ⁓ But I knew loads about her, I knew her company, I knew some of the problems that company was going for. And one of my tricks for doing that is when they ask you what is your profession,
If I want to stop the conversation there, or I don't want them to be interested, I'll usually say something like, oh, I work in internal audit. That's a really good one to use. Because no one wants to, oh, that's the way. But the opposite of that, if you want to get someone to engage in a conversation with you on a flight or somewhere, tell them you're a teacher. Because every single person has a teacher that made an impact upon their life in some way. know, in grade school, wherever it was, at university, college.
People will be glowing often about the teachers that they've had, the good teachers they've had in life. There's maybe only been one. So I love that story. So yeah, all power to the teachers, all the power to the teachers here as well. That word creativity is a little bit of a loaded term, especially when we're talking from a business and a commercial standpoint as well. What is the biggest misunderstanding that you think trips up leaders and teams when it comes to this idea of creativity?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (33:33)
Yeah. Sure. Great. I love that.
You
James Taylor (33:59)
and its relationship to the work that they do.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (34:02)
Hmm. You know, I've had a couple of CEOs say to me, well, I don't want my team to be creative. I just want them to be innovative. And I kind of look at them funny like, wait, what? What do you mean? Because to me, I use those words interchangeably all the time. ⁓ But they think of creativity, you know, when the people that have made this comment think about creativity as being this like fluffy
It's about making art or it's about doing things that are frivolous and don't have any long-term impact and are just a waste of time. And that's not at all how I see creativity. The definition I use is that creativity is novelty that is valuable. And you could define valuable however you wanted, financially increases efficiency, aesthetically valuable, whatever it is. ⁓ And when I dig in and talk about that,
they get it, they definitely get it. ⁓ But I think that, yeah, there can be lot of misnomers around what creativity is, where they think that creativity is about drawing. And it's like, okay, well, drawing is a skill, creativity is a skill. There maybe is a little bit of overlap, but it doesn't have to be, right? ⁓ Yeah, so I do think there's a lot of, that's one misnomer. I think another myth that I see a lot around creativity is people.
not even a myth, I think it's just a misconception is they think it will just happen. And they don't realize that in order to be creative, you have to be intentional. In fact, I have this phrase I say all the time, which is be deliberate to be creative. It will not happen by accident. when, know, if you look at probably any innovation you can think of, there was some intention around it. It didn't just happen.
And yeah, anyway, we perpetuate some stories that, yeah.
James Taylor (36:02)
I'm wondering, I I see that as well in terms of different parts of the world where, you if you ask them to raise their hand, if they consider themselves to be creative, usually if I'm in South Korea or Japan or China, for example, India, it'd be a lower score. Whereas if I'm speaking in Europe or definitely in America, it'll be a higher percentage who will consider themselves to be creative. But I've noticed something more recently, which kind of goes across cultures and continents.
which is the demographic piece. And I don't know, cause you're very close to, cause you're working with students all the day as well as working with companies as well. Are you noticing a difference in terms of that younger demographic, now the Gen Z, definitely the millennials, feeling more comfortable about using this phrase word creativity as it relates specifically to business and understanding that link between creativity and innovation?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (36:56)
I think so. And I don't work with Gen Z a whole lot. But one thing I've noticed, because I've been asking that same question of raise your hand if you think you're creative, I've been asking that for about probably 20 years. And I've noticed a change over time. And I'm mostly just working in the US. But 20 years ago, I'd ask that question and not even half the room would raise their hand. And now it depends on the audience, of course, and the group.
many more people raise their hand. And I think the reason that's happening is because of the national conversation around creativity and innovation has changed. And I think in part because of podcasts like yours. And we're talking about it in a different way. There's so many more books out about it. And there was this pivotal moment in our history. I don't know if you know this story, but in 1950, the president of the American Psychological Association at
their annual meeting, he stood up and he, as part of his speech, his rally cry for the psychologist, he said, we need to study creativity. And so what happened is from 1950 on, there's this like exponential increase of ⁓ research and understanding around creativity. And there's always a lag from when research is done to when
the world actually hears about it, and sometimes it's even a 20-year lag. But I think we're more in tuned now with what creativity really means than we were 20 years ago. And I think Gen Z is really benefiting from that, for sure.
James Taylor (38:41)
That's great.
I remember Edward de Bono writing in a book once, he got really annoyed because there was a big, I think it was in the US, one of the big creative, creativity, universities taught creative thinking as a skill. And they put this panel together of the world's top thinkers in creativity, and he didn't get invited to it. And the reason he didn't get invited to it was because he was seen as being too commercial with his work.
He wasn't almost academic, even though he taught Oxford actually, but he was not seen in terms of, he was using it with big oil and gas companies, and they were seeing, no, no, that's just, that's too commercial as well. So for those, I'm now going talk to those commercial corporate, as listening just now, those leaders that listening today, if they could implement just one principle from your book, or one idea from that book, what would it be?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (39:37)
I think if you could implement one thing, would be look at the process and really take a deep dive. are your meetings like? If you were just even more narrow, look at your team meetings. Are your team meetings really a place where you're fostering innovation? And because there's incredible potential there, you got, you know, say 10 people on a team, super smart brains in the room.
And if you were just spending the meeting doing these like very boring report outs where people are half listening, I think you're just missing some amazing brain power. So yeah, taking a look at, and I have some ideas in the book, but taking a look at how to really adjust your team meetings would be awesome.
James Taylor (40:20)
So quick fire question just to finish up here. Is there a quote that you live by? Is it one quote that inspires you or guides your life and your work?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (40:32)
You know, I think it would be what I said a few minutes ago. In fact, I even have this on a sticker. I'll hold this up. Be deliberate to be creative. And this is, you know, when people buy the book from me, I send them a sticker as well. this is, if you want to be creative, if you want to be innovative, you have to be intentional about it. And I think when you are, really amazing things can happen.
James Taylor (40:56)
And do you have an online resource or a tool or an app that you find very useful in your own creative work?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (41:03)
⁓ Yeah, there's a number of tools that I use. There's a couple that I've created that I use personally. ⁓ So I have this deck of cards that I created called Climber Cards. There's actually two versions of it, but basically these are cards that are designed to really look at that, that help with the creative process, particularly ideation, but they also really help with the team dynamics.
And what they are is they're very basic, very simple. ⁓ They're like the size of a deck of playing cards, about 50 images. And they're all these images that I, drawings or paintings that I did. And so there's things like a light bulb and a bag of groceries and a spool of thread. There's a giraffe, you all these different images and you lay these down on the table. And then let's say you're starting a meeting and you really want to look at ⁓
say it's about your budget. You're going to have a whole meeting about your budget. So you lay these cards down on the table and then you ask everybody to pick a card that represents
What's your hope for our budget for the next year? like, basically the point here is any question you can think of, any topic you wanna talk about, you can frame it so that they answer with a card. So for instance, ⁓ they, you you ask that question, select a card that represents one hope you have for our budget for the next year, and somebody might pick the giraffe, and they might talk about how they really want.
the team to stretch and think about how they can be innovative with the budget or more creative. I mean, I don't mean creative accounting, like turning a three into an eight, but how might we be more creative and how we bring in our, raise money or bring in more income. And what happens is when you use these cards to ask the question, it shifts the answers and people get more specific, they get more focused, they say things that they wouldn't have said.
if you just ask the question without the images. And it's kind of remarkable. It's actually really cool.
James Taylor (43:13)
I love that idea, creative cards. we had a guest on recently, he was talking about emotional granularity. Where often when we respond to something, how are feeling? How are you doing today? Fine, okay. And we're sitting in a very narrow emotional range. And she said, if you expand your language, expand the way of thinking about things, it just expands your life as well. So what you're kind of doing there with those tools is you're developing people's creative range.
as well in terms of the ability to express ideas, express emotions, express feelings as well. So I love that. we'll put links to that so people can get their copy of the pack of cards as well. If you could only recommend one book to our listeners, not one of your own because we're going to have the link to your new book, but if it was one book by another author, what book would it be and why?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (43:42)
Yes.
boy, there's so many. ⁓ I feel like I've got to turn around and look at my bookshelf around here. ⁓ my ⁓ gosh, this is such a hard question. I feel like when I think about the books that really influenced me, if you're interested in personal creativity, I think the artist's way is just a great classic. ⁓
James Taylor (44:08)
The library!
Yes, sir.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (44:30)
I will say it can be for some a little woo woo, you know, it can be, but if you can look past that, there's some really good stuff in there. And it's been around for, I think about 30 years. So it's a classic.
James Taylor (44:47)
Yes, early eighties, yeah, I Julia Cameron just,
and ⁓ I'm always, I think it's a particularly good book for people who are a little bit into their life, into their career. And they just, they feel like they need a restart. They need to reconnect with something deeper in themselves. And I think what she talks about in the book in terms of her background and challenges that she went through, I remember like the artist date.
you know, I remember one of the ones, which I thought was really lovely, just taking that time just to make a date for yourself, to go and do something just to kind of feed that creativity. Wonderful book. So we'll definitely put a link to Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. And what is the best way for people to connect with you and to learn more about ⁓ your book and your work?
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (45:12)
Yes, yeah.
You can find me online at my website is climberconsulting.com and climber is spelled C-L-I-M-E-R. And on my webpage, you can reach out to me via email. You'll find links to the book. You'll find links to the climber cards that I mentioned. And I'm also on LinkedIn. So you can find me there, Amy Climer.
James Taylor (45:52)
Well, Amy, Dr. Amy Climer thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.
Amy Climer, Ph.D. (45:58)
Thank you so much for having me, James. I appreciate it.
In business and in life, the smartest people aren’t always the ones with the best answers, they’re the ones who know how to ask better questions. Curiosity is more than just a trait, it’s a superpower that builds trust, reveals hidden insights, and sparks innovation. Yet in today’s fast paced world, many leaders skip over curiosity in favor of speed, ego, or fear of looking unprepared.
In this episode, James Taylor shares how a simple game called Only Questions sharpened his listening skills and transformed casual conversations into powerful breakthroughs. From uncovering industry secrets on long haul flights to learning strategies that shaped global keynotes, he reveals how to use the curiosity gap to your advantage. If you’ve ever wondered how to shift conversations, open new opportunities, and lead with impact, it all starts with the questions you ask.
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
“The smartest leaders aren’t the ones with the best answers — they’re the ones who ask better questions.”
“Curiosity is a superpower that builds trust and unlocks hidden insights.”
“The curiosity gap makes our brains restless — and great communicators know how to use it.”
“Most breakthroughs don’t come from answers, they come from asking the right questions.”
“A single powerful question can change the direction of an entire conversation.”
Curiosity is a superpower that builds trust, reveals insights, and sparks innovation.
Playing the Only Questions game sharpens listening skills and strengthens conversations.
The curiosity gap: The space between what we know and want to know — drives engagement and attention.
Ego, speed, and fear are the main barriers that stop leaders from asking better questions.
Breakthroughs often come from questions, not answers, as they change conversations and uncover hidden opportunities.
Sharpen curiosity by asking follow ups, listening for surprises, and keeping a running list of great questions.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
James Taylor (00:08) 8 seconds. That’s how long you have to capture someone’s attention before it drifts. You probably heard the goldfish comparison from Microsoft’s 2015 study. They claimed their attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds in 2013. Supposedly that makes us less focused than a goldfish. Now, whether that’s literally true or just a catchly headline, the point’s stuck. Our focus is under siege. Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine, has tracked human attention for decades. Her team found that the average time that we spend focused on a single screen has dropped from 2.5 minutes in the early 2000s to just 47 seconds today. That’s less than a minute before our minds wander off or our fingers swipe to something else. And it’s not just the data. A 2023 survey by King’s College London found that nearly half of UK adults feel their attention spans have shortened in the past decade. And many believe that eight seconds is now the norm. So if you’re a speaker, a leader, a teacher, or anyone who needs to hold attention, you can’t ignore this. Eight seconds is your runway. If you use it well, you earn the next eight seconds and the next eight seconds. And before you know it, you’ve got them with you for the whole ride. When I walk onto a stage, those first few seconds are where I’m testing the waters. Did that opening line make someone look up? Did I see the phone go face down on the table? Did the body language in the front row shift from, I’m here because I have to, to, okay, you got my attention? Those cues tell me I passed the first test. Sometimes I’ll open with a story, like the time I was halfway through a talk in Manila and the power went out. It’s unexpected, it’s human, and it makes people wonder what happened next. Sometimes it’s a question. What do jazz musicians and AI engineers have in common? It’s unusual enough that people want to stick around to hear the answer. more images ⁓ than all human photographers have. in history. That one usually gets a raised eyebrow or two. Whatever the hook, my goal is the same. Break autopilot. But here’s the thing. Grabbing attention is the easy part. Keeping it now, that’s the craft. I use what I call attention resets. Every few minutes I change something. I might shift from telling a personal story to showing a powerful image. I might move from the center of the stage to the edge or lower my voice so the room has to lean in. Sometimes I’ll throw in a surprising statistic or ask a question that makes people stop and think. These resets are intentional. They’re the moments that pull people back from the brink of distraction. Think of it like driving on long road. If it’s a straight highway with nothing to look at, your mind starts to wander. But if the road curves or you pass through a town, or a song you love comes on the radio, your attention snaps back. Those changes keep you present. In a talk, I tried to create those curves and scenery changes on purpose. The reality is, we are competing against the most addictive attention machines ever built. Social media feeds, news apps, streaming platforms, they’re designed by teams and teams of engineers and behavioral scientists whose sole job is to keep you scrolling. If you’re communicating in that environment, you need to be just as intentional. That doesn’t mean dumbing things down. It means structuring your message in a way that works with human attention rather than against it. here’s my framework for thriving in the eight second world. Step one, script your opening eight seconds. Don’t wing it. Know exactly what you’re gonna say, show or do. Step two, break your content into short, high impact chunks. If it’s a 30 minute talk, think in three to five minute segments. Step three, build in attention resets. These can be changes in tone, visuals, pace, or even when you’re actually in the room. Step four, deliver value quickly. Give your audience a reason to keep investing their attention in you. One of my favorite moments on stage is where I spot that shift in the room. The phones go down, the notes taking starts, the heads nod in rhythm. That’s when I know we’re not just passing time together, we’re in it. And it all started with those first eight seconds. So the next time you’re in front of an audience, whether it’s a keynote, a team meeting, or even a one-on-one conversation, ask yourself, what am I going to do in my first eight seconds to earn the next eight? Because in this distracted world, attention isn’t guaranteed, it’s a gift. And if you respect it, people will give you more of it than you think.
In today’s world, you only have eight seconds to capture audience attention before they drift. That’s shorter than the blink of an eye in public speaking terms. Research shows our focus has dropped dramatically in the past two decades, down to less than a minute on a single task before distraction takes over. Whether you’re a keynote speaker, a leader in the boardroom, or simply sharing ideas in a meeting, learning how to hook your audience fast isn’t optional, it’s essential.
In this episode, we’ll explore practical strategies to grab attention in those first eight seconds and keep it, using stories, questions, surprising facts, and attention resets that pull people back in. If you’ve ever wondered how to stay engaging in a world of endless scrolling and constant distraction, this is your guide.
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
“You only have eight seconds to capture attention — use them wisely.”
“Grabbing attention is easy. Keeping it is the real craft.”
“Every eight seconds you win, earns you the next eight.”
“Attention isn’t guaranteed, it’s a gift — and you have to respect it.”
“The first eight seconds decide if your audience leans in or tunes out.”
You only have eight seconds to capture audience attention before distraction sets in.
Plan your opening: Never wing the first moments of a talk or presentation.
Break content into short chunks (3–5 minutes) to match modern attention spans.
Use attention resets: Change tone, pace, visuals, or movement to re-engage the audience.
Deliver value quickly so listeners feel rewarded for giving you their focus.
Respect attention as a gift: If you earn it, your audience will give you more than you expect
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
James Taylor (00:08) 8 seconds. That’s how long you have to capture someone’s attention before it drifts. You probably heard the goldfish comparison from Microsoft’s 2015 study. They claimed their attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds in 2013. Supposedly that makes us less focused than a goldfish. Now, whether that’s literally true or just a catchly headline, the point’s stuck. Our focus is under siege. Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine, has tracked human attention for decades. Her team found that the average time that we spend focused on a single screen has dropped from 2.5 minutes in the early 2000s to just 47 seconds today. That’s less than a minute before our minds wander off or our fingers swipe to something else. And it’s not just the data. A 2023 survey by King’s College London found that nearly half of UK adults feel their attention spans have shortened in the past decade. And many believe that eight seconds is now the norm. So if you’re a speaker, a leader, a teacher, or anyone who needs to hold attention, you can’t ignore this. Eight seconds is your runway. If you use it well, you earn the next eight seconds and the next eight seconds. And before you know it, you’ve got them with you for the whole ride. When I walk onto a stage, those first few seconds are where I’m testing the waters. Did that opening line make someone look up? Did I see the phone go face down on the table? Did the body language in the front row shift from, I’m here because I have to, to, okay, you got my attention? Those cues tell me I passed the first test. Sometimes I’ll open with a story, like the time I was halfway through a talk in Manila and the power went out. It’s unexpected, it’s human, and it makes people wonder what happened next. Sometimes it’s a question. What do jazz musicians and AI engineers have in common? It’s unusual enough that people want to stick around to hear the answer. more images ⁓ than all human photographers have. in history. That one usually gets a raised eyebrow or two. Whatever the hook, my goal is the same. Break autopilot. But here’s the thing. Grabbing attention is the easy part. Keeping it now, that’s the craft. I use what I call attention resets. Every few minutes I change something. I might shift from telling a personal story to showing a powerful image. I might move from the center of the stage to the edge or lower my voice so the room has to lean in. Sometimes I’ll throw in a surprising statistic or ask a question that makes people stop and think. These resets are intentional. They’re the moments that pull people back from the brink of distraction. Think of it like driving on long road. If it’s a straight highway with nothing to look at, your mind starts to wander. But if the road curves or you pass through a town, or a song you love comes on the radio, your attention snaps back. Those changes keep you present. In a talk, I tried to create those curves and scenery changes on purpose. The reality is, we are competing against the most addictive attention machines ever built. Social media feeds, news apps, streaming platforms, they’re designed by teams and teams of engineers and behavioral scientists whose sole job is to keep you scrolling. If you’re communicating in that environment, you need to be just as intentional. That doesn’t mean dumbing things down. It means structuring your message in a way that works with human attention rather than against it. here’s my framework for thriving in the eight second world. Step one, script your opening eight seconds. Don’t wing it. Know exactly what you’re gonna say, show or do. Step two, break your content into short, high impact chunks. If it’s a 30 minute talk, think in three to five minute segments. Step three, build in attention resets. These can be changes in tone, visuals, pace, or even when you’re actually in the room. Step four, deliver value quickly. Give your audience a reason to keep investing their attention in you. One of my favorite moments on stage is where I spot that shift in the room. The phones go down, the notes taking starts, the heads nod in rhythm. That’s when I know we’re not just passing time together, we’re in it. And it all started with those first eight seconds. So the next time you’re in front of an audience, whether it’s a keynote, a team meeting, or even a one-on-one conversation, ask yourself, what am I going to do in my first eight seconds to earn the next eight? Because in this distracted world, attention isn’t guaranteed, it’s a gift. And if you respect it, people will give you more of it than you think.
Creativity and Emotional Intelligence Explained: Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle on Turning Ideas Into Action and Emotion Into Insight #355
26 Aug 2025
00:51:01
Creativity and Emotional Intelligence Explained: Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle on Turning Ideas Into Action and Emotion Into Insight #355
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, host James Taylor speaks with Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, senior research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of the new book The Creativity Choice: The Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas into Action.
Zorana reveals why the most creative people aren’t necessarily the most inspired—but the most committed to acting on their ideas. Drawing on cutting-edge research from the fields of psychology, creativity, and emotional intelligence, she explores how our emotions shape our creative process, how cultural norms influence our creative confidence, and why social conditions are key to sustaining creativity over time.
Whether you’re a designer, entrepreneur, educator, or innovator, this episode provides practical wisdom for transforming creative sparks into meaningful outcomes.
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
“Emotions are data. Frustration doesn’t just feel bad—it tells you what you’re doing isn’t working.”
“Confidence doesn’t come before creativity. It’s built by doing.”
“In many cultures, creativity is not a trait—it’s an act. You become creative through action.”
“You don’t need to eliminate doubt to be creative. You just need to act anyway.”
“The creativity choice isn’t a one-time decision—it’s a decision we make again and again.”
Links & Resources:
📘 The Creativity Choice (available May 6, 2025) – Buy on Amazon
🌐 Zorana Ivcevic Pringle – zoranaivcevic.com
🧠 Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence – Visit site
🎙️ James Taylor’s SuperCreativity Podcast – All Episodes
Seeing is a skill: Art schools don’t just teach craft—they transform how students perceive and interpret the world.
Linear thinking limits creativity: Great artists don't execute ideas—they discover them through iterative exploration.
Problem-finding > problem-solving: True innovation emerges not from solving known problems but from identifying better ones.
Critique is conversation: Professors don’t tell students what to do—they help them see what they’ve created and guide reflection.
AI lacks creative dialogue: Current gen-AI tools can't replicate embodied creativity or guide personal transformation.
Structure creates freedom: Constraints (like musical forms or material limits) often spark greater creative breakthroughs.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
00:09 – Intro to Keith Sawyer and his new book Learning to See
02:05 – Discovering creativity research through Csikszentmihalyi
03:35 – Why he immersed himself in art and design schools
05:05 – The surprising resistance to the word “creativity”
07:00 – What professors are really teaching: “learning to see”
08:30 – Why many see themselves as “accidental teachers”
10:34 – Making as thinking: the fallacy of the “one big idea”
13:45 – Malcolm McLaren vs. Vivienne Westwood creativity styles
15:36 – Problem-finding vs. problem-solving creativity
18:40 – How professors help students find their voice
21:53 – Mismatches and self-discovery in student work
22:25 – How the book evolved from research to storytelling
25:15 – What business and tech leaders can learn from artists
29:16 – Could AI become a creativity co-pilot? Not yet
33:49 – Redefining failure and building resilience
36:58 – The “deep water and canoe” metaphor for mentorship
37:42 – Why constraints help unlock creativity
39:10 – Jazz as a metaphor: structure enables improvisation
40:43 – Where to find Keith’s work and podcast
TRANSCRIPT
James Taylor (00:09)My guest today is Dr R Keith Sawyer, one of the world's leading experts on creativity and learning. Keith is the Morgan Distinguished Professor of Educational Innovation at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, beautiful part of America. He began his career as a video game designer for Atari, earned a PhD in psychology from the University of Chicago, and is also a lifelong jazz pianist and improviser. That unique blend of science, art and improvisation runs through everything he does.
Keith has written over 19 books and more than 100 scientific articles exploring the science of creativity, collaboration and how people learn. You may know him from his early works like Group Genius and Zig Zag, which explore how creativity happens in teams and how individuals can build innovative lives. His new book, Learning to See Inside the World's Leading Art and Design Schools, takes us into the studios and classrooms of top BFA and MFA programs across the world.
Based on 10 years of immersive research, Learning to See explores how students are transformed, not just in skill, but in perception, awareness, and the way they think. It's a book that challenges how we define creative education and offers powerful lessons for anyone in any profession looking to unlock deeper creative thinking. In today's conversation, we'll talk about what it really means to learn to see, the surprising ways that creativity is taught, and how these lessons apply
far beyond the arts to business, innovation, leadership, and everyday life. Keith, welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.
Keith (01:42)
Well, thank you. Well, that's a great introduction.
James Taylor (01:45)
Now, you've had a very fascinating career. You've moved from game design, computer science, first of all, then pivoted jazz improvisation, and eventually in what we know you for today in creativity research. Was there a key moment that kind of pulled you into this kind of work that you do today?
Keith (02:05)
I decided I wanted to go to graduate school and get a PhD because I was interested in collaboration and human social dynamics. So I went to University of Chicago. I didn't know at that time that there was a field of research called creativity research. In my first semester in graduate school at University of Chicago, that's where Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a professor and he offered a course called psychology of creativity. So right at the beginning of my graduate study, I discovered this fascinating
area of research that people could really use their psychology expertise to study creativity. And so I'm glad I learned about that in the first year of my PhD program because ⁓ I was hooked and that's where I spent the rest of my career and continuing in my current career to focus on studying creativity as a scientist to come up with rigorous findings and understandings that often are quite surprising.
rising.
James Taylor (03:06)
Now in this book and over the past 10 years or so of your work, you've really immersed yourself in this, world of top art and design schools, ⁓ architecture, interior design, all different types of design as well. Was there a particular reason you kind of thought, okay, this is the area I'm gonna focus on initially for this book? Was there a key story or a key conversation that you had? thought, actually, this is worth investigating.
Keith (03:35)
I don't know anything or at least I didn't know anything about art and design. I don't have an art degree or an architecture degree. I'm a jazz pianist and that's why I got interested in creativity research. I wanted to study the improvisational dynamics of an ensemble. And you mentioned my book group, Genius, which is based on my studies of Chicago Improv Theater and jazz ensembles. I decided that I should ask some artists and designers, some visual artists,
about their creative process to see how much of what I knew about performing creativity would generalize. So I went to the first place I went to, I've gone now to...
over 10 art and design schools across the United States. The first place I went was Savannah College of Art and Design, which is known by its acronym SCAD. And the first couple of interviews I did there were with painters and with graphic designers. And I was really astonished at how compelling and how articulate these artists and designers who are professional creators, but who also teach in BFA and MFA programs.
is to teach people to create at the highest professional level. And even though I was already a creativity research expert at that time, I still discovered a lot of new things about the creative process that I found very compelling and that's why I wrote the book.
James Taylor (05:05)
I heard one of the first interviews that you did when I think you spoke to one of the professors there and you talked about, know, tell us about your work teaching creativity. And I think she took a bit of umbrage at this. said, well, actually that's not really kind of what I do. So tell me about those kinds of first conversations and, you know, did you have to, did you have to kind of change your own perception, first of all, about what creativity means in the context of the work that these people are doing?
Keith (05:35)
Well, you're exactly right that these artists and designers that I talk to really reject the term creativity, ⁓ which when I first went into my interviews, had, like any researcher, I had a structured interview and I had a list of questions I was going to ask. The first question was, how do you teach students how to be creative? So in the first interview I did, the painter I was talking to was visibly uncomfortable.
with the question, but also trying to be polite. ⁓ Was a very nice person, Sandra Reed, and very articulate about what she does and how she creates. But yeah, she said, I don't think I'm doing that. I don't think I'm teaching people how to be creative. ⁓ Which to me, like most of us, if painters aren't creative, then what are you teaching? So like a good researcher, I didn't insist on using my terminology. I pursued that
I said, well, what are you teaching then? And this went on. Actually, I kept asking that question in all of my interviews, even though after the first few, I knew people were going to say, no, I'm not doing that. But it turned out to be a really good way to get the conversation started, to use the term creativity. And everybody pushed back, graphic designers, architects, painters and sculptors.
So yes, what are they teaching? And then, you know, I ended up writing a whole book about it. The main thing that they say they're teaching is how to see. They're teaching students a new way of seeing. And then think about that for a minute. Everybody can look, everybody can see. And students who enter these programs are already quite gifted creators. So you have to submit a portfolio of work to go into a painting program. You have to already have a lot of paintings.
and you submit that with your application. So you're really quite skilled at what you do. So what is it that you still need to learn? And this is what these artists and designers tell me. They're quite experienced themselves and they know how to create visually. And they say, yes, the students are good at making things that look good on the campus, but they really don't know how to see yet. And that's very difficult to teach. And all these professors tell me it takes
at least two years.
James Taylor (08:03)
So let's break that apart, learning to see. The learning piece, I heard one of other things that you found that some of these people, these professors, these wonderful schools, don't even, they kind of, they feel a little bit uncomfortable using that word teacher sometimes as well. the learning, so how do they often refer to themselves in terms of what is their role that they see or how would they describe themselves to others?
Keith (08:28)
They all say that primarily they are professional creatives. This is their identity. So the painters, to get a job at these top universities that I went to, you have to be a star. You have to have your paintings and collections. You have a dealer that you sell your works through. I talked to several people who have their paintings in the Museum of Modern Art.
the graphic designers. interviewed a couple of typeface designers, one named Jeff Keady, whose typeface KeadySons is in Microsoft Word. So these are the types of people I interviewed. So they know what it means to create at the highest levels. But many of them, ⁓
pretty much all of them did not start their careers as educators. They refer to themselves as accidental teachers. So they don't even join the faculty at one of these places until they're maybe 30 or in their 30s. So they already have established a career. And then they come in and that's kind of like a second identity for them.
But when they're in the classroom, in the studio classroom, what they bring to it is their professional success and their expertise.
James Taylor (09:45)
So in the third part of that, the word of your book, Learning to See, is the C part. What are they trying to help them see? Is it literally the canvas, the work that they're creating? Or is it something more internal? Or is it taking, I mean, I have to think in terms of jazz music, you're jazz musician as well, there's that balance between craft and the art. Our art might be up there, what we...
imagine we want to create this thing to sound like is up there but our craft is down there and so there's that kind of gap that bridge that has to happen and sometimes it takes a little bit longer than others so those professors you spoke to what were they teaching people to see? Was it internal or something more external?
Keith (10:34)
Well, you raised an interesting paradox for me because if you read my book You will not know how to see at the end So I can't teach you how to see and I guess the first thing I would say is you can't tell someone how to see Nobody lectures in a painting class and no one lectures in an advertising class ⁓ What what do you have to do? So really you're guiding someone through a personal transformation. It's like if you were in a therapy session
and your therapist says, you're being too needy in all of your relationships, stop being needy. ⁓ That doesn't work. You can't just tell someone to stop doing something that's so fundamental to who they are as an individual and to their practice. So this is what happens to students who come into a painting program or a typeface design program. They have learned
over their entire lives, probably since the age they were 10. They've learned how to generate works that are quite good. But that ties them to an existing way of working that I call a linear insight model of creativity. And you see this in a lot of creativity research as well. This idea that creativity originates in a great idea at the beginning and then the creative process is a matter of executing or realizing the vision that you have at the beginning.
And this tends to be what people who enter an art or design program do when they're creating. They have the idea at the beginning and then they execute it. But what these successful artists and designers tell me is a better way to be creative is to go through an exploratory iterative process where you don't get too attached to the idea that you have at the beginning because a better idea is going to emerge while you're engaged in the work.
really you need to learn a different way of thinking about the creative process and a different way of engaging with the canvas or with the paints that you're learning. So you mentioned a sort of maybe more abstract level up here and then the level of working with materials and technique. What I hear when I talk to these individuals is that they're closely tied together. That a lot of people will say making is thinking. That you need the materials and you need to engage in the material
embodied process of working with those materials because it's that dialogue with the materials that results in the emergence of surprising new ideas that you couldn't have had at the beginning. So you need to teach people, I guess, teach them out of this instinct to have an idea at the beginning and then execute that idea. And it's difficult to do that because the students have been quite successful with the linear model. I mentioned that they have to submit a portfolio and the portfolio
the works are going to look pretty good. So how can you teach someone to stop doing something that's been very successful for them, but that ultimately is preventing them from attaining the next level of realizing their creativity?
James Taylor (13:43)
I was just reading on that on that point I was just reading an interview the other day with Vivian Westwood, ⁓ the fashion designer, and was talking about her relationship with Malcolm McLaren for the early punk, early versions of punk and all those kind of what we now think of as punk. ⁓ she said the difference in their creativity between the two of them was Malcolm was very, he had like one big idea.
And like his idea, and it kind of came early in the work he was wanting to do. And it was all about execution of the idea. The skill bit was maybe less such of a thing. It was just like, the idea, the value of the idea. With Vivian Westwood, because she came at it really as a crafts person in terms of understanding crafts and material, as you were saying, she was, she just kept moving and kept adapting and kept evolving. And so it was creative. And she went through different stages in terms of her creative ⁓ mind and creative work as well.
And there was always this little bit of a conflict between the two of them where Mark was like one big idea and she was constantly evolving as well. know at University of Chicago you mentioned we had a guest on the show a while ago, Professor Galinson, who talks about these two types of creativity, you those people that are just, they just kind of just come out of the gates like all firing, but they tend to burn out quite quickly. And then there's those others who are constantly evolving and refining and developing their work and they might have a...
few key things, but they're kind of trying to develop it over time. When you worked with some of those professors and they told you about many of students that they had, were the majority of the students they tend to have really the kind of more Malcolm McLaren ⁓ side, they've got like one big idea and it's like that and that's the energy in that, or were they more open to being that more iterative way of working and developing and maybe moving into different materials and different art forms?
Keith (15:36)
successful way of working I often refer to it as the dialogue of creativity. It's an iterative process where you're engaged with work with materials in an exploratory fashion where you're open to ideas emerging from the process. So Galinson and I agree with this terminology. We talk about the difference between problem-solving creativity and problem-finding creativity. So the problem-solving creativity is that linear process. You pose a problem for yourself at the beginning of the
process and then you solve the problem. But greater creativity comes from a process where you discover a problem while you're working or problem finding. In fact the term problem finding was coined by my doctoral advisor Mike Csikszentmihalyi and he did that came up with that term from his own study of MFA painting students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the places I went and interviewed. So the professors all tell me this is what they're teaching. They're teaching a problem finding
process that's iterative and exploratory and then involves the dialogue with the materials. And you're exactly right that different creators have these two different processes, but I didn't see anybody teaching the problem-solving process. I didn't see anybody teaching this linear pathway. So, by the way, I went to people in 20 different disciplines from the design fields on one side to the fine art fields on the other side, and I didn't see anybody teaching this linear
insight problem solving view. So yeah absolutely people often create successful works in that process but you mentioned that it ⁓ limits you and I heard a lot of professors tell me this as well. They say yeah they might have some success at the beginning of their careers but it ultimately it's not going to nurture them it's not going to feed them over time because they're going to run out of the material that they have. It's that dialogue of creativity that keeps refreshing
you and keeps giving you ⁓ new opportunities and new vistas to explore.
James Taylor (17:43)
Did they, when you were talking to these different professors, did they give any kind of guidance in terms of how that individual is going through that four year program, how they can ensure that they keep something that's true to them and like who they are, their own voice or their own way of seeing the world, their own point of view, where they're often having to learn the works of lots of other creatives in their fields. I mean, I think you mentioned, we talked about Chicago there, but I'm always, the thing I love most about Chicago is the architecture.
where it feels that the buildings are talking to each other. kind of style is that that style and that style is a different style, but it's kind of, they're kind of reflecting on each other. talking to each other as well. And I think there's, there's that, how do we kind of, how did the, professors, how do they think about how to balance that thing between saying something, your own point of view, your own way of looking at the world, but also developing craft and learning from others? How do we, how do we get that balance right?
Keith (18:40)
I like that question because I think you're right when I talk about teaching people how to see in a new way, you might perceive that as, I don't know, almost depressive. Like the way you're working is bad or the ideas that you're having, you know, stop thinking about those. ⁓ And it's maybe subtle for me to explain what's going on. What's going on is that people who haven't learned how to see yet, they actually don't really know how to articulate what it is that they want to say or what it is that they need to
is say, a lot of students who are beginners come into a program thinking that, for example, they want to do work about the environment. So this comes up quite a bit. They come in, I want to do some paintings about the environment. Professor will say, absolutely, ⁓ go for it. And then the student, this is what often happens, is that they'll paint something, and then they bring it into class, and they're going through a critique where the professor and all the other students are looking at the painting.
And in many cases,
you don't see environment or environmental issues anywhere in the painting. It's just not in there. The student who's painted it thinks it's about the environment, but it's not on the canvas. So that's an example of not being able to see yet. You think what you've done, what you put on the canvas really has solved your intention, but when everybody else looks at it, they say, no, that's not what you've generated. That's very surprising for a beginning artist that other people don't see what they see.
that's the learning opportunity is to guide that person who's put in on the canvas to see that what they think is there isn't there yet. There's not a unity between your intended message and what other people are going to get out of the work. Now what happens is professors in that case, I call it a mismatch, what they don't do is they don't tell the student go back and repaint it. Go back and repaint it so it looks more like the environment.
That's not what they do in this exploratory process. What they do is they guide the student, look at what you've generated and value that and then see what it is that you've generated. You've generated something that you don't realize yet that you generated, but it came out of you and there's something powerful about that. And you might not realize yet what that message is. So really it's a kind of personal transformation where you're discovering something about yourself that you don't see yet. It really has to be a
between what you say the work means and what the work really does mean. So the fact that, and I hear painters say this all the time, it doesn't matter what the intention is. I don't even ask students what they were intending when they generated the work. We need to talk about the work that's on the wall and what's there.
and I'm gonna help you see what it is that you generated. So when I talk about professors teaching students how to see, it's not about oppressing them away from what they want to do, it's about helping them discover themselves at a deeper level so that they actually better understand what it is that they want to do.
James Taylor (21:53)
I know with like improv comedy, one the things that makes jokes funny is you think you're going along in one direction and suddenly it just kind of veers off and it takes you to a different place. When you were doing all these interviews with these different professors as well, was there one in particular which made you kind of almost have to of veer off slightly in terms of where you thought the book was going and where your research was going and it opened up a new area of exploration, either for this book or maybe...
future work, you're like, this is interesting. This is something I want to look at in the future.
Keith (22:25)
I thought it was going to be a much more academic book because I'm a learning scientist and I'm a psychology researcher. ⁓ A lot of what I saw is completely aligned with the research. So I already mentioned this concept of problem finding creativity and problem solving creativity. I only use those words in the book on one page. I don't use a whole lot of academic language or psychological terms because I think the words of these artists and designers are so articulate.
What I really wanted to do was tell their stories. So that changed for me. When I started writing the book, it was going to be a very academic book. I was going to have a whole chapter about problem finding, creativity, research, and sight studies, and the people who had done problem finding research in science or wherever.
And then, the more and more I started working with the transcripts of these interviews, and I also went into studio classes, and I made videotapes of what's going on.
when professors interact with the students and you know, let's look at what's here on the wall and talk about what it is that you've generated. So I have a lot of videotapes of that dialogue as well. So that's how the book changed and emerged for me, is that it became a much more of a storytelling book that I wanted to represent the compelling aspects of these stories. And I ended up leaving out the science. I don't have very many citations. I have less than 10.
citations at the end of the book and I don't have those parentheses, know, like academic journal articles have or so-and-so said this in 1974. I left all that out because I wanted to tell the stories. So for me, that's how it evolved. That was not the book I started out to write, but the book I ended up writing is a book that I think is a lot more accessible, especially to anyone who cares about art and design that ⁓
This actually is what people are doing, but they don't always know how to articulate it themselves. Because a lot of exceptional creators, they just do what's right. They do what works for them. they've been, many people, they've been able to discover for themselves this exploratory iterative process. But maybe not when they were 16 years old or 17 years old. These students are coming in at 18 years old. This is the value of going to an art school or a design school is that it's going to
accelerate for you this ⁓ learning of how to do, how to engage in this kind of process instead of you know stumbling along until you're 30 or later and then realizing that you know this is ⁓ a better way to accomplish my intention.
James Taylor (25:15)
Now a lot of people listen to this show are in business, they're business executives, they're CEOs, CFOs, they're in finance, they're in engineering as well, things that we often don't get labeled with the creative label or something within the creative industries anyway. You mentioned this kind of problem finding and problem solving, so I'm just going to go back on that one as well because I think that's the interesting distinction. We're seeing lot of obviously work just now in artificial intelligence where
the focus around increasing productivity of people, is kind of the, it feels like the problem solving bit, know, how can we make people work a bit faster? There seems to be less work going into the problem finding, which is like kind of creating entirely new ways of doing things, new industries, new types of products and services. For those people who are listening to this show who maybe don't come from the traditional arts world or the creative industries world.
What can they learn about the way that artists and those working in those industries think about the problem finding bit, how they develop their eye to be able to help find those problems?
Keith (26:26)
I think the lessons are absolutely transferable. You mentioned in the introduction that I have a background as a management consultant. My undergraduate degree is in computer science and in fact, in the 1980s, I was doing custom software in artificial intelligence. The much older algorithms that were being used in the 1980s. And then I eventually wrote my first business book. It's called Group Genius, where I'm applying the lessons of improvisational theater and jazz ensembles to
a more general model of collaboration when you want collaboration to drive creativity. So when you think about this contrast between problem solving and problem finding creativity, in a lot of cases in business you know what the problem is. So in that case problem solving creativity is absolutely what you need. I would certainly not dismiss problem solving creativity. But research shows that you get more surprising breakthrough creativity from a
problem finding. You have an opportunity to discover or to formulate a new problem that's different from what everybody else in the industry thinks the problem is. And it's that ability to see, honestly, it's that ability to see it when a new way of thinking about the problem presents itself to you. The finding of the new problem emerges from the process. You don't just sit in a room by yourself and think really hard about what kind of new problem is there. The new problems present themselves to you.
from engaging in the process. This is why you hear entrepreneurs talking about pivoting and about minimum viable products and entrepreneurship classes. And absolutely, I would endorse this, that you need to put something out there in the world and then be very alert and aware to what's going on with the thing that you've generated. And often, what happens with that thing you've generated, whether you call it a minimum viable product or something else,
it doesn't respond or the market doesn't respond in the way you thought it would. And then being aware to that and then being ready to go in a different direction, that's what people call the pivot. Or in my case, I talk about the zigzag process because I think when I look at the history of invention and innovation, I see more than one pivot. It's not just that you change direction one time, but people who are serial innovators who are really good at doing this, they continue
are aware and looking for opportunities that again they emerge from the process. So that's what I see artists and designers learning how to do. It's that ability to work with the materials that they're generating, the work that's in process, and it's very much like ⁓ pivoting in entrepreneurship or in product development.
James Taylor (29:16)
Now with these professors, they're obviously giving human feedback to those students and giving them advice on helping them kind of learn to see, as we're speaking about here. I'm wondering, you know, I see a lot within journalism and writers where now with artificial intelligence, I can write a piece and say, okay, imagine you're an editor from the New Yorker, critique this, show me the weaknesses, show me how I can improve on it, show me the weaknesses in a particular argument, for example.
So within text-based, it's art that's already happening. We have seen copilots. I'm wondering with the more visual arts, those who are in sculpture or painting, for example, are there any kind of AI tools or things that are coming across in terms of almost having that copilot or somewhat critique that can sit there at the side, kind of watching as you're working and maybe helping you see things that you can't necessarily see in what you're trying to do.
Keith (30:15)
I haven't seen it yet.
No, I haven't seen and I use Gen.ai all the time and I've experimented with it in many different ways. But first of all, the problem finding process is something that chat GPT and other generative AI, it's ⁓ ineffective or it just doesn't happen. You don't find this problem finding process because it's disembodied. It's in the computer. So there's no dialogue with materials. There's no generation of something and then interacting with it. And it's a dialogue that drives
the creative process for a human artist or designer. at least at the moment, AIs just cannot do that. They're not designed to do that. It's not a flaw, but it just is not possible with the current understanding of it being in a computer. Maybe someday when it's a robot and it's embodied in the world, maybe then there would be this opportunity. So that's number one, is that I don't think today's gen i create that way and I don't think
they ever will. They will not create in a problem-finding fashion. And number two, you asked about professors teaching students how to engage in this kind of process that I call the dialogue of creativity. And what they do is they talk to students in a classroom by engaging with the work that the student has generated. So the dialogue is between the professor and the students work. And they are modeling their own way of thinking about engaging in the process for the student. It's very custom.
It's very customized. It's very one-on-one. It's different for every single student. So there's not a formula because every student's different and every student's mindset and the path of personal transformation is uniquely for them.
So that is an incredible gift for a teacher to be able to do that. The people I interviewed have an average of almost 20 years of experience as teaching. And that's on top of the years they were a professional creator before they first stepped in a university classroom. It's not easy to do. So there's two things I don't see Gen.I.I. doing any time in the near future, and probably never with the current designs of neural networks or machine learning.
are not gonna be able to engage in problem finding creativity, number one. And number two, they are not going to be able to guide you in learning how to engage in a problem finding process. So yes, you can use them to help you solve problems, but you're not gonna get problem finding from today's AI.
James Taylor (32:51)
What about the those those teachers that you saw as they working with students? you go talk about that path piece? They're kind of softer side, the more like a psychological side where that student has self doubt or burnout in the work that they're doing as well. Did you notice anything in terms of those great teachers that they were doing in? Because obviously this is something that can not just within the visual arts, for example, but lots of industries see this way you have new members in the organization who
just they're kind of going through that process of learning their craft or whatever their thing is. And they have doubt, they have a lot of self doubt there. They have that crisis of confidence perhaps at a certain point in their career. Or they just get burnt out, they're just producing at such a rate, they kind of feel that they lose it. Was there anything you saw from some of those great teachers that they would provide their students in terms of way of looking at their creativity or way of just having a practice of some sort to of keep them soul and body and mind?
Keith (33:49)
I'm glad you asked that because it's almost a truism in creativity research that you have to fail or that failure is essential for creativity. So and I think that's true, but I think what I see from these artists and designers is a different way of thinking about failure. It's not a failure. At least that's not the way they think about it. And they say this happens to me all the time in my own professional practice. But what most people think of as a failure really is a mismatch between what you intended
and what actually has happened. And in many cases that mismatch is productive, which is what people mean when they say you need to fail to be successful. The failure is what leads to the pivot, or the failure is what leads to a turn in the zigzag. So it's a different way of thinking about it when there's a mismatch between what you've done and what you wanted to happen, is to see that mismatch as an opportunity to shift in direction, as opposed to seeing the mismatch as a failure to do what
you intended to do and then you said I didn't do what I intended to do I'm gonna throw it away and start over again. No that's not the way to be a successful creative or super creative the way to do that is to look at what you actually have done and then use that as an opportunity. So now you you mentioned self-doubt.
Students don't, at least according to these professors, they haven't learned the ability to successfully manage failure. And they haven't learned the ability to see the opportunity and the failures, the mismatches that they've generated. So they do get very discouraged. I mean, you're there in a top university. You've got a professional painter at the front of the room who's 20 years older than you, who has a work in the Museum of Modern Art, and you feel like you failed in front of that person. That's very intimidating and discouraging.
So these professors the ones who are very skilled they have learned to manage Failure to guide the students to not get discouraged and to see what they've done in a different kind of way It's part of learning to see and yes, absolutely. I heard this metaphor from three different professors saying I Here's what they say. They say I put the student in deep water and then Once they start to play around flail around
in the water, then I'm there in a canoe and I hand them an oar. But they say it's essential for the student to be in the deep water and to start flailing. You have to let the student do that because otherwise there's no learning. But you also have to be there to help them get past that discouragement and that depression. mean, you know, imagine you're 18 or you're 19 years old. So you're still learning how to...
use those mismatches of those failures to be productive. So effective teachers really do create a supportive learning environment and they really are just so gifted at helping students get through that discouragement and learn how to use what they might perceive as failures to drive the process forward.
James Taylor (36:58)
And was the one practice that you noticed in terms of those teachers were teaching their students in terms of helping them learn to see, as this book's been about, that you think could be applied to that executives, perhaps listening to this show just now, the engineer, the AI engineer that's listening to this show. We often talk about things, we have our guests on the show that we talk about something as simple as a morning pages, Julia Cameron, which is just this very simple way of just helping reflect and spend a little bit time in the morning, kind of reflecting.
giving them a sense of who their voice was. Is there kind simple little practice like that you notice time and time again that many of these teachers were teaching in terms of helping their people learn to see that could be applied outside of the traditional creative industries?
Keith (37:42)
I can think of two and one is the importance of constraints or guiding parameters that if you don't have any guidance whatsoever, you often will flail around. You can't just tell someone go be creative or go generate a painting. It's not gonna realize ⁓ their potential to generate good work. So having some sort of guidance or constraints on the process and it's difficult to do that for yourself. This is one reason why there's a value in going to art school because you have these
who know how to design carefully constrained assignments that are going to channel you through the optimum learning pathway. But successful artists and designers and graphic designers, they tell me that they have learned how to present to themselves structure, the guiding structures or parameters, especially when you're stuck and you don't know what to do next. That can really help.
to give yourself some constraints on the process. Like, for example, ⁓ pick a certain material. Let's say you always draw with a pencil. So you say, okay, I'm stuck. Today, I'm going to, ⁓ I don't
I don't know, use a crayon. And instead of doing it on paper, I'm going to find an old piece of wood, and I'm going to use a crayon on a piece of wood. So changing your tools or changing your materials can be a form of constraint. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's the sort of thing.
James Taylor (39:10)
No, it's like a jazz
musician, have a form within which to play, but then within that, there's lots of different ways they can take that.
Keith (39:21)
Oh yeah, exactly right. And so there's the standard mid-century jazz where you play off of these 16 or 32 bar song forms from Broadway musicals. And many of them are similar. They're kind of predictable with the cycle of fifths. And there's a certain 251.
So you get very good at doing that, but talented jazz musicians, really do seek out these 16 bar song forms that have an unusual chord progression, where it's a challenge now to fit a melody line into what's going on, because it's different from all the other ones. Now, if you're sitting at home without the 16 bar song form, and you're just blowing in your horn,
just for practice. Sure, you can be very creative that way, but the reason why jazz musicians seek out these 16-bar standards is because that structure actually can lead them to discover new melodic shapes that they wouldn't have without that harmonic structure.
James Taylor (40:20)
Now for those listening that aren't jazz fans, is structure within the chaos, believe us, believe us. It's wonderful having on the show, if someone wants to take one step towards becoming more creative perceptually, and you wanna learn more about your work, the book, where should they go? Where's the best place to come and have more of an engagement with you?
Keith (40:43)
I'd recommend my podcast, which is called the Science of Creativity and my sub-stack newsletter is also called the Science of Creativity. So there, like you, I have some fascinating creatives who are articulate about how to do this. And of course, there's always my book, Learning to See, if you're particularly interested in what goes on at the highest professional level of art and design. And I'm just astonished that no one has written this book already. If you want to find out what goes on in the world's
art and design schools.
What book are you going to buy? There's no book. I still can't believe it that my book in 2025 is the first book where someone went into art and design schools and found out what's going on in those studio classrooms. It's so fascinating and compelling. And I spent over 10 years doing it. And the whole 10 years I was working on it, I thought someone else is going to publish this book. I need to write this, but someone else is going to publish this book. But I kept interviewing new artists and designers because they're just so fascinating.
James Taylor (41:38)
Hahaha
Keith (41:45)
and that's why it took me so long to write the book and no one else ever wrote the book. So yeah, if you wanna know how to teach people how to learn to see, then yeah, my book Learning to See, that's the one.
James Taylor (42:00)
learning to see Inside the World's leading art and design schools is out now. Dr. Arki Soyer, thank you so much for coming on the Super Creativity
Have you ever had a brilliant thought strike in the middle of the night? Those 3AM ideas often feel random, but they’re actually a powerful spark of creativity. In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, keynote speaker James Taylor shares how a quiet flight over the Indian Ocean turned into a lesson on innovation, cultural exchange, and what neuroscientists call diffuse mode thinking. From late-night reflections to remixing influences like a DJ, discover how to capture those unexpected bursts of insight and turn them into your next big idea.
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
“Great innovators are cultural DJs—remixing influences to create something entirely new.”
“3AM ideas remind us that creativity often arrives when the mind is free to wander.”
“Diffuse thinking is where the magic happens—your brain quietly connecting the dots in the background.”
“The best ideas don’t always knock during office hours; they slip in between yesterday and tomorrow at 35,000 feet.”
“Expand your playlist, protect your downtime, and remix on purpose—that’s the path to SuperCreativity.”
3AM ideas are valuable – unexpected insights often emerge when the mind is relaxed and not under pressure.
Diffuse mode thinking fuels innovation – giving your brain downtime allows hidden connections to surface.
Great innovators act like DJs – they remix influences from diverse fields to spark fresh ideas.
Cultural exchange accelerates creativity – music, science, and ideas now travel across the globe instantly, shaping breakthroughs everywhere.
Protect your “off hours” – creativity thrives when you step away from screens and let your mind wander.
Not every idea needs to make sense – even the wild or confusing ones can lead to surprising innovations later.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
James Taylor (00:09) Somewhere, over the Indian Ocean, I found myself wide awake. I was flying home from Chennai, India, where I’d just delivered a keynote and workshop for senior leaders from a pharmaceutical company. It’d be one those energizing days where the conversations backstage are just as interesting as the ones that actually happen on the stage. But now, it was the early hours of the morning. The cabin lights were dim. The only sounds were from the gentle hum of the engines and the occasional clink of a coffee cup from the galley. I had my notebook nearby but in that moment I wasn’t writing, I was listening. In my headphones was Bano Maria, the debut album from Catriel and Paco Amoroso, an Argentinian duo I discovered a few months before on NPR’s Tiny Desk Show. Their live performance had blown me away. Their music is an alchemy of influences. Experimental trap music from Latin America, hip hop from the USA, European EDM, London drum and bass, jazz and pop. It’s chaotic on paper, but in their hands, it’s seamless, alive. As I sat there at 3 a.m. on that plane, I thought about how quickly ideas travel today. A sound born in Buenos Aires can influence a beat in Berlin on the same day. A breakthrough in a Bangalore lab can shape a product in Boston before the week is out. The speed of cultural exchange is unprecedented. But here’s the thing. You only notice those patterns when you give your brain the space to connect them. At 3 a.m., on a flight, you’re not rushing between meetings or staring at your inbox. You’re untethered. Your mind becomes a DJ booth, sampling from the influences that you’ve been collecting, books, conversations, mistakes, even music you didn’t understand the first time that you heard it. This is what neuroscientists call diffuse mode thinking. When your brain isn’t under pressure to solve a problem, but it’s still working, quietly making connections in the background. The truth is, great innovators are cultural DJs. They’re fluent in multiple creative languages, and they’re willing to combine them in ways that might look reckless to someone else. But that’s where the magic happens, in those combinations. So here’s my challenge for you this week. First, Expand your playlist, fill it with ideas, sounds, and perspectives far outside your normal reach. Second, protect your offer hours. Don’t fill every gap with your phone. Let your mind wander. And third, when you create, remix on purpose. Combine those influences until you’ve made something that surprises even you. By the time the cabin lights came up for breakfast, I’d filled my pages in my notebook. Some ideas were ready to use. others needed time to marinate. A few made no sense at all. And those are often my favourites. The best ideas don’t always knock on the door during office hours. Sometimes they arrive quietly, half way between yesterday and tomorrow at 35,000 feet. So, when’s the last time that you had your own 3am idea?
Teaching Creativity in a World of AI and Uncertainty: Keith Sawyer’s Art School Insights #354
19 Aug 2025
00:42:25
Teaching Creativity in a World of AI and Uncertainty: Keith Sawyer’s Art School Insights #354
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, James Taylor interviews Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, one of the world’s leading experts on creativity, learning, and innovation. Keith is the Morgan Distinguished Professor of Educational Innovation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of 19 books on the science of creativity—including his latest, Learning to See: Inside the World’s Leading Art and Design Schools.
Based on a decade of immersive research across top BFA and MFA programs, Learning to See explores how artists and designers are taught to transform their perception, navigate uncertainty, and unlock deeper creative thinking. In this conversation, Keith shares why the most creative people don’t start with an idea—they discover it through making. You’ll learn how great teachers foster creative breakthroughs, the power of constraints, why failure is redefined in creative environments, and what business and AI leaders can learn from the artistic process.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, educator, engineer, or executive, this episode will change how you think about creativity, leadership, and innovation.
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
“You can’t tell someone how to see. You have to guide them through a transformation.” – Keith Sawyer
“Making is thinking. It’s through engaging with materials that surprising new ideas emerge.”
“Students arrive with talent—but they haven’t yet learned how to find the problem worth solving.”
“AI can help with problem-solving. But it can’t yet help with problem-finding—and that’s where the most creative work lives.”
“Failure is not failure. It’s a mismatch between intention and result—and often, that mismatch is the breakthrough.”
Links & Resources:
📘 Learning to See: Inside the World’s Leading Art and Design Schools – Buy on Amazon
Creativity is not a trait—it’s a choice, repeated again and again.
Emotions are not barriers to creativity—they are information that guide the process.
Cultural perceptions of creativity dramatically affect confidence and identity.
Creative block often comes from emotional overload, not lack of talent or ideas.
Sustained creativity is fueled not only by inner drive but by social ecosystems.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
00:09 – Intro to Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle and The Creativity Choice
01:06 – Her origin story: studying “interesting people” and discovering creativity science
02:59 – The standard definition of creativity: originality + effectiveness
04:59 – What makes The Creativity Choice different from other creativity books
06:46 – The role of emotions in the creative process
08:28 – Emotional granularity and how to use emotions as feedback
12:20 – How art evokes complex emotion beyond language
16:20 – Why ideas alone aren’t enough—the decision to act
18:26 – Social fear, self-doubt, and identity: the real blockers to creativity
19:17 – Cultural differences in defining and identifying with creativity
22:36 – Japanese Takumi and Western vs. Eastern creative mindsets
24:08 – Language and creativity: being vs. doing
27:02 – Creative confidence is grown, not given
30:24 – Certainty vs. uncertainty—for both creators and audiences
32:43 – Georgia O’Keeffe and embracing discomfort in creativity
34:28 – What keeps people going: social support and creative community
37:54 – Competitors and the creative power of external motivation
39:27 – How to handle creative block and emotional overload
41:21 – Nature, art, and personal recovery strategies
44:41 – How creative habits evolve over a lifetime
46:38 – What a creative life looks like—and why it’s available to everyone
49:43 – Zorana’s personal creative process and emotional timing hacks
50:12 – Where to find the book and connect with Zorana
TRANSCRIPT
James Taylor (00:09)
My guest today is Dr. Zohanna Icevic-Pringle, a senior research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. She's dedicated her life to exploring the psychology of creativity, what sparks it, what sustains it, and how we can all bring more of it into our lives. Her new book, The Creativity Choice, is a powerful guide to turning our ideas into action and making creativity part of our everyday choices.
So whether you're an artist, an entrepreneur, an educator, a leader, her work offers the tools that you need to transform inspiration into impact. Zorana, welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.
Zorana (00:49)
Thank you very much for coming, James.
James Taylor (00:52)
Now, before you became one of the leading researchers in this field, what drew you into this area? It's not often a common topic that people go into. What was your early work life and how did you get into this area?
Zorana (01:06)
Well, I got into it very early. was really an undergrad when I got interested and I wanted to study interesting people. I, obviously that is not a way to define anything in science. And I was reading wide and I was thinking of what I really mean by this very late term, interesting people. And I came down to
what I really mean is people who are creative. They are making choices that are difficult. They are making choices that are interesting, unconventional, and they are doing stuff in their lives and with their lives that made me want to study that for, well, the rest of my life, I guess.
James Taylor (01:54)
So who were some of those early interesting people that kind of inspired you to look further into this area?
Zorana (02:00)
Well, there was a big boom in creativity research, historical in the 1960s, in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was historically related to the space race. And in the US, there was a big, big movement to study creativity in science, to study how to teach creativity, to learn how it works.
And I have read lots of stuff that was done at that time and found it very inspirational.
James Taylor (02:35)
Now that word creativity is a difficult one because it's quite amorphous as a term, you people use it different ways, often when you see adverts they talk about creativity in one way, we have the advertising industry that uses it in a very kind of distinct type of way as well, and in business they'll use it in a different way, there obviously there's entertainment, the arts, music, literature, so when you talk about creativity how do you define this term?
Zorana (02:59)
Well, I define it from the scientific standpoint. So the science of creativity has settled on what we call the standard definition of creativity. And the standard part says we really agree on what it is, which is very exciting in scientific terms because, well, we talk about the same thing when we are talking as a scientist. And it has two big
two big parts to it. One is always what comes to mind when we hear the word creativity, something that is original. And original does not have to be, it has never existed in any similar shape or form ever in humanity's history. There is a continuum of how original something can be. So it can be a small change in something, some kind of product, or it can be a dramatic revolutionary change. The second part of the definition of creativity
is it is effective in some way. And that is where the differences can emerge how we talk about it in different fields. So in the arts, what is effective in something that has an effect on its audiences, has some kind of reaction, oftentimes an emotional reaction, audiences like it or react to it.
In business, it's effective because it is solving some kind of problem. It is creating a new product or new innovation, and so on. It has somewhat different meanings depending on what it means for a particular field.
James Taylor (04:40)
Now, what brought you to kind of really be inspired by writing this particular book? So this book is The Creativity Choice. So we're gonna talk about what is that choice? But was, before you kind of get to that, was there a moment when you realized that the message that you wanted to put across in this book was one that we needed to hear right now?
Zorana (04:59)
Yeah, that is a great question because there are lots of creativity books out there, lots of good creativity books out there. What I wanted to say that was different is we are talking a lot about thinking, we are talking a lot about how do we come up with ideas, and I didn't think that we are talking enough about what it takes.
to do something with those ideas. And in particular, acknowledging that this is a long process, it's a difficult process, it's a very effortful process, and it's never smooth. And when something is not smooth because you're doing something original, therefore there's no roadmap, nobody can tell you how to step by step do it to make it work.
then there are going to be some bumps on the road and there are going to be false starts. So you have to make this decision over and over again. So it's not the creativity choice, it is a continuous making of choices.
James Taylor (06:06)
Now you mentioned this idea of emotion and you're talking about the science side as well. That kind of feels like there's two different things kind of going on there. They feel like they're often at war. You know, the sciences we're thinking about in the case of creativity, something that can be measured, can be repeatable. It's empirical in that size. Side emotion, you know, obviously we think about something as softer.
perhaps as well. how do you, how do these things link to each other? How does creativity and how does the kind of the science link with the kind of the emotion and the, what, I guess what some might see that the kind of woo-woo part of creativity.
Zorana (06:46)
Hmm. Well, it feels like a woo-woo part of creativity. It's actually not woo-woo. That's the cool thing about it. It is there is science of creativity. There's also science of emotions. And my goal in life is to put them together and to say, how do they inform each other?
And there is lots of emotions in the creative process. It's pretty much a roller coaster. It is very exciting to have an idea. It's inspirational. It feels energizing. But then we hit roadblocks. We are frustrated. We can be stressed because there could be pressures. There is a lot going on. And oftentimes a lot going on at the same time.
The interesting thing that seems to be really surprising to people is that how scientists talk about emotions. We talk about emotions as information. What does that mean? Emotions as information? Emotions are what we feel, they are soft, they are, well, they are both, really. So...
If we analyze what emotions do for us and to us, they are conveying data. They are telling us something. They are telling us something about the state of our mind. They are telling us something about the state of the world around us. And if we are skilled in reading those pieces of information, we can use it to our advantage.
To give you an example, this sounds very abstract, so let's take it down with examples. There is, let's take different feelings. When you are feeling happy or energized and satisfied, what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that everything is good. You're making good progress, don't need to change anything. It already gives you hints towards your actions. But what if you're feeling frustrated?
What does that tell you? Well, and what should you do? Well, sometimes when we feel frustrated, it's unpleasant, so we want to make ourselves feel better. But if we are just going to make ourselves feel better and make that feeling, that unpleasant feeling go away, we won't be able to extract that information that is inherent in the feeling. But if we say, okay, what is this telling us?
we can discover that it's probably telling us what you are doing right now is not working. You have to try a different approach. And that is actionable, right? It's saying you don't need to work harder. You need to perhaps take a break, look from a different perspective, try something different. And
James Taylor (09:44)
So
as you're saying that, I'm just thinking about when you talk about the emotions, you mentioned some different emotions there as well. Is one of the issues why it's often been felt as not as scientific in terms of things like emotional intelligence, which I know you've worked a lot on as well, is because the labels that we...
give and the fuzziness sometimes of the labels, like if I'm talking about some molecules I can talk about that, there's this chemistry that's going on here, there's this biology going on here, but with emotions we use the things like frustrated as an emotion and it means different things for different people and it can also feel quite broad as well.
Zorana (10:28)
That is a great point that you are raising and there is even a scientific term for that and the importance of very specifically labeling your emotions if you really want to learn from them. And it's called emotional granularity.
If we get very specific in labeling our emotions, then we can truly learn what's going on and we can uncover some actionable information. If we, like in our everyday life, I mean, just think of it. Think of last time somebody asked you how you were feeling. Chances are, if you are like most people, that you responded fine or...
busy or stressed perhaps. In our culture, in our Western culture of today, those are socially appropriate responses. And sometimes we go to these responses even if we don't want to just give a socially appropriate response, even in our minds, we go to that. But if we learn, and this is something that is a skill that can be learned,
James Taylor (11:15)
Hmm
Zorana (11:42)
If we learn to pinpoint more specifically, okay, stress, what kind of stress? Stress is something that is unpleasant, that is very activating, but what kind of activation and unpleasantness do you have? Well, it could be that you are anxious. It could be that you are confused. It could be that you are frustrated because something's not working.
And all of those have different information in them and different courses of action that come from them.
James Taylor (12:20)
I guess that's sometimes the interesting thing about art because it's not often labeling something. I just finished reading a book about the composer Gustav Mahler, the Venus composer, and this first symphony that he wrote is a lot about the loss. mean, lost, I think he had eight brothers and sisters over the course of his life when he was younger. And this is obviously that time when...
disease was very prevalent especially in places like Vienna at that time and there's a part in the the one of the first symphony where he's writing about almost the loss of this, feels to lose a sibling, a brother, little brother and there's a memory that you remembered of his parents owned a bar
pub as we say in England and he remembers very strongly that his little brother being who was maybe only three or four years old who'd passed away being taken out through the bar while the bar was going on everyone's drinking everyone's singing everyone's doing their thing and and he said how do I bring those different emotions together because on one side there's that that that feeling of
of people enjoying themselves, there's life, and there's also this death there as well, and there's everything that kind of goes with that, and what he ended up doing was he ended up making actually a song, early part in the piece, which was actually a nursery rhyme, but written in the minor key, and kind of feeling quite haunting, and for the listener, you can't almost, if you haven't read the story, you're kind of thinking, why does it not feel right? There's an emotion, and he's not using language, he's using, in this case, music and notes.
to be able to get that across and I just find it interesting like sometimes when you're saying that that emotional granularity sometimes language can almost be a hindrance to that and that's sometimes what creativity can can allow us to go a little bit further with.
Zorana (14:20)
Yeah, and art has great power. It has power to evoke what oftentimes pure words, simple words cannot do. And I'm not even sure that our language has words to describe all of what you just described in writing this piece, but it's very evocative. And when you are hearing it,
you hear the discrepancy, you hear something is not right, you have expectations that are not met because nursery rhymes have particular way of sounding, but this is not sounding like that. So you are searching for the meaning and you are searching for what you are deeply experiencing. In terms of science, what we call that, I know scientists can sometimes break things apart.
that we experience, that is the ability to use emotions in the service of thinking and problem solving and creativity. It is, he was taking his experience and the totality of it and putting all of it in one piece. We can do that in different ways too.
we can use the relationships between thinking and feeling in order to harness them for our power of thinking and creativity.
James Taylor (16:02)
Now in the book you talk about obviously this creativity beginning with a choice. That sounds simple, but it can also be this idea of like a major shift. How did you come to understand the importance of that initial decision to kind of act on an idea, that choice that you describe in the book?
Zorana (16:20)
I was very curious about this difference between having ideas and doing something with ideas. I have noticed that I know people who have lots of ideas but don't act on them. And it's not because they are not capable, it's not because they are not smart, it's not because they are any of those things that first come to mind as shortcut explanations.
So I was wondering what is it? And I have done some studies where I wanted to see what goes on in people's minds as they are considering whether to do something with their ideas, whether to share them, whether to do that first step. And I found that there's a number of considerations that go through our minds. The first one, very big one, is other oriented.
It is asking, well, how will other people react to it? Are those people who hear it going to think it's silly? Are they're going to be angered? Maybe they will think that this is challenging their authority. What will happen? What will happen on the outside? And then there is a flip side of that. What will be the experience for us individually?
if we consider sharing those ideas, are you going to be overwhelmingly self-conscious? Are you going to get so anxious that you cannot cope with it? Is that uncertainty around what happens too much for you to handle? And finally, the third consideration is totally different in nature. It is
how important for your sense of self and for your identity is creativity and being creative.
James Taylor (18:26)
I know there's been a lot of studies in terms of the state of creativity by Adobe where they asked broad sections of people around the world, do you consider yourselves to be creative? Is that a term you would define yourselves, an identity idea?
And obviously in North America where you are, it's kind of a higher number, it's like 50%, 55%. If you were to go to parts of East Asia, it's as low as 20%, 25%, for example. I think here in Europe where I am at the moment, it's kind of in the middle. is that, that third point you mentioned, is that just a simple idea of confidence, being able to say that you have this kind creative confidence, or is it?
that that word, creativity, means very different things for different people in different parts of the world.
Zorana (19:17)
It's both. And pretty much when you talk about psychology and people, it's usually both. So what people mean by the word creativity can be different. And oftentimes we have in our culture and in what is presented to us, the bias towards creativity and genius.
⁓ so we celebrate people like Steve Jobs, or like very famous artists and we put them out as role models of creativity. And that sounds to everybody like a good idea. Well, it turns out it's actually not a good idea because how many of us really think we are Steve Jobs?
How many of us really think we are Nikola Tesla? We don't. Those are such remote role models that it's very hard to imagine ourselves being like those people. And what we think is inspirational, it ends up backfiring. We end up getting a message, well, we are not like that. Therefore it has to be something they were born with.
And this idea of you are born with something is very dangerous to your mindset. It means, well, I was not born with it, therefore why even try? So that's one part of it. The other part of it is also that you are related and you're bringing cultures is what is culturally considered to be acceptable?
in terms of creative behavior. So oftentimes in, you particularly brought up East Asian cultures where these, according to this research that you cited by Adobe, are people don't think as much, they identify with the word creative. Well, there is a great tradition of creativity in these cultures, but there is an emphasis on word tradition.
So when you are an artist, for instance, and you are learning your art, there is an emphasis on you first have to master it and you first have to learn the basics, you first have to learn the craft part of it, and only then you get the right to be truly original.
So you have this almost delay in at which point you should even be talking about creativity. And yeah, we are talking about somewhat different things. While where I sit in the United States and in Western Europe, it's pretty similar. There's lots of talk about creativity and this idea of individuality and individual uniqueness and creativity being part of it. So it's easier to say,
that word out loud.
James Taylor (22:36)
Yeah. It's like, and I also think there's something that's going on around this idea you mentioned, tradition, craft.
regardless of what your job is, there's a beautiful word in Japan, takumis. So someone that's, in America, you did the 10,000 hour rule, made famous by the Malcolm Gladwells, in Japan, they have this 25,000 hour rule. So someone who's done 25,000 hours in their chosen profession field, could be in pottery, could be someone that's making cars, it could be anything. And they call them takumis.
the level, there's a fineness of the level of creativity, because they're building, they feel like they're kind of building upon that. And the thing I often wonder is, with the creativity is, almost like, is there a slightly religious difference going on where many in the West, because in the West we come from more of a Judeo-Christian background, so the world was created in seven days, for example, so ideas are like, come from nowhere.
that's the idea of creativity, whereas in the East it's much more because of the Confucian or the Buddhist thing, it's much more about nothing is truly new, it's recycled, regenerated in different ways and we're combining, we're remixing in different ways and so often the idea of creativity that gets put out there is the kind of the more Western style of something coming from nothing as opposed to this is actually something that's kind of, versions of it have been before but we're doing something new with it.
Zorana (24:08)
Yes, and that scientists who study creativity across cultures have made this connection. That how we culturally and from a cultural and religious traditions are very big part of it, how they influence the way we think about it and then the way we talk about ourselves in relation to it. And at which point we use a particular word.
And this subtlety in how we use words goes beyond comparisons of very different cultures, as the North American or Western European and East Asian cultures. I grew up in Croatia and I was talking to colleague in Bulgaria and we realized something very similar in...
are native languages, the word, the native word for creativity has very different connotation than the word that was imported essentially from English. And so the word that is imported from English has a connotation of trait, something that is inside a person. It's an attribute of a person and you are more or less creative.
James Taylor (25:17)
How so?
Zorana (25:35)
while the native word has a connotation of doing. It is an action-oriented word. You become this through action.
James Taylor (25:52)
That's interesting. It's all those little kind of, so someone might be thinking, I'm not really that thing because I've never actioned upon that idea. Because for them, it has to be kind of actioned. And once we're getting into obviously the weeds with different languages, but I just find it fascinating when you go to somewhere like the areas of the Antarctic, for example, or the Arctic where
they have like 50 words for snow or here in Scotland, we have like 40 different words for rain because we get a lot of rain and we have to have different ways of expressing fine rain, like all these different things. And so maybe what we need to do and obviously this is great, you're doing this work as well as you're kind of expanding that range and also this doing this link with emotion because creativity as we know, isn't smooth sailing. It doesn't always about that actionable thing all the time.
What do you find is the biggest emotional or psychological blocks to creativity, from taking it from the idea, the thing, to actually making it real, making it out into the world?
Zorana (27:02)
Yeah, so I think that there are two kinds of big, blocks. And one we have touched on here with the idea of creative confidence that you mentioned. And I think there are some misconceptions about confidence that get in the way of people. The big misconception is, well, you have to start with confidence. And it's almost as
You either have it or you do not have it. Doesn't work like that. Confidence is something that grows with time and something that grows with experience. So think about your confidence in your driving ability. Think of the confidence in your driving ability when you are first learning how to drive and today after 20 years of driving. Very different, right?
The same thing is with any other kind of confidence, including creative confidence. It changes. And I have spoken recently to a group of 300 professionals in creative industries. And there was lots of questions about confidence and about doubt. people ask me, because I study the emotional side of creativity, how do you make sure you are free of doubt?
and you can't. It's not possible. It's just not human. We are going to have doubts and the confidence will ebb and flow. It will start relatively lower as we start some work because there are a lot of unknowns and it will progress relatively steadily but with some dips because occasionally we run into an obstacle.
and then you are not so sure and you have some doubts and you don't know really what you're going to do next. So the creative confidence is something that is not constant and it's not an either or thing. And that's important to know. And if you don't know that starting out, you might misconstrue the fact that you don't have perfect confidence at the get-go as you are not having the ability or the potential to do.
And the second part, the second big barrier, emotional barrier is uncertainty. Uncertainty is psychologically experienced as risk and risk breeds anxiety. And so all of these unpleasant things and creative work is by its nature full of uncertainty.
We are doing something original. That means we cannot rely on something we have done before. It's not going to work because we are doing something new. And now we cannot be sure what are the exact steps we have to try. We have to try it out and see what works and adjust as it goes. But for some people...
that uncertainty and that ambiguity is not something they are able to tolerate. You don't have to be risk taker to be creative. You just have to tolerate it.
James Taylor (30:24)
I also think also the user or the end consumer of that creativity, there is sometimes a pushing away of or being scared of uncertainty. For example, in America, someone that wants to and buy a suit will often go to Nordstrom.
because they have a, there's, and they can see exactly what the suit is, the color, the fit, they know exactly what it is, and it's kind of, it's this kind of creativity of certainty. They know exactly what that is. As opposed to going to somewhere in New York or in London and having someone make something, tailor something specifically for you, which is creativity of risk, because at the start, you're not quite sure, neither particularly you or the person that's making you the creative of this.
of this thing is not 100 % sure how it's going to work out.
whether it's gonna work, whether it's gonna fit, all these kind of things, and it's gonna require that. And I think sometimes we think about this idea of certainty, we think it's about the, I feel it's kind of pushed onto the creator, but actually it's the consumer of that creativity that also has this kind of thing like how much do I wanna go to a comedy show where I know that I'm gonna laugh by the end of the night, or do I wanna go to something that's a bit more challenging, go to some abstract theater in some way?
Zorana (31:45)
Yeah, no, certainly it goes on the other way too. And we see this with experience of art in particular, where there is uncertainty in the part of creation. There is an uncertainty in the part of consuming, enjoying, appreciating art where you cannot quite be sure what the artist intended to say. Are you willing to engage anyway? I have recently come across
quote from Georgia O'Keefe who is beautiful, beautiful work and it said that that she was never comfortable with anything she did in her life but that never prevented her from doing it and I very much identify with that. It is okay, I don't know whether something is going to work out, it is a risk but
James Taylor (32:17)
beautiful artist.
Zorana (32:43)
if that prevents me from doing something, well, nothing's going to happen anyway, so might as well try and have some chance at it. And that attitude in life can lead us places, interesting places.
James Taylor (33:01)
Now your book draws on interviews with lots of different types of creatives, different fields. Was there any particular individual whose story kind of shifted your own thinking about what it means to be creative?
Zorana (33:14)
you know, I'm going to say no to that. ⁓ I know it is conventional and expected perhaps to say yes. But, what I really, ⁓ found beautiful kind of there is this aesthetic beauty to science, I believe certainly in my experience is when you talk to people who are doing things that we study.
when you see that lived, when you see how it lives in people's lives, how it is vivid in lived experience. And that's what I have really found time and time again, that people are experiencing something
sometimes don't fully know how to label it, how to describe it. And that the goal for writers and for science writers is to translate that into actionable terms.
James Taylor (34:28)
once someone starts to make those kind of creative choices, deciding moving it from just initial idea to actually something that's kind of real, actually take action upon it as well, what helps them stay in motion? What conditions or habits support a kind of sustained creativity? So even though they're gonna get maybe rejected for some of the work that they do, or they feel maybe their work goes out of fashion for a period of time, sometimes decades, and then it kind of comes, it might...
come back, it might not come back. What keeps them going? What habits or emotions do they need to have within them? What kind of sense of, I guess, those habits that they must have.
Zorana (35:08)
It's not so much about habits as one part is this identity that creativity is something that truly matters to me. But the key to what you are saying is actually not inside of us. The key of what you are saying, the sustained creativity is in the social nature of creativity. And what do I mean by the social nature of creativity? Well,
People immediately think about teamwork and collaboration and yes, I mean that, but I don't only mean that. Even work that seems to be solitary in nature. I just wrote the book and I was the only one writing the book, therefore it was just me, it sounds like it. But it's not really because there are social influences on thinking. There are social influences.
on all those perspectives that I gained from going to conferences, talking to colleagues, talking to all of the creative individuals who were so generous with their time and talk to me and let me interview them. And all of those are social influences. And you gain energy from people and you get that drive from those interactions.
And in particular, when we talk about sustained creativity in workplaces, there is much more of a formalized social part of creativity, where you have coworkers who in direct ways or indirect ways can support creative work by sharing ideas or by providing that.
emotional, essentially emotional support, support of creating conditions that make creativity possible. And that social infrastructure is what truly keeps you going.
James Taylor (37:08)
On that, so there's the kind of supportive element of having that sense of community around you, people are doing maybe similar things or have similar aspirations with their work, have similar identities with the work they're doing. But then there's also within that, I sometimes think there's the role of the competitor, let's say. Someone who is maybe on a similar path to you, maybe a bit further along, the same place, just behind you.
And what role does the, I'm using the word competitor, but it's not really the best word for it probably, but someone that's kind of going on a similar path as you, and they're pushing your creativity a bit further, or they're making you think your work is speaking to each other. What is that role?
Zorana (37:54)
Well, so what we have inside in terms of motivation, we talk about it as intrinsic motivation. Motivation because we are enjoying the work, because we find it challenging and stimulating.
That competition is part of extrinsic motivation, is something that motivates you from the outside. Those could be different rewards, different goals you want to achieve, and could be competition. And they can push us because they energize action.
Sometimes they provide also different perspective. A competitor is trying something that you haven't tried before or haven't considered before. So they can indirectly provide a perspective, but they also just push you. They give that extra oomph to the creative drive.
James Taylor (38:57)
Now every creative path has its dark nights. You mentioned writing a book, there's those periods where maybe the words aren't flowing as easily and there's maybe a sense of doubt that comes in or someone has been working for a long time and they have burnout in different ways and they need to take a step back a little bit. What's the toughest battle that you've seen people face in bringing their ideas to life? Any examples of those kind of dark nights and how people have gonna go over them?
Zorana (39:27)
Oftentimes, creative block happens. creative individuals, those who engage in creative work oftentimes talk about creative block. We are making progress, you're making steady progress, and all at once, nothing happens. And if you're writing a book, for instance, there are days when...
happens and everything you tempt is clumsy and unclear or plain out ugly and not communicating. And in those times what we really need to do is cool off a little bit because realizing that you're not making progress starts getting you worked up.
We use the word term worked up oftentimes in our everyday discourse. In scientific speak, our activation level gets higher. We are feeling very unpleasant and uncomfortable. And so it can start being something that is stressful or anxiety provoking that goes into being overwhelmed.
And the trick is not to make ourselves feel happy somehow magically and all at once. We just have to take the edge off so that something that is overwhelming becomes still difficult and challenging, but now you can engage in the process and still go and sit in front of the computer or in your studio or wherever else you are.
in doing your work and still engaging with it even if you're not going to make as much progress as you normally would.
James Taylor (41:21)
I know there's been a lot of scientific research in terms of how the physical environment affects your creative levels, your creativity, and this idea of a third place. And there's lots of writing on people that just, when they get to that point, they just, I'm gonna go out for a walk. And just changing your physical environment, being out in nature in different ways just kind of seems to do something, know, it changes that emotional tenor of what you're doing.
Zorana (41:46)
Yeah,
it lowers that activation we are feeling and then it can provide you different perspective. Oftentimes when we are not directly working on whatever we are stuck on, whatever we're experiencing that block about, those times of insight or breakthrough happen.
because we are taking that edge off and our mind, somewhere in the back of our mind, can still be sort of working about it, even if we are not actively and consciously doing that. And what's going to work for different people depends. So taking a walk in nature, going to forest is...
James Taylor (42:25)
Yeah.
Zorana (42:33)
really effective for some people. For me personally, it is not. For me, what works is being in the presence of art. If I need to recharge, if I need to reset, I need to get in front of art. And the challenge is that...
Sometimes if you read the blogosphere of the world, you end up sometimes getting this sense of you have to go for a walk. No, walks work for many people, not necessarily for everybody. The same way as those morning routines work for some people, perhaps even many people, but not everybody. Let me tell you, if I ever try to get up at 5 a.m., nothing would happen.
absolutely nothing. My brain doesn't kick in until 10. So it's the challenge of giving yourself permission to figure out what works for you and giving yourself permission to know that what you have read somewhere might not work for you and it's okay. There's no problem in you. You just have to find what is yours.
James Taylor (43:23)
You
Do you see that sometimes changing with people over time? I remember, like you often was told, know, actually just need to get out nature, be around that greenery. And that's for me, that's great for certain types of, certain times in the creative process when I wanna do certain things, but usually in those kind of earlier, more experimental stages where I actually want almost like...
too much input, I want a lot of things and so for me going into a Manhattan or a city or in London or somewhere that just has that a certain energy about it, it's not necessarily it's giving me ideas but it's just because there's so many different point inputs that are going on that work well for me, that took me a few years to kind of figure that bit out, to figure that's actually I need a little bit of both of those that is going on. What happened, have you seen things happen to people throughout the course of their lives as they continue to make this choice of
Zorana (44:40)
Mm-hmm.
James Taylor (44:41)
not just keeping something within them, but actually putting something out into the world one way or the other, perhaps how their identity changes or how they think about creativity changes.
Zorana (44:52)
I think that people become more aware of the complexity of the creative process. So insights like you just shared, how different things work in different parts of the creative process, I think people with more experience and with more achievement under their belt become aware of.
So what you are talking about there is something that we know from research studies, especially research on how others can influence us. In the early stages, having contact with lots of different people who you normally don't talk to, input from very different sources, broad interests, and you can be making connections that you...
did not think of before, that's good for those early stages when you are still brainstorming essentially. But later on, you need to now put the serious work, put the work of, well, trying it out, trying one way of building something. If it doesn't work, trying another way, trying to do it systematically, and there different things are going to work. So...
That insight of how creativity really works inside out is something we gain through experience.
James Taylor (46:16)
And finally, what does a creative life look like for you? Someone that's creatively fulfilled in what they're doing. They're of, they're at that point in some of the things you mentioned in the book of kind of building that confidence within what they're doing, but continue to adapt and continue changing. What does that look like? And is it something that you believe is available to everyone?
Zorana (46:38)
I think it is available to everyone if you are willing to engage. And if you are willing to do what, ⁓ what Georgia O'Keefe said, well, I am not necessarily comfortable doing it, but I'm doing it anyway. And that's that big jump. Once you, once you jump over that big hurdle, everything else is the process of learning and process of learning can be bumpy, but it's, it's one that starts.
and then grows with time. What does it look like for me? One thing that I was very conscious about as I was writing a book, for instance, is am I taking my own advice? Oftentimes we talk about research, we talk about what are research-based tips, and am I taking my own advice? And sometimes,
we react impulsively or not necessarily impulsively, more habitually. And it takes a moment to step back and say, hey, you are getting overwhelmed. What would be the lesson that you would want people to get? And that takes effort. That takes catching yourself when you are slipping in
whatever habitual modes of acting and reacting you have, and then putting things to practice. I have gotten into one big habit of putting the science of emotions to practice in my creative work that I know that there are these connections between thinking and feeling.
In certain kinds of moods, you're better able to do certain kinds of thinking. And I know that when I get up in the morning, I am not a morning person. I am not energetic in the morning. am, let's be honest grumpy. But being grumpy really and pessimistic in the morning is a superpower for certain kinds of tasks.
especially for those tasks that require you to evaluate what you have built or what you have written. So I start my morning by evaluating, reading and revising what I have written before. Around three or four PM when I am at my highest energy, I am doing that writing that needs the flow and that needs to just...
be going and words coming in quick succession, they are not necessarily the absolute best words that I can produce, but I can deal with that in those low times. So I am taking these lessons and putting them to action.
James Taylor (49:43)
So this
So this whole conversation today has really been about that link between emotion and creativity and how that can be nuanced in different ways as well. Zerana, I wanna thank you for joining us today. And before we close, I'd love to you to share with us where people can learn more about you, the work you're doing, the research that you're doing, and also just share if they wanna get a copy of the book, the best place for them to go and do that.
Zorana (50:12)
Best place to get the book is wherever you get your books. The book is going to be available. The book is available on May 6th. And I am happy to share the link in your notes and also the link to get in touch and my personal website. I would love to hear from people and I would like to hear how the book resonated.
James Taylor (50:38)
Thank you so much for coming on the Super Creativity Podcast.
Zorana (50:43)
Thank you very much for having me.
AI and Creativity: Is AI Stealing Our Creative Muscle?
14 Aug 2025
00:05:21
AI and Creativity: Is AI Stealing Our Creative Muscle?
We’ve all seen the incredible things that AI can do, from generating stunning art to drafting entire ad campaigns. But there’s a question that’s been on the minds of many creative professionals: Is AI helping us, or is it quietly robbing us of our most precious asset—our creativity?
Today, we’re diving into this fascinating paradox. We’ll explore the idea of “cognitive offloading,” where we let technology do the thinking for us, and what that means for our creative muscles. We’ll also look at the crucial difference between a human’s ability to create meaningful, emotionally resonant stories and an AI’s ability to simply recombine existing data. Join us as we explore how to use AI as a powerful trampoline to launch your ideas higher, rather than a crutch that holds you back.
5 Soundbites
“Creativity isn’t just about producing something. It’s a muscle that we need to train, stretch, and strengthen.”
“Heavy AI use can cause what researchers call cognitive offloading—the tendency to let technology do the thinking for us.”
“AI can generate lots of options faster, but when it comes to creative writing and emotionally resonant storytelling, humans still have the edge.”
“AI is like a trampoline. It can bounce you higher than you could jump alone, but you still need to do the jumping.”
“AI can draw our monsters faster, but we should not stop imagining them ourselves.”
Be aware of creative muscle atrophy: While AI is a powerful tool, relying on it too heavily can lead to "cognitive offloading," where we lose our ability to think creatively on our own.
Humans still have the creative edge: AI excels at divergent and convergent thinking (generating and filtering ideas), but humans are still superior at creating meaningful, emotionally resonant content based on lived experiences.
Use AI as a collaborator, not a crutch: The most effective way to use AI is to treat it as a partner that extends your reach, helping you prototype ideas faster and explore new angles. Avoid handing over the creative reins entirely.
Schedule "no-AI time": To combat creative atrophy, intentionally set aside time each week to brainstorm, write, or sketch without any digital assistance. This helps keep your creative muscles strong and engaged.
Focus on the "why": Let AI handle the "what" and "how" of a project, such as generating content or designs, but always own the "why"—the core meaning, voice, and values behind your work.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
When AI steals our creativity, is that a feature or a bug? Last week I was in San Diego speaking at a fintech conference and staying at the historic Hotel Del Coronado. If you’ve never been, the Del, as locals like to call it, is one of those grand old hotels with a past so rich it could fill a Netflix series. It’s where presidents have stayed, where Hollywood stars hid from the paparazzi, and where some of the great creative minds of the last century came to think, write, and dream.
One morning after the keynote, I sat on the beach in front of the hotel, coffee in hand, watching the Pacific crash into the shore in long, lazy intervals. To my left, surfers bobbed in the water like patient punctuation marks, waiting for the perfect sentence of a wave. And just a few feet from me, a six-year-old child knelt in the sand, entirely absorbed in drawing a monster. She didn’t have a tablet or a device. She wasn’t copying from a screen.
Every wobbling eye, jagged tooth and lopsided grin came straight from her own mind. It reminded me, creativity isn’t just about producing something. It’s a muscle that we need to train, stretch and strengthen. And right now, we’re in a moment where AI is both building and weakening that muscle. In the last 18 months, generative AI tools like ChatGBT, Mid Journey and Dali have gone from curiosities to core creative utilities.
Entire ad campaigns, concept designs, and even TED-style talks are being co-created with machines. But a recent MIT-backed study sounded the alarm. Heavy AI use can cause what researchers call cognitive offloading, the tendency to let technology do the thinking for us. And over time, this can lead to a form of creative muscle atrophy. The AI draws the monster for us. It even adds shading, texture, and style.
But in doing so, it quietly robs us of the joy and the neural workout of making something from scratch. A fascinating academic paper published earlier this year compared AI-generated outputs with human creativity across multiple tests. Divergent thinking, which is about creating lots of ideas. Convergent thinking, which is about narrowing to the best idea and open-ended creative writing. The results?
AI often scored higher than humans in divergent and convergent thinking tests. It can generate lots of options faster and filter them very efficiently. But when it came to creative writing and emotionally resonant storytelling, humans still had the edge. Why? Well, because true creativity isn’t just about recombining what’s been done before. It’s about meaning making, lived experience, emotional subtext,
AI can approximate, but not authentically inhabit those things. This is not a manifesto for rejecting AI though. Quite the opposite. I use it in my daily work, spark ideas for keynotes to explore creative angles for clients to accelerate research. When I work with AI as a partner or collaborator, it extends my reach. I can prototype concepts faster, test scenarios at scale, and open creative doors I may not have thought to knock on.
But when I hand over the reins entirely, I stop exercising my own creative judgment. Think of it this way, AI is like a trampoline. It can bench you higher than you could jump alone, but you still need to do the jumping. So here’s what this means for you. Number one, use AI like a trampoline, not a crutch. Leverage it to get fresh perspectives faster, but always inject your voice, your judgment, your values.
Schedule no AI time. One afternoon a week, ban the bots. Sketch, brainstorm, or write without any digital assistance. You’ll be surprised how creative muscles actually respond to this. Thirdly, focus on context over execution. Let AI handle the what and the how, but own the why, the meaning behind the work. But let’s get back to the beach. That child’s monster wasn’t perfect.
The proportions were off, the perspective didn’t make any sense. Sand isn’t the most forgiving medium. But none of that mattered. It was hers, an unfiltered, undiluted piece of her imagination made real. As I watched her scroll another crooked tooth into the creature’s mouth, I thought the future belongs to those who can imagine first, and then engineer later. AI can draw our monsters faster.
AI Decision-Making & The Future of Leadership | Kate O’Neill #353
12 Aug 2025
00:48:18
AI Decision-Making & The Future of Leadership | Kate O'Neill #353
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, host James Taylor interviews tech humanist Kate O’Neill, founder and CEO of KO Insights and author of the new book What Matters Next: A Leader’s Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World That’s Moving Too Fast.
Kate has advised global organizations like Google, Adobe, Microsoft, and the United Nations on how to design technology and digital transformation strategies that are ethical, human-centered, and built to last. In this conversation, she explains why we must move beyond shallow futurism to embrace strategic foresight, how to distinguish transformation from innovation, and why meaning is the most important compass for the future of leadership.
Whether you’re a CEO, innovator, strategist, or simply curious about the future of humanity and technology, this episode will equip you with frameworks for clearer decision-making and sustainable success.
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
“Transformation is catching up. Innovation is moving ahead.” – Kate O’Neill
“Leaders need clearer thinking, not shinier tools.”
“Foresight is not about predicting the future—it’s about preparing for meaningful outcomes.”
“We don’t need timid incrementalism—we need right-sized steps into what matters next.”
“AI lets us build serendipity into our thinking—if we use it thoughtfully.”
🔗 Links & Resources:
📘 What Matters Next by Kate O’Neill – Buy on Amazon
Transformation ≠ Innovation: Transformation is about catching up; innovation is about moving ahead.
Strategic foresight is not futurism: Leaders must develop insights and foresight simultaneously to navigate fast-changing environments.
Meaning drives decision-making: Whether semantic, emotional, or strategic—understanding “what matters” is the key to human-centered leadership.
Synthetic data and digital twins offer powerful tools to test future-facing decisions without risking real-world failures.
Cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines is where creativity and insight thrive.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
Welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast where we explore the intersection of technology, humanity and innovation. Today we’re honored to have with us Kate O’Neill, renowned as the tech humanist. Kate is a leading expert in aligning business success with human-centric technology. As the founder and CEO of KO Insights, she has guided organizations like Adobe, Google, Microsoft and the United Nations towards more meaningful and effective digital transformation.
Her latest book, What Matters Next? A Leader’s Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World That’s Moving Too Fast, offers a roadmap for leaders to navigate the rapid pace of technological change while keeping humanity at the forefront. So let’s delve and dive into Kate’s insights on making technology work better for business and importantly for people. Kate, welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (01:04)
Thank you, James. Great to see you.
James Taylor (01:06)
Well nice that we’ve met a few times before now and it’s just wonderful because I know this is your, is this your fourth book I’m guessing? Third, fourth.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (01:14)
It’s my fourth
book in the business and tech space. I have six overall and I’ve contributed to a few others, but so it’s always kind of a funny question. Like how many are there? Well, it depends on how you count them. But yes, four in the business and tech space.
James Taylor (01:26)
Now, what were you doing before you became known as a tech humanist? Because I’ve always known you as a tech humanist, and that’s the title that you often get, you is used. What were you doing before you were out there giving speeches, writing books, consulting?
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (01:35)
Yeah.
You know, so my career has been in technology for…
30 years now, but it’s been in different fields of technology. in different fields that didn’t have names at the time. before we were calling it information architecture, I was doing information architecture. Before user experience and before customer experience, was doing that content management, content strategy. So all these different fields that are, in some ways, the interesting thing about them is that what they all have in common is that they are this interesting synthesis of understanding language.
and the way humans organize in our brains and the way technology best organizes. And so it’s kind of always bringing those things together. And then over time, realizing that I was always, in every organization, the person who was the sort of fiercest advocate for the customer or the user or the people on the other side of the equation. And that became sort of my go-to role. I just became the person who
who realized like, need to make sure the business is successful, that the business objectives succeed, but we also need to make sure that in doing that, we’re providing for human success as well. And so that became that morphed into this field over the last 15 years of speaking and researching and writing around tech humanism.
James Taylor (03:04)
Well, it’s interesting, you use that, the tech humanist, it’s an interesting phrase because I don’t think of you as a futurist in that way. I think I’ve seen you talk about futurist adjacent, which I thought is quite nice because when I often think of traditional futurists, it’s like intellectual Red Bull. It’s just like a high, a sugar high, and there’s nothing really much there. But you kind of go deeper.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (03:19)
Yes, yeah.
Yeah.
James Taylor (03:34)
this, tell me about this, the tech, the humanist start, was there a particular point that you decided, because you could have gone and just done the typical futurist thing and gone down that route and break shany thing syndrome, but you chose a slightly different path to face it a little bit more around ethics, around humanity, was there a particular point that you went that this is the direction I want to go with this?
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (03:59)
Yeah, I think like you, I see the whole futurist space.
as one that’s filled with a lot of conjecturing and a lot of posturing that doesn’t really feel like it pays off in many respects. It doesn’t necessarily feel like it benefits business leaders either. You know, the people who most need to consume that content are the people who are trying to make the high stakes decisions and want the most guidance. And what it feels like is much more relevant is what I would think of as more like foresight strategy. And so that’s one of the things that I really lean into in this book is the difference between futures
them in foresight, really trying to use a model where we’re using insights thinking that yields foresight along the way so that we can triangulate our decisions for what we need to do now with what we need to do next. But that came about because I did work around the future space for a good bit of my career. I worked around fields that were very much trying to be on the cutting edge of things. And sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. And the times when it worked, like
You know, I know that in my bio you probably have for For viewers to have seen by now that I was one of the first hundred employees at Netflix It was a really incredible experience But what was for me the most incredible part of it was getting to see the visionary leadership at that company So for example, this is in 99 2000 2001 Netflix is still very much the very tiny company for compared to blockbuster, which is the 800 pound gorilla
in the video rental space in the US and largely internationally. And even at that time, Reed Hastings and the executive leadership team made decisions to invest research and development, money and resources into what we were then calling set-top boxes, which was the predecessor to streaming as we now know it.
And so you, just, it’s so mind blowing to me, the confidence and the vision to be able to say, here we are struggling to actually gain any kind of market share whatsoever. But we’re also going to be doing this research and putting money into what we’re going to be doing if and when we succeed in sort of dethroning the, the king and becoming the dominant player in the space. We know that there’s probably going to be new technologies, new platforms, and we have to be ready for that.
And to me, that’s far more useful than sort of an intellectual exercise in futurism. It’s really trying to think ahead and trying to put your resources where they most will make an impact.
James Taylor (06:37)
Now there’s a lot of, I guess, people kind doing what you do, but internally within an organization. You mentioned your work at Netflix, and there’s a documentary I remember seeing years ago called 16 Feet from Stardom, I think it was called. And it was about the backing singers in Famous, and there was a line, I think it was maybe Bruce Springsteen said, that 16 feet from the back of the stage where you’re the backing singer or the drummer or the bass player to the front of the stage where you are the main person.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (06:51)
yeah.
James Taylor (07:05)
where the spotlight is on you, that’s quite a distance to go. What gave you the confidence to go from that backstage hero within organizations like Netflix to going onto the front of the stage and to really being that thought leader we know you today?
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (07:21)
think you just called me Darlene Love and I like that. I’ll take it. I’ll take it. No one gets those vocals like she does.
James Taylor (07:25)
We love Darlene. Yeah.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (07:32)
But I think for me it was just the exposure to good leadership and good decision making like what I saw with Reed Hastings. I saw a number of other instances of good leadership. I also saw some bad leadership and I think you learn even more from a bad example than from a good example. So getting to see some choices being made that I would like to have seen made different. had a kind of a…
life-altering interaction with a CEO I was working with one time who who was frustrated with my Consists constantly trying to guide the decisions on what I how I saw the the market and the field playing out And he sat me down once and he said Kate I know you think you could lead this company better than I do I said no I think you could lead this company better than you’re doing and that’s really where this comes from. It’s not it’s not arrogance I don’t think it’s it’s really the sense that
In my last company, Before KO Insights, which I’ve now run for 11 years, I had an agency before that was an analytics and strategy agency. And we evolved our values through actual work with clients. And one of those values that we came to was speak truth to power, but confront with compassion. And I really feel like that second piece of that,
that idea is an important one because I think people are just doing their best sometimes. They’re really trying to figure out how to solve the problems in front of them and they’re intractable problems and especially today and that’s really what comes into fruition with What Matters Next. I think a lot of leaders are really struggling with how much complexity there is, how much acceleration there is, how much they feel like the field is changing all the time, how much it seems like technology is just constantly in flux.
And there’s a lot of anxiety about, what if I make this investment in this technology and try to, you know, update my customer service function and three to six months from now, there’s an entirely new technology space and we’ve made the wrong investment. And that’s a, that’s a valid concern. It’s one that I have an answer to. And that answer usually is you’re going to be so much better off because you’re not stuck in inertia. Just having some momentum around change actually makes you more agile and you can begin to swap out for whatever you
you
find that the more important latest technology needs to be much more readily than if you were still stuck in your previous implementation in most cases. So I think the compassion though for that situation is what I learned along the way is to be able to really empathize with the fact that these are complex decisions and leaders are in a really difficult role. And I like to find myself in a role where I can actually help.
affect that change in ways that scale, in ways that make pretty significant impacts because it’s downstream from those decisions that most people experience what the company has to offer and what the impacts of those decisions are going to be.
James Taylor (10:27)
Now, one of the things that you do in this book, I know you have a love of language, the use of language. We were speaking earlier, you speak ridiculous number of languages as well. You are definitely beating me on the Duolingo stakes at the moment. One of the things you talk about in this book, which is a useful thing, and I think it’s good someone with an understanding of language really calls us out, is the difference between innovation is that term that we hear all the time gets used.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (10:33)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
James Taylor (10:57)
but you kind of make a definition between transformation versus innovation and how these are not necessarily the same things. We think of digital transformation being used all the time, innovation, and they’re used in the same phrase, same thing often, but you make a distinction about that. can you just talk to about when did that idea come to you? Where did you see that as a problem in a lack of clarity in what people were trying to do?
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (11:04)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that I was seeing that in the questions and answers and interactions I was having with with executives and business leaders after keynotes, you know, having these sessions where in many of it, and this probably happens for you too, where in many of the conferences I speak at, one of those sort of perks that an organizer might set up is you get a 45 minutes alone with with the VIP attendees and you get to sort of field their questions in a much smaller group. And those kinds of things are just their goal. They’re so
useful. And I think the attendees really enjoy that too. So note to the event planners, that is a really nice feature. But in those kinds of sessions, I would often hear much more candid kinds of questions than I would hear, you know, in a 3000 room audience, 300,000 person audience, because you don’t want to speak up with those those personal questions. But the kind of thing that I was hearing, eventually made me realize that what was happening was that leaders who came up to the CEO role or to executive
leadership roles in a field other than technology, which is most of them. We have only recently begun to see technology executives make their way into the top senior roles in organizations. So most CEOs come from a field other than technology. And the way that they’re thinking about the technology imperatives was conflating what needed to happen in terms of bringing the organization up to current standards with what they needed to do to look ahead and
be ready for the future. And I just found it very useful to make this distinction to say, look, what you’re talking about most of the time when you’re talking about digital transformation, you’re talking about catching up. You’re talking about looking at what the market already expects you to do.
What you’re talking about, what your competitors already do. You’re talking about what there is an sort of existent set of models and technologies that you can use to get to where you need to be. Look at COVID, for example, digital transformation was incredible during COVID, but it was a lot of things that existing companies could already do, like, you know, the mobile ordering and things like that. so retail and fast food and these kinds of services had to quickly implement those kinds of things where lead
in the space already had them, like Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts or those kinds of companies were already ahead of the game. So that’s a catch up. But innovation is different. Innovation is looking ahead. Innovation is standing firmly in this moment and looking ahead and saying, again, like the Netflix example, what might the next series of changes be? If we ask the meaningful questions about this moment, what people need, what looks like it’s changing, what kinds of trends are actually sort of changing and evolving the landscape?
around us, where do we probably need to be or where might we likely need to be in 10 years or so? And how do we think about the kind of meaningful and significant changes that we need to make over the next few moves that position us there? And I actually have a few models that help people conceive of that better, and some of them are in the book and some of them are more conceptual consultative models, but…
I think that distinction is one of the clearer, more useful ones in the book and that for a lot of, especially for non-technology CEOs, I hope that’s going to be a really disambiguating, very helpful clarifying type of model that will help them give better headspace to the kind of decisions that they need to make.
James Taylor (14:55)
I guess that’s one of the benefits of bringing someone like you in, whether it’s in consulting or speaking, is there’s that phrase, you can’t, you don’t know what’s inside, you can’t see the label from the inside. There’s something like that, that phrase, that type of phrase where I think with transformation, it seems to be a lot of the time that people within the organization, they kind of know the questions that they should be asking. They might not have a process to think about that, about how you use those.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (15:07)
Right.
Yeah.
James Taylor (15:23)
but they kind of know because they’re quite close to it and they’re quite close to the customer versus the innovation part where they don’t know what they don’t know, they don’t know the questions that they don’t know. guess bringing someone like you in allows them to ask, help them ask better questions.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (15:37)
Or you, right? I mean, you find that as well, I would imagine. Don’t you find that transformation and innovation to be conflated ideas that happen so often when the discussions you encounter?
James Taylor (15:47)
Yeah, it’s funny, it often comes back down, I think it comes back down to the curiosity, having curiosity about asking questions. I think it’s really hard to innovate within an industry. If you’re embedded, if you look at Nobel Prize winners, many Nobel Prize winners are boundary crosses. They have expertise in chemistry, but then they kind of, I’ve got this interesting biology thing just now. And I think, know,
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (16:09)
Hmm.
James Taylor (16:16)
my brother-in-law owns a taxi company. And taxi companies were changed dramatically with Uber because the average age of a taxi driver was 58. And they’re not sitting around making apps really. So I think it’s quite hard to innovate within an aside. And I’ve seen different companies try to attempt different ways of doing this almost like having a kind of a, almost a separate part of the business that’s focused on
growth, going 100 % for growth while they have another team that’s focused on that kind of just transformation, getting the business to work more efficiently, more effectively, because it’s slightly different head spaces. And I think it’s very difficult sometimes to be boundary cross in that way.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (16:59)
Right, right. But the value is there. think it’s so right. The one thing that you and I have in common is that we bring these different fields of interest to the work that we do, know, music and language and everything else. And you and I both have an interest in animal rights. And, you know, I think just having those those radar, those antenna up for different fields and what’s meaningful and relevant in those fields, you know, this ties into the title of this book, What Matters Next is that I think one of the things that we miss is that
what is fundamentally human is our sense of meaning. What is meaningful is what matters. Meaning is always about what matters at every level. So whether we’re talking about semantic meaning, how we communicate through language or patterns or purpose or significance or truth or relevance, or all the way out to the biggest, most macro, big picture, what’s it all about? Why are we here cosmic, existential kinds of meaning?
It’s always at every level we’re talking about what matters.
And I think that distillation is really handy as a shortcut for asking the right kinds of questions in an environment, whether you’re crossing boundaries in an organization or not, inside of a silo in an organization or crossing across many layers of the growth people, the retention people, the people who are thinking about the two moves ahead, what matters and what’s going to matter. And what I advocate for in this book is really about
not timid incrementalism, where you’re too timid to take bigger steps, but the right sized incrementalism where you’re moving yourself a step at a time into the next thing and the next thing, because you’re making very sensible choices about how to navigate between what you know matters now and you’re balancing that perspective with what you can see about the future, what you can see about what is likely to be the priority, what’s likely to matter well ahead of you. And I think that’s
That’s what helps make those blended perspectives really helpful too. When you’re bringing together people from across the organization who have different metrics for success, different OKRs, different priorities and ways that they’re gauged for success. But if they’re able to bring it together at a higher level and say, what matters across everything that we’re talking about is this fundamental concept, then you start having really meaningful conversation.
James Taylor (19:25)
that word idea of meaning, I always find it interesting talking with clients sometimes and they’ll say we’re thinking about this, this is what we want. And then just asking the follow up question, what do you mean by that? Because me being the outsider, I can ask dumb questions and I have no problem about asking dumb questions. And what it does is it makes them just have to pause and to think about what do they mean by that? And I guess this is the great thing that you and I get to do, we’re not academics.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (19:37)
Yeah
Yeah.
James Taylor (19:55)
So we are getting to have real deep relationships often with clients and have that iterative process on our work and finding what’s working, how do we need to refine that, how do we need to define that in a slightly better way. As you’ve been working with clients, I’m interested to get an understanding of, in the book you have these set of tools to really help leaders make decisions specifically about the future.
and you mentioned the kind of insight foresight. Was there a particular occasion that when you were working with a client, it really helped you distill any of these particular tools or it made you kind of rethink actually what they think I’m thinking, I’m saying is not that thing, but actually that’s interesting or just that kind of little quick feedback loop that you meant, actually this is, I’m gonna change this tool because it’s gonna be more useful for them.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (20:45)
Yeah, yeah, it’s something that’s evolved over the years and it-
It’s my own insights, my own process that I talk in the book about keeping an insights inventory, you something where you’re, you’re keeping a log of the most meaningful insights and revelations that you’ve had about your business, about your life, about your priorities, you know, whatever they may be. But it was something that over the years of working in different industries, different countries with different types of leaders, â I would just hear the, these kinds of patterns.
of feedback. For example, one of the observations is that we think that we learn by asking questions and getting answers and that’s how we make decisions, but that’s actually only the very first step and that usually results in when you ask a question, I’ll ask this of your listeners and viewers right now, when you ask a question, how often do you get a different answer from every single person in your team or in the room, right? It’s probably every time.
And
the reason for that is not that everybody’s wrong, but it’s that proverbial elephant that we’re all on different sides of, right? We’re all seeing the trunk or the nose or the tail or whatever. And it’s really important that what we do is synthesize that, that we take all those partial answers, which are part of a truth, and look for what the whole truth is. At the best we can. We’re still human. We’re only going to be able to see what we can see. But what we do is we try to make some kind of whole list
sense out of that and then use that kind of clarity that we get from that insight.
That is an insight, know, the sort of compressed truth of those partial vantage points that then becomes this prism, this lens that lets us see more clearly into the decisions we’re making. So we may be able to then take it and say, look, this decision we have to make today about, you know, implementing this call center software, we have to decide what our taxonomy is going to be. Like, are we deciding between this breakdown and that breakdown? It’s going to help us to be able
to say, well, one of the insights we have about our company is that we truly value design and experience. Branded design is a really important facet to us. So we’re going to skew toward this decision over here. It helps us make decisions more readily. What happens along the way, though, is so interesting is that we sort of have this exhaust of
foresight I call them bankable foresight because what you don’t have to do anything with them right now you can set them aside but it starts to give you a clue about things that are going to matter like even in that decision that taxonomy decision it’s totally made up and not
not very vividly depicted, but you can even see how maybe saying, well, we’re going to make this decision toward this organization of our content because we’re a design and experience oriented company starts to say, well, but also we need to reconcile at some point, what do we do about this other organization? If people have a more natural inclination to that, we need to address that at some point and figure out, does this mean a partnership? Does this mean, you know, a referral type of situation? Those are just the
types of opportunities that become much clearer and more cogent by working through this process diligently. And I’ve just observed that through road work, right? Like you said, it’s just that the routine of being in the room and being in boardrooms and…
having the privilege of being on a whiteboard with customers again and again, and being in a room, being asked the questions and being able to turn the questions back around to people and ask for clarification, ask for what that means to you, et cetera. And you just start to see these patterns. And so hopefully the distillation of these patterns to be able to share them with others through the book is going to help there be a lot more clarity as people are making these important decisions about.
technology deployment that affect us all.
James Taylor (24:51)
sounds almost a little bit like Charlie Munger has his mental models, you’re creating these kind of mental models that you can see. it’s, I’m reading a great book just now about Vienna during the, I guess, the end of the Weimar Republic before and then before kind of early 1940s, it went through this, it was called Red Vienna and then Black Vienna. And it’s one of the things that was pushed back on because it was known as being empirical, you know,
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (24:54)
Yeah.
James Taylor (25:20)
Can we test this? Because that, and that was probably the greatest thing that Vienna gave to other parts of the world. It’s a sense of, is this testable? Is it repeatable? And if it’s not, then it’s just, that’s a nice idea, but it’s not real. It’s not like a mental model. So what you’re saying is you’re able to kind of create those insights from that, and then you’re able to test them with different clients and say, is this true at the end of it? Is the response we’re getting, is that correct?
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (25:27)
Mm.
Yeah, yeah.
Right, right. Or does it lead to clarity? think, you know, some things are testable in a quantitative way and some things are testable in more of a qualitative way. And the qualitative sense of, you know, does a leader sort of sit up more in his or her chair and go like, that makes so much sense. I suddenly have a new insight. I was doing a guest lecture for my friend at Harvard who teaches a class there with executive leaders. And so, you know, the really wonderful thing about
doing guest lectures in schools where executives are going to get further education is they’re coming already with experience and business projects and some examples that they start to think about as you talk through these scenarios. And I was sharing this process. so at each step of the process, I was asking these executive learners, do you have examples in your organization that you can see how this might apply? And every time somebody would go like, my gosh, yes.
share an example and how it was immediately helping the clarity of their thinking to be able to put these these steps in place. And I just I remember having this incredible sense of being able to affect change like through that moment and witnessing people coming back with very vivid examples, in some cases, you know, way too long a story, but very helpful to get to hear, like here’s the
Here’s the way that we’re gonna be able to take the questions to partial answers and distill it into insights. Immediately I can see how the many respective peoples on my team, that their perspective is going to be at odds with one another unless they have.
This was something we did at Netflix. each had our own area of measurement for what we needed to affect as a team, sort of at our team level. But those needed to roll up holistically into a metric that we all cared about as a department or as a company and so on. It’s almost like a taxonomy of metrics.
And I really found that process to be so helpful. It’s one that I share a lot with clients, you know, to be able to have that one unifying metric, but then everybody has their own version of it or something they feel contributes to it. So you’re not only looking at your one metric for your own team, you have to have some way that that resolves to something more significant than your own work, something that has more wholism than that. But it is, so wonderful to hear the real life
lived experiences of executive learners in those kinds of situations who are in the moment applying these insights into their world and figuring out how they’re going to solve problems and take them back to their organization.
James Taylor (28:38)
I guess one of the other interesting things we’re starting to see now, I you have a, I know you’ve written a lot and you’ve spoken a lot about the use of data for good and for bad. And a few years ago, I was introduced to this idea of synthetic data. And I thought, oh, this is fascinating. Where, let’s say San Francisco, where I I used to live and I used to be based as well. If we want to change something around, let’s say policing in this area, then there’s a certain amount of
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (28:46)
Mm-hmm.
James Taylor (29:07)
data that we have, we could think about how could that affect the crime rate in that place. Or what we can also do is we can add synthetic data in order to get a wider data pool in order to test it. And then we get some different results. So I guess what’s interesting, what you’re talking about now is, some of these things, you just have that conversation with that CEO or that senior leader and trying different things. But I guess what we can also, going a few steps forward,
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (29:17)
Mm-hmm.
James Taylor (29:35)
is you can take some of these ideas and you say, listen, rather than actually test it out on the real business or this real department, let’s create the digital twin of that with some synthetic data and let’s see what actually happens. Let’s test our assumptions.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (29:49)
Yeah, that’s interesting. I had seen that kind of thing in practice in a couple of different areas. So when I read my previous company, the analytics and strategy company, we were doing a lot of experimental kind of modeling and helping companies figure out how to model their company in data.
sort of say, are the meaningful things we need to capture here? We need to know about inputs and we need to model what’s happening kind of internally and then we need to know about outputs and what the overall system looks like. And along the way, in order to synthesize or to be able to simulate that, to know if a change over here would affect the outcome over here, you would often have to create synthetic data. You would have to create kind of bogus use cases and inject synthetic data into different places
of the model. yeah, as it relates to the insights and foresight, I hadn’t thought about that parallel. It’s pretty interesting. I also think, you know, synthetic data is something that comes up a lot when you’re dealing with AI ethics and, you know, counterbalancing some of the bias in data sets and so on. So that, again, circles back to many of the underlying
sort of dilemmas that we’re trying to deal with when it comes to using these models in the first place, using the insights and foresights and the now next continuum and the harms of action and harms of inaction. All the other models that I’ve introduced in this book are very much intended to deal with the reality of the challenges that a data-based and algorithmically optimized and technologically advanced.
a society is leading us to. You know, we’re leading, we’re being led into or leading ourselves into a world where many of these, decisions that we make have scale and capacity and consequence well beyond what many leaders were ever taught to deal with in business school.
Or if they didn’t go to business school, what they learned through years and years, decades of being in the trenches. But the consequences are just so much bigger. So they need new models. They need clearer thinking and they need the ability to have some sense that what comes in over here is going to have this kind of an echoing impact over there. And the only way we can really do that is by trying to demonstrate it with different use cases, different examples as we’ve done throughout
the book, showing with some clarity how some of these past to present to future consequences play out, trying to give some clarity around some of these ideas around like transformation and innovation like we’ve already talked about. You know, all of it just comes down to clearer thinking. And at the end of the day, if someone is approaching these technology decisions with clearer thinking, I’m really hoping that they’re going to be making better decisions overall.
James Taylor (32:48)
So you’re brought in by these companies to help them with that clearer thinking, that decision making. Where do your ideas come from? Where do you go to get inspired? How do you go about developing your ideas? there things that have tried and tested for you that you kind of caught you in your kind of box of tricks that you tend to go to?
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (33:08)
Yeah, you know, I, like you, I am drawn to many fields and I agree with the notion that innovation or, you know, new ideation comes often from the juxtaposition of ideas from different spaces. Like you were talking about Charlie Munger’s sort of mental models and I also am a fan of the Zettelkasten, you know, the idea of kind of a thought process, like a thought cataloging process. So I read a lot of across a
lot of different fields, economics, history.
physics and so I’m constantly recognizing these meaningful sentences or something that someone says that I go like, that’s really interesting. I wonder if that’s true in another space. I wonder if that would be true if you applied it over here. And just keeping a set of interesting observations that maybe sometimes you encounter randomly as you’re looking for something else. A lot of that is cataloged in my notion. I use notion as many people probably do who are listening here.
And so you go to search for something if I’m looking for if I just search for the word insights in Notion, I might come back with a whole lot of different documents that I wasn’t looking for, but it might go like, yeah, the Amsterdam engagement that I had, that was an interesting one. And thinking about smart cities and AI ethics and, you know, the responsible deployment of tech as it relates to multiple stakeholders, that could really apply in this health care company example that I’m thinking about right now. And so I think you do.
you just kind of, if you design your workflow well, you sort of build a certain amount of serendipity into it. And you get some of these cross-pollinization opportunities sort of just by the way it happens. And so that’s what I look for. And sounds like that’s probably somewhat similar to your approach too, is it not?
James Taylor (35:02)
Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of fun. I used to have, I’m listening to a book just now, The History of the Notebook, going way back into the Egyptians and then the Venetians and the Tuscans. And so this idea of like just keeping a note, things are obviously important you want to reflect on. So I’ve always done this. I’ve always an idea, a thought, or I read something or I see something, I carry my notebook everywhere with me.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (35:10)
yeah.
James Taylor (35:31)
But then I decided to go with AI, because I’m fascinated about how we can use AI to become more super creative. I then said, okay, so this is the concept, this is the idea. So I then I use an AI to then say, take this idea, this concept, this phrase, and turn it into a visualization, a visual representation of this idea. That could be a graph, it could be something else. Okay, now give me something in terms of a metaphor that I could use.
that relate to that story. Then give me a phrase that pays. Then give me the data that supports that. So what I’m trying to do is because often we’re speaking to different types of learners and different types of audiences, I’m trying to figure out at what stage am I better, like just with a real sharp phrase that really just kind of lands. And then what point am I better actually with something visual that represents that or a metaphor or…
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (36:13)
Right.
Yeah.
James Taylor (36:29)
a key data, a key graph or something as well. So that’s why I have a lot of fun using AI just now to help take that idea, that notion, that thing, and then kind of go across. And then that kind of builds that intellectual property, like kind of database that I can go. And sometimes then that feeds on something else and I can say, actually that image, I can do something else. I know that a lot of, you know, especially like you and I, speak to lot of global audiences and
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (36:42)
Yeah.
That’s fun.
James Taylor (36:59)
One of the downsides, we have a mutual friend called Sylvie Di Giusto, and she gets booked all the time. And one of the benefits being a German speaker, a native German speaker speaking English, is often she’s much more direct in her language. Whereas as us, as native English speakers, we can get a little bit overly flowery, a bit fancy, I guess, which is a detriment sometimes when you’re speaking to people whose English isn’t their first language. So if I’m speaking in parts of the world with English, like Vietnam,
I knew it was much easier to get my message across with a very strong visual rather than like two paragraphs on a particular idea. So I do kind of what you do, like taking these notions, finding a way to capture them and then thinking how can I expand that so it’s multimodal in some way.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (37:48)
Yeah, that’s great. I love it. That’s so fun. And I love that it ties back to this history of the notebook thing, because that is very much my kind of nerdery. we’re very aligned on that.
James Taylor (37:51)
So in this.
Yeah, yeah. it’s
fascinating reading all the what the Venetians used to do. They used to have like five different notebooks and how they would keep these notebooks. And if you’ve ever read any of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, we used to write right to left. So you didn’t think anyone would copy his work. So a lot of things are particularly new. But what I find so amazing just now is how, especially with generative AI, we’re able to help that.
even richer, even fuller as a way to be able to do it. And for me, that’s the exciting thing. And I hope that we go a little bit more towards that because my biggest concern, talking about the ethics, is we end up going the same way that we went with social media, where it had so much optimism, know, when it initially started many of these social medias, and we kind of went to a slightly different place with it. There probably wasn’t, and a lot of people that were starting those businesses didn’t really
envisage. And that’s my thing with AI is like having people like you speaking events, talking about the human side and talking about what are the questions that we’re not maybe asking that we should be asking. think that I think is a really powerful thing to do. So you mentioned Notion, are there any other tools or apps that you just find indispensable for the creative work that you do?
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (39:06)
Right. Right.
Yeah, yeah, mean, the writing obviously takes place across its own set of tools, Scrivener and Notion and Evernote and so on. But I’m a big mind mapper. I love MindNode and I love the ability to sort of sketch out in MindNode, whether it’s to just get at a crude level, you know, sort of like organize, what are the component parts of this thought? Let me break them up and see them, you know, visually.
Or in some cases, it’s for really trying to catalog something that I’m not as familiar with. Like for example, if there’s an opposing viewpoint to my own, like if I see someone put out an idea that they’re advancing that I think ideologically, philosophically, like we’re not on the same page, but I need to understand what their perspective is.
in order to refute it even, you know, or if I want to have some standing, if we’re on a debate panel together or something like that, I want to be able to understand their perspective. And so I may just have to take it apart in my note, I find as a really useful tool for me to do that and just plot different aspects of it. But I use AI a lot as well. Sorry, go ahead.
James Taylor (40:30)
think
that’s great. Someone told me the other day when they write a book, they do the first draft and the second draft and then the third draft that they actually show to people and then they also do another draft. Well, what they do is they use AI to basically strong man, I guess, against the ideas in the book and read it from the perspective of someone who is the absolute opposite who is going to destroy the book and the ideas in the book. Yeah.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (40:51)
Yeah.
I did that. I did that a lot
with What Matters Next. Strawman, I think, is what you’re looking for, right? The idea like here, walking through this, there were a few places where there are people I name who have different ideas. Mark and Andresen, for example, holds different philosophies to mine, and they’re opposing philosophies in some respects. And so, yeah, I would use generative AI sometimes to say,
James Taylor (41:02)
Sure man, that’s the word.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (41:24)
pretend you’re Mark Andreessen and you’re reading what I’ve just written, how would you push back on this? And it’s so helpful. It’s so helpful. Because you can think what that might be, what the objections might be. But when the tools that have actually been trained on lots and lots of documents that understand Mark Andreessen’s point of view, know, like that come from a…
come from myriad perspectives of Marc Andreessen’s writings over the years, it’s just gonna be better. It’s just gonna be that much more able to distill what the pushback is likely to be. And so it helped me to say either I need to shore those things up or I just need to not care.
And one way or the other, it doesn’t matter which way you choose to go. It’s just very helpful to understand what those objections are likely to be. So yeah, that’s a really helpful tool in the process. But also just using generative AI, like you described a really wonderful rich process for modeling different types of learning. I also use it to distill many times across the sort of digital Zettelkasten where I might have the…
the physics clips and the economics clips and politics clips and all sorts of things all in one space and have AI kind of summarize. If you go through and look at all these notes that I’ve saved, what seemed to be some of the common themes that maybe I’m missing, that I seem to be drawn to? And it might say like, you seem to be drawn to the concept of entropy across all these different systems. Like, yeah, that’s true. I am really drawn to that. Good observation, AI. So maybe now I’m actively going out and reading about entropy.
James Taylor (42:55)
Yeah.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (42:58)
more directly so that I understand what it is my mind is instinctively drawn to. I just think that there’s such opportunities, as you say, for us to use these tools in ways that just make us better at what we’re already doing and take us leaps and bounds, you know, fields down the road so that we can just do what we’re doing and do it much more effectively.
James Taylor (43:21)
Now we’re going to have a link to your new book, but I’d also love to know, is there a book you think our listeners should be also checking out, maybe some that’s been influencing you over the course of the past few months, you just kind of been returning to, it’s kind of, maybe you reassess an area or got really interested in a particular area.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (43:40)
There’s so many. I think that in this book, the ones that, these are classics, but the ones that I taped up the tables of contents of Good to Great and Blue Ocean Strategy as two of the really most effective business strategy books of the last few decades. And I wanted to make sure that,
Conceptually, there was a flow that was happening in the book that would bring readers through that transformative process of, you know, sort of starting at a more abstract argument and working your way through to how do you implement, how do you operationalize and how are we going to take step by step through that? So for me, those were books I returned to many times. I just flipped good to great or bluish and strategy open to any page and sort of read a paragraph over it.
and thought, all right, I’m not hitting that level yet. I need to level up what I’m doing. And it’s funny, because it actually sort of, for me, I know you and I have music in common and songwriting in common, and it was similar to a process I learned from Pat Patterson, the really wonderful songwriting instructor at Berkeley University in New England. He has this idea that if you’ve written a verse and a chorus,
And then another verse in the chorus that you might look at one of those verses, maybe your second verse, because the second verse usually is weaker than the first, and you’ll kind of go like, oh shoot. He usually says something different than oh shoot, but oh shoot. Like now I’ve written a better verse and I need to go and write a better second verse. So it’s always whatever is your level that you’ve hit with one section, your other sections need to level up too.
And that’s what I find across my writing. It’s a trick I’ve learned from my songwriting that if you really hit it out of the park, it’s like, shoot, now I just made my job harder across the entire rest of the book. I have to level the rest of it up.
James Taylor (45:45)
that’s great. I mean, I think
it’s, you know, because there was an, I remember there was an Ezra Klein from NPR said something along the lines of, you know, that idea where you’re sitting at one level and then, you have great taste and your craft or your art is not at the level of your taste yet. But there’s that constant, that’s constantly what you’re trying to do. And I think it’s very hard in what you and I do in the world because
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (45:58)
Yeah.
James Taylor (46:11)
There is an artistry towards what we’re trying to do, but then there’s also very much the business side of it as well. And one of the hardest things, last night I watched a great movie again, because I was talking to someone about it called The Big Night with Stanley Tucci about a great meal. And the movie is basically really about this idea, yeah, this idea like this tension we have between creating great art, something that’s gonna live beyond us and really influence other people to doing the stuff that pays the bills, as you would say in the States.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (46:24)
yeah, yeah, yeah, And Tony Shalhoub,
Right.
Yes.
James Taylor (46:41)
And there’s that constant tension that we have to do. And I guess, know, where I see amazing companies sometimes is that they have this aspiration to create great artistry in what they’re doing with the technology just disappears. You’re not really thinking about the technology, but then they have the execution and the quality of execution and planning and strategy behind that to be able to make that happen. And that’s where it gets really exciting when you see that as well.
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (47:07)
Yeah.
James Taylor (47:09)
Where is the best place for people if they want to learn more about you, want to bring you in to come speak at their event, want to bring you in to consult, where’s the best place for to go and do that?
Kate O’Neill (she/her) (47:18)
My website is KOinsights.com. My company is KOinsights. KOinsights.com is the best place to find me, my work, the book, other books, and speaking information. I also spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, so I’m Kate O’Neill there, on Blue Sky, Kate O’Neill there, and so on, so you just look for me. There’s a lot of Kate O’Neills in the world, but if you search Kate O’Neill tech humanist on Google, you will usually find me.
James Taylor (47:46)
Well, what matters next? A leader’s guide to making human-friendly tech decisions in a world that’s moving too fast is out now. Kate O’Neill, thank you so much for coming and being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.
Hi, it’s James Taylor here, and welcome to another episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast. Now, last month, I had the incredible opportunity to deliver a keynote in Dubai for duTech, a company at the forefront of Hyperscale Data Centers, Cybersecurity, IoT, and Cloud services. As I spoke to their leaders about the future of innovation, one concept that really resonated with them was the power of mentorship—not just as a way to develop talent but as a driver of creative thinking and problem-solving in organizations.
And today, I want to share that idea with you. It’s something I call ‘The Barbell Guide to Creative Mentoring.’ And it could just change the way you think about mentorship forever.
If you’ve ever lifted a barbell in the gym, you’ll know that to create balance, you need weight on both sides. And that’s exactly how I think about mentorship. Most leaders understand the value of having a mentor—someone older, more experienced, someone who’s been where they are now and can offer guidance when they face those career-defining decisions. This mentor acts like a sounding board, helping you navigate challenges with the wisdom that only experience can provide. They’ve been in the trenches, they’ve made the mistakes, and they can help you avoid the pitfalls.
But here’s where many people stop. They focus only on having that one mentor who’s ahead of them, but they forget the other side of the barbell. And that’s where things get interesting.
Why You Need a ‘Reverse Mentor’ Confucius once said, “Respect those younger than yourself.” And I think he was onto something. If you really want to supercharge your creativity and stay ahead of the curve, you also need to have a mentee—but not just any mentee. You need someone younger or less experienced than you, someone who sees the world through fresh eyes and isn’t tied down by ‘how things have always been done.’
At first, it might feel like you’re mentoring them, passing on your knowledge, guiding them in their career. But here’s the secret: in the process, they start mentoring you. Their questions—sometimes naïve, sometimes surprising—can challenge your assumptions, expose your blind spots, and help you see opportunities you might have otherwise missed. They bring fresh perspectives, energy, and ideas that can shake up your thinking in the best possible way.
I’ve personally experienced this time and again. Some of the best insights I’ve gained in my career have come not from the seasoned experts but from those just starting out. Their curiosity and willingness to question ‘the way things are’ help me stay sharp and innovative.
The Reverse Mentor Challenge So, here’s my challenge for you:
Identify someone younger or less experienced in your industry or organization. This could be a junior colleague, a recent graduate, or even someone outside your usual network.
Set up a 30-minute conversation, but instead of you giving advice, flip it around. Ask them about their thoughts on your industry, how they see the future, what they think could be done differently.
Capture at least one insight from that conversation that shifts your perspective. And I promise you, there will be one.
Closing Thoughts So, the question I leave you with today is this: Are you balancing your barbell? Do you have a mentor who can offer guidance from experience? And do you have a mentee who challenges your thinking and helps you see the world in a new way?
Great leaders—and great creative thinkers—do both. Because when you have weight on both sides of the barbell, that’s when you find balance. And that’s when the real innovation happens.
If you take on this challenge, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a message on LinkedIn or tag me on social media with your biggest insight. Let’s build more creative pairs and drive innovation together.
Until next time, keep learning, keep creating, and keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
AI in Leadership: Marissa Afton on Awareness, Wisdom & Compassion in the Age of Machines #352
05 Aug 2025
00:32:24
AI in Leadership: Marissa Afton on Awareness, Wisdom & Compassion in the Age of Machines
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, host James Taylor interviews Marissa Afton, co-author of More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead. Marissa is a Partner at Potential Project, where she works with companies like IBM, Eli Lilly, and Amgen to create more human-centered workplaces.
Together they explore how artificial intelligence isn’t here to replace leaders—but to amplify their humanity. Drawing from real-world examples, global executive interviews, and practical frameworks from the book, they unpack how leaders can become AI-augmented by developing awareness, wisdom, and compassion.
If you’re a leader navigating the rise of AI, this episode will help you avoid dehumanizing traps and unlock a more mindful, emotionally intelligent, and ethically grounded approach to leadership.
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
“AI gives us the time to be better leaders—but we often just fill that time with more work.” – Marissa Afton
“The leader of the future is not more digital—but more human.” – James Taylor
“Awareness happens in stillness. Creativity happens in stillness.” – Marissa Afton
“AI is an exoskeleton for the mind and heart. But we still have to drive.” – Marissa Afton
“We must ask not only what AI can do for us—but what it can do to us.” – Marissa Afton
Links & Resources:
🔹 More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead – Book on Amazon
AI is an amplifier: It will magnify your leadership—for better or worse.
Awareness, wisdom, and compassion are the three human capacities that will differentiate great leaders in the AI era.
Time-freed ≠ time-used well: Leaders must reinvest AI-generated efficiency into more connection, creativity, and presence.
Digital twins and psychometric AIs can help simulate and anticipate—but the human touch is still essential.
Stillness enables awareness: The best leaders will use AI to create space, not just speed.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
My guest today is Marissa Afton, partner and head of global accounts at Potential Project, a global research and leadership development firm helping companies like IBM, Amgen, and Eli Lilly build more human workplaces. Marissa is also a co-author of the new book, More Human, How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead, a powerful and timely guide for leaders navigating the intersection of artificial intelligence and human potential. In More Human,
Marisa and our co-authors argue that AI shouldn’t dehumanize leadership, but elevate it. Drawing on interviews with over a hundred global executives and research from thousands of leaders, they show how AI can help us become more aware, wiser, and more compassionate in how we lead. Today, we’ll explore what it means to be an AI augmented leader, how to lead with both heart and algorithm, and why the future of leadership is not about being more digital, but being more human. Marisa.
Welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.
Marissa Afton (01:09)
Thank you so much, I appreciate your introduction and it’s so nice to be here.
James Taylor (01:15)
So before we get into the depth of the book itself, what first sparked your interest in human-centered leadership, this field more generally?
Marissa Afton (01:24)
Well, Potential Project, and as you mentioned in our introduction, Potential Project is a global research development and research firm, and we have been around for about 15 years now, and our mission is to create more human workplaces. Sounds simple, not necessarily easy, but the way we do it is we invite leaders to look at their own, enhancing their own leadership potential by understanding their own minds and their mindsets.
They’re how mindsets enhance behaviors and how mindsets enhance action. So we have for a very long time been very committed to looking at what are some of the research-backed outcomes of being a human-centered leaders. And now we have kind of extrapolated the research we’ve already been doing for some time into how we support leaders in an AI-enabled world.
James Taylor (02:19)
Now, probably when you were probably starting to think about this book with your co-authors, we might have been just coming out of the kind pandemic period and everyone was talking about distributed teams and virtual teams and working that way as well. And I’m guessing you were probably thinking about going down one way of the book, but with the AI, maybe things kind of changed. How did this book kind of develop and did it become a different beast as you started creating it together?
Marissa Afton (02:45)
It’s so interesting that you’re asking that question. So in fact, we were already under contract with HBR and HBR has been our partner now. This is our third book published with them. And we were under contract for a completely different book. It was going to be on selfless leadership on eagle-less leadership. Stay tuned. We’re still under contract with them for that book. But right when we were at the beginning stages of looking at that topic, they came to us and they said,
Hey, have you heard about this thing called generative AI? And this is going back to about 2022. And we thought, yes, we’ve heard about it, but why are you coming to us? And they said, well, we understand that you’re not experts in the technology.
but you are experts in leadership. And we’re really curious about starting an exploration on how AI can enhance leadership or to the point that you said in our introduction, could it dehumanize our leadership? And that became very interesting for us. So that’s how we started and to be really transparent. We weren’t all in on AI. I mean, we did have some skepticism about can AI actually elevate our leadership potential.
Can AI help us be more human-centric at work? And ⁓ we were skeptical, but now we see that actually there’s some real benefits that AI can do for us in our leadership.
James Taylor (04:14)
I saw Jeff Bezos being interviewed the other day and being asked a question on stage and someone said to him, the first question people are asking him as a leader is, what’s gonna change? And he said, and that’s an interesting question, it’s a good question, what’s gonna change with artificial intelligence we’re seeing? said, but the better question probably, the more interesting question is, what’s gonna stay the same?
Marissa Afton (04:40)
Hmm.
James Taylor (04:41)
as we go through these different changes, said, because you can build a strategy as a leader around things that stay the same. In his case, he was talking about an Amazon, in 10 years time, people are still gonna want fast delivery. No one’s gonna be saying, actually, could you just deliver it, but make it a little bit slower. So said, we can build a business around that as well. As you started talking to all these leaders about artificial intelligence, how it was reshaping both their industry, their businesses, but also themselves as leaders, what surprised you about some of those initial conversations?
Marissa Afton (04:55)
Yeah.
What surprised us at first was the disconnect that some leaders had about how much AI is here and it’s here to stay. And so we noticed that there was a bit of a gap between some leaders who were kind of all in, they were early adopters, they were really ready to leverage the benefits of AI, may or may not have seen some of the risks of AI for their leadership, which we can talk about. And then there was another huge category which…
I think is shrinking a bit over time, but it’s still there of some leaders who are like, mm, AI, do I really need it? Is it really helpful? Maybe if I just wait it out, it will be a fad that will pass. So that was one of the first curiosities we had about those who were early adopters who we actually think are augmenting their leadership potential even more by using AI and those who were kind of waiting for.
maybe the digital natives to use it for better efficiency but weren’t seeing the benefit to themselves as leaders.
James Taylor (06:09)
And for those that were probably in the middle, maybe the 80%, they weren’t the outliers, they weren’t the early adopters, but they also weren’t the laggards as well. What kind of questions were they asking of themselves, their leadership team, those people that were reporting to them, ⁓ advisors about artificial intelligence?
Marissa Afton (06:28)
Well, I think one of the questions that we have noticed that has become a real theme for us is around leaders really asking the question first and foremost about what AI can do for them. And we know AI can do many, many great things. It can make you more efficient. It can help you with tasks. It can help you with decision making. In fact, there’s some
pretty scary research out there, not our own, that ⁓ up to 70 % of leaders would prefer an AI to make the decisions for them rather than having to make their own decisions. And it’s simply because leaders are overwhelmed. They’ve got so much going on and the pressure is continuing to increase. And so while that’s a good question for leaders to ask, which is what can AI do for us?
We also have invited the question, what can AI do to us? And I think that that’s the balance that we need for everybody to embrace is it has great capabilities, but it also has some risks.
James Taylor (07:29)
And it’s a line in the book where you say, AI gives us time to be better leaders, but we often fill it with more work. Why do you think we struggle so much with that? know, I remember years ago reading books like The Four Hour Workweek, and I know a lot of people that kind of really went all in, and all they ended up doing was just working even crazier than they were probably before. So they didn’t end up working four hours. You kind of use some of the benefits of ideas in that book, but they just…
they just can use, like with, yeah, so with those leaders, if let’s say they are releasing themselves from making some of the decisions and they’re able to use AI to make better decisions or think through things in a better way, they start to save some of that time, where do think they should be diverting that time? How should they be using that additional time that they’re gonna gain from this?
Marissa Afton (07:58)
Feel the time.
Yeah, thank you, James. It’s a great question. And like to the first part of your question is like, why do we do that? And that’s kind of like an age old question. I mean, I think nature pours a vacuum. And so we see that space and we think about email was supposed to be the great time saver. How well has that worked for us? I mean, we just seem really, really prone to fill in time with activity, busyness, which doesn’t necessarily equal impact. And so what could
leaders or dare I say what should leaders be doing with that time saved and this is where that human centered approach really comes in. If you can become more efficient with the AI tool, your AI agent, well could you just add more work to your plate? Of course you can or you can have ⁓ make a different decision and
This requires some intentionality for leaders to determine what’s the best way for me to help engage my people, to help bring them along with me. And so really the invitation is if you’re using AI to help you prepare, for example, for a performance conversation, do you just cram in more time or more activities, or do you actually create some of the mental space to think about how do you want that conversation to go?
where do you want that person to ⁓ end up and land in the dialogue that you’re about to have? Let the AI do all the data collection and the sentiment analysis and use the algorithms to give you the insights on where that person is in their journey. And then you use your human head and heart to really make the space to determine what you want.
that conversation to evolve into and what you want that person to get out of that conversation as an example.
James Taylor (10:14)
I remember when I, I I use AI before I get into, if I’m doing, I’m doing a sales call, let’s say with someone. And I’ll use AI to analyze the psychometrics of the people I’m gonna do the call with in advance of the call with, it’s a board or whoever the board is. And I remember doing it early on, this was, I’ve been doing it since like 2018, I think, as I started using very early tools, IBM was starting to make tools to be able to do this. And I was just kind of playing around, it was great. And, but it felt a little bit early on.
Marissa Afton (10:24)
Excellent.
James Taylor (10:41)
like it felt a little bit too ⁓ machine, almost like machine-like. was kind of, and then it took me a little while to figure out, how do I blend that machine learning, that what I’m learning from the machine to be able to do that and bring the kind of the humanity bit back in as well. It feels like that’s where we are for a lot of people. Everyone sees the potential, the AI and you saw it first, like customer service companies rolling out chat bots and agentic AI and everyone then starting to go, whoa.
Marissa Afton (10:58)
Exactly.
James Taylor (11:10)
Whoa, whoa, whoa, we’re kind of losing sense of who we’re serving and the human part of this.
Marissa Afton (11:16)
But it’s great that you had that insight and that you had it early. And I think that not everybody has caught onto it, especially as the AI tools have become more more sophisticated. sound like every day it’s evolving. It’s constantly learning. It’s constantly growing. It’s capabilities to be more human-like and to have more of that human touch almost. So you don’t have that kind of machine robotic sense when you’re interacting with it anymore. And actually that’s a bigger risk.
Because the more human it becomes, the less human we need to be in how we are interacting or how we’re using the outputs of the AI. It create this beautifully crafted communication. And you think, ⁓ that’s it. I’m just going to cut, send.
without actually using your own discernment as a human to determine whether what it’s put out is number one, is it a hallucination? Is it like even giving you valid ⁓ kind of facts or data? And number two, does it sound authentic for you? And this is where I see leaders have gotten trapped by letting the AI help inspire a new way of communicating.
but forgetting that they have to still put their human element on top of it as you describe that you do.
James Taylor (12:34)
I’m also seeing it because so much of the training data for the AI was trained on Western ideas, actually, would narrow it even further than that, Western, often written by people that probably look like me, white guys living in Bay Area, and there was certain biases that automatically go in when you’re doing that. And I was actually having a conversation with two very different groups the other day. One was in the Middle East, where they’re launching ⁓
series of AIs, Falcon is probably the most well-known in the UAE, because they said we want AI that also reflects our culture and has more training data related to us. And then the other one I had a conversation with one of the Native American tribes that were talking about this as well, but from a slightly different perspective, because he said for them, they were worried more about things like credit, credit history, credit biases that are kind of coming in from a finance and loan lending side of things as well. So as we start,
Marissa Afton (13:11)
Yes.
Mmm.
James Taylor (13:31)
we start looking at is kind of bringing back that human side into this, that human kind of centered leadership. What structures have you seen companies start to use or leaders start to build around themselves to ensure that they bring in not just from themselves individually as a leadership, but across their whole leadership team? So I’m now kind of talking about things like governance and having ways of just checking some of this stuff.
Marissa Afton (13:53)
Mmm.
So one of our principles is always that humans need to stay in the driver’s seat, right? The human still needs to leverage the AI, not the other way around. And one of the things that we notice, as you just said, the benefit of AI is it can give you unlimited perspectives. The risk of AI is it can put you into an echo chamber. And the echo chamber is based on whoever has taught the AI whatever it is that it’s being asked to do.
And when we don’t use our own critical thinking capability, then we can get trapped in the echo chamber as opposed to, then reinforcing our own biases that we may or may not even be aware of, rather than looking at what the potential is of having that unlimited perspective taking that the AI, has unlimited.
⁓ knowledge like more knowledge than any human on earth can have but if we just allow the AI to be the expert instead of allowing ourselves to be the experts and Really checking in and making sure that humans are in the driver’s seat. That’s where it can be problematic But but the other thing I just want to say James is is there’s also a real opportunity and I love that you’re bringing up, know different perspectives from different cultures and I have a lot of leaders who
want to make sure that they are inclusive and that they are culturally appropriate. And this has to do whether you’re in a geographic, you have a team member who’s in a different geographic culture, or even if you have a team member who has a neurodiversity, for example, and they may approach perspectives or challenges in different ways.
And that’s where AI can actually help us. And you can use the AI as a little bit of a coach for you. Like if I’m, you know, the white, middle-aged, female, American, and I’m speaking to my younger digitally native colleague who’s in India, for example, and what’s a way that I can approach this individual in this scenario in a way that they’re going to be able to hear and feel heard at the same time as another way of looking.
James Taylor (16:10)
Now one of the other lines you had in the book is you talk about AI as an exoskeleton for the mind and heart. Can you unpack that a little bit? Just give us some of that in terms of practical terms for the leaders.
Marissa Afton (16:21)
Yeah, so the idea of an exoskeleton is it helps strengthen our own capabilities. And so when we’re really looking at the AI and the leader, we’re seeing the marriage of both ends. We’re seeing that the AI has some great strengths. And as I’ve also talked about some risks, ⁓ if we’re just
⁓ over indexing on the AI making all the decisions. And then the humans also have some great strengths and then some downsides as we’ve just described. And so the exoskeleton idea is that we take the best of both to enhance them together. And so one way that we suggest doing this is it’s a little bit of a dance. And maybe just to step back, James, to illustrate this.
When we started doing our research, not only did we do a lot of data analysis and assessments with leaders, we had a lot of one-on-one interviews with leaders, but because our area of expertise is in understanding the nature of the human mind, we really wanted to explore how to create this exoskeleton, this marriage of human and machine through the operating model of the mind.
To explain that, I’ll just say when we look at any model of the mind, there are basically three core things that we look at. We look at how we perceive information, how we discern information, and then how we respond to information, anything that’s coming up in our environment. And then we overlay that perceive, discern, and respond with three key qualities of human potential, which is for leaders to become more aware.
So when you’re perceiving, you’re aware of your internal environment in your own mind and the external world you’re in. And then you discern. And to discern, you need your inner wisdom, your own ability to really tap in not only to your intelligence, but every part of what you’re bringing to the table as a leader. And then the responsive capacity of the mind, we look at bringing heart. And that’s the compassionate piece. So the human brings awareness, wisdom, and compassion.
And then the exoskeleton that the AI brings is this toggling of human setting context so that the AI can give us content. And as I mentioned earlier, where leaders go wrong is if they just say, there’s the content, I’m good, I press send and I keep going. But the exoskeleton says, no, I have the content. Now I use my inner wisdom, my discernment to ask questions.
and make sure that I’m probing the content that I’ve just gotten from the AI to make sure it’s exactly what I need and where I want to go. And when I ask those questions, when I start to ask the AI, give me a different perspective or how can I think about this a different way or tell me what could go wrong, then the AI presents answers. And then the last piece around the responsiveness with the compassion.
It’s the leader’s ability to respond in the moment with heart and let the AI be algorithmic. And so it’s really this dance between context, content, questions, answers, heart and algorithm that creates the exoskeleton, the best of human and machine.
James Taylor (19:46)
So on that first one, perceive, perception, how we perceive things. So we’ve had another guest on the show, Keith Sawyer, his episode will be coming up soon. He just wrote a great book about learning to see and what those in any form of work that they do, what they can learn from those who work in the fine arts, ⁓ architecture. And he said, they interviewed over a hundred professors from the top arts degree programs in America. And he said,
Marissa Afton (19:49)
Yes.
Hmm.
James Taylor (20:16)
what many of them say, what we’re really teaching, because most of these students are coming in, they’re already actually very skilled from a craft, from their skill, but what we’re really teaching them is learning to see, how to perceive things in different ways about themselves, their own work, their identity, how it’s expressed in their work, but also how others perceive them and what they’re doing as well. So was there any, as you were talking to all these leaders, was there any examples that can have stayed with you on that?
Marissa Afton (20:30)
Hmm.
Nice.
James Taylor (20:45)
perceived bit, that perception bit and how people were using AI to kind of augment them in that way as leaders to help with the perception and the perceived part.
Marissa Afton (20:54)
Well, I think one of the things that I’ve seen many leaders embracing is AI as a personal coach. And you can do so many creative things. And I love that example that you just gave of being able to like see things from the inside and see things from the outside. And we all have blind spots. But what you can do is you can create and again, you know, within protected
⁓ systems and assuming that different leaders may have their own ⁓ tools for AI that have already been ⁓ put into some data security ⁓ system. But you can feed the AI information about you as an example and the type of leader you want to be. And you can give it
so many different data points and you can teach the AI about the future you, the legacy you want to lead, the values you have as a leader. You can also give it some metrics about say your personality type, if that would be of interest and you’re creating a profile of the idealized you. And that coach can then be a sparring partner for you as the individual and you can go in and you can
invite it to give you ideas about how to move through different types of challenges to build your own awareness of what may be unseen in terms of the assumptions you might be making or decisions you might be taking that may not fit for the type of leader you want to be.
James Taylor (22:34)
That, as you’re saying that, it’s reminding me of two things. One is Marshall Goldsmith, the coach, business coach, where he has someone call him, I think what his coach calls him every day at a certain time of day with the same three questions. So it’s like a prompt. So he’s basically has to reflect on the day. And in Buddhism, in Tibetan Buddhism, they have a thing, I’ve forgotten the name of it, it essentially means five times a day. Where five times a day you have to pause, stop,
Marissa Afton (22:51)
Yeah.
Yes.
James Taylor (23:03)
and just be present and think about what am I doing just now? How is this? What is it? And so I guess the AI can almost, as you’re saying, it can fulfill part of that function, like helping that leader pause five times a day, for example, very briefly and just say, what is this doing? How does this reflect the leader that you want to become and the potential that you have? And also the objectives that you have for yourself and your organization.
Marissa Afton (23:29)
I love that you’re bringing in that pause as well because that’s something that, and again, the awareness only comes when we give ourselves the space to pause. Usually awareness doesn’t happen when we’re just moving from meeting to meeting or activity to activity and our brain is simply full. Awareness happens in moments of stillness. And you you talk about creativity, creativity also happens in moments of stillness. You know, we have these great
creative breakthroughs when we’re in the shower or on a run or whatever it is. And so for leaders to be able to embrace that pause and be really purposeful and intentional and allow the AI to help you with that is another great tactic to be able to enhance our awareness and our perceptions.
James Taylor (24:15)
Now, as we’re get moving to this more, you talk about as the AI augmented leader. So let’s imagine, let’s contrast two leaders. Let’s contrast a non-AI augmented leader and an AI augmented leader. How would they perform something differently? How would they react to a situation in their organization as a leader slightly different?
Marissa Afton (24:39)
Well, I think you just use one of the key words right there and that’s react. So the non-AI augmented leader, first of all, is probably just running on a lot of habitual behaviors, ⁓ potentially also habitual mindsets. So they may be a little bit rigid on how they approach a particular challenge, a particular situation, which may not be a way to ⁓ creatively think through and problem solve.
⁓ they’re probably much more in reactivity mode. They’re probably feeling like they are putting out fires all day. They’re just ⁓ moving from activity to activity and they may get to the end of the day and simply feel like I’ve been active, I’m tired, but what have I actually gotten done? Have I been able to move the needle on what my big goals are and what I’m trying to achieve?
And I will say, I hope that there are not a lot of leaders who are in that extreme of that category, but leaders who are, are probably not feeling great about themselves or their impact. Where we want to be able to move to with AI augmentation is to be more thoughtful and more responsive to the day-to-day pivots and really look at how we’re leveraging AI, yes, to make us more efficient, but also to make us more.
thoughtful, to make us more compassionate, to be able to leverage AI for preparing for big decisions, for even having brainstorming sessions with our team, to be able to create more team cohesion, even more of a sense of connection and belonging, right? The risk is we’re all going to ask all of our critical questions to AI. We’re not going to talk to other humans anymore because we don’t want to admit or be embarrassed by our silly questions.
AI never judges us for having the silly questions, but actually the opportunity is, yes, of course, leverage AI for those questions, but leverage the human connection as well. So using AI to help us brainstorm how to be more connected with one another, to be more creative with one another. I have used ⁓ AI in so many group brainstorming sessions where each
member of the team is using their own AI, which of course is going to give you different responses, even with the same prompts, depending on how we use it. And that helps us generate a lot of collective energy and a lot of collective creative problem solving rather than us each individually working in silos with our AI agents.
James Taylor (27:22)
I saw a CEO the other day she was talking about, I forgot the name of the CEO in the company, but I think she was one of the big US banks, if I remember right. And she said what she’s done is she’s created digital twins of each of her board members. And ⁓ so she said as she’s prepping for her board meetings or board conversations, she’s essentially doing the pitch, doing the presentation for the digital twins first. And she said what’s been interesting, said they will
Marissa Afton (27:30)
Mm.
Yes.
James Taylor (27:52)
it knows those individuals quite well, the digital twins, it will then know the kind of questions that person is likely to ask. And that’s interesting, but she said what’s even more interesting is that because you’re able to recognize those questions, you automatically then build it into your presentation. So the questions then the humans in the room actually are asking end up being like five levels higher in terms of the quality of the questions than you would normally have had, because you’ve already kind of dealt with lot of the simpler questions that they would have had.
Marissa Afton (28:13)
Yes.
I love that and it’s such a great example and we’ve done something similar in potential project within our own leadership team and again, you know that leader hopefully I assume has asked the permissions of her people to create those digital twins just you know, that’s a good best practice. But you know, why wouldn’t you get that kind of buy-in for exactly the type of impact that you just said? Isn’t it great to have a leader and have a group where you can level up, raise your gaze on the type of questions
that you asked, you can get there that much quicker because all of the basic questions have already been vetted, if you will, by your AI agents. Love it. What a great example.
James Taylor (28:59)
So as we start to finish up here, if someone’s listening to this and they’re leading a team and they want to become more human, basically, they’re deploying AI, they’re implementing AI, they have all these things, but they’re getting a sense, it’s kind of getting away from them a little bit and they’re kind of losing a sense of the humanity in the organization. What is one thing that you could tell them to do, to think, to question as they’re going through this?
Marissa Afton (29:28)
So one of the things that we have noticed is a lot of companies that have decided to embrace AI, they put a lot of their focus on the tool and the technology, and they have their whole technology team making sure that everybody has access and that’s great and good. But what some have lost focus on is that not only do we have to train in using the tool, we have to train the human as well.
And so really making sure that there’s a balance for leaders and teams to not only train on the technology, but to train on the human aspect is one of the ways that we can help people leverage it more effectively. ⁓ So James, I don’t know if that answers the question.
James Taylor (30:15)
No, I mean,
I think one of the things you mentioned in the book, the analogy used in the book is AI is like a Ferrari, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to drive, but if you have that really powerful machine there, and if you don’t know the basics of how to drive, you can get into some trouble pretty quickly in that situation.
Marissa Afton (30:20)
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And remembering that AI, unlike a passive tool, right? So you think about a hammer, for example, a hammer doesn’t become dangerous if nobody’s touching it. It only becomes dangerous once you’re picking it up. But the AI is constantly active. It’s in the background. It’s listening. It’s learning. It’s an active agent. And so that’s why, again, humans have to be in the driver’s seat. We have to be the ones who learn how to best leverage it before it’s
starts to leverage us. So yes, the Ferrari is another great example.
James Taylor (31:11)
So Marissa, this book, More Human, How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead is out now. We’re have links here to the book as well. But if you wanna learn more about the work you’re doing yourself and ⁓ the Penetral Project, where’s the best place for them to go and do that?
Marissa Afton (31:26)
people are welcome to come directly to our website, which is potentialprojectalloneword.com. We also share a lot of our insights on our website, but on our LinkedIn channel. so we frequently will, the research is constant, it’s ongoing, even though we have the book. The book was published in March, 2025, based on data that was probably already several months old by then, and it’s continuing to evolve. So go to our LinkedIn channel.
potential project and you can reach out to me individually on LinkedIn as well.
James Taylor (32:02)
Marissa Afton, thank you for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.
The Barbell Guide to Mentorship — A Game-Changing Strategy for Creative Leaders & Innovators #351
28 Mar 2025
00:05:34
The Barbell Guide to Mentorship — A Game-Changing Strategy for Creative Leaders & Innovators #351
In this episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, global keynote speaker and creativity expert James Taylor shares a powerful new framework for mentoring in the modern workplace.
Titled “The Barbell Guide to Creative Mentoring,” James explores how true innovation doesn’t just come from learning from those ahead of us—but also from those just starting out. Drawing inspiration from a recent keynote he delivered in Dubai to tech leaders at duTech, he unpacks how combining traditional mentors with reverse mentors can unlock fresh thinking, challenge assumptions, and supercharge creative problem-solving.
Whether you’re a leader, innovator, or someone passionate about personal growth, this episode offers a game-changing approach to building mentorship relationships that spark real transformation.
Tune in now and ask yourself: Are you balancing your barbell?
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
1. “Most people look for mentors ahead of them—but the real creative breakthroughs often come from those just starting out.”
2. “To find balance in mentoring, you need weight on both sides of the barbell: one from experience, and one from fresh perspective.”
3. “Reverse mentoring isn’t about giving—it’s about receiving insights that challenge your assumptions and spark innovation.”
4. “Their questions may seem naïve—but sometimes it’s the simplest question that unlocks the biggest shift in your thinking.”
5. “If you want to future-proof your creativity, listen to someone who hasn’t been conditioned by how things have always been done.”
Mentorship is a two-way street. True creative growth comes from having both a traditional mentor and a reverse mentor—someone younger or less experienced who brings a fresh lens to your thinking.
Reverse mentoring sparks innovation. Younger voices challenge your assumptions, expose blind spots, and help you stay ahead of change by offering unfiltered, unconventional ideas.
Creative insights can come from anywhere. Some of the most valuable lessons don’t come from the top, but from those just entering the game—people who see possibilities without limitations.
Leadership is about balance. Great leaders develop talent below them while staying open to being challenged by those same individuals. That’s where growth happens.
Action fuels transformation. James challenges listeners to set up a 30-minute reverse mentoring session—and to capture one insight that shifts their perspective. That small step can lead to big creative leaps.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
Hi, it’s James Taylor here, and welcome to another episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast. Now, last month, I had the incredible opportunity to deliver a keynote in Dubai for duTech, a company at the forefront of Hyperscale Data Centers, Cybersecurity, IoT, and Cloud services. As I spoke to their leaders about the future of innovation, one concept that really resonated with them was the power of mentorship—not just as a way to develop talent but as a driver of creative thinking and problem-solving in organizations.
And today, I want to share that idea with you. It’s something I call ‘The Barbell Guide to Creative Mentoring.’ And it could just change the way you think about mentorship forever.
If you’ve ever lifted a barbell in the gym, you’ll know that to create balance, you need weight on both sides. And that’s exactly how I think about mentorship. Most leaders understand the value of having a mentor—someone older, more experienced, someone who’s been where they are now and can offer guidance when they face those career-defining decisions. This mentor acts like a sounding board, helping you navigate challenges with the wisdom that only experience can provide. They’ve been in the trenches, they’ve made the mistakes, and they can help you avoid the pitfalls.
But here’s where many people stop. They focus only on having that one mentor who’s ahead of them, but they forget the other side of the barbell. And that’s where things get interesting.
Why You Need a ‘Reverse Mentor’ Confucius once said, “Respect those younger than yourself.” And I think he was onto something. If you really want to supercharge your creativity and stay ahead of the curve, you also need to have a mentee—but not just any mentee. You need someone younger or less experienced than you, someone who sees the world through fresh eyes and isn’t tied down by ‘how things have always been done.’
At first, it might feel like you’re mentoring them, passing on your knowledge, guiding them in their career. But here’s the secret: in the process, they start mentoring you. Their questions—sometimes naïve, sometimes surprising—can challenge your assumptions, expose your blind spots, and help you see opportunities you might have otherwise missed. They bring fresh perspectives, energy, and ideas that can shake up your thinking in the best possible way.
I’ve personally experienced this time and again. Some of the best insights I’ve gained in my career have come not from the seasoned experts but from those just starting out. Their curiosity and willingness to question ‘the way things are’ help me stay sharp and innovative.
The Reverse Mentor Challenge So, here’s my challenge for you:
Identify someone younger or less experienced in your industry or organization. This could be a junior colleague, a recent graduate, or even someone outside your usual network.
Set up a 30-minute conversation, but instead of you giving advice, flip it around. Ask them about their thoughts on your industry, how they see the future, what they think could be done differently.
Capture at least one insight from that conversation that shifts your perspective. And I promise you, there will be one.
Closing Thoughts So, the question I leave you with today is this: Are you balancing your barbell? Do you have a mentor who can offer guidance from experience? And do you have a mentee who challenges your thinking and helps you see the world in a new way?
Great leaders—and great creative thinkers—do both. Because when you have weight on both sides of the barbell, that’s when you find balance. And that’s when the real innovation happens.
If you take on this challenge, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a message on LinkedIn or tag me on social media with your biggest insight. Let’s build more creative pairs and drive innovation together.
Until next time, keep learning, keep creating, and keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
Is AI Headed for a Catastrophic “Chernobyl Moment”?
In this video, we explore one of the most urgent questions of our time: Will AI have its own catastrophic failure—an event so disruptive that it reshapes society overnight?
Drawing parallels between the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, this video breaks down the warning signs of unchecked AI development, the potential for large-scale failures, and the critical steps needed to prevent disaster.
From autonomous warfare and financial meltdowns to deepfake-driven misinformation, we’ll dive into the risks—and more importantly, the solutions—that can help us build AI responsibly.
🚀 Will AI lead to disaster, or can we harness its power for good? Watch now, engage in the conversation, and let’s shape the future of AI together.
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
1️⃣ “Will AI have its own Chernobyl moment? A single flaw, an unchecked system—one mistake that changes everything.”
2️⃣ “History has shown us: when technology evolves faster than our ability to control it, disaster isn’t just possible… it’s inevitable.”
3️⃣ “AI doesn’t ask ‘should we?’ It only asks ‘can we?’ And that’s where the real danger lies.”
AI’s “Chernobyl Moment” is a Real Risk – Just like Chernobyl was a failure of human oversight, AI’s rapid advancement without proper regulation could lead to catastrophic consequences.
AI is Already Showing Warning Signs – From job displacement and misinformation to financial crashes and autonomous weapons, AI is proving that unchecked growth comes with serious risks.
AI Lacks Ethics—Humans Must Provide Them – AI doesn’t distinguish between right and wrong; it only follows its programming. Ethical guidelines and human oversight are crucial to ensuring it benefits society.
The Future of AI is Not Just About Risk, But Opportunity – AI is already transforming healthcare, sustainability, and creativity. If we guide its development responsibly, it can be one of the greatest tools for progress.
Regulation, Transparency, and Human Control Are Non-Negotiable – To prevent AI’s “Chernobyl moment,” we need clear regulations, ethical guardrails, and human decision-making at critical points. The time to act is now.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
A single mistake at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant triggered an explosion that changed the world.
Today, we’re on the brink of another technological revolution—Artificial Intelligence. AI is already transforming industries, solving complex problems, and unlocking human potential like never before.
But here’s the question no one wants to ask:
🚨 Will AI have its own Chernobyl moment? 🚨
Will a single error, an unforeseen flaw, or an unchecked system cause a disaster so big that it reshapes society overnight?
Because history has shown us—when technology evolves faster than our ability to control it, disaster isn’t just possible… it’s inevitable.
In December 2021 I stood in the ghost town of Pripyat, Ukraine. Just the day before, I had delivered a keynote in Kyiv on AI and innovation. But there, walking through abandoned hospitals and empty apartments, I was reminded of a simple truth:
Chernobyl wasn’t just a failure of technology—it was a failure of human oversight, flawed design, and blind optimism.
And right now, we’re making the same mistakes with AI.
AI is advancing at an insane speed. Here’s what’s already happening:
⚠️ AI could replace 300 million jobs – Goldman Sachs. ⚠️ AI misinformation spreads 10X faster than real news – MIT. ⚠️ AI-driven trading has already caused billion-dollar crashes – One faulty algorithm wiped out $440 million in 45 minutes.
And these are just the warning shots.
Let’s talk worst-case scenarios. What does an AI catastrophe actually look like?
💥 Autonomous Warfare – AI drones making their own kill decisions. No human oversight. No off switch. 💥 Financial Meltdown – AI-powered trading triggers a stock market crash within minutes, outpacing human intervention. 💥 Total Information Collapse – Deepfake videos and AI-generated propaganda make it impossible to tell fact from fiction.
And the scariest part? AI doesn’t have ethics. It doesn’t ask “should we?” It only asks “can we?”
And yet… I am more excited about AI than ever before.
Because AI isn’t just about risk—it’s about opportunity.
🚀 AI is already accelerating medical breakthroughs, diagnosing diseases faster than human doctors. 🚀 AI is transforming sustainability, helping us tackle climate change with smarter energy solutions. 🚀 AI is enhancing human creativity, composing music, writing scripts, and unlocking new ways of thinking.
AI has the potential to make the world a better, brighter place—but only if we build it responsibly.
So, what do we do to keep AI from going off the rails?
✅ We need transparency. No more black-box AI making decisions we don’t understand. ✅ We need ethical guardrails. Just like nuclear treaties, we need AI regulations that prevent dangerous developments. ✅ We need human oversight. AI should never be in full control of life-and-death decisions.
Standing in Chernobyl, I saw firsthand what happens when we ignore the risks of powerful technology.
But AI doesn’t have to have its Chernobyl moment.
If we act now—if we stay curious, creative, and critical—AI can become the greatest tool for human progress we’ve ever created.
🚀 What do you think? Will AI lead to disaster, or will we use it to build a better future? Drop a comment below, let’s talk. And if this video made you think, hit like and subscribe—because the AI conversation is just getting started.
Welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast, the show dedicated to unlocking your creative potential with insights on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence. Hosted by internationally renowned keynote speaker James Taylor, this episode reveals “The 3 Secrets of a Hit Keynote Speech”—and why some speakers fail to make an impact.
Drawing inspiration from legendary music producer David Foster’s formula for creating a hit song, James shares how the same three essential elements—the voice, the performance, and the content—are what transform an ordinary keynote into an extraordinary experience.
Whether you’re a seasoned speaker or preparing for your very first big stage, this episode is packed with actionable strategies to help you stand out, engage your audience, and deliver a message that truly lasts.
So, sit back, take notes, and let’s dive in!
🎙️ Top 5 Soundbites:
1️⃣ “A hit keynote, just like a hit song, needs three things: the voice, the performance, and the content.”
2️⃣ “If you sound like everyone else, your speech is forgettable. Your unique point of view is your superpower.”
3️⃣ “The best speakers don’t just fill time on stage—they create an experience that transforms people.”
4️⃣ “Brilliant content without great delivery is like a hit song sung off-key—no one sticks around to listen.”
5️⃣ “Inspire, educate, and make it actionable. That’s the formula for a keynote that actually makes a difference.”
Your Unique Voice Sets You Apart: A memorable keynote starts with a clear, distinctive point of view. Your perspective—how you see the world—is what makes your message stand out.
Performance is Just as Important as Content: Even the best ideas will fall flat without engaging delivery. Energy, storytelling, and emotional connection are critical to keeping your audience captivated.
Content Must Be Relevant, Memorable, and Actionable: Inspire your audience, yes—but also give them practical tools and insights they can apply immediately. Substance matters as much as style.
The Best Keynotes Create Transformation, Not Just Inspiration: A great speech doesn’t just entertain—it changes the way people think, feel, and act long after they leave the room.
Mastering All Three Elements is the Goal To deliver a hit keynote, you need the complete package: a unique voice, powerful performance, and meaningful content. Nail all three, and you don’t just give a speech—you create an experience.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
00:00 – Introduction: Why some keynote speakers fail (and how to fix it) 00:15 – The David Foster Formula: What hit songs and hit keynotes have in common 00:40 – Secret 1: The Voice – Your unique point of view 01:20 – Secret 2: The Performance – How you deliver matters 02:10 – Secret 3: The Content – Creating a message that sticks 03:00 – Final Thought: Do you have all three? 03:20 – Call to Action: What’s your biggest challenge?
TRANSCRIPT
🎬 The 3 Secrets of a Hit Keynote Speech
What makes a great keynote speech?
Well, legendary composer David Foster once said that every hit song needs three things: 🎤 The singer 🎭 The performance 📜 The song itself
And guess what? A hit keynote speech needs the exact same formula.
But most speakers get it wrong—and that’s why their speeches fail.
Let me explain.
🎤 1. The Voice – Your Unique Point of View
Great singers have recognizable voices—think Adele, Freddie Mercury, or Sinatra.
Great keynote speakers? Same thing.
Your voice isn’t just how you sound—it’s your perspective. Your point of view. The way you see the world.
If you sound like everyone else, your speech is forgettable.
👉 What’s YOUR unique take? That’s what makes you stand out.
🎭 2. The Performance – How You Deliver It
Ever heard someone butcher a great song?
Same with keynotes. You can have brilliant content, but if your delivery is flat, robotic, or boring, no one will care.
✅ Energy matters. ✅ Storytelling matters. ✅ Emotional connection matters.
The best speakers command the stage—not with volume, but with presence.
Think about how you perform your message, not just what you say.
📖 3. The Content – The Message That Sticks
Some speakers are all performance, no substance.
They get laughs, they engage the room—but the audience leaves with nothing.
Great keynote speeches don’t just inspire—they transform.
Your content needs to be: ✔ Relevant (Does it solve a problem?) ✔ Memorable (Will they remember it next week?) ✔ Actionable (Can they use it today?)
The best speeches do BOTH: 🔥 They excite AND educate.
🚀 Final Thought: Do You Have All Three?
So, before your next speech, ask yourself:
✔ Do I have a unique voice? ✔ Am I delivering with impact? ✔ Is my content powerful and actionable?
Because when you nail all three, you don’t just give a speech— 👉 You create an experience that transforms people.
🎯 Now tell me in the comments: Which of these three is YOUR biggest challenge? 👇
💡 Like, share, and subscribe for more on creativity, innovation, and the business of speaking!
Why Your Ideas Aren’t Ready (Yet) – The Secret Process of Idea Development – #348
21 Feb 2025
00:06:33
Why Your Ideas Aren’t Ready (Yet) – The Secret Process of Idea Development #348
In this episode of SuperCreativity, James Taylor takes you behind the scenes of idea development—how a simple spark evolves into a fully formed concept ready for the world. He reveals the five levels of an idea, from the sacred space of initial inspiration to the big stage where it impacts audiences. If you’ve ever wondered why some ideas thrive while others fade, this framework will help you refine and stress-test your creative thinking.
Listen in as James shares personal insights, real-life examples, and actionable steps to help you nurture your best ideas before you share them with the world.
🎙️ Soundbites from This Episode
1️⃣ “Every great idea starts in the quiet.”
2️⃣ “Not every idea needs to be shared, but the best ones demand to be tested.”
3️⃣ “The best way to innovate is sometimes to stop doing certain things.”
4️⃣ “Great ideas don’t arrive fully formed. They evolve through conversation.”
5️⃣ “Too many people rush to share ideas before they’re ready.”
Ideas Need Time to Develop: Great ideas don’t arrive fully formed. They go through multiple levels of refinement—from private reflection to public experimentation—before they’re ready for a big stage.
The Best Ideas Start in Stillness: Before brainstorming or sharing, ideas emerge in quiet moments—during a walk, on a flight, or in early morning reflection. This "sacred space" is where creativity begins.
Testing an Idea in Safe Spaces Strengthens I: Before taking an idea public, discuss it with trusted people. Conversations with a mentor, a partner, or a mastermind group help refine and sharpen the concept.
Small-Scale Testing is Crucial Before Going Big: Social settings, blog posts, or short videos help gauge audience reactions and refine an idea. Feedback at this stage helps avoid launching underdeveloped concepts.
Ideas Need to Be Stress-Tested Before the Big Stage: The best keynote speeches, business pitches, or published articles come from ideas that have been shaped, tested, and refined over time—not rushed to completion.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
05:30 – Testing in private: Level 4 (Inner Circle)
08:45 – The social test: Level 3 (Dinner Party Effect)
12:20 – Public experimentation: Level 2 (Short-form content)
15:10 – The big stage: Level 1 (Keynote, book, or full launch)
18:00 – Why most ideas fail: Sharing them too early
20:30 – How to apply this framework to your own ideas
22:00 – Closing thoughts and next steps
TRANSCRIPT
The Five Levels of an Idea: From Spark to Stage
🎙 INTRO “Welcome to the show! I’m James Taylor, keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence, and in today’s episode, I want to take you behind the scenes of how an idea develops—from that first flicker of inspiration to the moment it’s ready for the world. Last week I was speaking in Manila in the Philippines at a Leadership Summit for SM Supermalls, the owners and operators of 95 shopping malls in the Philippines and China. In that speech I shared a story and concept to help the leaders in the room implement Artificial Intelligence in the organisation. In today’s episode I’d like to take you through the process of how that story was created. From spark to stage.
Because here’s the thing… ideas don’t arrive fully formed. They go through layers, stages—what I like to call ‘The Five Levels of an Idea.’ And if you want to be a more effective creator, innovator, or leader, understanding these levels will help you shape your best ideas before sharing them with the world.”
Level 5: The Sacred Space – Where Ideas Begin
“Every great idea starts in the quiet. Before the brainstorming sessions, before the conversations, before the keynote stage, there’s a moment of stillness where an idea first appears.
I like to think of this as Level 5—the sacred space.
For me, it often happens while I’m on a flight, going for a walk, or in the early hours of the morning when my mind is clear. It’s that deep, personal moment where something clicks, and I think, ‘Hmm, there’s something here.’
Now, most ideas never make it past this stage. And that’s okay! Not every idea needs to be shared. But the ones that do? They start their journey here, below the choppy waves of daily distractions.”
Level 4: Testing the Waters – Conversations in Safe Spaces
“Once an idea has sat with me for a while, I take it to Level 4—the inner circle.
This is where I share it with just one or two people I trust—maybe my partner, a close friend, or a mentor. It’s a safe space where I can explore the idea without judgment, refine my thinking, and start shaping it into something more tangible.
For example, a few months ago, I had this spark of an idea around exnovation vs. innovation—the idea that sometimes, the best way to innovate is to actively stop doing certain things. It was just a passing thought at first, but I mentioned it to my wife, and we talked about it over coffee. She asked me some great questions, which helped me see angles I hadn’t considered before.”
Level 3: Social Testing – The Dinner Party Effect
“Once an idea has been refined in private conversations, it’s ready for Level 3—the social test.
This is where I bring it up in a casual setting, like a dinner party, a mastermind group, or a conversation with fellow speakers and creatives. It’s a way of testing the waters with a slightly broader audience.
A few weeks after first thinking about exnovation, I mentioned it over dinner with friends. Some of them immediately latched onto it, adding their own thoughts and stories, while others weren’t as convinced. And that’s exactly what I wanted! Their reactions helped me sharpen the concept, making it clearer and more compelling.”
Level 2: Public Experimentation – Videos, Posts, and Short-Form Content
“By this stage, the idea has been shaped and refined through different conversations, and I’m ready to take it to Level 2—the public experiment.
This is where I test the idea in a more structured way—maybe in a short video, a blog post, or a social media post.
In this case, I filmed a quick video about exnovation while I was on the road. Nothing fancy, just a way to put the idea out there and see how it resonated. And sure enough, the comments and feedback helped me refine it even further.”
Level 1: The Big Stage – Ready for the World
“Finally, an idea reaches Level 1—the stage.
By now, the idea has been stress-tested, refined, and packaged into something strong enough to stand on its own. This is where it becomes a full keynote story, a published article, or part of a book.
Last week, I was speaking in Manila, Philippines, and I included the exnovation concept in my keynote. It had evolved from a vague thought into a fully developed two-minute story that resonated with the audience. It got laughs, nods of recognition, and follow-up questions afterward—all signs that the idea had landed.”
Why This Process Matters
“Now, why does this matter?
Because too often, people rush to share their ideas at Level 1 before they’ve gone through the deeper levels of refinement. They post half-baked thoughts online, pitch untested concepts in meetings, or launch ideas before they’re ready.
Great ideas need time to develop. They need to go through these levels to become their best versions.
So, next time you have an idea, ask yourself:
Is it still in Level 5, the sacred space? If so, give it time.
Who can I share it with at Level 4 to refine it?
How can I test it socially at Level 3?
Can I experiment with it at Level 2 before taking it to the world?
By following these steps, you’ll not only develop stronger ideas but also increase your chances of real impact when you finally bring them to life.”
🎙 OUTRO “That’s it for today’s episode. If you found this useful, do me a favor—share it with someone who’s working on an idea right now. And if you want more insights on creativity, innovation, and AI, make sure to subscribe and check out my latest speaking topics at jamestaylor.me.
DeepSeek AI And Why Too Much Freedom Kills Creativity – #347
07 Feb 2025
00:07:04
DeepSeek AI And Why Too Much Freedom Kills Creativity #347
In this solo episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast, James Taylor explores a counterintuitive truth: creativity thrives on constraints. While we often associate innovation with limitless freedom, history, psychology, and business show that well-defined limitations often lead to the most groundbreaking ideas.
From Haiku poetry and jazz improvisation to AI advancements and low-cost prosthetics, James dives into how scarcity fuels innovation. He also shares practical ways to introduce constraints into your work to boost creativity, improve focus, and overcome choice paralysis.
🎙️ Soundbites from This Episode
“Constraints don’t limit creativity—they ignite it. The best ideas come when we have to think smarter, not bigger.”
“Haiku poetry, jazz improvisation, and AI innovation all prove one thing—creativity thrives within boundaries.”
“When you remove options, you unlock solutions. Constraints force focus, drive innovation, and fuel creativity.”
“Too much freedom leads to paralysis. The secret to breakthrough ideas? Set limits and watch creativity soar!”
“Want to spark innovation? Don’t ask what you can add—ask what you can remove. Less is more in creativity.”
✔ Constraints Fuel Creativity – Having too many choices can stifle innovation, while limitations force focus and problem-solving.
✔ Real-World Examples – From Haiku poetry to MIT’s low-cost prosthetics and DeepSeek AI’s efficiency breakthroughs.
✔ Choice Paralysis Is Real – Too much freedom can lead to overthinking; constraints help you move forward.
✔ Practical Creative Constraints – The One Take Rule, Limiting Your Tools, Setting Hard Deadlines, and Reducing Resources to supercharge creativity.
✔ Less Is More – Instead of asking what can I add?, ask what can I remove?
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
⏱ 02:15 – Haiku, jazz, and literature: How artists use constraints
⏱ 06:40 – Business & tech: AI innovation and low-cost prosthetics
⏱ 11:00 – Psychology: Why the brain works better with limitations
⏱ 14:20 – Four ways to apply creative constraints in your work
⏱ 19:00 – Why removing options makes you more creative
TRANSCRIPT
DeepSeek AI, Japanese Haiku and The Power of Creative Constraints
Hello, and welcome to this week’s solo episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast. Today, we’re exploring something that might sound counterintuitive but is backed by history, psychology, and even artificial intelligence: how constraints can actually fuel innovation and propel us to greater creative breakthroughs.
Now, you might be thinking, “James, isn’t creativity about freedom? The ability to explore new ideas without limits?” Well, yes and no. While having complete freedom can be exciting, the reality is that too many choices can actually stifle creativity. In contrast, well-defined constraints—whether in art, literature, technology, or business—often lead to the most innovative solutions.
Creativity Thrives in Constraints
Let’s start with something simple: Haiku poetry. If you’ve ever written one, you know that Haiku follows a strict 5-7-5 syllable pattern. You can’t just write anything; you’re forced to be concise, precise, and meaningful within those limits. This constraint doesn’t hinder creativity—it enhances it. It pushes poets to be more deliberate with their words, leading to some of the most profound and beautiful pieces of writing.
This isn’t just true in poetry. In literature, the Oulipo movement was founded on the idea that strict rules—like writing an entire novel without using a particular letter—could drive greater creativity. And in music, jazz musicians impose structures on themselves—such as chord progressions or time signatures—that allow for greater improvisation within a defined space.
Artificial Constraints in Business and Technology
Now, let’s take this idea and apply it to the world of business and innovation. Some of the biggest technological breakthroughs have come not in spite of constraints but because of them.
Take DeepSeek AI—China’s answer to Western AI models like GPT-4. Because of restrictions on the types of chips they could access and the energy they could consume, they had to think differently. Instead of following the same path as OpenAI or Google DeepMind, they optimized their AI models for efficiency, making them more lightweight and less power-hungry. As a result, they managed to leapfrog some Western competitors by designing an AI model that is not just powerful but also highly efficient.
This principle applies across industries. Consider MIT’s work on low-cost prosthetics for people in developing countries. Instead of using expensive materials and complex designs, they had to create something functional, durable, and affordable. The constraint forced them to innovate smarter, not bigger. The result? A groundbreaking prosthetic limb that costs a fraction of traditional models.
Psychology: Why Constraints Work
So why do constraints work so well for creativity? The answer lies in how our brains operate.
Constraints force focus. If you’re given a completely open-ended problem, your mind can get overwhelmed with possibilities. But if you introduce limitations—such as a deadline, a budget, or a word count—you’re forced to make decisions faster and more effectively.
They encourage problem-solving. When we’re restricted, our brains naturally search for workarounds. It’s why people come up with their most creative solutions when they have limited time or resources.
They prevent “choice paralysis.” Have you ever stared at a blank page, unsure of where to start? Sometimes, too much freedom can be crippling. But when you set a few rules—such as writing in bullet points or using a specific framework—it becomes easier to get started.
Applying Constraints to Your Own Creativity
So how can you use creative constraints to fuel your own work?
Try the “One-Take” Rule. If you’re writing, speaking, or recording content, challenge yourself to do it in one take. No edits, no re-dos. You’ll be amazed at how much clarity and energy this creates.
Limit Your Tools. Designers often do their best work when they restrict themselves to a single color palette. Writers sometimes force themselves to use only short sentences. What’s one small constraint you can introduce to challenge yourself?
Set a Hard Deadline. Some of the best ideas come at the last minute—not because they’re rushed, but because constraints force you to focus.
Reduce Your Resources. Give yourself fewer tools, fewer options, and watch how your brain adapts.
Final Thoughts
The next time you feel stuck, don’t ask yourself, “What can I add?” Instead, ask, “What can I remove?” Constraints don’t limit us—they liberate us. They push us to do more with less, to think smarter, and to create something truly unique.
If this idea resonates with you, I’d love to hear how you’ve used constraints to boost your own creativity. Drop me a message on LinkedIn or share your thoughts in the comments.
Until next time, stay creative—and embrace the constraints!
Elon Musk’s Bold New Strategy: Why Exnovation (Not Innovation) Is the Future of Business – #346
31 Jan 2025
00:05:42
Elon Musk’s Bold New Strategy: Why Exnovation (Not Innovation) Is the Future of Business - #346
In this episode of the Super Creativity Podcast, James Taylor explores exnovation—the strategic elimination of outdated practices to enhance efficiency and agility. While businesses focus on innovation, many overlook the need to phase out inefficient systems that hinder progress.
Using examples from Ford, GE, and the retail industry, Taylor highlights how leading companies are cutting costs, reducing risks, and sharpening their focus through exnovation. He also examines Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its implications for streamlining processes.
Tune in to learn how eliminating the old can pave the way for breakthrough success.
🎙️ Soundbites from This Episode
“Innovation is exciting, but exnovation is essential. Let go of what no longer serves you to make room for real progress.”
“The best way forward isn’t always to add—it’s to subtract. Clear the clutter, streamline, and thrive.”
“Businesses that refuse to exnovate get stuck in the past. Those that do, create the future.”
Exnovation is as important as innovation – Progress isn’t just about adding new ideas; it’s about eliminating outdated practices that slow you down.
Efficiency beats complexity – Streamlining processes leads to faster decision-making, reduced costs, and better outcomes.
Letting go creates space for growth – Removing legacy systems and outdated workflows makes businesses more agile and resilient.
Strategic elimination is key – Successful companies like Ford and GE actively phase out inefficiencies to stay competitive.
Don’t just innovate—eliminate – The best breakthroughs happen when you stop doing what no longer works and focus on what truly drives success.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
⏱ 03:45 – The problem with innovation addiction and innovation theater
⏱ 07:30 – Business examples: Ford, GE, and exnovation in the automotive & retail industries
⏱ 12:15 – How to exnovate: auditing, strategic elimination, and a growth mindset
⏱ 15:30 – What should you stop doing today to create space for your next breakthrough?
TRANSCRIPT
James Taylor (00:00)
A lot of people are very worried just now. Normally I don't talk about politics on this show, but I've decided to make a bit of an exception here. Why? Well, because we need to talk about Elon Musk's new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. DOGE is the US government's new initiative to cut through bureaucracy, streamline inefficiencies, and remove outdated processes that slow progress. But here's this interesting part.
Elon Musk isn't just innovating here, he's exnovating. And that's what we're going to talk about today. You see, the mainstream media loves writing about innovation, new ideas, new breakthrough technologies, the next big thing. But innovation alone isn't enough. Sometimes the most powerful move a company or a government can make is to create something new, but to deliberately phase out what no longer serves them.
That process is called exnovation, the systematic elimination of outdated practices, technologies, or business models to make way for more efficiency and more agility. And exnovation isn't just about cutting the dead weight. It's about refining, optimizing, making sure that the right things survive while the clutter is cleared away. You can think of innovation as planting new trees in the forest. It's exciting.
It's fresh and it's necessary. But if you don't prune the old overgrown trees, you end up with a tangled mess where nothing can really thrive. Businesses, governments, and even individuals are guilty of innovation addiction, or what is sometimes called innovation theater. They chase the next big thing, but they hesitate to phase out legacy systems, outdated tools or inefficient methods. That's where exnovation
plays a crucial role. Today, an increasing number of companies have successfully integrated Xnovation into their strategies. Ford is phasing out inefficient manufacturing processes to make room for automation, while GE has recently streamlined its portfolio by divesting from underperforming business units to focus on its core strengths. And I know in my own business, we've been spending these past few weeks streamlining, getting rid of a number of our
back office systems in order to make room for new AI tools that we're really excited about utilizing. These will enable us to be more nimble, more agile, more efficient, and yes, more innovative. So here is why exnovation matters in a fast paced world. We live in a world of rapid technological change. AI, automation, robotics, digital transformation are reshaping industries, but many companies are still running on old systems, outdated workflows.
legacy thinking, not because they don't see the need for change, but because they struggle to let go. Exnovation matters for four main reasons. Firstly, efficiency beats complexity. Simplified operations means faster decision-making and better outcomes. Two, cost reduction. Removing redundant systems saves millions in maintenance and labor costs. Three, risk mitigation. Instead of piling innovation,
on top of inefficient structures, organizations get leaner and more resilient. And finally, four, clear focus. By exnovating, businesses can really double down on what actually works instead of being distracted by everything that doesn't. You know, I was recently speaking at leadership event for those working in the automotive industry, and car companies are discontinuing traditional combustion engine models to make room for EVs, hybrids, new fuel technologies. Meanwhile,
many of the retailers I speak for have excavated physical locations in favor of digital first experiences, while others have closed outdated stores in countries with lower growth like the UK in order to open up new, more innovative physical stores in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Spain. And here is how to apply exnovation in your business and life. The first thing you need to do is audit your systems, identify outdated processes, tools, strategies that are really kind of holding you back. Secondly,
Strategically, sunset old ideas. Be intentional about what you get rid of, what you phase out. Don't just innovate, eliminate. And thirdly, adopt a growth mindset. Understand that letting go of outdated methods is just as valuable as creating new ones. Elon Musk's Doge experiment, whether you like it or loathe it, is an extreme example, but it highlights an important underlying truth. Sometimes the best way forward isn't to add, but to subtract.
So ask yourself, what do you need to stop doing today to create space for your next big breakthrough? Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Super Creativity Podcast. If you found this helpful, please make sure to subscribe, leave a review, it means a lot to me. And if you have an example of exnovation in action, share it with me in the comments. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Until next time, keep creating, keep innovating, and don't forget to exnovate.
The 5 Biggest Job Shifts You MUST Prepare for in 2025 – #345
24 Jan 2025
00:08:14
The 5 Biggest Job Shifts You MUST Prepare for in 2025 - #345
Welcome to the SuperCreativity™ Podcast, hosted by keynote speaker and thought leader James Taylor. In this episode, James dives into the Future of Jobs report and unpacks the transformative shifts reshaping the global workforce. From the rise of AI-driven roles and the booming creative economy to the surge in green jobs and the staying power of remote work, this episode highlights the biggest changes happening in the job market.
Listeners will discover the three most critical skills to future-proof their careers and learn how to thrive in this fast-evolving world of work. With practical insights, actionable advice, and a vision for the future, James Taylor takes you on an inspiring journey to unlock your creativity and stay ahead of the curve.
Tune in to gain the tools and strategies you need to not just survive but excel in the future of work
🎙️ Soundbites from This Episode
“By 2030, 92 million jobs will be lost, but 170 million new ones will be created. Are you ready to embrace the future of work?”
“The creative economy is booming—problem-solving, innovation, and imagination are the skills employers value most in a world driven by AI.”
“Green jobs are exploding, offering careers that impact sustainability while ensuring long-term stability.”
“Soft skills like empathy, adaptability, and resilience are becoming the most valuable tools in navigating an AI-driven world.”
“To thrive in the future of work, master creative thinking, embrace AI fluency, and develop the agility to lead through uncertainty.”
AI is transforming jobs, not just replacing them. The most sought-after professionals will be those who can integrate AI into their workflows across industries like marketing, finance, healthcare, and more.
Creative thinking is a top priority. In a world where AI automates tasks, creativity, innovation, and problem-solving remain invaluable skills for both traditional and emerging roles.
Green jobs are on the rise. With the global focus on sustainability, careers in renewable energy, environmental management, and circular economies offer significant opportunities.
Digital and remote work is here to stay. Digital skills and the ability to communicate effectively in virtual environments are essential for thriving in hybrid and remote work models.
Soft skills lead the way. Empathy, adaptability, and leadership are becoming even more critical as companies look for individuals who can navigate uncertainty and inspire teams in a fast-changing world.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
James Taylor (00:00) What if I told you that by 2030, 92 million jobs will be lost, but 170 million new ones will be created? The future of work is changing faster than ever, and the skills that got you here won’t be enough to keep you ahead. The latest World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report reveals some shocking insights about what’s coming next. In today’s episode, I’m breaking down the three most in-demand skills.
the industries are growing and how you can future proof your career. So let’s dive in. Hello and welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast. I’m James Taylor, keynote speaker on creativity, innovation and artificial intelligence. If you’ve been following the conversation around the future of work, you already know that automation, AI and innovation are disrupting industries at a really unprecedented pace. But here’s the good news.
While some jobs will disappear, even more opportunities are being created during this time. And that’s exactly what today’s episode is all about. We’re going to break down the five biggest job shifts happening right now, the three most important skills that you need to develop, and how you can stay ahead of these changes to build a future-proof career. So let’s get started. Big job shift number one.
the rise of AI driven roles. Let’s talk about artificial intelligence. It’s no surprise that AI and machine learning specialists are among the fastest growing jobs. According to the Future of Jobs report, 86 % of employers expect AI to transform their businesses by 2030. But here’s the thing, AI isn’t replacing jobs necessarily, it’s transforming them. Companies are looking for professionals who know how to work with AI, not against it.
That means the best opportunities will go to those who can integrate AI into their workflows, whether you’re in marketing, finance, healthcare, or even within the creative industries itself. So ask yourself, how can you start using AI to enhance your work today? Big job shift number two, the creative economy is booming. Now this one really excites me because the demand for creative thinking has never been higher. The Future of Jobs report places
creative thinking, innovation, problem solving at the very top of the skills that employers are looking for. Why is that? Well, because in a world where AI can generate content, automate tasks and analyze data, the ability to think differently and to imagine and reimagine new possibilities is really priceless. Roles in design, storytelling, branding, product development, they’re gonna skyrocket.
And businesses aren’t just looking for artists and designers. They want creative problem solvers who can apply innovation to any field from strategy and leadership to engineering and healthcare. So if you’re not actively exercising your creativity, now is the time to start. If you go to my website at jamestaylor.me, I have a free course available for you on the creative process. Big job shift number three.
Green jobs and sustainability careers. Another massive trend. The green economy. With climate change driving global policies and business strategies, we’re seeing an explosion in jobs related to renewable energy, sustainability, and environmental management. If you have expertise in engineering, energy, or even policy and consulting, this is an area to really watch. But it goes beyond just technical roles. Companies are looking.
for creative solutions to sustainability challenges, from designing circular economies to reducing carbon footprints in supply chains. If you want a career that can really make an impact while also offering long-term stability, green jobs should be on your radar. And if you want to learn more about green jobs and sustainability,
then check out our recent episode of our sister podcast, The Ethical Futurists, where myself and sustainability keynote speaker, Alison Burns, interview executives from companies like IBM, 3M, GE Vernova, and Deloitte about these new opportunities. You’ll find short episodes at theethicalfuturists.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Big job shift number four, the explosion of digital and remote work. Here’s a shift we’ve all been seeing.
digital first and remote careers are really here to stay. With companies embracing hybrid work models and global talent pools, digital skills are more critical than ever. This means demand for jobs like cybersecurity experts, digital marketers, software developers, online educators and coaches, but beyond technical skills.
the ability to communicate effectively in remote environments and lead virtual teams is really becoming a must have. If you’re not already investing in your digital communications and collaboration skills, now is the time to do that. And finally, big job shift number five, the human advantage, soft skills take center stage. Now, this is the most surprising shift and one that might give you a bit of a competitive edge.
While AI and automation are replacing routine tasks, soft skills like empathy, leadership, and adaptability are becoming more valuable. In fact, according to the report, resilience, flexibility, and agility are among the top skills for this new future. Why is that? Because the world is changing fast and companies need people who can navigate uncertainty to inspire teams and can also adapt quickly.
So whether you’re an entrepreneur and employee or a leader, developing your emotional intelligence and your interpersonal skills will give you an edge that AI can fully replicate. Let’s finish up with the three most important skills to future-proof your career. So what skills should you focus on developing today? Number one, creative thinking and innovation. The ability to generate original ideas, to challenge assumptions and see solutions where others see only problems.
Two, AI and digital fluency, not just using technology, but understanding how to integrate AI and automation into your work. And three, resilience and adaptability. In a world of rapid change, the ability to pivot, learn, and lead through uncertainty is invaluable. If you invest in these skills, you won’t just survive the future of work, you will thrive in it. And if you’d like me to come and speak at your next meeting, conference,
or event on creativity, innovation and AI, then please get in touch. Some final thoughts, just to recap. The 2025 Future of Jobs report tells us that AI and automation are reshaping industries, but creative thinking and human skills are more valuable than ever before. Green jobs, digital careers and remote work opportunities are exploding. And the ability to innovate, adapt and lead
will separate those who succeed from those who really struggle in this new age. Now, I wanna hear from you. Which of these job shifts excites or concerns you the most? Drop a comment below or send me a message. I’d love to continue this conversation. And if you found today’s episode valuable, hit that subscribe button, leave a review, and perhaps share this with someone or a colleague who needs to prepare for the future of work.
Until next time, keep learning, keep creating, and keep unlocking your super creativity.
The Surprising Link Between Temperature and Creativity #344
17 Jan 2025
00:06:00
The Surprising Link Between Temperature and Creativity #344
Welcome to this week’s solo episode of the SuperCreativity™ Podcast! In this episode, listeners are invited to explore a fascinating topic that combines science, the environment, and the art of creativity. The discussion centers on an intriguing idea: how the temperature around us can significantly influence our ability to think creatively.
Have you ever noticed feeling more focused in a cooler room or experiencing a surge of ideas on a warm sunny day? As explained in the episode, temperature isn’t just a minor detail—it plays a pivotal role in shaping how people generate and refine ideas. Drawing from studies on cognitive performance and personal experiences in various climates, this episode uncovers surprising ways temperature impacts creative potential.
Whether you’re a leader looking to optimize your team’s workspace design or an individual striving to understand your own creative flow, this episode provides actionable insights and practical ideas. It’s time to explore how adjusting the temperature might be the key to unlocking greater creativity.
🎙️ Soundbites from This Episode
“Creativity isn’t just about inspiration—it’s about creating the right conditions for ideas to thrive.”
“The Goldilocks zone for creativity is between 22°C and 24°C—a temperature range where your brain can focus fully on creative tasks without distractions from regulating body temperature.”
“Warmer environments encourage divergent thinking for brainstorming, while cooler spaces support convergent thinking for refining ideas.”
“Temperature doesn’t just affect how well we think—it shapes how we think, influencing whether we explore new ideas or focus on precise analysis.”
“Small changes, like tweaking the thermostat, can have outsized effects on your creative performance and productivity.”™
Temperature affects cognitive performance: Optimal creativity thrives in the "Goldilocks zone," with a temperature range of 22°C to 24°C (72°F to 75°F), where the brain can focus without expending energy to regulate body temperature.
Different temperatures influence different thinking modes: Warmer environments encourage divergent thinking—ideal for brainstorming and idea generation—while cooler spaces support convergent thinking, which is better for analyzing and refining ideas.
Small changes in workspace design can enhance creativity: Adjusting the temperature of a room based on the type of task—creative exploration or focused execution—can significantly boost productivity and idea quality.
Personal and cultural preferences play a role: Not everyone experiences temperature in the same way, highlighting the importance of tailoring creative environments to individual needs and cultural contexts.
Creativity thrives under the right conditions: Beyond inspiration, fostering creative potential requires attention to environmental factors like temperature, allowing ideas to flourish in supportive surroundings.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of SuperCreativity™—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
TRANSCRIPT
Solo Podcast Episode Draft: “The Temperature of Creativity”
Hello, and welcome to this week’s solo episode of the SuperCreativity Podcast. Today, we’re exploring something that might seem a little unconventional but is backed by science: how the temperature around us affects our ability to think creatively. Now, you might be asking, “James, isn’t creativity all about ideas and inspiration? What does room temperature have to do with it?” As it turns out, the temperature we work and live in can have a surprising impact on the quality of our creative output.
Let’s set the stage. Over the years, researchers have investigated how environmental factors—things like lighting, noise, and yes, temperature—shape cognitive performance. Creativity, as a cognitive process, is no exception. Studies have shown that extreme heat or cold can impair our ability to think clearly, make decisions, and generate ideas. So, what’s the “Goldilocks zone” for creativity? Let’s explore.
When temperatures drop, your body has to work harder to produce glucose—the primary energy source for your brain. That means less energy is available for complex thinking, including the creative and critical processes we rely on. Similarly, in hot conditions, your body diverts resources to cooling itself, leaving less bandwidth for your brain to operate at full capacity.
So, where does creativity thrive? Research suggests the optimal range for cognitive performance is between 22°C and 24°C (72°F to 75°F). At this “just right” temperature, we feel thermally comfortable—neither too hot nor too cold—allowing our brains to focus fully on creative tasks rather than regulating body temperature.
But here’s where it gets even more interesting. Temperature doesn’t just impact how well we think—it also influences how we think. Warmer environments tend to encourage divergent thinking, which is ideal for brainstorming and exploring new ideas. Cooler spaces, on the other hand, are better for convergent thinking, where you focus, analyze, and refine your options. Imagine the creative potential of tailoring your workspace temperature to suit the task at hand!
This insight has fascinating implications for how we design workspaces. For example, you could set up a slightly warmer room for brainstorming sessions to stimulate free-flowing ideas. Then, when it’s time to refine and implement those ideas, switch to a cooler, more focused environment. A small change, but one that could have a big impact on creativity and productivity.
Now, of course, individual preferences matter. What feels just right for me might not work for you. This month, I’m working on the first draft of my upcoming SuperCreativity book from a little cabin in the Scottish Highlands. With winter temperatures dropping as low as -11°C—that’s 12°F—I’ve had to tweak my creative routine to adapt to the cold. I take longer, warmer bath and showers during the day to kickstart my divergent thinking. Later, I head to my study, which I keep at a cool 16°C (60°F)—a perfect environment for focused writing and editing.
Contrast that with my time living in Dubai and Bangkok, where the heat was so intense I could barely think creatively outdoors during the day. I’d save my creative walks for the cooler evenings. But I have friends who thrive in warmer climates and swear their best ideas come while sunning themselves on a beach. This variability reminds us that personal and cultural adaptation plays a key role in how temperature affects creativity.
Let me take a quick detour into the world of artificial intelligence, because it offers a fascinating metaphor. In AI, there’s a concept called “temperature” that governs how creative or conservative an algorithm’s outputs are. A higher “temperature” setting produces more varied and unconventional responses, while a lower setting keeps the results predictable and precise. Similarly, as humans, we can tweak our environments to align with the type of thinking we need—divergent or convergent.
So, what’s the takeaway? Start paying attention to how temperature influences your own creative flow. Experiment. If you’re a leader, think about how to optimize the thermal environment for your team. Small adjustments, like tweaking the thermostat, can have outsized effects on creative performance.
Before we wrap up, here’s a thought to leave you with: creativity isn’t just about inspiration. It’s about creating the right conditions for ideas to thrive—both inside your mind and in the world around you. And as we’ve explored today, temperature is a key part of that equation.
Thank you for tuning in to this solo episode. If today’s topic resonated with you, I’d love to hear about your experiences. Are you at your most creative in a cozy, warm setting, or do you thrive in the crisp chill of a cooler space? Let’s continue the conversation on LinkedIn or in the comments below. Until next time, stay curious, stay creative, and keep experimenting—even if it’s just with the thermostat!
Building Your Virtual Advisory Board: SuperCreativity in Action #343
10 Jan 2025
00:05:12
Building Your Virtual Advisory Board: SuperCreativity in Action #343
After taking a much-needed break to reflect and recharge, James Taylor is back with a fresh perspective and exciting updates for the SuperCreativity™ podcast. This new chapter is all about delivering more impactful content, inspired by your invaluable feedback. The episode kicks off with an introduction to the revamped format featuring three distinct types of episodes each week—solo insights, expert interviews, and industry-specific conversations.
James also opens up about his personal journey of tackling one of his most ambitious creative projects yet: writing his first book. He shares the challenges of overcoming fear and maintaining focus, while introducing the innovative concept of virtual advisory boards, a method blending human advice and AI-driven insights to fuel creativity and progress. Whether you’re looking for inspiration, actionable advice, or the tools to take your projects to the next level, this episode sets the stage for an exciting new era of Super Creativity.
🎙️ Soundbites from This Episode
“Creating a virtual advisory board allows you to combine human expertise with AI-powered insights for your creative projects.”
“AI tools can simulate feedback from thought leaders you admire—guiding you toward innovation and clarity.”
“Fear of falling short often holds us back, but accountability can transform hesitation into action.”
“Refining your creative project begins with summarizing it in one sentence, one paragraph, and one page.”
“Your virtual advisors guide you—but remember, you make the final decisions.”
New Podcast Format: Expect fresh content with three focused episode types weekly—solo insights, expert interviews, and industry-specific strategies.
Creative Accountability: Sharing the ups and downs of writing a book to inspire others to tackle their creative challenges.
Super Creativity in Action: Learn how combining human and machine collaboration can amplify innovation.
Virtual Advisory Boards: Discover how real and AI-simulated advisors can provide valuable guidance for any project.
Practical Exercise: Summarizing your creative project in one sentence, paragraph, and page can tighten your focus and clarify your goals.
In his upcoming book, James Taylor delves into the transformative concept of Super Creativity—the art of amplifying your creative potential through collaboration with both humans and machines. Drawing from his experiences speaking in over 30 countries, James combines compelling stories, case studies, and practical strategies to help readers unlock innovation and harness the power of AI-driven tools. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their creativity and thrive in the modern age of human-machine collaboration.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
After a few months away, we’re back, and I couldn’t be more excited to kick things off with a fresh start and some exciting updates. So first of all, why the break? Two main reasons. Firstly, last year was non-stop. 24 countries, keynote after keynote, and it’s been an incredible journey, but it really left a little time for deep reflection, deep work. Secondly,
We took the time to listen to you, our loyal listeners and viewers, and your feedback on what you love, what could be improved, and either also what we should stop has really kind of shaped this new direction that we’re going in now. Now here’s what you can expect from the revamped Super Creativity podcast. We’re dividing the content into three types of episodes. On Fridays, we’re gonna have what we call the solo episodes. These are just bite-sized, actionable insights on creativity, innovation,
and leveraging technologies like AI. Then on Mondays, we’ll have our expert interviews. These are conversations with authors and thought leaders sharing strategies to help you innovate and create better, along the lines of some of the things that we’ve been doing in the past, some of the interviews we’ve had in the past. And then the third is our industry insights, and those will be on Wednesdays. Those will be talks with CEOs, CXOs, chief innovation officers from the world’s most innovative companies. And this will give you a peek.
into their successes and how you can apply similar ideas in your work. We’re aiming for three episodes a week to keep you inspired and informed. I first of wanna say though, thank you for your input. It’s really helped us to shape the show and that is hopefully gonna give you a better and more impactful episodes. Today though, I wanna dive into a concept that’s been on my mind as I embark on my next big creative project. And it’s this idea of creating.
virtual advisory boards and how it can fuel your creative growth. For years, I’ve been asked to write a book. I’ve hesitated for two reasons, focus and fear. My focus has been on speaking and traveling, leaving little room to do the kind of deep work that writing demands. Fear, well, it’s the same creative fear that many of us face, the gap between the vision of what we want to create and the reality of our skills. Writing and speaking might seem similar, but they’re entirely different crafts.
That said, I’ve decided to go for it this year. Over the next few months, I’ll be using these solo episodes to share my journey, successes, challenges, failures, everything in between, as I write, rewrite, and eventually publish this book. Why am I doing this? Well, firstly, to inspire you. If you’ve been hoarding off on your creative project, perhaps my journey will nudge you forward. And secondly, to hold myself accountable. By sharing my process, I’m making a promise to you and to myself to see this thing through.
So what’s this book all about? Since 2018, I’ve been speaking about my concept of super creativity, how individuals can augment and amplify their creativity by collaborating with humans and machines. The book will bring together the stories, the case studies, the strategies, the tools and techniques that I’ve shared on stages in over 30 plus countries. I’ve opted to self-publish for speed and flexibility, and week one of the project has been all about laying the foundations.
Now here’s where the idea of a virtual advisory board comes in, how you can use it. For this book, I’ve created a mix of real and virtual advisors. On the human side, I’ve spoken with Elaine Pofeld, a brilliant ghostwriter and journalist, and David Avrin, a wonderful keynote speaker and author. Their human guidance has been invaluable in refining the book’s concept and process. On the virtual side, however, I’ve leveraged generative AI to imagine advice from thought leaders like Ryan Holiday,
Seth Godin, Jay Papasan, authors I admire and have interviewed on this very podcast. Using AI tools, I can ask for feedback as if it’s coming from these brilliant minds. Now, one standout piece of advice from my AI Ryan Holiday, if you will, was to write a single sentence, a single paragraph, and a single page summarizing the book’s premise, audience, and value. This exercise has really been transformative in tightening the concept of the book up. Now, here’s a practical takeaway for you.
Think about a creative project that you’re working on, or maybe one that you’ve been procrastinating on for a while now. Write down five to six names of people, real, fictional, alive or dead, that you’d want on your virtual advisory board. Then head over to an AI tool like ChatGBT to simulate their feedback, get their feedback on your project. Remember, they’re advisors, they’re not decision makers. Their job is to guide, but it’s your job to decide. Try it out now. Let me know in the comments.
who you’ve chosen for your virtual advisory board members and how perhaps their feedback has helped shape your project.
Robert Hannigan – The Power of Neurodiversity in Innovation, Cybersecurity, GCHQ and Counter-Intelligence #342
02 Jul 2024
00:34:41
Robert Hannigan - The Power of Neurodiversity in Innovation, Cybersecurity, GCHQ and Counter-Intelligence #342
In this episode of the Super Creativity Podcast, host James Taylor sits down with Robert Hannigan, former director of GCHQ, the UK’s largest technical and cyber security agency. Robert shares his journey from being the Prime Minister’s security advisor to establishing the UK National Cyber Security Centre and now serving as the international chairman of Blue Voyant. Tune in to learn about the lessons from counterintelligence that can be applied to problem-solving and creativity, the importance of neurodiversity in intelligence work, and the fascinating history of Bletchley Park.
Sound Bites:
“I was trying to answer the question of how was it that Bletchley Park… created the world’s first digital programmable computer.” – Robert Hannigan
“Tolerating that kind of eccentricity frankly is one of the interesting challenges for an organization, particularly a company, trying to engender creativity.” – Robert Hannigan
“It’s really important that people can express any ethical concerns and discuss them and have them addressed.” – Robert Hannigan
“The blend of these different types of thinking and ways of looking at the world is massively powerful in creativity.” – Robert Hannigan
Counterintelligence offers valuable lessons in problem-solving and creativity.
The innovative environment at Bletchley Park was driven by a diverse and young team.
Neurodiversity in intelligence work brings unique perspectives and solutions.
Open communication and ethical discussions are crucial in maintaining high standards in intelligence agencies.
Balancing optimism and pessimism helps assess risks and harness technological advances effectively.
Personal sources of inspiration, such as nature and casual interactions, play a significant role in fostering creativity.
Robert Hannigan is the former director of GCHQ, the UK’s largest technical and cybersecurity agency. He established the UK National Cyber Security Centre in 2016 and was responsible for the UK’s first cyber strategy in 2009. Robert is now the international chairman of Blue Voyant, a global cybersecurity services company, and a senior advisor to McKinsey & Co. He is also a senior fellow at the Belfast Center at Harvard, a fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology in London, and an honorary fellow at Oxford University. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth for his services to national security and is one of the only non-US citizens to have received the US Intelligence Distinguished Public Service Medal. His new book, “Counterintelligence,” explores what the secret world can teach us about problem-solving and creativity.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
James Taylor (00:09) What can the secret world of counterintelligence teach us about problem solving and creativity? That’s what my guest today and I will discuss. Robert Hannigan was director of GCHQ, the UK’s largest technical and cyber security agency. He established the UK National Cyber Security Centre in 2016 and was responsible for the UK’s first cyber strategy in 2009. He was previously
the Prime Minister’s security advisor at number 10 and worked closely with Tony Blair for a decade on the Northern Ireland peace process. Robert is now international chairman of Blue Voyant, a global cybersecurity services company, and was a senior advisor to McKinsey & Co. He is a senior fellow at the Belfast Center at Harvard. He is a fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology in London and an honorary fellow at Oxford University. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth for his services to national security.
and is one of the only non -US citizens to have received the US Intelligence Distinguished Public Service Medal. His new book, Counterintelligence, which is absolutely wonderful, is about what the secret world can teach us about problem solving and creativity. And he looks to answer a couple of questions. How do you hire smart people who can work together to prevent terrorist attacks and decode encrypted technology? How do you come up with creative, counterintuitive solutions to solve major global problems?
And how do you provide the right environment for these people to thrive and work at their best when under immense pleasure? And it’s my great pleasure to welcome Robert Hannigan on the Super Creativity Podcast today. Welcome Robert.
Robert Hannigan (01:41) Hi James, well thanks very much, very good to be with you.
James Taylor (01:45) So currently what has your focus? You’ve got the book is out now. What are you currently focused on?
Robert Hannigan (01:50) Yeah, so the book is out and obviously I have a role in Oxford which takes a lot of time in term time and then my main focus is on cyber security obviously which is my day -to -day work and that’s changing very fast and every day we see new headlines which kind of emphasize how fast moving and how sophisticated the threat has got. So cyber security is where I spend most of my thinking time.
James Taylor (02:16) Now in this book, I learned so many interesting things. I learned a lot about Bletchley Park that I didn’t know in the work that went on there and the history of GCHQ. But there was a quote that you have right towards, you mentioned something right at the beginning of the book, which I thought was interesting. The other day I was in Austin in Texas and I was speaking and this sounds very strange compared to what we’d probably be talking about, but…
I was speaking for a company that manufactures the ingredients for bread and pastries and chocolates. And while I was there, I met a gentleman who was the sourdough librarian for this company. His job is to keep the sourdoughs of all, he goes around the world collecting sourdoughs from these amazing places and he has a library of this. And in the book, earlier on, you see this, you talk about the work of…
of Bletchley Park and the GCHQ is less about mapping the DNA of Bletchley Park and more like identifying the ingredients of a digital sourdough starter, a messy blended fermentation that constantly changes, that is never entirely within the baker’s control, but nonetheless produces something entirely surprising. So my first question I had for you is, what are the good ingredients for someone that’s working in counterintelligence and has that changed over the years?
Robert Hannigan (03:35) So I love the idea of a sourdough librarian, that sounds fantastic. And Austin, Texas is a great example actually of tech innovation at the moment, as I’m sure you saw when you were there. What I was trying to answer, and I didn’t want to write one of these prescriptive books that says do X, Y, and Z, and you will have creativity, because I just don’t think it works like that. I was trying to answer the question of how was it that Bletchley Park, which was this not particularly impressive.
country house in the English countryside where they gathered to break codes during the Second World War and to solve one big problem which was how do you decrypt and then use a massive amount of intercepted radio material that was coming into Bletchley and then get it out fast enough for commanders to use. So that was the problem they were trying to solve. But in solving it, they
created the world’s first digital programmable computer colossus. And so in that problem solving process, there was this immense creativity and everything we now have. So what we’re communicating on our laptops, our iPhones and so on, you trace their lineage back to Bletchley Park really. And so I wanted to explore, so how did that happen? And to come to your sourdough analogy,
Many people at the time described Bletchley as an asylum, as rudderless, as full of crazy people. It wasn’t, they thought, structured and hierarchical in the way it should have been. And so what were the ingredients? Well, the ingredients were, of course, the people. And it was this amazing mixture of people. Not just mathematicians, not just Alan Turing types, if he is a type, the famous people, but predominantly women. So 76 % of the staff of Bletchley were women.
Most were young, most were under 30. So you were quite old if you were over 30 and you were ancient if you were over 40 at Bletchley. But it wasn’t just mathematicians and academics, it was people from manufacturing, from banking, from department stores, from the telecoms world. And it was putting those people together both as disciplines and as individual ways of thinking. And we might come onto neurodiversity.
But that’s where the magic and the creativity came from. And I think that’s closer to a sourdough starter than it is to any kind of business book which tells you, do this, this, and this, and you’ll get creativity.
James Taylor (06:07) The thing I found really interesting, and you talk about this towards more towards the end of the book, but it’s actually, it’s a bit of a thread that kind of goes through is what you mentioned, like neurodiversity. And we’ll kind of come back to that. But there were lots of, we’re talking about this building this kind of culture and there was lots of very interesting characters where the Bletchley Park and obviously now in GCHQ. One of the ones that made me laugh was early on you talked about Dilly Knox, I think was the name and Rym Forty at the old Admiralty.
he decided to do something a little bit unusual, something to help his creative process, which I actually, I do today as well. So can you share what that was?
Robert Hannigan (06:46) Ha ha.
Yeah, and Billy Knox was an amazing character, but he did a lot of his thinking in the bath. So he had a bathtub put into the old Admiralty building in Whitehall. And then when he moved nearly 20 years later to Bletchley Park, he had a bathtub put into the cottage there and he was sitting in it for hours and hours at a time. So much so actually in Bletchley that one of his colleagues thought he had drowned and broke the door down. So…
It wasn’t just an affectation. He didn’t just occasionally go and have a bath. He would find it a good place to think. And we now know from neurological research quite a lot about the effects of warm water, water in general, on the brain. So he wasn’t wrong. He described it as, bathing helps me with the perception of analogies. So not exactly sure what that means, but we think it…
closest to a kind of lateral thinking, making connections in the brain that wouldn’t otherwise surface. And he was a very passionate, slightly irascible character. And so the calming environment of a bath probably helped as well, helped him focus his thinking. But it’s a nice example of something which no corporation would naturally think of doing. So.
tolerating that kind of eccentricity frankly is one of the interesting challenges for an organization, particularly a company, trying to engender creativity. You’ve got to be allowed, you’ve got to allow people to work in the way that they want to up to a point. And his is a kind of extreme example. He’s also a great example.
James Taylor (08:31) I wonder if you got inspiration from that from, I was recently in a place called Ortesia, near Syracuse in Italy. And about two and a half thousand years ago, there was a king hero, his name, and he was trying to figure out a problem. And he did like what I guess many
business senior people do today as they bring in a management consultant. And the management consultant was Archimedes and we heard the story of like the bath and jumping at the bath, Eureka. So I wonder if he was, had a bit of an Archimedes thing kind of going on there as well.
Robert Hannigan (09:05) Yeah, maybe, and he was a classicist himself, so he would have known the work of Archimedes well. And of course, that was a brilliant scientific breakthrough in itself, giving him the idea of the volume, measuring volume. But yeah, a good example of a non -mathematician, everything’s computing and is about mathematics, but in his case, he was a papirologist. So he spent much of his career trying to piece together these little fragments of
papyrus that have been found in the sands of Egypt around mid to late 19th century. And he tried to put these together to restore the poetry that was written on them. And I think the interesting thing about that is the puzzling theme that runs through the book. All these people loved puzzles. And for him, the puzzle actually wasn’t about, it wasn’t like a jigsaw, it wasn’t just finding little bits of papyrus and making them put together, though that helped. The real puzzle was that
The people writing the poems on these bits of papyrus weren’t the original authors. So they were copying them out two, three centuries later. And so the challenge for him was to work out the mistakes they’d made. So these were scribes who were often bored, didn’t really understand what they were copying, didn’t really care very much, made mistakes, human error. And there are big lessons in code breaking. So a lot of the progress that was made in Bletchley Park in breaking German codes was about understanding the people at the other end.
and the mistakes they were making, the human errors. Same is true now in cyber security. It’s trying to understand the human errors in cyber security, defense and offense. So he’s a good example around it.
James Taylor (10:41) When you think of when people think of Bletchley Park, they often think of the movie kind of highlighting Alan Turing and I always kind of push against it and I sense that you kind of pushed against a little bit in the book, although it was amazing telling that story and it brought to attention the work of Bletchley Park to a wider group of people. But my bugbear, I guess, with that was always that it kind of does the whole lone creative genius.
thing. And in the book, you talk about really, that’s, that’s kind of not how it worked. So I mean, maybe you can give us some ideas in terms of what at that point, when they’re breaking these codes, what was around, for example, Alan Turing, who was he, who was he working with? How was the collaboration side working there?
Robert Hannigan (11:29) So you’re absolutely right, James. I mean, the Imitation Game was great for the profile of Bletchley Park and actually big increase in visitor numbers in the years that followed. So I’m not knocking it, but it was very Hollywood. It was all about good and bad, goodies and baddies in Bletchley. And it was also all about this, as you say, this lone, solitary genius. Now, no question Turing was a genius by any measure, but he wasn’t a loner in his work. He very much worked as part of a team.
And in Breaking Enigma, he relied very heavily on the fantastic work of Polish mathematicians before the war, of French mathematicians, and he acknowledged all that. And then those around him in Bletchley were absolutely critical to him. So he wasn’t this sort of lone person who just crapped it. And the other thing I think that doesn’t quite come across in the film is Joan Clarke, who’s sometimes fiance for, wasn’t for very long, but…
who was a really talented codebreaker in her own right and mathematician. And after the war, she went on to work at GCHQ until the 1970s. And in fact, just as she was working on counter -UVOTE, counter -submarine work in Bletchley with Turing, she ended up working against Argentine submarines in the Falklands War in 1982. So she had a remarkable career in her own right. And she wasn’t just the fiance of Alan Turing. So the film gets lots of things wrong.
But overall, as you say, it was great for the profile.
James Taylor (12:58) There was another type of, you mentioned the relationship with him and his fiancee wife at one point as well, was in the US, you have the National Security Agency, which I guess is the equivalent of our GCHQ in the UK. And you talk about Elizabeth and William Friedman there. I believe that William Friedman was the founder of America’s NSA. But you talked about how, I use this term creative pairs. They can operate it, they had very different.
ways of looking at problems and challenges, but they can lent something to each other. Can you talk about that relationship? I thought that was that was interesting when I’d like to maybe kind of learn a little bit, go and maybe read a little bit more about that couple.
Robert Hannigan (13:38) Yeah, so there’s some wonderful books on them, actually. And there’s a wonderful parallel story going on in the US alongside what’s happening in the First World War in the UK and then Bletchley Park. And at the same time, these big characters emerge. So William and Elizabeth Friedman, as in a way, the founders of US code breaking, US cryptology. And they met in this weird
scientific research establishment in Chicago and outside Chicago just before the First World War and it was run by an incredible man who’s worth reading about but called George Fabian who had this obsession, had lots of obsessions, but one of his obsessions was that Shakespeare plays weren’t really written by Shakespeare. They were written by Francis Bacon and so he hired all these people to try to prove this and in trying to prove it, so William and Elizabeth.
met, spent the rest of their life together and they conclusively established that actually Francis Bacon hadn’t written these and it wasn’t in secret code, much to George Fabian’s disappointment. But they’re an amazing couple because I think you’re right, they complement each other. Elizabeth had her own career in the 30s against smuggling during the prohibition era and it’s only actually in this century that her contribution has been recognised by the
US government and by Congress in particular, she tended to get overshadowed by William. But actually, William himself would have been the first to say she was an amazing codebreaker in her own right. So these partnerships are important. And there’s an interesting story about the two of them in the First World War, trying to break up a particular machine that had been given them to test the British machine, actually. And William asks Elizabeth to close her eyes.
and say the first thing, clear her mind, say the first thing that comes into her head when he says a particular word. And she gets it right, of course. And they put that down to gender, actually. They said maybe there’s a different way of looking at this. Williams was very structured, hers was more creative and fluid. Yeah, it may or may not be right, but it’s certainly true, as you say, James, that partnerships sparking off each other, teamwork is absolutely essential to creativity.
it isn’t on the whole a solitary pursuit.
James Taylor (16:08) And then towards maybe the last quarter of the book, you move into talking about kind of just picking up on that, about gender, but also talking about diversity of thought and also wider, like neurodiversity as well. There was one stat in it that really blew my mind that we find here one in four people that work at GCHQ are neurodivergent, which I thought was fascinating. And then as you’re kind of getting into this,
You were just talking about people obviously with autism. My father is a musician and he has synesthesia. So he sees musical notes as certain colors and you talk about that and the benefit of that for code breakers as well. You mentioned briefly, I think in Israel they have a, I think it’s called Unit 9900, which is made up of people with specific, the forms of neurodivergence. So tell us, as you were kind of researching and kind of learned,
learning about it. Was this just something you were kind of picking up on because you were just around different people at the time you were kind of noticing this pattern? Or was there something else that kind of led you down this path to want to investigate this area more?
Robert Hannigan (17:18) I’m fascinated by this area and although if you look at Bletchley Park there were lots of people who were clearly neurodivergent. It wasn’t called that in those days, tended to be seen as eccentricity or just oddness. But when I got to GCHQ and I’d spent 15 years in and around it before I became director, I would just met more and more staff who had really interesting views of the world and perceptions of the world.
and I started to talk to them and then to research more about what neurodiversity was and just how diverse it is actually, as you say, the synesthesia is a fascinating example of how the brain works and shows how little we understand about it. But I give one example in the book where I was chatting to someone who was overlooking the car park and the building of GCHQ’s headquarters is a donut -shaped building. It’s very similar to what Apple have now done in Cupertino.
And round it is this massive car park. And looking out at this every day, he would say, he felt compelled to organize that and explain the distribution of cars. Whereas to the rest of us, we would probably just accept, well, people park and they get out and they go into work. He felt this compulsion to systematize that. And of course he was right. It wasn’t random. So this is about putting order into the world and finding patterns.
And he was absolutely right because not only was there a computer program booking system for the car park, which was complex, but all the trends of economics, of car sales, of where people lived, of their school runs, all those things influenced the organization of those cars around the building. And while the rest of us might just not even think about it, he felt a compulsion to explain it every day. And I think…
That is interesting in itself, but it’s also a massive advantage in a creative team to have people who think like that, who are systematizing brains, if you like, and all the other neurodivergent traits that are explored in the book, all of which blended with other people in a team can be massively powerful. And one of GCSQ’s of the secret world’s great strength has been able to value that and say, these people are not a problem.
they’re a huge advantage. They may need extra support, they may need understanding, they may need the right conditions in which to work, but actually they’re a fantastic asset. And you give the Israeli example, I mean, I think, I’m not sure I’d go as far as saying we need to employ certain types of neurodivergence in certain jobs, but for sure the blend of these different types of thinking and ways of looking at the world is massively powerful in creativity.
James Taylor (20:06) What advice would you give if someone’s listening to this just now? Maybe they’re, I said they’re not in the world, most of us not in the world of the counter intelligence and code breaking and things like that. But we do have to manage people, often in large organizations, you’re managing a big mix. You have, you know, you make your diverse people within the organization. You also have generational differences. I know a lot of leaders I speak to, they said they really, they struggle with figuring out, you know,
everything from Baby Boomers to Gen Z to Gen X to millennials, like working with them. What can management more broadly learn from the way that organisations like GCHQ manage that diversity of employees?
Robert Hannigan (20:50) That’s a great question, James, and it’s the one I get asked most often by board level people and managers. And I think three, just three quick examples. I mean, one is around recruitment. The way most companies recruit staff militates against those kinds of people because they’re very often very open questions designed to explore competence, competencies. That is the worst possible.
kind of interview for many people with neurodivergent conditions who need something much more structured. So thinking about and getting advice on how you recruit is really important. Once you’ve recruited people who are neurodivergent, you need to support them. So that might be very practical things like computer programs that help them, but it may also just be really good line management. You have to invest a lot of time.
And you have to accept that there’s going to be some disruption. And one of the interesting things about Bletchley is that the first leader of Bletchley, Alastair Denniston, spent a lot of his time protecting his staff from criticism from outside, particularly from senior military and Whitehall, who would say, you know, these people are scruffy, they’re too young, they’re arrogant, they’re telling me what to do, they don’t respect authority, you need to do something about it.
and he would push back and say, no, you’ve got to accept that if you want the amazing things they’re doing, you’ve got to accept some of the difficulties that come along the way in this unusual group of people, as he put it. That takes courage in a leadership management context. So yeah, there are definitely some lessons on how to do it, practical and cultural.
James Taylor (22:32) One of the ones that I read, which I’d never seen before, where you talked about, you called it tea parties, where bletchily, because of the work of the shift system, they work in these shifts all the time, someone would come in and they would sit and they would write down, challenge an idea, something up on a, it could be an equation up on a board, a white board. And the next team that were coming in, can almost kind of look at that idea and pick it apart or figure it out, or that would maybe spark them as well.
Do you, without going into any confidence, what is the modern, is there a modern equivalent of that to ensure that you’re using this hive mind, this collective consciousness well?
Robert Hannigan (23:13) Yeah, it’s an absolutely key part of the culture of lecture that’s been carried through GCHQ to the current moment actually. And there are two sides to it really. One is having those opportunities for people to discuss and feed in informally their thoughts about how to do things better. And the second key thing is to stop that being hierarchical. So there was always a principle in GCHQ that any member of staff, so getting on for 10 ,000 at some periods, could approach the director.
directly through email. Now that could be a burden at times, but actually it’s really important. And it goes back to the power of young people as well. But actually, most people, as I said, were under 30. And you have to accept that some of them will have absolutely brilliant groundbreaking ideas and be able to do things that all their senior distinguished colleagues haven’t thought of or haven’t been able to do. And to allow that to happen, you’ve got to have some…
parties as they were called at Bletchley, we would call them something different in modern GCSE but get different disciplines together to discuss problems. But you’ve also got to allow the most junior, youngest people to have their ideas and have their say because that’s often where the magic comes from and there’ve been some good examples post -Bletchley of exactly that happening with people straight out of university coming up with amazing, amazing cryptological solutions.
James Taylor (24:38) Now you also said something in the book which I thought was interesting in light of what’s going on in many organizations today where, you know, the general thing is, you know, don’t talk about politics, don’t talk about religion, you know, there’s certain things in many organizations that they don’t talk about. But I thought it was quite interesting that in terms of like politics, talking about these ideas does seem to be quite open within the organization. I don’t know where that just came from.
a Bletchley thing or if that’s more recent, because I know that many organizations, they tend to stay, you know, let’s keep all that very separate, but you seem to embrace it in some ways.
Robert Hannigan (25:18) Yeah, I think so. I mean, I wouldn’t go overboard on party politics, I think. So it’s important that these are apolitical organizations and it’s written into the law actually that those running these agencies must be apolitical and implement within the law, implement the wishes of the government of the day. But I think what’s different about the secret world is you are not allowed to take anything home.
So you can’t take your work home. You can’t discuss your work at home with your family and friends. And so there’s a kind of world inside which you’re working where you have to have an outlet for some things. And if you’re thinking of the ethics of intelligence gathering and intrusion into privacy that goes with intelligence agencies, it’s really important that people can express any ethical concerns and discuss them and have them addressed. You don’t want to have that kind of bubbling away.
It’s also important to make sure that we maintain the highest ethical standards and a huge amount of effort goes into adherence to the law, into legal advice, but also into ethical considerations. So giving staff an outlet to discuss that is really important. One of the parallels in the book is with the John Lewis partnership. So we’ll meet a lot of people in the UK and not so much outside, but it’s a mutual, a very successful
department store and grocers. And they had pioneered this in the early part of the last century for their staff and they have a gazette which still exists I think where people would express their views on all sorts of things. And one of the key people at Bletchley came from there and indeed there was a big interchange between the two organizations over the years. But one of them inherited a lot of these management processes and brought them into Bletchley, which is
probably part of why they were so successful, but who would have thought it would come from a department store.
James Taylor (27:15) Yeah. And the other thing I think most of the time that I know you and I, we speak at different conferences, different public events, or for companies. And in my role, I’m usually the, I guess, the tech optimist. You talk about utopians. I’m usually painting a more utopian picture of, I kind of talk about the dangers, but probably 80 % of what I’m sharing is these are amazing things that are going to happen. You know, in
in GCH QAnon and those services is almost like that is flipped. And your job is to look at the dangers, the risks in these things, how these things will affect it. So is this an organization of pessimists or is it just clear eyed folks that are there?
Robert Hannigan (27:50) Yeah.
That’s a really interesting question because obviously they’re mostly tech people themselves or interested and inspired by technology. So it’s an organisation of optimists who are enthused and excited about the technology as you are yourself, James. I guess that what makes a difference is that their job is to focus on the bad things that could happen. So what are bad people with bad intentions going to do with this technology in the future? Because technology itself is kind of ethically neutral on the whole.
It’s all about what people do with it and how will it be abused is a question which the big tech companies are never going to put front and center, partly because they’re utopians, they’re optimists, partly because it doesn’t make commercial sense. You don’t spend a lot of money developing a product, push it out and say, by the way, we’re worried that this might be, might have to do it. So take social media, for example. They’ve spent 30 years saying, this is great building communities, connecting people, all that fantastic stuff.
But they haven’t said, well, all the bad things that can be done with it from election interference through to the impact on teenagers. Those are things which have kind of been forced on them. And so I think getting the balance right, I mean, overall, I am an optimist too. And I think, primarily, I would say, technological advances are fantastic and they’re bringing human progress forward at an incredible rate, or as you know, better than anyone.
But to do that completely without looking at the downsides is a real risk. And so it’s quite useful to have some agencies whose job is to look at how things might be abused in the future.
James Taylor (29:47) Now bringing it back to your own work, as I was reading it, I was thinking, you’re just touching on AI, you’re just touching on quantum computing. And I thought, is this where the next book’s perhaps gonna go for you? But where do you go to get creative inspiration? You mentioned in the book about the donut, GCHQ, has a garden in the middle, which I love the idea of that. We often get inspiration when we’re out in nature, or where that color green is around us.
but also you have these open plan offices which I know for some people can cause real stress, especially if you’re more quiet person. So you have what they call caves and marketplaces. But for you, where do you go to get inspired? Where do you go to think about these big ideas and ways of solving them and actually in your writing as well?
Robert Hannigan (30:33) So I do go outside, I do like to be out in nature. I do find that inspiring. I also find talking to people, wandering around, just seeing what they’re doing inspiring, which is a very, literally, DTHQ thing to do, actually, just to kind of wander around and chat to people. I’m not sure that you can prescribe that, different people find different things good for their creativity, from baths, as you said earlier, to sitting in a garden.
if you’re lucky enough to have a garden that’s accessible, not everybody does. I mean, your point about mathematicians and what they need is something that’s kind of occupied a lot of my time, both at GCSQ and also now I’m in a university in Oxford and we think a lot about the architecture, how that helps or hinders academics to think. And there have been some wonderful examples of institutions for mathematicians which try to blend that.
time alone that they need, almost a kind of monastic cell to go and think. But the interchange of ideas, the sort of marketplaces you say, where they can be sociable and exchange ideas. If you get that wrong, you can significantly damage the potential for creativity by just limiting the environment in which it can happen. So it’s really important. I think the built environment, the natural environment are really important to creativity.
James Taylor (31:58) Yeah. It’s like the genius loci, the places themselves have their own creed and they can inspire their own genius as well. Just a couple of quick, back to the classic, so quick fires, we just start to finish up now. Is there a book you’ve personally been reading just now that has just kind of got you thinking differently? And if anyone is interested in maybe creativity, innovation, technology, future trends, where the world may be going, is there one book you would recommend people check out just now?
Robert Hannigan (32:01) Exactly.
Absolutely, it’s back and back to the classics.
If I’m absolutely honest, I tend not to read books about those kinds of technology developments. I prefer to talk to people, but I ought to read the tech press. There’s a lot going on in the tech press, which I find very inspiring. And I tend to read fiction. So I’m reading Long Island at the moment, which I think is great. But…
Yeah, I try not to read too many of the… There are some very good ones out there, but I try not to read too many of the kind of predictions of the future books. Partly because I think a lot is being written about AI that is not particularly helpful. There’s a lot of hype around AI. But of course, AI was actually a big part of AI.
James Taylor (33:10) Yeah.
Yeah, it’s one of my things as I watch more like TV shows, they have a very dark view of where we’re going as a civilization in the future. And I hope that we have more interesting storytellers. There are some amazing things that we had, where we had Sir David Ormond on, we form a colleague of yours, we were talking about the three body problem and there is really interesting fiction going on just now.
Wonderful book, so Counterintelligence, What the Secret World Can Teach Us About Problem Solving and Creativity. Robert Hannigan, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you. If you want to learn more about you and your work, I know you’re heavily involved in different universities, I think you’re in the Bletchley Trust as well. Where can people go to learn more about you?
Robert Hannigan (34:02) I’ve got a website, roberthanigan .com, or there are more details in the book. The proceeds of the book go to Bletchley. It’s been a real pleasure, James, and thank you very much. I think podcasts are a great way of exploring these things. It’s probably more dynamic than books, actually, so it’s great to be here.
James Taylor (34:20) Well Robert Hagen, thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.
Sam Dixon of Womble Bond Dickinson, The Evolving Role of Lawyers in the AI Era #341
25 Jun 2024
00:33:01
Sam Dixon of Womble Bond Dickinson, The Evolving Role of Lawyers in the AI Era #341
Summary
Sam Dixon, Chief Innovation Officer of law firm Womble Bond Dickinson, discusses the role of AI in the legal profession and the challenges of driving innovation in a traditional industry. He shares his journey from online retail to law and how he became involved in innovation. Dixon explains the different applications of AI in the legal sector, such as document automation and machine learning for document review. He also discusses the buy vs. build argument and the potential impact of AI on pricing and billing in law firms. Dixon emphasizes the importance of developing social intelligence and complex problem-solving skills to remain relevant in the evolving legal landscape.
Sound Bites
“Generative AI is able to do a lot of that work without the need for lots and lots of examples.”
“The key for me is creating that culture of innovation where it is part of the conversation and where people are enabled to suggest ideas and implement ideas.”
“I don’t think lawyers need to be coders. I mean, query in the modern world of low and no code, how much coders need to be coders?”
Generative AI is a major focus in the legal profession, with applications in document automation and machine learning for document review.
Law firms need to strike a balance between buying and building AI tools, leveraging existing software and integrating different systems.
The role of lawyers is evolving, and skills such as social intelligence and complex problem-solving are becoming increasingly important.
The pricing and billing models in law firms may need to adapt to incorporate the use of AI tools and technologies.
Creating a culture of innovation is crucial in law firms, where traditional mindsets and billable hours can hinder progress.
Sam is the Chief Innovation Officer of law firm Womble Bond Dickinson in the UK. He is also a practising lawyer in the firm’s restructuring team. His innovation journey started in online retail in the early 2000s and led him to law via a brief detour through the world of DJing.
Sam specializes in advising various stakeholders in relation to distressed businesses, charities and providers of public services; especially in scenarios with a continuity of supply requirement or which involve complex stakeholder management.
He is a qualified insolvency practitioner (non-practising) and has 18 months’ experience in a non-legal banking role within the business support team of a major clearing bank.
He has particular experience in the education, healthcare and charity sectors.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
sam-dixon-the-supercreativity-podcast-with-james-taylor_scp341-sam-dixon-full-video.txt James Taylor (00:08) Sam Dixon is the chief innovation officer of law firm Womble Bond Dickinson in the United Kingdom. He is also a practicing lawyer in the firm’s restructuring team. His innovation journey started in online retail in the early 2000s and has led him to law via a brief detour through the world of DJing. And if you don’t know Womble Bond Dickinson, I’m gonna put my hand up here. They are a client of mine. I’ve spoken to them for a number of times before. I think they have about a thousand.
lawyers in the US and the UK and they cover lots of different areas of business as well. And we’re going to be taking a deep dive into the work that Sam and his team do around innovation, specifically in the legal profession. So Sam, welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.
Sam Dixon (00:50) Good afternoon, James. Thank you for having me.
James Taylor (00:52) So share with us just now what’s going on in your world, what currently has your focus at the moment?
Sam Dixon (00:57) Well, I think it would be very difficult to give an answer other than generative AI, to be honest with you. It’s stormed onto the scene. We’re working our way through the hype cycle, of course. And it’s keeping us all very, very busy, both in terms of what we can do right now with it, but also what the future trajectory is going to be and where we might end up.
James Taylor (01:18) And take, how did you get into this role? I mentioned that you’re obviously a practicing partner, you’re a solicitor, you do DJing as well. Tell us how this journey into the current role happened.
Sam Dixon (01:29) Well, I’ve always had a bit of an interest in doing things differently and innovation and in the use of tech. Going back to, you mentioned the online retail at the start of my journey. And essentially for me, that was working in an outdoor equipment retailer in a shop and then ended up taking over their mail order business, turning that into an online retail business in the relatively early days of online retail and doing things like using AdWords and a computer.
a different way to how anyone has used them before. So we were targeting essentially a product comparison approach that no one else was using at the time. And fast forward in, sorry, go on James.
James Taylor (02:07) I think, yeah, I was gonna say the move into the law. So you didn’t come initially from the legal profession then. You kind of, you were starting in e -commerce and retail first, and then you kind of, how did you find your way into the law?
Sam Dixon (02:22) Well, in some respects, in a relatively conventional route, in the bit of online retail, and then I was doing a law degree. Now, being honest with you, whilst I was doing a law degree, I was doing quite a lot of DJing and event promotion, and I didn’t apply for a training contract two years ahead of time in the way that people normally do, because frankly, I thought I was going to be traveling the world DJing. And as I went into my final year, I had a number of offers to work in various parts of the world as a DJ.
But in my final year, we did real legal work. And I ended up dealing with a multiple conspiracy to murder case, so some gangland stuff. And it was fascinating. And at the same time, the firm I’m currently with, which at the time was called Dickinson Dees, prior to a number of mergers, they approached the university I was at and said, do you have anyone who might be interested in starting a training contract in a few months’ time? So I went in and had a chat. And one of the icebreaker questions was, do you know?
tell us something interesting about your week last week. So I explained that I’d DJed for an artist called Chesney Hawkes. It turned out the head of graduate recruitment was a massive Chesney Hawkes fan, and the rest, as they say, is history.
James Taylor (03:37) So you went into, obviously, you started initially in the kind of legal side around criminal law. But my understanding is that one Bond Dickinson is known really for commercial law, and it’s that kind of world. And then you specifically, you focused on the restructuring side of things. So how did you get into that particular part of commercial law?
Sam Dixon (03:58) Absolutely, well as you say it’s a commercial law firm so the criminal side of things was just part of my university experience. As soon as I joined what’s now Umubon Dickinson it was commercial law from the start and I started off as a trainee like all lawyers do and I rotated around a few different seats and being honest I didn’t know an awful lot about restructuring. I didn’t know what to expect but as I was going into my final seat it was in the height of the recession.
And there weren’t necessarily the opportunities in other areas that I would have perhaps liked to have done. And so someone gave me the chance to go and work in the restructuring team. And it turns out it was a really good fit for me. So I qualified into restructuring and insolvency and spent a number of years learning the ropes and really enjoying the restructuring sector, helping to try and save businesses and that kind of thing. But over time, I saw there were a number of things that we were doing in restructuring, which
I think it’s probably fair to describe as a bit boring at times. James form -filling, doing the same precedence again and again that he didn’t necessarily feel was the best way of doing it. There must have been a better way. And that got me to start looking at document automation. Originally using things which with hindsight look like quite archaic technology now and borderline kind of coding. Whereas,
things have evolved and it’s got easier and easier to do. But that first time that I saw a suite of documents that are automated, where in the past it would have taken hours to produce it, to then be able to just go out to answer a few questions and it’s going to tell me what documents I need. And it’s going to produce them all for me with all the associated paperwork. This is just amazing. And it was that that really was the trigger point for me gradually over time becoming more and more involved in our innovation.
efforts across the firm.
James Taylor (05:53) I know with a lot of law firms I’ve worked with in the past, they initially got very excited about RPA, robotic process automation, taking some of those agreements, automating things to a certain extent. We’ve now moved from just doing that into obviously artificial intelligence and machine learning as well. When you’ve seen these technologies start to be applied in the work of law firms, where do you typically see it? Is it in document?
Is it being document management side? Is it looking at risk in relation to contracts? Is it helping lawyers draft agreements or something else?
Sam Dixon (06:31) So I think it depends on the particular technology. But if you’re talking about that document automation side of things, that’s the production of documents very clearly. When you look at machine learning though, that’s usually around something like a document review. So that might be a due diligence exercise. It might be someone wanting to understand their range of contracts, whether it complies with their policies in a particular area. They might be trying to understand the lease portfolio and wanting to extract various bits of information across that portfolio because,
they’ve inherited it from someone else, it perhaps doesn’t have the level of detail and structure that they need. And that original transition machine learning tools worked to a degree to deliver that task. And there has been some success on that front. I think where it gets really interesting is that generative AI is able to do a lot of that work without the need for lots and lots of examples.
and the proactive work to train the particular machine learning tool to look for particular points of interest.
James Taylor (07:41) Now your work obviously around innovation, a lot of law firms struggle around innovation because it’s traditionally the legal industry is one that’s focused on billable hours, your six minute increments or however long it is. And so everyone obviously partners associates very focused on those billable hours and to be able to take a step back and think actually, is there a better way of doing this or a smarter way, a more productive way of doing it? It’s often very difficult when people just focus on those billable hours. How did you…
to change the mindset within a firm, especially with those colleagues of yours who maybe said, we’ve been doing this for years, why do we have to change it?
Sam Dixon (08:20) I think you chose a great word at the start of that, James, which is traditional. And law is a very traditional sector. People have a very traditional mindset. What we’ve tried to do to get people to think a bit more differently and to try out some of this new stuff is, first of all, just to get it on their radar. Because if they don’t know about it, then they haven’t even got the option of trying to do things differently.
So we do things like our International Innovation Week, where we work with our colleagues in the US and where you’ve spoken before, to just tell people stories about innovation, give them that inspiration. It’s about making them want to get involved. And are you going to get absolutely everyone to take a more innovative approach? No, you’re not. With the best will in the world, that’s never going to happen. But you don’t know exactly who is receptive to it and who isn’t.
So the key for me is creating that culture of innovation where it is part of the conversation and where people are enabled to suggest ideas and implement ideas. So, sorry James.
James Taylor (09:30) No, I was just going to say, so take us through like an example of that. Let’s say you’re a partner in the restructuring part of the business and you’ve been doing something for a while and it works, it’s fine. But you’re thinking, listen, maybe I want to try using some of these AI tools and thinking about things in a more innovative way. What does that process look like? Is it lead often led by the partner? Is it led from the innovation lab within it? Is it led by an associate? Is it project managers?
How does it start to come together?
Sam Dixon (10:03) So we take a two tier approach to innovation, James. And what I’m talking about there is our starting point and the first tier of that two tier approach is what we call our self -service toolkit. So we’ve been focusing on trying to sort of leverage that experience across the whole business. So rather than having a team of people centrally who are the ones who innovate, the others.
We try to stay away from that and empower everyone to do differently what they know best, what they’re dealing with day in, day out. So the self -service toolkit is a series of pieces of software with training materials made available in a way which minimizes the need for central approval, be that cost approval or whatever else so that people can pick things up.
take ideas forward with the appropriate approvals from within their own teams so that ideas aren’t being duplicated and so that time isn’t being wasted when it should be applied on something else. But really empowering everyone to be able to take that forward. We do recognize though that some of what people want to do might be a bit more ambitious. And it might require a little bit of coding skill. It might require some admin.
access rights from an IT perspective, which with the best rule in the world, we’re not going to expect our lawyers to have. In my view, I don’t think lawyers need to be coders. I mean, query in the modern world of low and no code, how much coders need to be coders? But lawyers for me certainly don’t need to be. And therefore, we have the second tier, which is the complex automations. And that’s where you’re looking at potentially an end -to -end process.
with a lot of heavy automation in there and probably integrations between multiple different systems.
James Taylor (12:01) So let’s say on that then, let’s say you’re having all folks from different parts of the business say, we’ve got this problem, we think we could use, we would like to use AI to help us on this problem. Someone else sees an opportunity. How do you then kind of sort and sift all that, decide actually this is where we’re going to focus on? Is there strategic kind of pillars that you’re focused around? Will you only do projects where you think it could benefit across the whole firm rather than a particular department in the firm? How do you decide?
Sam Dixon (12:30) Well, I think it depends on what support is needed, James. I mean, the idea of the self -service toolkit is we don’t need to decide. The individual teams, for example, restructuring can say, right, well, we’ve got a sale agreement here, which we think will benefit from being automated. There’s a self -service tool available to let us do that. And we, as a restructuring team, can assess whether or not we want to use our own team resource in order to progress that.
So that’s one side of it, obviously on the complex automation side. There is a need for prioritization. And that’s done on a business case basis, as you probably expect. And so we listen to what teams want. And sometimes teams don’t necessarily know what they want. This is as much about a conversation as it is about anything else. And I’m currently touring all of our UK offices just talking to people.
floorwalking, having conversations around, right, well, what are your pain points? What are you trying to achieve? What is the most boring thing you’re doing, the most frustrating thing you’re doing? And where have you got to work around? Because that’s always a great example of an innovation opportunity is where someone’s currently trying to work around existing systems and processes. So we have those conversations. We then review the business cases and we work out where the best ROI is, frankly. And sometimes,
That’s where there is really well structured workflows that are high volume and it makes a lot of sense to put a lot of structure around that. But other times there might be things which could benefit a very broad part of the firm. And actually someone in one particular team has come up with an idea which is of much, much broader application. And then it’s not around that really well structured work necessarily. It might be.
around a particular aspect of a task or just something that everyone’s doing. Like for example, reviewing agreements in Word. There are aspects of that. One of the tools that we’ve put in the self -service toolkit recently, which has been really, really popular, is, it sounds like the simplest thing in the world, but essentially it’s a sidebar in Word that scans your Word document and it allows you, rather than…
jumping around the document back to definition tables and clause 12 .5 that’s referenced down here, it allows you to just double click on the work, the defined term, or double click on the relevant clause, and it pops up alongside you. So you don’t have that constant context switching and loss of focus. And it turns out that is something that is applicable to a really large part of the work that we do. And it’s saved an awful lot of time and to be frank, has probably improved consistency as well because…
even the best lawyers in the world get tired and sometimes miss things.
James Taylor (15:27) So how do you decide, and this is the thing I’m starting to see with some firms where they’re saying they’ve been using a lot of off the shelf products from different providers. Some that focus very much on the legal industry, others that are just more broad like the chat, GPTs of this world, for example. And then there’s those firms that say, actually, we are going to employ our own data scientists. We’re going to build our own models. We’re going to do that work as well, which is obviously more expensive and sometimes is not in the…
the usual field that a law firms would do. Have you made that, have you started coming up against that? Have you started thinking about that decision about, okay, when are we going to have to maybe think about starting to build our own things that will have basically be WombleBone Dickinson creative products?
Sam Dixon (16:12) The buy v build argument is something that’s been going on in the legal sector for a long, long time. And I’m largely still of the mindset that firms that specialize in developing software, be that for legal tech or otherwise, are probably going to win and probably going to produce something better than we can. It’s the old adage of keeping the main thing the main thing, isn’t it? What we do is provide legal services. We don’t develop software.
Where we really have the advantage is in using that software, in integrating different pieces of software together using APIs where that might not have been done previously. And that’s where the edge is. However, I do think there’s a bit of a blurring of the line now between buy and build, because how you’re using some of these tools increasingly starts to look like building rather than buying. So.
I mean, you reference people building their own models. Personally, I think the idea of someone building their own large language model as a law firm is bonkers. The scale that is required and the broad capability that existing models have, it just doesn’t make sense to me for someone to build their own model. But you can go and use Microsoft Azure Studio, OpenAI Studio, to develop your own.
GenAI powered chatbots. And that’s something that we have done. Now is that buy, is that build? We’ve created the system messages, we’ve played around with the p -values, the k -values, the temperature, we’ve put the data set into it. I don’t know whether it’s buy or build in that situation where we bought in a tool and then we’ve used it to build a GenAI chatbot. And frankly, I guess it doesn’t really matter which side of the line that falls in.
And we’ve started relatively simple and there’s an ambition to build out from there. So what we’ve built so far, we’re calling iWomble. And iWomble currently looks over our 70 something policies and procedures and answers plain English questions about them. In line with our AI policy, people still need to verify the answers. They can’t completely rely on what’s provided, but we’ve found, passed over a relatively small data set, what we’ve
built, bought, is really quite accurate. And people are finding it far, far easier to get to the right answers, especially when some questions are answered across multiple policies. And it brings them all together, gives them an answer like if I asked you the question and you knew all of our policies, the kind of answer that you would give together with citations so that people can go and check them. And then that saved a lot of time. And due course, we’ll build that out on a modular basis to look at all sorts of other areas of the business as well.
James Taylor (19:12) If I was a client, one question is going to be coming up in my head just now. Okay, when I get my bill and I have partner X, 20 hours, a junior associate X amount of hours, paralegal X amount of hours, where does the AI, where does AI Womble AI, AI Womble live in that? Are you going to bill that as a separate kind of product service within it, or are you just seeing this as something that just helps augment the…
the folks that actually already work in your firm.
Sam Dixon (19:45) I think it’s still quite fluid at the moment, to be honest with you, James. I think the whole sector is trying to work out how generative AI is going to impact pricing. For me, currently, it’s a question of looking at things on a case -by -case basis. We are still, I believe, at a relatively early stage in gen AI being applied to law. So there are a number of major vendors who are building gen AI solutions onto existing products. And the roadmap for those is sort of
during the course of this year. So a lot of the legal specific benefit is still to be realized. When you look at something like iWamble, for example, those questions around policies and procedures, clients are benefiting there because some of those policy questions will be around how a particular process works. And we’re making sure that people get to the right answer quickly. Now, some of that probably wasn’t time that was.
was ever charged to clients in the first place because it’s our own internal policies. Some of it, depending on the nature, might well be. So there’s some savings and efficiencies there which would just be passed on. The more general potential for this around document review and things like that will be discussed on a case -by -case basis. So it might be that clients are given the option, for example. It might be, look, we’ve got this new tool.
We can do it this way, and we can agree a fixed price of x. Or if you prefer, we can do it a different way. And it’ll be charged based on time, but those rates might reflect, for example, the overhead cost of the AI. So there’s different ways of looking at it. Whether we’ll get to a place where there’s a technology charge.
that sits on files alongside time, for example. That might be one route that the industry goes. But I know that when other industries have tried that, there’s been some pushback there. So I think that could be challenging. One thing that could well happen, James, and as I say, this is all really fluid at the moment, it might well be that as with other overheads, essentially, chargeout rates are adjusted.
to reflect the fact that work is being done more efficiently, but there’s a big investment cost in these tools in the first place. So it could be that it’s offset that way, but time will tell.
James Taylor (22:08) Yeah, I was I was thinking we had one of our other guests we’ve had on the the season is Sir David, Professor Sir David Allman, who was the formerly head of GCHQ. And so what with all the intelligence services, one stat he shared was of the public of publicly indexed information is out there, I when you’re on Google or Yahoo, wherever, that is only 0 .3 % of information exists, because most information exists on intranets or
dark web or places that the general public do not have access to as well. And one thing I was wondering there was, were some of these larger clients that you might have where you say, listen, we can maybe do a, almost a quick pro -crop because AI, we need data to train it on. And if there’s some way that we can obviously, it needs to data security and all the things and anonymize and all the things you would normally have, but there’s almost a bit of a competitive advantage there because some of your clients who have large data sets,
large amounts of information going back many, many years, that’s amazing information to train an AI on.
Sam Dixon (23:14) It is, and I’m sure over time we will see more and more licensing style deals to get access to content that isn’t indexed, like the Financial Times announced last week or the week before. I think for a law firm, it’s really, really challenging because you’ve got that duty of confidentiality, you’ve got all the information security requirements, you’ve got all the data protection requirements, and…
Again, I guess it goes back to keeping the main thing, the main thing. To what extent do we want to be distracting from what we do best by having conversations with clients around potentially acquiring their data for a different purpose to how we normally use it, which is essentially what we will be talking about. And I don’t know.
Call me traditional James, call me someone who’s been trained as a lawyer, but it just makes me inherently nervous and I wonder if actually the way that that will progress is for the really big players to approach some of the big multinationals and do licensing deals with them in the same way as they have done with the FT rather than trying to partner with law firms who leverage it.
James Taylor (24:28) Yeah, it’s almost a little bit like the within the UK with the NHS data that’s been anonymized. So and just different companies that have access to that so that they can run models and do, you know, use AI assay models and things to kind of test but individuals information is not necessarily known by that AI. I’m interested, you know, with your your other side of view, which is the DJ, which we’ve come to just now. I mean, the world of music is being
changed so fast just now because of AI, especially generative AI. I was playing with something for an event I’m doing in London later this week, a tool called Suno AI. I don’t know whether you’ve been playing with it at all where you can just write in some ideas for some lyrics, give it the kind of theme that you, the kind of style of music you want to do, and it will do you a track. And it sends this real sounding audio, real sounding vocals, real sounding everything. And it’s great. It’s good for getting a first idea. And some of them are quite funny as well.
Are there any things that you’ve seen within the music space and your background as a DJ where you’re kind of thinking, actually, I’m starting to see this now within the legal profession, perhaps in terms of how the job is changing or how we’re going to have to take a certain approach or a certain position in terms of how we work with AI?
Sam Dixon (25:47) Well, I think there are going to be parallels across lots and lots of different sectors. And I think if you look at how DJing has evolved over time, I started in the CDJ era. So just after vinyl, the early days of CDs being the medium of choice, simply because you could carry more of them. But you were still actually mixing. You were still exercising a degree of skill over time.
And I suspect there’s lots of modern DJs who would be screaming the, their radios right now, but over time, technology and earlier forms of AI have increasingly been able to say, right, well, this is this many beats per minute. That’s that many beats per minute. and what we can do is marry that up and we can line up. So when you, when you drop the one track over the other, actually you’re slightly off in your timing and therefore I’m going to adjust it for you and make it play. So what that’s done over time is level the playing field a bit.
and allow people to, more people to access that particular profession and to perform at a standard that they weren’t previously able to perform. And I suspect that generative AI might have a similar levelling approach for certain bits of legal work going forwards. And the key will then be, well, what skills are the ones that really add the value?
when you get to that place. And for me, when you look at what’s going to be left as AI advances, and who knows when we’ll get to the end game on that. But it’s going to be things like the social intelligence and that complex problem solving in a complicated set of circumstances. And that’s where I think lawyers need to be really focused on developing those skills and making sure they remain relevant. And the other thing is you’ve got to accept
that the world will change and you can’t fight against that. It’s better to be part of that change and to embrace it and to accept that the skills that you needed before are different to the skills that are needed now. I mean, handwriting is a lot less relevant in the role of the modern lawyer than it used to be, James. I think many lawyers would argue with that. So it’s just another step in the evolution.
James Taylor (28:13) guess also, you got a front row seat of this in terms of all those young trainees are coming in young and older trainees, you know, people are going to university later in life. But some of the younger trainees who have come up being that first generation who have been using chat GPT for in their exams, for example, in different ways, they’re now coming into your firm saying, Hey, I was able to use this when I was at university studying for my law degree, why can I not have access to these same tools in a firm? So you’re kind of you’re coming.
You’re going to be coming up against that as well. Quickfire questions as we start to finish up here as well. Is there a quote or a line or statement that you kind of live by that you often kind of is kind of your, is your kind of compass in life in some way?
Sam Dixon (29:06) I’m not sure that there’s any one statement to be honest with you James.
I mean, I was once mocked roundly and I suspect I’m about to be again, but I will do it because it’s the answer to the question, I guess. I was once stopped and interviewed by someone from Radio Lancashire and asked exactly the same question, essentially. And as a 16 -year -old, I said, keep it smooth. That was my response. And I guess as cringe -worthy as that was and as much abuse as I received from…
James Taylor (29:34) Keep it smooth. Keep it smooth.
Sam Dixon (29:43) friends at the time for saying that. I think there is a certain truth in just staying calm and objectively assessing problems in order to properly work out what an innovative solution to that problem is, which is my attempt at a neat segue into your next question.
James Taylor (30:04) And then, so on that, we’ve been talking about just having a sense of perspective on things and assessing in that way as well. Are there any tools that you use or apps that you use you find are very useful in the kind of work that you do? We’ve mentioned obviously the Chat GPT and different Microsoft tools and things. Are there any that you particularly think, I don’t think I can live without this now?
Sam Dixon (30:31) Well, I think it’s probably more use case for one of the tools we’ve touched on rather than anything else. And that is generative AI for me has become a really useful sounding board. It’s essentially a coach for me. So I might draft a new idea, a new element of our strategy, and then say to it, right, act as our managing partner and ask.
what questions would you ask about this documentation? Critique this for me. And I use that on an iterative basis to try and anticipate some of the things that people might ask and some of the challenge that might be put back against a particular idea.
James Taylor (31:12) I use a very similar thing I call virtual masterminds where I’ll put in an idea for a project or a business plan that we have, and then I’ll give it six people that I respect who have very different perspectives on business and things. And I’ll say, okay, find all the flaws on this. And it’s fascinating because you get to see from different perspectives and then we kind of do the human bit, which we kind of triangulate all of that and say, okay, that’s fine. Now that I know how Elon would approach it or how Warren Buffett would approach it.
now I need to think like, okay, how would Sam Dixon approach it? What would we do? What about books? Are there any books that you can recommend to our listeners, maybe around AI or the future in some way?
Sam Dixon (31:56) Well, Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, I’m sure you’re familiar with it, James, is a fascinating read about AI and about, well, I would guess the potential doomsday scenarios that we might all face. But in approaching those doomsday scenarios, you do get a reasonably good feel for the progression of AI over time and a good grounding in what AI is.
James Taylor (32:24) And if people want to connect with you to learn more about Womble Bond Dickinson, more about the firm, what’s the best place for them to go and do that?
Sam Dixon (32:31) Well, you can find me on LinkedIn or on X, I am at Innovation in Law.
James Taylor (32:38) Sam Dixon, Chief Innovation Officer of Law firm 1 with Womble Bond Dickinson Thank you so much for being a guest on the SuperCreativity Podcast.
John Craske of CMS, Collaboration between Humans and Machines in the Legal Industry #340
18 Jun 2024
John Craske of CMS, Collaboration between Humans and Machines in the Legal Industry #340
Summary
John Craske, the director of innovation at CMS, discusses the firm’s AI strategy and the role of innovation in the legal industry. He emphasizes the importance of fostering a culture of curiosity and experimentation. The firm has implemented an innovation department and introduced innovation hours to encourage employees to pursue their ideas. Craske believes that AI can enhance the efficiency of legal work and sees opportunities for collaboration between humans and machines. He also highlights the need for foundational legal skills and human skills like empathy and creativity.
Sound Bites
“We’re using our computers more like electronic typewriters for many years.”
“Innovation hours are like seed funding for ideas.”
“AI has captured the imagination of people in a way that lots of other technology has never had.”
Fostering a culture of curiosity and experimentation is crucial for innovation in the legal industry.
Implementing an innovation department and introducing innovation hours can encourage employees to pursue their ideas.
AI can enhance the efficiency of legal work, but collaboration between humans and machines is essential.
Foundational legal skills and human skills like empathy and creativity are still valuable in the age of AI.
John Craske is responsible for the innovation and knowledge functions at CMS, with the aim of helping their clients and business to work smarter: to find the right balance between client satisfaction, cost effectiveness, profitability and opportunities for our people. He leads their dynamic Legal Innovation, Legal Operations and Project Management, Legal Tech, Managed Legal Services and Knowledge teams. He’s passionate about fostering a culture of innovation and encouraging people to be curious, ask questions and experiment. John is currently leading our firmwide AI strategy as tjeu look to use AI to supercharge our digital transformation programme. He regularly works with clients (and others in the legal industry) to help design / implement practical (and innovative) solutions to their challenges.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
james-taylors-studio-hj5fj_james-taylor-may-27-2024-001.txt James Taylor (00:08) John Craske is the director of innovation at CMS, an international law firm with offices in over 40 countries. He is responsible for innovation and knowledge functions at CMS with the aim of helping their clients and businesses to work smarter and to find the right balance between client satisfaction, cost effectiveness, profitability, and opportunities for their people. John leads CMS’s dynamic legal innovation, legal operations and project management, legal tech, managed legal services, and knowledge teams.
He’s passionate about fostering a culture of innovation and encouraging people to be curious, ask questions and experiment. Currently, he’s leading the firm -wide AI strategy at CMS as they look at AI to supercharge their digital transformation program. In his role, John regularly works with clients and others in the legal industry to help design, implement practical and innovative solutions to their challenges. He loves hearing about specific legal and business challenges.
that clients have and then trying to solve them. And John, welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.
John Craske (01:09) Thanks James, lovely to be here.
James Taylor (01:11) So share with us what’s going on in your world just now, what currently has your focus.
John Craske (01:15) Well, thanks for the intro. Yeah. I think the focus at the moment is working hard on our AI strategy roadmap. But secretly, I think we’re using that to help kickstart the digital transformation innovation journey for all of our lawyers. That’s been quite hard in a law firm when I think probably if I’m being unkind, I would say we’ve been using our computers more like electronic typewriters for many years. So it’s great to sort of be secretly using that to help drive it.
James Taylor (01:45) Well, we’re definitely gonna get into the AI piece, we’re gonna get into the genesis of AI piece as it affects the legal industry. Just let everyone know, my wife is a lawyer and a solicitor, so I’ve been getting a kind of a bit of a seat to see how that world is transforming with some of my legal clients as well. But let’s just take you back, how did you get into this work you do? Did you come from the legal profession before that or from the technology background?
John Craske (02:09) Yes, so I’m a qualified lawyer. I’m actually a Scottish Solicitor, even though being English, so I live up in Scotland. I know you do too, James. And I’ve always been interested in that sort of junction between the practice of law and the business of law. But a long time ago, my wife told me I need to do something a bit more creative and she didn’t mean painting or music, although I do love music. And then I think it was a series of…
lucky accidents maybe that everyone’s careers a bit like that so you know I had a boss I didn’t get on with so well we did a merger with Anderson Legal and then a de -merger with Anderson Legal when the Enron Scramble happened and then another things like that and so I’ve just kind of taken the opportunities when there’s been moments of change to get into that why are we doing things the way we’re doing it and I’m also always been that person in the room who asks the stupid questions and
why are we doing it like this? And that’s kind of led me down the path that I’ve gone down.
James Taylor (03:10) Now, a lot of my legal clients have innovation departments, innovation labs. I was speaking the other week for a law firm. They had an innovation week to help their partners and their associates and their administrators kind of focus around legal tech and innovation. Tell us about the development of the innovation department within your business. How did that get started? How did it start to develop over time?
John Craske (03:40) Sure, so I think we started probably a good long time ago. I mean, we’ve always been interested in using technology to help us be as efficient as we can be, both for our clients benefit, but also because the more efficient we are, then obviously the more profitable we can be like every other business. So for both of those reasons. But…
think the lawyers find it quite difficult to get involved and think about how they can use technology themselves. It’s almost like they would want somebody else to do it for them or provide it for them or innovate to them and then maybe that’s something we can come back to a bit later. So we started off quite gently. We did lots of work around legal project management and helping people think about
how they might structure their work in a sort of more innovative way. But then we realized we had a sort of missing gap and we were talking to all of the practice groups about innovation and what does the future of their work look like and how they’re gonna develop in the future. And actually they almost universally then said, that’s great John, but what tech have we got? And…
and so we were like okay no we’re not really here to talk about technology that might well be a way that you can use you can use technology to help you innovate but that’s not what we’re here to talk about and they’re like yeah well we’ll get to that our clients are demanding to know what technology we use so what tech have we got so that’s when we built out our legal tech capabilities and built our portfolio of tools that we’ve got and then moved on from there and actually we’ve always whilst we’ve always been sort of nudging away at the
core innovation piece, it’s only relatively recently when we’ve been able to go back and say, okay, well we’re back to talk to you about innovation. And still they say often, well what tech have you got? And we’re like, okay, well we’ve got a good answer to that now, we’ve got a team that can help you and we’ve got lots of tools. We really want to help you think about what ideas you’ve got for the way you deliver your work, what services you deliver and stuff. So we’ve incrementally grown the team out and it’s been a bit like a guerrilla war as well. So.
messages from the top and infiltrating from the bottom as well.
James Taylor (05:58) Now there’s this tension that often exists in legal firms and accountancy firms, audit firms, where as a lawyer, you’re often thought to, you think in billable hours or five, 10 minute chunks. You’re always having to do your, I know lawyers have to do their time sheets and they’re thinking about that and the files and everything as well. And innovation obviously doesn’t work in that way. It kind of works in a slightly different way where we sometimes have to step away from the problem, kind of think from different perspectives, do a lot of research.
That takes time, that takes resources to do that as well. So how have you worked with the people within the business in order to get them to think about really innovation and the value of innovation as a concept and something that they should do, rather than it’s like, well, this is a compliance thing or you think about innovation from that perspective.
John Craske (06:50) Yeah, sure. It’s actually, funnily enough, it’s every six minutes. Well, most law firms, it’s every six minutes rather than five or 10 because it’s a neat divider for the hour because you get 10 of them in an hour, right? But you’re absolutely right. It’s one of the key drivers in the law firm is this sort of need to record every six minutes of your day. And actually, most lawyers, certainly in private practice, will have targets around the number of…
billable hours or billed hours that they have to achieve in a year and if they don’t achieve those targets then they don’t get their bonus. So you know, we all know you get what you measure and so that’s what the lawyers do of course is that’s why they were driving. So we’ve done a number of things. The first thing is we’ve started at the bottom and we’ve made sure that innovation is in everybody’s competencies and that the people understand it’s part of their job.
Now, that’s only a beginning. We also try and do some training around things like creativity. I actually heard somebody once say to me, I’m sure you’ll disagree with this, but I heard someone say to me that, you can’t train creativity. But I don’t think that’s true at all. I think you absolutely can. But probably the, you know, one of the most interesting thing we did was introduce this concept called innovation hours. And I managed to convince the management team that.
This would be a valuable way of demonstrating to both the firm and to our clients that we took innovation seriously. So the way they work is if someone’s got an idea, think of it like seed funding for ideas and if they’ve got an interesting idea that they want to pursue then they can say, hey I’ve got this idea, this is what it’s about and can I have a budget of hours? And so then they kind of get a budget for hours the same way they would get a budget of hours if they were working on a client job. So…
and then we would support them with either help accessing tech if they need to do that or with the creative process if they need that or connecting them with other people around the firm or externally to try and experiment with their idea. Importantly I guess that the hours aren’t contingent on whatever it is being successful, it doesn’t matter, it’s more about them getting into the zone of trying some things out. So over the years we’ve had an increasing number of
innovation hours projects. And as I said, it’s partly symbolic. Of course, it’s partly practical because it gives people hours that count towards their target, but it’s also partly symbolic because it shows the way that that’s important for the firm.
James Taylor (09:32) And how do you link that in terms of the strategy of the firm as well? So let’s say you have a partner or associates or people within the marketing functions of a law firm and they want to, they have maybe an idea of a problem they want to try and solve or an opportunity you want to look at. So they need to think in an innovative way. How do you then basically maybe build a team around this? How do you ensure that it is in alignment with what you’re trying to do as a firm? So it’s maybe has wider.
applications across the firm, so it has maybe a bigger impact. And then how do you go to that next stage where maybe you’re going from say a prototype of an idea to actually it being reviewed and saying actually this is something that we can give more additional resources to.
John Craske (10:16) I think we try and start early and just help and the short version is and then just iterate around it to try and improve it, make it better, improve it, make it better. Each of the practice groups, so the legal departments in the firm has got a partner who’s responsible for innovation and they tend to have a group around them of lawyers who are interested in it and so we try and cultivate that and often…
the ideas for innovation project will come out of those groups not exclusively sometimes they come from someone who just got you know and and and idea to help solve the real pain point for them or for their clients and but we really trying support each person as they come through but we don’t try and do it for them i think that’s been quite an interesting journey that we’ve been on in and it in as i said earlier we quite often get the lawyers wanting us to innovate for the more to them and actually
that may be a bit like parenting. You can’t do that for them. You have to kind of do enough to support them and help them along the way, but you can’t do it for them. They need to learn themselves. And then, depending on what the idea is, we will either extend the project or iterate again around it. And then there’s been a few of them which have ended up being sort of market -facing things that we’ve launched, or just as many which are internal things about efficiencies or improving things for teams.
James Taylor (11:42) Now, whenever you start talking with lawyers about innovation, the first term that usually comes up is artificial intelligence. How are we going to implement AI and what we’re going to do? How is it going to make us more productive? Is that a threat? Are we going to get rid of all these paralegals that we have in our law firms just now? So tell me, in terms of your personal approach to artificial intelligence, where do you see the biggest opportunities in the short term for firms like yours? And then maybe what are you a bit more excited about?
in the medium to longer term around AI.
John Craske (12:14) Yeah, so I mean, I think it’s captured the imagination of people in a way that lots of other technology has never had, has before, at least I’m starting to sound like a beer advert if I say it quite like that. But the, yeah, and I think that’s been brilliant because we’ve, for one of the first, which is why we’re using it as a lever to help drive the digital transformation, because for the first time people are coming to us and saying, hey, how could I use this? Or what can I do with this? Which is really exciting.
I think there’s loads of opportunities to work with the technology to improve the way that we work. I think it’s really, really actually fascinating because people do say, well, what’s going to happen with our particularly junior resource and whether that’s paralegals or junior lawyers. And actually, I think…
The key, and people at work who are bored of me hearing me say this now, I think the key is to think about this sort of human plus machine. And I know from watching some of your stuff, James, that this idea of working on the human bits is something that you’re passionate about as well. But I think what we need to be doing is we need to be thinking about the future. So right now we can be using AI in what we do. And that can improve the efficiency of what we do. And we’re doing lots of experiments with AI.
things and we’re trying out a bit of a portfolio approach on lots of tools. So we can do that now, but we need to be thinking also about the longer term, about how are people going to be working in the future and what skills will they need to work with the machine, so the plus bit, but also what are the human skills that they’re going to need to make the best, do the best job. There’s also a bit of a thing around foundational skills. And this is not just law, but if machines are going to be doing
what our junior people are going to be doing. We still need senior people. We still need senior doctors, chefs, lawyers, whatever it is that, you know, where some of the stuff might be being done by machines. But how do you get to be a senior person if you’ve not been the apprentice, if you’ve not learned the basic skills? So we’re still going to, so those people are still going to be needed in the system. So I’m not worried about, you know, major like losses of jobs in the legal industry.
I think there is going to be major change in the legal industry though in terms of the tasks that people do. But I think that people will, so we’re going to need to think very carefully about how we build those foundational skills, legal skills in our case, into people and all the way through from university through to when they’re training in a law firm and then getting experience on jobs. But I think we’re also going to have to think about those human skills. So human skills, things like empathy and emotional intelligence and creativity and curiosity.
and those things that make us fundamentally human. I think actually we’re going to paradoxically we’re going to need those things even more in the relatively medium to medium to longer term, maybe not immediately. And that’s going to be an interesting thing, as I think as a, you know, for law firms, for industry, for humans, I think it’s really fascinating.
James Taylor (15:30) a few years ago in California, I used to live in California and there was a young gentleman called Robert Huang and Robert trained as a computer scientist first of all learning about AI and then he went and trained as a lawyer. I’m not quite sure why you would go from being a software engineer to a lawyer, it’s kind of unusual, I can see you maybe going the other way but so he went trained as a lawyer and his early years as an associate he realized how mind -numbingly boring a lot of legal
work is, especially if you’re doing due diligence and certain things, and he said there must be a better way of doing this. So what he would do is, during the day he would do his legal work, and at night he went home and he basically programmed and worked on AI programs to replace himself. That’s really what he was doing, and by the end of the year he’d essentially replaced himself by building out different tools and functions to do that, and then being entrepreneurial he went and started a new type of law firm called, I think it was called Robot, Robot and Huang.
and there were three partners. Two of the partners were AIs and one of the partner was him as the human. And one, I think Darya, she specializes in AI, but specialized in litigation. And the other one specialized in mergers and acquisitions, I seem to remember. And what I find interesting about that is what then the human, what he was doing in his role. And it was exactly what you were speaking about there. It was the, the creator work, the curious work, the strategizing, empathy, building, building that relationship with clients.
so much of the kind of softer things that we don’t think, while the machine was able to do what is better doing at a tactical level as well. And certainly a lot of my clients, that’s what I’m seeing a lot of them using that for the first level is amazing for discovery, amazing for being able to send an algorithm across all of your legal agreements to say, hey, there’s this new Brexit has just happened or something has just happened. What is the risk factors to all of our legal agreements that we have with our clients just now?
and it pulls up that. So there’s obviously great things there as well. And I don’t know whether you’re seeing this in some of my clients, I’m seeing what traditionally was, let’s say, a 30 page contract, because some of these firms are using AI now, and on both sides are using AI, we’re now seeing 100 page contracts, because the AIs are kind of adding things that maybe the human wouldn’t necessarily have thought about adding before.
John Craske (17:47) Well, I think we’ve seen the trend of contracts getting longer and longer for a good while actually. And I’m not sure it’s AI that’s driving that. It’s a mix of the world just being more regulation, more uncertainty, more volatility, all sorts of things and complexity that’s going on in the world. But you’re right. And I do wonder whether actually they will go over a peak and then they’ll start getting shorter again because they’ll only put in the contract the things that you really need. Who knows? But yeah, absolutely. We’re…
when we’re seeing AI helpers, you know, summarize meetings and actions, coach you in your email with your drafting with your, you know, like your sidekick. But it is really interesting to think about the mode in which people are using it because actually quite a lot of lawyers are good at delegating. So delegating to a more junior lawyer to do that or paralegal to do a task, but not so good at sort of
co -creating and working with and a lot of the interesting challenges around AI especially around the sort of edge of where AI is capable today and of course that edge is moving out all the time. It’s not universally good at every task and one tool isn’t universally good at every task so but so when you’re on the edge of the capabilities you need to be working with it not delegating to it. So if something is very capable then you can delegate to it but if something you know and
and there’s a lot of noise in the world around hallucinations of generative AI but if you’re working with something then actually a lot of those risks around hallucinations go away because you’re using it, you’re working directly with it to help you in your work process, whatever that is. So yeah, I think that’s going to be really interesting to watch.
James Taylor (19:36) I know within the world of management consulting, there was a study done the other day by Harvard University and Boston Consulting Group, where they gave a bunch of their consultants access to a generative AI. And it was interesting just seeing how, I think it increased productivity by 40%, the task was judged to be, I think, 12 % better in terms of quality. But what I thought was interesting about it was that you had these two groups in particular that really excelled, and they were called Cyborgs and Centaurs. So, yeah.
John Craske (19:44) Yeah, that’s exactly it.
That’s right, exactly that, that’s what I’m referring to.
James Taylor (20:04) Yeah, so the Centaurs were what you were kind of talking about a little bit there, where you would look at a project or a task and you would say, okay, these are the things that the AI, I’m going to give to this AI to do this particular task, and these are the things that I’m going to reserve as humans. Whereas the cyborgs, and they were almost intertwining everything that they were doing with AI. It became like a guitar player would have a guitar, or, you know, it just became an extension of themselves. And that is the kind of more that, that kind of co -pilot thing kind of going on. It’s more collaborative in nature.
John Craske (20:35) i think that’s exactly right and that’s the same study of referring to them to read if any of the listeners are wanting to get that it’s called the navigating the jagged edge of a i a that’s a harvard business review article and within that they they collaborated with boston consulting group is worth reading the whole thing but actually that nothing cyborgs and sent or this is like almost like a a footnote in appendix seven or something is right at the very end and but i think it’s one of the most interesting nuggets in the whole thing and
James Taylor (20:58) Ha ha.
John Craske (21:04) If I’ve got time, my daughter, if she ever listens to this, will be embarrassed about me telling you this story. So I read that and I didn’t really absorb it. And then just over Christmas time, she was doing some homework, or before Christmas, she was doing some homework at the kitchen table and I was cooking. And she was writing an essay, a critical essay on a book they’d been reading in class, which is, it’s another twist in the tale. It’s a book about female empowerment, about…
Oliver Twist’s sister that you’ve never heard about before and and and she had chat GPT open and she had a word processor open and she was Working with it in the way you described like playing a guitar So she didn’t go chatgy page chatgy PT write me an essay about this book You know the way that we’re all worried about people cheating on exams or whatever with generative AI She just didn’t do that. She was like she’s the right route a bit and she went. I’m not sure about some words
Hey, can you give me some words that mean this or describe that? And then she wrote a bit more and then she said, not sure about that paragraph, copied that paragraph into chat. Can you help me rewrite this? And she was backwards and forwards all the way through. And so she produced something which was probably, she produced something quicker and probably better than had she written it herself, but she didn’t just delegate the task to the AI. And I think that was for me a real, a real light bulb moment about how we should be.
talking to our people about how they should be using AI at the moment, especially at that jagged edge of AI where it’s not universally capable at that thing. So forgive me for the story, James.
James Taylor (22:38) No, but I think it’s great as well. I mean, obviously that generation is coming through now. A friend of mine, Mark Prensky coined the term digital natives and you know, very much. And actually her generation is way beyond that. They’re AI natives. You know, they’re using these tools in slightly different ways. My wife who’s been in law for a long time, she hadn’t really been using many of these tools. And I just kind of sat down with her one day and she was having to…
John Craske (22:46) Yeah, totally.
James Taylor (23:05) review a new piece of legislation that’s currently going through the courts, going through the Scottish Parliament around food. I think it’s called the Good Food Bill or something around food. And it was amazing because what she was able to do was to pull in all these different studies from different places, feed it in, and then it was about the quality of the questions that she was asking, in this case, to chat GBT, to help her think about how to term something, how to kind of use the language, in this case, of the…
the Scottish government to kind of refer back to what she was wanting to do, her target, her goal with this particular thing. And it was like that, I was saying, and you could see her, it was the first time I’d really seen her eyes kind of go sparkle because she’d, I didn’t realize I could use it in this way. I just thought, I didn’t realize I could use it as that type of collaborator. So it’s not too late for everyone. If you’re kind of coming to this a little bit later in life and you’re not a youngster, then there’s lots of opportunities here.
John Craske (24:03) Yeah, totally. And that’s why I talk about human plus machine. Because so you’re now, that sort of prompting skills we’re talking about is that plus bit, right? So you have to work how to work with it as well. But you still need the human questions and things. So you need to be able to ask them. So yeah, I think it’s lovely when we start to see that, whether it’s at home or at work and people exploring it. I think it’s great.
James Taylor (24:30) And then your own journey as a lawyer working within innovation as well, was there a key insight or a light bulb moment in your life and you work your own creative journey?
John Craske (24:43) I think when I realized, I mean I’ve always been interested in this junction between the practice of law and business and law, but when you described doing due diligence as really boring, I was a real estate lawyer so I was just doing lots of occupational leases, which for those of you if you’re not a lawyer means…
if you ever get a shopping center and all of the units in their elect every one of those got a leak behind it and the whole framework documents of such a doing those all day and there’s only so many occupational leases i think i could could do and and so i’d and that my wife and saying to me that i needed to do something more creative is probably the real sparkle and what led me down this that this path i think this many light bulb moments all of the all the time though i think it’s
you know so i i’d wanted home just a couple weeks ago and i bought myself a new saxophone because i’ve never i’ve always wanted one i can’t play the saxophone it’s not very well yet but i have played the clarinet for ages and the guy in the music shop he was like olivander honestly matching instruments and things to people but i’ve been playing my clarinet with the same mouthpiece i’m fifty one now so it must have been for forty years with the same mouthpiece and he went
you’re on beginners mouthpiece what you want is one of these and so he sold me a new mouthpiece a bit of plastic only at you know 100 pounds or whatever it was and you think 100 pounds for a mouthpiece and I played it and it was like it was like the clouds parted and the sun came out so you know so that idea of having the right kit and knowing your as part of knowing your craft and things because you know people always say that it’s about the kit but of course it’s not it’s this join between the person the human and the
kit and knowing how to use it whatever you’re doing so yeah there’s a there’s a personal one and a work one.
James Taylor (26:36) Yeah, that reminds me a little, we had a guest on the show a little while ago, Professor Roger Neybone, who’s the world’s leading expert on experts. He wrote a book all about experts and he’s a surgeon originally. And he talks about this idea of a mise en place in French, you know, if you’re a chef, you have certain tools closer by because these are the ones you’re using all the time. Well, you might have other ones a little bit kind of further out of reach because you’re not using those so often. It’s that distinction of being able to know which tool to use in the right way, in the right order for the right
right thing and that adds, you know, that adds a little bit of distinction from someone that’s just an amateur in what they’re doing to actually someone who’s a professional and more skilled and more expert at it as well. Let’s get into some final quickfire questions before we finish up here. First of all, is there a quote that you live by that kind of a guiding light for you in your life?
John Craske (27:29) I don’t think I’m a big one for quotes or sound bites, but I do firmly believe that you get out what you put in. And I remind myself to try and lead with kindness.
James Taylor (27:38) Beautiful. And is there an online resource? We’ve been talking a lot about tools and technology today, but is there an online resource or a tool, like Gmail or Evernote, that you find very useful in your work?
John Craske (27:50) I like finding new tools and things, but I think I’m going to give you a bit of a different answer. I love Spotify. It’s always got something to listen to, whether that’s new music, trying to take you away or focus on something or podcasts or audiobooks. I consume new music all of the time, almost all genres, so I love Spotify.
James Taylor (28:08) Great talk, great talk. And if you could only recommend one book to our listeners, what would that book be?
John Craske (28:14) We’ve been talking about AI today, so I think everybody should listen to or read The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleiman.
James Taylor (28:23) Great, wonderful book. And as we finish up here, Sher, what is the best way if people want to connect with you? Maybe we’ve got a lot of lawyers that listen to the show. We’ve got a lot of people within legal profession, a lot of people within innovation labs as well. If we want to connect with you, learn more about the work you do, learn about your firm, what’s the best way for them to go and do that?
John Craske (28:41) Probably just message me on LinkedIn, that’s the best way to get in touch.
James Taylor (28:45) We’ll put all these links on the show notes. People go to the SuperCreativity Podcast, go to jamestaylor.me, just look for the SuperCreativity Podcast. We’ll have all the links for this particular episode and all the other things we’ll be talking about on the show today. John Craske, thank you so much for being a guest on the SuperCreativity Podcast.
JD Meier of Microsoft, Productivity Strategies for Success #339
11 Jun 2024
JD Meier of Microsoft, Productivity Strategies for Success #339
Summary
JD Meier, high performance and innovation coach, discusses his focus on using AI to advance high performance and change how the world innovates. He emphasizes the power of one person businesses to impact and influence a billion minds. Meier shares his two-track transformation model for innovation, which involves sustaining innovation in the current business while also working on disruptive innovation for the future. He also highlights the importance of productivity and offers strategies such as setting three wins each day and reflecting on weekly achievements.
Sound Bites
“I’m all about trying to use AI to advance high performance”
“I call it billion dollar solopreneur, not because you’re going to make a billion dollars, but it’s about impacting and influencing a billion minds”
“You have your current business, which is your current business model… and then you have your future business model”
AI can be used to advance high performance and enhance senses
One person businesses have the power to impact and influence a billion minds
The two-track transformation model involves sustaining innovation in the current business while working on disruptive innovation for the future
Productivity strategies include setting three wins each day and reflecting on weekly achievements
JD Meier is a High Performance & Innovation Coach who has 25 years of experience changing the world at Microsoft. JD was the former head coach for Satya Nadella’s innovation team at Microsoft and is also the author of the bestselling book Getting Results the Agile Way. His WHY is to advance human potential and to help people realise their potential in work and life while his specialty is to provide proven practices combined with information models to advance a space. People at Microsoft know JD for innovation, productivity, and changing the world because he always took on big challenges and moved the ball forward.
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
jd-meier-the-supercreativity-podcast-with-james-taylor_copy-of-scp339-jd-meier-edit.txt James Taylor (00:08) Meyer is a high performance and innovation coach who has 25 years of experience changing the world at Microsoft. JD was the former head coach at Satya Nadella’s innovation team at Microsoft and is also the author of the bestselling book, Getting Results the Agile Way. His why is to advance human potential and to help people realize their potential in work and life, while his specialty is to provide program practices combined with information models to advance the space.
People at Microsoft know JD for innovation, productivity, and changing the world because he always took on big challenges and moved the ball forward. JD, welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.
JD Meier (00:48) Wow, that was a great intro. Thank you.
James Taylor (00:51) So share with us what’s going on in your world just now. What currently has your focus?
JD Meier (00:56) Okay. So that’s a great question. AI is definitely top of mind and specifically, I’m, I’m all about trying to use it to advance high performance. I think there’s a lot of tricks and hacks that people haven’t thought about yet specifically about enhancing your senses. And, the other big thing is really, I’m trying to change how the world innovates. I know that might sound audacious, but when I wake up in the morning, I actually ask myself how to want to change the world today. It actually guides a lot of what I do.
And with innovation, I think there’s an incredible, easy way to change how we innovate at the individual level, the team level and the org level. So that’s got my focus. The other big thing I would say is, I call it billion dollar solopreneur. I call it billion dollar solopreneur, not because you’re going to make a billion dollars. You might, but it’s about impacting and influencing a billion minds. I think that we’re in a perfect time and age where the one person business.
can actually share and scale their expertise with the world. And so I’ve been diving into that, looking at it from two perspectives on the, let’s say the left -hand side. The left -hand side is the tech arena. So what can we do with AI, of course? What can we do with social media? And what can we do with SEO? I know a lot of people think, SEO is dead, but not really. SEO, what I found, especially as an innovator, is the best way to figure out the language of your customers and your audience. There’s pains, needs, and outcomes, even if you don’t do SEO.
But so that’s on the tech side. There’s this other side though, this other side of scaling to the world. There’s tools that we have. So for example, there’s a massive transformative purpose. So for example, Nike, you know, just do it. Everybody fights their demons every day, but you get on board with Nike’s bigger mission. Microsoft empower every person in business to achieve more. Again, you know, it’s, it’s bigger than you. When you have something bigger than you, it’s easier to get on board. But there’s also these ideas of like,
simple, sticky slogans, the things that stick in your mind. And if you can create those idea viruses as the one person and then share and scale with the technology, you’re on fuego. So I think now is one of the greatest times ever to be able to change the world as one person. And even though I say one person, it doesn’t mean you’re just one person. You have your friends, your partners, your network, your family, you have your everybody, but it means that you don’t have to go and be part of a giant business to go change the world. I think that’s the key.
James Taylor (03:24) Yeah, we had a guest on the show a little while ago, Elaine Pofeld, who wrote the million dollar one person business. And I interviewed her, actually, and I spoke to her recently, we were doing an event for the New York Public Library together. And she said, if she was to change anything about the book, she said, maybe the one million is too small, because you have people, especially with technology now, that are doing and you see, you look at a number of companies now, I think of especially in the AI space who have very few actual employees.
JD Meier (03:42) It’s too small. Yep.
James Taylor (03:52) but they are billing multi -billion dollar businesses. So maybe the one person billion dollar business is closer than we think just now as well. Yeah. So you’re obviously passionate about productivity, you’re passionate about innovation as well. I thought where we’d go first is, because we’ve had a number of guests on the show recently who have talked about the challenge in being able to do the main…
JD Meier (03:53) Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s a reality. Yeah. And it’s exciting.
James Taylor (04:21) of what that business is about, whether it’s a legal business or it’s a technology business or whatever the business is. And then at the same time, innovating in their industry, innovating in their businesses as well. How do you, you know, those are two wild horses. How do you deal with those horses?
JD Meier (04:37) Yeah. Okay, so great question. It starts, believe it or not, it actually starts with your mental model. I asked an anthropologist long ago, I said, what are the best business leaders do that other business leaders don’t? And the surprise was she said, they share their mental model. I was like, for real? Like, is that really it? And it actually was, because when you don’t share your model as a leader, and you have tens of thousands of people reporting to you,
People guess and they make things up and they try to figure out how to do innovation. So they end up either doing innovation despite the organization rarely with the organization, because they don’t know what it’s supposed to be. So with that in mind, I kept going back through all my experiences, like where did people get stuck? Like why did I call it the innovator gets fired? I call it innovation gets a fired side -liner pushed out. And it’s because they don’t have a space in their mind where innovation goes. So recently I shared the model, but I call it two track transformation.
And the idea is to have a simpler, better metaphor for to do innovation in parallel. But here’s how it works. You have your current business, which is your current business model. It’s your current customers. It’s your current talent. It’s your current products and offers, and it’s your current KPIs. You know that track, but I’m, I’m letting leaders know like, look, that is your sustaining innovation track. That is your 10 % growth. Yes. Take care of it. Good. However, in parallel.
This is where we need to work future back. This is how we avoid getting disrupted. This is how we disrupt ourselves. This is your future business model. This is that second track. This is your disruptive innovation, possibly 70 % growth cumulative over time. This is your different set of talent, because it’s a different type of talent to actually focus on these kinds of things. But the reality is, is you’re stepping into the future. And this is where it’s going to be.
A lot of people get lost because they step in the future. They have no empathy for it. It’s like a stranger. You’re stepping into the future and you’re breaking it down into small business experiments to check value today. You validate value today. So what you’re really doing is you’re not suddenly wildly changing your business. What you’re doing is you’re setting up these two tracks and running them well. Because if you don’t do it like this, what happens is you use your current KPIs against the second track and you break everything. You don’t make space for innovation.
But with this, this two track mindset, with this two track mental model, you have space for both and you can do both well, especially when you recognize that, that first track that’s yeah, we’re doing innovation. Yes. You’re doing sustaining innovation, 10 % growth. Great. Do you want a piece of that 70 % growth? And do you want to have a chance to be able to survive in the future? And do you want to make sure that you’re not the one disrupted or that you disrupt yourself? Yes. Okay. So that model, it’s easy for me to whiteboard it. It lands well with people. People follow it very easily and it.
Usually it can easily get people out of the muck and the mess that they’ve been in going by all these other different, you know, models of innovation and trying to do even something as simple as like an innovation portfolio. As soon as you have those two tracks in your mind, now you know which KPI is to focus on. Now you know why they’re different. It’s intentional. And that basically makes space for the real, cause usually when people are thinking about innovation, they’re thinking about the disruptive stuff.
they’re already doing sustaining, they don’t realize that they’re innovating in their processes and their products. They’re doing that 10 % optimization, but the disruptive innovation is really where the big action is, especially in today’s world where change is so fast. And the other thing I told people do when you’re working backwards from that future to make it real, make your mock press releases, make your one page write -ups of those future scenarios that you want to bring to reality. That
lets everybody feel the future. When you can feel the future and start to create empathy, now you get more stakeholders and sponsorship in the game. And then that’s a good thing. But if we don’t, if we do not make space for this in the minds of the leaders, then there will be a lot of sabotage. Maybe not even on purpose, but it happens. But when you are very deliberate about carving out that space, you could protect and support it. Otherwise the current business.
is going to eat it up, is going to fight for the resources, is going to fight for the money, and it’s going to defeat it with the current KPIs. Does that make sense?
James Taylor (08:58) So you’re building almost like your competitor, your category killer, alongside you’re building the existing business as well. I love the idea of creating those mock -up kind of press releases. I’ve heard authors do that before where they’ve actually written up the reviews of their book before they’ve written the book to give them a sense, what value do I want to have this book? What kind of impact do I want this book to create? So you’re doing that. So that’s really kind of talking about, I guess, imagination.
JD Meier (09:03) Yeah, yeah, -huh.
Yeah.
James Taylor (09:26) and having a depth of imagination. I’m a big critic at the moment for, I see loads of great stuff on Netflix and Apple and all these great TV shows just now. But it feels at the moment when we talk about the future, a lot of the future that we see on TV and in movies is like a post -apocalyptic future. TV shows like Fallout, which are great, which are really fun and everything. But it doesn’t feel like we have so much of that painting that picture of…
JD Meier (09:27) Yes.
Yeah, right. Yep.
Yes.
James Taylor (09:56) a more optimistic future, what that could be and how technology can actually help us get there.
JD Meier (10:00) Yeah. Yep. I agree. And I think we have a deficit when it comes to the visionary leaders that can share that vision. That was actually the instigator of the billion dollar solarpreneur. I realized that people weren’t able to share the big visions. I’m like, you know, where’s the Disney’s? Where’s the Andrew Carnegie’s? Where’s the captains of the industry? And I was lucky to be surrounded by a lot of great people that were very good at articulating a future state. Like you could step into the future and they could connect the dots and they could light up these beautiful scenes of the future.
And it got people excited and inspired. And what I realized was, a lot of people don’t think about the future as this space of creativity and opportunity. They just project more of the past. So their past drives their present. And their present is driving the future, but all driven from the past. When you step out of that and you step into the future for real, but to do this, there’s also, I found that there’s another gap. So.
There’s a skill strategic foresight. It’s actually more popular in Europe than it is in the U S that kind of surprised me. But with strategic foresight, you’re learning about trends, you’re building vocabulary around the trends. So you have all of these little building blocks. So, I have a couple of frameworks that I use, but you know, one of my patterns is I call it the CEO pattern, customers, employees, and operations. You know, how do you transform the customers, the employees, the operations makes the people to realize where to focus their effort. But then the other thing I do.
Is then I would pull in, well, how does mixed reality or augmented reality change the scenario? How does AI change our customer experience? How does, and when you step into it that way, now you’re using these building blocks for innovation to create these scenes of the future. You become the choreographer, you become the director of the future. And if you decide deliberately that you’re going to work backwards from, you’re not going to accept bad scenarios in the future. You’re going to create great scenarios in the future.
you’re not going to try to predict the future. You’re actually going to create and shape it. When you come from that place, you have a lot of, it gives you a lot of empowerment. And especially if you stay on top of the trends, enough to know which ones to pay attention to enough to know which ones to ignore. And when I do that, I like to take a, a 10 year view. So if I look 10 years back, 10 years back was utility computing, your cloud companies, your Amazon, your Microsoft, your Google’s 10 years forward.
And the big mega pattern is ESG, environment, social and governance, or I think of it as good for people. I call it good for people, good for the planet. You know, think about it like that. Every business then has to reimagine itself, has to figure out how to be good for people, good for the planet. That means that you can actually go back to the basics of your business. And I like to use a business strategy pyramid. You can think of it like this at the top is your bold ambition. In the middle is your business model. And in the bottom.
is your operating model. The problem is too many people think, I’m transforming. And they’re focused on cloudifying or transforming or digitizing the operating model. And what they’re ignoring is that ambition part to start with the ambition. So if you were backwards from bold ambitions, it changes the strategies you choose. It changes the opportunities that you create. So you’re right. There’s a lot of a lack of imagination for the future because it’s focused on just doing more of the past. And it tends to be pretty pessimistic.
James Taylor (13:18) Yeah.
We had on Professor Sir David Ormond on the show and we’ll put a link here as well to that. And we were talking about, so he is the former, basically he was the person that advised the prime ministers in the UK on the various security services. So in the UK we have MI5, MI6, GCHQ, in the US you have CIA, NSA, similar kind of roles. And he was talking, what you just mentioned about the strategic foresight in his book, he calls it strategic notice.
JD Meier (13:41) Hmm.
Hmm.
James Taylor (13:53) So he said, you know, part of the role that you’re trying to do as an intelligence analyst is the kind of work he would probably talk about is taking that 10 year view that you spoke about. And he said, that does require both critical thinking and creative thinking, like the imagination and like, well, what is the probabilities? And now we get into the mathematics of it. What do we believe is the probability? And when we look at risk, obviously just today, today, we see…
JD Meier (14:04) Yeah.
Yep. Yes. Yeah.
Right.
James Taylor (14:19) certain risks that we’re seeing like now it’s on CNN, it’s on Fox and those channels, but the environmental, the E of the ESG piece, feels a little bit further away. So we kind of push it out a little bit further and we don’t kind of bring it in a little bit. So you’ve spoken about vision, we’ve spoken about the big picture stuff and promoting that vision and helping people understand that mental models with the Charlie Munger, like the kind of mental models. What about when it comes to the rubber hits the road, the productivity?
JD Meier (14:23) Hmm.
Yeah, right.
Hmm.
James Taylor (14:49) You’ve worked with these leaders at Microsoft and you’ve really helped these leaders on their productivity, both as a leader individually and as a team. Where do we get to on that? What are some of the key things that you notice on those people and the teams that are really great at productivity?
JD Meier (15:02) Yeah.
Yep, so it’s definitely a mind shift because usually what happens is people start to care about it when they’re in pain. They get a bad review in terms of their health score, their org score, their whatever score. Then now they start to care about it. And because I moved in so many different orgs in Microsoft, I had to learn how to change the culture fast. And I learned that I could change it through questions because smart people like to answer questions. And so one of the questions I would ask, I would…
You know, so we’d say, yeah, that productivity stuff. Why should we do this? I said, well, you spent a lot of time last month, right? You did, you spent a lot of energy. You probably did more than 40 hour work weeks, right? Everybody on the team did a lot of work, right? What were the three wins? I asked them for the three wins. And usually first I see a deer in headlights. Then I see them start to rattle off like meetings they went to and activities and all this stuff, but it doesn’t accrue to anything. And I go, you know, we can completely change the game.
by telling three stories of victories. We should be able to tell three stories of victories a day, three stories of victories for the week, three stories of victory for the month, three stories of victory for the quarter, three stories of victory for the year. And when I put it out like that, they said, well, we’re doing OKRs. I’m like, OK, show me your OKRs. And usually, it’s something abstract and disconnected that they don’t really have empathy for. And I go, look, if you’re trying to tell your manager that that was your impact,
Would that feel like a wow moment? Is that a press release? Where are the wows? And so I actually combine some of the practices I have in Azure results, where some of the practices that people do look like the OKRs, but thinking of three wins, it’s the simplest, easiest way to start to drive better outcomes because you’re working backwards now. Otherwise you fall into the trap of, and I fell into this trap too, where you hope that your process takes care of you. You hope that by doing the right things each day, it’ll lead to these awesome things.
But if you never put a line in the sand, if you’d never sketched out that model of the future, if you never thought about what that future scene of victory looked like, you’re not going to look your way there. Kind of like, you know, you’re not going to wander your way up the mountain, right? You’re not going to wake up one day and I’m on the top of Mount Everest like a zigzag. So the idea here is that you’re working backwards. At the same time, I’m a big fan that you do need to work your way forwards. And so the way I do it is I have the backbone of my book, I call it…
Monday Vision, Daily Wins, Friday Reflection. So on Monday, you step into your Friday and you look back on your week. What do you want those three victories to be? So that’s your Monday Vision. Now imagine that you’re looking forward to going through your week because you have three victories to pull you through. And it sounds simple, but now what you’ve done by identifying these three victories is you’ve prioritized. You’ve chosen what you’re going to do, what you’re not going to focus on. You’ve also created a way.
to channel your energy. So now you’re going to find your motivation. It’s meaningful. You can connect it to your values. Don’t call back a customer when a raving fan. Don’t go do a project, lead an epic adventure. Don’t go do a task. Turn your chores into chances to practice and master what your strengths and your special abilities are all about. So that’s really the key. That’s the Monday Vision on the Daily Winds through Winds for Today. So when you wake up, you’re going to have a day. You’re going to spend a bunch of time.
What are the three wins for today? You can do your, have your existing to -do list. It might be a laundry list, actually a lot of stuff, but just put the three wins at the top that you hope that you can achieve. So you can direct your energy and attention and you’ll get better at it. You will get better at that. And then Friday reflection. This is where personal development meets your productivity. This is where self awareness comes to life. You actually reflect on what were my three wins for this week? You know, what are three things going well, three things to improve.
And it’s that improvement piece that means that you’re going to get, but this is your chance to be honest with you and go, did you bite off more than you could actually chew? Did you get randomized? Like if you completed things that had nothing to do with your goals, did you get randomized or are you not good at learning in your system? Are you not good at understanding and predicting what’s going to be expected of you in the week? So you get better at that. And the surprise, this is, this to me is the biggest surprise is that, by practicing Friday reflection.
You know, I started by putting an appointment on my calendar for 20 minutes on Friday. I made space for it. I got so good at my basic productivity, like extreme, that I started to take on much bigger goals. And, one of the things that I started to do was I just started to add checkpoint questions about ways that I want to improve myself at the identity level. And I had read the book leadership challenge and in it.
One of the questions is around, you know, seeing around corners. How will DC around the corners? So I had this one little question in my Friday reflection. So each week I was just asking myself, yeah, how am I getting surprised? Am I seeing around the corners? Am I predicting what’s going to happen? That alone improved me to the point where I actually think if I trace it back, that led to me becoming an innovator that led to me becoming a futurist. That was the basic skills that helped me become the head coach for Satya’s innovation team.
So it surprised me in a lot of ways. But those are the basics. If you can do a day well, you can do a week well. If you could do a week well, it compounds. But you want to be working backwards from your big dreams, your ambitions, your future scenarios, your future state, and using that to drive why do you do what you do today? and then the.
James Taylor (20:36) Those questions obviously, so please carry on.
JD Meier (20:41) I was going to say this. There’s one more frame that really helped me a lot, like the light bulb went off. It was super productivity, as when you’re working on the right things at the right time, the right way. When you unpack that and you start to dive in, am I using my strengths? Am I driving from vision? Am I spending more time in my values so I can renew my energy? You’re on fire.
James Taylor (21:07) thinking as you were talking about this and kind of bringing some of these ideas together, there was Marshall Goldsmith, the leadership coach for a lot of various executives. He has someone who calls him every day, I think at the same time, to basically ask him a series of questions. That’s their only job. And it’s an accountability, it’s a way of keeping him on track in terms of what he’s doing. Now, that’s wonderful, but not everyone can…
JD Meier (21:26) Wow. Wow.
Hmmmm
James Taylor (21:36) You can afford to have someone that that’s their job. So I was thinking obviously now with AI, not everyone can afford windy roads from billions on their team that’s asking those questions and making them think slightly differently about things, but everyone can pretty much afford an AI to be asking questions, asking better questions every time and asking questions that kind of nudge us out of our usual way of doing things.
JD Meier (21:37) Right. Yeah.
Right.
Yes.
Big time. And so first and foremost, I would say structure your week. So for example, I have three recurring appointments on my calendar that ask me the question. So like my Monday vision, when it pops up, it asks me, what are your three wins for this week? And then each day it pops up, what are your three wins for today? And then Friday reflection, it pops up. So I made the space and the time for it. And then to use AI to take you to the next level.
You can actually pair up with AI. I think if it is pairing, you know, pairing up, you can pair up with AI to figure out a good personal, actually a great, a great personal development plan for the month. I think that when you do it at the month level, you get a different balcony view. And in that balcony view, you can ask higher order questions. Cause if you get too mired in the day to day, I think, and if you ask yourself too many questions in the day to day,
It’s kind of hard to see the forest for the trees, but I think when you do it at these timeframes, like, okay, what’s the, what’s the mindset of motivational questions for today that keep me growing and showing up strong. Like for example, one that I never expected to have is how do I want to change the world today? But there’s a little story there. Like, I kept for some reason it’s like deep in me. I think it’s because one of my early managers at Microsoft, every time he came by the office or in the break room.
He would say, did you change the world today? Like every day. And I’d be like, yeah, we changed it, but everybody wants us to change it back. And so, you know, it’s, it’s strong in me. And one of my early books, you know, went to like 800 ,000 people in six months. So when, when would you do that? You get used to changing the world. And so one day I found myself asking the question, how do you want to change the world? And I thought, you know, everybody’s stressed. They’re worried about the future. They’re worried about today. They’re,
James Taylor (23:32) Yeah.
JD Meier (23:57) overwhelmed, they’re overloaded and they’re in fear mode. I was like, that sucks. It’s like, what’s the best thing I can give people that would help them to start their day. So I ended up creating a, so that night I was like, okay, how do I change the world today? I want to change how the world wakes up. So that night I put together like 40 slides. I created a framework on the fly. I created 40 slides. I called it wake up great. I haven’t written. I don’t think I’ve even written about it yet, but it’s a, it’s wake up great. And it’s, I’ve been teaching it to different companies, but it’s a G is gratitude.
If you feel grateful, you can’t feel fear. So when you actually do gratitude, right, and you’re in that grateful mode, you can feel fear. So I thought, wow, what a great way for people to start, you know, gratitude. R is reflection. Reflect on your future self. People go, okay, reflection, but they don’t know what to reflect on. Reflect on your future self. Last week or even yesterday or even today, are you being that person that you want to be for the future? So R is reflection. E is of course, exercise, but people, I don’t have time and I don’t know what to do.
And so I put together a small set of things that people really can do, like Bruce Lee’s three minute workout. When he broke his back, he had to figure out how do I work out my full body? Well, he’s got a three minute workout. So when you learn these kinds of things, you, you open up these possibilities. So then there’s a affirmation, but most people do affirmations wrong. What do they do? They have a bunch of affirmation. I am smart. I am happy. I’m great. I’m strong. Choose one. You choose one. You picture it in your mind so your subconscious can see it.
So you know what you actually mean and you’re congruent. Otherwise, if you say like an apple, red apple, green apple, Steve jobs, you know what? So you picture it, but you have to feel it. So my affirmation, for example, for today, I am strong. When I say that, what do I look like when I’m strong? What do I feel like when I’m strong later in the day, when I don’t feel strong, I remember in the morning. So you say it, you feel it because you’re rewiring your nervous system. You’re changing your nervous system. That’s where this gets real.
So G -R -E -A and then T. It was funny when I was making the framework that night, I was like, what’s T? Three wins, you know, from my book. It was like, it was perfect. I was like, picture three scenes in your day, morning, noon and night, your three victory scenes. So you can have a compelling day that you’ve just envisioned on the fly in the morning, in your strength place, in a place of gratitude and greatness where you can be as strong as you could possibly be. And so, you know, that was like, you know, quick little framework, but it helps, it changes lives.
James Taylor (26:03) you can have a compelling day to just envision on.
I love that.
But changing how the world works, I often think about when I go into the shower in the morning, I call the shower my ideas machine. Because different people have their ideas at different days and at times of day. For me in the morning, I actually ended up having longer showers because all these ideas start coming to me. Obviously, you’ve been ingesting them overnight. You’ve been kind of thinking through them overnight. For yourself, where do you go, where do new ideas generally come from for you? Where do you go to just…
JD Meier (26:31) Yep.
Yeah.
James Taylor (26:50) Maybe take a step back from your day to day to kind of reflect, to really think at that kind of higher level.
JD Meier (26:56) Yep. So where do the ideas come from? God, they come from so many places, but of course, like you, the shower. So this morning I had a thought about thought maps or thought structures or thought scaffolding. I thought about a lot of times people give you a thought to think, but they don’t break it down. And I had a parallel thought around, and program management work, breakdown structures. I thought about what if we actually shared these thought challenge and responses for specific challenges that we have.
because people do have these thought patterns. There’s success patterns and there’s anti -patterns. But too often, I think we hit the tip of the iceberg, but we don’t drill in. And I bet that if we start to share examples of thought maps, like what should be my thought structure when I feel like nervous or anxious about presenting? What does that look like? Break it down, but like little example of thought structures. So showers is a place, of course, before bed is of course another perfect time. So I keep my handy little sticky pad, my yellow sticky pad and pen. It’s been my greatest advantage.
And I also use a practice I call Imagine If. Imagine If is how I channel my imagination, but in any situation that I’m in, I imagine how it could be better. And so it gives me a lot of flexibility around choreographing the future of like a restaurant or even in the movie theater, you know, traffic, you know, how would I redesign this? So playing with Imagine If and just playing out future possible scenarios completely changes the game. A quick example is…
You go to the grocery store and this is before we have all the things that we have now. But I remember I was supposed to design, you know, the future of, grocery stores for big company. And I thought, man, when I drove up parking sucked. What if I could just drive to the curb and the groceries come to me? And then another scenario was like, wow, I can’t find anything in the store. What if I could hold up my phone and like either play, find the vegetable or I could find the gluten free, whatever, you know, whatever I need to go look for. And, you know, as I’m going to fill these scenarios, I was like, well, what if.
groceries came to me. This was before they did. What if the groceries came to me? And to scare the leaders into the future, I gave them a competitive idea. I said, look, your house is the future store. If you don’t fill the shelves, then Amazon will. And so it’s those little ideas, but they come from everywhere. But what made that even possible was I read a book called Thinker Toys. And in it, Thomas Edison shared his idea quotas. And so that was the idea.
That first week, I took my little yellow sticky pad and I wrote one idea per note. By the end of the week, I had 10 notes. And I thought, wow, my God. But it wasn’t that. It was that as soon as I put the ideas down, and these were good ideas, these are 10 good ideas, when I put it down, my head was empty from those. I didn’t realize how much those were bouncing around. Once my head was empty from those, ideas wouldn’t stop coming. So the next week, I filled two of the notepads.
By the third week, it was getting silly. It was just absolutely ridiculous. So I think a lot of people don’t realize if you keep your ideas floating around in your head, see what happens when you put them somewhere. Have an idea catcher, a thought catcher, an idea portfolio, an idea catalog, put them somewhere. And then you’ll be amazed at how much space and room you have for ideas to come your way. And practice that imagine if habit. It’s a habit you can practice and share with your friends.
James Taylor (30:07) That’s great. And while we’re talking about capturing ideas, is there a tool that you use or an app, some way that you find it very easy, because you’re getting all these ideas all the time, how do you ensure that you can capture them so you can then go through them at a later date?
JD Meier (30:17) Yep.
Yeah, I know it sounds old school, but I use Evernote and I have more than 30 ,000 notes and the it I’ve been on a quest for probably, I guess, a couple of decades. I’ve been actually on a quest to find the world’s best insight and action. So I have principles, patterns, insights for mind, body, emotions, career, finance, relationships, fun. And so I have not just a big, deep library of profound knowledge, but then I have my catalog of my ideas where I have, I do two things. Actually, I have a.
a notebook for my best ideas where I capture those in different domains. And then I have a daily insights where it’s just, it’s, it’s a running note. I put today’s date and any like little idea that pops up, I put it in my journal. So basically the daily journaling combined with my catalog, my portfolio of my best ideas.
James Taylor (31:07) Yeah, I love I’ve been like you, I’m a long time Evernote user. My only complaint, if anyone from Evernote is listening just now, please speed up the mobile app, because it’s by the time you have the app from the idea to capturing it, those six seconds or 10 seconds it takes to open the app and put it in can be really frustrating. Very, very simple thing there. What about if you were to recommend one book?
JD Meier (31:11) Cool.
my god. my god. Yeah.
Yeah.
James Taylor (31:29) to our listeners. You mentioned one that’s Thinker Toys, which I’m going to definitely check out that one. If you would recommend one other book to our listeners, not one of your own, but kind of links to your own, what would that book be?
JD Meier (31:30) Mmm.
Hahaha, yeah.
It would be Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins. That’s my secret of how I read faster. But Unlimited Power is probably the deepest book that I’ve ever read that goes into the inner engineering. And what I’ve learned in life is that all things are created twice, first in the mind, then in the world. I think of it as inner world, outer results. But that book is probably the deepest that I know for modeling, learning, sharing, and scaling expertise of other experts. It’s a way to distill it because it’s the inner engineering.
You watch somebody shoot pool, you watch what they did with the cue. You don’t go through the thought process of wait, their neurology. What was their breathing? Where was their focus? Did they look at the, you know, the hole? Did they look past it? Did they focus on the cue ball? So that is probably the greatest book for profound performance, I would say.
James Taylor (32:24) a huge, like you, massive, I think I’ve read that, I don’t know how many times I’ve read that book. I read it when I was probably 13 years old, changed my life. I think it was, there was a line in that you mentioned in questions. I think you said, Tony said something along like the quality of life is the quality of the questions that you ask. And it’s just that constant, wonderful book, absolute classic. Let’s, as we finish up now, what is the best way for people to connect with you JD, to learn more about your books, your writing, your other things you’ve got going on just now? Where should they go?
JD Meier (32:33) my god.
Yes, yes, so true.
Probably the best starting point is JDMeier .com. So JDMeier .com. Yeah, that’s the best bait.
James Taylor (33:03) Well, JD, thank you so much for being a guest on the show today. After listening to you, I’m gonna go and pick up my old battered copy of Unlimited Power and reread it again as well. Thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.
JD Meier (33:09) Hahaha.
Thank you for having me. Awesome times. Take care.
Sir David Omand, Author of How Spies Think – 10 Lessons in Critical Thinking #338
04 Jun 2024
Sir David Omand, Author of How Spies Think 10 LESSONS IN CRITICAL THINKING #338
Summary
Professor Sir David Omand, former UK security and intelligence coordinator, shares insights from his book ‘How Spies Think: 10 Lessons in Intelligence’. He discusses the importance of critical thinking, the SEES model used by intelligence analysts, and the role of creativity in decision-making. He also explores the impact of biases, the Bayesian approach to probability, and the challenges of decision-making in high-stress environments. Omand emphasizes the need for diversity of thought and expertise, especially in the face of emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology. He concludes with the importance of ethical decision-making and recommends the book ‘The Three-Body Problem’ by Cixin Liu.
Sound Bites
“We have a polluted information environment, which AI, I’m afraid, adds to with the ability to make deep fakes and to provide misleading information.”
“You can spot trends in technology, international affairs, domestic affairs and social attitudes, and then have the imagination to say, well, if that were to happen, what would it look like?”
“The Reverend Bayes was an 18th century cleric in Tunbridge Wells, and he amateur mathematician. And he came across this rule, which we call Bayes rule named after him, which essentially relates the likelihood of something happening to which you’ve worked out to how you should then recalculate that likelihood when new evidence arrives.”
Developing critical thinking skills is crucial for making better decisions and avoiding biases.
The SEES model (Situational Awareness, Explanation, Estimate, Strategic Notice) provides a framework for intelligence analysis.
Creativity plays a role in intelligence work, particularly in finding innovative ways to uncover secrets and address challenges.
Understanding biases and creating a safe space for diverse perspectives is essential for effective decision-making.
Emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology require careful consideration and preparedness for potential risks.
Ethical decision-making is important, and doing what is genuinely believed to be the right thing provides a solid defense.
Biography:Professor Sir David Omand was the first UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter-terrorism strategy, and “homeland security.” He served for seven years on the Joint Intelligence Committee and was Permanent Secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to 2000, and before that Director of GCHQ (the UK Signals Intelligence Agency). Previously, in the Ministry of Defence as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Policy, he was particularly concerned with long term strategy, with the British military contribution in restoring peace in the former Yugoslavia and the recasting of British nuclear deterrence policy at the end of the Cold War. He was Principal Private Secretary to the Defence Secretary during the Falklands conflict, and served for three years in NATO Brussels as the UK Defence Counsellor. He has been a visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies at Kings College since 2005-2006. His latest book is called How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence where he shares the methodology used by British intelligence agencies to reach judgements, establish the right level of confidence and act decisively. The British former Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary the Right Honorable Jack Straw calls ‘How Spies Think’, ‘A brilliant book, by one of the UK’s true polymaths – author, academic, administrator, mathematician – and former spy. But this isn’t just a book for those interested in the secret world of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ; it’s for anyone wanting to know how to make better decisions, and avoid the traps into which businesses and governments can, and do, fall, time after time’https://www.amazon.com/How-Spies-Think/dp/0241385180
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
Free 3-Part Video Training Series On How To Unlock Your Creative Potential, Break Down Creative Blocks, and Unleash Your Creative Genius FREE training video shows you how to unlock your creative potential in 5 simple steps. The world’s top creative individuals and organizations use these exact strategies.
James Taylor (00:08) Sir David Omand was the first UK security and intelligence coordinator responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter -terrorism strategy and homeland security. He served for seven years on the Joint Intelligence Committee and was permanent secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to 2000, and before that, director of GCHQ, the UK Signals Intelligence Agency. Previously in the Ministry of Defence as Deputy Under -Secretary of State for Policy,
He was particularly concerned with long -term strategy, with the British military contribution in restoring peace in the former Yugoslavia and the recasting of British nuclear deterrence policy at the end of the Cold War. He was principal private secretary to the defence secretary during the Falklands conflict and served for three years in NATO Brussels as the UK defence councillor. He’s been a visiting professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College since 2005 to 2006 and his latest book is called
How Spies Think, 10 Lessons in Intelligence, where he shares the methodology used by British intelligence agencies to reach judgements, establish the right level of confidence, and act decisively. The British former Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, the Right Honourable Jack Straw, calls How Spies Think a brilliant book by one of the UK’s true polymaths, author, academic, administrator, mathematician, and former spy. But this isn’t just a book for those interested in the secret world of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, it’s for
anyone wanting to know how to make better decisions and avoid traps into which businesses and governments can and do fall time after time. Professor Sir David Orman, welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.
Sir David Omand (01:43) Thanks, James. Delighted to be on the show.
James Taylor (01:46) So this book was first published 2020, then you added a preface on the paperback edition in 2021. Since then we’ve seen the invasion of Ukraine, artificial intelligence enter very much the mainstream and increasing tensions with the West and China. If you were publishing this book today, as we’re filming today in 2024, any big changes that you’d be making to it do you think?
Sir David Omand (02:09) Not to the guts of the book, which as you say is about critical thinking, I might emphasize even more than I did in the book that we have a polluted information environment, which AI, I’m afraid, adds to with the ability to make deep fakes and to provide misleading information. So my message, which is how do you think clearly and straight, even when?
some of the messages reaching you are not true or are designed to be deceptive. That still holds, I think.
James Taylor (02:46) Now you give these 10 lessons towards the end of the book, but then you talk about the main framework, the way to think critically about situations, whether it’s in business or in other situations as well. And you call it the SEAS model, which is really how intelligence analysts think. First of all, maybe give us just a bit of a kind of top line, and then maybe we’ll get into some of those four parts of this particular model.
Sir David Omand (03:09) Yeah, I put C’s S -E -E -S just to make it memorable. But the first S is situational awareness, which is answering questions about what is going on, where and when. Facture, questions which ought to be answerable if you’ve got a good grasp of the situation. But then the first E in C’s is about explanation. And that’s the bit we often get wrong.
because that usually involves getting inside somebody else’s mind, an adversary, a terrorist group, a dictator, and trying to work out why are we seeing what we are seeing, what’s behind it, what are the motivations? So those questions that have why in it or what for. And then if you’ve got enough situational awareness and you’ve got some decent explanations,
You can move on to what the British Intelligence Community, the Joint Intelligence Committee, I spent seven years on the committee, what they tried to do, which is to assess and provide an estimate based on assumptions, but trying to peer over the hill to give an estimate of how things might work out. Normally in the sort of short to medium term. So that’s why the final S.
I add into my acronym Cs is strategic notice. Can you actually spot some way away developments which could either provide big opportunities or perhaps more often could provide serious challenges? It’s not a prediction. I’m clear in the book that there are no crystal balls. Nobody can produce accurate.
predictions over any length of time. But you can spot trends in technology, international affairs, domestic affairs and social attitudes, and then have the imagination to say, well, if that were to happen, what would it look like? And are the things we perhaps should do now in order to try and make it
that future more bearable if it were to come about.
James Taylor (05:35) One of the critical thinking tools you talk about in the book is the Bayesian approach. Hopefully I’ve got that right. What is this Bayesian approach and how can this be applied in the work that, maybe you’ll listen to this show in business when you’re thinking about probabilities, the chances of something happening or not?
Sir David Omand (05:55) The Reverend Bayes was an 18th century cleric in Tunbridge Wells, and he amateur mathematician. And he came across this rule, which we call Bayes rule named after him, which essentially relates the likelihood of something happening to which you’ve worked out to how you should then recalculate that likelihood when new evidence arrives.
So you have the prior position, which you believe, you’ve read intelligence reports, you think you’ve got a grasp of it all. And then some new intelligence arrives and should alter your view of how likely your proposition is to be true. And of course, all these magical AI neural networks that we’ve got used to in the last year or so, they are all based.
on Bayesian thinking you train the model and every time you provide some new information to the model, it works out. Does that help me? How do I get closer to the accurate answer? It adjusts the weights in its neural network, depending on whether it got it right or wrong. And if you iterate that millions of times, you end up with a sort of trained.
AI program, which is rather better at recognising faces than a human being, which is what indeed has happened, all playing chess.
James Taylor (07:27) And so this is often expressed in a kind of formula that we might see. I know you were involved in the creation of contests where we, in the UK, we had this thing, the Prevent Strategy, for example, where you expressed, I guess, risk using this type of formula.
Sir David Omand (07:32) Yeah.
Yes, I mean, the basic approach when we put together the UK counter -terrorism strategy was to reduce the risk that terrorism posed to everyday life. So it was based on this idea of normality and can you take steps which helps maintain normality? And when you think about it, the risk is the product of the likelihood of bad things happening. Your vulnerability.
to those bad things, which is something you might be able to do something about. And then if they were to get through your defenses and something bad happens, what’s the reaction? What’s the impact of that? Both immediately, how well did the emergency services cope, but also in the longer term, how resilient are the systems? So after, say, a terrorist attack, next day, is the London Underground working?
Well, on 7 -7 it was.
James Taylor (08:45) Now, one of the things you said as a common mistake you see organizations, governments make, policy makers make, is they immediately try to jump from situational awareness into the third part with the estimates, making estimates of what’s gonna happen. But there’s this kind of stage before that that you need to spend time on. Can you go into that?
Sir David Omand (09:06) Yes, that’s the E that stands for explanation. Why are we seeing what we are seeing? It’s a truism in all statistics that correlation is not causality. Just because you’ve spotted two things happening together, does that mean they are necessarily related or that one is causing the other? You need an explanation. You need some sort of explanatory model.
And particularly when you’re dealing with human beings who may mean us harm. So take the period just before President Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine a couple of years back. All those tanks had been on an exercise, tens of thousands of soldiers. Was he going to invade or wasn’t he?
And that’s the point at which you don’t just jump from those tanks to assuming he’s going to it. You actually have to work out what’s the explanation. And in that particular case, UK and British and American intelligence, they had the intelligence to be able to say with near certainty, yes, we know what he is up to. We know he’s going to try and mount a false flag operation to provide a pretext for the invasion.
We know that the medical supplies and other logistics have been, which you wouldn’t see in an exercise, have actually been activated. This looks like the real thing. So that’s the explanatory bit. And it is difficult to do. It’s the bit we most often get wrong.
James Taylor (10:58) Now, something I noticed in the book, I love the book, and it was just great how it took through in a very kind of systematic, very kind of logical way of thinking through things to think more clearly, as you say. But one thing you didn’t speak about so much in the book was the role of creativity in this. And I guess what you were talking about there in terms of the explanation is, is this is us as humans also using our imagination to understand, well, what is the role of this being? So I wonder, like, what is the role of creative thinking?
as opposed to critical thinking in the work of, let’s say, the analysts? And is that different perhaps from the people who are, let’s say, the agents in the field, that people are actually having to be a bit more improvisational in the work that they do?
Sir David Omand (11:40) Yes, I mean, you don’t want your intelligence analysts to be too creative. It has to be grounded. And this is, of course, the great lesson of 2003 to 2003 intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. So you want it to be grounded. You want critical thinking to be applied every step to be tested. But when you look further ahead,
you certainly do want imagination because you want to be able to see some of these trends, which may not be obvious, which could lead to significant problems in the future. If the Chinese were the first to develop a quantum computer that works at scale, which nobody has yet really done, then they would be able to read, get through the encryption.
that protects all our financial transactions, our military communications and so on. There’s no guarantee they’ll get there first and maybe we will or the United States. But if they did, and this is the point about strategic notice, if they did, it would create quite a difficult situation. Implication, very obvious. Let’s spend a bit more resource on building quantum resistant encryption.
which can be developed and persuade people to use it so that we’re not stuck with that position if one of our adversary nations were to get there first. And that’s simple example. Where creativity comes in is particularly in the work of the intelligence agencies to think about how are we going to get around the determined will of the adversary not to let us.
see his secrets. So this is what secret intelligence is about. It’s about getting better decisions made because you have uncovered the secrets of people who mean us harm. Dictators, autocrats, people smuggling gangs, terrorists, criminals, and so on. They have secrets. They desperately don’t want us and our allies.
to find out those secrets. So that’s where you have to be really creative in trying to think of ways they haven’t thought of, which will enable you to penetrate the secrets of the terrorist group or the narcotics smuggling gang or whatever it might be. That requires a diversity of mind. And that’s something I would certainly want to emphasize. It’s something that my old department, GCHQ, has…
James Taylor (14:18) So,
Sir David Omand (14:29) has really developed is to employ people who think differently. And that diversity of minds makes it more likely that somebody will make the creative breakthrough, which is new and helps.
James Taylor (14:47) So with diversity of minds, when I often talk with organizations, we talk about, there’s different ways of doing this. I know we sometimes have things like, going back in history, like Edward de Bono, six thinking hats, a way of just looking at things from different perspectives. In the book, you talk about one of the biggest challenges for us as humans, humans and machine side, that the human part is biases that we all have and recognize that you talk about Dick, I think it’s Dick Huer of CIA.
Sir David Omand (15:15) Hmm.
James Taylor (15:16) and these six key biases that we have. What are the ones that you often in your career, you’ve often seen most coming up in these biases? And then second to that, how do you create a space, a safe space where these biases can be discussed, sometimes with colleagues, sometimes with other governments, for example?
Sir David Omand (15:37) Yes, I once went on a training course with Edward de Bono himself. It was fascinating and we wore the hats, his thinking hats. It’s a little artificial. What I was trying to get people to recognize is we’re all subject to cognitive biases, as they’re called. And it’s a natural human instinct, confirmation bias. We interpret information in the way we…
kind of unconsciously feel that’s what we believe. That’s what we would like to see. The group think is very well established. So if you’ve got an analytic group and it’s coming up for closing time at the end of the day, and there’s a lot of pressure to reach an answer, that’s where you want the, perhaps the one analyst who doesn’t agree not to just quietly accept,
the group consensus, but to say, no, I think you’re missing something. It’s a great skill to be able to work a group. There are different techniques that are taught. One is empowering individuals to, well, for the next five minutes, tell me what we’re getting wrong here. What are we missing? So that an individual doesn’t feel that they’re, particularly junior, that they’re somehow challenging.
the authority, but actually they’ve been told to, it’s your job to take this information and then tell us what are we getting wrong? Or what would it, an interesting question, what would it take for us to reach a different conclusion? And when you apply that logic, you may well find that your thinking is all based on one report, which when you examine it closely, say, well, we don’t, we can’t be so certain.
Creating the safe space is one in which people work as a team and they’re not dominated by the most forceful personality in the room. Something that I touch on in the book and I’ve come to talk about even more is that when you think about any serious decision that any of us have to take, whether it’s in the family or whether it’s the prime minister or something,
major matter of state. There are two different kinds of thinking have to be integrated within the single mind of the person taking the decision. On the one hand, you’ve got the emotionally based thinking of this is what I want to achieve. This is what I must achieve. This is what the world I want to live in looks like. And on the other hand, you’ve got the analytical thinking that says,
These are the limits of the possible. This is what the spreadsheets show. And so both are necessary. So if you haven’t got the emotionally based thinking, then you won’t have the right kind of narrative to incentivize people. You know, Churchill in 1940 gave the British people the narrative. Zelensky has given his people the narrative to enable them to keep going despite the odds.
but neither of them neglected the analytic part, which is it’s not enough just to have bombast. You’ve got to have grounded analytical thinking about what armaments are we going to need? What steps do we need to take? Churchill brought in Beaverbrook to revolutionize Spitfire production. So you need to integrate both. If you just have the former, then…
Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, it’s emotional. It may sound very powerful, but it’s not backed up with solid analysis. If you just have somebody talking off a spreadsheet, who’s going to put themselves out to do extraordinary efforts on the basis of what a spreadsheet says? So you need both. And that, I think, is one of the secrets of getting this safe space where…
you have the analysis, but you also can bring out the narrative of why all this has to be taken seriously and developed into a public message.
James Taylor (20:21) I’m wondering, as I was reading the book, and I was thinking, especially the story you start with in the book, which is about the beginning of the Falklands War, when there was a period of obviously high stress, you’re in a very intense period, time is contracted. I wonder what that does in terms of people’s biases, how that safe space is created. The other day I was doing an event and I was sitting in a dinner next to Willie Walsh, who’d been formerly the CEO of British Airways.
IAG. And we were having this discussion about stress, because I thought, you know, your job as CEO must be very stressful, things happening all the time. And he said, one of the things that you often find is that in high stress environments, people kind of revert to a version of themselves that is sometimes not the best. And he said, as a leader, your job is over time to try and nudge that and move that to a slightly better place as well. In your own working, I mean, is the
with these skills that you’re talking about, is this something you can be trained to become better at under more high stress environments where you’re maybe not sitting in the comfort of a nice ideation brainstorming room with cups of tea, for example?
Sir David Omand (21:34) Yes, I mean, I’ve written another book. It’s the paperback comes out on the 6th of June from Penguin called How to Survive a Crisis. And this is very much at the heart of how we survive a crisis, because the point about a crisis is not we have emergencies all the time. So I distinguish between emergencies and crises. And when a real crisis arrives, the person in charge won’t know what to do.
If they did know what to do, it’s just one of those emergencies that companies have to deal with all the time. And British Airways, you know, sometimes the computers go down, people know how to sort it, you get on with it. But a crisis is when events are hitting you faster than your responses can cope with. I have what I call the rubber levers test. You pull the normal levers and nothing seems to happen on the ground.
If anything, it gets worse. And some of the steps that you may have taken early on actually seem to make things worse and you risk sliding into disaster. And that’s where it’s so important that the person at the top, and that’s the person who doesn’t know what to do by definition, gathers the team. And this takes you back to the safe space and says to the team, we’re in serious trouble. We’re mobilizing.
all the best people we can get our hands on. This is number one priority for survival of a company or the business, or indeed the nation. This is now the priority. And together we will work out what the solution is. And that takes you into teamwork. Surviving crisis is a team sport and it’s not something that the leader will.
James Taylor (23:20) It seems so… yeah.
Sir David Omand (23:30) instinctively know exactly what measures to take. That’s why you need the expertise, you need the team together. And it’s high stress. And it’s very well documented that in conditions of high stress, tempers fray, people, there are what I think are called the Ds. So the first is denial. This can’t really be happening to us. Let’s just wait a bit.
Prime Minister Johnson doesn’t turn up to the first five COBRA meetings on the COVID emergency. That’s a very well -known phenomenon. You have the disparagement of people bringing bad news, so you send them away to do more work. You have displacement activity, where people, you get the staff to focus on anything other than what they really have to focus on, which is the…
crisis which is looming. So you can trade, you know, just talking about this, having little exercises, being coached, there’s a lot of things can be done to improve the performance of those at the top when something unexpected happens. And as the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been saying this morning, we’re entering an era.
of more and deeper crises over the next five or 10 years. So we better prepare ourselves.
James Taylor (25:04) And we had a guest on the show a little while ago, Professor Roger Nibran from UCL, I think, and also from Cambridge University, who wrote a wonderful book called Experts. He’s like the world’s leading expert on experts. So do you think we’re in a time now where maybe post -COVID experts are coming back into fashion? Because it certainly seemed in the UK for a little while, they were deeply unfashionable for a while.
Sir David Omand (25:26) Indeed, and we would have been well and truly stuffed if we hadn’t had the expertise, for example, on the vaccines task force. And if those vaccines had not been developed and innovative ways found of getting them into people’s arms quickly, then we would still be in the depths of a very major pandemic. It’s still hanging over us and people are still suffering, but we’ve got over the worst of it. But there are…
more pandemics to come, undoubtedly, and new diseases will jump the species barrier. So we’ve got to be ready for that. Technology will turn much of our life upside down. We’ve already mentioned artificial intelligence, but quantum developments, bioengineering, we’re going to see some remarkable things happening with bioengineering. We’ve already got
DNA being used for genetic disease treatments, which are entirely novel. It’s very exciting. There are lots of opportunities, but, and it’s a big but, are those who mean us harm, our adversaries, will take advantage of some of these. And we’d better be ready for that.
James Taylor (26:52) So you were talking about this idea of diversity of mind, having that diversity of mind, being able to hold emotional and analytical thinking at the same time. You’re obviously absorbing, taking in lots of inputs all the time. You’re obviously reading widely, you’re a polymath in the work you do. But where do you go for inspiration? How do you go to sort and sift this stuff in your head to take, you know, then to be able to take a step back and think about, well, what is it, AI or climate change or whatever the thing is, how do you…
Sir David Omand (27:05) Hmm.
James Taylor (27:21) set that self and yourself so you’ve got that time to yourself to be that kind of creative part of you to think in that way.
Sir David Omand (27:28) Well, the best thoughts come to me when I’m out running early in the morning. And I think that’s quite a well -recognized phenomenon. You do have to give yourself time, but this is one of the difficulties that as technology advances so quickly, you actually got to put in the hard yards to understand what is actually happening.
So to have the first inkling of what is going on with generative AI and what the magical treatment is that has turned simply machine learning into something so much more. You’ve actually got to do the work and you’ve got to study it. But we have a wonderful way. If you think about going to any hospital or medical clinic and you’ll find lots of talk about, well, we’d better get an MRI scan.
done and people talk about MRI scans, but that stands for magnetic resonance imaging. And magnetic resonance is one of those extraordinary, to understand that is one of those extraordinary parts of the quantum world that we’re talking about the resonance of molecules and atoms in a way that the general public has no idea of what is driving the MRI scanner.
So all advanced technology, you know, it looks like magic when it first appears. And then we all get used to it. I have no idea what is under the bonnet or the hood of my car. I used to, 20 years ago, I’ve been able to say, well, that’s the carburetor. And there’s probably a fuel pump. You know, there’s a bit of dirt clogging the fuel pump. I’ve no idea whether my car even has a fuel pump. So…
A certain amount of work is needed as well as relaxation.
James Taylor (29:29) And it’s interesting, you know, with obviously artificial intelligence, first coin, 1956 has been around for a long, long time, but obviously we more recently it’s, we’ve seen this drive primarily through big data, which the fuel for it as well. what’s for me is interesting is now seeing almost I can imagine a few hundred years ago, you know, invention of electricity being used where suddenly anyone has the ability, you don’t have to know how electricity works to be able to flip that switch or to.
Sir David Omand (29:35) Hmm. Hmm.
Hmm.
James Taylor (29:58) add electricity to your business in some way. Now you see people using it for good and for bad. Bad actors using generative AI to create deep fakes and all this stuff as well. So we’re certainly going into a pretty fascinating time in human history.
Sir David Omand (29:59) Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, the parallel is probably with the invention of the printing press, which has produced world literature and made it available to everyone. And simultaneously, a lot of other stuff, which we ideally would not have had to suffer. So the printing press turned the world upside down. It led to decades and decades of religious war, AI and
the other technologies, particularly biotechnologies, are going to do the same to our world in the next five to 10 years. So, you know, buckle up. It could be a bumpy ride.
James Taylor (30:56) So just to finish up, a couple of quick fire questions for you. There’s some wonderful quotes in the book, wonderful lines by different folks, Churchill and all kinds of different areas. Is there a quote that you live by you can have as a bit of a guiding star for yourself?
Sir David Omand (31:11) that’s a difficult question. Perhaps there is one. And I owe it to my former boss, Jack Straw, who was Home Secretary and I was his senior official, I was his permanent secretary. And Jack always approached the difficulties by saying, when in doubt, do what you genuinely believe is the right thing. It will still go wrong. Most things go wrong. And you have a defense.
Well, knowing what I knew at the time, I took the decision to do what I believe was the right thing. That’s a defense and a solid one. But the moment you start to say, I’m not going to take the straightforward course, I’ll try some devious maneuver, I’ll blame someone else, or I won’t tell all the truth, and you try and shimmy your way through, spin your way through, as the spin doctors say.
when it all goes wrong, you have no defense. Yeah. So I think it’s not a bad principle in life.
James Taylor (32:14) there’s no right way to do a wrong thing. It’s the ethical dimension.
And then what about, is there a book that you would recommend to our listeners? We’re going to have links to your books as well. Is there a book just now that you’ve been reading that’s really made you kind of rethink? We’ve been talking about AI, we’ve been talking about biotechnologies as well. Is there something that you think people should check out?
Sir David Omand (32:37) Well, a lot of people have checked it out, but the three body problem, and there’s more than that’s the first volume of the trilogy by Fikin Liu, if my Chinese pronunciation is right, is mind -bending. And I thoroughly recommend it.
James Taylor (32:54) Yeah.
Sir David Omand (33:04) It’s you can watch it on Netflix, which is rather a shortened version and rather a sort of dumbed down version, but the original. And there’s also a Chinese series in 30 parts, which doesn’t spare the mathematics and the but it’s about the future and it’s about, in a sense, a plausible future. And it’s well, it raises some very deep questions.
as well as being great fun because it’s an entertaining story.
James Taylor (33:40) Well, it’s been a pleasure being with you today. If people want to learn more about you, learn more about the books that you have coming out as well, where’s the best place to go and do that?
Sir David Omand (33:51) The King’s College website, I’m a visiting professor at King’s College in the War Studies Department and they can find all about it or just Google me and you’ll find a lot of details about the, as I say, latest paperback out on the 6th of June, how to survive a crisis.
James Taylor (34:12) Professor Sir David Omand, thank you for being a guest on the SuperCreativity Podcast.
Hey there, it's James Taylor here, keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and future trends. Today, I'm in Chicago, Illinois. And I'm here because I'm keynoting a conference in a few hours' time.
And it's a law firm conference. Actually, it's lots of law firms that are coming together. They're sending all their senior partners. Their managing partners all around the world. We have people from Japan, from all parts of Asia, Latin America, Europe, and of course, here in North America.
Collaboration
And the topic that they brought me to speak about is innovation, specifically how law firms and legal firms can innovate better. And the key thing I'm going to be talking about really is collaboration, and how we deepen collaboration, both within law firms and also across different law firms. So different firms can collaborate with each other. And in order to build the pie, increase the size of the pie and their businesses. Now, one of the interesting things last night, we were at dinner, and we went to an amazing restaurant, the client, for this particular event organized for us all to go to a restaurant, it was one of Frank Sinatra, and Al Capone's favorite restaurants, great restaurant.
So we're sitting there, and we're kind of having a conversation with some of the partners from these different law firms. And one of the things that we kind of all pretty much agreed on is that productivity stayed pretty high during the pandemic, all these law firms, professional service firms, and many businesses were able to transfer pretty quickly to working virtually working online. So productivity actually stayed held better than many people thought it would. But the thing that really suffered was innovation, innovation, and culture, which were the two things I see that many companies are bringing me in today to talk about because it really got pushed down further. And it was much more difficult to do in a virtual context.
So one of the great things here is all these people coming from all over the world, they'll have different perspectives, different skills, different expertise. And it reminded me of something that Andy Jassie from Amazon said the other day, and he said one of the reasons we want people coming back together and collaborating physically in the same spaces together, is because we just weren't riffing the same way was his expression here in Chicago is famous for the blues and jazz. And I'm actually gonna be talking about the role of riffing and improvisation as a way of improving collaboration in law firms. So let me show you a little bit of footage from today. And maybe you're a law firm. Maybe you're a legal network you want to bring me in to come to speak at your next conference. Go and check out JamesTaylor.me. Lots more information there. We have case studies from some of the big global 50 law firms that I work with. Check this out.
Good morning, James Taylor here. Keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and future trends. Today I'm in Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, where the blues and lots of cool things are here speaking for about 50 of the top law firms from around the world. I'm gonna be talking to them about collaboration, what collaboration means, and why collaboration is so important to innovation, especially within the legal industry as well.
It is my first time here speaking in Chicago, been here many many years ago, this city is really famous for its architecture tell clean city. And I'm actually going to be adding in a whole section about architecture to like you know, the pillars and the foundations and all that good, good stuff. I always like to add a little bit of a tailor-made something in the speech that relates to the police in which you're having the client having their event. So let me give you a little bit of a tour around you can check this place out
so he told me the best way to see Chicago is from the water. So I'm going to go on one of those,
I'm here because I will be keynoting and delivering a workshop at Norwex's conference. I'm gonna be delivering it for about 120 mostly women entrepreneurs, who build businesses around Norwex and Norwex's products. We're gonna have a lot of fun. I've already seen some of the groups already. They're up to have fun, learn, collaborate, and come up with some really great creative ideas to grow their business because that's what we're looking at today. How to generate creative ideas to grow sales in your business.
Fundamentally, what we're going to learn is how to unlock your creative potential
So you can grow your business from here in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Take care and see you soon.
Today, I'm actually on my way to go and speak at a conference. I'm walking through this beautiful airport here in Copenhagen. And as I'm walking through here, I just noticed statues of the mermaid, the famous mermaid that's here in Copenhagen. And we're going to visit the last time I was here. And it's interesting because I'll probably use this idea of the mermaid in my speech this week because I'm going to be talking about this idea of centaurs, which is half human, half something else, half beast creatures, and every country I speak in the world, whether it's here in Denmark, or South America, or Africa or Asia, you all we always have something called centaurs in culture, lots of different versions of it. But basically, the Centaur brings give this idea of the human and something else. And today, as we start to work into this new order of things, artificial intelligence, machine learning robotics, we are going to see a lot more. This idea of the Centaur is a little bit of video here just now from a talk I recently gave in Istanbul, where I kind of talked about this concept of the centaurs.
Idea Of The Centaur Mindset
These hybrid collaboration systems are called centaurs, after the half-human, half-beast creatures of ancient mythology. A modern version of this would be in the movie Ironman, we had the Tony Stark character played by Robert Downey Jr. and has an AI assistant called Jarvis. And together, Tony Stark and Jarvis built and create these amazing things. And when you apply this idea of a Centaur Mindset to doing any type of creative or innovative work, I call this Supercreativity
Hey there, it's James Taylor, keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and future trends. Today I'm in New York, I'm actually on the Upper East Side of New York City in Manhattan. Staying here at the Carlyle hotel, a very famous hotel, lots of very kind of creative, interesting people have stayed here over the years.
And the reason we chose to stay at this hotel is next to one of my favorite things to do places to visit here in New York City which is Central Park. Now, the reason that I like being close to Central Park being next to what we call a public luxury, how many have a wonderful parking garage walking on every morning, later in the afternoon, have little passage yachters is because, for me, it kind of sparks creativity for me is a place I go to get ideas to rejuvenate myself as well.
Generate Creative Ideas
Now, there are some great studies done recently by the University of British Columbia and the University of Berlin that looked at what colors could affect your levels of creativity. What they found was the best color to have around you if you want to spark ideas and generate more ideas, is the color green. This is one of the reasons why we often get some of our best ideas when we're out in nature. And that color green is all around us, the trees and the plants.
So think about this for a second in your own life. Where can you go to have that color green around you maybe there's a great park near where you live, you can go and spend an hour just kind of ruminating and opening up your mind to possibilities or maybe in your office or home environment. You can add more green into that maybe I'm plants next to you on your desk, for example, to spark that can activate that part of the brain.
So from here in the Carlyle hotel and the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York. I hope you find that useful. Please make sure that you click subscribe you like this, share it with anyone that you think could use a little bit of inspiration today, and maybe we could do it getting out there in a little bit more green. Take care
Today I'm in Concord, Massachusetts and I'm here because I'm visiting the homes and the last resting places for three of my favorite authors Alcott, Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.
Thoreau wrote an incredible book called Waldenthe best life living by a pond here and self-sufficiency and freedom, and what that means. And it's just an absolute kind of joy, to be able to come here and spend a bit of time understanding how these creative minds worked. And also the impact that the families had on the community was part of how that community can feed off each other how these different minds Emerson, all caught through the auction and knew each other, and they all kind of support each other's work sometimes mentored each other Emerson mentored Alcott Alcott then mentored other people can have that family mentored other people after that as well. And it just is very kind of heartwarming to see the power of mentoring at this place. The other thing I thought was really, really interesting was why she did two other things. One is how small their workspaces were to see how small these desks were. They wrote these incredible works of literature, from these very, very small spaces. So didn't let that stop them. And one of the beautiful things here is here at Henry David Thoreau's gravestone, different writers come and they place a pencil or a pen, or some kind of writing implement here, just to remember that man, so yeah, if you want to do any kind of creative work, find a community of people around you that can support you and if you don't have that community, then you want to move to a place or can find that place online or even better in person where you can have those conversations
here I am, the grave of Louisa May Alcott, credible writer, wrote one of the seminal books on American literature, Little Women apart from other books as well. And she's also her graves here along with her sisters. So we've just been at the outcrop family can home it's called the orchard house. And one of the things that were really pressed upon me was the impact that her parent's mother and father had in that when they were bringing up these girls who went on to become really great creators. One was an artist or writer. The father especially was very keen on just always asking them questions, getting them to rather than giving them the answers to things, getting them to really think through the answers themselves. Just asking lots of questions can catalytic questions, it got them to use their minds in a slightly different way be more curious and arrive at a truth but a truth that was supported by their own thinking because they thought through all the workings of it as well. So a very memorable occasion. Just coming here to the gravestone of Louisa May Alcott. And if you haven't read that book or watched them, check out a Little Woman
This week, I'm in the east part of the United States, actually the Northeast of the United States. I just came to New York City yesterday. Today, I'm actually in Montclair, which is in New Jersey, just across the bridge across the Hudson. And this place is famous because it was the place where Thomas Edison, the great inventor, of the light bulb, and lots of other things were. He had his studio's workspace here, they have a memorial just very close to here, as well. And this week, I'm going to be traveling all across the Northeast part of the united states all across different parts of New England, visiting the homes and the workplaces, of some of the greatest inventors, innovators, thinkers and writers in history, so follow me along but today I'm here in beautiful Montclair, gorgeous part of the world very nice part of the world I've never been to before. Early, I was meeting with the co-author, Elaine Pofeldt, who I'm co-authoring a book with just now. And then tomorrow, we're going to be starting to wind our way around, up through New England. So follow me along.
Mark Twain on the Lone Creative Genius Myth
I'm here at Mark Twain house in Hartford, Connecticut, and had an incredible tour around seeing his place here that plays the room that used to do his writing is creating his thinking is reading. And something I just kind of saw which I wanted to kind of share here was this idea that people think creativity is this thing that has to come from nowhere, it comes out of nowhere. But actually, Mark Twain said a really interesting thing about kind of plagiarism and taking inspiration from others. And he said substantially, "all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the gardener with pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that originated them, whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed and characteristics of freezing".
See what Mark Twain actually said was he said, "When a great orator makes a great speech, you're listening to 10 centuries and 10,000 men, but we call it his speech. Really some exceedingly small portion of it is his but not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle to some degree and we call it his but there are others that have contributed." So when you think about seeing a great speaker on stage is not for him or her are 1000 other people 1000s of years of history behind that speech. So I'm going to turn around a little bit more to see this incredible place I'll put some footage as you can see all these incredible places come as to look like come here to Hartford and Connecticut and check out the Mark Twain house.
We're talking about the future and what the future is for their industry. And I'm going to be speaking about the metaverse and what the metaverse can mean for different industries, how people are starting to make money from this world of metaverse, and how they're creating more immersive experiences for their customers.
Hey there, it's James Taylor here keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and future trends. Today I'm in Milan, Italy, actually very near Lake Como. And I'm here because I'm speaking for a company one of the biggest manufacturers of tires and Indian company this is that they have a headquarter office here, buildings here in Italy. And the reason I'm speaking is they brought some of the top customers here to Italy.
Metaverse
We're talking about the future and what the future is for their industry. And I'm going to be speaking about the metaverse and what the metaverse can mean for different industries, how people are starting to make money from this world of metaverse, and how they're creating more immersive experiences for their customers. So when people say to me about Metaverse, and they can talk about what the metaverse but there are really three things I want to encourage you to do. If you don't know about the metaverse and just start experimenting stop playing when there's metaverse.
So first of all, the first thing you can do is start checking out all the different platforms Metaverse can have platforms out there, there are Roblox sandbox decentral and matters own one, they're building out their own one as well. So just start getting comfortable kind of checking out some of these different platforms and seeing how your industry is playing. Now.
Secondly, buy yourself, a set of virtual reality can headset glasses because this will allow you to fully experience what this kind of physical virtual phygital kind of experience actually feels like. And if you do want to spend like 400 euros for one of the Oculus kits, go and check out Google Cardboard, which is for 10 euros, you can buy a very simple candle kit, put your phone in it, put our software on your phone, and you can experience a little bit of what it feels like for virtual reality.
And the third thing I'm gonna encourage you to do is go and buy your first NFT your nonfungible token this will have you experience what things like cryptocurrency are about how tokens work and how wallets work, and it will just kind of get you into that world how the financial and the business side it works. So the best place I think to go and do this to experiment to buy your very first NFT is called open sea opensea. And you can buy NFT's on everything from sports music, to great art NF T's there as well. So those are the three things. I'm going to suggest you if you're interested in the metaverse, then go and start experimenting there. Let me show you some videos just now on this event here that I'm doing and show you the next video
if you're looking for a keynote speaker on the metaverse, then reach out to me and my team is one of the most popular topics that I'm speaking on just now. And I'm really talking about the creativity that exists when you start to explore the metaverse as you start to build products and services in the metaverse
I've just come off stage speaking at the St. Regis Hotel downtown in Dubai. I was speaking for a US company on the topic of resilience, and the role that collaboration and innovation plays in resilience. But as part of my talk, I was also talking about the resilience of Dubai, or what makes Dubai such a resilient place. Dubai was recently voted the world's most resilient city by the United Nations. And there are five reasons I believe that Dubai is such a resilient place.
I've just come off stage speaking here at the St. Regis Hotel downtown in Dubai. And I was speaking for a US company on the topic of resilience, and really the role that collaboration, innovation plays in resilience. But as part of my talk, I was also talking about the resilience of Dubai, or what makes Dubai such a resilient place. You may not know this, but I think Dubai was voted the world's most resilient city, recently by the United Nations. And there are really five reasons I believe that Dubai is such a resilient place. The first is around the diversity of this incredible city.
You come here, people come from all over the world meet Dubai, their home, and where they work from the build businesses from here as well. I just find it whenever I'm working with clients here in the region, the manager's diversity and the people I'm dealing with. So diversity in terms of gender, in terms of
their religion, ethnicity, where they're from in the world, also neurodiversity, that kind of element as well. And there's been loads of studies done on the impact of diversity, on making places more resilient. In fact, Ursula Burns, who's a
CEO, former chairman of Xerox America, she was here in the UAE not so long ago, speaking at national wealth, Mr. Emirati Women's Day. And one of the things that she was talking about was the idea that diversity is a driver of innovation, and the role of diversity and its impact on innovation, and resilience. And one of the I think the numbers, I saw the other day from McKinsey, that those companies who are in the top quartile of their industry, in terms of diversity of the people that work there, they have results, which think 30 to
32%, better than the other competitors in their field. So there's definitely a link between diversity and also financial performance. The second part I see here in Dubai was you notice as soon as you land is redundancy, the amount of redundancy the errors, they're always building systems for more than they actually need. It's something you really noticed when you come to the airport if you're used to airport see in the West, for example, when we go to airports in the West, it sometimes feels like there's only there's really been built for maybe a 10th of the people that are going there. But you know, my experience of ever coming here in Dubai, I'm usually from the plane out, picking up the car within, you know, minutes often. I mean, just so quick, very quick to get through immigration here, just a very quick process. And that is done on purpose. So that this sense of redundancy here is a feature, not a bug of the system has been thought about in a very, very deep way. And the third thing I see is connectivity makes the device such a resilient place. It's always connecting with other parts of the world if you notice it a lot during the pandemic when many other places in the world really closed down. But Dubai was pretty much always open. And it was a place and now that people came to connect, you know, connect connectivity in terms of traveling also connected connectivity in terms of
money, and in terms of ideas, as well. And now that the pandemic is kind of we're coming to the end of this pandemic, hopefully, Dubai is a place that so many companies, so many of my clients are choosing to use to have their conferences and their meetings, because just as the connectivity that a lot of other places, people remember that they have a memory for that. And then the fourth one I would say is adaptability, this place is always changing. Every time I come here, there's something new there adapting to new preferences, what people are wanting could be the restaurants, the hotels, the businesses here, there's just this constant drive for adaptability. And then the final one I would say is here in Dubai, they just have a culture of preparedness, I would put it this way. You know, they're planning just now for 2071, the centennial celebrations and just announced a big plan, because everything that they want to do which VR is focused on education, for example, ethics. And something I find really fascinating here is most companies I deal with here in the region, whether the smaller companies or the larger conglomerates may be operated from here in the region is that constant sense of preparedness, they understand the volatility is going to happen, whether that's inflation or energy costs, or whatever the thing may be. So they've all got multiple plans of how to deal with that there's a culture of preparedness here, which you don't sometimes find in other parts of the world as well. So for those reasons, diversity, redundancy, connectivity, adaptability, and this culture of preparedness, there is some of the reasons I feel that Dubai is such a resilient place. So I've had great fun speaking today on this topic.
I have resilient what resilient organizations in the role of innovation and collaboration, creativity, and that and now I'm going to fly on to my next event, which will be on the topic of the metaverse. I'm gonna be speaking in Milan for an engineering company on all the opportunities I'm going to call the super creative metaverse. So follow along if you've already subscribed here, make sure you subscribe and you can follow along and come with me from here in Dubai to Milan
The World’s Most Creative People With Debbie Millman – #337
29 Jun 2022
00:35:35
The World's Most Creative People With Debbie Millman - #337
Named as “one of the most creative people in business” by Fast Company, Debbie Millman is a designer, author, educator, curator and host of the podcast Design Matters, one of the world’s first and longest running podcasts. In the 16 years since its inception, “Design Matters” has garnered a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, six Webby nominations, and an Apple Podcasts “best overall podcast” designation. In 2009 Debbie co-founded with Steven Heller the world’s first graduate program in branding at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her writing and illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Print Magazine, Design Observer and Fast Company. She is the author of seven books, including her latest, Why Design Matters, a book she describes as 'a love letter to creativity, a testament to the power of curiosity. It features nearly 60 interviews curated from her podcast show with guests including Brené Brown, Tim Ferriss, Anne Lamott, Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, David Byrne and Maria Popova. These conversations explore what it means to design a creative life, the creative process, dealing with rejection, and the relationship between humanity and creativity. Welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast Debbie Millman.
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
The World's Most Creative People
Debbie Millman 1:22 you. Thank you so much. It's such a wonderful honor to be here, James, I really appreciate it.
James Taylor 1:27 Now, your seventh book, this book, Why design matters is subtitled conversations with the world's most creative people you've interviewed over 500 creative minds now. I think it's for the show. Incredible. Have you spotted any commonalities amongst them in terms of the outlook on life, their motivations, their fears are what makes them the best in their respective fields?
Why Design Matters
Debbie Millman 1:48 Oh, such a good question. Well, I've noticed a few commonalities across the range of people that I've spoken to. And it's a bit of a paradox, actually, on the one hand, there's this deep insecurity about continuing to make great things being able to make great things can they continue to sort of hit the ball out of the park mentality. But then on the other hand, there's also this deep need to share what they make. And so I'm really fascinated by the that space between those points of being insecure about doing it, but then when doing it, also wanting to share it. So that's one. And then the other common denominator that I'm really interested in researching more and sort of finding more out about is the sense that, despite however many successes they have, there's still a longing to do more. Not only because they want to keep making things, but also because the feeling of success and accomplishment is really fleeting. And those are, those are two points that I really do want to understand better in the coming work and research that I do.
James Taylor 3:15 I saw you doing an interview the other day, and you actually on that note, you mentioned a quote, you heard I think it was from Miss Eddie Van Halen, or one of the Van Halen fans in Italy, right? It's a really real story from from Banila. And that's what it perfectly sums up. Like that idea that you were speaking. So first of all, share that quote, because I think it's a fantastic quote.
Debbie Millman 3:38 Yeah, he's, he's really quite something. I interviewed David Lee Roth before the pandemic, and he came into the studio, we had a really long, really circuitous conversation. And for anybody listening that doesn't know who David Lee Roth is. He was the frontman of Van Halen, the major rock band, at Van Halen, and his brother, Alex and David all started this band. And in the 80s, particularly the mid 80s, they were one of the most popular bands on the planet, they had the number one album, the number one tour, the number one music video, they had it all. And when I met with him, we were not only talking about his past, but also what he's currently doing. He has a business of, he's designed and created all these wonderful inks for tattooing. And so we were talking about that, but of course, I couldn't help but want to ask him about his past and his time with Van Halen. And I said, What did it feel like in the mid 80s, to sort of be the most popular dude on the planet? And he said, and he's, he's a real jester, I have to say he's very funny. He's very witty. He's constantly making jokes and puns and making these really awesome connections between things. And he laughs a lot. And he's a really big, really boisterous personality in all the best possible ways. But when I asked him that question, he got really quite somber and introspective and said, You have to be really careful when you get to the top of the tallest mountain on the planet. Because generally speaking there, it's very cold, you're often alone. And there's only one direction to journey. And it really, it really has resonated with me all these years later, because I suddenly had this vision of my life and sort of trying so hard to race up the mountain to get somewhere and to get something. And it suddenly made me realize that perhaps it's okay to take those slower steps up the mountain. So that maybe if you're really, really lucky, you don't peak until the day before you die. And that has just stayed with me ever since.
James Taylor 6:10 I'm talking about those slower steps. I've heard you speak before about you went through this 12 year period of basically rejection, starting out your career before kind of hit your stride. struggle. And I think that that will resonate with people, when they hear hear that's your story as well with a lot of great tips. But when you've also interviewed all these other creative minds, what do they share? What it's almost like, what keeps them going through that period? And keeps them searching keeps on finding which is there's maybe some something they also about that latter stage when they've hit success that keeps them wanting to be hungry for it, what kept you going? And what do you think keeps some of your guests going through those initial periods in their career where they're maybe not quite sure if what they're doing is right, or if they're going down the right, right avenues?
Debbie Millman 6:58 Well, for me, what kept me going was an attempt to Brene Brown about this, I've always felt like I've had one more notch hope than shame. And so even though I was getting rejected and have had these failures, and these moments of of utter desperation about how I was ever going to make something of myself, I think I always did have one more notch hope that at some point, someday, if I just kept at it long enough, it would happen.
James Taylor 7:34 One thing you are expert, artful in is the art of the interview, and asking questions. So I really get nervous with guests on the show. I think we've done about 250 episodes of this this show now. I really get nervous. But I was actually I said to my wife earlier, I'm actually a little bit nervous about speaking with Debbie, because she's such a masterful interviewer. I know you the research you go into when you do your interviews, you have your go, there were like 70 pages of distilled of notes going into it, which is really is really beautiful. So I would love for anyone that's listening to just now. And also I'm saying this to myself, anyone when it's a podcaster was a journalist or maybe they have to go and attend an event where they're going to be interviewing someone that's going to be up on the stage. What advice would you give to them in terms of how to how to do good interview?
Debbie Millman 8:26 Well, the first thing that I would say is really listen, most people don't listen, they talk. And then they stop talking and wait for the other person to who they're talking with or to, to stop talking so that they can start talking again. So I think
James Taylor 8:48 the first the first bit of advice, I'm gonna cut you down, you're just exactly I'm going to be a completely my fault as well, because I've actually heard you speak about the almost like, billions, I think was a phrase I've heard.
Debbie Millman 8:59 Yes. Vision is like a game of pool. Yeah, you are. With a great conversation. You want to keep the conversation going, and keep it inspiring. And for me, the questions that I asked aren't about me, they're about the person that I'm talking to. And so I want to keep building on them and on their narrative and on their story. And when you're playing pool, it's not a volley, it's you want to keep getting the balls in the in the pocket so that you can continue playing. And so when I ask a question, I need to be prepared for wherever the billiard ball is going to land and be leave the balls on the table so that I can continue getting more balls and more pockets. And so when I have a conversation with someone I need to be prepared enough to be able to follow them wherever they go, you know, I'm the ball that's following theirs. And I want to really ensure that I'm being able to forward the conversation that they want to have. Not necessarily that I want to have. But I need to know what it is they might be interested in talking about in order to be able to meet them fully in that conversation.
James Taylor 10:29 So you're almost like a great, like a jazz music context where you have maybe a Tony Bennett with a Bill Evans, or Ralph Sharon, who is accompanying them, they're listening, and they're moving, and they're giving space as well at the right time, and maybe maybe maybe taking them in directions they don't necessarily expect they haven't been before.
Debbie Millman 10:50 Oh, James, I love. I love that. That's a wonderful description. It's not anything I've ever heard before, or thought before. And that's it. You've nailed it. Thank you. I mean, I wouldn't really like to think I could be that good, like a jazz musician. But that's what I'm seeking. That is absolutely right.
James Taylor 11:13 So on the note of jazz musician, and the reason I mentioned jazz musician, my wife is a jazz singer, my father's jazz musician. And one of the things I remember, one of his first gigs he got when he was 15 years old, was as a musician on the QE to the ship that used to go from from Southampton to New York. And I remember him telling a story that he said that he used to go every night and go and listen to this other band that was playing on the ship, because there's multiple bands on the ship. And he said, The reason I used to go into this ship, this other band here, this musician, this particular guitar in this band, is because I would go and listen. And he did so many things I didn't want to do, it was almost like the antithesis of tasteful art for playing. And so I used to go and I used to listen to I used to listen to the perspective of like, okay, what is the opposite of that? Whatever he's doing, what is the opposite? So let's, if we imagine this like an interview, for example, what would be if it's just a bad host of an interview? What would they be doing? And then we can kind of flip it around to like, what is what is the good version of that?
Debbie Millman 12:15 Oh, my gosh, what would they be doing? Not paying attention? Looking at their email while they're talking? or Instagram or anything on online? Thinking about what they want to eat for dinner?
James Taylor 12:31 Not being present.
Debbie Millman 12:34 Yeah, not being present is really the, I think, kryptonite of an interview.
James Taylor 12:41 Now, I saw brand is magazine describes why design matters. This beautiful, beautiful coffee table book here as well, of which I I mean, I love the the articles, the actual interviews, and I actually love photography in it as well. Thank you. There's, there's a wonderful shot of one of the guests we've had on the show, Amanda Palmer. I've never seen a shot like this of Amanda before. And it's a really great, so wonderful book. And branded magazine describes why design matters book as a salon, in book form. And with you as the kind of the Gertrude Stein, I guess, character. There's hopefully I know, we were talking earlier, you heading on to Paris, and I'm really fascinated by that whole kind of 1920 sale on, you know, this kind of post pandemic gathering Casso Hemingway. I'm just reading another book just now which is great, which is I'd recommend anyone, which I'd never read poor people toy ideas
Debbie Millman 13:38 here. Yeah, my
James Taylor 13:41 guess is great. A couple people who recommended me this book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, and I've never got it but in summertime, this version illustrations by Myra calendar, which I believe you might know, as well, great. And as I was reading it, and I was thinking and thinking about our conversation today, somebody who's coming up very strong was this idea of, of creative peers, creative pairings, these two different but complementary people that kind of push each other forward. Now, in your career, it seems to me like you've had multiple creative pairings. You've had Milton Glaser, you've had Steven Heller, your wife, Roxane Gay, what do you look for, in great creative pairings?
Creative Pairings
Debbie Millman 14:28 Trust, trust, in order to really collaborate. You have to trust and respect whoever you're collaborating with. There's something wonderful about doing work on your own because you're making your own decisions and you're able to do essentially whatever you want. You know, one of the reasons I like making visual stories is that I can edit the copy and adjust the copy to the visual or just the visual to To copy in any way I want to. But when you're collaborating with someone else, you have to trust that their point of view is as good as yours, or better. And maybe it's even better to think that it's better so that you're more generous with the way that you listen to whatever input or sharing somebody has or contribution that somebody has. And so for example, one of my most successful partnerships was with Simon Williams, my former partner at Sterling brands, he was the CEO, I was the president. And the secret to our success was his trust in me to do what I felt like I needed to do in the division that I was running. And he gave me that runway and was there for what I needed. Feedback was there for when I needed advice or guidance, counsel, a sounding board a shoulder to cry on whatever, but he gave me a certain amount of freedom to be able to do what I thought was necessary to grow this division of sterling, which was the biggest division. And I think, truly, that's why because he gave me that ability. He not only gave me the freedom, but he also gave me the sense that he believed in what I was doing. And so therefore, I wanted to deliver on that belief, as well. So I think one of the most successful partnerships of my career,
James Taylor 16:35 so this is this idea of trust. We had Dr. Amy Edmondson from Harvard University on a little while ago, sure about psychological safety by creating this, you as also as a leader, when you were at Sterling brands, you had maybe new members of the team coming on, how do you as a leader create that sense of that trust that sense of psychological safety in a, in a group that maybe hasn't worked together? Before?
Debbie Millman 16:57 It's a good question. It's, I think, very hard to integrate senior people into an established company with an existing hierarchy and existing cliques and existing personalities. I think it's one of the hardest things to do in a corporation is to bring in a senior person that you want to empower, because there's so much of an existing pattern of behavior that I think makes for real difficulties for anybody new. I mean, you usually can tell pretty quickly whether somebody is going to be able to jump on that, right that that driving train, or is not. And that's really what it's like for a senior person coming into an organization, the train doesn't stop and wait for them to get on, the train is speeding along, and that person literally has to jump on and move with it. And that's really challenging. And so it is a matter of whoever that person is reporting to, to be able to get that trust, and that empowerment instantly, instantly, even if there's nothing to base it on other than the hope and belief that it's possible.
James Taylor 18:11 But there is a there is a kind of competitive challenging nature I would guess and much of the work that you have done in the past when you're working with with groups in we're I'm from Scotland, in Edinburgh, our version and during the enlightenment of the Cylons was the clubs. So every industry, every professional, their own clubs, the the farmers had their own clubs, the scientists had a club, the merchants, other club, the sex workers had their own club, everyone had their own clubs, where they kind of get together to debate and discuss and challenge each other's ideas. And one of the phrases which is a Scottish phrase that we have is this phrase called fighting. The fighting basically means the ritual abuse of your opponent by means of verbal violence. So it's where you challenge someone's idea, you really push back on the idea, but it can only work as use it. When there's that sense of trust and respect the other person you wouldn't do it with someone you don't know. But it's because you're you're putting in your work. You had a really interesting experience where with a group called Speak up, they took umbrage at you judging a design competition. So I'm wondering, what role does criticism have in creative work? Can the critic be another type of creative peer, someone that can challenge and your ideas and make your ideas stronger?
Role Of Criticism in creative work
Debbie Millman 19:38 I think that the role of the critic is really important because they are able to help you understand where something fits into culture, but they can also be really damaging and that I was just talking to Richard Tuttle, one of the last living great New York painters from the New York School of Painting. He's in his mid to late 80s A contemporary of Rothko and add Reinhart and Pollock. And his very we were talking about how his first show or his first piece at the Whitney in 1974 was eviscerated by Hilton Kramer in the New York Times, just completely destroyed him. Both his work and then ultimately it took them a long time to recover emotionally. So something like that is it can be really harmful for someone. It's only decades later that the Wall Street Journal ended up saying that show that work that Richard Tuttle did for that show is one of the most important contributions in art in the 20th century. So I think there are times when it helps you understand where something belongs in culture. But there are other times where for whatever reason, a critic doesn't understand what they're looking at, especially if it's something new, because people don't always understand the new and and then tries to destroy it because of their lack of understanding. It might not be because they don't like it, it's maybe because they don't understand what they're seeing. You know, it's sort of like the people that say, Oh, my kid could do a potluck, and it just looks like a bunch of splattered paint. Well, there's a whole reason he did that in that way that they don't understand. So they can disregard it as being something that's easy, or their kid could do. But there's so much intellectual heft behind it, there's so much conceptual thinking behind it, that they don't realize that they just then disregard it. So I think it's the role of the critic is an interesting one in in our culture, because everybody's a critic now to you know, we're all critics on Instagram, and Twitter, and so forth. And so I think we have to understand that there's a place for criticism, and then there's also a place where you need to shut off the criticism in order to continue to believe in what you're doing, especially if it's critical.
James Taylor 22:05 Do you think of the people you've interviewed? Do you think that is something the struggle more than the general population with the act of being creative is that you have to maybe be more empathetic in the world more in touch more present more emotional, emotionally open, let's say? Or is that just nonsense? Is it? You know, is how are the people you've interviewed? How do they respond to the critic, how does the site this is I'm gonna listen to this, I'm gonna take this and this other stuff, I'm just going to ignore him, I'm not going to use
Debbie Millman 22:36 that I don't really know. But I do think what's as important to think about and consider is what to do when all of the feedback is positive. Because then you run the risk of catering to your audience, and wanting to keep pleasing them and giving them what they want. So I think my answer to that would be to be aware of both the critical as well as the positive, because once you start working in a way that includes the concern about what people think you stop creating from your own soul and voice. And so once you start trying to accommodate both the critical or the positive, you run the risk of diluting your own ideas.
James Taylor 23:35 And how does the work of C design agencies or advertising agency sit in that because I obviously is a very challenging job, because you have the art, the artistic side of it, very creative. And then you have what feels to me like more that the commerce side, we have an audience and you have to listen to an audience and how do you what advice would you give to maybe designers or people that are working in that, that corporate crossover commerce art world in terms of how to compete with this?
Creativity And Curiosity
Debbie Millman 24:03 Well, in terms of art, I think it's really having a single minded focus in terms of design where you actually do need to please an audience, especially in branding, you do want your zealots, your loyalists, your consumers to like what you're doing, then you have to be really careful. I mean, you have somebody like Massimo Vignelli, who would show one design option, because he would feel that if my clients are coming to me for a solution, I'm like a doctor, I'm not going to give them five diagnoses. I'm going to tell them what they need to do in order to do this the best possible way that they can. So he would give one very few people have the audacity and the competence to do that and very few clients would be willing to accept that now. Paul Rand was the same way one design in terms of my concerns or advice now is if you have to listen to any One if the agency, the consultant needs to listen to anyone, I would say, err on the side of the consumer, because they're the ones that are really engaging with the product, because they want to, once you start having to design by committee inside a corporation, you know, I would say that unless those specific people are diehard consumers as well, and even then I wouldn't trust the purity of their opinion. I would say that it's probably better to do some ethnographic research with really key members of your your community to be able to understand how they feel before you.
James Taylor 25:47 You've spoken before I think it was on I heard you on the Tim Ferriss show speaking about earlier in your life, your your one purpose really was to live in Manhattan, whatever was required to do whether to work different jobs to live in not great apartments, that so desire, I want to live in Manhattan, because you felt it was that was the place to be able to make those connections or to have a full of creative, creative life. New Yorker wonderful, say I Love New York. And it's just one of those great creative cities of the world. And now I believe you're splitting time between New York and Los Angeles. So the Romans had this phrase, the genius loci that places themselves can have their own creative genius. They can almost be like a, an inspiration or an actor in creativity. It obviously you have New York for that. And you've you've already got that. But have you discovered that in LA yet? Because I was nearly two weeks. And I've yet to find that soul and it but but I'm an outsider. So maybe you're an insider, you can tell me you've discovered it?
Debbie Millman 26:52 Well, I don't know that I've discovered exactly what you're talking about in terms of the Spirit. But what I can tell you is that a lot of people ask me, which I like better, New York or LA. And as a city. I think I like New York better, probably because it's my soul city. And I've lived here my entire life. And I am connected to it in a way that I probably don't even fully understand. However, I like me better in LA, I'm less stressed. I'm less harried. I'm less I feel less obligated. I garden more I am much calmer. So I think there's benefits to both right now. And thankfully I don't have to choose at the moment.
James Taylor 27:54 So how do you keep your thinking fresh? I mean, you're you have all these different avenues of your creative self, your, as mentioned a designer, you're an artist. You We haven't even gotten your guitar playing. So that's something you're getting back into as well. How do you keep your own creative thinking fresh? What influence Did you tried to surround yourself with?
Debbie Millman 28:14 Well, it tried to get enough sleep because that's when we are our brains are rejuvenating, that's when our cells are rejuvenating. And I don't think you can do anything creative without that. So that's the first thing I'm asleep aholic. I love sleeping and I do almost everything I can to get seven or eight or nine hours of sleep a night. And and that's and I walk a lot and I while I'm walking I think gives me an opportunity to sort of freeform think without any specific deadline or objective. It's just freeform. Not super important to me. So that I think those two things are really important to my creative energy.
James Taylor 29:03 Now a bit early at the start of the show that you're you've been in this podcasting thing for a while you will kind of early on in the technology. Is there any technology that you feel kind of helps either augment the creative work you do or makes you more efficient in your creativity? I you can certainly get to tell me you're now moving into doing design matters in the metaverse or what technology are you using day in day out at the moment?
Debbie Millman 29:29 Well, it's the moment and talking to you right now for my little podcast studio at the School of Visual Arts. And I love this little room. It's tiny. It's about the size of a postage stamp, but it's very intimate. And while I don't really have guests coming here much anymore, because of COVID and now doing the podcast through zoom mostly. I am still really excited about the art of conversation with or without technology. To you know that you don't really need technology to have a good conversation that helps it, it certainly provides a foundation to be able to have that. But you know, I'm, I have a wonderful producer. So I'm not really thinking about the microphones and the speakers and the headphones and all of that. My art, I still love to do almost everything by hand. But I also do a lot of digital art, with an Apple pencil on my iPad, which I also love. So there's a lot of things that I still do old school and a lot of things that I still enjoy learning through new uses of technology. But I am not. I'm a bit of a Luddite. And so I depend on others to help me with technology, for example, I still have not mastered the remote on my television. And so it's almost inevitable that I turn on the television, and I get a blue screen or a green screen or something that says that something's not connected, right. So Roxanne is still endlessly perplexed by why that happens to me, and not her. But she's a real technological whiz, she's the first person to get the new iPhone to get the new iPad to get the new headphone. She loves technology. I'm still a little bit terrified by it. And so the less I need to depend on it, the happier I am.
James Taylor 31:29 And what's next for Debbie Millman. What are your next projects you're really excited about you're working on at the moment?
Debbie Millman 31:35 Well, there are two things that I'm super excited about. And they're both going to be launching around the same time. I'm working on a piece and installation for an opening for the new Broadway museum that's opening in the fall. And so the Broadway Museum is going to feature installations and rooms in the museum that all are about different moments in Broadway history. So there'll be a room about rent, and there'll be room about Hamilton and there'll be a room about any number of other moments in time in Broadway. But there's also going to be more conceptual rooms. And there's a room that I'm working on, which is going to be a room that is celebrating the many, many, many people that the Broadway community lost during the AIDS crisis. And so I'm creating two walls of names of people that that died during the AIDS crisis that were in the Broadway community. And so I'm working on that right now. It's very intense to be doing something like that. And that'll be out the museum is opening in October. And then I'm also working on something that I had been asked to do for years and years and years now. And it harkens all the way back to the work that I've done with Milton Glaser, which in the intensive that I took with him back in 2005. He asked us all to create a five year plan for our future lives. And I see you nodding and Yes, wonderful. So I had been asked over the years to write a book about it, which I didn't want to do. But I was asked by chronicle to design a deck of cards. And the cards are a way for people to write their own 10 year plans. I extended the runway because it took me 13 years. I made it a 10 year plan. It's called the remarkable life deck. And it's a 10 year plan for realizing your dreams. And I created 30 times two, so 60 pieces of art for the cards, and then a journal and instruction booklet. And it's in this beautiful jewel box of a box. And that'll be out in October as well. And I'm really excited about what people can make with it.
James Taylor 34:15 I would love love. I know you've done some stuff with Creative Live in the past with Chase. And I would love a course on that. That was ever possible.
Debbie Millman 34:24 I think that's a great idea. And I have to start thinking about how to help bring it to life for people. So thank you for that idea.
James Taylor 34:32 Well, then we move on. Thank you for the podcast. Wonderful, wonderful podcast, you've you're it's always a joy to listen to you because you you take this arc of a life with all your guests, and it's just it's so enlightening. So I go to listen to the podcast, not knowing who this person is and being thoroughly immersed in their story. And you helping them tell that story as well. And also thank you for the book putting it in old fashioned traditional book form. So as some of us Hello Luddites Can, can get into it as well. Where's mostly people, people to go to learn about everything that you're doing in the future? Where should they go and connect with
Debbie Millman 35:07 you to my website, Debbie millman.com It's all there.
James Taylor 35:11 Debbie Millman thank you for even being a guest on the Super creativity podcast.
Debbie Millman 35:15 Thank you, James. It's been an honor to be here with you. You can subscribe
James Taylor 35:19 to the super creativity podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts while you're there. Please leave us a review. I would really, really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor. I knew been listening to the super creativity podcast.
The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley With Jimmy Soni – #336
26 Jun 2022
00:59:06
The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley With Jimmy Soni
Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir and LinkedIn. What do all of these companies have in common? They were all formed, funded, or advised by a small group of men who founded or worked at one company, PayPal. Members of the PayPal Mafia as it's sometimes called, and who include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Reid Hoffman, have gone on to drive innovation and entrepreneurship in the 21st Century. Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals and hidden figures who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success. Jimmy Soni's previous book, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, won the 2017 Neumann Prize, awarded by the British Society for the History of Mathematics for the best book on the history of mathematics for a general audience. Welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast, Jimmy Soni.
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
Jimmy Soni 1:16 James, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
James Taylor 1:18 So you reached out to me, we connected because we had Sebastian Mallaby on the show. And he was talking about the power law is great book about Silicon Valley, venture capital firms. And one of the things are just reading through your book, the founders, one thing that links his book and yours is they both completely blow out of the water, the idea of the lone creative genius, the instead look at kind of innovation, entrepreneurship through this lens of either creative peers or collaborative teams. So one thing is you had all these different options of how you could write and get into this topic. But what first attracted you to the idea of writing a book about PayPal? And why did you decide to write a book about the founders of this one company, the various founders, rather than just one individual like Peter Thiel? Or an Elon Musk, for example?
Jimmy Soni 2:06 Yeah, that's a great question. I appreciate you picking up on on that specific thing that this this dispels the myth of one person in a garage, like hacking these companies together, assembling it together. You know, it's interesting, I hit my last book was about a mathematician and he worked at his name is Claude Shannon, and he worked at Bell Laboratories. Bell Labs was one of these places that also dispelled the myth of the lone creative genius, because they had a lot of geniuses in one place at one time for a series of decades, not just like a short period, this was, you know, a decent chunk of the 20th century. And so I started thinking, you know, this is this, this whole idea of, of clusters of talent. It's what I write this in my intro, it's with the producer, Brian Eno called Sidious. Not genius, but serious, right? So I started thinking, like, what are other senior says, use the plural, little awkward, but whenever I started just thinking, what are other groups, there are a few that came to mind in the world of technology, entrepreneurship, there was General Magic, which was this incredible place, you know, a ton of incredible alumni, their product didn't quite take off. But it was actually, the ambition and the scope was worthy of this just incredible documentary that was done that I think everybody should see. There was Fairchild Semiconductor, which is one of the valley's more famous clusters, there was Xerox PARC, where a lot of actually like what we use on laptops and computers was first invented. I found really good and media meaning books or docs on those groups. And I didn't quite find the same like, Hey, this is the condensed story for Pay Pal. And I thought of that as like, Wait, that doesn't make any sense. Because like, we're, you know, there, I don't know, 200,000 tweets about Elon Musk in the last like, what? Five minutes? Right? Or hour? Right? How is it that no one went back and kind of excavated this moment. And it's like these four years of his life, or the same for Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman on down the line. And it just struck me like, you know, a lot of my projects come to me, and I'm sure this is true for the things you work on, like you spot like, for me, it's an empty space on a bookshelf, right? You sort of like see the empty space, and you just, it bothers you. You just get you're like, I just I remember when I was thinking about it, I just I would call friends and say, this makes no sense. Right? Like, this makes no sense that there's not a book about this because it was this hugely interesting time. the.com bubble, rise it you know, it sort of gets created, it bursts. All of these people live through that experience. They live through September 11. Together, they IPO the company, that company gets acquired, and then they go on to build YouTube and build Tesla and all the other things they did. Why hasn't anyone done this? And when I couldn't find a sufficiently good answer to that question. I just decided they answered for myself.
James Taylor 5:01 And essentially, as I was written reading the book, the thing I kept thinking about was a TV show, I watched probably every club around Christmas time Band of Brothers a TV show, I kind of just want to watch it, it's kind of a thing, I just do it before Christmas, because there's like 10 episodes is quite short. But there's this, they kind of go through the forming stage, and you know, where they like each other don't like and then the, they have a strong leader that tends to come out or actually a kind of pairing that happens. And it can go through and it really then you see this, this culture that is formed over a number of months and years out of battle. Essentially, I really the book, it felt like it was like just loads of these little mini battles that were kind of going on in this culture was crazy. Tell us because it for people that don't know the history of PayPal, and you got a lot of detail. It was really initially two different companies, confetti and x.com. These were competitors that later became collaborators. So tell us, how are they cultures different? And why did they decide to join forces to what we can know as people today?
Jimmy Soni 6:11 Yeah, it's your description is very apt. It's it's actually funny that you describe it with Band of Brothers. Because Reed Hoffman use that exact reference. In a quote, he said, because someone sort of talked about how they were like, Oh, the PayPal Mafia, this or the PayPal Mafia that and the problem with that phrase is that it actually reduces the team of several 100 people to just a handful of people. And it makes you think that they all think the same way about everything. I actually have my own misgivings about the phrase, I write about it. And I what I would regard as a pretty balanced way at the end, and there are some people who love it, and a lot of people who don't really like it. And here's the kind of effect that it's sad. But Reed Hoffman use Band of Brothers, he said, he said something to the effect of and I won't get the quote, exactly right. He said, You know, people tend to think that the PayPal Mafia-like we're all hanging out together, it's not really that it's more like the band of brothers, we all went through this very, very intense experience together. And then when they were writing, the Times wrote this long story about in like the mid 2000s, or late 2000s, around the Pay Pal, alumni and Max Levchin, the CTO said, it felt like we were veterans of an intense military campaign. So your analogy isn't just something you made up? It's actually exactly how they feel about their own experience. Right. So you're spot on, you gave a little bit of background. But you're absolutely right, there were two companies that formed that merged together to become PayPal. So Elon Musk fresh off his first startup exit from zip to a company that he created in the mid 1990s takes the bulk of what his winnings meaning, you know, the bulk of what he made doing that company and invest it into a company called x.com. And x.com, ambition is enormous. What it is, is the idea is like, basically, oh, we're gonna take all financial services, and unite them under one banner. So if you want a mortgage, a loan, a credit line, if you want to do checking savings, if you want to do basically anything, financial x.com is going to handle it for you. And the idea was, if you do that you reduce friction within the financial system, and you can reduce fees for people that's x.com, big, vast surpassing vision. On the other side, you have these two relative unknowns who have who are trying their hand at startup entrepreneurship, Max Levchin, and Peter Thiel. And their idea is, is a company called infinity and confited these basic dip their their signature product launched in 1999, was that you and I, if we were at launch would be able to whip out our then hot Palm Pilots, right, this sort of that that arrows, smartphone technology, although I think it's an exaggeration, even call it a smartphone. It's not very smart. I do.
James Taylor 8:45 I do remember having one lovingly having one for a number of years, he was great lawmaker,
Jimmy Soni 8:49 knowing they were really popular. And their idea which was, which was able was at the time, it was seen as exciting and novel. And it was that the palm pilot had just introduced these little infrared ports into the corner of the device. And if you and I were sitting at lunch, and we needed to swap money, they built up a an application to do that in an encrypted way, meaning that it was a fully secure transaction. If I sent you 10 bucks to the infrared port, it would actually work. It was a real transaction. And that was their product. And they called that product, PayPal, they built an email companion to that product. And it turned out very quickly that like people didn't want to use these glitchy infrared ports to transfer money, but they really love the email companion product. And so that is how their half of the company was built. In late 1999. These two companies go toe to toe to fight for users on an auction website called eBay. It is the most intense I mean, even in describing it to me they sounded tired when they talked about it the most intense like three to four week period where they are fighting each other doggedly for user growth. Somewhere in the middle of that fight. They basically conclude that they're that they're better together. They are apart. Not everybody agrees with this, but they sort of see the writing on the wall. And they're like, look, we're just going to bankrupt each other if we continue this fight, and so they decide to merge together and become one company.
James Taylor 10:12 So I thought it was interesting kind of this this, this merger that kind of happened. You can almost see the differences in the culture in the code. Of them, like one was built, I remember was was on was kind of like Microsoft kind of based. So it was kind of quicker to do things. You needed less people, but it was less flexible. The other one was on Linux based as well. And I just thought it was interesting in looking at the cultures like one we felt it was a strongly kind of geeky kind of thing. And another one felt a bit more consumer and kind of reading through the book. And I was trying to think, if I was in that organization at point, who would I naturally gravitate, who were the people that I would feel like I would like to hang out with, and the one person can read through the book. And obviously, everyone talks about Elon Musk was probably the one person I would love to just sit down when was Max Levchin because he felt to me like he had the soul of that business, like, I know you can write a lot of initial code. And last November, I was in Chernobyl, and I got a chance to visit Pripyat, which is where he's from, which was the former kind of where the Chernobyl site happened. And you watch this journey of this person that gets out of Ukraine and moves to America and starts this thing. And this is the classic American story there as well. And I've thought Why is more not being written about Max Levchin and any kind of thoughts on that?
Jimmy Soni 11:41 Yeah, it's funny. I you know, and this is for your listeners. I didn't prompt this but it's the your description of what you just said is the reason that I kick the book off with Max Levchin. You know, people might anticipate that because for a variety of reasons, you might lead the book off with Elon, right? But I was moved to start the book with Max because I thought of him as, in some ways, like a prototypical Silicon Valley story, but also an atypical mind. Right. He is someone who is able who goes toe to toe with Elon Musk, right. And they're battling over serious engineering questions. And he I just found his story to be remarkable, you know, he emigrated to the United States. When he's in high school, he finds his way to the University of Illinois, then finds his way out west and begins to build the company that becomes PayPal. And, you know, there's this article that comes out about him well, after the Pay Pal years, and the person writing it was, I think, from the San Francisco Chronicle, they interviewed Peter Thiel. And one of the things Peter said, is almost a version of what you just said about being the soul of the company, Peter, and I, there wasn't time nor room to fact check this. But he said something to the effect of, you know, a bunch of people who worked at the company decided to name their kids after Max, because that's how highly they thought of him. Right. And I found that feeling again and again, when I interviewed people, you know, they they had, they looked up to him and his leadership in the company. Now what's really interesting is, you know, he's in his mid 20s. At this point, like the idea of of quote, unquote, leading a company is still something that it feels like it ought to, you know, being a different, somebody else, so many others more grey hair, right, but he is the founding CTO of convexity. He is with the company through its IPO, and it sailed to eBay. And he is the person who either directly or indirectly is responsible for a number of the company's signature achievements. What is really interesting is that he know he's one of the people that goes on to develop other things. He develops photos, photo application called slide that he sells to Google. And today, he's the founder and CEO of a firm, which is the Buy Now pay later technology and has gone public. So he's done this like multiple times. He's he was one of the he invested in and help to sort of bring to life glow, which is a fertility application. I mean, people really in Silicon Valley's like thought of as like leading light thought people think very highly of him. I was surprised that more of the world didn't know about him like and that's actually like, why threaded his story throughout. The other piece of it is that, at people's core is about payments, right? It's about James being able to send Jimmy 10 bucks right over email really efficiently. But what it really is about is making sure that James is actually James, that you are who you say you are, what Pay Pal is is a very, very, very big fraud fighting application that is like that what people see is the like glitzy interface in the front, a lot of that fraud, fighting a lot of the encryption, a lot of the emphasis on security comes from and is driven by Max Levchin, and the team that he builds it's not him alone, and he'd be the first to say that and did but there's a big part of this story that is around him really rigorously thinking through fraud and fraud fighting, that is actually what makes a company successful. You know, he's also just like, For the person I like, he has a photographic memory and he's brilliant and it was just fun to engage with him in that way.
James Taylor 15:05 And there's some funny stories in it and we'll maybe get into a few of them. I remember one Levchin when he realized that it was not the kind of Russian hacker groups getting in and trying to do kind of things to, to kind of different types of fraud. Like Levchin starts hanging out in the hacking chat because obviously speak, you can speak Russian as well. So it's kind of like playing with them. And there's, there's loads of really quite funny, very kind of creative ways gonna go. I remember at one point, you were in a book that left you and said, as soon as he got on those hacker groups where he was listening and watching the conversations of people saying how they're going to take money from PayPal, you also realize, you know what, least I'm in this room, all these other banks, they're not even in this room. They're all screwed. You know, they're not even thinking about this conversation. So live chat is fantastic. I love whenever I get a chance to meet him. I would very much like to do that. But the thing that links I think your book really nicely with Sebastian's book, The Power Law is, as I mentioned, you wrote about this book being a constellation of talent, but at the core of it is also these creative peers is combinations of two different but complementary people, Levchin and Thiele, for example. So the other person that kind of comes into it is maybe a controversial character for some is Peter Thiel. He seems to be like the one that could really go toe to toe with legend in terms of intellectual talk about that relationship between Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. What was the thing that kind of connected them, how did they spark off each other?
Jimmy Soni 16:35 Yeah, you know, it's actually one of the things that to take it to take a step back. I love that you identified this specific thing, because I think there are there are these business pairings that we sometimes talk about, we talk about Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, right, will talk about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. And I think in that Pantheon should be Peter Thiel and Max Levchin as well. And I, by the way, I think, in fact, I know because they've spoken about it in other places, as well as with me, each of them has spoken very highly of what the other contributed, right. And so So a good example is that, actually, there's a, there's a bunch of great, great stories around this. But there, there is a way in which what Peter does for Max, and he's spoken about this is give him call it the most ambitious rendering of what Max's life could look like as an entrepreneur. So initially, when Max pitches his ideas to Peter, he has this idea that like, like, it's kind of a what a fresh out of college entrepreneur who built several small companies in college, one that succeeded three that failed, it's what that person might think, is a good idea, which is he wanted to build mobile encryption libraries, and then essentially charge a rental fee for companies to use these mobile encryption libraries. And I think that the connection with Peter does a couple things. One, it gives Max some investment, it gives him some money, some capital to actually like build the company. The second is that he gets him to think more expansively about what the product could be, and does basic things that even Max admitted to me that he wasn't able to do, like write a business plan, right, and like, write a pitch deck. And so you have this person in Peter who kinda like in, like, outlines that vision can help to enable it in different ways, is a is a recruiter, you know, he plays this role of like, there's all of these things that an engineer like Max either doesn't want to do, or doesn't feel like he's the best at and into that into those pocket steps, Peter. Now, on the on the other side of it, you know, you do have somebody in Peter who is a like world class, talent, magnet and talent seeker, he can find people and often people who like, almost like, it's almost like Moneyball for Silicon Valley, like he finds people that everybody else says like, that's not gonna work. And he finds a way to bring them to their highest and best use. Max spoke, there's just one really incredible moment where, and I don't actually think I included the book. So for your listeners, this is not in the book. But you know, in the spirit of sharing it. Max is at one point, like a year into these two products, the Palm Pilot money beaming product, and the email money product. And there's like some late night at the office, and Peter comes to the office. And he says, Max, what are you doing, and Max, like I'm doing some bug fixes for the for the Palm Pilot product. And they're like a year into the launch of the product. And the email money product has like millions of transactions, and I think north of 1 million users, and the Palm Pilot product has around 12 or 13,000 users. And so Peter basically just goes like, wait, what you're like, why are you doing bug fixes on this product that only has 12 or 13,000 users? You're the CTO of the company like we need you doing these other things that are far bigger, right? And so there's there's this kind of clear call it clarifying effect that Peter will often have in the story not just with Macs but with other people where he is able to direct their energy in the place that's going to add the most value. And, and you know, I tried in my own way, like do You're the narrative to explore that and explain it a bit on how he does it. But it is there, it's really there for Max because one of the things that Max is this great thing. You know, his his, he has an investment firm or like an investment fund where he used his to, like do angel investing called hVF. Hard, valuable fun. And, and I my understanding of the backstory is that he really likes hard problems. But he has this moment where he's like beating his head against a wall about a problem. And Peter just like gently asked him the question like, well, what's the point of this? I know, it's hard, but is it valuable? And it was like this revelatory moment for X Ray said, oh, like, it's not enough to just solve hard problems, they actually have to be valuable, like I might enjoy them. But it doesn't mean that there's value in the world about solving them, right. I think that this interplay between these two people was, I mean, it was critical, I don't think it was absolutely critical. It created the foundation for the company that became PayPal, a company that is still in existence today. And that changed the lives of all of the people in the middle of the story. But that partnership really is is the glue that held certainly half at least half of the company together. At the end
James Taylor 21:15 of the book, you also mentioned you can give credit to different people. One of those was Ryan Holliday, who? I think you've had rain on the show. I've interviewed him on other things before. And he said he was able to kind of make an introduction to Peter Peter Thiel as well. Were you able to actually have a conversation with Peter to kind of talk about some of these things? Or was it still, you know, looking at what Pete had said in other magazines, interviews, conferences?
Jimmy Soni 21:37 Oh, no, I've done I did several conversations with him that were pretty lengthy actually, that where he, he would engage on the subjects in the book and some of the ideas and sometimes I was asking general questions like about the development of technology in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And sometimes I would ask him really specific questions, you know, because there were specific moments. A good example is that he is in New York on September 10, and flies out that night. And it is this very worrying trip, it's a really hard trip, because they meet with investment bankers, and the investment bankers basically don't understand the Pay Pal business. And they tell Peter and team like, we're not gonna be able to take you public. And here are the 25 reasons we're going to be delayed. And it's a really hard day, and they catch what is even though there's bad weather, they catch what is the last flight out that night. And the next morning, you know, they awake, and the nation is in chaos, and the world is in chaos. And so we were we dove into the kind of general trends in meaning technology development, but also really specific stories. Like I asked him to tell me like, What was it like, you know, flying back that day? And what was that meeting like? And what did it mean for the company's future? And so there was we had a, we had a bunch of really great conversations. And you know, to his credit, he was really generous with his time. And he didn't really, he didn't restrict me from talking to anyone. Nor did he asked to see material like he didn't say, like, I need scrip approval or something. He was very open and saying, you know, here's what happened, from my perspective, you should talk to other people.
James Taylor 23:05 And he one of his stories was the recount. I'm not sure it was from the interviews or people can have previously heard about the story was how they came to arrive at the office for Thiele capital, and see 1000 Sand Hill Road, which I thought was a very kind of, like fake it to make it into a bit of creativity as well. So can you tell us that story? Because I love that little bit? Yeah.
Jimmy Soni 23:26 It's great. It's it's, you could you could call it like a hackers approach to trying to get the right address on your business card. Right. So one of the people that that Peter hires very early on is a gentleman named Ken Howery. Ken and Peter had connected because Ken was a Stanford undergraduate and Peter had been back on campus for a couple of Stanford review events. And they stayed in touch and Peter offered Ken a job working with to Capitol and one of his inaugural assignments I don't know if it was the first but it was one of the first was we need an office and it's really important that the office have a Sandhill Road address because they don't lead people to take us seriously because at this time, that real estate meant something right it really was it could noted you know influence and and and respectability and you you are you are a somebody. So the problem is everybody wants addresses there. And so Ken how he told me the story of how he spent basically a full day just like going sort of door to door like looking at office spaces that they either couldn't afford or weren't available. And it gets to this one address. And the person who owns the building is outside his name is Tom Ford. He's actually kind of a call it like a like a real estate legend. You know, he's passed, but he he had scooped up a bunch of real estate in that area. And one of his quirks was that he really liked would go outside and if he saw something wrong with his property would fix it himself. He was like he was a very, it was sort of a Midwestern ethic about him, right? He meets Kenari and Ken says I'm looking for an office he's expecting like there's no availabilities. No vacancies, and Tom Ford says, Well, come on, let's go. Let's go take a look at the map. And he looks at the map of this particular property, and he spots a clause is not spoken for. And he says, Well, would you be okay with a with a with a broom closet essentially and Kansas will? Sure let's take a look at it. And that is the inaugural to capitol office because they retrofitted broom closet. Were kind of how we actually did by the numbers to put on the outside. There were no windows. And Mac's told me the story. He said, No, I said that. I told him the office story. And he said, No, I remember that office. He said, sometimes if I was working in there, I had to suck in my my stomach and push the chair up against the table so that somebody could pass by me that's how thin it was. It was actually a closet. It was not an office
James Taylor 25:38 are wonderful. And there's lots of other ones that this as well. But also, it's nice about some of these little strange kind of quirky things ended up resulting in inventions which we deal with every day, I think Sanjay Bhargava, inventing authentication using bank payments. So with this this problem that people were having, how do you authenticate someone that they are who they say they are. And just by sending these to open a micro payments, you know, we're thing that and we can know this, but that can it came from someone sovereign, but I think the other one was the sending money by email kind of early on. It was almost like it was a, you know, they they kind of created a but they didn't even think anything of it. It was not even so there's so many stories in the book, where they kind of created these little things, little side things, it wasn't really a main they had solved a little problem. And these became the main thing as well. I thought it was fascinating.
Jimmy Soni 26:30 What and I would argue this probably one that everyone who's listening is used at some point in the last 24 to 48 hours, which is CAPTCHA. So the first commercial application of the captcha, these little tests that you have to use to prove that you're human, like if you have to find a fire hydrant. And there's like a bunch of things that are not fire hydrants that the first app commercial application of that was at PayPal, it was how they fought bots that were creating fake PayPal accounts. Because what was happening is all these bots were creating PayPal accounts in order to cash in on bonuses, you needed the ability to force someone to prove they were human, or meaning force a computer to prove that it is not a computer. And they developed the captcha and obviously that is just standard, you know, throughout, it's changed a lot for obvious reasons. And it's gotten visual, not letters. But it is fundamentally the same technology that was first applied there. And it was this this thing where they had a problem. And they had to come up with a solution really, really fast to to fix it. And a series of those solutions still dot the landscape of financial services today. And I just I wanted to dive into the creativity of how that happens.
James Taylor 27:38 And one of the things that you often feel very strongly in the book is, these were, they weren't long hours, they were working all that they were doing all nighters all the time, as a written thing would accompany work like that today, with a young company with, you know, 1920 21 year olds, would they work in that same way? Do you think that ethics still is there in in tech and Silicon Valley? Or do you think that's something that we can look back in the past and say, we will get mad men and 1950s?
Jimmy Soni 28:10 You know, it's a really good question. And I I, my disclaimer is I don't work in technology. Right? And so I don't have to, I don't, I don't, I'm not sure that my answer will be accurate. What I can tell you is some of the feedback that I've gotten from people who do work in technology about the book. And I had this one person write me a note. And he said, You know, I'm glad that in the book, you didn't run away from writing about how hard it was, and how long the hours were. You didn't glorify it, but you didn't dismiss it either. And what this person was saying was a version of what I had heard from other people, which is, if you are trying to bring a new thing into life in the world, it is often the case that it doesn't happen within a contained number of hours every week, that the story of startups whether they want to talk about it publicly or not, especially at the beginning, is the story of just like gratuitously hard work, right. And I think that people maybe you know, today we've sort of we've had evolutions on this front, we know that there's some value in the brain taking a break, we have more science to back up the value of rest. But I think that even in the face of all of that, there is still something about the startup culture that is just about like working to bring your vision into reality, no matter how hard it is, and knowing that it will be hard and there will be long hours. Do I think that's always positive? Probably not. And I wasn't casting a moral judgment or making a recommendation when I was writing the book. All I heard was just story after story of Yeah, we go home and Friday night and like everybody was expected to be in the office on a Saturday. And I and I will say like, I I wonder how one could do it another way, especially in the earliest moments where you're just trying to have traction, and there's so much to be done and the team is so small. It seems to me that it would be really hard to accomplish it other wise. But I also, you know, the disclaimer is maybe there is and we know that there's another type of story to be told. But I can't think of a major technology company that didn't have this kind of intensity in its first, let's say, one month to 24 months, it would seem to me to be almost inconsistent with by that kind of world of work.
James Taylor 30:20 As I was reading it, I was thinking, Well, you know, we're here now, but work life balance that's going to push more. And I'm reading I think, what if that? I mean, you know, you've got a young daughter, I believe, and you know, what about that young parent? How would they deal with and I know that word, the word young parents working at the thermostat? And I thought, how did they do it? Because I can understand maybe the, you know, the young 25 year old single person doing all nighters and drinking Red Bull, but there was people there who were parents, you know, they had other responsibilities?
Jimmy Soni 30:49 No, and I'll tell you the honest answer, the honest answer is it was really brutally hard. And the people that it was hardest for or was were parents, because you had a senior, you had senior managers who didn't have kids, many of them. And then you had a group of people who didn't have children. And I spoke to them. And I actually, it's funny that you say that because I as a parent, I would ask them, I said, Look, you're one of the few parents like on this roster. How did you make this work? And to a person? The answer was, it was just very, very hard like it it strain families, it was difficult it was it was a period of their lives where you look back and some of them describe Hey, pal, PTSD, right, then, like, that's how hard it was. But they also said, and this is to the team's credit, one of the one of the people I interviewed who was apparently had look, was it difficult? Sure. But one of the things about PayPal was that if you've got your work done, and you and you were effective at what you did, you know, it was a culture where like, you could actually set more of the rules for yourself in terms of hours and timing, then people would say, so, meaning this person was saying, like, you know, they kind of knew that I knew my swim lane very well, and that I would get my work done efficiently. And then I could go off and work and do whatever I wanted to do. It wasn't necessarily about clocking in at nine and clocking in at five, or you know, clocking in and out and clocking out at 9pm, it was much more about Dude, are you effective? Do you get the things done that you say you're gonna get done. But I will say the people I admire most in the story, are the people who were young parents of young children at that company worked so hard during this period. And you know, my hat's off to them, because I'm not sure I could have done the same.
James Taylor 32:27 Now, I'm probably kind of arriving the gorilla in the room. Elon Musk, when you kind of went out, it can kind of go directly into the Elan, and there's some stories there. And obviously, his character comes bass very strongly. But there was something else that linked all the characters in this book was as well as just their intellect and their drive and their ability to put in the hours the hard work was their curiosity. And you describe in the book Elon Musk having an aha moment where he reads the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think, when he's younger. And he said, a lot of times, the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So going into this book, what were the what was the what was the defining question that you were looking to try and answer you were trying to kind of get to the root of rather than thinking about us, because there's so many different ways you can you can go into what was your guiding style in this book?
Jimmy Soni 33:23 Yeah, you know, it's a good, you know, pardon the pun or not, but like, it's a good question. I, I would always think about when I was writing, I would always say to myself, like, how does this particular moment or scene help explain how the company came to be? Right? Because the temptation is to do what a lot of people do, which is focus on controversy, because it sells or to focus on, you know, the high profile figures because they sell, right. But I would try whenever possible to return to the question of what I'm writing about is a four year window with one company and there are a lot of people who made that company possible. Does what I'm writing serve a purpose here? Right? Meaning does it serve to advance the story of the company of Pay Pal? One of the things that people will notice if they read the book is that after Elon is departure from the company in late 2000, I don't actually write about him all that much. And people might be like, Oh, I wanted that, or I need that. And for my, for my purposes, it was always well, he's not in the company anymore. He's doing other things. So he's not sort of directly relevant to the Pay Pal story. And I think that like that question, kind of always got me back, which was I'm not telling the Mac story or the Elan story or the reed Hoffman story. I am telling a story of several 100 people, does this serve that particular purpose and mission? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy thing is fun. And you know, I will say that There's an irony in having spent this much time thinking about what is arguably like today, the least interesting part of his life, meaning what other people are interested in, right? Like, I spent a lot of time, you know, examining understanding, talking to him about the years call it like 15 to 2829, right, like there abouts. And it's this very generative period in his life, you know, he goes to, from one, college to an E transfers to the University of Pennsylvania, he gets accepted to Stanford decides not to go to grad school, builds his first startup then builds a second startup, he almost dies twice, right? Like there are all these things that happened in his life. But like in the last two weeks, all anybody wants to know is this this sort of his perspective on these other matters, right contemporary technology with his acquisition of Twitter. And I will say it's actually it was, it's been really helpful to have explored the early years of this person around whom there is a lot of discussion and chatter, because I came to appreciate that many of the, we take for granted so much, so much of what he's done and how to overcome. And it strikes me that in a different way, but in the same way that you expressed about Max Levchin story Elon is is a classic immigrant entrepreneur story, right down to the details, right? comes here with very little goes very far. Doesn't Know anybody has to build his his success and his Rolodex has helped along the way from different people has teammates who are interesting and vibrant and colorful. But just in the same way that Max is a story of someone coming here with very little and succeeding, Elon is the same. And in a way, it was a real privilege to explore the early, you know, the, or the different the early years, the years that weren't, you know, the Met Gala? They weren't, they weren't what you see now, because you learn so much about what a person is, when they're making those choices, you know, and asking him about, how did you how did you decide to go from this to this, and not talking at all about the things that are going on today? That was a great gift and an unreal, fun part of this project?
James Taylor 37:11 And as I was reading the book, and I was thinking, well, what would if I was to gift someone like three books to understand Silicon Valley nap time, probably I was thinking of it like this book. Give them you know, Sebastian Mallaby his book, I think it's great to understand the money side of things. And the third book, which kind of links on to this, which is your commission on writing this book, which is talking about how did this company, not just the individual that the company, is creativity, Inc, by Ed carrier, because that's really about that's really about then it goes to the culture. And I'm reading that book he talks about, it was almost like, like baking a cake. And like, just, you know, you don't want too much of one ingredient, you want this and it's like these things. You want the salt and the sour and the spice and you want all these kind of things together and reading the book that I got that sense there was all these different flavors, these different tastes of people within it. And on their own. So many skills be highly overpowering. But when you put them together, they actually they were actually pretty cool. So I'm gonna go back to what we talked about creative pairings. And in this book, you pay a tribute to editor Alice Mayhew at Simon, who passed away during his junior writing this book, you also had a contribution with the late Jane will Entus on the book, Jeff carousel. Talk to us about how did these pairings augment your own creativity, your creative or how do you enjoy working with these people? Because this is these are your creative powers these editors nice,
Jimmy Soni 38:40 right? Yeah, you know, Alice was a was a giant. I'm glad you you mentioned her, you know, she was like, she was like, the she was like, Simon and Schuster is Lebron James. Right? She was like the person there who has worked with a lot of the writers that I grew up reading and admiring, you know, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Walter Isaacson, like the biggest people on the planet, former presidents Supreme Court justices, you worked with Alice Mayhew, and it was a rite of passage, because part of what people know about Alice and what has been written about her in public, you know, and she is very hard. Like, she will just flat remember, there were so many times when she would just flat out, call me out on something or just like, take, like, send back an email. It was like how, you know, how could you do this? And it was in service, though, of producing a book that was better, because she was willing to have that level of honesty with with her authors, right? It was actually one of these funny things, because there's this like alumni, not alumni group, but you know, informal alumni like people who had worked with Alice. And as I got to know some of these people, some of them are, you know, 1020 years older than I am, I'd find out that they actually had the same fear that I did whenever they write to Alice because they never knew it was going to come back right. Because she was so bracingly honest. But she helped to She lit the place on fire in the sense that, you know, I can't I don't even know how many books have books, the first one killed surprises and were made into movies and like had this kind of big bigness about them. Right. I mean, Walter Isaacson was at Steve Jobs, deathbed. And that was the book that Alice helped to edit. And I think the biggest thing that she did for me with this project, is that she got it right away, because it's sort of hard like you sort of are pitching it and you're like, Pay Pal and be like, Pay Pal. That's not that big of a deal. Like, what's the deal here? She understood right away. She said, No, this is about like the founding period of this generation of technology entrepreneurs. She got it, believed in it, fought for it, and was a real advocate. Like she would say she would make analogies to me in emails that I would write to her like, I remember the last email she wrote to me before she passed away by Senator chapter one, which is this like, really, like kind of, you know, a lot of Hurly burly a lot of stuff happening. And she wrote back and she said, I felt like I was there, though. I'm glad I wasn't most of the time. That's great.
James Taylor 41:04 Story. She was getting into the story.
Jimmy Soni 41:07 Exactly. And she's like, that was great. And then she also said, you know, Edison would be amazed. Because I think she understood that innovation and this type of creative work. It's not it's not tidy, right? It's really messy. And it can be very their egos and personalities can come into the mix. And so that that was also the Edison story, right? This is a sort of larger than life figure had his hand and everything was very, very exacting and demanding. She saw these historical parallels. Working with her, helped me improve as a writer, I mean, because you just had to bring your A game like it was just one of those like you didn't send bad work to Alice Mae, you you just you couldn't
James Taylor 41:43 find that. And then the work you did with Jane Mullins, I didn't know about this. This is a bridge or in in Brooklyn. Yeah. carousel carousel. What was this collaboration was this was a kind of CO CO writing collaboration.
Jimmy Soni 41:58 Yeah, it's so random. I mean, it's the most random, it sort of shows do these projects come together? So I had my daughter six years ago, she fell in love with Jane's carousel in Brooklyn. It's this carousel on the waterfront right in your neighborhood called Dumbo. And she, I, my daughter would just keep writing this thing. And I mean, like we wrote it. I mean, I've written an obscene number of like, hundreds of times, right? Because it was like one point, there's like nothing to do. It was like cold and you go to the carousel, because it's somewhat indoors, and you can, you can make a day of it. So I kept writing this thing and noticing that it was in much better shape than a lot of other carousels in New York, and that it was just better. Like it just the colors are more vibrant. The whole thing was amazing. And I wrote Jane a note, I just wrote, I wrote chain and email, I found her email address. And I just sent her a note and said, you know, thanks. It's like, I think this really cares. I was really busy. My daughter loves it. And here's some photos. And you know, I'd love to learn more about it. And she was great. She wrote back and said, Let's have lunch. And so we started to get to know one another. And I said to her, I was like, because I learned in the course of that that the carousel took 30 years to restore, and she did the restoration herself. She was sanding the carousel down with exacto knives and discovered the original color of the horses so that she could recreate it and do what she called a historically faithful restoration. It was an amazing process. I mean, amazing. But I couldn't fathom one person spending 30 years working on a carousel restoration. And so I said to Jane somewhat offhandedly. But let's sort of half off handedly, I said, you know, you should really do a book about this, like a coffee table book. describing the process of restoring the carousel like this is a historic carousel was built in 1922. This year is actually the 100th anniversary of the castle. So it's been around for 100 years. It's been through, you know, World War, Great Depression, etc. Actually, sorry, World War, multiple other wars, things like that. It was in Ohio, it almost was almost lost to a fire. You know, there were all these things that happened to it. And so this is like a dramatic story of this carousel. And she said, you know, people have talked me about writing it. And I don't know. And then we just kept talking and one thing led to another, we decided to do it together. And she was a packrat. She kept all the archival material, the images, the photos, she actually kept the exacto knives in a box of exacto knives. I worked with her on a tragically she passed away just before the books debut. But we were able to capture the actual story of the making of the carousel. And it's you know, it's a book by Pheidon just incredible company that were the collaborative with her on it. And, you know, to my mind, I think the thing that I admired about her is actually just the same thing I admire about some of the other figures that I wrote about in technology, which is, endurance is at the heart of a lot of these stories, right. So creativity isn't just about having the spark or having the apple hit your head. It's actually about enduring. It's about deciding that you're going to bring the thing into existence and knowing that you're going to face about a million obstacles between here and the finish line, but deciding to go anyway, that sounds like a cliche, except that the cliche turns out to be true in every act of creation of anything significant ever, right? Whether it's the iPhone or Jane's carousel, they all have this. They have skeptics. They have doubters. They have forces opposing them. You wouldn't think this, but there were all these people who live in Brooklyn who did not want a carousel in that site, you wouldn't think there'd be any opposition to a carousel, but there was huge opposition to it. So if you had to become a political campaigner to fight for the future of the carousel, I think of endurance is one of the unheralded virtues within creativity, it you have to have it without it, that the creative thing can just be an idea on a page.
James Taylor 45:27 I'm so glad, because I'm co writing my first book just now. And the other writer is a writer who lives in in New York, in New Jersey. And it's interesting kind of working with her she's a journalist is her background. So she's very good at like, focusing on like, deadlines. And and I'm not, because I'm a professional speakers, my main thing, and I'm used to getting on stages and telling stories to an audience and having that interaction, and she's doing it in the written word. But it's just, it's an interesting kind of working with someone who's very, very different from you and thinks in a very different way from you. And one of the things my career that we're working on is that she's very good at just drilling, drilling, digging, digging. So when you were working with Jane, how are you complimenting just from from a technical standpoint, we you sitting down with her and you essentially her her? I was gonna say a scribe to work in getting all the things from her or she kind of building out things, and you were helping structure, what was the what was that relationship? Like?
Jimmy Soni 46:29 Yeah, you know, it was more than that. It was, it was two things. One is that, you know, when we first started working together, I think in my head, I had an idea of what the story could be. But the more she would share, I would actually just help structure the tale in a way that like we had a beginning, a middle and an end. But the actual interaction was that we would sit and I would interview her. So I had these long interviews that we taped, where I would say, Okay, let's get to the part where the carousel arrives in New York, and it's basically just survived a fire and it looks like, you know, junk and you've just bought this thing randomly. Let's walk through what was the day that it? How was it? What did it look on the day of arrival? Where did you ship it? What did you do? How did you begin? And so, you know, I think I asked all the questions that somebody looking from the outside in might want to ask, and then what we would do is we would just sit for these conversations, and then I would go off and write stuff. And the idea was to pack as much, you know, people buy cognitive books for different reasons than they buy narrative nonfiction, or you know, they're buying it mostly for the images and that sort of stuff. But what I wanted to make sure is that 100 years from now, if someone ever wants to know the story of the carousel, they get as close to Jane's version of it as they could, based on what she shared with me and the documents she shared with me and the memos and the notes and all of that. And that's the the principal interaction was I was basically interviewing her I was sort of doing with her what I did with Elon, which is, let me ask you about some things. And I'm going to ask you some questions you've probably answered before. But I'm going to ask you a lot of stuff you haven't actually been asked before. Or I'm going to ask you to go in the Time Machine and take me back, you know, to this date. And like, let's go back there. And in both cases, whether it's sort of January lawn, you know, it was fun, like these are these were fun conversations, because I was asking them to sort of, again, go back, it was more nostalgic, then, you know, where were you on this, this in this date, it was more like an impressionist paintings. Give me a sense for what this was like.
James Taylor 48:29 And enough time has passed. So some of the sharpness has maybe come off in a good way and about as well. This whole episode, we'll obviously be talking about creativity. How do you keep your own thinking fresh? What influence do you try to surround yourself with all the time?
Jimmy Soni 48:46 Yeah, it's a good I wish I had a better answer to that. No, I look, I read a lot. I, you know, almost always in the middle of three different books at one time. I would say that, that I'm a big issue. For me, it's, it's about I suppose that I do two to two or three things to keep the creativity bustles relatively fresh. One is I I love documentaries. I'm not a documentary filmmaker or anything. But I watch a lot of documentaries. And I find that that especially when I'm tired and I like don't have the the sort of zeal to read a book or whatever. I find that docs are a really good way to just like kind of explore different things that I wouldn't necessarily have exposure to. You know, there's just so many good documentaries that are actually underrated and under watched. Like it's funny because they don't have the same kind of massive theatrical quality or theatrical release that a lot of films do. But I love documentaries. So that's one one way
James Taylor 49:47 I guess we're in a golden time of documentary making. Yeah, it's almost tell me about the vowel in the documentary which is supposed to be incredible, which I think is also in Brooklyn or New York, certainly. So we are pretty Golden Time of the of documentary making.
Jimmy Soni 50:03 And I think that what it allows it allows you to do is it allows you to take stories in one genre, but make them appealing to people in a totally different setting. So a great example is, you know, I'm not necessarily somebody who knows the world of music super well. But the documentary Defiant Ones isn't about Dr. Dre and Jimmy I Avene. And in Jimmy IV is the founder of Interscope Records, and together, they help to create beats headphones. Now, what I like to know to know about their lives, or like their entrepreneurial lives, not really, but because HBO did it as this four part very, very well done documentary series on them, I was exposed to a world that I otherwise like didn't have a lot of, like, you know, and then like, the roadmap for right to understand producers, or to understand lyricist or that sort of stuff. So that's kind of one thing. The second thing is I tried to look for, like, I can't read a study like, like, if I, if I noticed a trend, I'll sort of nerd out on the trend to like, let's say, like two or three to the two or three book level. So like, I'm super interested in like nuclear energy right now, right, because I think nuclear has gotten a bad rap. I think that we kind of conflated nuclear war with nuclear energy, it sort of has a branding problem like it, you know, we think of Hiroshima. But like, there's actually sort of like boring work in reactors that needs to be done. And I think there's some real power there. I so I've been reading books about nuclear energy, just because I want to learn more about it. So I sort of tried to go to like, what I what I think of as like the two to three book level on any subject. And then the other thing I think, is, from creatively, I also always try to think about what project or projects I'd want to be working on, I do find that like, if I don't have something that I'm actively like, creating my creativity, muscles actually atrophy because there's no application to the stuff that like it, I kind of need a goal, I need a target. I'm not somebody who can, who just sort of has the self discipline to like, I hate to say this, but it's like, they're sort of learning for the sake of learning. And that's all well and good. And I admire the people who can do it, I'm not one of them. I need a project or a purpose or a thing. And then I bring all the resources to bear and I'll read really widely, and I'll find out everything I can about the late 1990s Internet and Pay Pal and Elon his life. But if I don't have a target, if I'm just doing it for fun, like I you know, there are other ways I certainly did my time.
James Taylor 52:26 Now we although we've been people as a technology company, and we haven't really spoken too much about technology, I guess, but what technology do you use to either kind of free up your time for your creative work? Or maybe to augment the work you do as a writer?
Jimmy Soni 52:44 Yeah, yeah, man, it's a it's a great question. I'm pretty low tech in the sense that, you know, I use sort of the basic tools. And I'm not sitting here with like a quill in a thing of ink, right? Like I have a laptop and a phone. But I actually, for the work I do, which is the book work, which is like long form nonfiction, you have to be really careful that you don't let technology become a distraction. And so I actually make it a point to kind of not go tech to tech heavy button for the sake of like, let's leave people with something that they can use. All my interviews, I transcribed to a really, really good AI transcription service called otter.ai. And otter is great, because if you're paying for a human person to do transcriptions, it can the cost can really add up. They've built this really, really elegant and very seamless technology. And I'm not like I don't work with them or anything is just, I'm a fan. They were it was so helpful to have that during my interviews because I could look at the text and see what it it read like not just see what it sounded like, which is really powerful. One of my my kind of favorite tools is just like Google Docs has so much magic in it that goes under explored and under utilized. Like they have this voice typing feature in Google Docs that is scary, accurate. And I owe them so much. Like it's really like they've saved my bacon on multiple occasions of this voice typing thing because it eliminates writer's block. If I can just talk into a microphone and see the words appear on the screen, and then I have a bad first draft to start with. And then I'll offer one more, which is when I wanted to reach out to people who worked at PayPal, one of the best services I use was this company called Rocket reach. Rocket reach is really good and again, you know, you have to be careful when you're sending out cold emails but I was there with a purpose I wanted to find out what this you know what employee 37 thought about their time and PayPal. Rocket reach was enormously helpful in finding email addresses to contact people so those are the three but but honestly otherwise, I I actually try to like keep technology at bay a little bit. I'm not, you know, I'm not jumping into Metaverse writing
James Taylor 54:52 because I was gonna say ya know people mentioned Ryan Holiday earlier. You know, he has this kind of note system or his you know his cards. We If that's how, because there was obviously so much research you're having to do on this, I was thinking, How are you, you know, getting a handle as a using Evernote? Or is it what are you using to corral all this stuff? And on the research even before you start writing? Yeah,
Jimmy Soni 55:14 so that's actually the latter another piece of technology, not technology. But it's a good piece of software called Scrivener. Scrivener for long form projects, like novels, or screenplays or nonfiction books. It really is amazing. It's like someone took Microsoft Word and told it to go to the gym for like a year. And Microsoft Word came out and it was all like beefy, you know, it has all these tools and functions that you didn't know you needed until you start using it. And then right away, you're like, oh, this makes so much sense for just compat compiling, and like you said, corralling the research and corralling all this material. It makes it super easy. And I recommend it to people who are doing book-length projects. Because you sort of don't know you need it. And then the moment you start using it, you can't imagine your life without it. Yeah.
James Taylor 55:59 So how are you moving between Scrivener and Google Docs is Google Docs where you actually sit down to start writing? And you're just using? collating everything. And yes, how you're using those?
Jimmy Soni 56:09 That's exactly right. So I when I'm gathering string, when I'm just like mining raw material, it's all happening in Scrivener. And it's all organized there in a relatively disciplined way. I write the chapters and piece material together in Google Docs, there's a couple of reasons. One is you can kind of do it anywhere, right? Meaning if you have your phone, or if you have your laptop, you have no excuse not to be working. The other thing is like, I mean, I don't know if anybody grew up in like the blue screen of death era of computing. But if you did, you're always paranoid that something's gonna collapse. I feel like an entire generation of people that live with the blue screen of death are probably like cloud services power users, just because we were so traumatized by being like mid document and having to give you a blow up on us. And so I ended up using Google Docs, I'm totally afraid that like, I'm not going to press Ctrl S and save right. And so I ended up using Google Docs that way. The other thing that Google Docs does for me with books is I use Google Sheets like which is their, their spreadsheet software. And I kind of can track like, if you went back to my Google sheets on Pay Pal. This is even before I sent it to the publisher, there were eight separate versions, V one, two, all the way through V eight. And I can have links to all of them in Google Sheets, and they were all linked to Google Docs. And so it meant that I was never like, futzing around trying to get back and forth from Scrivener to this to that. I just had sort of two windowpanes, open whatever chapter I was working on that day, and the Google Sheets organized, crazy master control system. And that was that helped me keep everything in square. And it also meant that if I ever felt like something I wrote in a previous version was better. I can go back to it in a heartbeat and not have to worry like not have to have this like panicky like oh my God, where is it? Which version is it? That helps me deal with version control?
James Taylor 57:48 Fantastic. Well, these are some great tips for any writers, aspiring or professional writers out there as well. The founders is out now, where's the best place for people to go? We're going to put a link to book two and get a copy of that. But where's the best place for people to go to learn more about you and your other writing your other books?
Jimmy Soni 58:07 Yeah, my website is just JimmySoni.com. I'm also on Twitter. I'm at Jimmy a Sony. I'm admittedly like not the most active Twitter user, but I do use the DMS and I check those pretty regularly, especially right now. And then if you want to reach out to me just through email, it's just hello, JimmySoni.com. And I would love to hear from people I like I like corresponding with readers. We always teach me new things. I'm the mother of one of the people I wrote about just reached out to me 24 hours ago and basically made my week and so I love hearing from readers.
James Taylor 58:40 Well, Jimmy, thank you so much for coming on this super creativity podcast. I wish you all the best with this book and future books.
Jimmy Soni 58:46 Well, James, thank you so much for having me. And thank you so much for doing this.
James Taylor 58:49 You can subscribe to the super creativity podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast while you're there. Leave us a review. I would really really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor. I knew been listening to the super creativity podcast.
The New Leadership Playbook with Andrew Bryant – #335
15 Jun 2022
00:49:25
The New Leadership Playbook with Andrew Bryant - #335
Being an effective leader in a post-pandemic world goes beyond being good at what you do; it requires balancing empathy with accountability. In The New Leadership Playbook, self-leadership coach Andrew Bryant provides a practical guide to being human and understanding people, whilst simultaneously driving for accelerated results. For nearly 25 years Andrew Bryant has been transforming individuals and organizations with his Self-Leadership Methodology and has delivered training, coaching and keynotes on five continents in 20+ Countries to 200,000+ Executives.
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
The New Leadership Playbook
James Taylor 0:00 Please welcome Andrew Bryant. Good to see you, Andrew.
Andrew Bryant 0:42 Good to see you too, James.
James Taylor 0:45 So in this book, you can put a definition of leadership, I thought we can start there just Sukh as we hear the phrase leadership, what is this? How do we can think about it. And one of the definitions you provide is leadership is the process of influencing others in a manner that enhances their contribution to the realization of group goals. I think that word influencing is really interesting. So what does influencing mean to you?
Influencing
Andrew Bryant 1:12 Well, thank you for that. So that is, that is a social leadership definition. And there are as many definitions of leadership as writers on the topic, and that's a that's a quote from a leadership writer. Bass. leadership is influence. John Maxwell coined that as a phrase and for me, influence is as opposed to manipulation. Now, the interesting thing is if you go to the dictionary and look at influence, persuasion, manipulation, the actual definitions don't really give you a distinction. But over the years working coaching executives, and in a university setting, I've done this and I've said, If I walked down into the audience grabbed one of you and dragged you to the front of the room, would that be influence? And everybody universally says No, that wouldn't be influence? And I said, Well, what would that be? They would say, well, that's manipulation that's forced. That's coercion, I'd say absolutely. I agree with you. Manipulation actually comes from the root manners, which means hand, which gives us the expression man handled. So you know, in leadership, sometimes we can force people, we can manage people, but that isn't influence. Then there's the point I could get somebody from where they're sitting in the audience up on stage by cajoling them and pleading with them promising them. Oh, please, please, please. And I call that persuasion. I think we've all been persuaded that come to my party on Friday night. I'm busy. So please, please, please come I need you there. I don't think that's influenced either. I think influence is when the person gives you a willing. Yes. And if I would say to the audience that have come up on stage, and what would be important to you around your learning your transformation, being a role model for the audience, what will be important for you to come and join me here on stage? And somebody says, Well, yeah, those things are important to me. I will come on stage that is a willing. Yes. So the simplest definition of influence is getting a willing, yes. And if we as leaders are getting a willing, yes, from our followers, then I believe that's leadership.
James Taylor 3:15 And one thing I really like about this book is actually reminded me of great books on learning guitar. As you know, I have an interest in like music and everything. And it's a playbook format. And it reminded me of some really good books I've read on learning guitar, or even learning drums, and other instruments. Because you find a lot of guitar Guitar Tutorial books, they tend to either focus on principles or theory. And you got these others that can focus on just kind of quick riffs or licks that you can learn so you can get a bunch of songs under your belt pretty quickly. The problem is that a lot of those principles books tend to be a little bit too academic. And they kind of they're a bit off-putting at times well, the licks books you can attend to reach a limit very, very quickly in your learning. So I thought was really just because what you did is you in this book, you've combined principles and kind of playbook actionable kind of tactics, please. So can you talk about like why you decided, to write it in this way? Because this is the first book you've had, you've had multiple books, why did you decide to write the book in this type of format.
Andrew Bryant 4:23 Because this was written for a client. So I was working with one of my Silicon Valley clients and I coached the CEO and the executive leadership team doing the thing that I, I usually do and the chief people officer said to me, could you write a book for our managers we want to have, you know, the way that we do things in our company. And I'd actually seen those kind of practical books for other clients. I have some I've spoken for a number of clients, some of them have handed me their manual, and I always been sort of frustrated by them because they were like, they'd hodgepodge they done, you know, a bit of DISC personality here, a bit of this here. And I was thought, you know, I really could do a better job than that. So when I was asked to do this, I thought, here's a real opportunity, the client wanted a very practical, here's how you give feedback, here's how you have a career conversation. Here's how you manage bad performance, they needed that in a very coaching format, which I was absolutely happy to do. And I delivered that on request to the client, we agreed that I would deliver them the material that they would do, but I kept the intellectual property so that I could publish this book for the public. Because that client didn't want the principles behind it. They wanted the, what you call the licks, what some people would call the hacks, they wanted that. But for me, I always understand that principle drives behavior. You can teach somebody how to do something, but but if they don't understand why they're doing it, then they can never reach a level of mastery. And you know, for me, the analogy is chess. And I use the chess analogy in my self-leadership books. And I love playing chess, and you know who one of my key chess Buddies is I play almost daily with him online. And if I'm playing it trying to play catch up, I can watch a video on how to do an opening, right how to do the Queen's gambit or the Sicilian defense. And you could follow the moves. But if you don't understand why those moves, work, and in what context those moves work best, you want much better. So you need both principles, and practice. And so I divided the book. So if you want to just read the link, the hack, you can read it. I need to give somebody feedback tomorrow, or this afternoon, quick read that section. But if you really want to become a master of management and leadership, you understand why you do things,
James Taylor 6:54 I think was that reminds me a little bit of a book that came out a few years ago. Michael Pollan is a professor at Berkeley in California. He wrote a book called The Omnivore's Dilemma, and if you ever saw it, it's it's a book. I mean, I'm a vegan, but it's a book about why we meat and you know, plant based diets and all these things. And essentially, because he talked about he first wrote this really big, thick academic book about omnivore and plant based and why it's good. And then people kept saying to him as clients, could you just write like a slightly shorter book, like a condensed version that we can give to our family members and friends. So then he wrote the second book, which is slightly, and then people came to begin said, Actually, could you read a book of just the rules, or the laws, like do this, never, never buy something that's got more than five things in list of the ingredients, like, don't eat something that your grandmother wouldn't have recognized? Like simple little kind of laws like this, in this book, you've kind of you've kind of done, you've condensed all your knowledge and experience into these these principles, which are enemies. And the tips are the kind of plays which I really like, I love that as a format.
Andrew Bryant 8:03 Now, well, thanks, I'm glad you like it and took the time to read it. I had the same experience. In 2012, I wrote self-leadership, how to become a more successful, efficient and effective leader from the inside out. And that gets used as a textbook on MBA programs. But a good friend of mine, Jerome Joseph, who, you know, was doing some some marketing for me, and he said, Could you write the simple one? And could you have it to me by Saturday, at this point, it was Wednesday, right. And so I wrote that book in three days. And that became an Amazon bestseller, because you can read it in an hour. And it gives you self-leadership and an hour, and then you can go back to it. So maybe that was the primer that showed me that I needed to write this book, in sections. So you can read the whole book, or you can read the bit that you need. Right now. I haven't quite distilled it down to the 10 rules like Jordan Peterson's 10 Rules for Living, but maybe maybe they've come up with a great idea that, get them
James Taylor 9:01 get them carved on stone and get them some stone for you. So and in the book, you kind of talk about accelerating results. That's kind of as a lead. That's one of the key things. And on the principle side, you talk about this combination of three principles, clear expectations, mindset, and motivation and right behaviors. What is it important, what is important for the leader to remember when it comes to that first principle that clear expectations? What should we be always thinking when we think about our phrase clear expectations? What what does that mean? What does that look like?
Expectations, Mindset And Motivation
Andrew Bryant 9:30 Oh, well, that's that's a great question. The one of the things I've always told managers is that if you're gonna be a good manager, make sure you have a mirror. Because more often than not, when we're complaining about our people not delivering the result. Right. If we really look in the mirror, we didn't explain it very well to them. And a lot a lot of stuff gets lost in communication, but the word communication contains the root in it communio, which means to share. We've only communicated when there's a shared understanding And, and so, so often managers have been didactic that to do this. And I give a very simple example in the book, you know, let's say the manager says, you know, go buy a sofa, right? And they will follow up with Do you understand? And when a manager says, do you understand employees always say yes. If I asked managers do they always understand they always say no. And I say, well, actually, yes, they do understand, they understand what they understand. And so setting clear expectations is your clear. What do you want? What kind of sofa do you want, right. And in communicating that does the person you've delegated that to understand the type of sofa and the use and function for the sofa? Because then they understand the principle behind it, right? So I mean, if I say, go out and buy this catalog number, you know, this is it. Or if I go, so go find this a sofa that's suitable for our waiting room, we want something that looks nice for our guests coming to the podcast, then you could give them a level of ownership and empowerment in the choice of that, because they know the function, they know how it's going to be used, why it's going to be used. So hence, expectations are everything. How often in life, have we entered into conflict with even dearest loved ones, as spouses, because we had different expectations. And that's because we didn't communicate them.
James Taylor 11:20 So that kind of feels like it links naturally to leadership styles. I mean, you talk in the book about different leadership styles. Your back when you're someone that's born in in England, brought up in Australia, live for many years in Singapore, now you're in Portugal, you've worked all different parts of the world. What is your you mentioned, these four key types of, of leadership styles or kind of typical types of leadership styles? And as I was reading that part of the book, I was thinking back to some of my own experiences in leadership, where, let's say, when I worked in California, I found that people they were very task or goal orientated. So you could just you know, that there was a certain way of working and leading them. Whereas working, let's see, more folks, maybe in parts of Southeast Asia, it felt a little bit more directive at first, although there was lots of people there, it was almost like building relationships is there's more of a kind of coaching element rather than being so. So directive. So have you noticed that leadership styles tend to predominant one type of leadership style in different parts of the world? Or is it generational? Or is it still very much you need to understand that individual standing there in front of you?
Leadership Style
Andrew Bryant 12:31 Well, yes, to all of the above. So let me unpack that a little bit. The way I describe leadership in the book is based on some, some leadership theory. And that is that there is a leadership style, there is the follower's motivation and skill set. And then there is the context. And the situation. And that's where, you know, country or culture would come in. So if we were on a plane at 35,000 feet, and the oxygen mask did actually fall from the ceiling, if the captain came out of the cockpit and said, ladies and gentlemen, a bit of a problem, let's create some focus groups, I'd like to get some buy in around what my options are, we'd all be terrified. At that point, I joke that even the atheists would get religion at this point, that at the stage of it's a crisis, right, that's the situation, our ability to affect that crisis, unless we can fly a plane is zero. So we need the leadership style to be highly directive, fasten your seat belts, you know, Stay in your seat, you know, put your head down. But the ultra mascot, do, as you're told, is the correct leadership style in that scenario. If you're leading a bunch of professionals who know their staff, and it's a very stable environment, then telling them what to do is gonna get a heck of a lot of resistance and pushback, you need to engage them be participative or consultative, get their buy in and direct them, you know, to work towards a bigger vision and get buy in around that vision. So we have to think, what is my leadership style? Is it appropriate for this context? And for these people, and so having some self awareness, and that's the self leadership piece. And the flexibility for that is very important. Now, culturally, yeah, there are elements of culture, and that is context. I didn't deep dive in this book on all the different cultures. I just wrote a speech yesterday for a client in Sweden. And I talked to I went to my textbook on culture, and I talked to my Swedish friend. And there's the Swedish paradox. They're highly individual, and yet they like to make decisions collectively. Well, there's a paradox right there. So, you know, how are you going to manage that as a leader? Well, you want to make sure they know that they have their individual choice, and then we'll get together and create a consensus around how we're going to do it.
James Taylor 15:00 It reminds me of three years ago, there was a series of plane crashes. I think it was Korean airlines or one of the Korean Airlines, there's lots these kind of crashes. And they listened to the black box recordings to see what was going on. And it often happened when there was a pilot and a co pilot. And they were very different in seniority. So as the pilot was very senior, very expensive, and the copilot was very junior. And you would listen to the transcripts of these and you would hear things like the copilot saying, Ah, Captain, I see that mountain is getting quite close, ah, Captain that is getting even closer now. But not shouting out, Hey, we're gonna crash this boat if you don't move, and they had to send it and a lot of pilots to training. And it was they had to be a bit more just kind of a bit more forceful a bit more upfront, as well. So, I mean, that is like context and culture. I think that kind of audiences do you work with? That must be a real kind of interesting mix when you're working with these kind of global organizations. Yeah, and
Andrew Bryant 16:03 then you throw gender in there and as well, and it can be really interesting. Yeah, that's a great. That's a great case study. In fact, it was Korean Airlines was the study which became Korean Air because Karela airlines became deregistered. And there are a number of factors to that. One is the language the Korean language is not a very directive language. So you vaguely pass there's the hierarchy. So most people are under the impression that they are safer when the pilot is flying the plane. In fact, that case study shows you You're safer when the copilot is flying, because it's easier for the pilot to tell the copilot they're making a mistake. In a high power differential culture like Korea, it's almost impossible for the copilot to tell the pilot he's making a mistake. And this birth something called CRM cockpit resource management, which became called Crew Resource Management. And I built quite a lot of that into this book, as you read this book, you'll see that being human whilst delivering accelerated results means that you have to understand who's in front of you, how are they responding. Because if you are being like that pilot and not listening to your to your copilot, you're going to crash the plane or crash the car.
James Taylor 17:21 I remember, years ago, when I did my MBA, I remember we had we did a series of trainings around around leadership, and unfortunately was extremely academic. Remember kind of thinking back, I wish we'd been able to have a chance to roleplay and do different different things. You mentioned this idea of chess and the you know, the world of chess or and lots of games like go, for example, in China, were completely changed when machines started beating the humans, because the machines start to get really good at chess. But then what happened is the humans start to have the opportunity to, to play against machines and the human's ability to win actually improve. They're the kind of rankings can have massively skyrocketed as well, because they got a chance to practice the whole time. Is there a way to practice leadership? Or do you just have to kind of get into an organization and start doing it?
Andrew Bryant 18:19 Well, you raise a very important observation here. And this is the new leadership playbook. And the reason it's a new leadership playbook. A lot of leadership principles are of course, timeless. It's new, because we live in this virtual environment, you and I are talking through zoom right now, as you record, this podcast. And AI and robotics is real and the pandemic has accelerated the automation. Smart people are not going to be afraid of that. Because we can use AI and robotics to accelerate our learning. Right. So using chess and the chess algorithm, the AI behind chess, I will play against the computer. And I can set the ranking of the computer I'm playing against, I know what my my chess ranking is. And I'll set the AI a couple of 100 points above my chess ranking, and play and lose. And then I'll step back and analyze the game. And this is a key self-leadership approach, which is self-learning. You accept the reality, you adjust your behavior, and then you accelerate forwards. So we can use these role plays to accelerate. And that's why in the plays in the book, I wrote them as conversations that a lot of the plays are actual conversations. How do I give a feedback conversation? So I've given an example. If they say this, you can say this, if they say this, you can say this. This is how you frame a performance conversation when somebody's not meeting their target. This is how you consider where somebody is in terms of their promoter ability. And there's no such word but I've made it up and their actual performance. So Oh, it gives you as you read the book, you'll get a little bit of that feedback, oh, I was gonna say it this way. But if I say it this way, I'll get a different result. And then the opportunity to go, and it is a play. So you got to go practice it, get the feedback and adjust your behavior and improve. So leadership is an iterative process. I had, I was talking to one of my CEOs, client coaching clients, I think was about last month. And he said to me, he said, I don't know how it was for you, Andrew, but he said, I'm starting to think I'm getting wiser. And it was just it was just, it was just a funny thing for him to say. But what he was articulating is pattern recognition. You get better at chess, because you thought, right, oh, if they go here, this is going to happen. If I go here, this is going to happen. And leadership is the same. And we as we, as we gain more experience, we talked to more people, we get better at pattern recognition. What improves your learning is a framework to learn how to interpret that. And that's what I have, hopefully, put in this book.
James Taylor 21:05 So and one of the places I really enjoyed that there was a section on coaching. You talked about the power of asking questions, being able to go deeper, probing further, whether that's with a someone that's that's one of your team, or someone that you work with, or even a family member. So what are some great questions. You've had many, many years experience as a coach, what are some great questions to ask, if you want to just probe a bit further, perhaps you want them to help that person? Reframe the challenge or the opportunity that they're looking at? What are some nice questions to kind of go a little bit deeper?
Coaching
Andrew Bryant 21:41 Wow, okay, well, so firstly, in coaching, and in that section, I say, this way, you have to know what you're coaching for, you have to index the current reality. So I use this, I use this framework, accept the reality, right, adjust your behavior, and then advanced or accelerate towards your objective. So where are you right now? What is happening? who said what, where, how? And doom? These are the index questioning that we have? Because if we're coaching somebody, we need to know how they perceive the reality back to early discussion on expectation, what is what is actually happening for them? And so we start with that, and then you can you can use probing questions. What does that mean for you? What do you believe about that? What would be a good outcome for you? If you want this? There is a great coaching question. And I, I kind of almost have gone off using it because it was made so popular by Dr. Phil on the Oprah show, which is, how's that working out for you? And it's because we often get stuck into doing things a certain way, because we've always done it that way, even when we're getting really bad results. And that coaching question is, how's that working out for you? And if you ask it in there, and people go, it's not working out really well. So how would you like to work at it to work out? What would be a desired outcome for you? So what can you change to make that happen, and that presupposes that you have some agency and ownership in the outcome? More often than not, even if we have little agency, if we increase our belief in our agency to change the outcome, we get a better outcome. Okay, so are there certain things that we can absolutely adjust? Right, what I say, you know, how I say what I do how I do it, and there's a whole bunch of things that I can't change the weather, for instance, but I can change my attitude to the weather. Right? So it's raining and I wanted it to be sunny. And rather than throw up my hands, I could say, well, what's my outcome? Well, I want to have a good day. Right? So put our raincoat go for a walk. Does that. Does that does that does answer it?
James Taylor 23:52 Yeah. No. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, one of the ones someone used to me the other day, and I thought, have they got an early copy of your book? Or is this a common common question? And the question was this one, and you actually read it in the book? What do you believe about x? Yes. And I thought that's a really good question. Because what it does is it makes you then voice what you believe. And then as you're hearing yourself saying that you're going, is really, is that really what I believe but is that really true? Is that and I think that's a fantastic? What do you believe about eggs because it makes you have to voice what you believe about that problem or that opportunity?
Andrew Bryant 24:29 Yep. So there's, in framing and reframing there's, there's what we call the black box that X, whatever x is, is your current experience leads to why what you believe about that common experience, right? And we get locked in that frame. That box that this happens, therefore, it means that now as a ridiculous situation, the cockroach crows in the morning and the sun comes up So in the mind of Rikako, there's a cause and effects the sun game up that x. That means I made the sun come up. That's why. Now, of course, it is such a ridiculous scenario from a human perspective. yet so often we have these false cause and effects. Right. You know, I, the prospect hasn't called me back after I've sent them the proposal, therefore, they think I'm too expensive. Well, no. I mean, that's in your head. What do you believe about that? Well, they haven't called you back. There is a million reasons why they haven't called you back. Right. And you I know that you've done a lot of sales in your time and developing, you have to have well, what else could it mean? Right, can be they got busy, they didn't receive it. You miss you didn't you didn't connect exactly with their pain point. Could be a whole bunch of things. So what do you believe about this? Go find it out.
James Taylor 25:52 Then I have a cute story. That I mean, that goes to the idea which I tend to find in a lot of great salespeople. I know there's a there's a curiosity in and so they're asking that, you know, this one question, but they're asking these kind of questions like, Well, does that really mean that you know, there's that that questioning mindset?
Andrew Bryant 26:11 Yeah, absolutely. And understanding that reality is fluid in these situations. I just have a cute personal story that I'd like to share. So I was just in the UK earlier this month or the end of last month, dropping our daughter Lila off at university, she's going to study to be a vet, and they had an April intake at Nottingham. And we're in a pub in Nottingham, my wife, Andrea, and I and Lila is Xandra is daughter with we she's my stepdaughter. And anybody who's had a stepdaughter knows that that's a tough relationship. She's going to be very skeptical and cynical of you for your entire life. So we've had a fun relationship. She's super smart. But we're in this pub in Nottingham, and she asked me this question. She says, How much do you charge for coaching? And I always understand what's the question behind the question. And I'm like, Well, why do you need some? She said, Actually, I do. And I said, So what's the issue? And she was having second thoughts about her commitment to do five years of that. And I said, Well, that's natural. I said, even the CEOs, I coach have second thoughts about their decision. But let me ask you a question. Do you have enough data yet to know whether you made the right decision or not? And she said, No. And I said, How long is the shortest period of time that you would need to have any kind of data? And she said, Well, I guess one term one semester, I said, Okay, so right now, there's no point worrying about this. We need to have this conversation in one semesters time. And she said, Yes. And then she turned to a mother and said in Portuguese, now I know why they pay him. At the final validation, and that was a little bit more to it than that. But basically, you know, she had all this angst or this inner turmoil. And really, she didn't have enough information. She didn't need to worry, she just needed to throw herself. And her mother was very happy, because, you know, she didn't want her to quit.
James Taylor 28:17 One of the other plays you mentioned in the book is around collaboration, which is a common theme that we have speaking with guests here on the show. What have you witnessed? I mean, you've worked with lots of different leaders, lots of different industries. What have you noticed about those who have been successful in building a very collaborative culture in their organization, and I'm thinking of this, I was actually talking to a client a couple of days ago, a new client. And one of the things that they expressed to me was that their organization doesn't have a particularly collaborative spirit in it for various different reasons. And I was thinking about this, and I was reading your book, and I thought, Okay, well, I wonder if, if a really great leader went into what would they do? What have you seen what have great leaders do have done to kind of develop to foster to build that collaborative culture in an organization?
Collaboration
Andrew Bryant 29:09 Okay, so this goes back to my earlier work on on self-leadership is that we can't collaborate if we're needy, right? We need to have met our psychological needs and feel safe so that we can be abundant, right? And so it's very important that the leader creates a psychological safe environment, and each person is validated for what they bring to the party. Because if anybody is needy, they're worried about the ego. They're worried about their power, they're going to be engaged in some level of turf war. I can't collaborate. I can't give you my ideas. Because if I give you my ideas, well, then you might use my idea and then it's not my idea anymore. Well, if you come from a place of abundance, here's a really great idea, but you know what, I've got 900 99 more great ideas use this one. And in fact, if I give you this idea, it's going to come back to me even better than when I put it out there, that abundant mentality because you have led yourself, you've influenced your own thinking, feeling and actions, then, you know, a self-leadership team where you have a clear direction, and people coming in and they're confident in themselves, they are much more likely to be abundant and share the moment we have any kind of silo mentality that your game is my last and many organizations are structured that way that created a competition, then you won't get the collaboration. So the leader has to look, are there any structural impediment over and above the psychological safety individuals had coming with self-leadership? Is there any structural? So I mean, many years ago, I worked with an IT company, who said, Could you could you, Andrew, could you run a conflict management training? And I said, Well, yeah. And I was thinking I'd do that in my sleep. But the point is, where's the conflict? Who's in conflict with whom? And the innovation department was in conflict with the operations department? And I said, Well, what's the KPI? What's the performance indicator for the operations department? 100% uptime? What's the what's the KPI for the innovation department, new products, new apps? I still let me ask you a dumb question. Does the does the innovation department have to test their apps on Operation servers? And they said, Yes. I said, Well, you've institutionalized conflict, because they have completely competing KPIs. And there's no, yes. And here, there's no, you would be familiar with Improv Theater. You know, the first rule of improv theater is yes. And not yes. But and so there's immediately conflict built into the system. So good leaders look at their departments, and they go and understand. Do I have good people who who are validated for who they are? Is it a safe environment for them to throw an idea out without having it shut down? And have I removed any structural impediments to the collaboration?
James Taylor 32:12 That I just saying that I'm also thinking of clients within banking within pharmaceutical where you've kind of often got this very common battle that seems to go on between product or the sales, relationship, manager side, and compliance. And there's just this constant struggle and, and, and I felt like one of the thing is just obviously getting things out on the table, I think it makes a big difference that everyone can see everyone and hear everyone. And then the other thing I found, I don't know, where you take this is, sometimes I find what's been out of kilter. Is one group of people have a lack of respect for another group of people. Maybe it's because of their domain expertise is different. Or maybe it's for various different reasons. How would you feel if if a leader is an organization where maybe there's one group, let's say, the tech group, we think, Well, we're fantastic. We're the smartest group and then there's another group, which is the compliance side, they are they just, they just want us to stop doing something illegal, they just want to stop doing so. How do you build a sense of respect? How does a leader foster that sense of respect within that organization?
Andrew Bryant 33:25 Well, again, that's often that's structural. So to your answer around compliance, one, one part of compliance is sometimes human resource. And smart organizations have taken HR and stopped being a department and take an HR people and made them write business managers or business partners rather. So you're an HR partner to business. So business has to achieve X, and we're back, the x and y are going away. But business has to achieve an outcome and HR is there to make sure they achieve that outcome in a way that engages people and doesn't break the rules. So they're working together, tech, right? tech guys need to be partnered with the sales guys, so that they are a solutions team, that they understand what the client wants. And then they build the solution technologically, to solve the problem in a safe, secure, compliant way. And respect happens when we work with somebody when we understand what they know that we don't know. Trust is built the same way. The trust is built in the trenches. It's a band of brothers. And so good leaders build teams where different divisions or different individuals and especially ours work together on a common outcome. And that's when we build trust. And that's when we build respect because we realize they know stuff we didn't know
James Taylor 34:49 your language. I know you said you said tech guys and sales guys, the the main I would say because it is a very funny part in the book. work where you go and deliver. I think there's a seminar for Tanvi gametime, I think is. Yeah, exactly in Singapore. And it's it's really interesting interchange because you're one of these people know you personally, you know, if someone doesn't know you, you could come off as like this kind of type A personalities. But you're like an onion, there's so many different layers to you, which I think is interesting and is reflected in the book. So could you please just share with our audience that story because I think it's a really fascinating story that kind of brings a sense along as a line of respect, trust the whole kind of gender thing within organizations as well.
Andrew Bryant 35:42 Okay, so thank you for picking up on that, for me, guys is a gender-neutral term or gender-neutral pronoun, or whatever. So yes, I am very much he for sheep. I'm a father of two daughters and a brother to two sisters, and I am on external faculty at the women in leadership at Singapore management University where Dr. Tammy Galton brings me in for a session on executive presence specifically for women. And yes, it has been joked that my general physiology is that if the leadership doesn't work out for me, and coaching doesn't work out for me, I could get a job as a nightclub bouncer. So so. So the first time that Dr. Tammany introduced me to this group of high powered women, we're doing a leadership for Women program, she she really built me up, you know, just as you did with the intro, and I appreciate it, you know, author of books, coach to CEOs, and immediately created this, this barrier between me and the audience. And I struggle to get the point through. So next time we did this, I said, Tandy, I appreciate that you love me, and you like my work. But please don't introduce me with anything she said. But I said, Please, just trust me on this. So it's day three, the women have all bonded, they've worked through their eggs, they've built their avatars of their strong female identity. And I walk in after lunch. And I just stand in front of the group of, of powerful women, and I don't say anything for 60 seconds, it gets extremely uncomfortable. And then I say, while I've been standing here, you have in your mind conjured up some adjectives that describe me, please turn to the person next to you, and share what some of those adjectives are. Some of them needed to share with somebody else. And some of them were quite happy to tell me, you know, arrogant, confident, alpha male. And so they had labeled me well, and truly, and all I hadn't even opened up my mouth. And I said, you know, his problem, men label women and stereotype women, and that's unfair. And yeah, you just did the same thing to me. Let me share some slides of some things that I do. And I showed the time that I was a single dad, and I show the work I do with that risk teenagers. And when I was a physiotherapist working in outback Australia delivering babies because I, there was no midwife. And I asked them, did that change your perspective? Now? For the majority? It did, there's always the hardest test is that now we still think you're an alpha male, like, Okay, fine. But it's a problem that we all have about gender and age and ethnicity is that bias exists. And even Daniel Kahneman, who wrote thinking fast and think slow, said, after 50 years of studying unconscious bias, I can tell you, I'm still biased. So do I still trip up? Yes, I absolutely do. And I ask those very, very pro feminist, just take a chill pill for those of us who are trying to be better, right, don't shoot us down because we're not perfect. Please encourage us that we're desperately trying to get through our bias. Right.
James Taylor 39:05 And it was interesting you saying that it reminds me also of a podcast I was listening to the other day, it was the the act that took the part of Damon Matt Damon on the Bourne series. I can't remember his name as American act from California. I think he's also in the Avengers TV series as well. If you looked at him, you would assume he's have a certain type of kind of rugged kind of male you know, outdoorsy type of person. And he is that and you mentioned improv and he is also something else and maybe I'll put a link to this interview that you did and it was fantastic because it just showed all the complexities in someone and not judging that person that you know the first time that you see them as well. Your every time I talk with you always kind of sharing new ideas as we How do you keep your own thinking fresh, what influences Do you try to surround yourself with
Andrew Bryant 40:01 Well, I'm always I'm always reading these days, I'm watching a lot more video listening to podcasts. I love to exercise my mind and my body. And I will listen to an audio book or a podcast when I go for a walk. And I feels very efficient. I'm working my body and my mind. And a friend of mine, who is an organizational psychologist, tested my fluid intelligence. So you know, there's IQ. And there's, you know, there's EQ, but the fluid intelligence is how you keep your brain fresh and new ideas. And I'm very good at taking two quite disparate ideas from two different authors and connecting them and I know you have this as well, and doing the podcast, you know, you've already done that, in this conversation, you said, Oh, that reminds me of this. And this is how this connects this. So my brain works very much as a connector, how am I? How does this fit in with this, and I've got very good at, at challenging my own thinking and paradigms, right. So I will put something out there. And I welcome the feedback and I, I noticed how it pushes other people's buttons. So there's a great piece of research by a lady by the name of Tangney, who in 2000, talked about humility. And working in Asia for 1718 years, humility is a big value. Humility doesn't actually mean making yourself less than other people. humility comes from humility as meaning grounded. But But humility is having an accurate and either overestimated or underestimated view of your own abilities. I just talked about my intelligence, which could sound arrogant, but now it is what it is, my intelligence in this area has been objectively measured, it is what it is, this is why I get hired because I can connect the dots. But what humility is also is the ability to consider other people's perspectives as equally valid as your own. And this level of being able to embrace that ambiguity is that I need to hold on strongly to my viewpoint, but at the same time, I need to absolutely 100% Consider what if I was 100% Wrong. And there was a different viewpoint, and I keep myself fresh, by considering the opposite. Whether I'm talking about philosophical ideas, political ideas, scientific ideas, I like to challenge my intelligence by by almost debating the opposite point. And I often encourage the leaders I coach, who are pushing ideas, okay, now for the next 20 minutes. I want you to argue against that.
James Taylor 42:34 Yeah, yeah, there is a politician here in the UK, who always used to rate up art article read write up articles for some of the big newspapers here. And he would write two different articles one for and one against the idea. And then he would leave into the very last minute, before he decided which he sent to the editor. Because it was his way of like working. And I know, I didn't have a speaker, you may know Matt church, it was based in Australia. And Matt, he talks about this idea of when you're reading a book, having two yellow kind of legal pads. And as you're reading it, you have the one on your left, you're writing all the things you'd like and concepts you think are good and adding to those. And then you're right, all the things you disagree with and why you disagree with them. So you're always going to work in these two, these two, the kind of critical thinking and creative thinking kind of side as well. You're you've always got very high kind of emotional intelligence, but you're also a geek, you like technology? I know. So do you use technology in ways either that can free up your time for your own creativity? Or help you augment the creative work you do? And just tell us a little bit about that?
Andrew Bryant 43:49 Oh, and again, to the point about, we talked about AI and learning, and I always think so I'm not. I think you need to make technology your friend. And as we, as we pivoted into doing these things, virtually, we still fellow speakers, rail against, oh, my God, I have to learn zoom and teams and learn how to use a webcam. And I was like, wow, bring it on to what can I use? One of the things I use, and I haven't got it switched on to this, and I wish I had, typically anytime I'm coaching anybody, I've got a meeting, I have otter.ai turned on. So every meeting, I've got the audio on the transcript. So for my coaching clients, I immediately share the transcript. So they've got everything we said. And it's written down so they can export it as a Word document and do a search. Because often I'm coaching a client and they're doing a pitch and either they're trying to influence their boss or the board members. And I help them frame it. And I might say, Well, I would say it this way, and they go, Oh, that's brilliant. Can I write that down? So you don't have to? I've recorded it. You can just read it back. Or they might say something really good. And I say well, that's it. You nailed it, and they go, I don't remember what I said. I said okay, all right. We've recorded So that's just an example of. And so I pay for the subscription, because I've got months and months for that. As I wrote this book, you might remember I interviewed you back in 1990. Sorry, 2019. For myself leadership success summit, and a couple of pieces in this book, were actually interviews of leaders that I'd said, you know, how are you leading, etc. And as I was writing this book, and I wanted the stories, I'm like, I need I need a story that articulates this point i Hang on, I interviewed the managing director of Red Hat about that, and I went back, drop the video into auto AI and transcribe it for me, I lifted his exact quote, went straight in the book. And so that's how I leveraged my time with technology.
James Taylor 45:49 Well, you'll be glad to know this interview that we're doing just now people go to James taylor.me. When you look at the transcript section is actually done. My otter.ai is the one we use as well. So it's always quite funny because I read read through them. Sometimes it is not totally accurate. And I always love how can my strange accent how it can take certain words create certain words from it as well. But it definitely worth doing. I know that this idea of recording everything, every session is something that people like Ray Dalio, the Great Investor at Bridgewater capital uses every single meeting, with exception of an HR related meetings, every single meeting in the building is recorded, audio recorded and video recorded and transcribed. So you can type in a word or a keyword phrase and bring up any meeting that's happened within the organization for the past 10 years, where that word or that phrase, or that person has been mentioned, and it's called brutal transparency. And one of the nice things that they make them do as well. He said, anytime you mentioned someone else's name in a meeting, you have to send them a link that person a link to the transcript of that meeting, if obviously, if it's if it's internal, as well. And that's just because that then gets rid of the whole idea of speaking behind someone's back, as well. It's just a different different way of doing that. So,
Andrew Bryant 47:05 yeah, yeah, well, I love that. And I mean, the whole value of ethics is doing the right thing, even when nobody's watching. And we are seeing in the media now, of course, that people are reinventing history. And then the interviewer says, Well, let me just play the video of what you said last year, and playback. And I think there's some conversations I've had, that I would be terrified if they were recorded in playback. And as I've got older and wiser, I am editing myself more in real time, and particularly that about talking about others. Because we live in an industry where it's really easy to gossip about AG, colleagues and competitors. And I really, I know that I have not always been my best self about that it's so easy to get that person. And now I'm really watch. If this was being recorded to sort of play back, would I be okay for them to hear that? Now, I'm actually okay to tell people where I disagree with them. And so I'm getting better. And so that was a, that was a growth area for me, that tendency to get pulled into gossip, I and I work really hard not to do that. Now,
James Taylor 48:15 now that the new leadership playbook is out now, where is the best place for people to go to get their copy of the book and also to learn more about you your your coaching your writing, and your other programs that you have?
Andrew Bryant 48:28 That's very easy. So firstly, the book is already available for pre-order on Amazon, or by the time this goes out, it'll be it'll be live. For both the for the individual book and the ebook is already on Amazon easiest place to find it, the new leadership playbook.com will have it and if you are an organization wanting bulk orders, that's the place to go. So you can get that directly from me, thenewleadershipplaybook.com Or you can go to selfleadership.com. And that has both a link to all of the above and to my coaching. So the things I talked about self leadership and the new leadership playbook. I use technology and I bought web domains.
James Taylor 49:04 Well, Andrew Bryant, thank you so much for coming on the Super creativity podcast. You can subscribe to the super creativity podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts while you're there. Leave us leave us a review. I would really, really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor, and you've been listening to the super creativity podcast.
The Creative Brain With Dr Iain McGilchrist – #334
08 Jun 2022
00:27:02
The Creative Brain With Dr Iain McGilchrist - #334
My guest today says that in order to understand ourselves and the world we need science and intuition, reason and imagination. Dr. Iain McGilchristis a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and a former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He is the author of a number of books but is best known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. In his latest book The Matter With Things he argues that we have become enslaved to an account of things dominated by the brain's left hemisphere, one that blinds us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us.
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
Dr Iain McGilchrist 1:00 No, thanks very much, James, great to be here.
James Taylor 1:02 So this is a big book. And I cannot imagine the amount of research that went in to this book, I often think with a book you see about such a small amount and all the researchers can hidden under the water. So during during the research to the book, what what kind of surprised you about the relationship between the right and left hemispheres of the brain that you maybe hadn't thought about before?
Relationship Between The Right And Left Hemispheres
Dr Iain McGilchrist 1:26 Well, I mean, it's been a long process of about 30 years starting from, you know what everybody thought they knew about the brain hemispheres, which turns out to be entirely wrong. So in a way, the whole story is a bit of a surprise to me. I didn't approach it with any preconceptions. But what was staggering you interesting to me, coming from a background of the philosophy of literature and how we misunderstand poetry, was that the three most important thing is that we we do to a poem, when we take it apart in a seminar room, as we make the ad, make the thing that's completely embodied abstract, we make the thing that is unique general, and we make the thing that is implicit or explicit, and in doing so we destroy it. And it was some years after I'd left that and trained in medicine that I discovered, one day that actually one of the most important things to know about the right hemisphere, which doesn't speak is that it understands implicit meaning it sees the unique case, and it is more in touch with the body, the left hemisphere, which is the one that does the talking, it tends to generalize the unique tends to disembodied, whatever it's looking at, and makes explicit what needs to remain implicit. What I mean by that is like, it's like explaining a joke. Once you've paraphrased a poem, it falls completely flat. So it was fascinating that what I've been experiencing was, my speaking hemisphere wasn't able to say the things that my other hemisphere was picking up about this poetry. And so this was a absolute eureka moment for me when I heard about this lecture in 1990, I think, yeah,
James Taylor 3:10 another kind of key thing you talk about in the book as well, which I guess relates to this idea of a, of a synthesis or a simple symbiosis is this idea of Gestalt. For those who are, you know, sending word that gets used, used a lot, but maybe doesn't, don't get unless they think can fully support is when you are talking about Gestalt in the book? How do you How are you thinking that in relation to kind of what's going on in the brain during various different kinds of activities, and then we'll come in and get into the creative side of things as well?
Dr Iain McGilchrist 3:42 Well, the idea of rationality is very important in creativity, both in the arts and in science. And what we mean by a gestalt is a shape or form, that cannot be decomposed into parts without losing something very important about it. So in another way of saying what happens with a poem is that if it's success, it creates a whole form. And then when you come along and pick bits out of it, and analyze it, you've lost it. So the tendency to analyze is very valuable. But it's second to the tendency to see the whole which is absolutely crucial.
James Taylor 4:21 Because this is definitely takes a position. This used to be against a kind of a reductionist view of the world. This is this idea that we're just a sense of bundles of senses and a universe of material things. And in the book, you actually use an example an analogy of a Mozart quintet to kind of explain your thinking, this idea that, that a piece of music only comes into being each time a mind, I think you said with all its history and preconceptions actually encounters it. So that kind of starts to kind of build on the idea, can you so can you explain what you mean by that?
Dr Iain McGilchrist 5:01 As I was trying to distance myself from two polarized views that tend to be much touted these days. One is that reality is something that science finds just out there. And it's completely separate from the business of knowing.So the knower and the knowing don't affect it at all. It's just sort of inert and out there, and it's our job to find out what it is. And the other view, which is the sort of postmodern view, which has prevailed quite a lot in the academy, when it comes to the humanities is this idea that we make it all up effectively, there is no objective reality. Now, I wanted to suggest that neither of these is true, there is a something that's separate from us, and we need to know it. But it also is altered in the process of our knowing it to some extent, I mean, not out of all proportion, because otherwise, we wouldn't find that most people who've been equipping themselves to get to know something like a performance of the G minor quintet largely agree about it then all all over the place, hearing completely different things and feeling and thinking different things. So there is a common core to our experience. But it is always an experience. That's the crucial thing. It is what I call an encounter. So everything that exists, in short, is an encounter is not a thing out there. It's more of a feeling in here, it's an encounter.
James Taylor 6:26 And there's that word of art I've encountered as I was reading the book, and I was you're kind of helping a layperson, like myself understand what's kind of going on, and doing different things, including parts of the creative process when the left and right hemisphere of the brain. And the thing that kind of kept coming back to the time and time again, is, This almost looks a little bit like a creative peer, you know, we sometimes you know, think about creative pairs, you know, Jobs and Wozniak, Pierre Marie Curie, Lennon and McCartney, is the brain just another type of creative pair?
The Creative Process Of The Brain
Dr Iain McGilchrist 6:59 Well, I do believe that there is this kind of, to and fro between elements that are not actually wholly distinct, but complement one another. And the brain is like that, we wouldn't be better off without the left hemisphere. But we certainly wouldn't be better off without the right hemisphere. They're not quite equal. One of them is the one that sees the whole picture. That's the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere does some work on behalf of the right hemisphere, more like a personal computer doesn't really understand what it's dealing with. But it deals with it very fast and efficiently. As long as it's completely routine, when it gets to be non routine. It doesn't work with it. Now, you can imagine that in creativity, there's a whole host of things that are very important. And that won't happen in the left hemispheres view of things because it sees everything is first of all familiar already. It's one of those I know it, I put it in that little category over there. That's the pigeonhole. Got it. Whereas when it's something creative, that's coming into being, it's a process of a gradual revealing of something, not a kind of making up like putting a piece and another piece, like you make a motorcycle, but the coming into being of something as a whole as a shell in the mind. And if you're if your brain is constantly saying, oh, yeah, I got it, it's one of those is quite familiar to me, you will never be able to find anything truly new. Now what we do know. And you know, I'm not talking figuratively, I'm talking Absolutely, really, any kind of new experience in any modality. It's the right hemisphere, which first has a sense of it, then the left hemisphere takes it and plays about with it in an analytic way, then the right hemisphere takes that back, this is what should happen. And then you get a new hole. And the analogy I use, which people find helpful is like playing a piece of music. So to begin with, you're attracted to it as a whole, you hear it and think, yeah, that's marvelous. It's so powerful, I want to know how to play that. And then when you try to play it, you need to take it apart, and you need to practice one or two of the bars over and over again, because the fingering is difficult or whatever. And so that's fine. And you know something about the musical theory, you can see, oh, yes, this is where we go back to the tonic. But when you actually go out on stage and perform, you must forget all of that. It was useful at one stage, but it's not useful now, if you see what I mean. So it's not that there was a problem in doing the analysis. It's only a problem if you end with the analysis. And that seems to me what's happened we've taken the universe apart, and not surprisingly, have no idea how to put it together again, because we're trying to use this mechanistic, manipulative part of the brain.
James Taylor 9:51 And you see something in the book which is, which I have a lot of kind of sympathy for as well where people often think about, you know, creating Have a tea as or doing anything kind of creative about problem-solving. And certainly, most creative people I know, definitely don't go into it thinking that they're looking to solve a problem. That's not really what they're as much kind of vaguer and vaguer than that, I guess. And in the book, you talk about this, what the kind of brain is having this kind of interchanges to images left in this right, this interplay that's kind of going on, I think it might be useful for we've talked a lot on the show before about the creative process. But there are different stages of the creative process. And there are different ways of seeing it. But you know, essentially, let's say that there's a preparation stage, the incubation stage, the insight, or I think you've got into the illumination, stage valuation, or verification, and finally, the elaboration stage. So those states that, let's say, a creative process, whether that's writing a piece of music, or working on a book, or coming up with an idea for a startup, what is going on with the brain, if I if I went onto an under an EEG, at each of these stages, I guess if it was clear, and as linear as that, which is obviously it's not what's happening there, or it or it's actually the not really so useful because it's not
Problem-Solving
Dr Iain McGilchrist 11:15 really well, you can set people creative tasks that can be measured in the lab. And that's where I say, but usually, the proxies that are used for being creative are not really like what most of us mean about creating something that's more like, as I say, problem-solving. But there is a lot of literature, which I refer to in, I've actually put it in one of the appendices to volume one of the book, which shows that during the process of creating something at the incubation phase, we're going backward and forwards from either hemisphere, but at the moment of illumination, this is very heavily dependent on on the right hemisphere, not the left. So there's a long period of preparation, which may take months or years, very often years. And that's a matter of carrying out certain procedures and researching and so on rather late right then becomes the incubation which is a period when you let it go from your conscious mind and allow things to it's almost like the preparation of some marvelous wine, it's got to ferment, you know, and it's got to do it stuff for a while, the incubation has got to go on outside the glare of the left hemispheres. bright spotlight, it tends to spotlight something just a very small part of the picture. But really all the hard work is going on unknown to the person who's doing it at an unconscious level and very largely in the right hemisphere. Because the right hemisphere is able to make broader connections, it's more able to sit with something that's not well defined is always ambivalent, and I'm not sure what it's going to be, but I'm not going to abandon it. It's something there, I can feel it. That process is much better served by the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere is Come on, what is it? Is it a darker? Is it a rabbit? You know, please, so that doesn't help us. And also this business of being open to something new that the right hemisphere is better at that? It Ramachandran calls it the devil's advocate, because when you think oh, yes, it's that thing that's very familiar with the right hemisphere is ghost, no, but it might not be it might be something really interesting and important, which is quite different from what you think you already know. So in all these things, being able to suspend judgment to be open to something new, to deal with the ambivalently ambiguous for a long period until that shape comes into the mind, the right hemisphere is better at this. And when the moment of illumination comes, we know very strongly that that is associated with activity in the right Superior Temporal sulcus. And in the right amygdala,
James Taylor 14:06 and what in the book, obviously, you focus so much on what's the physical nature of the brain about what's kind of going on the brain, but it's something I kept thinking about and kind of asking pondering to myself as I was reading is what is the role of, of the place you know that you know, the Roman genius loci that place themselves can have their own creative genius, and you're writing this book, let's say up in the beautiful island of sky up there? What role has the place have in all of this isn't just simply an actor that is kind of a useful walk-on the part that has maybe that point of incubation it's kind of useful because maybe spurs you to think about something or or or doesn't have any space it is it really just what's going on in the brain.
Dr Iain McGilchrist 14:56 We're living the place does play a part. I certainly feel that way. Because what you need when you're pondering a long-term creative project is to have quite a lot of peace for one thing, not being bombarded with stimuli. Because if your attention is constantly fragmented, it's very, very hard to deal with what we're trying to deal with. Also, you don't want people putting you on the spot and saying, I have to have this answer by three o'clock on Friday, it because these things just don't respect that at all. So stories of great scientific discoveries and great maths discoveries, just as the great artists creations show that there is, you know, that one needs a certain piece, really an environment in which one can, you know, the environment here is very risks receptive to me, and I am to it, there's a kind of sounds perhaps rather odd or pretentious, but what I'm really saying is that there is a dialogue, as I say, an encounter, which is an important thing, because it routes you in the world, if I'm in a sort of very harsh sort of box in a city. Somehow, I feel disconnected from the world and from what it might be telling me. Whereas here, surrounded by the words that the sky, the hills or water, the sea, this is something different.
James Taylor 16:22 It might be I think there's a number of years ago, there was two studies came out. One was from the University of Berlin, I think there was University of British Columbia, where looked at how colors affect our creativity. And the both studies I think, came out of seeing the color that was very good for activating that part of the of the brain that and this is a while since I kind of read this was was the color green. And this is one of the reasons we often get our best ideas when we're out in nature, seeing the color green, and I was about to tell that to a couple of people yesterday, I was actually in a major I was speaking in Saudi Arabia yesterday, where it's like, is red is the color everywhere, because this may not go down too well. So I may or may not tell this this story. But have you heard things like that? I mean, is that is something is it? Or is it? Is it still not? You don't think fully proven? How things like colors? I mean, I'm thinking nothing's that you know, the worldwide words that you hear about now as well.
Dr Iain McGilchrist 17:18 No, I think that probably plays a very small part, it might be that actually, it's not that nature is good for us, because the color green is there. But we respond to the color green because it is the color of nature, it's probably more important than natural surroundings than anything, and green may just remind us of that, or it is a it's a peaceable color. And it's the opposite in a way of the effect of red, which is to put one on the left and to make 110, since to be prepared for anger and aggression. So of course, none of that is remotely helpful. What one needs is to be in this peaceful state. So I think the colors blue and green probably are helpful. But you know, I wouldn't want to reduce creativity to a culture of baby
James Taylor 18:04 abuse in the book, there's a really fascinating section about the impact of people that have different stages of dementia, or have had strokes, actors, or not basically, directors, artists, and how that has an effect on their creativity, what do you find, when you kind of looked at the impact of things like dementia stroke, on people's creativity, what was kind of going on in the brain as a result?
The impact of dementia and stroke, on people's creativity
Dr Iain McGilchrist 18:29 Well, I do look in some detail at what happens to artists who've had strokes. And what is very clear, is that it's very damaging if the right hemisphere is affected. So if there is a stroke or a tumor, or as you say, occasionally dementia can affect one hemisphere much more than another. There are relatively predictable consequences. The moral character of the person, their capacity for empathy, their cognition, all these things do change. But the thing that's important for the topic of creativity, is that it seems to be the, you know, damage to the right hemisphere is very difficult to compensate for, but damage to the left hemisphere can leave people relatively unaffected, or even in some cases, it's claimed, rather more creative than they were before. Then there's a very nice case of a professor, Professor F. We don't know his name, who was studied. And he had a right hemisphere stroke and began to see all kinds of things all the life he'd been unable to understand. And people who knew him said, it's wonderful. He's so much more human. He's so much kinder he has. So there's a whole lot of our humanity that is very much dependent on what the right hemisphere is able to give to us a capacity for empathy is one. This business of creativity is Very important, determined by whether the right hemisphere is working or not. And what's interesting about that is just imagine, if you have a left hemisphere stroke, and I'm saying it, it very rarely seems to damage the knife has the capacity to create. Imagine if they're a painter, they've had a left hemisphere stroke and a right hand, the hand that all life has learned how to paint or draw is affected, they've got to learn to paint or draw with the left hand. I mean, I can't do that. But often, within months, they're able to do this. And so despite the massive disadvantages of the left hemisphere stroke, in that they can't express themselves in language so well, and that they can't use the right hand so well, nonetheless, their artistic productions are at least as great. And this includes poets. So you know, as I say, this is an extraordinary outcome, because people wouldn't expect it to be that way around.
James Taylor 21:00 Talking about poetry, there was the I was at the Nobel Prize museum a few years ago in Stockholm. And there's an exhibit there to hear to Mala that the German poet. And it had these little fragments of bits of paper, that she would cut things you'd cut out and bits newspaper, and you can put it in a draw it the same way that David berry used to do as well, in order to if he got she got stuck on a line, she would pull a bit of paper and use it as a prompt to visually to spark her kind of creativity. And you had a conversation recently, I heard with them with Philip Pullman, a really fascinating conversation, and he almost does something a little bit similar, you can develop this little trick. The trick is mind by imagining a word that to come in, is that something that you find you do, or in terms of finding other things to kind of spark to maybe move you out of a fixed way of thinking about something just to kind of like, just be a little bit of a nudge?
Dr Iain McGilchrist 21:56 Absolutely. And I don't write very few much of at all, but occasionally, phrases and words come to me and I do write them down because in fact, old news, create a lot of his poems out of collocations of words that he just found attractive and written. But yes, I do resonate with that. I thought you were going to talk about Thomas trance termo, who is, I think, a Nobel Prize winning Swedish poet, who had a left hemisphere stroke, but nonetheless went on to write fantastic poetry, which is, which is interesting, because as I say, the left hemisphere doesn't do all of language by any means some very important parts of language are served by the right hemisphere. But speaking for most people who are right handed is in the left hemisphere,
James Taylor 22:46 does poetry change they've become more abstracts or in style became,
Dr. Iain McGilchrist 22:51 is it always been rather terse and Telugu Matic in style. And that aspect was probably accentuated by the stroke? Yeah, the poems are judged to be at least as good as his pre stroke poems, if not better. And it was long after he'd had the stroke that he received the Nobel Prize, he'd written a lot more in the intermediary phase. And that these extraordinary cases of composers, I mean, it's a little known fact that both Handel and Bach had left hemisphere strokes at some point in their lives from which they made recovery. And Handel was still in the recovery from a left hemisphere stroke when he wrote the Messiah. So you can imagine, but there are cases of composers who had a left hemisphere stroke and went on to write far, far greater and better music than they had before. I'm not sure I'd say that's true of handling bargains, you know, their work both before and after, it was great, but the preponderance of the evidence is that, you know, the right hemisphere is the important one for, for these aspects of creativity is kind of a nuisance. You know, I'd have paid good money for it to attend out differently, because, you know, one of the only things that people always said about the right hemisphere that was correct, is that it's more creative. And it's kind of embarrassing to have to say that after really going into it, you know, for decades, I have to agree that this is the case, because in many other respects, things are the other way around, you know, the left hand moves is not down to earth and reliable. It's not an emotional I mean, one of the emotions that most strongly lateralized is is anger and it right left realizes the left hemisphere is also not reliable aid. Often, it's more likely to be subjected to delusions and indeed hallucinations than the right hemisphere by a considerable factor about three or four For one, so it's not dependable. It's not boring. It's actually a bit of a lunatic. And the leftovers on its own is not good judging reality. The right hemisphere is the one that grounds us in reality and reports to us on the depths and the complexity of, of what we're seeing.
James Taylor 25:18 It reminds me a little bit that that phrase, when he talks about whiskey, I know you're in a part of the world with very good whiskey, where they talk about whiskey, great whiskey. This is complex, not complicated, I think is the phrase complex, not only rigid, which I love is a phrase. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. And I highly encourage people to go and get this i I'm gonna go now into your back catalogue with the master and emissary, because Because everyone's I think a lot of people probably have heard about that book first, and then come into this, I'm gonna go back the other way. I'm gonna I'm gonna go in reverse order to read your work in where's the best place for people to learn more about some of the other projects you're working on? I know you've been doing speaking tours recently as well, where should they go and find out? Everything you're up to just now.
Dr Iain McGilchrist 26:02 Yeah, there's a website, channel McGilchrist. There's an enormous amount of information. And there's also a lot of videos and talks on it. That's free. If you really want more, you can become a member and you can join forums and you get invited to ask me questions, which I answer live several times a year. So you can you get more material. If you're a member, you don't have to be at all you can just go there and browse for free. That's where you find out what I'm up to. Yes.
James Taylor 26:34 Fantastic. Well, the matter with things wonderful book is out now. Dr. Ian McGilchrist, thank you so much for coming on the Super creativity podcast.
Dr Iain McGilchrist 26:43 Thank you very much, James.
James Taylor 26:46 You can subscribe to the super creativity podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast while you're there. Please leave us a review. I would really, really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor, and you've been listening to the super creativity podcast.
How Emotions Shape Our Thinking With Leonard Mlodinow – #333
31 May 2022
00:46:07
How Emotions Shape Our Thinking With Leonard Mlodinow
How can you make better decisions? How can you improve your relationship with others? What can you do to live a happier life? My guest today argues that the answers to all these questions and more lie in understanding our emotions. Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist and author of five best-selling books including Subliminal, The Drunkard's Walk, and the #1 New York Times bestseller 'The Grand Design', co-authored with the late Professor Stephen Hawking.His latest book Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking explores the new science of feelings and offers us an essential guide to making the most of one of nature’s greatest gifts.
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
How Emotions Shape Our Thinking With Leonard Mlodinow
Leonard Mlodinow 0:46 Thanks, James. Great to be here.
James Taylor 0:48 So as I was reading this book, it book is on emotions, and actually felt like quite an, it must be quite an emotional book to write because you actually in the book, you, you share a number of stories about your mother and your father in it as well did that the fact that you were writing a book about emotions lead to you having to write a more personal book, maybe then you've you've written previously?
Leonard Mlodinow 1:11 Well, I always write personal books. And I think what I try to do as a science writer, is to bring some story and drama humor, to my, to my books, and to make them as far away from textbooks or the kinds of books that you might see authored by a researcher and his or her own work. I tried to make them entertaining and to draw in the reader. And so what do I know, I know my my own life. So I always talk a lot about tell stories for my own life. But of course, in this book, it was I went a bit deeper, because the book is about emotion. So the stories I'm telling are either emotional stories or stories about strong dramatic emotions that I felt growing up with my family. And unfortunately, my parents went through the Holocaust. And that was some very sad times. But the result was that I grew up in a house that was a bit unusual, and where emotions were very strong. And so for this book provides a lot of fodder. And I tried to, to be open and to write about it, honestly, and wherever it fit to use those stories.
James Taylor 2:21 So you put some of those stories from your own kind of personal life. And where else do you go to find stories as a writer?
Leonard Mlodinow 2:28 Well, that's interesting, because I think that one of the key components of my books is to have interesting stories, I tried to introduce the concepts in a non technical way through a story, I really believe in storytelling. And I spent a lot of time looking. And thank God for the internet, because I use the technology. So I I'll scour old newspapers, not necessarily the New York Times, but maybe the St. Petersburg press, Florida, Ms. Our old obscure publication, scientific publications, I go everywhere, and I spend a lot of time reading and when I find one that really engages me. And that makes my point, then, then I get really happy and I feel like I've discovered gold. It's it's kind of like mining, it's like think of it as mining Bitcoin by mining stories. And so it's a lot of mining, to find those little gems.
James Taylor 3:24 And remember, there's some wonderful stories in this. And there's also I guess, you call them kind of mind hooks, as well. They're they're kind of things where as I was reading the book, and I was every so often I would, I would say, Oh, listen to this, I will say to my wife, listen to this, you guess guess what? You'd never guess what I mean, I remember one of the ones I think I talked to her about a duck's penis, which is in the book, so you're gonna have to get through, we're gonna have to get a copy of the book to understand what that's all about as well. So there is there is obviously a real art to taking science and adding that kind of storytelling component. I mean, I mentioned before you've worked with the late professor, Stephen Hawking, I know you've also worked with Deepak Chopra. For those other people that come who come from a science background. What do you notice about the ones that are able to make that transition to being able to move into the storytelling and tell them tell their stories?
Leonard Mlodinow 4:15 Well, I think there's not many I think Steven was one and he he certainly reached touched a lot of people. But most scientists are so focused on their work. And there's so literal and they're in the forest, and they can't see that they can't all they see are the trees. That's difficult. It's very, it's very difficult to present things in a way that is really compelling for the general audience. I'm lucky that I, one of my passions is the science of course, and it has been since I was a kid, but I've had another passion since I was a kid which has been writing and I wrote for television for eight years. I used to write short stories all through my high school, college, graduate school. So I've always had a love of storytelling and for me I found that my niche is combining my love of science and my knowledge of science with my in kind of intuitive and internal knack for telling a story,
James Taylor 5:10 because I didn't want to you're based in LA and I didn't want to is there something in the water there? I mean you've got is the the water that like Joseph Campbell, you know Robert McKee and all these greats people that can share ideas about storytelling is story just into the DNA of everything in LA.
Leonard Mlodinow 5:28 Well, I think LA attracts storytellers. So a lot of people come here to make their way in Hollywood. But whether it's film or television, or now on, even on the internet, and so the storytellers tend to gravitate here, because that's here's where here's where you can sell it. Here's where the jobs are. Just as in, in the book world, it's New York and love authors are in New York. And because when you're local, you can take meetings, you can meet people, we can make contacts, and so it helps your career. So yeah, I but I feel like I draw the energy from the other people here who are focusing on that the creativity and the storytelling here in Los Angeles. By the way, if you've got the water that attracts, reminds me of Casablanca or he says, I came for the water. They says, water, this is the desert. I was misinformed.
James Taylor 6:19 I think I read a book the other day, it was I can't remember right. It was a travel rage from 1920s, who was traveling through the Empty Quarter in was now Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. And he was talking about having to go back to the UK where obviously, it rains a lot. And he said, I, I prefer places where they appreciate water a little bit more. In other words, I appreciate it slightly drier climates. But now many of us think about emotions, when we view it through this, this lens of maybe what we've read maybe in popular science books, for example, and we have to kind of navigate through a kind of this very modern can sophisticated world with same time. In the book you describe we have this kind of reptilian brain, there's much more instinctive, can you share with us how our understanding of emotions of change perhaps from the times of the, you know, the ancient Greeks up until today?
Understanding Of Emotions
Leonard Mlodinow 7:13 Well, the most famous of the very early treatise is what came from Plato, who felt that we have three different aspects to our thinking or feeling well, one was the loss of our drives, one was our emotions, which are higher emotions that might lead us to accomplish things and to motivate us to do good things. And then there was the head, the charioteer, if these two were horses, the person holding the reins was it was the conscious mind. And over the centuries after that, it got developed and morphed and changed quite a bit. And there were so many philosophers with different points of view, the Christians in particular added some elements of morality to that. And by the time we got to the 19 century, we are only really beginning, to understand a motion as a scientific, something for scientific study, as opposed to just something that we talked about philosophize about Newton, Newton changed that for physics in the 1600s, we moved from philosophy to science, but that didn't really move from philosophy. Emotions didn't really move from philosophy to science until Darwin. And this was long after he published his work in evolution. And he was looking at emotion. And of course, from his point of view, what he wanted to understand was, how do we explain emotion from the evolutionary point of view? Why did Why do animals have people have emotions? What's the purpose, and he made a lot, he made a tremendous amount of did a tremendous amount of study was a very meticulous person. He studied other cultures, other human cultures and their expressions of emotion, and all sorts of animals. And he went to the zoos and studied animals very closely. He came to a lot of conclusions that really made a lot of sense, common sense, and seemed somewhat intuitive. He came up with six basic emotions, anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and disgust. He thought those were the central emotions. And that he thought that the purpose of emotion was really twofold. One is to get the animals to act quickly when confronting a threatening situation. And the other was to communicate such information about such situations or about the animal's state of mind to other animals since they don't have a language. So if an animal you know puts on an angry face that tells the other animals to stay away from me, don't fight with me I'm fierce, or if the animal freezes or runs when faced with a predator that's a reaction for survival. And Darwin thought humans don't really need that anymore because as number one, we have rational thinking to reason our way out of those situations, and we have the language to talk to others. So Darwin felt that emotions were a vestige that emotions are separate from rational thought. And they were a vestige of our evolution. And that there are certain basic emotions, which are really the most important. And then there are some other emotions, but those are the main ones. Well, it turns out that all those our ideas are really raw. And based on his thinking, though, that became part of the common culture for over 100 years. And it wasn't until the last 10 or 20 years that there's been a revolution, in the theory of emotion and the science of emotion. That's really why I wrote the book because it really hadn't been written about very much.
What scientists have discovered through new techniques, especially different methods of brain imaging, and something called optogenetics, where you can control individual neurons in a brain. And through the study of brain connectivity, which is a new and very exciting study of how different neurons are connected. And what scientists have found, is, first of all, that there's there are, there's a wide variety of emotion, and you really shouldn't separate the so-called six basic emotions the way he did, and not only that, that you can even define the emotions, that that definitely the way, definitively the way Darwin did that fear. There are different kinds of fear, you can't call everything fear. And there are different types of fear and different types of each emotion. And they have different pathways and different processes in the brain that create them. Also, that the the borderline between different emotions is not a sharp borderline, one emotion, for instance, fear and anxiety can be hard to distinguish, and there's an overlap between them. So it's just, it's really not so clear. But most importantly, rational thinking and emotion cannot be separated in the mind, you can't not just can't say that emotions are bad and a rational mind is good, that's wrong. But also, the information processing that your brain is doing happens in a manner in which the logical rational processing and the emotion work together, and there's no way to separate them every rational decision thought idea you have comes was created not just through rational processing, but also through emotion.
James Taylor 12:21 But that almost kind of goes against it definitely seems to go against a lot of what we've been told over the years where emotion has been kind of degraded, or, I mean if you think about it in a business context, that was, you know, the worst thing you can sometimes used to be able to say was, I just have a hunch, I have an intuition about this. And then first of all, show me that, you know, show me the data, the data on it, as well. So, so to go a little bit further, you know, how, let's see, you know, we're looking at lots of interesting situations going on in the world just now. And everyone's trying to be very, like a chess player, they will be cold and calculating about how they move their chess pieces around. How can emotions actually increase our flexibility in making decisions?
Emotions Increase Our Flexibility In Making Decisions
Leonard Mlodinow 13:06 Wow, that was a lot. Let me start really quickly, at least by saying, hunches are good. You're on count I wrote a book called elastic about where ideas come from and hunches and creativity, as a lot of is an unconscious process that you're not even aware of, and it surfaces as a hunch or an idea. And those are not to be taken lightly or dismissed. Those kinds of your unconscious mind is doing a lot of very sophisticated and important processing of data that is so complex, that your conscious mind has trouble with what your unconscious mind does more easily. And it presents that to your conscious mind as hunches and ideas and so forth. And you should not dismiss them. And emotion is a very big component of all that processing. But the second part of your question,
James Taylor 13:55 that flexibility, I guess, stability in decision making
Leonard Mlodinow 14:00 a motion, it actually exists in a large sense to give you flexibility. So let's understand how different organisms might be able to think or how let's look at how a robot would think if you were programming and what are the different ways of processing information? Well, the most basic one is something called fixed action patterns. They're really algorithms where there's a trigger in the environment, and that leads to action, and that that is the dominant way that most animals face the world. If if a moth sees light goes toward the light, doesn't think about anything, it doesn't take into account other factors. Other aspects. It's programmed to go toward the light or if an animal feels a fire, it runs away. Those are programmed in hardwired into animal brains bacteria have that to bacteria are built in a way that they will gravitate toward nutrients. For example, rats
James Taylor 15:05 almost like rules are coded into the DNA or rules that could
Leonard Mlodinow 15:10 program a computer to say, if you see this through that those are programmed into the DNA into the structure and of animals. And a lot of what you see in animals seems to be more thoughtful or emotional. But it really isn't. For example, if there's a goose on a nest, I tell this story in the book, because an egg falls out or the goose season egg alongside her nest, she will reach her neck out, and with her neck, grabbed the egg and bring it back into the nest, it looks like the loving action of a loving of a loving mother, right. But if you put a baseball there, the goose will do the same thing. In fact, you could put a volleyball there or or a can, you can put any object there even feral amount larger than than the egg and the goose will just pull it up. Because the goose is programmed to pull in objects like that, that are next to her nest, she's not going Oh, my poor egg. I want this baby, I'm gonna go save it. No, it's a fixed action patterns was programmed in into the goofs, and that that works really well, for what we call lower animals, which a term I don't like, but for non human animals. But it's not the most sophisticated way of behaving. Because if there's a variation in the environment that was not usual, in that species environment, for example, an experimenter putting a softball next to the nest, then it kind of goes haywire. But the animal has no choice because it's fixed, it's very rigid, or situations change. So if an animal finds itself in a different climate or, or the climate changes, then those fixed action patterns might not be ideal. So humans, fortunately have have more sophisticated and nuanced ways of reacting to the world, through through our emotions. And through our rational thinking. What emotions do is they they are, they rate our way of reacting to triggers, but it's not that rigid, where a trigger produces a result, there's a whole class of triggers, for example, take disgust. You don't, you could have just a trigger, if it smells like this, or it smells like that, or it smells unfamiliar, spit it out. If it tastes this unfamiliar, or has this taste or that tastes, but it I have a whole spit it out, you can have a whole catalogue of smells, tastes and appearances, that that lead to avoid food avoidance, and that would be fixed action patterns or algorithms. But instead, we have a much more vague more general, kind of a structure through emotion where, if it's a little bit weird, smelling, tasting, or looking, this is a very general rule, then you question it, you don't necessarily sometimes you spit it out immediately, depending on the strength of the signal. But, but what it does is instead of that it gives you instead of automatically taking action, it gives you this extra layer where your conscious mind your rational thinking can mix with your emotion. And you might consider should I spit it out? Or not? Or should I? Should I eat it? How hungry I might? How likely? Is this to be rotten? Is it just an off smell? Is the milk still good, I won't get sick from it and I need some milk, or should I spit it out. So you have that extra layer of analysis that can happen, you have a more generalized form of the trigger, you have this extra layer of analysis, and then you have the action to spit it out or not to spit it out or whatever it is. And so each emotion is tailored for a certain kind of situation, to give you to react more generally gives you the flexibility to then decide what action to take based on that generalized trigger. And then to take the appropriate action but it's much more nuanced and complex.
James Taylor 18:52 So I guess that kind of thinking about in terms of machines about how they're trying to see artificial intelligence trying to make them more human like or centers or you know, in different ways. And I think about I was I was driving somewhere the other day and there was the piece of music came on. It was Vagner Richard Wagner, it Tristan in assault, it was a very dramatic piece. And my wife and I were just driving we came up this hill and this came on and it's like this is very dramatic music. And that and as I was listening to I was thinking you probably also know that they can a history of Richard Wagner's very dubious background to him as a human being. But and I was listening to it though and I was thinking will a machine ever create a music as as elevated as this with these emotions? Because that requires it? Surely it requires someone to have the inner skin, maybe hatred in them, love have lost someone greed, disgust, all these kind of vain gnarly things which aren't in There's kind of six very defined sections. So is, how is it possible to train a machine on that when we all have these very, you know, there's kind of very gray type of emotions in our lives?
Leonard Mlodinow 20:13 Well, that's really a really good question. And there are computers now that can that can compose music, that sound like certain composers, so for example, Mozart or Bach now, and the way those work is programmers have studied the music of Bach and Mozart figured out what somehow the, the principles are to the, to their sound. And they put those into the computer and say, make up sounds that are obeyed, that are made up according to these principles and put them together, string them together and make a piece and from I haven't heard any, but I've read about them. And I hear that they sound they sound somewhat like those.
James Taylor 21:00 They're very, very similar. But did you Yes, but it's the button.
Motivation And Emotions
Leonard Mlodinow 21:05 So here's the but that is not. That's not creativity, that is not art. Yeah, that is kind of I would call that copying a painting. So the person who said I used I paint, and I used to go to museums and paint, copy a painting, right, and that that, that the computers can do huge jump from that to creating something original. To create something original. Now we get to what you were saying you need first of all motivation to do it. The computer that creates the box, let's say, didn't decide wake up in the morning, go I feel like composing, I want something new, I'm going to you know, I'm going to create a new piece know, the programmer push the button that said create and the thing to dutifully does it and then when it's done according to whatever the program says, When you're done, it turns, it's finished and it stops calculating, right? Humans don't do that. You have your own motivational system inside, you're very closely related to your to your emotions. And the ideas that you get coming from your unconscious mind, as we discussed earlier, which are always percolating, those are heavily influenced by your motion. So just as you said, forget a computer to create something original. And really artistic, we will require that the computer have motivation, its own motivation and emotional system, which drives it to create it and shapes what it's creating. So I so right now, there's a revolution going on in computer science, which I'm sure everyone here has heard of the deep learning neural network programming. So what that is, is a new way of programming computers, that's more like our brain works. The old way of programming computers is you write an algorithm, it's a recipe if this if this happens, do that, if this data is so is like this, do that if the data is different to that, and when you combine the data, you do something else, and you get this, do that, and so on. It's like a decision tree that's fixed, that's designed by the programmer, the programmer creates the architecture, and the computer executes it, step by step, neural network is totally different. In neural network programming, you take the elements of the of the computer, and you set it up so that the computer is doing something very complicated, where all the different components are connected, and they talk to each other. And at the end, if it's successful, it gets a certain reward that reinforces what it was doing. And if it's unsuccessful, it goes the other way, kind of like evolution. And he lets the computer goes through millions and millions of such trials, and it gets better and better just like a human baby learning something. And when it's done, there's all these circuits that are made from you know, within the this neural network that go from whatever the initial situation is to the answer. The program doesn't even know what it's doing any more than you know what your brain is doing when you solve a problem. But the computer is solving the problem. This is just in its infancy right now. And I don't know if a computer physical computer ever get to be like our brain because we have 100 billion neurons, and they don't have that many components. But my belief is that this before you ever get a computer that can really do creative work. It's going to have to develop emotions. And we might not, we're not going to put in emotions, we're going to be building very complex neural networks that are doing something and as they evolve, I believe that that in certain cases they will evolve in a manner that has what really looks like emotions, just like we evolved to have emotions, but there are no seats there's no specific places where there's an emotion component in your brain. It's all different parts of the brain working together to create these emotional experiences. And that's what's gonna happen in the neural networks to I think if they get far enough,
James Taylor 24:53 but I do want to if the bridge on this is what some like a Garry Kasparov we talk about Centaur Centaur chess players human chess players playing alongside AI. And they're stronger than the human chess player playing on their own. And also stronger AI working on its own because it combines our human ability to be creative to take on huge returns to be curious think in a slightly different strategic way. And the machine's ability to be tactical. And I think about that, and I think about something like in Japan and the Lexus cars that come off the factory there, they have these people called to Kumys. The I don't know if you've ever heard of this wonderful phrase is Japanese trees, where this is a car factory, they make some of the most complex machines on the planet, machines, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning all this amazing stuff. But there's still these people that sit and stand at the end of the line of the production line, who are called to Kumys. Who the equivalent is on a Malcolm Gladwell said 10,000 hours to do in your profession, these people have done 25,000 hours and more. These are the some of the most skilled engineers have worked in cars. And their job at the end is just to walk around the car, touching the car, feeling the car, and they can spot these minut things that wing mirrors just slightly off or that that that line doesn't quite doesn't quite go, which even the machines aren't able to gauge. And when you ask them, What are they doing? They would they said, Well, I can't really describe what I'm doing. I feel it. I feel that this is that is off. And I feel that it's not that line should be and I feel that that leather edging is not quite as it shouldn't be. So I do wonder if in the meantime, before we get to the machines taking over the world, well, there'll be a little bit more this kind of Centaur play.
Leonard Mlodinow 26:38 Well, that would make sense. There's computers right now they don't they ate us. And there weren't when I write a book, it's me and the computer writing the book. Yeah. Other computers. You know, when I started out in physics, for example, and I'm a theoretical physicist, I would go to the library and have to have to page through these journals to find related articles. And, and I would have to do all sorts of hand calculations and that today are done can be done on the computer, I can figure out what needs to be done. And so you, you go over there your computer, do this calculation or find this paper. So right now I feel very, and when I write my books, as I said, my research was done on the computer, and so is of course, the typing. So I'm very much interface with my computer as I'm doing my work.
James Taylor 27:23 So we're almost like hearing this like long ago, maybe maybe it's going too far, but kind of creative pairing. Jobs and Wozniak, Pierre and Marie Curie. And in the computer, yeah, your computer. And I'm thinking, you know, you mentioned the book of the physicist, Paul Dirac, about how a woman called Mansi, I think, acted as his antiparticle. So can you tell us a little bit about with this idea of the anti particle and, and also in your collaborations, you've had very successful collaborations with other scientists, other writers, how this kind of creative pairings worked, what is what has been the nature of those pairings?
Collaborations
Leonard Mlodinow 27:59 Well, in the rocks case, he was a person who is apparently are seemingly outwardly very unemotional. And he felt uncomfortable around other people interacting with them. And he was, by the way, one of the top physicists of all time and sort of the 20th century, but also of all time, and one of the creators of quantum theory particular, what we would call relative role combining relativity with quantum theory to allow us to create theories, elementary particles that all those big colliders study. And so he was a he was a major physicist in the 20th century. And what he really didn't, he really didn't understand or have very much emotional intelligence until he met this woman who turned him around really, and made him appreciate, feel, and be more in touch with his emotional life, which was 50, which is very important in all our lives. But what really touched me was, said something to me was something I read in a biography of of Dirac, which, which was that in his later years when people came up to him, and he asked, What's your key for being so successful in physics? And you would think you would be saying no to really, and he was known to be a very fine mathematician, you know, to understand the math to be very precise and not sloppy, or maybe to be intuitive, because that's important. But know what he said was, it's to always be guided by your emotions. And I thought, bingo, that's the message of my book as well. And to come from him who is known or thought to be so unemotional and a field that's thought to be so unemotional is was something very important and the reason is that okay, in physics, what you do a lot of the time is crank through mathematics, which is very well defined and and you're following rules and figuring things out but that That's just one part of the process, you also have to decide what problem to choose, for example, you have to decide usually what approximations to make because we can't solve anything exactly. You have to decide what assumptions to make. And in all these areas that are not the pure rules of mathematics, your feelings and your emotions are very important. And that's the same in life. That's what your emotions do for you your emotion. Each emotion corresponds to a state a mental state of mental state of your mental information processing, give your brain some data, and a question it will process through to the answer. But that processing was made the logical rational processing is not in a vacuum, you use your memories, your goals, your ideas, your past experiences, your hopes, and dreams, all that feeds into whatever processing you're doing. It's not, it's never done in a vacuum that affects the processing. And all that stuff is very heavily influenced by your emotion state. So your emotion state is like it, it's intertwined with your logical reasoning. And each emotion state is it gives you a different set of priorities of skepticisms, and so forth that affect the outcome. If you if I asked you to do to think like, I'm thinking I'm looking at getting a vacation house now. So there's a lot of data coming to me the price, the average price per square foot around the interest rates, what's going to happen to the economy in the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If I'm in a, in a anxious of motional state, I will take make, I will, I will give more weight to the pessimistic side of those things. If I'm in a happy, joyous state, I will give more weight to the optimistic side could come to a totally different price at the end that I'm willing to pay. So
James Taylor 31:52 So here's, here's a question for you on that. Because you mentioned this in the book. And it was one of those little mind things I've heard I said to my wife, if I was the agent trying to get you to buy trying to make you to make that decision on buying that property. Does the temperature of the room that you're in or the place you're in have an effect? Yeah.
Temperature
Leonard Mlodinow 32:12 Great. Okay, because we react to our environment around us. Very strongly. We're a couples that after all, when we evolved, we were very dependent on that we like warm temperatures, we like we don't like to shiver and chill. We like the sun. There's a great series of great studies on the stock market. It was done in the 90s before everything got computerized where people everything depended really on human traders. And they found that they looked at the days and different stock exchanges around the world, not just the New York Stock Exchange, they look at the the movements of the stocks on sunny days, versus overcast days. And they found I forget what the percentage was, but there was like a 20% better performance on sunny days than an overcast day. Because the traders who are constantly making decisions about the value of things without realizing it, we're more willing to pay sunny days and less willing on the on the on the overcast day. So yes, it does.
James Taylor 33:11 So I hope you'll read the real estate agents not listening to this. Just now he's gonna you can influence your emotions up and you've had all these different relationships with other great kind of thinkers as well. So what did you think in that in those pairings for this? You mentioned? Deepak Chopra, Stephen Hawking, I think you've done with the Steven Spielberg and in the past as well, what come on Star Trek. When those people have come to you to work with you, what what they look for new, what have you added to that relationship that they couldn't perhaps have done on their own? And you've really, the sum has been greater than the individual parts?
Leonard Mlodinow 33:50 Well, you know, it. It varies. Just as in any relationship, you can have people who are the opposites who complement each other. You can have people who are the same, who reinforce each other was Steven Spielberg. I made a computer game. I knew the technology I had, I had a story background from being in Hollywood, of course, nothing like him. But so we could work together with Deepak Chopra. I love Depop. We've become great friends, I would disagree on the I would, how the world works. We agree I think and humanity and I think he has great ideas about meditation and inter personal relationships. I don't agree with him on the universe, debating each other about where did the universe come from? What is consciousness? So we in that sense, we were
James Taylor 34:39 it was a bookmark a conversation of two different people.
Leonard Mlodinow 34:44 It was called War of the worldviews and it was a debate. So we would go back and we were, I think, 20 questions and we would go back and forth about those questions. With Steven, we were on the same wavelength. So we I think we reinforce each other He, He loves stories and I was always bringing stories. And he, you know, he, he was interested in explaining his physics, I could help translate that for ordinary people help him to do that. Maybe because not being as brilliant as him, I could be play the dumber person who needs to have the explanations. And yet I could read his paper, so I could figure out what he was talking about. And so that was, that was very rewarding. And of course, I was also, you know, his hands because he can't move. I mean, he, he wrote a lot of it himself and rewrote, and he was quite a perfectionist. So we would sit together and slog through things, but you know, his, his ability to communicate was extremely restricted. So I could, in some ways, help him by, you know, by doing that,
James Taylor 35:51 so on this, you wouldn't so much translate, you can maybe an interpreter of that helping in terms of widen that out to, you knew that?
Leonard Mlodinow 35:59 Yeah, we really worked together. And it's hard to say, who wrote what in that book, because we went back I would be I was at Caltech on the faculty at the time. And so we would send stuff back and forth, and then we would meet. And he would rewrite mine, I would be right here, as we argued about a lot and thought over things.
James Taylor 36:17 A bit of tension. So it's always a good thing there as well. At the towards the end of the book, you shared a, I think one of the most moving stories in the book. So for me, I thought was an incredibly powerful story about your father's time as a prisoner and the book involve concentration camp and how when the camp was was liberated, he was able to restrain himself from gorging himself on food. I'm every Christmas I watch band of brothers, and it has one of the episodes in that studio, which has him going to one of these camps and this terrible thing with the soldiers that I have to stop the prisoners from giving them too much food gorging himself as well. So and he was in that same camp with other people, I think maybe your uncle, his uncle, who was not able to and so is this something your point? Like, why was your father able to hold back, you know, strain those kind of emotions and not gorge himself when maybe other people weren't able to do that and suffered as a result of it?
Leonard Mlodinow 37:18 Yes, as he was with, I think a friend of his who actually died from eating too much. And because when you my father was 85 pounds at the time, where he was normally 160. And then they were hiding for several days in a cellar when Americans were coming to liberate the place because the Nazis were killing everyone and take them on death marches and whatnot. And so they managed to hide without food or water for several days. So they come up, having not had food or water for several days, and again, being half their normal body weight. And then the Americans are going here, have some chocolate, have some salami, whatever you want. And, and your, I guess your digestive system can't can't take that. I don't know, what, where my father found history strain or what he was thinking, the point of the story was that are we evolved in a certain environment. And that part of the book, I'm talking about addiction, and your reward system, and how it can get fooled and be counterproductive, sometimes in artificial or unusual situations. And this was course was an extreme unusual situation. And your body leads itself to eat itself to death, which is unfortunate, to say the least, that I transitioned from there, though, to talk about the modern world where we have something that certainly not as gruesome or as extreme, but something similar analogous going on with a lot of the food manufacturers of processed food, trying to design food that will trick your body into gorging itself and buying it and not stop eating. And they, they're proud of it, but the ads, they can stop eating out we can't eat just one and so forth. That's not a good thing. Yeah, you might think that it's, you know, it sounds like Oh, I'm gonna love it, but you become addicted and you never get satisfied and they do this, they're in the field, it's called supernormal stimuli, these are stimuli that that cause you to get certain rewards in your brain, that in a natural world are self limited. So, the way sugar appears in the natural world is not the way it appears in Coca Cola and sugar and fat do not appear as cheesecake in the natural world and so forth and are and these companies are designing the cheesecake and their soft drinks for to, to do two things to to please you and to not and to never satisfy you. And by using making combinations of things chemicals and fat and sugar in a way that is not found in nature, they they are able to trick your system into the you know, making you eat till you too you explode. And also that I've been similar with other tobacco, similar tobacco companies, when they make their cigarettes, they put chemicals in to give them certain properties that make it more addictive. If you're in the wild, and you just pick some tobacco leaves and rolled up in some way and smoke it, that's not nearly as harmful as smoking cigarette after cigarette, which we can do.
James Taylor 40:24 So they're becoming become very good at manipulating your emotions. You know, I think I heard the other day, I think a lot of the social media companies, they have more behavioral psychologists than any any kind of university could possibly have as well. So it's a fantastic I love love that reading the book as well. And I had to ask you, you know, there's, you've written this book, you've, you've got this wide range of other things that you've worked on as well, we only covered a tiny segment of some of the things that you've done. How do you keep your own thinking? Fresh? How, what influence did you try to surround yourself with so you always can think of maybe where that next book idea that next project idea can come from?
Leonard Mlodinow 41:04 Yeah, I talk about that a lot. And elastic, it's how do you keep your creativity or stimulate your creativity, you have to constantly be challenging yourself and exposing yourself to new ideas to new people to new experiences, it's really important not to get in a rut. Most of us live in a in our own little cocoon world where we have friends that we've had for years that we may have met, probably through our kids through our spouses in a restaurant or wherever you meet people at work, people who are like you, and you stay with them, and you're in his own little world. And you have little contact with people who do things that are wildly different from your different socio economic class, different races, different nationalities, different ways of thinking or living. And our thinking gets to be that way to you. You think in a certain way. I'm when I was working for TV I wrote for Star Trek and MacGyver, which you might expect as a physicist, but those that were much different than that that did not, you know, cop shows, I wrote for I wrote comedy, people said, nobody writes comedy and drama. But I said, well, and I can get twice as much work if I do both. So you know, I'm always trying to do that not to get in a rut, I don't think that, you know, it's good to be. I mean, if you like it, it is but even for me, I don't want to be the I'm on the science shows, or I'm on the cop shows. That's what I do, I want to expand my mind. So I when I, when I go to a bar, I try to talk to people who are most different from me, or if you're, you know, meet someone at a bus stop. It's interesting to interact with people that normally would meet break out of the shell, there's a guy I can't remember his name, who actually developed an app that was in the news a few years ago, this is a great app. Instead of just going to your favorite restaurant or your favorite bar, he developed, which people do he, if you want to really stretch yourself, where you have an adventure, he developed an app where you type in a radius, and it'll pick a place at random, and you say, I'm going to go to wherever it pick, whatever the thing that picks, and instead of going to your usual sushi place, you know, you might end up at a Somali restaurant or something and you maybe you don't normally go for that food, but go for it. When I go to restaurants, people they tell you, here's what's popular, I say what's unpopular? What's the weirdest thing on the menu, because that's what attracts me. And sometimes it's no good. But you know, in the in the scheme of things, it expands your horizons and helps your creative thinking to be exposed to such things.
James Taylor 43:34 And we mentioned it during the interviewer your use of technology. We talked about things that AI machine learning neural networks. Is there any technology that you use, you find it as useful helps me free up your time to do your creative work or augment your creative work in some way?
Leonard Mlodinow 43:48 Well, the all the usual things. Of course, Google has changed things tremendously. Allowing you allows me to find my stories that might be written in some obscure Australian newspaper from 1974. And I'll find it the word processing software, of course, I think back to how different I imagined I wonder sometimes it's some sociologists who study books, both novels and nonfiction that were done, let's say post 1990 and pre 1980 When When he used to write without a computer editing was so harsh, right? Yeah, copying and pasting drawing arrows using whiteout. If you're old enough to remember what that is, compared to what you can do on a computer today, I can I am, I am a perfectionist in my writing and I'm revised over and over and over and over again and I can't imagine doing that paper if I didn't have my computer to allow me to cut and paste and cut and paste and keep doing it and to keep all my old versions. So if I screw it up, I can always revert. That's for me as a as a as a godsend. And with the latest stuff that I like, of course is the voice to speech, voice to text and I'll have my my phone with me, and I'll get it, you know, I'll just I'll be walking down the street and get like an idea for a paragraph and I'll just type it in by talking. And then I'll just email it to myself and copy it in. So it's, it's great. It's taken a lot of the Drudge drudgery out of it.
James Taylor 45:18 Well, I look forward to your next book after this. But I encourage you all to go and get emotional the new thinking about feelings. Leonard's modern Al's new book. Lana, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story and all about emotions on the SuperCreativity podcast.
Leonard Mlodinow 45:34 That has been Firefly hold up my work because of
James Taylor 45:37 that we can't because we've got the two different versions
Leonard Mlodinow 45:39 battling versions there. But that one if you're in the States, get this one. Or if you're in other non US countries. I think you got it.
James Taylor 45:49 Thank you. You can subscribe to the SuperCreativity podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts while you're there. Leave us leave us a review. I would really, really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor, and you've been listening to the SuperCreativity podcast.
Lean Innovation Problem Solving With Peter Newell – #332
24 May 2022
00:29:41
Lean Innovation Problem Solving With Peter Newell
Peter Newell is a nationally recognized innovation expert whose work is transforming how the government and other large organizations compete and drive growth. He is the CEO of BMNT, a Palo Alto-based innovation consultancy and early-stage technology incubator that helps solve some of the hardest real-world problems in national security, state and local governments, and beyond. He is also a founder and co-author, with Lean Startup founder Steve Blank, of Hacking for Defense (H4D)®, an academic program that engages students to solve critical national security problems and gain crucial problem-solving experience while performing a national service. Pete is a retired US Army colonel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. From 2010 through 2013 he was the Director of the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force (REF) charged with rapidly finding, integrating and employing solutions to emerging problems faced in the battlefield. This experience gave him a unique perspective on how to anticipate competitive challenges and head them off quickly, whether on the battlefield or in the board room.
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
Pete Newell 1:14 Well, thanks so much. Great opportunity to chat.
James Taylor 1:17 Now, I've been speaking, messaging this week and last week with some friends who are really on the frontline of defending Kyiv. In Ukraine just now. They're using US and UK Top technologies like Javelin Stinger missiles and these small Turkish made drones. But it's just the I think the big very kind of creative in their tactics. So one of the first quick questions and maybe this is a kind of a strange question to start with. But from your perspective, what is the relationship between innovation and creativity.
Relationship Between Innovation And Creativity
Pete Newell 1:48 So the key others, a great example of people in crisis will reach out and grab whatever they have in hand, and happen, modify or adapt that accelerate the accomplishment of whatever mission that is, and if you're on the streets, defending your home, your neighborhood, your city and your country. So, so it is the three minds that can look at things that were intended for a radically different purpose and combine them into something that actually does something quite different. You don't want to that was at the heart of innovation. Most times, that's, that's in fact, what we do. Sometimes it's taking old tech and mixing it with new tech, to perform a completely different operation that somebody had imagined it sometimes it's dreaming up some new, new tech to solve a new problem. But, mostly it is the creativity that comes from those combinations that actually achieves that acceleration that you're after.
James Taylor 2:55 Now, we had a little while ago, we had that your collaborator, Steve Blank on the show as well as Eric Ries the author of The Lean Startup. So from your perspective, what does a lean innovation process look like? When do you apply it to more than a government agency or military or defense contract? How does this differ from maybe many people who are listening or watching this just now who come from a startup or big business background?
The Lean Startup
Pete Newell 3:19 What attracted me to the lean methodology, when I first went across it, is the fact that it forces you to do iterative customer discovery, not necessarily development discovery, which forces you to create an MVP is often used that MVP to test a number of theories and validate or invalidate it, validate or invalidate them along the pathway to actually developing a product that solves a problem for people. From my standpoint, the I used to say it this way, you know, when I tried to solve a problem for somebody on a battlefield, I realized over time that the first honest conversation I had with somebody about the problem they asked me to solve didn't happen until I handed them a potential solution. And then at that point, is when we started talking about what the problem really was. Because as they would look at it, and say, Well, I really expected something that was a little different than you know, are actually meant. Yeah. So this process of, of creating Mbps and getting the first best, fastest thing you can find into somebody's hands to drive a conversation became kind of a mantra, particularly during my time in the rapid equipment course. So of how we work through emergent problems. And what we realized it was those conversations that taught us what the right problem was, and then what the right potential solution was, based on what was actually going on. What Steve and I also recognized overtime was the discovery by itself, a lien wasn't a complete story, it really was our ability to discover new and emerging problems and curate them into things that were actually workable, that that fed the lien process actually made it that much richer, you know, you know, the outcomes are just phenomenal.
James Taylor 5:23 So that's an interesting word curation process. You know, that work you did as the head of the US Army's Rapid Equipping Force, you built a curation process to help these technology solutions to be deployed more rapidly? Can you go a little bit more detail into what that curation process actually looks like?
Curation Process
Pete Newell 5:39 It's actually a couple of things that I focus on problems.And that's the way we teach hacking for defense or hacking for the climate or, or how I work with government agencies and in large companies is we tell them to stop talking about solutions. Let's discuss the problem that they set out to solve. And what we have learned over time that I learned in Afghanistan was that most of the problems you are first handed are wrong. And it just it for whatever it is, is often is a symptom of a problem. Sometimes it's an idea of masking radius masquerading as a problem, but the problems are wrong. The second issue we have is oftentimes the problems are dependent or closely aligned with the pace of emerging technology, which, simply means that, that I can look at a problem and the underlying attack and tell somebody that don't bother doing three years' worth of r&d on a solution for that problem because the text will change so fast, that it's going to cause the problem to change faster than you can produce solutions for it, pull out a credit card and buy something for him. Because there's not going to last you and I think so as we work through this curation problem, we actually discovered that many people were loading their innovation systems with problems that were ill-formed, we're not necessarily supporting and they weren't prioritized. And what you saw was, you know, a problem that came from, you know, the highest general or somebody with the loudest voice. And when you looked at the problem, it simply was not ready to be on the innovation platform. It was clogging the pipeline. Then we looked at things and said, Okay, you know, if you give me a problem, the first thing I want to know is, is the person who provided me the problem and expert in the impact of the problem. It's like, do they sit right next to where the problem occurs? Or are they seven deaths and three bureaucracies away from it, and they really don't have an eye on the impact on the ground? The second thing we look for is, does this problem have a senior leader champion in by senior leader champion? It was? Is there a senior leader out there who has the authority and the budget and the will to do something about the problem? If they see a potential solution? And then obviously, we would look at okay, if I've got I've got an expert in the problem. How long has that expert been in a job? And how long are they going to stay? Just think about it. If I've got an expert, which is you know, there's nothing stronger than a passionate expert, somebody really wants to solve a problem. But if they change jobs, three months into the process, so you have a story. So so we literally came up with I think 36 data points, we looked at whatever the problem to decide whether the problem was ready to put onto a platform and actually use our assets to do something about
James Taylor 8:42 it reminds me a little bit of this Peter Drucker, the management theorist who said that the main problem in problem decisions is that they could have spent too much time focusing on the usefulness of the problem not asking the question, and not spending enough time with the questions. I think Albert Einstein said a slightly different way around this once asked him if he had an hour to solve a problem, how would he solve the problem? He said I spent the first 55 minutes thinking about what the question should be. Once I knew that then it could open up. So there's, so what I'm hearing you're doing in this kind of curation is your kind of blending, kind of asking more catalytic deeper questions, with almost kind of design thinking, does it kind of design thinking kind of process going on really kind of get empathy with that person, the other side that's experiencing that problem and try and get close to that those people that are experiencing those
Pete Newell 9:33 problems? That's exactly why I think when we really dug into innovation as a process, and we kind of labeled a collection of activities and methodologies and disciplines, you know, in a strange so that the output of a design thinking session, create data that's valuable to the next step. And we simply don't do design thinking for the sake of doing design thinking it really is intended for a purpose. And the discipline comes from connecting all those activities into something that over time narrows the number of things you're looking at, and, and allows you to actually come up with a solution.
James Taylor 10:17 So on that process of narrowing the kind of evaluation and the prioritization of innovative ideas. I think I've read before you've also used McKinsey's three horizons model. Can you describe how that works, how that may be useful for other people that are involved in doing kind of innovation work, and how they can use that to kind of prioritize what to focus on?
McKinsey Three Horizons Model
Pete Newell 10:39 Yeah, one of the things we wanted to know and I think, Steve, started, as we started talking about, you know, the difference between horizon 123 work, and recognizing where the problem fit, we actually added a fourth, we actually call the horizon zero. And I'll come back to explain that, in the process of curing problems, we wanted people to understand whether they were working on something that was simply an incremental change that improve the efficiency of the current system, whether it was something that would change the current system or something that would just make the current system go away. So horizon, one is an incremental improvement of the rather efficient system was out there, Horizon two was a replacement of the system that actually produce whatever we're doing federal horizon three was a holy grail was stopped doing any of them and do something else. We added her Horizon Zero, which basically said, Don't do this. You know, it's outside the scope of what you should be doing and doesn't belong at play, don't touch it. Because as we looked at the large programs, I remember looking at one intelligence agency, they had 214 innovation projects they were tracking, of which maybe 5% had actually been through some sort of curation process. And we really dug into it, there were a whole bunch of Horizon Zero things we look at, say, the tech that you're trying, the problem that you're trying to solve involves a tech that is on a 10-year trajectory. You're not going to solve that this year because it is a hard science issue that has so many other things that Pastore the other thing that we wanted to help people understand is different levels, there's a different focus of innovation if you're at the lowest and we call it tactical level, you're trying to solve things in a very short timeframe using essentially whatever and versus an organization that is chartered with, you know, really finding horizon three, what's, what's the next weapon system going to be or what is the next business model is going to be to completely change the world. And you don't want to confuse the two, but what I found with a lot of young innovators is they all thought they were gonna be the next Elon Musk, and they were looking for the thing that was gonna change the world where they didn't have the reputation, they didn't have experience, they didn't have the backing, and quite frankly, the tools necessary to do what it was they were trying to do. But they're all hungry for that experience.
James Taylor 13:21 So that almost that those high back kind of level three years, I think in America, you have DARPA is one of your agencies in the UK, we're just about to start something similar. I think it's good to Harper is not very original, in terms of what it says a name. But and then obviously, you got work going on GCHQ in the UK and other places, you created something else as well, you can co-create something else which focus a little bit more on those horizon 01 And two, which is called Hacking for defense. And you I've read things you've written about it before where you said one of the parts of the problem you're trying to solve was this, that you call it the frozen middle, in, in the military and or in organizations as well. So first of all, can you tell what the problem you're trying to solve with hacking for the defense was? And how are you solving it with hacking for defense?
Hacking For Defense
Pete Newell 14:12 You know, hacking first started out with an asked by a government client who said, we're struggling, having a conversation with people in Silicon Valley about something important to the government. We can't get people to talk to us and especially the guy asked me to prove that there was a way to get people in Silicon Valley interested in having a conversation like that. I had, you know, I was not long off of the battlefields, Afghanistan and Iraq, but I understood problems. One of the things that I learned, you know, one of my many trips to Silicon Valley was that the fact that I had a checkbook was not attractive in the valley. The fact that I had the wickedest versions of problems, that people weren't Problem Solving was, and that was my collateral. So I learned that if I brought a problem to the table and could articulate that problem both as a military issue and as a commercial issue, I would have a roomful of people who would want to talk to me. So we use that. To go after this prove it is we simply bought a bunch of Stanford students over spring break and set you on a team. And your job is to articulate this problem in a manner that is attractive to people in Silicon Valley from a team, we articulate that problem as a two dual-use problem, which means a solid commercial base, and a military. I know he wants you to pitch it to a bunch of venture capital folks. And if they get excited and take it out of your hands and send it to the portfolio companies, you get an A, and it was absolutely smashing. It was it was phenomenal. We were doing the outbreak for that time. And we're talking a bunch of high-level people. And we basically said, Listen, we borrowed Stanford students over spring break, to do this. And it's not, it's not scalable, it's not sustainable, because quite frankly when they go into school, they're busy. They have other classes. And you know, one of the students who had nothing to do with the military circling back around and said, Wait a minute, there's been a class at Stanford, it would have taken. And then we realized, you know, roof out, within nine months, we wrote, the educators guide for a lot, the first class at Stanford, the students are looking for an opportunity to apply everything they've learned in university, to work on a problem, a real problem with real people, that gives them real experience that helps them get a real job. And the Stanford students will tell you, they take this class, it is the hardest class, they've taken the Stanford quarter. But it's also the most professional reward. So we went from, you know, that discussion to realizing there were four value propositions. One was to the government, people who brought problems in because what you don't one of the things we find out is that the first pivot in the course is always when the students look at the government. And so your problem will be solved in the wrong time. And then there's a lot of headway made toward what's the right problem? Who the right people, what are the potential solutions? Is there a pathway we can deliver that solution? So the process of we use something called the mission model canvas, which is a version of Alex Osterwalder Business Model Canvas, the process of developing that Canvas produces the richest market research, you can get your hands on it, you just you can't produce it, you know, in any other manner. But the the output of the program was students really excited to work on something that was real, where they were treated as as entrepreneurs and potential startups, the university was able to provide an academic course that was attractive and that didn't exist in the past. The industry came to the table and said, We're willing to mentor the students and get involved because quite frankly, they want to hire the students. They really want the talent that comes out of a course like that. And what they say is, we don't only need in the future, but it looks like that, then we want more of those. So the four value propositions met in the middle was force. The the course, you know, very rapidly expanded the United States in the UK, you have I don't have 1214 universities teaching that course. Now. You actually have one called Hacking for police now. So you have one involved policing, you have one for sustainability. The UK Ministry of Defense, Defense College, national creative degree programs, the Minister of Finance in national security innovation with a capstone course in that degree program is hacking for defense class for military officers. So many cases, even UK has taken what we did in us and expanded on in some cases, I think they're doing federal that we are
James Taylor 19:14 I just saying that and you mentioned students at Stanford and these other universities, other places. What about the people we're already within? They're enlisted. They're there. They're in one of the militaries and I'm thinking here particularly of my wife's brother, was in the British Special Forces, the SES. And until he was killed, he was killed in combat. But I think about someone like him. This is someone that didn't do very well at school. Then they went into the military, and he learned three, or four languages. He excelled. He just kind of flew he found his, his purpose, his passion. And I think about someone like that, who's that maybe a 21-year-old who joined you know, one of the forces that parts of the military when the uncertainty Tree, all the Defense Intelligence Services, and they really want to serve and they want to they kind of also got this hacking mindset as well. So how can you get it? So it's happening not just within the universities, but actually with someone that's already serving and they'll be will be serving for a while maybe they're that person that they're kind of hierarchy or that in that messy middle of the organization? How do you make a culture of innovation within the services?
Pete Newell 20:22 So we were asked the same question, I thought, one of the agencies that bought us a problem for the very first Stanford course with me and said, I'm gonna give you a problem for your course. And he said, quite frankly, solving one problem here for me is really just not helpful. I have 1000s. And what he said was, I'll do this for you, but you're going to you're going to do, I'm going to create something like that for for my workforce. That has expanded to the point where, where we run what we call mission acceleration programs, inside larger organizations, where we were we will work with the organization to curate a number of problems, and then work with them to assemble teams multiple times from the middle of the organization. And we do the same thing we make sure the problem is important, it's valid, it's got an expert, it's got to see another champion. And then we take teams of people from the organization through almost the exact same process we would take students through, it's much compressed, I would say it's much more violent. But then the organization looks at them at the edge and says, you know, we'll, we're going to fault that we're not going to do that, but we're going to send that back. And they actually start to produce things based on what those those teams are doing. And we probably take probably a dozen agencies right now that were involved within that process. To your point on young people, and I had this conversation last night with somebody who said, there was a, I was on a panel where somebody said, you know, you have to do your time. And that's interesting young guy, call me afterward. And he says, You know, I've applied to a bunch of different organizations, and I keep getting this, this patriarchal, you gotta do your time, you got to come in and, and I said, I get it, that you want to do the time, but you want to do it 100 times as fast as everybody else. And is that I want the experience, I want to do this book, but I don't want to wait 10 years to learn the tools are into it. Folks who come from a special operations background tend to learn at 10x speed because they're provided the experiences or the opportunity to get the experience much faster than the rest of the world does. That that's that's the true difference between the two parties. We're finding that particularly within larger organizations, the teams that we bring through this process, some of them fleet up much faster. Because it's an experience thing as you go through this process of doing interviews and building MVPs and you learn there's a subtle change between I gotta be successful all the time between that and learning that I need to fail which means I need to test an MVP that is wrong. To give me the confidence on the one that I selected that is right. And getting them to understand that getting things wrong eventually will teach you what the best solution for something else. But that's that's a big change for somebody comes out of a government bureaucracy.
James Taylor 23:30 Absolutely. Last week, I was in Dubai and I'm on my flight over to the UAE I read New York Times Nicole Pearl Ross really great books on cyber warfare called this is how the the tell me the world ends really happy title for a flight. Now one thing to read on an airplane. The gentleman who's sitting next to me on the flight said what is that book that looks like the terrible book to read, you know, with everything going on in the world just now. But something she was speaking about in the in the book was a basically focused on information security, cyber, cyber that that whole world. And she was saying, you know, for America, the big threat is a cyber Pearl Harbor, not a not a currency, a shooting kind of war in that way. Now, one of the things that she was really pushing in the book was seeing some of the reasons that she felt in the US had fallen behind countries like China or Russia on certain elements in that, that battle that that race. And one of the things she was pointing to was that so many of those kind of bright young things. They say, I'm gonna go, I want to work for Google, I want to work for Facebook, I want to work for for those companies. So this is a talent thing we're going to talk about here. How can organizations like the US Army or the NSA or GCHQ, for example, in the UK, what can we be doing now to attract that brightest and the best not just from the kind of hardware side but the content from the software from the coding side? How can we make it this this is something to really to aspire to and to see where you would aspire to joining Google or Facebook because it can be about the money.
Pete Newell 25:06 No, it's often really about the mission. I think all of them after this, the the idea that, you know, 300, some odd hacking organizations have banded together to take on Russia simply was not meant for a whole lot of people working in their basements, you know, 24 hours a day doing something because they're excited by doing it. And then I call it the challenge of recruitment. is, one is the military is the government was already full of people who would do if they were given the tools or choices, yep. Because being an innovator or an entrepreneur is not a professional inside large organizations, we tend to chase them away. Yeah, and we lose that passion and excitement, yet we're starting to see places was an opportunity that says, Listen, you don't have to serve full time. You don't even have to be a reservists, we've created these places where you can rapidly assemble to work on something, you know, in your spare time, or when you're not, but but that for me, I already have working together, creates a language between them, that makes it much easier to recruit them when you need to. Yeah, and I think, you know, for instance, like to go back to the hacking for defense classes. It's such a rich environment of students, professors, people in the industry, people from venture, they it all comes to one place and over time, we find that the students, you know, take that class continue to work with a government sponsor, well, after the class downs, fully 70% Stay engaged in the problem for long term. Some of them actually go on to work in the government auditors go on to work in places like Facebook and Google, yet, they keep showing up with that class. I want to be a mentor, I want to be an assistant I want to do whatever it is that just I think they're driven by their passion for service, that they just want that opportunity. So we spent a lot of time coaching, you know, our government clients, how do you take advantage of that, you know, lower the barriers that prevent people from helping you, but also internally prevents you from bleeding your talent when they learn how to do this, because because you have no place to put them once was the really good.
James Taylor 27:26 It's funny, I saw when when stuff started to happen in Ukraine, someone sent me the link for the telegram group is the at army of Ukraine. And it went from almost from no one to I think I've got 300,000 members now, who only sent daily missions of things that they're going to do and mostly kind of like, obviously, cyber kind of ops. And it's interesting, just kind of seeing that there's a real passion within that there's because in some of these are Ukrainians, either these are people and other people are just because they just feel aggrieved, or what's kind of going on and they want to do something to help. Maybe they can't offer up their home to a Ukrainian family fleeing, but he said I have the skills I could use the skills for to affect some change. So it's a fascinating area. Pete, thank you so much for coming on today. If you want to learn more about hacking for defense, you're you know, you've got some books and writing coming out really soon as well. All your other projects, where should they go to learn more about you and the work you do?
Pete Newell 28:20 So you can go to B and then t.com? Yeah, and you can see, you know, essentially, we write prolifically about what we've learned. So there's a great collection of articles and other things that we could read about the processes and about how they apply and about the effect on him. For hacking for defense, you can go to common mission.us Or in the UK, common mission.uk. And you can get a great understanding of what's going on inside the classroom, both in terms of attacking defense problems, National Security, Homeland Security, climate, policing, sustainability, this literally I think there are 100 universities around the world now teaching some form of this. Also great stories and that people who've become involved and some of the companies that are doing really cool stuff afterward.
James Taylor 29:14 Well, Pete, thank you so much for coming on to the super creativity, podcast and sharing your knowledge your experience in the work you've been doing. Thanks so much for coming on today. While syndromes thanks for the invite. You can subscribe to the super creativity podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast while you're there. Please leave us a review. I would really really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor. I knew been listening to the super creativity podcast
Innovation Is All About People With Alison Hawks – #331
18 May 2022
00:42:22
Innovation Is All About People With Alison Hawks
Dr. Alison Hawks is the CEO of BMNT, Ltd and Executive Director of the Common Mission Project in the UK, and a recognized expert in military strategy and sociology. Ali was previously the Director of Research of the Section 809 Panel, a US congressionally mandated commission tasked with streamlining and codifying defense acquisition. She was a Lecturer at King's College London, Defence Studies Department, Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Security Studies, King's College London. She has also taught at Brunel University and the Department of War Studies, King's College London. Her doctorate thesis was in military sociology and Ali received her Ph.D. from the Department of War Studies, King's College London, and her MA in Strategic Studies from the University of Leeds. She holds a BA in Political Sciences from the University of California, San Diego. Welcome to the SuperCreativity podcast Alison Hawks...
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
Alison Hawks 1:04 Thank you for having me, James. Great to be here.
James Taylor 1:07 So people can have probably wondering, you know, the show is all about creativity, innovation startups. Your background is in military strategy and sociology. But there's part of you and part of what you do now, which is really about innovation startup, lean startup methodology. What got you interested in innovation as a topic?
Military Strategy, Sociology And Innovation
Alison Hawks 1:29 Yeah, that's a great question. I think that one of the things that we talk about at our company at BMNT around innovation is, is an overwhelming narrative around not only defense innovation, but innovation in general, whether you want to look at kind of FinTech, or different areas of technology or innovation is that it's about technology. And one of the things that differentiates our company, outside of that innovation is that innovation is about sociology. And it's really about people and how people react to things, whether that's different skill sets, or processes or policies, how it changes their career pathways. So when we think about innovation, from our perspective, it's really about people. So you know, what attracted me to innovation. And lean startup was really what attracted me into academia and military sociology was just being genuinely curious about people. And it came down to I can trace it back to what I did my PhD on, which was armed contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, and looking at them as veterans. So US and UK veterans coming out of the armed services, and then joining a private security company, and redeploying back to Iraq and Afghanistan, where they had deployed previously as a service personnel. And what I really wanted to understand was how that affected their transition to civilian life. So a lot of times veterans transition to civilian life, and they have a series of documented potential issues. Most of them do not have a small subset do and there's a lot of documentation on that. And I was coming from Coronado in California, where it was a lot of the West Coast Navy SEAL teams, I knew a lot of people that have been private security contractors. But what I was reading in the newspaper and articles wasn't the same as what I was seeing from the people I knew. And that really drove my curiosity of well, who are they? And why are they going back to Iraq and Afghanistan? And what does it give to them? And then how does it affect their life in terms of their economics? How does it affect potentially their mental health? How does it affect their family structures? How does it affect their sense of belonging, their sense of purpose. So that was really what I focused my PhD thesis on. And in academia, one can actually be very innovative and entrepreneurial. So you are in charge of your own academic agenda, the books you want to write the topics you want to write. And while it has to go through a relatively extensive peer review process, you really are allowed to be an entrepreneur within academia. And so that was the approach I took. But I still felt that something was missing. And that kind of curiosity about people. I wasn't able to action it so I could research people and I could talk to them, but I actually wanted to do something with them. I wanted to solve problems with them. And so by the time I was in, at the section 809 panel, doing research for Congress on overhauling defense acquisition, part of the job was how do we change the workforce? The acquisition workforce in the Department of Defense, so the acquisition workforce is around 167,000 People in the DOD and they wanted to say, well, how can we change the way that they think and they solve problems? So they brought in the program hacking for defense, which you've talked with Pete Newell and Steve Blank about the program, they co create it so I was asked to go and be a part of an educators course educating contractor personnel in hacking for defense methods and lean startup. And when I went there, I it was like a puzzle piece that fit together where I that well, while this is a crossover of everything I wanted to do, which is to stay partly in academia to stay within the defense world to conduct research, but then to apply, apply innovation and apply this kind of creativity in different thinking, towards outcomes that we can kind of anticipate. But we have the flexibility to pivot and experiment and fail and learn. So it's kind of all of this excitement that came together at once. And that kind of Venn diagram was, you know, me in the middle running over to Pete and saying, Pete, I want to take this to the UK, and I want to grow it and run it. And we can have such an impact in UK academia. And that's really where the conversation started. So it was really coming from a place of innovation. But seeing that methods like lean startup, are really at the heart of academia and kind of types of qualitative research going out and talking to people developing hypotheses, testing those hypotheses, that outside of academia working on real, real problems out of defense that are really challenging, interesting, complex kind of mind bending, but that you work at such a pace, that it puts you in a position that you're really forced to be ruthless about your hypotheses. So it's kind of accelerated a lot of social science research methods in one place. And that's what really drew me to all of it.
James Taylor 6:18 And it's interesting that you mentioned that word, a curiosity, curiosity about people kind of go into the sociology part, which I guess is the thing that then links the creativity and the innovation, which is that curiosity, which can I often think sits above all those things can lead into those things. But anyone that's listening just now, you know, they may think, Well, why would why? Why are we talking about, let's say, the world of defense, for example, and relation to creativity. I was I was in December, before, things started really kind of kicking off in Ukraine, I was in cave, and also in Chernobyl may just not show up for the first time. And I've been kind of watching as that war is kind of unfolded. And it's interesting, because for me, it's an outside and not involved in that world. I can see the creativity and innovation almost like working together. Obviously, there's lots of innovation in terms of certain products, and equipment that's getting used. But then I saw something the other day where the government, I think there is reusing the the app that all the citizens have for filing their taxes so that they can also so they can now report Russian troop movements using the same app, and using the video, which that's like, for me, that's kind of creativity, you know, that's been your kind of hack that you're hacking something in that way. So I'm interested in your view. What do you see as that relationship between creativity and innovation? Or do you think they're related at all?
Alison Hawks 7:51 Well, it's interesting that you asked, because I have looked this up before. For work, I've asked myself that same question, what is the relationship between creativity and innovation, and there's tons of stuff in Google Scholar that talks about it, there's a lot of kind of articles and various business reviews. And to be honest, I don't really necessarily understand it. So it's not something that I linked together in my everyday work, where I recognize the relationship occurring, that as you were talking about it, and the example that you were using, I kind of jotted down that creativity, to me and in our work are are the ideas and the possibilities. And an innovation is the execution and kind of the delivery of that creativity of that solution into the hands of whoever needs it. So the relationship I see is kind of one fueling the other that might be really different for other people. But in our line of work in the way I think about it, again, creativity is around the ideas and the possibilities, the how might we use? And then innovation is the execution. Okay, how are we actually going to get it into the hands of someone who needs it?
James Taylor 8:55 Now I read an article you did the other day, I think it was you wrote with Pete, How to be competitive in a post COVID world and you kind of outlined these different areas, these kind of six bottlenecks Do you often see that's kind of holding organizations back from being innovative is it seems that so many organizations have just come up with creative ideas and how to deal with what they're dealing with just now. They've created new processes, you know, there's innovation kind of going on there. Can you tell me in terms of those bottlenecks now, if anyone listening just now that's maybe had ideas, creative ideas, develop innovations, new ways of doing things, new processes, but want to ensure that they can keep that and move that and don't just kind of say, Okay, we're back to the world as it was, we can go back to what what are those bottlenecks Do you often see in organizations for innovation?
Bottlenecks To Innovation In Organisations
Alison Hawks 9:47 I think the I can only really talk about the area that we operate in, which is in public institutions, and for us, it's mainly defense and national security. So the intelligence community And the bottlenecks that we that we often see. And one of the things that we work with our customers the most is it comes back to kind of the reason I'm here, which is being curious about people. And and how we manifest that is what Steve Blank developed out of Lean Startup, which is getting out of the building and doing that customer discovery. So a lot of the bottlenecks are because people don't necessarily understand what are the problems or the issues, or the policies or the processes that matter to people who are doing all of the work. And so when we have an organization, and maybe we have siloed work, or we can't really get that buy in, or we're doing things over and over, that's not getting an outcome. A lot of times, it's well, let's go talk to people and see what matters to them. And then really being able to if you get into a constant, if you build the muscle of customer discovery, we call it beneficiary discovery. Because in governments, we don't have customers, we have beneficiaries, people who benefit from the problem being solved. But if you're going out and you build that muscle over and over of talking to people to say, you know, what is your problem, what can keeps you up at night, then you start to understand what really matters most to people. And when you can solve problems that matter most to people, you can start to create that buy in, and you can start to get rid of those some of those blockages. But what we've found in kind of this COVID world is that having a repeatable and scalable way to do something, which is reliant upon ecosystems and co creation, collaboration, again, that part of getting out of the building, talking to people, bringing people together, and having a bit of a mindset of a rising tide lifts all ships, identifies a lot of opportunities that we see in our business and with our customers, for people to collaborate and say, Oh, you were doing that, too? Why don't I share what we were doing and see if we can go faster together? Or you have that problem, too? Why don't we go in and try to share a budget and trying to solve it? So I think, again, it comes back to that really qualitative component of just simply talking to people, and then developing the skill of what are the right questions I need to ask. So for the things that I want to get through a process are the problems I want to solve? What data do I need in order to move this along a process or a pipeline, as we call it? And then what data do I need at certain parts of that process, in order to bring people with me on the decision making process or to really care about the problem? So the bottlenecks that we see a lot are siloed activities, and a lot of redundant efforts? And I think that we tend to look at our work in a really in a mental model that's really well known in Silicon Valley. And I think in startups, which is that and product development, desirability, will anyone use my solution? Does anyone want to use it? feasibility? Can it be built and viability does the organization want it solved and doesn't have the budget to solve it. And so in terms of looking at the silos, the more that you do beneficiary discovery, if you can validate that there's desirability feasibility and viability, then you have a roadmap for solving a problem, or trying to get someone to at least adopt something, if they don't have a problem, then you've convinced them it's a need that they want to use your solution for. So I think kind of at the heart of it, those are some of the biggest problems that we've seen in our work is not necessarily having a doctrine to go about doing innovation or necessarily being creative doing experimentation within defense. And then a lot of times out of that three desirability feasibility and viability one is always missing. And 95% of the problems in government that are the hardest to hack, or viability, does the organization want this problem solved? And do they have the budget to solve it?
James Taylor 13:42 So on that, just wondering, you know, we often you mentioned, the defense contractors you were mentioning before as well, where they may, my understanding of in the world of military is often a the minister might say, Okay, this is a problem we have. And it's almost like, we need to find a solution provider to do this. There's, it's almost like a purchase model I get, I guess it's something outside anyway. I'm wondering, is it desirable? And if so, how do you do it to create a culture of inclusive innovation right across the organization? So everyone from that person that's working in logistics, to you know, that that frontline, Navy Seal, for example, to that senior person? How do you ensure that everyone and doing want to do you want to ensure that everyone feels that they have a voice that they can contribute ideas that solve problems, and so that they are involved in some of the kind of innovation process in that way?
Culture of Experimentations
Alison Hawks 14:51 Yeah, I think I think it's really important. I think that you need to have a real diversity of thought around problem solving. So there's there's no point in identifying, you know, one out of every five is the right person to work on innovation. I think all of us as human beings are naturally innovative and creative, how we manifest that is in very different ways. Even if we seem at the surface, we're not creative people are not innovative people, we solve problems every day, as we go through from leaving the house in the morning to coming home at night. So I think in terms of inclusive innovation, is for us, is getting allowing people to have a voice to talk about the things that matter most to them. Because a lot of times that overlaps. So a lot of people have the same problems, a lot of people have the same priorities that really matter to them. Once you start to get transparency and visibility around those problems, or those challenges at scale, then at a leadership level, you can start to really prioritize what you can work on that will change the needle of the organization, because you're solving problems, or you're addressing things that matter the most to the people in the organization. So it's a little bit of looking at priorities from a different way. So as opposed to going out and asking people very specific questions to try to get the data that you yourself. One is you're allowing the data to surface as it exists. And to understand you know, what's out there and giving people a voice. To talk to that. I think the second part of it is really about in our parlance is about disrupting the requirements process. So when you talked about it about saying, like I have a problem, now I need to find a solution provider. So a lot of times in defense, and this is not a negative thing I think this is a really great attribute of people want to solve problems quickly, is they'll say, okay, or they'll want to adopt tech, you know, just to retain a competitive advantage. There's all this like, really positive energy going towards doing the right thing. But it's like, I really want a really cool piece of tech, because I know that's going to push the needle farther on our competitive advantage. Well, when we look back in terms of value for money, and using taxpayer money, we have to, we have to be able to answer two questions, you know, what is the problem? And why should I care? And it's really trying to understand what problem are we solving, and then we can go out to the right supplier, and we can find the right supplier. So we know that when we spend taxpayers money, we know that problem will be solved, as opposed to let's get a really cool, like missile launcher, you know, and do something with it. And it might really impress a lot of people. But it's not really relieving any pains for people in their everyday work. And it's not really providing any gains strategically. So I think two parts of it come down to is that inclusive innovation is allowing everyone to be able to surface the data they have, whether that's problems or ideas or their own creativity, but allowing that to be heard having some mechanism mechanism for prioritization of then how do we work on this together, and then being really clear about requirements. And that's specific to us in the area that we work with in defense and maybe government? I hope that answers
James Taylor 17:59 and all that I mean, we were speaking about obviously internal and you kind of you provide frameworks, you talk about that kind of hacking for defense within so people feel empowered, they have a process, they have a way of thinking about innovation within the organization itself, if it's a defense organization, and then you have contractors. But I'm also wondering now about the colleges and the universities? How are you ensuring getting all these kind of bright young minds, maybe in the 50s, they would have gone out, you know, 40s, I got, I want to go and work in California defense, maybe then they can move, maybe they went to work in the music industry in the 60s, as everything is a bit cooler. And then then they maybe moved into finance in the 80s. And now and then more recently, we moved off into technology and everyone's to be in Silicon Valley or Berlin or somewhere? How do you ensure those bright young minds are able to solve problems that are related to defense and what to feel? Because this often feels like a little bit of a tangent. You've seen a lot of large organizations where there's a lot of maybe coders, you know, machine learning experts, for example, say, Listen, I don't want to deal with and I don't want to be involved in that world. I don't want to solve problems in that world. I want to make a better app for video, for example. So how do you get the universities and the colleges and those bright minds involved?
Alison Hawks 19:19 Well, give them really interesting problems to solve. So this so the students that are universities here in the UK, and I've had, you know, a real honor of being an academic at one of them, King's College London, actually, and Brunel, two of them. And then this past spring, I co taught the hacking for ministry of defense class at King's College London at the department worst day, so they let me back in to help co teach. And one of the things that I realized that we hear a lot about, you know, the different generations and their attitudes and maybe even apathy for for what's going on in the world. And the more that I've gotten to know university students through the common mission project and are hacking for courses what We call mission driven entrepreneurship is that the students that we have now, and the people that want to contribute to society are incredibly hardworking. They're very ambitious. They're highly motivated, and they are incredibly talented. So I feel like they have gotten a bit of a bad rap. But one thing that I have learned from them is that yes, they do want to work at Google and Facebook, and they do want to earn some money. But actually, they want to work for something that has a sense of purpose. They want to work for something that contributes to the greater good, so they're more environmentally conscious. They're more conscious around inclusivity, and equality and inclusion. And oftentimes, what I hear from students when they're looking at their next steps after their master's degree is, yeah, the money matters. But I actually want to work on something that matters. So that's a little bit different, maybe from my generation, where it was just totally, like, not so much about like, do I really want a job at helping to solve climate change? No, I just want to pay my rent. But but those things really matter to the students. So in getting hacking for which we call it into the various courses, so we have hacking for police here, we have hacking for M OD, we have a couple other vectors coming soon. But when you look at in the US hacking for local hacking for oceans, the methodology applies across all of these kind of bigger problems, society's problems, but what really interests students are interesting problems and real world problems. So our students take the class because they get to have hands on experience. It's a very intense and fast paced course. But they come out of it kind of being spit balled out of a wind tunnel saying like, Oh, that was the hardest class I've ever taken. But it was also the best. And, and they want to continue working with the government on the problem. So they come in, and they tend to some of our students that more liberal universities think, well, the MO D does nothing but like drones and more. And they come into the class and they see, actually, I had no idea that mo D works on this, I didn't really know how much thought or time they put into developing their people and skills. I didn't know that they were they really grapple with how do they attract women into the Royal Marine commandos and the amount of effort that they have put behind it. You know, I didn't really know that the police are looking at these certain aspects of community policing, and building trust. These are really interesting, they really mean something to me, because I feel like I have an impact, I can make an impact in solving that problem. So our classes are oversubscribed, here in the UK, in universities, but it's also the value that the university see that in 10 weeks, teams of four to five masters students who do not come from a defense background or necessarily a tech background, have have applied and unbiased way of thinking and solving a problem without the baggage of kind of being in a bureaucracy for 20 years. And trying to solve the problem and coming up with maybe really elegant or easy solutions. You know, our students are not reinventing the wheel or coming up with cold fusion, you know, some of their solutions are a phonebook, right? That was one of the solutions for a DSTL problem, a phonebook of what everyone does, how they can be, you know, their extension line. And like the last project that they've done, and literally the sponsor almost leapt out of the chair being like, do you have that? I need that, right? No, and that's not so when we think about innovation, we think about solving problems that matter to people at pace, as opposed to, you know, being Elon Musk, and kind of building SpaceX. So I think really interesting problems that speak to their sense of purpose and their generational calling, which I think is kind of the wider society's calling around climate change, equality, diversity, inclusion, financial parity, etc, that you
James Taylor 23:47 started this organization. And also, I mentioned the, the other organization you're involved in as well, at this just before the start of the pandemic. So as any kind of founder, I'm guessing that was a very interesting journey for you. And yeah, she says, um, before we came in, we started recording which is, you said, you felt that time to creativity was a lot is a luxury. What was luxury? Because so can you can you dig into that a little bit? I'd love to know your journey. And also you had another big launch of a human being into the world as well. So talk us about what that looked like that period and what why you thought you know, creativity can somebody that feels like a luxury.
Alison Hawks 24:27 Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Um, well, I think this is really the first time kind of publicly talking about, you know, my journey in this way. So this is actually really exciting for me. So I when I met Pete, and kind of pitch coming over here in launching the common mission project, and then we decided to co founded BMT over here. I had this incredible vision in my head, and by default on, I just love working so I'll spend all day working and kind of a bit of a workhorse and then I launched we had a launch party. For the common mission project, we you know, we're starting to talk to potential customers and the first month that we launched the M and T here in January of 2019. And then in March in 2019, I found out I was pregnant. And I remember thinking, oh, man, I'm on this trajectory. And now I'm going to have a baby. And I'm not, you know, I'm not going to be able to do it all. And this kind of Anne Marie slaughter is you know why women can't have it all article can visit kept floating around my head. And I went into, I went into my pregnancy, pretty naive and thinking, Well, when I have a baby, I'll just continue working at the same pace of work now, because I can push through anything, and I'll just breastfeed on the go. So that I disprove that hypothesis. And I did work pretty much up until I had my child. And I didn't take that much maternity leave, because I knew that the train had to slow down, but it could not stop. And also, we were not at a position where we had customers where I could hire a lot of people to cover me or get them trained in time. So it really was upon me. And then people like Pete Newell, and Steve Weinstein and Jackie space from BMT coming over and kind of Holding, holding the fort down for me until I got back on my feet. So when my son was about three and a half months old, we we went into lockdown. And I think I took about six weeks off, but I was on emails. And I was as I was saying earlier, I was kind of driving to meetings and, and pumping and being in a janitor's closet and pumping and being late to meetings because I had to pump. So I think at the time, I was already feeling pretty tired. And kind of like, wow, I'm just barely keeping us all together, but still really dedicated to what what I'm doing. And then locked down hit. And it is the first week of lockdown. I thought this is great, I don't have to go out anymore. Like I don't have to feel guilty about not going to things I can just sit at home. And what I found was I worked twice as much in lockdown. And I work twice as hard and twice as much while still having a really tiny baby. And, and it kept going to the point where I kept thinking, Oh, I've hit burnout. And then six months later, I'd be like, Man, now I really hit burnout. And then three months after that, I'd be like, Oh, I think I hit it now, you know. So when kind of coming out of lockdown and pivoting a lot of our products and services. But not only that, you know, when we went into lockdown, we had kind of one customer doing one engagement. Now we have multiple customers, and we're a multi million pound company in the UK. And it was I think through like sheer grit determination, probably looking back through creativity, we had to pivot all of our stuff that we do in person, we had to do it online. And we did that really quickly. And then trying to hire people bring them on board formed this company, while still trucking along. So when when what we talked about earlier is it feels like we have been moving at warp speed that COVID actually accelerated the speed at which we were moving. Yet, I read something really interesting in COVID. And I can't remember who it was from like Bloomberg or something saying that in COVID, that people are able to maintain their social capital in terms of their customer relationship management, but they're not able to increase their social capital. So it's really hard to go out and get new customers online and virtually. And that was something that we definitely found. But it was maintaining that social capital, keeping that speed trying to bring people on. And then also think about, well, what do I have to do to be a good leader? And what's the culture that I want to build in this little company, and then having all of that also delivering to customers, but then getting up at you know, 420 in the morning when my son gets up, because it's very early riser, you know, managing him, and then after going home from work, working from seven to 10pm, to try to get it all done. And so when you asked, you know, where do you get your creativity from? It just struck me, I have no idea. Like I don't think I've had like a moment by myself to really think. And I get a lot of pushback from a lot of people saying you need to carve out time to think. But I think when you're in the really early throes of having a start up and then throw in having a baby and not taking the kind of normal 10 months maternity leave, you know, kind of six to 10 months that's taken here to really recharge, which I think is amazing. And I would definitely do it again if I had another kid.
Creativity I think has been a real casualty of COVID For me, whereas I'm very focused on growing the company. But I wouldn't know how to answer that question. And I feel like having Creativity to me feels like having time to read and to think and having those outside conversations, learn about new things. And it feels I'd be so curious to hear feedback from other startup founders especially, we'd love to hear from female startup founders who are also pregnant as they launch their business. So you know when did when did you You recharge when Where did you get your creativity? Do you derive it from your family? Is it from books? Is it from work? Because I'm still trying to answer that question.
James Taylor 30:08 Well, if anyone's listening to watching this, just now as well reach out to Ali, if you've got any thoughts, your observations, but I am wondering, you know, just listening to an album yesterday, as it was Alma Mozart, he had this two years in 1786, and 1785, which was his timing, he was really prolific, he did his best work. And a lot of people said that one of the reasons he was most prolific was because his, he ended up having a lot of children. And he had to constantly produce in order to keep the money going in. So it wasn't like something you know, I think, taking long walks next door, he had to produce, he had to like, you know, Jerry, that creativity at that level, and also, he had expensive tastes, I think he likes nice clothes and other things as well, which probably didn't help. But I am wondering that you know, that you're picking up on something I think we've actually spoken about on the show before, which you're speaking about one stage of a woman's life, I know that child, childbirth, and then thinking about, okay, how do I make space, my creativity, deep thinking. But there's, there's another stage, which is that kind of which I've seen other women, maybe some other guests we've had on the show, which is that kind of menopause post menopause stage as well, where it's been described to me that the menopause, it has been so difficult to, you know, that fog, that brain fog we often hear during that kind of cook time as well. And sometimes after the after that, that kind of passes and you move to that next time in one's life. There's an explosion of energy and ideas. And then that reminded me a little bit of sometimes when you see top tennis players or sports stars, they often hit their real peak, they're at that real prolific period in their career after they've had an injury. Because it's forced them to reassess things and get a little bit smarter with how they use their time, you know, the training time as well. So I don't know, I don't know if you've got any views on any of that stuff on it.
Alison Hawks 32:11 I think I think it's really interesting, because that's, that's a narrative I hear quite a lot about, you know, people love hiring mothers, because they know how to multitask, which by the way, is not a thing, our brain cognitively cannot multitask. And that they know how to prioritize, because time is so precious, I have not gotten any better at prioritization, I do not know how to multitask. And I haven't, I don't feel like I kind of waited for that superpower to arrive to be like, Wow, I know, I'm going to focus so hard on five things I need to do. And sometimes at the end of the day, I'm like, wow, I only got one or I completely missed the task. And now I'm going to work tonight. So if that superpower is out there, and it's looking for someone, to be receptive for it. But I think it also sets really false expectations around what women can do in the workplace, after after having kids. And that's not necessarily that they can't be ruthless, you know, prioritization, however, this prioritization, or they can't multitask or do these different things. But there's an expectation because we have kids in the end, because we take on so much at home and different tasks, that this is a natural ability that we have, and that by virtue of having a child, we then become someone who's almost superhuman, their ability to do administrative things, or to get things done. And when you put that additional pressure on women, women, I think, generally, it is absolutely crushing. Because it's just, you know, I actually don't want to multitask, I don't want to prioritize, I want an hour just to think I want to read a book, I don't want to be more productive, I want to be more meaningful. And to be more meaningful, I need to do less small things. So it's something I tend to see a lot of, I think, definitely, and I'm only aware of it, because I am a woman kind of going through this, I don't read men's magazine, so maybe it's going on with them in different stages of their lives. But there seems to be this kind of overarching, this is what you should be, and then holding women to an even higher standard, because they've had a child and therefore they become superhuman. And I think that's really dangerous. Because as I told you, you know, sometimes I just get through the day, and I'm like, wow, I cannot do the laundry. I don't want to cook supper, you know? And to think that I can do all of those things. I think it supports a I think it really supports a false a false narrative. And yeah, I'll stop there. I think it No.
James Taylor 34:37 So I mean, that there's that obviously that time, and I think it is changing. And obviously, you're in the UK now and I'm based here in the UK, and you're from the US I've lived in the US and and there's differences in terms of, I guess, state support of, of co parenting, and that in there's different places in the European model in the US and other models. So there's it's diff Got to make any generalizations on it. But I am interested in you know, even just now when you don't necessarily have the time to be able to take those long. You know those periods that can really deep thought all the time? Who do you try to surround yourself? Or what influences Do you try to surround yourself with? So at least you're getting new new neurons are firing noose, new influences are coming into your thinking in different ways. Even if you don't have a chance to really stop to think differently. least you're getting those inputs, different inputs, what influences you surround yourself with?
Alison Hawks 35:31 And I think it's a great question. And again, I feel in a way, it does feel a little bit of a luxurious question that I have the opportunity to find all these different influences to surround myself with when, when my life right now, and my priorities are my family and my bark,
James Taylor 35:49 but I'm getting I'm guessing even in your work, you're you're not just reading dry? No, exactly. Yeah, to do document.
Hacking for Defence
Alison Hawks 35:57 So my influences are one. So a couple things I always loved learning. So I tried to at least learn about something I don't know about, even if it's really bite sized stuff. So right now I'm learning about artificial intelligence, natural language processing, just like, you know, artificial intelligence for Dummies, was something that's so far out of my wheelhouse. Can you coming from such a social science background? Um, I read, you know, I guess I will say one of my little luxuries in the morning is My husband always brings me a cup of tea in the morning, and then he picks up, you know, now it gets our son when he wakes up and takes them downstairs for a few minutes. So I get to read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and just look at some articles. And I definitely helps me think about things differently. Because I'm looking at things from a different perspective and what's going on. Like it get my something that we talked about the very beginning, and maybe before we started was around, I don't know, the attorneys creative pairing. That was a and you know, I think that is where that is such a great term, because my husband, I think is one person I get a lot of, it's very influential to me, he thinks completely differently than I do. And so he really challenges me on why I think things and also really tempers me, but forces me to think about things in a different way. And then I think Pete Newell and you know, who we co founded, BMNT here together is to me, P is is kind of my canvas, and he's had these experiences, and his experiences and his values of his co founders are what really drives the ethos and the values of BMT in the US. Now, BMT in the UK is not a US company, it's a UK company with UK customers. And so when I came over here, I just almost regurgitated Pete stories, verbatim, right? And kind of told them over and over until I started to get my own stories. But one thing that I love about P and Steve Blank, and Steve Weinstein has a total intellectual generosity. So when I go to them, I say, Hey, I have totally plagiarized, do I have I've taken your you know, your experience? And I said it verbatim, their response is great. Okay, now, how do you weave that into your your own experience, and then I can take what Pete and Steve Blank and see Weinstein have been through, and and then I can look at it, and I can talk about it a little bit differently. And so that kind of creative pairing is, I think, between the two companies where we look at the model of what they've done. And then I use that as a blank canvas to kind of build out, you know, well, what does that mean for us? And then I guess this is a really good way to think about it for me. So thank you. It's like, well, how can we be creative about it? Because we have to think differently. So I think actually, a lot of that creativity comes from that creative pairing.
James Taylor 38:51 It's interesting, because we've had Steve Blank on the show. And Pete as well, I'll make sure we link to those episodes, people can listen to those episodes. And that was a thing that I've just meeting people the first time, although I've loved his work for many, many years, was how you said that intellectual generosity. You know, we had Eric Ries on the show many years ago, which was kind of the first time I learned about really that whole lean startup movement and that methodology and and I think that was the nice thing about Stevie was very being very open to other people to build upon his ideas as well, which is a beautiful thing to see. Um, you mentioned artificial intelligence. Is there any other kind of technologies that you actually use to help you work a bit smarter to free up your time to augment you in the work that you do?
Alison Hawks 39:39 If you talk to my employees, they would say that as a last question, I would be able to answer I might I can. I've nailed Google Calendar. But apart from that, no, I'm actually I like to keep things really simple. I take notes by hand. I don't like to have a lot of technical will actually I find it makes me less productive. It's very confusing. I don't really know where I put the last thing. So kind of my hacks are to keep everything in one notebook, which I tote around with me all over London but I don't Yeah, I don't I'm not someone who
James Taylor 40:18 on now I'm wondering, you know something that is often the thing of the Silicon Valley type model is lots of whiteboards short in different boards, people scrolling all the time, is that something that you use to kind of is one thing I often think about my own in my own creativity is, is I love I'm an old fashioned person as well. I have my moleskin journal and my look down journals and that's my thing, but sometimes I just feel that I need a bigger canvas to work on. So I have to go to a board I don't know is that something you find or you can have to dig into your ideas and explore your ideas just using that paper and pen?
Alison Hawks 40:52 No, definitely you know earlier just before I got on with you, our leadership team was using kind of a whiteboard and post it notes to try to brainstorm, diverge and converge around a couple of things about the company but yeah, I think using paper and pen that kind of whiteboard more physical expression of communication and knowledge and observing is something is kind of my hack as opposed to trying to use a big tech stamp.
James Taylor 41:18 Fantastic. Well Alson where's the best place if you want to learn more about BMT hacking for mo D hacking for police we've had and also the common mission project, where should they go to sort of finding out about all these things?
Alison Hawks 41:31 Well, BMT in the UK, you can find us on BM n t.co.uk. The common mission project which delivers our hacking for programs, you can find that common mission.uk and happy for anyone to reach out to me. My email is a Hawks. Ah, aw ks@bmt.co.uk.
James Taylor 41:54 Well, Alison Hawks. Ally Hawks. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing your journey, you're going to wish you great success with it.
Alison Hawks 42:02 Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. You really enjoy the conversation.
James Taylor 42:05 You can subscribe to the super creativity podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts while you're there. Please leave us a review. I would really, really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor, and you've been listening to the super creativity podcast.
Overcoming Resistance To Innovation with Jim Euchner – #330
16 May 2022
00:31:42
Many large companies today have begun to adopt the principles of Lean Startup, a methodology first adopted among Silicon Valley tech startups in order to become more innovative and agile in implementing new products, services and business models. However large corporations are not just bigger versions of startups.
My guest today, Jim Euchner has studied how the Lean Startup concept can be applied to innovation within established businesses and has shared his findings in a new book called 'Lean Startup In Large Organisations'. Jim was Vice President of Global Innovation at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, where he led the development of new businesses and incubated and launched five businesses on three continents. Prior to his work at Goodyear, Jim held positions as Vice President of Growth Strategy and Innovation at Pitney Bowes, Inc. and Vice President, Network Systems Advanced Technology at Bell Atlantic (now Verizon). Today he is Editor in Chief at the Research-Technology Management journal, Honorary Professor at Aston University in the UK, a member of the Scientific Advisory Council for the Nissan autonomous vehicle program and a co-founder of the MIT Innovation Laboratory, a consortium of companies interested in user and community innovation.
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
James Taylor 0:00 I'm James Taylor and you're listening to the super creativity podcast a show dedicated to inspiring creative minds like yours. Many large companies today have begun to adopt the principles of Lean startup methodology first adopted amongst Silicon Valley tech startups in order to become more innovative and agile in implementing new products, services and business models. However, large corporations are not just bigger versions of startups. My guest today Jim Eichner has studied how the Lean Startup concept can be applied to innovation within established businesses, and shared his findings and a new book called Lean Startup in large organizations. Jim was vice president of Global Innovation at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, where he led the development of new businesses and incubators and about five businesses on three continents. Prior to his work in Goodyear, Jim held positions as vice president of Growth Strategy and Innovation at Pitney Bowes Inc, and vice president network systems advanced technology and Bell Atlantic now Verizon. Today, he is editor in chief at the Research Technology Management Journal honorary professor at Aston University here in the UK, a member of the Scientific Advisory Council for the myson autonomous vehicle program and a co founder of the MIT innovation laboratory, a consortium of companies interested in user and community innovation. Welcome to the show, Jim,
Jim Euchner 1:19 thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.
Fear of Innovation
James Taylor 1:21 Now, in your book, we had Eric Ries on the show a couple of years ago, and your book dovetails perfectly into that as a great accompaniment to it. And in the book, you described how innovation and adoption of Lean Startup methodologies in large organizations is often held back by different types of fears. So can you explain that the form that that fear of innovation often takes in larger companies?
Jim Euchner 1:45 Sure. And I'd like to start just by saying, I think the Lean Startup principles really work, whatever kind of business you're trying to create, and going from conditions of very high uncertainty as Eric described it to conditions of lower uncertainty, so you can actually invest. But inside large companies, the very principles that make you successful in innovating new businesses, create antibodies in the core business, and there were six that I identified in the book. And it's, it's actually a little bit ironic, because the practices that work are the very things that create the antibodies. So for example, a big premise of lean startup is that you learn using what Eric called Lean learning loops, or you might just call them business experiments, where you've identified an unknown, you develop an experiment to learn about it, whether it's about the channel or the product, or the service, or costs or, or whatever, you run the experiment, you learn, and you either move forward, or you pivot in some direction. So that's great. But inside large companies that can seem very chaotic, large companies generally have much more structured processes for developing new products and new services. And if the, if you're operating in a world where you know, you go wherever the customer takes you, and there, you're doing everything at once the business model, the product, etc, it can be a little bit disorienting and feel chaotic. So a solution to that, and I think there are multiple solutions. But a solution to that is to contain the chaos really, into phases. And the phases are the phases of the three big questions or hypotheses of the Lean Startup, the value hypothesis, the business hypothesis, and the growth hypothesis. And so that's the, that's if you do that the chaos happens inside a phase, you review the customer value proposition, then there's a lot of chaos, as you develop a business model. You review it and decide to go to incubation, there's more learning during incubation, and then you make a decision to scale. So you have both the flexibility and agility of sort of lean startup, but also an impedance match to use an engineering term with the core business.
James Taylor 4:08 It's to unpack some of that, and push before we start to unpack some of it seems that fear of chaos and some of the other fears, I know you mentioned, we're this idea of fear of distraction of the team being distracted by the side thing that's maybe not Nestle. They don't kind of understand where it fits. And another one, which is what I actually quite hear quite a lot, speaking to organizations, and if I talk to him about this a lean startup or how it plays to the large organizations, is this fear of resource bleed. So tell us about that one, because that one maybe doesn't get talked about quite as much unless you're in the finance and accounting side of things.
Jim Euchner 4:45 Yeah, I think what happens is, you know, in your very successful world, eventually, you're incubating a business, right, you're in market at small scale, maybe it's in you know, a particular market. You're learning If you're trying to understand two things, does this really work? To the customers buy it? Can I deliver it cost-effectively? You know, will it scale those types of things, and then you're trying to determine how to grow it. What happens inside large companies, if if you're not, if you're not careful about it is that the core business will see the drain of resources as a threat to the business they have to do everything you do with innovation is funded from somewhere, and it's funded from the people who are making the money in the core business, they have their needs, they have their objectives, they have their aspirations for how they want to grow the business. So there can be a fear that the new business will draw both talent and funding, and, in that way, disrupt the core, the best way to deal with that, in my opinion, is to create a sort of separate but connected model. So you have a model where the new business has its own entity if it's got a different business model in particular, but it has defined relationships with the core business. And those are negotiated in a very careful way. The new business is funded separately at a CEO level. And yet its relationships with the core like how do you go to market? Does Salesforce go together? Or independently? If you're buying a product from the core, what's the price you're paying for it? What are the terms of service? If you using the service network? How are you how's the customer going to be charged, how's that going to flow to the different parties, you know, all the contractual arrangements that let the new company leverage the assets of the core need to be negotiated, if they're not, the new company will suffer by not, you know, through delays, I would say sort of suffocation, basically. And a common is that a large company will win in the marketplace with a new venture, only if it's able to leverage the assets of some of the assets of the core business. If it can't leverage those assets, then it's competing with startups that are far more agile, and in many cases have much better funding through the venture, one as they prove their, their value proposition and their market. So you've got to be able to leverage assets. And that means you have to be able to coexist. So the separate but connected model is what I think works effectively. I so wish
James Taylor 7:38 I'd read this book, probably in 2013, this book, it exists 2013 2014, I remember living in the moving into the Bay Area. And when the first book someone put in my hand was Eric Ries Lean Startup, and then kind of reading like Steve Blanks work and other work that came from that. And then being asked him to come back to the UK to help an established university, a higher learning institution, watch his online version. And it's like classic, you know, the big established thing, organization, and then you're trying to start this new thing that's kind of different. And so many of the fears that you mentioned in there was very much buy in from the senior from the CEO level very much by and actually from the lecturers and the teachers. But there was a messy middle, there was extremely difficult to navigate. And in the end, it just didn't, it just didn't really kind of work. It didn't work out like we'd hoped. But I remember taking this whole kind of lean startup to that CEO at the time, you might have heard about him. And he has me coming with my strange Californian ideas and what's going to work in, in London. But one of the things I was explained to him was this idea, you mentioned that there's lean learning loops, this idea of the circle. So for anyone that doesn't know that, I mean, you mentioned these three key principles, we have to understand leaner learning loops, minimum viable product, probably a lot of our listeners understand minimum viable product prototypes, those types of things. And then deciding pivot or persist, you go with it, or do you try something else? But this, this idea of the lean learning loops, can you take us through what that loop actually looks like? And that would probably help inform the rest of the conversation?
3 key principles lean startup
Jim Euchner 9:14 Sure. So lean learning loops are you start with a hypothesis about your business, you design some sort of prototype, to learn about that particular issue?You do the experiment, and then you look at the results. So let me just give a simple example, at Goodyear. At one point were interested in the potential of a green or eco-friendly tire. And we had some concepts where we could dramatically improve or increase the amount of recycled material in a tire. And we thought that there was a market interest in this at least from surveys and so forth. But the question was, if we build it, will they buy it? And will we be able to be profitable So what we did before we had developed the tire, we mocked one up, we just use the laser to cut a new logo in the side, we develop marketing materials, and then we tried to sell it in, in service centers, tire centers, in California, it was there was positioned as a product, if someone was interested, then we would understand their interest, understand their willingness to pay and give them a coupon toward a future tire letting them know, they were part of a research project. If they were not, we tried to understand what was their resistance. That was an experiment. And what we learned from it was that people were interested, but we were not willing to pay anymore. And we're not willing to make any compromises in performance metrics that made it an uneconomic concept, at least at that point in time. And so that helped us pivot to another project, we actually discontinued that. And one other big experiment indicated to us that we could not make that go. So we didn't, at that point in time, that's a simple experiment, it was, you know, took some time, but a lot less time than developing a business would have taken.
James Taylor 11:13 But you can actually understand from your explanation there, why engineers love this type of methodology so much, because it's that natural, kind of, it's like a scientist, you're experimenting, you're going with that hypothesis. And not sure if it's gonna be maybe have a bit of a hunch member feel. But let's see, let's see what it says and just follow the data where the data leads. So I can understand that from from that you mentioned these three different types of hypotheses as well. Value hypothesis. Sometimes we call this, like customer value proposition, the business model hypothesis, how to capture the value. And then finally, the growth hypothesis. In the book, I thought you laid out a really nice way of, of this value hypothesis, this customer value proposition in the form of a statement. And I never said I wasn't sure if this was actually your this was your way of doing this, or this or someone else. But I actually was on a call earlier today with some clients. And you were thinking about this product. And I said, Well, that's that's, I've just read this great book, let's talk about it in this in the nature of this this value hypothesis, to understand what is the proposition what is it that we're trying to do? Who is it serving? Can you maybe share? Is it your Is this your
Value Hypothesis
Jim Euchner 12:25 more Geoffrey Moore, I think, is the first person who articulated the value proposition in that way.
James Taylor 12:32 Like, same as Moore's law, that's the same No, no, it's
Jim Euchner 12:35 Geoffrey Moore, he's he wrote a book, he wrote a whole bunch of books, but about about innovation. And I actually don't remember which of the books that was, that was from, but it was one of his earlier, earlier books. And it's, and I found it very useful. People I find are very vague, oftentimes about who their customer is very vague about what exactly the customer wants, about how they'll deliver on all aspects of the what the customer wants, and why it's better than what's out there. So he has something. And essentially, it's just for a particular customer set, who has a specific problem that you really need to understand precisely, we offer and then you provide what your solution will do. This delivers the following benefits to the customer, and does it better than what the what competitors are, you need to do a lot of research to do that. Well, but, but I think it's very helpful. I mean, I think the whole book, I have to step back and say, is really built on. On top of a lot of other researchers work. So Steve Blank and and Eric Ries really did the foundational work on lean startup, I'm trying to say, Well, what does it do to adapt? What do you do to adapt that to a large organization, and then along the way, other people have really done great work to understand how you look broadly at at what the ecosystem around your product is and how you develop a new business model and so forth. So it's Jeffrey Moore is one of the thought leaders,
James Taylor 14:13 I think something I think this is innovation stage gates, this is one of yours. Is that correct? Yeah. So we had a guest on the show. It was a couple of weeks ago, and people will link to the show notes here. It's Daniel Lamar, who was the CEO of Cirque du Soleil, now the executive vice president, and he spoke about this idea when putting these shows together, which is like $30 million to put an average show together. He would have these checkpoints when they were developing the shows and as I was reading your book, where you describe this concept of innovation stage gates, it reminded me a lot of kind of what he what they were trying to do when they do these, these checkpoints in the process of creating a show. So can you explain innovation stage gates?
Innovation Stage-Gates
Jim Euchner 14:55 Sure. The idea that of lean startup for Just to go back to the basic principle is that all at once you're looking at the customer value proposition, the business model and, and sort of how you might grow and you're experimenting in market. And that is, I think can be a very valuable way for startups to learn there in market from a very early stage with something that meets the minimal needs for some minimal subset of customers, but meets them completely. In in the innovation stage gate, you basically unravel those three things. The first is the customer value proposition. The second is the business model and validation of the business model. And the third is incubation and the model for growth of the business. So that's the first gate is really where do we want to play your best off if you're playing in a, an opportunity space, not looking at a particular idea? Then you come up with a value proposition? And the two things you deliver? Are the three are the brief, who what customer we serve? And what do we know about them? The value proposition framed in the Jeffrey Moore style, and then something that I think too few people do, which is an estimate of customer value created, forget how you're going to capture value? How much value do you create for customers? And there are good ways of estimating that. Once you have that, you can start saying, Well, what are my business model alternatives? And how can I assess the risks of those business models and develop them? I have what I think is a somewhat different view than say Alex Osterwalder who you may have have talked with in the past, I think that there are a limited number of business model archetypes that work, they you know, there are to work together the all the pieces have to work together in a coherent way to create a profitable model. And over time in industry, maybe 40, maybe 50, there's been a real explosion of them in the digital age, but a relatively small number. So what you need to do is find out which one fits your needs, and then adapt to that model. And then you have to do that in the context of a core business that might be threatened by it. That's the the issue. So you're, you're simultaneously trying to understand how to build a new business model, and how to make it coexist in a way that will work for both parties. And then during the incubation, you're just understanding how to make it grow.
James Taylor 17:27 So during that word you meant like this kind of threats, this idea of threats. And as I was reading the book, I kept going, in my mind going back to a speech at a keynote I did a few years ago in Abu Dhabi. And it was for the internal auditors Association. And it's very, you know, these are very risk focus, folks. And I think I did a date event the day before, it's for a big bank. And we I was sharing a number of ideas, I think it was actually sharing about Adobe kickboxers, which is an IT can innovation tool. And he said, James, that's great. But you don't realize in our industry, we have compliance, and we have all these different things to go through. And I often thought about okay, well, what are those? How do you get that involved? You know, how do you kind of deal with I just think about that. And then in the book, you talked about a very nice little game, you can kind of play this idea of that was watchdog game, which I think alleviate some of these problems. Unless you get into a conversation with those folks on compliance about how to this man this thing you're thinking about implementing and doing and testing how to kind of reduce the threat level for them how to make them feel a little bit calmer. So can you share what the side of the watchdog games? I really love it?
The Watchdog Game
Jim Euchner 18:37 Yeah, yeah. So so it's built on just game theory. And the idea is that everybody makes decisions based on what they expect other people will do. And, and, and oftentimes, game theory, just lead you to a place where nobody does anything. Because the expectations are, that that's the best solution for for some of the players in the game. So if you're responsible for it, or you're responsible for liability, you may look at what someone's doing and say, if they do that, it's going to make my world terrible, it may come back to there may be a liability problem, they're not going to blame the innovation team. They're going to blame the liability department for not flagging it. It may be a completely different environment that I don't have the skills or the resources to maintain, I'm going to be held accountable for not maintaining it. The innovation team isn't so the tendency for those people is to just say, let me slow walk this. And I think the innovation team needs to first understand that's legitimate.These people have a day job they have accountabilities, they have expectations placed on them and so forth. So first thing to do is understand what their concerns are. And then try to really understand them from their perspective and then try to say what is it that we want to do on an experimental basis? What is it that we want to do? How can we do that in a way that will maybe not be risk free, but will minimize the risk? And how can we share the consequences of that risk if it happens? So you try to, there are a few things that I've used as practices. One is just going through that process and then acknowledging the risk. And you sign off that I understand that this is a risk. And at Goodyear, they had something called the yellow slip means the liability, people thought it was an issue, it was considered at an executive level, the mitigating factors could be considered. And then you could at least proceed with an experiment, if you if you got the approvals. The other thing is what I call a graduated engagement. That's the idea that you worry about these issues, but you don't obsess about them until you get into incubation. When you're in the earlier stages. You're an experimental, it's small scale, it's with the market, it may not even in the market, you're not, the consequences are very contained. And you can contain them further if you if you think about how you conduct the experiments. But when you get into incubation, when you're learning about the business, in the real world, you commit, we will address these issues. And by then it's worth taking the time to address them, whether they're security issues or liability issues or IT issues, we will take the time during that eight or nine months that incubation takes to understand the concerns and to figure out do we need to redesign the product in some way? Do we need a different kind of insurance for liability? Do we need to do some testing that hadn't been done yet? All those kinds of things can be done during that time period in parallel with the in market learning,
James Taylor 21:50 I think I'm going to try that when the next workshops I do if I'm doing something with a bank, when I've got all this compliance folks, I might try and put that at the start mentioned, you know, talk about this idea at the start. So people feel there's a bit more of a say, I know safe spaces as a different connotation and university. But just there's more of a sense of psychological safety. Because what I tend to find is, especially on the compliance, you do focus on compliance or, or risk. Once they do get a sense of like, oh, actually, this is a this space, I can play it because there's going to be these other checkpoints. They're actually there's, there's a whole bunch of things that can come from that and ideas and different perspectives, which I think is very valuable. In the book towards the end the book you mentioned, and I remember the gentleman you interviewed from Amazon, from the marketplace, I'd really started with Mike Ross Ross one year. And I didn't, I didn't know this. But in Amazon, they had this concept of some small AI innovation and big AI innovation. And I know a lot of the companies I deal with often, there's always a danger when you go and share these kind of big, big innovation things. It goes well. So what does that mean, for me? What does it what does it mean for me? So can you get explained the differences? I think it's a nice way of just contrasting different types of innovation?
Jim Euchner 23:04 Yes, I think it is, too. And the I think small AI innovation is anything you do to make the current business better. And I sometimes referred to it as type one innovation, you still make it some resistance to it. But the resistance is a lot less, because if you're successful, it makes the core business better. And it's and that can include process improvement, it can include a lot of small ideas from employees, it can include new product innovation can making products faster, better and cheaper. All of those kinds of things fit in that category. And but then the second type of innovation is innovation that creates a new business or a new business model. And that's much more difficult because it challenges the identity of the core business. And And oftentimes, and Amazon does this masterfully well, it leverages assets of the core business to move into a new business that may be dramatically different. So you know, the the etail software infrastructure was used to help launch the the cloud services business, which is now a huge unprofitable business. The the existing business, Amazon book and CD business and customer base was used to launch marketplaces where they actually shared the storefronts and fulfillment by Amazon and so forth with partners, very controversial inside and it had to actually be separated from the core business at its inception. But it leveraged such assets in such a strong way that it created a huge growth business. So yeah, I think that there's both types of innovation matter. One of the things I think is, in my experience almost unique to Amazon, is how all the executives are expected to both execute and innovate. And, and they're, it's part of their objectives there. It's part of how they're compensated. So it's a very interesting company that I
James Taylor 25:13 think gets the thing that kind of holds all that together. is really this idea of customer centricity being so customer focused, the innovation always comes from that perspective is always focused on the customer. Yeah, absolutely.
Jim Euchner 25:25 And I think that the way Bezos I think, governed a lot of those decisions was the customer will always want more variety, lower costs and faster time to market. So faster delivery. So whatever we can do to do that we'll do and if that means opening up our storefronts to other vendors, then we'll do that. If that means opening up our logistics center, that means that if that means providing price comparison between an Amazon offer and a competitor will do that. Those are big decisions that very few companies I think, are able to make, but that he's able to make it because he had such a strong focus on what's best for the company in making the decision. I mean, for the customer.
James Taylor 26:11 And there's this linkage between creativity and innovation, although necessary, but not always sufficient in terms of making, the way I think about as creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is just about bringing new ideas to the world. That's just your university professors, you'll have a much better version, script version of that. But in your own work, how do you keep your own thinking fresh? What influences Do you try to surround yourself with, so you're having different influences different ways of looking at the world?
Jim Euchner 26:41 So one thing is I'm just fortunate that I, I added this journal, research, technology management, so I read a lot of papers. And then for each issue, I interview a thought leader. So in many ways, I took advantage of that when I was working at Pitney Bowes are good year to say, I'm trying to do something, I'm having trouble with it. Maybe I can just call the person who developed it, interview them and press and learn. And so I learned a lot in that way. The other thing is just finding ways of colliding with other people who are trying to do the same thing. Sharing what works, what doesn't work. Fudd trying to figure out what the differences are. And being out in the world, I think, you know, that, unfortunately, COVID has kept people very close to home. I think the thing that unlocks your brain, or unlocks mine anyway, more than anything else, is traveling to different places and seeing how people are doing things that is very different from what I might do. It's one of the nice things about consulting, too, is you're working with different companies with different cultures and different assumptions and different industries. And, you know, so you learn from that. I I think all of those things come in, into the mix.
James Taylor 27:59 I think Andy Jassy, the new CEO of Amazon said the other day, he was talking about how with COVID happening in the lock downs, actually, productivity has been very good. I think many companies would be surprised me Amazon, especially an incredible growth in terms of value in our business and be productive. But he said innovation has suffered. And he just said the way he expressed that he said we're not getting together in person. And as a result, we're not riffing in the same way that was this word riffing, which I thought was a nice way of expressing it. But hopefully, as the world starts to open up, we'll be riffing a little bit more, do us. We've been talking about technology here, but use technology in any ways that that either kind of free up your time to do more creative work, more deep thinking or perhaps to augment the work that you do. Are there any tools or technologies that you find particularly useful in that way?
Jim Euchner 28:47 Yeah, I wish I had mastered the whole time management, time management thing. But one thing I will say that I have found useful, I mean, first of all, everybody's gotten better with Zoom. And it's caused us to reconnect and to do things we might not have otherwise done. But one of the things I found useful is mind mapping. And and the reason for that is, when there are a lot of a lot of different perspectives in the room. And you're and you're doing brainstorming, or you're discussing an issue, there can be a tendency for some voices to be stronger than other voices. And if you have a shared display, in a format that everybody can see, and it captures a little bit of the structure of the discussion, I think that that can help help reach better solutions to problems, help everybody in the room feel more heard, and can help people build on each other's ideas without, you know, without dominating them. So I've used mind mapping. And I find that I find that useful.
James Taylor 29:53 And it's really particularly mind mapping tool that you've used, especially in contexts like working with a team perhaps virtually as if any that you've found particularly useful.
Jim Euchner 30:00 If I use something called MindManager, I'm experimenting with a tool that's a little different called the brain, which is more has more network representation. The biggest challenge for me is for big projects, the map gets very big, and it's hard to manage. So I'm trying to find something that helps with that.
James Taylor 30:20 I think we had, we had Daniel Pink, the writer on the show, recently, and he was talking about, he uses mind mapping as well, specifically for when He's researching he's doing is very research driven in his writing. And just as a way to kind of connect all the research and the links and all the things he said other ways as good brain would explode. So it's a mind mapping, great tool. And so the book is going to be out now. But I'd hope people hear this. And the book is called Lean Startup In Large Organizations. We'll put a link to books people get a copy of the book if they want to learn more about you and your your other work, your consulting, your teaching, the other things that you do, where's the best place to go and do that?
Jim Euchner 30:57 I think baby just start with Lean Startup dot biz, which is the site I have for the book, and it has links to my blog and and some of the other stuff I do. So it's probably the best place to start.
James Taylor 31:10 Fantastic. Jim, I'll put all those links here. Jim, thank you so much for coming on the show talking about this idea of Lean Startup, how it applies to big businesses, and for just kind of sharing some so many great concepts on the Super creativity podcast.
Jim Euchner 31:23 Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.
James Taylor 31:26 You can subscribe to the super creativity podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast while you're there. Leave us leave us a review. I would really, really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor, and you've been listening to the super creativity podcast.
Human Creativity in the Age of Analytics With Chris Jones #329
03 May 2022
00:40:34
Human Creativity in the Age of Analytics With Chris Jones
Chris Jones is a long-time journalist and short-time screenwriter. He has written extensively for Esquire, The Atlantic, WIRED, the New York Times Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal, and has won two National Magazine Awards for his feature writing. He was also a producer on Away, the Netflix series starring Hilary Swank. His latest book The Eye Test makes the case for human creativity in the age of analytics. The book seeks to serve as a reminder that if beauty is less of virtue in the age of analytics, a good eye still is. Welcome to the show Chris Jones.
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
Chris Jones 1:00 Well, I hope so. That's the case I'm making. So I hope I hope there is.
James Taylor 1:07 We could just finish the interview now. I think,
Chris Jones 1:09 sorry, James, it's over for us. No, I think there is I think it's, it's just different than it used to be. And and what I think creativity requires today, maybe more than once did is a bravery, I guess. Because there is a lot of I don't know what the word is. The marketing behind Analytics has been very powerful. And you, you are sometimes cast in the role of trying to think of the nice word moron. You're you. You are anti math or anti science, if you don't subscribe boletes analytics. And it takes some I definitely had a few years in the wilderness there where I thought, Oh, am I on the wrong side of this because I I subscribe to science, I believe in facts, I believe in rational decision making. You know, so I'm not some I don't believe in sorcery. But what I do believe in is a room for there's room for that human element. In everything we do. Sometimes Analytics is a useful tool. Sometimes it's the best tool. But sometimes it's not. And there are places where those gaps, you know, we can fill in those gaps.
James Taylor 2:22 And in the book you talk about this is this concept called embodied analysis. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that is?
Chris Jones 2:30 I stole that James. I stole that from the New Yorker.
James Taylor 2:35 I just sources that's
Embodied Analysis
Chris Jones 2:39 scrupulously footnoted book, I was trying to come up with a way to describe what I believe in. And it started with. I don't even Scotland, I start start with a baseball manager, who, when you're a baseball manager, you have to make decisions really quickly. It seems like a very slow game, particularly to people who don't watch it very often. But it requires choices constantly. And I followed this young baseball manager through his development. And what he was doing was a kind of, he would get so much experience that he would learn to be able to predict what was about to happen. In past cases, this is what happens next, usually, and then he would already know what his choices would be based on those circumstances. So he would plan out it seems like he was making quick decisions, but really, he had planned them all out. And I use a kind of clumsy term or I talked about intellectual muscle memory. Where like a good golf swing, it's just sort of automatic. You don't really think about it. Justin, this baseball manager wasn't really thinking about his choices. He made the choices. He planned everything out in advance and his experience and it wasn't God. It was what he knew about the game informed his decision making. Then I read a story in The New Yorker by a writer named Burkhardt Bilger about a carpenter named Mark Ellison, who was using a table saw which is a tool designed to make straight cuts he was using a table saw to make curved cuts really intricate cuts. Very counter to what the machine is supposed to be useful. And he was doing it while having a conversation with Burkhardt and wasn't really paying attention to the spinning blade that was millimeters from his fingers. And what they settled on was embodied analysis. That was the term they use for when you've done all your thinking. You've done all your work, you've practiced, you have earned valid experience. And you are just good at this thing. And that that for me is sort of the goal in any sort of creative enterprise where you it's not unjustified ego. It's not got it's not instinct, it's experience and wisdom combining another sort of perfect flow state, I guess you would call.
James Taylor 4:53 It might be a little bit I know many people have heard that that 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell made famous, but there's a There's a next level to it in Japanese culture, that Kumys. This idea of Lexus is one of the companies that kind of really made it famous again, this idea of to Kumys, where they, they have people on the end of the line of production line, these cars coming off in Japan, who are just running there, hands down the side of the car, and just looking. And even though these cars be made, mainly by machines, these humans because they're not just got 10 years, 20 has got some a 40 years of experience in the business. And they can feel they can almost like sense that when there's like, slightly off, you know, and so that's kind of embodied is kind of what you're talking about.
Chris Jones 5:43 Yeah, it's in you. It's not, it's almost, it's almost like you're an instrument, I guess, the way the way the carpenter described it, he was another baseball term, not referred to another baseball player, there was a amazing player named Roberto Clemente. And if a batter hit a ball into the outfield, Roberto Clemente would turn his back to it, run to the spot where he knew the ball would come to earth, and then turn and catch it. And so he just, the 10,000 hour rule has kind of been dispelled a little bit in the sense that there are preconditions to success, you can take anyone and make them do something for 10,000 hours and make them great at 10. And I admit that a book like I would never be a great musician, I don't have the prerequisites. I'm tone deaf. So you know, it's not going to work for me, no matter how many hours has been banging on a piano. But if you are legitimately talented at something, you find your gift, you practice that gift, and you get to this point of sort of disembodied analysis, you get to this point where it's like almost part of you, then you are an amazing machine in a way, like you're talking about those guys that Lexus running their head, they're really part of the assembly line, an integral part of the assembly line, doing something that a machine couldn't do. And that's the gap. That's that's where they fit. You know, that's where the people get involved. And that's where that experience and that love, passion. All these things that we we admire and creative people, that's where they all come to the forefront. And, and that's for me, it's how you make something great. It's, it's when we talk about analytics often is discussed as like, that is the one too. But no tool is universal. And if everyone's using the same numbers in the same models, and crunching the numbers the same way, then what's your advantage? Your advantage is when you do something a little bit better than somebody else? And how do you get there? Unfortunately, you get there. But like, often mind numbing practice, just experience.
James Taylor 7:39 I remember when mice live in the Bay Area, and then Oakland there you had that, obviously the baseball team, the Moneyball kind of thing became famous. And then you talked about in the book about having looking at that, and someone can beat you to the draft to write that story, because I'm sure that that would have been a kind of fascinating story. But you also talked in the book about times when it hasn't worked. Really, when everyone has got so focused on the analytics and the data. It's just taking them away. And one area was in filmmaking and film production. And you haven't experienced this. I mentioned you're involved in that Netflix series as well. So can you tell us about what happened in the, in the film industry that is a little cursory kind of tale, I guess about this. It's something to look out for.
Analytics And Data
Chris Jones 8:28 It definitely informed some of my thinking. Because I did that story, probably in 2009. And I fell for it. So the story is a guy named Ryan Kavanaugh set up Film Company and Relativity Media. And he convinced a lot of very smart, rich people that he had figured out how to Moneyball the film industry. The problem was moviemaking for you know, since it began, nobody really knows what people are gonna go see. So you're spending a lot of money on what is essentially an informed gamble. You can look at past performance of things and go well, people like that. Maybe they'll like this and you can try to make something really original that sparks something you can, you know, but it's always something of a gamble. And in the film industry, movies have gotten more and more and more expensive. So the Gamble's have become bigger and bigger and bigger. 100 million dollars $200 million $400 million. He Ryan claimed that he had quantified audience attraction, and that he would never make a bomb that he would maybe not always hit homeruns to use another baseball term, but he would always hit singles and doubles. They'd always make a little bit of money. And if you consistently make a little bit of money at making movies and you make a lot of movies, you're gonna end up making a lot of money. The problem is his system did not work at all. He lost billions of dollars. He made a lot of movies. Most of them weren't very good. And he lost billions. And it just, it's just something that you can't quantify audience reaction is something that's really hard to quantify. It's just, you know, your favorite song is your favorite song, not just because of how it sounds, it was who you were in the moment when you heard it. Maybe it reminds you of something that you like, maybe it makes you nostalgic for something, it's this powerful combination of things. And the way that YouTube will recommend something, or Netflix will recommend something and it doesn't hit you. It's because you've changed a little bit, you're not the same person you were, when you watch the other thing or heard the other song. And, and this idea that everything is quantifiable sort of sneaked into the came sort of spread from baseball, to film, you know, criminal behavior, medicine, like everything can be quantified, and it's just, it's just not true.
James Taylor 10:52 And in the book, you mentioned a book, I actually going back and reading it again, because it's you mentioned, Robert McKee story, which is, you know, this idea that there's these, there's only a few main stories, and they have a similar story arcs. And if you just plug it into that, and then from there, I actually ended up watching adaptation, the movie Nicolas Cage movie, where it's kind of the story about, you know, the create human creativity versus they just doing it by the numbers painting by the numbers as well. And so movie people don't know about Rob McKee story maybe worth considering what that is. And, and I think maybe you mentioned that, and maybe the reason I watch adaptations, you mentioned it in the book. Yeah. So and it was this push, and at the end of it, it was it seemed to fall in the case that you should kind of go with the tried and tested route. It was I was gonna get excited by the end of the movie, but so did you get different take on on that concept of painting by the numbers?
Chris Jones 11:52 It's, it's so I also find this incredibly depressing because i i screenwriting, and the fact is, there are only a certain number of stories. And once you start screenwriting, for a living, and you watch, you can pretty clearly figure out what's going on. Because there is a set, there's almost a template that a lot of movies follow movies, in particular, TV is sort of a more creative form. But movies in particular, usually three acts. At the end of the first act, we're just like 20 minutes into the movie, there'll be some inciting incident that gets joined, or something changes for the character. The end of Act Two is usually some kind of you think they're about to succeed under some kind of terrible setback. And then act three is they conquer, you know, whatever the setback was, in some satisfying way. And that's, that's a very standard structure for film. What I tried to say in the book is that, yes, most movies are made that way. And if you're a novice screenwriter, just learning how to do it, it's probably not a bad idea to follow the template. It's, it's, it's, you know, it's hard to take big swings when you're new at something and no one is going to take a chance on you to make a movie when, unless you're like a pure genius, and you come up with something incredible, then you're you're you're better off sort of following numbers. But there comes a point when with your skill and talent, you can start to veer away from sort of the paint by numbers approach and make something more beautiful. And it might have some of the basic elements of filming or songwriting is another good example where verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge chorus is a pretty standard structure for a song and a lot of great songs are written that way. But maybe you can do something a little different. Once you it's like, it's like, I remember I had an English teacher always used to say, you have to learn the rules before you can break them. And that's that's sort of what I sort of discovered when it came to things like screenwriting. It's not true for everything but screenwriting in particular,
James Taylor 13:46 but there are movies in music like punk music, for example, that went dead against that, no, I'm not gonna learn the rules I'm just gonna go in and it was a freshness about it whether you like punk or not you there was an energy there was a freshness about it as well. And it feels and it maybe it's a little bit just now it feels like we're getting so pushed down in terms of the analytics and that kind of the quantifiable self is losing a little bit of the the humanity and things well, maybe maybe I'm just kind of old fashioned.
Chris Jones 14:14 No, I think you're right. I mean, I feel very passionately about the film industry and was last time you saw movie that really knocked you on your ass. Well, yeah,
James Taylor 14:23 actually most most of his TV and you mentioned because TV can take a little bit of a slightly we just watched afterlife on Netflix. We could you have as a show, and he kind of goes in different directions and there's a heart and there's a there's a soul to it. But it's and you can absolutely understand why so many TV, film houses now they they do sequels because it's they've they've sunk costs in version one. And they can go time and time again. So they can do that. But I kind of wonder where it doesn't really take us too far.
Chris Jones 14:56 It does something like afterlife is a great example of what I'm talking about. We're He Gervais couldn't have made that show 20 years ago, I don't expect. I suspect he would admit that. Yeah, that has taken years of TV making and storytelling and joke telling to make that for him to be able to make that show, which I would argue is the best thing he's made. And it does veer from traditional TV and a lot of ways but TV is. First of all, he's Ricky Gervais. He's got more rope than most of us get and he TVs is cheaper and easier to find. It's just just there's more demand for TV right now than film and you're allowed to take bigger swings, just moviemaking right now. I mean, it's it's Marvel, just comic book movies with sequels, it's because people will probably go see those. So if you the thing I always try to remember and I hate to think of it this way. moviemaking is a business. The people who make movies are in it to make money. Yeah, they want to make some art, but they want to make money. And so if the movie going audience goes, I'll go see black widow 19. Or I'll go see Spider Man 26. Like, okay, then I'll make that for you. I'm making as well as I can. But I'm gonna make you that. And hopefully you'll like it. But something like TV like afterlife is a great example of, for me of The Eye Test is someone who is smart and creative at the height of their powers as that earn confidence to make something original and beautiful. And there's no analytics, there's no mainframe in a world that would have predicted that people would watch afterlife, or that could have made afterlife. That's an exclusively human enterprise. It's beautiful.
James Taylor 16:39 And the other thing I kind of felt there was this kind of tension you kind of pull on throughout the course of the book. This is a test about you know, the, the human side the kind of more we think analytical whether it's you know, machines side as well. And it kind of playing around with a little bit there was that movie The Big night. And the name of the the director, the actor and director was great movie. And it was this the two characters and second Primo and secondo. They're they're making this these two chefs and, and it's almost like that tension between the art and the marketing, the art, the art and machine as well. But as I was kind of thinking about that it kind of made me think about this idea of of kind of creative peers and Duo's. You mentioned Ricky Gervais then so we will talk about recovery. So Stephen Merchant. Yeah, the office recently had that that kind of creative pen is something you hear a lot Jobs and Wozniak Glenda McCartney, and I'm wondering, in your own creative work as a writer, is there someone that you have actors that collaborated that creative peer for you?
Chris Jones 17:44 Yeah, my magazine writing career was a was essentially a duo. And I feel bad that only my name was on top of the stories. I had an editor named Peter, who was Yoda. And the incredible thing about Peter is that he would confess really quickly that he's not a good writer. So a lot of times writers become editors, and vice versa. Peter was an editor. And I'm a terrible editor. I'm a writer, he would see things and I would get so mad sometimes, because I would send them a story. And he would go, Well,
James Taylor 18:19 what if we did this? And I'd be like, of course, of course,
Chris Jones 18:23 we do that. And I was a professional writer. I've been doing it for, you know, 15 years? Why didn't I see that. But it's something about how Peter read, and how he looked at story. And he would just see solutions. He would suggest things early on in a story process. And I would think to myself, that's insane. Like, I'm not going to do that. But then it would sort of filter in would find a home in my brain and I would start going home. Maybe I try that like Peters never wrong. Maybe I try that. And it wouldn't work. And it was just, you know, I wouldn't you mentioned off topic very kindly, I might try one of these two National Magazine Awards, both of those stories. Peter made significant editorial suggestions that are the reasons they won the award, they wouldn't have won the awards. And so, you know, young writers always think that editors are there to meddle. They're there to mess up. They're gonna screw up my stories are the gatekeeper that's preventing me from being great. Peter helped me be the best I could be. And, and without him, I wouldn't have been nearly as successful. And I think teamwork. It's interesting. We're talking about agent later today about a sequel to the success based on creative teams. And just sometimes teamwork does a group work in school, but sometimes horrible. I don't know about you, but I usually ended up being the hardest worker in a group and carrying the load and it's really frustrating for me. But great teams can make incredible things like most TV is Ricky Gervais is the
James Taylor 19:51 so your editor was almost he had a bit of that. That embodied analysis that you're kind of talking about the heat because you've done that What often when we've had people on the show before with, you can find behind that person there is another person and his team is judo. The the word that comes up a lot is the word Trust, or having a trusting relationship. And so something like like that editor, how long did it take you to trust each other?
Chris Jones 20:20 It took a took a bit, because I was quite young, when I joined with Peter and I had that sort of arrogant idea that my writing was sacrosanct. And I mean, a terrible way of thinking, but when you're young, you're stupid. And what happened was, you can't sort of go trust me, you just sort of do the work. And I started to see what Peter was bringing to the equation. And I'm really liking what he was doing to my stories. And I think he could see that I really wanted to do good work. And he would trust me to do the work. I mean, magazine, writing, journalism is a faith based exercise, almost every step of the way of getting someone to talk to you getting a source to trust you, they're trusting you that you're going to tell the story, right, you're trusting them that they are telling you the truth, then the writer editor relationship, the the publication reader relationship is all matrix of faith. It's just, I'm trusting and choosing to trust you, in Peters case, and vice versa, with Peter and me, I hope I think we earn each other's trust. And it took a little bit it didn't take decades, it took a year or two. But But we got to that beautiful point in partnership, when you know, shorthand was just, we would finish sentences for each other, we didn't even really have to say much it was it was. And it was also I shouldn't say, Well, I liked it very much was a pretty strictly professional relationship. Like we didn't live in the same city, we've hung out socially, sort of a handful of times. It was very workman like, in a lot of ways and, and I recognize like, I will spend the rest of my life searching for a partnership like that, like he was he was the perfect partner for me.
James Taylor 22:09 So a lot younger records today, I guess it's a doing mock up article based work there. They don't have that, that creative pairing. And I hear a lot of writers, younger writers are saying that thing that's getting pushed on them a lot is the number of views of that article that page. And that's almost like the analytics bit the quarter that kind of called our analytics bit. But and there's a there's also a, there's a hardness to it, because that number is not going to tell you how to write a better article unnecessarily. It's just a kind of a cool dump. And you're left to kind of fend for yourself as to figure out what you have to do. And maybe it's the it's gonna take you down a wrong path.
Chris Jones 22:53 So I hate the influence of analytics on on journalism. It's made demonstrably worse. I'm it's it's, you know, the importance of views, clicks, likes all that nonsense. It's just it's it's wounded the business and sort of ways that I don't know how we get it back. And that's sort of I think the overarching message of the book in some ways is, is this the path we really want to be on? Should we hit pause here and make some changes? Because I'm not sure we're going in the right direction and a lot of ways and what you were talking about, you know, we had two kinds of analytics, we that they would tell us when people stopped reading stories, for instance, on page three, you lost 12% of your readers. Oh, great. You know, and you would try to do better. The other thing is it encourages you. The two things that sparked engagement are anger and fear. So it encourages you to locate extremes, to cater to a stream you want, you know, we were talking that there was a brief period where I worked for another place where there was some talk of you getting paid by the views. And I was like, Oh, you want me to write something that gets attention. I can write something super racist. I can write something super sexist, that'll get some traffic. You know, it's like it's it's, it's it's sort of the lowest common denominator approach. And it's, it's, it's bad for journalism. It's just it's, it doesn't encourage smart thinking. It doesn't encourage nuance. It doesn't encourage doubt or uncertainty, which are valuable. It leads to black and white thinking that leads to extremes that leads to polarization. It's everything that we see in society. I think a lot of it you can blame on like our lives being governed by our Facebook. Facebook is demonstrably bad for us. As a society, it hurts people and it's because they want you to be engaged. fear and anger. And away you go. It's just it's bad. It's might be good for business. It's bad for people.
Analysis And Creativity
James Taylor 24:53 As you're coming back to the kind of, I guess the humanistic side. You mentioned about your next work being around teams. You read a lot Sports in the book, other examples that you've seen where sports teams have been able to combine that the analytics, the creativity and the teamwork into a really nice mesh, Liverpool,
Chris Jones 25:16 Liverpool are sort of the platonic ideal of that. They have. They have a physicist and Dr. Ian Graham on their staff, who does not watch football.
James Taylor 25:29 He says, I'm my kind of guy.
Chris Jones 25:32 He won't, he's like, it'll bias me, I don't need to see it. He has a database of allegedly over 100,000 players. He knows what they're good at. He's the one who convinced Liverpool to hire Juergen Klopp in the first place, because he looked at Dortmund's results saw that they weren't awesome but also saw how Locke had sort of played against them in a lot of ways he was like Juergen Klopp, is better than you think he is. And then they bring in your again and Juergen is, obviously listens to Dr. Graham, but he also has his own embodied analysis about how football should be played, he's evolved the fullback position, your country and Andy Robertson has become sort of an integral part of the attack. He's also just the kind of guy who would run through a wall for those players clearly loved him, and will do anything to win for him. And that, that sort of chemistry that that lightning catching, that's, that's the human part of the Liverpool equation. So they've got this, they've got this extremely analytical component, you know, their owners, also on the Boston Red Sox, which is one of the most analytical baseball teams in North America. But then they're led by this charismatic, intuitive, slashing speed metal, German, and that is just an awesome, potent combination. They won their first title in 30 years. It's because I don't think one could have done it with the other without the other, I think it was, it was that combination of the best parts, both tools that allowed them to succeed.
James Taylor 27:01 So yes, it's almost impossible for one individual, one human to embody all of these things. But that's why you can need that team, you can sort of like archetypes in a team, you can add these different things. And you can add these different ingredients into the mix.
Chris Jones 27:16 Yeah, it's hard to be all of the things because creative people tend not to be particularly mathematical, or they're creative in a very, like numerator of Word, which is also its own kind of beauty. Like, that's a beautiful mind. But it's hard to be, it's hard to be everything. And that's, that's kind of basically the case of the book is analytics, it's hard to be everything. Analytics cannot be the solution to every problem. It's just not, we wouldn't use a hammer for every situation. It's just it. And I hesitate. Like, I worry that people are gonna go off the ante. Moneyball. It's not sometimes analytics are the best way to make a decision. But you have to be it takes a human to go oh, this is when we employ this. And this is when adequate by what's going on here. We need to do
James Taylor 27:59 this. We had mathematics professor at Oxford University, Marcus du Sautoy, on and he was talking about, in his great book, creativity code, he was talking about how, with the Turing test, we almost set the bar too low. on artificial intelligence, he said it needed to be able to imitate humans to point you couldn't recognize the difference. And he said, Really, the person we should be looking to is Ada Lovelace when they can original coders, I guess, you know, from the Victorian age. And she was a nun. And that's, that's really not what it's about, it should be about, that a machine can create a new art form, you know, create a new thing that we can do. And, and, and, and what he was saying, you know, until this machines can feel some of those emotions that you're expressing that that, you know, the anger, hatred, that that sadness, that all those things that we go through as humans, it's going to be very, very difficult for it to be able to can imitate incredibly well. And the analytic side helps it kind of do that, but to create that new form, that new thing that that, that using this, that imagination is is a more challenging endeavor, your imagination
Chris Jones 29:03 is our biggest strength. And you know, that's that's the thing that, you know, I open a book with a quote from Einstein about knowledge and imagination, where he's give me imagination, because knowledge is limited, but your imagination is not. And that's where machines, I still think that's where we outrun machines is we, we can see things that machines can't see because they're programmed to think a particular way. They're not self correcting, which I think is what someone like ADA would wish for them to be, they would go, Oh, I'm making a mistake. I need to not do it this way. Machines tend not to do that. People are the ones who sort of self analyze people are the ones who go, oh, this situation is not something we've seen before. But I trust what I'm seeing because it's in front of my face. You know, that's happening now with climate. There's storms that we haven't seen before. And the models have a really hard time predicting, because data mining is based on past performance, replicating itself into the future. Climate is an example where it's not doing that anymore. More, only people can look outside and go, Ooh, that's a real doozy. It's like, the machines that so the imagination is for me, is our greatest strength. It's the thing that we have that machines up to this point, don't have.
James Taylor 30:18 Imagination is our greatest strength in and you consider your greatest strengths. How do you keep your own thinking fresh? What influences Do you try to surround yourself with? And also environment? I mean, I believe you live on a lake over there and Canada as well. What role does environment in terms of keeping your your inspiration your kind of imagination fresh?
Chris Jones 30:39 It's for me, it's always been about. I don't want this to sound egotistical because for me, it's always been about curiosity. It's always asking questions and training yourself to never look at a situation and just accept it for what it is always ask, like, why is that that way, and, you know, working for Esquire for as long as I did, you know, ideas, story ideas, were the hardest part of the process. You always had to find something that would sustain like a four or five 6000 word piece that didn't have to come up tomorrow. So it can be breaking news, it had to be sort of a law that no one else was doing because you needed time to it was really tricky to come up with good magazine stories. And that sort of I trained myself to just constantly, oh, why is that? And something as simple you know, I know, I'm a voracious reader, and I'll read something. I'll go, Damon, I should have thought of that. Like, it's John McPhee is a writer for The New Yorker who does amazing stories, but the most ordinary things like he did this great story about how FedEx delivers a package. And it's fascinating, because when you think about FedEx, we will get that there tomorrow. Now, if it was just one package, that's something. It's millions of packages. And it's a crazy system. And it's incredible. It's fascinating. You wrote a whole book about Orange. Orange industry is super interesting. It's like I'm eating this orange, how can I be eating this orange? I grew up in Florida, how did it get to me like, so I have just trained myself to constantly go, Oh, why is that? And doesn't have to be that way. But environment is huge inspiration from other people. I like to teach I like to talk to classes, you get so much back from students will ask questions and see things a different way. Writing reading now, as I am doing more screenwriting, I'm constantly watching television, I'm constantly watching movies, and I will see moments where I'll just go off, that's fantastic. I want to do something like that. And that's, that's where you get it from, I don't get it from being sort of inside yourself, you have to be open to the world. And it takes some mindful process where you just constantly I gotta be open, I have to be open, I have
James Taylor 32:52 to go. So I'm often intrigued why Canada for a country with a relatively small population produces so many creative individuals at such a high level, whether it's in music, the arts, loads of different areas, writers are so many great races come from, from Canada. And part of me thinks it must be the weather, you know, you've got a similar kind of weather to it and scan in like that here in Scotland or Scandinavia, where it's cold a lot of the year, so you stay inside. And I often have this this lovely imagination of myself being able to go and sit in a lovely beach in the Caribbean and sit there writing, but my wife always wakes me up to the reality of what that would really be, which said, you will get no work done. You wouldn't do anything. You said you need this type of environment. So So do you think actually maybe claimer has maybe a bigger part to play in our creativity than we necessarily think?
Chris Jones 33:46 I do. I you know, again, we're now we're entering the realm of narrative. I don't have any statistics to back up my assertions. But my sense is that winter in Canada is a very creative time. Because you are inside it's dark. And you find sources of light and hope elsewhere. You don't have the sun to rely on. And so you, you, you consume, and you think you spent a lot of time thinking it's like the summer I consider June July, August to be sort of my off time. And that's when I try to devote that to my children's sports and I coach and things like that and but the winter is my work time. And that's really when creative things start to happen. You can see it in music scenes in America. A lot of great music scenes are often in towns with terrible weather. Seattle rainy Apalis Yeah, you know, Athens, Georgia is hot as balls in the summer. You know, there's just it's often associated with Scotland. I mean, think of the bands that are part of Scotland. Fantastic music and it's just it's I think the weather does have something
James Taylor 35:00 So, now coming back to where we can start talking about technology. Are there are there any technologies that really kind of free you up for doing the kind of creative work you do? Or perhaps augment the work you do as a writer?
Chris Jones 35:15 So, this is where you, you know, this is where you expose me. I am a Luddite. I am I have a very old MacBook. I have a brand new one that I'm refusing to use because it doesn't it does things differently than the way I like. I will say that I could not have written in the typewriter era because I do too much cutting and pasting. I don't outline. So I'm a writer who moves pieces around and without cut and paste I would have been lost I think, but as far as technology goes with what I choose to do with what I do, there's not a lot of technological influence i
James Taylor 35:59 What about software but 10 of screenwriters leave the office a lot of screenwriting or the use of Final Draft Yeah. And use that for your when you came to your article more you're you're kind of squire writing, you're using more word type God's word.
Chris Jones 36:12 Yeah, that's like the only my little tip that I one thing I do and this will make me sound like a weirdo but I there's a little note at the end of the book about this I write and Garamond so Microsoft Word I can't remember what the baseline scientists can please
James Taylor 36:31 help. It may be I think it's area law times area.
Chris Jones 36:35 No, sir. It's like a fight without tariffs to me is like, no offense to your logo, but I like I, I,
James Taylor 36:45 the romantic and you
Chris Jones 36:47 romantic me. So I try to make my writing on a computer experience speed pretty close to writing as close as I can make it to writing manually. And if you switch, I have found that switching my font to Garamond makes me careful. slows me down. It's a really beautiful font. It makes your words seem valuable. And it's an how they fit on the page really starts to matter. And when I'm screenwriting, your listeners who have never looked at a script, a script has a lot of whitespace it's just you know, scripts are entirely dialogue driven almost there's not a lot of words on a page. I like to make them look nice. On the page. I like for scenes to end at the end of the page I like I'd like for paragraphs to fit nicely. Like I for me writing is is a manual art in a lot of ways and that's that I try to I think that helps me be creative too. I would never write in Helvetica
James Taylor 37:42 does it distress you when you go on set and you see actors with all their notes and this scribbles that marginalia? Oh, no, because
Chris Jones 37:50 maybe it's good. It was helpful. I wouldn't do one of those. But I know a lot of people were like, the words are sacrosanct. Peter taught me that sometimes that outside input you know, there's a great I am if you have seen the end of succession, please don't tell me anything about it.
James Taylor 38:05 I'm on so I haven't seen it either. So
Chris Jones 38:08 I have I there's a great character. There's recently a New Yorker story written about Jeremy strong who plays one of the main characters Kendall Roy, and there's a restaurant scene where he was to eat a Waldorf salad. And apparently, Jeremy strong gets deep into the character and he was like he would never eat a Waldorf salad and they had an argument on the set about he would never eat that and they ended up with shaved fennel, che che fennel salad with a vinaigrette. And that's his and it's perfect that's exactly what this if you don't if you haven't seen the show, just trust me that that's exactly what this character would be. And it took him going I don't know about that and then a little give and take and then they settled on the right thing and it's that's a very human people invested in what they're doing care passionate just accounts and and yeah get these seems like a very small thing. But that accumulation of very small things has made for a very entertaining show as that's true of most creative work it's an accumulation of of discipline and care and every word count
James Taylor 39:11 I think it machine would struggle on the analytics that put a little something like that it's annouanced like that and Chris Jones The Eye Test: A Case for Human Creativity in the Age of Analytics is out now. I will put a link to it if people want to learn more about you and your your other writing your other work. Where's the best place to go and do that? Well,
Chris Jones 39:26 like we've explained, I'm a Luddite but I do participate in one social media and that is Twitter. Where my handle is N swell Jones, e n s w e l l Jones, which is because Chris Jones has a horrible name. My parents were not creative when it came to that and an N swell is a boxing tool that they use to take down the swelling. So it's like a cold piece of metal that you see them press against boxers to take down bruising and swelling. And I am trying to provide an antidote to social medias doom and gloom. I tried to take down the swelling So Twitter is my only that is that is that is my that's the only place I surfaced on the internet.
James Taylor 40:07 Chris Jones, thank you so much for coming on today sharing some of the ideas in The Eye Test been a pleasure having you on the SuperCreativity podcast. Thank you so much for having me, James. You can subscribe to the SuperCreativity podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast while you're there. Please leave us a review. I would really really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor. I knew I've been listening to the SuperCreativity podcast
To say that Steve Blank has led an interesting life would be an understatement. He’s had three careers: First, in the U.S. Air Force for four years during the Vietnam War. Next, as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur in 8 startups in two decades (with four IPOs). Currently as an academic teacher at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, and NYU. Steve Blank has changed how startups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught worldwide; how science is commercialized in the U.S., and how companies and the government innovate. He is the author of “The Four Steps to the Epiphany,” credited with launching the Lean Startup movement, and the bestselling Startup Owner’s Manual. Welcome to the SuperCreativity podcast, Steve Blank...
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
Steve Blank 0:47 Thanks for having me, James.
James Taylor 0:49 So your latest, I was gonna say your latest book, The startup manual has been around for a little while. And I just got, I had, I think the four steps of epiphany when I lived in California, someone thrust it into my hand and said this is you need to read this, you need to read the so the starter owner's manual his mindset is kind of brings things a little bit can walk to date as co authored with Bob Dorf. But it's really kind of step by step guide to getting startups right. So it might be useful if just the start if you could just define for us what a startup is, and isn't. And also what you see the role of the startup playing and how America thinks about itself, and how it projects itself to the rest of the world.
The Startup Manual
Steve Blank 1:29 Wow. And then, and then we'll be finished with the semester. So, you know, there are lots of definitions of a startup mine, finally a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model, which is kind of different from the way others have defined it. But number one, a temporary organization means the goal of a startup is not to become a startup, meaning don't fall in love with the dogs at work, or the beanbag chairs or whatever. You might. And if you do, then, in fact, you have a small business, not a scalable startup, designed to search and that was the real insight behind lean. That is large companies execute, what do they execute, they execute on the Goldman known business model, that is a fancy word for saying you know who your customers are, and your distribution channel and pricing and how to do customer acquisition, and startups, all you have is a set of hypotheses or, or beliefs. In fact, on day one, a startup is a religious organization, because it's a faith-based organization rather than a fact-based organization. So the distinction between the early-stage venture is you're searching for the truth. You want some evidence that your hypotheses and your beliefs are true. So startup is a temporary organization, did scientists search Well, what are you searching for? Something that's repeatable and scalable. That is the mistake startups sometimes make is hire wholesale sports and say, Hey, here's our opinion, go out and then sell the stuff, and then discover that no one's buying because you didn't find out what that repeatable and scalable model was, that is more salespeople had, or more Google AdWords or whatever, the more sales I should get, or more customers, I sign up or something. And so what you're searching for First, and in most businesses, what's called product market fit that fits between? What are the problems the customers have? And, and what are you? What are you offering them? And, and that's part of something called the business model, which are all the other pieces I mentioned. So that's the long answer. The short question I think you asked is, what's the startup and different types of startups, as I said, they're people who have lifestyle businesses, they're entrepreneurs, and then kind of might have a startup, there are people who have small businesses. And again, those people are definitely entrepreneurs, but they can't raise risk capital, they, they can't hire local people who can attract the best and brightest, etc. But that's okay. That's their goal is to feed their family and maybe their extended family. And then those who want to do scalable startups are the things I kind of have focused on, which is, gee, I want to change the world. And I'm gonna need external capital to do that. Maybe angel or, or, you know, seed, and then maybe tons of capital. Those are the types of startups that make the news and the ones we read about. Entrepreneurs are the ones who do all those things, whether they're small businesses, scalable, whatever. And then there are nonprofits that are NGOs, that could be startups as well and run by entrepreneurs with different sets of goals. And then there are startups inside of large corporations as well and inside government agencies, different goals run by entrepreneurs with different processes. I hope I totally confused you when hopefully, but not your audience. But before
James Taylor 4:52 before we can get into the bit about the can role of the startup and American how America thinks about itself out projects itself. I just want to pause and just Can an eight-year-old startup exist? Or is it, doesn't that really work? It's not really a startup is it all a few years old?
Steve Blank 5:10 Well, the first thing is when we, you know, depending on your audience, if you're talking to people in software and hardware, you might get some eye rolls, because, you know, it's usually a two year old startup attached to a six year old failure that's in the land of the living dead. But if you're in life sciences and working on therapeutics, you know, it's sometimes it might take that long to actually go through, you know, FDA phase one through two or three trials. So So let's be careful about what industry we're talking about. You know, if you're in software, the answer is, yeah, you probably should have been an research lab somewhere for the first five years. So there's no fast and hard rule of thumbs, but it is kind of probably worth considering is why are you spending, you know, six years of your life on something that might not have scaled, and there might be some technical reasons, there are some reasons of your personal passion. Everybody has their own timeout, clock, mine happens to be three and a half years, that is I would, on average, do something and three and a half years, but there is no right number, I have found that number decreasing in 20%, for use by students go 18 months, I'm out of here, there are not some liquidity events, and I kind of go, you didn't even figure out where the bathroom was the names of your, of the rest of the employees. But people said that about me when I bailed after about three or three and a half years. So it really depends on, first of all, are you a founder, a co-founder, you know, are you an early employee? You know, you know, have you found product market fit in the company? Do you think there's a chance of success? are investors still funding you at scale? So there are both business questions and personal questions that one has to ask. And then as I said, Whatever industry you're in life science is very different than hardware and software, different social media is very different than, than the rest of enterprise software, for example.
James Taylor 7:07 So that second question, kind of going back to this idea of, of the strong partnership, or from an outsider seeing that the strong part of the American psyche, no, there was, I guess, the, the people that came to America first went west, they were kind of early entrepreneurs, you know, kind of going finding a bit of land and building something. This idea of the startup now seems to be it's almost like a soft power. It's almost a bit like the the State Department you said Dave Brubeck jazz tree, or out in the 1950s, there was a way of America where it's where do you think startups it's now an American?
Steve Blank 7:46 It's the equivalent of the cowboy movies and Hollywood that used to influence worldwide culture, right? It used to be, you know, people outside the US learned English by watching American movies or, or American television programs and, and got the view that there were cowboys and Indians still running around, you know, chasing each other. I think the, you know, the metaphor again, is still this unbridled capitalism, Darwinian capitalism, that the entrepreneurship and venture capital together kind of represent. You know, it's only recently that that countries in Europe, and some still haven't changed their rules that allowed employee stock options and limited partnerships, etc. And, you know, this, this notion of socialism, versus unbridled capitalism really does strangle innovation, it's crib along with corruption in a number of company countries. And, and, you know, it's just been amazing to me that the politicians in a number of European countries have taken decades to recognize that what entrepreneurship and startups could do for your country. On the other hand, countries like China have now begun to realize what unbridled and uncontrolled investment in maximizing dollars versus maximizing social good have done. And have, in fact, redirected venture capital to go to places that they think are in national interest. I'd be paying a lot of attention to the moves that China has made in the last year or so in kind of reining in where VCs should be putting their dollars. That might be their dumb move, or personally, I think it's a very smart move in terms of aligning national interest and private capital.
James Taylor 9:35 I mean, everybody's a little bit of the East India Company, and whenever 1700s were, there was that kind of blend of, of private capital, I guess, going in and also be much a state state area as well.
Steve Blank 9:48 Yeah, that didn't turn out so well for the people that I definitely
James Taylor 9:51 tend to well for the Indians know, when we took about billions of trillions of dollars worth of, of assets from them But when I first moved to from the UK to the Bay Area 2010, someone gave me Eric Ries his book, The Lean Startup initially, which is which has done we've had Eric here on the show. And because I come from a family of jazz musicians, I'm always interested in finding the roots have an idea like finding the roots of that music and you start listening to Ella Fitzgerald you find out she was really inspired by Dizzy Gillespie. So start lesson Dizzy Gillespie. What we think of today is that lean startup methodology is so many companies so many institutions around the world can promote, seems to be really a kind of a trio of three different concepts from three different minds or creators. Can you explain this evolution of this Lean Startup because some people even think it was just this was Eric, no thing? And then they discovered a little bit later.
The Lean Startup
Steve Blank 10:50 Eric was the Johnny Appleseed, which is a euphemism for the one who planted and proselytize the process. The history was, at least in my mind, pretty simple. You know, after eight startups, I started thinking about the nature of innovation, entrepreneurship, and realize that one of the key tenants of and differentiators of success and failure in startups is whether you were just thinking about ideas in your own head, or whether you got out of the building and tested them as early as possible. That is the old model used to be you wrote a plan, you got it funded, you hired a team, you build something and you'd be shifted, and only then would you discover whether people wanted or cared about it. My simple statement is there no facts in the building, so get the hell outside. And that became a formal process called customer development. And I started teaching a class mad at UC Berkeley in business school. And I invested in a company where it Eric had been a junior engineer, and then another company, where he became the co-founder, I am Vu, and the head of engineering. And I was sitting on their board. And Eric started taking these customer development ideas and start to try to implement them and recognize that customer development shouldn't be Pam paired with Agile engineering. That is in the 20th century, we build products serially a step at a time when in the 21st century, software engineers were building things iteratively and incrementally whether it was didn't matter what your methodology was, but that's where it was heading. And Eric became the first practitioner to pair customer development and agile engineering, and I credit all that to him. But we still weren't clear what it was we were actually solving for and kept saying you need to understand the repeatable sales process and what's customer acquisition. But I ran into the work of Alexander Osterwalder who had come up with something called the Business Model Canvas and his book, Business Model Generation. And it dawned on me, then Osterwalder, there's what's called the Business Model Canvas, a single piece of paper that articulated the nine things you needed to worry about. And he was focused on large corporations was actually the perfect roadmap for a startup to be thinking about. And so I kind of said, well, women, these three components, Osterwalder is working on giving you the map, Eric's observation about agile engineering and my observation about customer development. Actually, the sum of those is what the lean startup is three components, get out of the building, build things incrementally, and iteratively. And here are the things you should test. And so Eric was over at my ranch and staying in one of the cottages. And I said, you really need to write up with his story of how you did this. And what happened, then, what should we call it? Startup? Next thing I know, there's this great book. And, more importantly, Eric was passionate about proselytizing, and like it was religion. And, you know, this might just be some neat academic class if it wasn't for him. And I give him all credit for, you know, he held conferences, he told everybody was the greatest thing ever. He ran some experiments at GE, which we now know, didn't work. But it was a great, great set of experiments. So so I kind of credit the three of us as you said, it was it really was a pickup team of figuring out how to put this stuff together in a way that any entrepreneur looks at it and goes, duh. Isn't the most obvious thing ever. Like, did you have to write some books on it? And then you got no, you don't understand what we were doing before. We were just writing plans and praying to the gods implicitly that we were right. Now we can actually get some early evidence. If you think about it. We're just moving the evidence that we would typically discover later after we burn time and cash just as much earlier in the process. And so we take for granted that's of course how you build an early-stage venture. I don't need a damn book. It's like second nature. Trust me, it was not for those of us open enough to remember, and there are still investors who go, No, I want to read your 45-page plan? Well, you know, I still believe business plans are to be taught in universities, but they ought to be taught in the English department, because the best example, creative writing you're ever gonna do. It doesn't mean you don't need planning. Let me be clear, of course, you need planning. But at first, you need some evidence that in some discipline to discover what are the hard things you needed to figure out? So that's the long answer of, of your jazz analogy.
I completely agree. It was it took the three of us. And now by the way, there are hundreds and 1000s of other people writing books and additional insights building on top of it, jobs to be done and you know, like lean UI, and I mean, you can't not step over one. But they're all built on that foundation that I think Eric I and Osterwalder kind of set and the surprise it turns out 20 years later, it's still some fundamental set of truths. I thought this might be a fad, but went in and out? I don't think so I think now, it turns out that this seems to be the, as I said, kind of like, well, of course. Alright, I'll stop. I'll stop babbling. No.
James Taylor 16:18 mean, there was a great question. That was I mean, the one thing I was I was wondering about, because it feels like this evolutionary thing, as well. And the one thing kind of looking through the book and looking at the index, at the end, there was one word which I noticed was absent. And I wondered, Is this on purpose? Or is this is a difference of opinion? Or what's that, and that word is creativity. You know, but often people think of the, maybe the start of that process. So interesting, because this is obviously, a lot of companies, they talk about this innovation as the word that they use, and I speak a lot younger people who seem to be almost more that word creativity is something and the difference, I'd like to get your sense of, like how they fit or don't fit together. And where you think that idea of creativity fits in to the lean startup methodology?
The Lean Startup Methodology
Steve Blank 17:12 You know, it's, it's a great question. So to me, that's the front end the whole process, right? I mean, what we call ideation, right is how do I come up with ideas? And how do I, G m i creative? How do I learn how to be creative, etc. There's a woman I teach with a professor at Stanford named Tina Seelig, who's written 21 books on the subject. And, and at the first time I met Tina, it was actually kind of a funny interaction. I said, Tina, who needs books? Who needs classes? I said, my problem is like trying to turn it off and pick one idea, you know, I'm always coming up. And she says, Steve, you're an outlier, most people actually need. And then then I realized she was absolutely right. And it wasn't an only I've cut myself on the back, but it's not about me, it's in fact that there really are methodologies and books and whatever the Lean Startup method and the startup owners manual, all kind of assume that that's the front end of the process that's occurring elsewhere. And, and, and, you know, I'll list the other things that you need to do not only need to be creative, but you also need to be agile, you need to be tenacious, you need to be resilient, you need to be incredibly curious, which feeds into to creativity. All those are the front ends of what makes great entrepreneurs, great founders, not touched by the methodology meaning, meaning it's kind of a priority set of given. And there are some great books and methods on how to do that. So left out on semi-conscious purchase purpose, assuming it is the front end of this process. Came to your question, yeah, we'll
James Taylor 18:53 definitely put some links to Tennessee legs work, I think I D School. At Stanford, great, a great institution as well. One of the things I noticed just starting to travel around traveling around the world speaking, especially on creativity is I'd often get I get invited to these innovation labs, whether they're it's kind of state-owned kind of innovation things or whether it's an incubator within a large organization. And it feels like some of them are getting better. But they a lot of them have what you call, I think in one of the books, innovation Theater, which I love a term. So what is innovation theater? And do I was just in one in Ukraine, actually, I just came back from Ukraine, and they have the amazing place that they're building there. And I think that's they're doing things a little bit better than some of the other ones. So what is innovation theater? And where do you see a lot of organizations or governments going wrong when it comes to the kind of creating these innovation centers and innovation hubs?
Innovation Theater
Steve Blank 19:53 Sure, that's a great question, because it ties back to your creativity question. You could be the most creative In the world, but if you don't know how to deliver things at scale, you're also one of the biggest failures in the world as a founder. And for me, and again, you know, no value judgment, but maybe a little value judgment is entrepreneur people who deliver things. And by delivering things, I don't mean demos, I mean, things in the hands of customers or delivering the government deploying and scale to, to the populace, etc, or even the military getting the mounted soldiers or warfighters in the field. It's not the demo, it's not the idea. It's the process that actually solves all the other intangibles about whether it's product-market fit or getting sufficient funding, or in government agencies how to work around the saboteurs or existing processes, etc. Innovation theater typically doesn't happen well, it doesn't happen in startups, because you're 100% focused on shipping. It does happen in incubators, both inside and outside of governments, and by innovation theater is it kind of like the cargo cult, we, we copy the, you know, we copy like the beanbag chairs, and we have lunch, and you could bring dogs to work. But the output is demos and not deliverables. And so my mantra is to know that you might need a demo to convince people to give you money or whatever. But that's not the goal. And unless you are doing large organizations, unless you solve some of the tougher problems first, which is not how to set up the incubator. But how do you set up channel conflict where your VP of Sales said, There's no way you're taking this new idea into by existing customers that don't kill whatever, or the head of marketing says, You can't use the company name that'll destroy the brand, or the legal folks say, oh, we can't do this, like, we'll be sued. Now, I mean, every possible reason to kill innovation that doesn't exist in an early-stage venture. And so you end up with lots of theater, there's lots of smoke, and your CEO takes pictures in front of the beanbag chairs or whatever. Or just like when people visit Silicon Valley, they stand in front of the Facebook sign and think they understand entrepreneurship. Facebook has nothing to Facebook is the Purdue pharma now of startups. But in any case, innovation theater just has lots of smoke, but no fire no deliverables. Does that help? Yeah,
James Taylor 22:21 I mean, I just think you mentioned that word channel conflict. And, you know, when it's if you think about it, in some kind of maybe incubators, the worst thing they're going to lose, people can lose some time, it's going to lose some money. In organizations, they're going to lose some, you know, stock value, let's say if that spin-off doesn't really work. But you're involved also in an area, the Gordian knot center for national security innovation, where you tie it Listen, this stuff, these losses, that we're making these conflicts, these are major con saboteurs, where these things are talking this silo action of, of innovation, is actually going to affect real lives of real people. So as an outsider, this is me, I can say this is a British person that's lived in America as well. It feels like America has kind of fallen behind when it comes to innovation and defense. Can you imagine China comes like China you'd be winning the battle for AI supremacy? Well, a lot of American technologists seem almost kind of caught up with more the making money with NFTs or building the next video app is a remedy for this to be teaching innovation within the different branches of the military? Or do we need to work harder on actually getting people who enter universities to think about starting startups, using their creativity, their ability to innovate, and taking that insight into the military uses?
Steve Blank 23:47 None of the above. And here's, here's why. In fact, I find the problem the US Department of Defense has run into is exactly the problem that entrepreneurs and investors had before we came up with the Lean Startup, which is they don't even have the language or model to describe what the hell just happened to them. And let me explain. You know, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US was kind of the union power, and we fought non-nation-states like ISIS and al Qaeda, but they never challenged us superiority and weapon systems and whatever we we failed for lots of other reasons. But what's happened in the last five or 10 years, really is a confluence of things we weren't and still aren't prepared to deal with. Let me go through them is number one for the first time in the history of ever. The US no longer owns the technologies needed to deter or win the war. You mentioned a couple of them AI machine learning, autonomy, quantum cyber, even commercial access to space, biotech, etc. All these you know, drones, CMA, drones and rockets and whatever. The DoD has some of them but the best and the brightest don't work for them anymore, then buy them I mean They don't work in what we call FFRDC federally funded research labs, they don't work for the prime contractors. With all due respect to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, they are not hiring the same people than androl, or even Google and Facebook are hiring, because they can't afford them. So that's number one. Number two, by the way, half those commercial companies are in China. Whoops. Number two is, and this is a little esoteric, the US built up an acquisition model, that is a way to buy things that doesn't allow it to actually buy things that get deployed in less than nine to 20 years. Think about that. We can't deploy major ships or planes or large programs. Yet all the problems and crises we're facing, whether they're China, or Russia and Ukraine, or, you know, North Korea and Iran, they're not waiting around 10 to 20 years
James Taylor 25:50 a disruption, we have the disruptive, we have a what I call an impedance
Steve Blank 25:55 the mismatch between the systems we built, when our adversaries think about it, we're moving at the same clock speed as we were, that is the threats were predictable. And more importantly, the technology was predictable, decades out. And so you could plan to get it out, it wasn't stupid, and accurately matched what the environment looks like. The problem is the environment has changed. But the Department of Defense hasn't even gotten their heads around that lots of these things have changed. Technology's changed the notion of time that is we need to be building systems and having processes that could operate in less than five years. And it's not that people don't get it. And here's the point about lean startup versus what's the DOD needs. Everybody in the DoD who understands this is trying to hack the system individually. They're they're writing special contracts called OTAs. They're standing up rapid capability groups that is every service has this, but they're hacks to the system. Rather than understanding Well, wait a minute, can we need a different language and processes to describe this? And the way I kind of summarize this is the US Department of Defense has world-class people and processes, world-class, unfortunately, they're for a world that no longer exists. It's a big idea. And so what I'm working on this Gordian knot center and Gordian knot, for those who not familiar with it refers to the idea of cutting through most intractable problems with unique solutions is basically how to give the DoD a different frame a different language and toolset to think about No, no, no, you don't need to make a better version of this process, you need to get your head out of that this is different than then what we're encountering now. And it's so different, you don't even have the words to kind of describe what's going on or understand the processes needed. And that's what we're trying to do. That's the long answer to a short question of what the hell happened to the US Department of Defense?
James Taylor 27:53 Well, I understand that here in the UK, they're in the process of creating, I guess, our version of a DARPA here, and, and also kind of looking probably across the side of the pond in terms of how things could be developed much faster, much more agile, as we start to finish off here. You mentioned this in what we were talking about earlier, where you're kind of a little bit of an outlier, I think probably about 40% of the population say that they consider themselves to be creative. And but 6% don't, so we can have to kind of work on that 6% Even though there, I believe we're all kind of born with this kind of creativity. But for you, how do you keep your thinking fresh? What influence do you try to surround yourself with in terms of people place in order to keep that creativity bubbling the whole time?
Steve Blank 28:43 That's a great question. And probably, you know, how many what underlies the answer I'm about to give you. And I think it's true of all great founders not saying I'm one but it is a common theme is they're intensely curious about a lot of things. And that's the first question I ask is, you know, what are you interested in? What kind of hobbies do you have, and whatever, I'm interested in a lot of stuff. I mean, I could tell you about particle physics. And, but, Carty and, you know, and, and CRISPR. And at the same time, you know, and how I, how I do this is I teach, and I teach students much smarter than myself, you know, just teaching at Stanford, in the engineering school, your head explodes at the same time, at the other side of the campus teaching and national security policy. And also at the same time, I'm sticking my head in places I have no right to beat whether it's national security or biotech or, or, you know, semiconductors and whatever, but in doing that, it forces me to kind of learn the language and you know, start reading going back to the books, and that's the second thing is I read voraciously. You know, just general business stuff but a lot of technical things and a lot of barriers and, and I consider Myself, probably an inch and a half deep on a lot of subjects. But, but certainly, enough to do, which is the third piece, pattern recognition across all of them. And I think I've only had in my career, two skills and one of them is to ingest an enormous amount of data and to is to run a neural net across the data, and pick up patterns that some people miss. That's what the lean startup was, by the way is, is I didn't invent anything, I was able to see a pattern that other people had missed, then I worked on that multiple times.
James Taylor 30:37 But one of the things you start and you see this, you set a timer at the time again, is this idea of getting out of the office to go out and do things so I'm always interested as well as how to find these different sources, different things. So you can spot these patterns. Where are you do I know you have real love in terms of the environment, you know, you outside of your you're working in entrepreneurship and academia, in terms of land that you're surrounded by as well? Does that play a role in your creativity, this idea that the genius loci that places themselves, can inspire you?
Steve Blank 31:16 When it isn't rational, but sometimes solitary, the opposite. Part of that is actually putting yourself into situations where you haven't been invited. You know, 80%, of being successful is showing up more than most people. And I did a lot of that is, it's gone to conferences and meeting people, we're seeing things you've been reading about, but then actually getting your hands dirty, try to do it or see it or go to a factory or go to a whatever you go, Oh, this is what that paper man, holy cow. This is a compliment. Listen, you can read about the semiconductor supplies shortage all you want. If you've never been in a bunny suit and walked through a fab, you have no idea. Like, this is the most complicated thing that human beings have ever made. And it's like, oh, yeah, we should build some more fabs, you have no idea what it takes, or Oh, yeah, we'll just order some more wafer fab equipment from applied material. No, you're ASML. And I just pick on that is that, first of all, getting out of the building really means you need to get and not just read, but immerse yourself in some of these things. And then you start seeing patterns across some of them. The second part about the land connection is I grew up in a 600-square-foot apartment in New York City. My parents were immigrants. And it wasn't until I came out to California, then I realized, oh, yeah, you're gonna walk for miles and like, that's the traffic light, or see a car or whatever. And then you could walk for more miles, and then you can realize your loss, but you can still turn around and go back, and I got lucky enough to be able to, you know, have a place on the coast of California where I could do that. And I think, you know, part of my thinking is being able to take all that data back home, and then just take walks in the woods or along the ocean and start letting that neural net kind of in the back of your head run and start thinking about well, wait a minute, maybe this is connected to this in some interesting way. We're gonna answer a question.
James Taylor 33:21 Yeah, yeah, I guess you're getting part of the worldwide would, there is when you're in the forest. Steve, like blank, it's been a pleasure having you on the show that the book, The Startup Owner's Manual, and the Four Steps to the Epiphany are out now we'll put links to those if people want to find out more about some of your other work, where's the best place for them to go and do that?
Steve Blank 33:44 Well, the I have a website called Steveblank.com. Probably not hard to remember. And I'm laughter set of categories of information. On the top are a couple of tabs with books, and, and videos and other things. And if you're interested in how Silicon Valley got started, there's even a tab on the secret history of Silicon Valley about a couple of surprises that you might not know about. So, so go to the website. And I think you might be amused and maybe educated
James Taylor 34:17 is a great, amazing director of resources. I mean, when I came to the Bay Area, I was on your site a lot, looking and clicking all the links and discovering all these amazing things. Steve Blank. Thank you so much for coming on the Super creativity podcast.
Steve Blank 34:31 Thanks for having me, James. This is fine. Great question.
James Taylor 34:33 You can subscribe to the Super Creativity Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts while you're there. Please leave us a review. I would really, really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor, and you've been listening to the super creativity podcast.