Latest / The Innovation Show / Jeff & Staney DeGraff — The Art of Change (DeGraff Trilogy Finale)

Transcript

Jeff & Staney DeGraff — The Art of Change (DeGraff Trilogy Finale) · The Innovation Show

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  this really became the cornerstone for a lot of the things that we're now
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  doing with really large corporations in the age of artificial intelligence
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  where, you know, where expertise is compressed and the real key is
• 0:14
  thinking through complexity and how do I manage in this environment
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  that's disaggregating very quickly.
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  So that's become a tone for that, how to do that.
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  But it really came out of this experience of how come these really
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  brilliant people who give their blood and treasure their life for the cause,
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  why are they having trouble with this?
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  if you wanna punish somebody, don't punish them for doing the wrong thing.
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  The worst thing is to punish them when they think they've done the right thing.
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  And that just cut to the very core of what it's like to be an innovator.
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  'cause that's what happens time and time again.
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  When y
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  When y
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  you start doing something really innovative, no one will notice.
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  He said, after that they'll tell you that, you're doing it wrong.
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  He said, after that, they'll call you unprofessional.
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  He said, in the end, they'll take credit for your work.
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  Before we start into the finale of the trilogy with the DeGraffs, I want
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  to thank our sponsor Kyndryl, who runs and reimagines the technology
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  With a unique blend of AI powered consulting, built on unmatched managed
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  service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness the power of technology for
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  And a lasting competitive edge.
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  You can find out more about KYNDRYL and the KYNDRYL Institute at KYNDRYL.
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  Don't forget, if you sign up to the Innovation Show Substack, you can
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  win a copy of the creative mindset.
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  But let's get stuck into this book.
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  The Art of Change.
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  Change efforts rarely fail because of poor strategy or execution, but because
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  leaders are using the wrong mindset, they treat change as a project to be
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  managed with fixed goals, linear plans, and measurable outcomes when change is
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  actually a dynamic paradoxical process that resists that logic entirely.
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  Our guests argue that organizations are structurally designed to
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  resist change because they exist to eliminate variance and deviance.
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  Change makers.
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  Therefore collide with the system by definition and often get
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  pushed out even when they succeed.
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  It is a pleasure to welcome back for the finale of our DeGraff trilogy,
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  the authors of the Art of Change.
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  Today's book and the others are there behind me, Jeff and Staney DeGraff
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  . You're very welcome back to the show.
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  Thanks for having us back.
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  Thank you.
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  It's great to have you guys back I thought we'd start a little bit
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  different because we've come to the finale of our trilogy and.
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  I have the distinct gift here, and I mean a gift from the universe of
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  reading the books in sequence, kind of like as you'd written them, except
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  this compressed week after week.
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  So I've seen how the books have, have compounded on the knowledge that
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  you've collected during the years.
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  I've seen little bits of sprinkles of earlier books appear again.
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  But Jeff, I thought I'd come to you.
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  first about this, because this book is a little bit different and it reflects
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  the learning you've had and the amount of clients you've worked with in the meantime
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  since you started your very first book.
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  Yeah, so the whole idea of this was the books were written as a trilogy.
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  And this book was written that really came out of a bunch of discussions
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  with sort of two groups of people.
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  Number one, when I got together with these great thought leaders that I
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  kind of came up under CK Prahalad Karl Weick and Bob Quinn and Kim
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  Cameron, and all these brilliant guys, we never talked about successes.
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  We talked about our failures, and we talked about them
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  as learning opportunities.
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  What did we learn?
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  And these were the kind of projects that people read about, the United Nations
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  or the military or , apple or Google or whatever companies are reading about.
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  second thing was we were working on a project at the
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  very highest level the military.
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  And not just the US military, but militaries around the world.
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  And what occurred to us was these are some of the brightest, most committed people.
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  We love these people, but when it came to.
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  Highly ambiguous situations, paradoxical situations, their ability to adapt,
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  their ability to think in very different ways was highly constrained.
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  And it's because they'd been trained differently.
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  And we noticed that, giving them all these lenses, et cetera, wasn't really landing.
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  What really landed talking about my own failures of saying, okay, here's
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  what happened when I went to this biotech and it completely failed, and
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  we figured some stuff out eventually.
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  And then it became this very famous company.
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  So the book is about that.
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  The book is kind of being vulnerable and almost like a parable and saying, and at
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  the end of this, the moral of the story is this is how you think about this.
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  So it really connects the idea of change.
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  To the idea of adaptability to the idea of learning.
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  These are learning opportunities.
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  And this really became the cornerstone for a lot of the things that we're now
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  doing with really large corporations in the age of artificial intelligence
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  where, you know, where expertise is compressed and the real key is
• 5:34
  thinking through complexity and how do I manage in this environment
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  that's disaggregating very quickly.
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  So that's become a tone for that, how to do that.
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  But it really came out of this experience of how come these really brilliant people
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  who give their blood and treasure their life for their, for the cause, how,
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  why are they having trouble with this?
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  I just wanna remind our audience, I have a copy 'cause you're probably wondering
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  why is there's four books up there.
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  I have a copy of the Change Mindset up there.
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  For those of you who sign up to our substack as Well, I've already picked
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  a winner for part one and part two.
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  This is part three.
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  So there's one more chance, one more bite at the cherry before we finish.
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  But this book is The Art of Change, and at the heart of the book is
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  two core things to understand.
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  One is paradox and the other is, the word mindset itself.
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  I thought we'd get them outta the way first.
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  Your definitions of what they mean because they're core to understanding this book.
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  paradox is I think relatively easy, meaning that two ideas
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  that seem to be antithetical and they appear at the same time.
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  Remember, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the guy wrote the great Gatsby, said
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  The definition of genius is being able to hold two oppositional ideas
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  in your mind at the same time.
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  That's what a paradox is.
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  And I would expand the concept of a paradox a little bit to say incongruities,
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  high degrees of ambiguity, right?
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  Things that are nonsensical when you first encounter them, right?
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  And then the idea of mindset is whatever we're calling cognition and inquiry.
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  your mind makes inquiry, your cognition, if you're neurobiologist,
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  you know, your neocortex, right?
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  Whatever your list, whatever your listeners believe about
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  mind, how it makes inquiry.
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  And, the whole idea of this is it makes it, we're taught patterns and patterns
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  are really important because the world would be very complicated they, or
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  nominal if we didn't think of patterns.
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  But the notion is some of those patterns become so rigid.
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  When we're seeing something, we're not, uh, we simply try and
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  destroy it with that pattern.
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  And so there's a whole part to this that I think is another word, which
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  is meaning making or sensemaking.
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  There's a key idea here, you know, what are we looking at?
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  What does it mean?
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  And I know Staney has a lot of experience.
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  This, she was a graduate student
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  I didn't realize that.
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  Yeah.
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  'cause Karl Weick is the sensemaking guy really, isn't he?
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  He brought it to prominence.
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  Staney's nodding away there.
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  I was thinking about this, Staney.
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  You know, I, I wrote an article recently and I called it being
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  punished for doing the Right Thing.
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  And my wife actually said to me, it was that about me because I was, I just, for
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  those who may not have called part one and part two, Jeff and Staney are married and
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  they're in separate places at the moment because Jeff is in the university and
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  Staney's in the office, runs the office.
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  But the point of this article is very relevant for this book
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  and, in particularly the opening about this guy, Luis, because.
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  I was writing about those innovators and often so many innovators go
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  out on a limb, they're deviant, they go against the paradigm of the
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  organization, they go against the rules and they have a breakthrough
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  and then they're punished for that.
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  And I cannot find for the life of me where I heard this, but I believe
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  it was some, and I may have just imagined this, I thought it was
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  somebody, like Nietzsche, who said, if you wanna punish somebody, don't
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  punish them for doing the wrong thing.
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  The worst thing is to punish them when they think they've done the right thing.
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  And that just cut to the very core of what it's like to be an innovator.
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  'cause that's what happens time and time again.
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  When y
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  And I thought we'd open and maybe close the entire day
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  today with the story of Luis.
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  'cause it comes full circle at the end of the book.
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  I have a sign in my office that said organizations love innovation
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  but hate their innovators.
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  And, it really came from a conversation when I was a very
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  young man with Jonah Salk.
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  Probably the greatest, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.
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  He really let me know what was gonna happen.
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  And he famously said to me, you start doing something really
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  innovative, no one will notice.
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  He said, after that they'll tell you that, you're doing it wrong.
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  He said, after that, they'll call you unprofessional.
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  He said, in the end, they'll take credit for your work.
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  Right?
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  No truer words have ever been said, That's been Staney in my experience throughout
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  our career, and this is important for people to know, if you're on the
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  path to be a real innovator, and I'm talking about writing about innovation.
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  Remember, we've been in half the Fortune 500 companies.
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  I mean, we're kind of the, I dunno where, you know, whether, whether we're
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  the Indiana Joneses or the, or the, or the forest Gumps of this field.
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  But the notions we're practitioners we're academics, right?
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  So we write about things, but that we also build a lot of things.
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  And this is, these are the table stakes.
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  So the book starts with the story of Luis, and we got brought in to look at how to
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  accelerate the transfers from radical new technologies into the military.
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  And, Luis was the guy who did it.
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  And what happened was, they completely sat on the project, as you.
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  would've expect, the bureaucracy took over, nothing happened.
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  And this was only about two months before COVID hit COVID hits.
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  And, you remember all the world governments sort of
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  completely, fumbled the ball.
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  They don't know what to do.
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  There are these two or three different models, none of 'em are very good.
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  around, April, the United States government decides to create something
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  called operational warp speed.
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  is now we're gonna put some real muscle behind this.
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  And.
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  this thing that Luis worked on, which became called Rapid X, was
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  actually co-opted to, uh, to, so to expedite the process of the vaccine.
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  So not so much to develop the vaccine, but how to get billions of vials and billions
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  of needles and cold chain storage.
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  And how do we get this into people so that we're, we, , we survive this.
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  And, , he did just a brilliant job and a very unassuming man behind the scenes.
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  Lots of stuff, bringing the right people in, all the stuff.
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  We've talked on previous ones.
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  And then when it was over had victory, you know, a hundred, remember the
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  object was a hundred million vaccines and a hundred, and we did it.
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  Yay us.
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  You know, Louis certainly was one of the key people for this.
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  It came time for him to be promoted and they passed him over.
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  Right, and, and we've seen this, Staney and I have seen this time
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  and time and time again, right?
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  So the notion was, that's why I wanted to start the book is to say even getting
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  it right doesn't mean you'll succeed.
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  what happened was that then other people started taking credits and they
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  posted and things and say, well, I was the leader of this and or whatever.
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  I created this and we were like, we were there when Luis was getting it off the
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  ground, and we knew the people who were around him and who work with him and
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  no, these other people who claim the credit,were, were nowhere to be found!
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  It's just ridiculous.
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  Even a couple of very popular books that had been on the New
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  York Times bestseller list.
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  You know, we were there.
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  what they're reporting is a reporting of reporting, and they're incorrect.
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  This is really important to note.
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  These are very established writers who would swear that these are correct.
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  They didn't talk to the right people.
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  Right?
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  The whole idea of Luis and this.
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  Particular part of the military, which became the background.
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  And again, Staney and I were part of all this in a, in a
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  only in the supply chain way.
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  And only because we had developed this for technology, we did, we did not
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  develop this for the COVID vaccine.
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  it's a perfect example of how great technologies also
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  get co-opted great processes.
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  And remember we talked about this in a previous one.
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  Innovations and changes do not move from the inside out.
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  They move from the outside in.
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  And what happens is the farther you move to the center, the
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  more ideas become co-opted.
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  Right?
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  And I'm not saying this is a bad thing, you know, watch the movie Oppenheimer.
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  It's a perfect example.
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  Robert Oppenheimer is not quite a, Nobel prize winning quality thinker,
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  but he knows all the people and he's a key leader in these ideas.
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  He brings, brings everybody together.
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  He's really smart.
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  But the part of the movie which people get really upset is
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  when they take his clearances.
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  I'm not sure if I was in that boat, I wouldn't have taken his clearances
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  because the people who invent things or build things at some point have
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  to hand off to the people who are gonna run them or manage them.
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  The problem in the first chapter of the book we talk about, Luis, isn't
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  that it should have been handed off.
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  It's that they basically said, we invented this when all they really
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  needed to do was tip their cap to Luis.
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  I've seen that time and time it's happened, me and I think that's the thing.
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  It's happened most change makers when they've had a success and I talked about
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  it in a previous episode, one of the hard things I found, my ego found hard.
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  And it depends on the organization you you're in.
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  And if they tip the hat towards you, that's a key thing just to be the
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  recognition that you went through so many difficulties to get this over the line.
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  And in some cases, the very people who are the biggest blockers are up.
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  Doing the keynote, doing the presentation saying, this is what I
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  and my team did, and you're going, you, you, you were the biggest blocker.
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  There's no way around that though.
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  What I want your, listeners to understand, these are table stakes.
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  This if, you know, if you're gonna be an innovator, a real innovator,
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  not innovation theater, none of this, you know, I mean, you're
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  a builder, you're a builder.
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  a real innovator, expect this.
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  And if you wanna be loved, get a dog.
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  Right?
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  I mean.
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  it's really that simple.
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  You innovate because it's in your soul.
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  It's, it's, you're, you're internally motivated to do it.
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  It's so difficult though, I have to say to you, I struggled so hard
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  in the early days, particularly 'cause it was early in my career.
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  And you wanted some wins and you wanted some recognition so you
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  could move up in the organization.
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  This line in particular, I pulled a line that I think will cut deep, sorry
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  about this, for open up any wounds for those people listening, perhaps you're
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  a change maker, driven by profound dissatisfaction with the status quo.
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  You come across as negative, but in reality, you harbor a very positive
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  belief that things can be better.
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  You have good ideas on how to transform your organization, but
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  you have trouble selling them and even bigger challenges trying to
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  get them implemented effectively.
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  I think that in a nutshell is such a common issue for so many change makers.
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  And as you say, instead of being considered a gainsayer,
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  you're considered a naysayer.
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  Or you pipe up in a meeting and you can visibly see people going, oh,
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  not him again, not the black hat guy.
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  Once again, that's another problem.
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  Let's call that out.
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  I know we haven't even got into the book yet, but.
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  These are things that you just see crop up time and time again,
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  and it can make the change maker feel ostracized, bullied, gaslit.
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  Yeah, I wanna add to that, people, I'm one of the original people here
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  at the University of Michigan that created this Center for Positive
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  Organizational Scholarship, which is a very important thing.
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  But one of the real early things that I wanted to make very clear
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  was positive, doesn't mean happy.
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  It means a sense of destiny.
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  It means a sense of positive that I can get to some place
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  that no one's gotten before.
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  It's not the same as happy, happy, happy, happy, right?
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  If you want to, the difference between happiness and meaning,
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  happiness and impact, what we're working for is meaningfulness in life.
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  My opinion and what we're working for is impact.
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  Did we make a difference being here?
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  Right.
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  So, so I think what you're talking about is I think great change makers, like great
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  innovators, have a deep sense of destiny.
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  there's a, a really interesting thing I observed, and it's probably
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  'cause you quote so many of these people, but actually you knew all
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  these people like, , Bob Quinn.
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  And, , Kim Cameron and Mintzberg.
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  We had Henry Mintzberg on the show, by the way, he's still thriving up in Canada,
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  talking about this idea of deliberate versus emergent strategy, et cetera.
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  But I, I think this part that you call out, because you saw it firsthand, both
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  of you saw it as scholars, as academics.
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  You saw what had happened inside the field, and you said, traditionally,
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  change management has often been treated as an offshoot of project management.
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  Leaders establish fixed targets and employ streamline processes
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  to reach those objectives.
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  However, true mastery of change requires a different approach.
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  One that prioritizes time as a critical factor given the inherently ambiguous
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  and ever evolving nature of crises.
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  I thought we'd speak to that because that was a key point for me to
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  share to our audience that they may have missed that because that.
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  That means that, you know, it's like the Planck principle that science doesn't
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  advance because somebody has a great idea.
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  It advances one funeral at a time, and the old, old way of doing things is
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  kind of died out and people realize this is the new way and therefore we
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  get into that new paradigm as a result.
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  I don't wanna get too esoteric here, but most of management theory is
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  based on the concept of structure and, change and innovation is based
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  on the concept of time or process, what we call process philosophy.
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  That there are states in which we're in, right, it's like a child developing.
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  So we think in terms of cycles, we think in terms of states.
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  current state, you know, desired state, version one, version two, version three.
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  Think about thin versions and thick versions that innovators talk about.
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  So there's this real strong component of time, uh, that, that underlies everything.
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  And that's the kind of the key that led to this whole idea of the paradox mindset,
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  the paradox, mind cycle, you know?
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  One of the things that Staney and I both do, and I do this with
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  students, and at the beginning of classes at Michigan, particularly
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  the MBAs, it drives 'em bananas.
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  'cause this is, they wanna have the right answers.
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  And the first slide I show them is the age of answers is over.
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  You know, we have artificial intelligence, you know, it's like GPS or Bluetooth.
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  If you want an answer, press a button and you'll get it.
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  The issues, you can't, what you can't do is you can't mobilize or manifest that
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  idea into the world by pressing a button.
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  So the first thing we do is we start with a story.
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  So, for example, I would show a story of.
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  Young people and young people are hooking up more than anybody.
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  You gotta talk to young people the way they do.
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  They're hooking up more the story, new story.
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  They're hooking up more than any other generation.
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  And then somewhere along the lines, somebody to just make this weird
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  comment about, on the story about, it's the loneliest generation we've ever
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  seen, including widows and widowers.
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  So we've never seen this in our studies.
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  you start out by saying, okay, we watch the video.
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  Where's the paradox?
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  And so they start finding paradoxes, right?
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  So they're thinking in real time.
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  They're stirring in real time.
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  They're making it up as they go along.
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  Then the second question is, me what it means.
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  Now, this is really important because half the time people solve the wrong problem.
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  That's difference between project management and change in
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  innovation, the problem is it fixed.
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  If X marks the spot in the age of artificial intelligence,
• 21:08
  press a button and you'll get it.
• 21:10
  mathematics, right?
• 21:11
  It's not morality, it's mathematics.
• 21:13
  So to me, the hardest part, and this comes back to Staney's, an expert
• 21:17
  on this, is what does this mean?
• 21:20
  And you're not allowed to answer it.
• 21:21
  You're not allowed to say it means this.
• 21:23
  What you have to do is come up with a whole list of things that this could mean.
• 21:26
  So you're basically thinking around the problem and I'm
• 21:28
  forcing you into plasticity.
• 21:31
  I'm forcing you to be, , an adaptive thinker.
• 21:34
  we'd say, okay, what are the guiding principles then that
• 21:38
  we can derive from this?
• 21:39
  What can we learn from this?
• 21:40
  Which is much more like philosophy, but it's not philosophy in a rigid
• 21:44
  way where I start with a model.
• 21:46
  It's, we're gonna make a model.
• 21:49
  We're gonna make a model that might work or might not work.
• 21:51
  It's a work in progress.
• 21:52
  See that time element again, it's a work in progress.
• 21:56
  And then the next part, which is right outta Karl Weick's playbook.
• 21:59
  What are the small experiments?
• 22:01
  How are we gonna hedge.
• 22:03
  How are we gonna run a bunch of small experiments, not looking for confirming
• 22:07
  feedback, but disconfirming feedback, looking for where we're wrong right now.
• 22:12
  This is a, there's an implicit humility into this of saying,
• 22:17
  assuming that, I don't know, some things that I need to know.
• 22:21
  And and a lot of this stuff came from our work with biotechs and, you know,
• 22:25
  radical, kind of new technologies.
• 22:27
  The kind of thing you'd maybe see come on our DARPA or you
• 22:30
  know, in Europe, DIANA right?
• 22:32
  The notion is if you are really in that mood, there aren't any clear answers.
• 22:38
  And the key step to all of it is what does this mean?
• 22:42
  Which is a learning step.
• 22:43
  and we see this a lot of, the projects that we've worked with,
• 22:48
  the most difficult part is to get people to understand that everything.
• 22:55
  Everything can change.
• 22:57
  It's not just one thing or two things or whatever.
• 23:01
  So when you're a change maker, you make a plan, right?
• 23:05
  The plan itself can change, right?
• 23:07
  I mean, the goal of the plan might change.
• 23:10
  We might not wanna do A, you wanna actually wanna do B. The time
• 23:14
  itself much, everything must change.
• 23:17
  And I think lot of people just kind of think you can make a plan from
• 23:22
  A to B, and then you can just kind of figure out a way to get there.
• 23:27
  And that way might change, but it isn't just that.
• 23:31
  I mean, destination might change.
• 23:33
  I think readers of this book, there seems to be, I'm getting feedback
• 23:37
  from a lot of different people.
• 23:38
  There seems to be kind of the more general readership and then the people
• 23:42
  who are really, really insightful of this.
• 23:44
  I'm getting a lot of emails from them.
• 23:46
  What this book is saying is that the paradox is not part of change.
• 23:50
  It is the change.
• 23:52
  The central thesis of the book is that what change basically
• 23:56
  is about is not resolving the paradoxes, but diving into them.
• 24:01
  And the, the notion is a lot of what we, we do for change goes
• 24:06
  all the way around these paradoxes and we never get change from them.
• 24:10
  Right?
• 24:11
  And it, and it doesn't mean that these paradoxes are gonna be resolved.
• 24:14
  This is the process piece.
• 24:15
  The notion is these paradoxes occur, they occur in antiquity,
• 24:20
  they'll occur in the future.
• 24:21
  They're just common paradoxes.
• 24:24
  But you have to work through, , those paradoxes which are unresolved to come
• 24:28
  up with experiments that at least move you forward on trying to make the change.
• 24:32
  that positive change that you're trying to make happen.
• 24:34
  Let's bring it to life with a, there's multiple episodes.
• 24:38
  Episodes in the book of experiencing this, but one that many people might relate
• 24:44
  to, which is a married couple, Aaron and Olive, and an all too familiar tale.
• 24:49
  I'm gonna let Staney take that.
• 24:51
  Go ahead, olive.
• 24:52
  Go ahead, olive.
• 24:54
  that, one, is a, actually, it's, it's um, it's more of the easier ones that
• 25:01
  is, you can actually kind of solve that.
• 25:04
  Right?
• 25:05
  mean, you know, two people have two different goals and then so, and because
• 25:10
  they have two different views of how to.
• 25:13
  You know, in this case, finances, right?
• 25:15
  Staney, can I add a bit of context just to give the background here?
• 25:18
  So Olive and Aaron.
• 25:19
  Aaron, I think is the more, he comes from a background where finances are tight, so
• 25:26
  everything needs to clear the debt, don't borrow too much, et cetera, while Olive
• 25:31
  comes from a more wealthy background.
• 25:33
  And I may have them the wrong way around, but olive's like more, let's invest,
• 25:38
  let's put it in high risk investments.
• 25:40
  'cause there's bigger return from that.
• 25:41
  So that's the setup because I think that's an important thing just to call
• 25:44
  out that it's that and also we talked about this before, the embracing of the
• 25:49
  difference is where the beauty comes from.
• 25:52
  And we talked about this with the innovation code, that there, there's
• 25:55
  beauty in that diversity that neurodiversity if you harness it
• 25:59
  like you're gonna tell us about here.
• 26:01
  Yeah, so in that example, you're right.
• 26:04
  So, , Aaron's is a lot more conservative in terms of what you do with the money.
• 26:08
  And Olive, knows that in order for you to make money, you actually
• 26:12
  have to invest more, right?
• 26:14
  And I think it's just kind of shows there are ways.
• 26:18
  In the middle on how to do things that can combine both interests and
• 26:23
  so forth, because both thing is true.
• 26:26
  , the point of the story is kind of two parts to it.
• 26:27
  Number one, not about compromise.
• 26:30
  The first part of the story is we're constantly rebalancing
• 26:32
  our portfolio life constantly.
• 26:35
  What worked for you?
• 26:36
  Imagine if you got everything you wanted the day you graduated from
• 26:38
  high school, you'd be disaster.
• 26:40
  Right?
• 26:40
  So we're constantly rebalancing our lives and these dynamics change that,
• 26:45
  and they're changed often from not just personal aspirations, but from outside.
• 26:49
  There's a recession, there's a war, something happens to, right?
• 26:52
  So on and so forth.
• 26:53
  But the second part of this was that it wasn't just rebalancing,
• 26:56
  it was finding hybrids.
• 26:58
  It was finding things that met both criteria so that got the
• 27:02
  benefit of both pieces, not just, and so it's not a compromise.
• 27:06
  It's trying to find something that's beneficial.
• 27:08
  Right.
• 27:09
  I think the key part of the thing that we're talking about is that the
• 27:12
  change changes with the change, right?
• 27:14
  Which is part of what we talked about originally with Luis.
• 27:18
  The whole use of this technology that where this process we developed
• 27:22
  changed because something changed.
• 27:25
  You know, and there's a ton of examples historically.
• 27:27
  You know, think about, uh, Alexander Fleming, what he's trying to do at Oxford,
• 27:32
  and he's, he's trying to solve certain types of things and a, a mold of falls
• 27:37
  on his Petri dish while he's on vacation.
• 27:39
  The next thing you realize is it's killing, bacteria.
• 27:42
  And we have, penicillin.
• 27:44
  And so now it's going in a different direction.
• 27:46
  And this is very common.
• 27:48
  And so again, the difference in project management would we say, well,
• 27:52
  no, we're trying to accomplish this and there's gotta be a part to this
• 27:56
  where somebody goes, wait a minute.
• 27:57
  There's something else going on here and I need to be adaptive at that point.
• 28:02
  And course correct.
• 28:02
  There's something that's maybe more valuable outta this.
• 28:05
  And of course we could give hundreds of examples of this, but to, to
• 28:09
  Staney's point, this happens at both the level of just individuals.
• 28:13
  And it happens at higher levels.
• 28:15
  We try and minimize conflict, but change is created by conflict.
• 28:19
  , If you really wanna see an organization that's not it's not gonna change,
• 28:24
  not gonna invent anything, what you really wanna look for is
• 28:27
  a lot of alignment and apathy.
• 28:29
  Everyone's happy.
• 28:30
  Right?
• 28:31
  And I give an example in the book of coming to a one, one of the largest
• 28:35
  organizations in the world, and going in the elevator and listening
• 28:38
  to Led Zeppelin, Muzak, and seeing jw pa, you know, Turner paintings
• 28:42
  on the wall and everyone was nice and it was great and whatever.
• 28:47
  And you just, and you know, then you become the black hat
• 28:51
  guy of going, you brought me in here to make innovation happen.
• 28:54
  You guys are way too compl.
• 28:56
  You know, you're way too, calm.
• 29:00
  is way too aligned and apathetic for anything to grow here.
• 29:04
  You know, and you really have to work what are the issues here?
• 29:08
  And you have to pull them out.
• 29:09
  And then finally, it's like functional versus dysfunctional families.
• 29:14
  families never have the argument.
• 29:15
  And then there's divorce, right?
• 29:17
  And dysfunctional families are having the argument in a dysfunctional way.
• 29:20
  And then there's divorce , everybody who's ever been married for a long time
• 29:25
  knows there's going to be a dust up, There's gonna be some chippiness, right?
• 29:31
  Whatever you wanna call it, in whatever part of the world you're at.
• 29:33
  But within boundaries within that, we're trying to do the same thing.
• 29:36
  We're trying to get ahead.
• 29:38
  So those, I think that becomes really kind of the key to this is,
• 29:42
  are we, do we have enough generative energy to get to the next place?
• 29:48
  It's such an important thing.
• 29:49
  Jeff, I was thinking before when I was reading the book, the first book, the
• 29:53
  Innovation Code, and by the way, it's not the first book of what you've written.
• 29:57
  It's the first of the trilogy.
• 29:58
  I just want to tell our audience that there are other
• 30:00
  books that we didn't cover.
• 30:02
  But I was thinking about my son.
• 30:03
  So my son had this horrific teacher.
• 30:06
  She was terrible his first teacher and she had this rule, the Irish, we speak
• 30:11
  Gaelic we're taught Gaelic Gaeilge it's called Irish language here, and
• 30:16
  white spots is spotai bana right?
• 30:19
  And she say, she would say, you're not allowed to have any spotai bana.
• 30:23
  So when they were coloring in, they weren't allowed to leave white
• 30:27
  spots and she must have given out to them or scared them in some way.
• 30:31
  Fast forward to, I'm coloring with him.
• 30:33
  He is only, you know, he's four or five and he's done, you color mine
• 30:37
  for me, he was scared to color in, in case he left the white spots.
• 30:41
  Right?
• 30:42
  So I was thinking about this like, firstly.
• 30:45
  That teacher, I was angry with her, but apart from that, I was thinking
• 30:51
  about, well, sometimes , you start the lens or the paradigm for that
• 30:55
  person, even in childhood like that, that don't make mistakes.
• 30:58
  Or like you said in another time when inevitably you have an
• 31:02
  argument at home with your partner or your wife or whoever I had.
• 31:06
  Anytime I do, I say to the boys, my two sons, I say, you know, it's
• 31:09
  normal to fight, otherwise you just hold it up and then something
• 31:13
  worse happens down the line.
• 31:14
  And I want them to know that conflict is important because
• 31:18
  you disagree on something.
• 31:19
  And I'll tell them about the point of disagreement.
• 31:22
  And then last part on this, I sometimes brought into organizations, I run a
• 31:28
  program called Communicate to Innovate.
• 31:31
  And I am, I'm talking to this team and I'm brought in specifically because people
• 31:36
  won't call out the elephant in the room.
• 31:40
  In the room, but they'll talk about each other behind their backs, right?
• 31:44
  And not purposefully.
• 31:46
  I le my fly is down for the first hour.
• 31:50
  I'm, my zipper's down, I'm flying low.
• 31:54
  No one says it to me.
• 31:55
  And then, and now passes.
• 31:57
  And a guy kind of says, we're having a coffee break.
• 32:00
  And he says, Hey man, I dunno if this is part of your gig
• 32:03
  here, man, your fly is down.
• 32:05
  And then I was like, why did none of you say it to me?
• 32:08
  They're like, oh, we weren't sure.
• 32:09
  We didn't wanna upset you.
• 32:10
  And I was like, going, that's the point here.
• 32:12
  You should have told me straight away.
• 32:14
  But I wanted to then bring it to the book.
• 32:16
  Because leaning into that, and if you don't lean into it and also
• 32:21
  if you don't have the culture that allows for it, you miss things.
• 32:24
  And a great example you give in the book.
• 32:27
  And I learned about this only recently looking at Nokia.
• 32:31
  I know you're the Nokia scholar.
• 32:33
  Was Timo Partenen a guy who teaches up in Adelphi University?
• 32:37
  I mentioned him before.
• 32:38
  He told me that Nokia had this music service where you could
• 32:42
  actually get free music for Nokia.
• 32:44
  And the whole idea, it was like, think about it, 20 years before
• 32:47
  Spotify, they had Spotify.
• 32:49
  You downloaded the music, you had unlimited music amounts to download, but
• 32:54
  nobody saw that this actually could be a different service that they could sell.
• 33:00
  Instead, they used it to do what they always do to sell more phones.
• 33:03
  And it came to mind when I read about your work with the car manufacturer, when they
• 33:09
  had this beautiful concept , sitting right in front of them of mobility and because
• 33:14
  of the deliberate strategy, 'cause they're aiming for that strategy, they missed
• 33:18
  the emergent right under their nose.
• 33:20
  Maybe you'll share this one.
• 33:22
  Well, I don't wanna say what the car manufacturer is, I'm still on good
• 33:25
  terms with them, but I used to be part of, running the board meetings
• 33:30
  and I'd fly to Europe to do it.
• 33:31
  Right.
• 33:32
  And um board meeting we were looking at.
• 33:37
  Growth and profitability.
• 33:38
  And they, they amazing engineers.
• 33:40
  I just cannot say enough good.
• 33:42
  I mean, really amazing people.
• 33:46
  And, um, they ran a project in London and they ran a project in,
• 33:50
  in Germany the projects had to do with ride sharing and they were
• 33:55
  extremely successful and profitable.
• 33:58
  And so the question came up about, well, why aren't we thinking
• 34:01
  about transportation this way?
• 34:03
  then the issue became, well that will cut into sales, of this stuff.
• 34:09
  And I have a million of these around this kind of industry.
• 34:12
  I mean, if you think about where the electronic vehicle came
• 34:15
  from, it did not come from where most people think it came from.
• 34:18
  The electronic vehicle, you look it up, the EV one came
• 34:21
  from General Motors, right?
• 34:22
  19, uh, I think 89 90 early.
• 34:25
  Right.
• 34:26
  There's a ton of these where, you know, and they're famous.
• 34:29
  You know, Kodak got to digital, imaging first, and Blockbuster got to streaming.
• 34:33
  I know that 'cause I worked.
• 34:35
  on Hulu, which, you know, got there first, right?
• 34:37
  For, for a, for a, a friends, a General Electric.
• 34:41
  So there's a ton of these where somebody gets it, but because
• 34:45
  it doesn't fit their model.
• 34:46
  And the most prominent example here in the United States is Sears.
• 34:50
  And people tell the Sears stories all wrong.
• 34:52
  Remember, think about this for just a minute.
• 34:55
  If your listeners are willing to do this, think about how
• 34:58
  the digital economy started.
• 35:00
  You know, so Sears, uh, you know, Sears had all state.
• 35:05
  Which began buKyndryling.
• 35:06
  It had Coldwell Banker, you know, uh, real estate.
• 35:10
  It had, uh, hit everything.
• 35:13
  It created the digital economy.
• 35:15
  People forget this and you should look it up.
• 35:16
  I wrote an article on Big Think around this, right?
• 35:19
  No Ink Magazine.
• 35:19
  I wrote, freak think But the point is, um, they had all the
• 35:23
  pieces and it's the wrong story.
• 35:24
  People get it wrong.
• 35:25
  Sears missed.
• 35:26
  They didn't miss anything.
• 35:27
  The problem was they tried to fit it all into their store, right?
• 35:30
  And that's the problem that this book is really trying to address, is saying, a lot
• 35:36
  of times this is not an issue of working harder or doing something new or better.
• 35:41
  It's an issue of looking at this differently.
• 35:44
  Remember, this car company had done this already.
• 35:48
  The only issue was they, didn't recognize that they had discovered
• 35:53
  the future it really cost them.
• 35:56
  There's so many cases of that, Jeff though, right?
• 35:59
  And I I was thinking about the, the character you call out in there, I'm
• 36:03
  sure he is anonymized, but you call it the guy who was leading that project and
• 36:07
  he could see there was something in it.
• 36:10
  But going back to a Luis type character, he presents that in his career suicide.
• 36:15
  You know, one of somebody told me recently that CIO, chief Innovation
• 36:19
  Officer actually stands for career is over as soon as you take the job.
• 36:24
  And, and that's not funny because actually it is the case in so
• 36:27
  many, , organizations, particularly if you choose the future.
• 36:32
  And I was me, I met, I was telling you before I met with two, , of the
• 36:35
  innovation community here in Ireland.
• 36:37
  Hello, Karen and Anne-Marie.
• 36:39
  I'll say hello to them because I, I told 'em specifically to listen to this series,
• 36:43
  but we were talking about two things.
• 36:44
  One was what you said that, and you talk about this in the book and , the
• 36:49
  science and the neuroscience behind this, that if you learn something
• 36:52
  and you don't immediately apply it, just like any habit, it will fade.
• 36:56
  'cause it's habit change.
• 36:58
  And I think that's what's really nice that you do in the book and why you
• 37:01
  structure the book the way you do.
• 37:03
  It actually should be read much slower than I read it because I read it
• 37:07
  for the purpose of this interview.
• 37:09
  But if you read it and you put it into practice, it's kind of like,
• 37:14
  you know, I give you a great example.
• 37:16
  Physio.
• 37:16
  You go to the physio, the physio goes, you need to do this rehab.
• 37:19
  And you don't do it that day or the next day you forget it
• 37:22
  and you're like looking up.
• 37:24
  Now you have YouTube luckily, but you, it fades and you don't ever do it properly.
• 37:28
  And we see this so many times with change theater that you call out in
• 37:33
  the book, that you have a big event, you're brought in the change, the
• 37:37
  speaker's brought in, you, me, whoever is brought in as the keynote speaker.
• 37:41
  You can spot it a mile away.
• 37:43
  There's a big event.
• 37:44
  There's loads of energy for like a day or two, and then it fades and
• 37:47
  everybody goes back to business as usual.
• 37:50
  And what I like about you doing the book is you encourage people to get it
• 37:54
  straight to practice, do something small experiments, like you said, et cetera.
• 37:59
  I think we, we should probably call that out because it's a
• 38:01
  core part of the whole concept.
• 38:04
  I just brought in the other day to, two governments are trying to make a deal.
• 38:10
  I'll leave it at that.
• 38:12
  this is a pretty high stakes kind of conversation and the first
• 38:16
  question I asked was when they start trying to put together these
• 38:19
  groups that are gonna innovate across boundaries, borders, right?
• 38:25
  Was who's actually built something here, who's got a lot of experience with this?
• 38:31
  the challenge was there were people who had a lot of experience, but they were
• 38:35
  the junior people and there were a lot of senior people who were administrators.
• 38:40
  Administrators are fine.
• 38:41
  We need administrators.
• 38:42
  But my point to the administrators was, you don't have this experience, you have
• 38:47
  to be, a guardian, a enabler, helper those people, stop telling them what to
• 38:53
  do because you don't know what to do.
• 38:56
  I see this universities do this all the time.
• 38:58
  Where the person gets appointed to be that person is not the
• 39:02
  innovator and they're not always pro innovation, which is very frustrating.
• 39:06
  I know when I get into these big organizations, I would say at least half
• 39:10
  the time, the person who's most threatened by me is the chief Innovation officer,
• 39:13
  even though I'm there to help them.
• 39:15
  If I am, you know, I'm not, I don't want your job.
• 39:19
  I don't, you know, I'm just here to help you get this right side up.
• 39:22
  the reason for that is of the, and again, I'm not saying this is everywhere,
• 39:26
  but what I find is that often becomes a position like somebody who couldn't
• 39:31
  make it as the chief operating officer.
• 39:33
  Right?
• 39:34
  It's often the also ran position, but it's also often a. Bureaucratic position.
• 39:40
  My opinion often under them are the real innovators, the people who are builders.
• 39:45
  I'll give you a great example.
• 39:46
  The, when I look at the military, the most amazing people
• 39:51
  I've met are tech sergeants.
• 39:53
  They have to be, a ton of stuff they gotta figure out in real time, and they're
• 39:57
  stunningly good all across the globe.
• 40:00
  All these different cultures, they have great tech sergeants, right?
• 40:04
  The issue is a lot of times the people above them have those same kind of
• 40:08
  dirt under the fingernails experiences.
• 40:10
  Remember, innovation and change is not something you can do on a
• 40:14
  blackboard or on a PowerPoint slide.
• 40:16
  You have to have gone through it.
• 40:17
  That's why this book is about stories.
• 40:20
  That's why this book is about parables and most of the stories
• 40:22
  in this book are about my failures.
• 40:25
  couldn't do this, and they don't all win.
• 40:27
  I love the story in the book where I talk about one of the largest
• 40:31
  organizations I got brought into.
• 40:34
  And I knew exactly what was wrong and I knew exactly how to fix it.
• 40:37
  And I was a jerk, right?
• 40:39
  Even though I knew what was wrong and I knew how to fix it, and I was brought
• 40:43
  in by the , top dog, you know, my view of this was, you guys aren't getting it.
• 40:49
  You're the slow group here.
• 40:51
  So the learning doesn't always be, and then we won.
• 40:53
  So the learning that one was, you know, it's very clear as I'm walking out
• 40:57
  the door, , I probably needed to be a different kind of person here, So it's
• 41:02
  not always, , that kind of abstract.
• 41:04
  Yeah.
• 41:05
  You know, on, on that, that idea of you have, you have skin, you
• 41:10
  have dirt under your fingernails.
• 41:11
  A great story.
• 41:12
  You, you probably know him, Gary Klein.
• 41:14
  I had him on the show recently, so you're nodding.
• 41:16
  So Gary told me this brilliant story about Napoleon, where there was a
• 41:21
  part of France Toulon that was, the enemy had taken Toulon and Toulon,
• 41:26
  had this core, it had resources.
• 41:28
  It was important, but.
• 41:31
  Napoleon worked as a, an artillery sergeant.
• 41:34
  So he had skin, he had dirt under his fingernails, and the, his commanding
• 41:38
  sergeant was attacking the, attacking the port to head on with cannons, et cetera.
• 41:45
  And Napoleon's staring over and he is going way all the attacking the port.
• 41:48
  All you have to do is take out that small little tower over there that's on a hill
• 41:52
  because they won't have any supplies.
• 41:54
  And uh, you know, it's like that thing of the, the caveman with the round.
• 41:59
  Somebody has a wheel and they, they're pushing along the square wheels.
• 42:02
  It's like, we're too busy.
• 42:03
  They're like, going shut up with your crazy ideas.
• 42:06
  'cause he was a junior sar uh, junior, um, officer.
• 42:10
  And eventually his boss gets fired.
• 42:12
  He takes out the, the hill and they capture Toulon.
• 42:16
  Again, core battle.
• 42:18
  But that thing you said, I just, I'd love to double click on
• 42:21
  that where you have knowledge.
• 42:25
  And your superior blocks you, or in many cases, gets rid of you from the
• 42:31
  organization because they see you as a threat because you know more than they do.
• 42:35
  A hundred percent happened to me and it's why I'm here doing the show
• 42:39
  in the organization where I started this innovation show where I worked
• 42:42
  for the national broadcaster, I essentially got fired by my boss.
• 42:46
  Now the organization's tried to save me, but I was like, I'm outta here.
• 42:49
  But it was because time and time again, and I You don't
• 42:53
  mean this, I didn't mean this.
• 42:55
  I would say stuff in a meeting where I was asked my opinion and my boss
• 42:59
  is gonna going like this, you know, head in her hand, kind like going, I
• 43:02
  should have been the one who said that.
• 43:04
  And I'm sure Staney's nodding there, you too have seen this.
• 43:08
  'cause you've worked with so many different organizations across
• 43:11
  the world, time and time again, and you see the moment as well and
• 43:15
  you glance over and you go, uh oh.
• 43:17
  I saw what happened there.
• 43:19
  Even though there was no words shared.
• 43:23
  I think it's all about the culture and what you you project, right?
• 43:29
  Within the boundaries and what's not, and what's cultivated.
• 43:33
  And, actually this is why I, I told Jeff, just don't go to faculty meeting anymore.
• 43:38
  Just don't, it's, it's not useful.
• 43:42
  just makes you angry because it just creates bad energy
• 43:45
  but it, but again, I mean, this is all about if the leaders of the organization
• 43:49
  make it clear they appreciate, you know, opinions and they appreciate great
• 43:56
  ideas, as long as, you know, people are respectful, I think it would be different.
• 44:01
  And it's difficult to do that.
• 44:03
  But, difficult as a leader to be mindful of this, right?
• 44:07
  Because you saying your boss's boss, should have seen, be able to seen it.
• 44:12
  But he has so many other responsibilities, even if he made it known that.
• 44:18
  know, he wants great ideas.
• 44:20
  It doesn't always happen.
• 44:22
  He can't see what everybody does.
• 44:24
  So part of, I think what's also difficult is a leader, you have to see,
• 44:30
  you have to be able to spot talent.
• 44:34
  And I think that's hard, I think that's the key.
• 44:38
  It's the people you are not looking for, you are not
• 44:42
  looking for a particular thing.
• 44:44
  To me, it's like you, if you find the right people, I think that's the key.
• 44:49
  When we go home to, Indonesia, to Staney's house where she was
• 44:52
  raised, I'd like to look through her elementary school reviews.
• 44:58
  I hope there's no white spots there.
• 44:59
  No white spots in our coloring.
• 45:01
  Staney's really smart.
• 45:02
  And the good news is of the class, all this in very
• 45:06
  competitive environment, right?
• 45:07
  All this stuff, but in every review, she's disruptive, right?
• 45:12
  And I just think that, to me, I love that part because if she wasn't disruptive,
• 45:16
  it would be she wouldn't do this.
• 45:19
  So what I find is that people who've kind of ascended to the part where
• 45:23
  they're kind of very successful innovators, they have long history of
• 45:27
  being reviewed as not, not disruptive in a negative way, but disruptive, right?
• 45:31
  And then people will use that word with it.
• 45:33
  So I wanna go back to your son, right?
• 45:35
  If your son would've had a different response to his teacher,
• 45:39
  he would've been delved, he would've been deemed, , disruptive.
• 45:43
  Now, here's the point.
• 45:45
  The point is, what happens with innovation is those people have been disruptive and
• 45:50
  if had gone through the failure cycle a lot, fired, been marginalized, whatever,
• 45:56
  when it comes time to, to go through the failure cycle, remember that's one
• 45:59
  of the things you, you know, we try to avoid failure, but there in innovation
• 46:02
  and change, there's no avoiding failure.
• 46:04
  You have to go through the failure cycle.
• 46:05
  We're more comfortable, we're more comfortable calling us dummy, or we got
• 46:09
  it wrong, or whatever you wanna call us.
• 46:11
  We're comfortable.
• 46:12
  'cause we've had, we've taken a, we've taken our beating, right?
• 46:16
  Whatever you wanna call it.
• 46:17
  it's, the people who have had effortless superiority that
• 46:21
  they, they, they completely fail.
• 46:24
  And one of the things I wanna say about the way we're raising our kids these
• 46:27
  days, uh, I'm very worried about it.
• 46:29
  I think there's two kinds of parenting.
• 46:31
  There's the, the don't do that, don't do that parent.
• 46:34
  And then there's like, my dad hurt, didn't it?
• 46:36
  Don't rub any, get on me a dumb ass.
• 46:38
  Right.
• 46:38
  The notion is you, the only time you say don't do that is if junior's
• 46:43
  gonna play on the freeway or he is something that's really dangerous.
• 46:46
  Right.
• 46:47
  But most of the time you have to let people go through, not major
• 46:52
  failures, but minor failures.
• 46:54
  Right.
• 46:54
  The, and I, one of the things I'm very thankful for is my mentors
• 46:59
  were very much take a whack at it.
• 47:01
  And they weren't all nice.
• 47:03
  say this to your listeners.
• 47:06
  They loved me in the way that maybe a coach would love you.
• 47:09
  I can, you can run faster, you can jump higher.
• 47:11
  You're stronger than that.
• 47:13
  I think I, I'd expect more out of you than that, but, so that doesn't, it
• 47:17
  doesn't mean that they didn't love me, it just means that were very
• 47:22
  much, you have to figure this out.
• 47:24
  You're gonna have a lot of fun staying up all night the next two nights,
• 47:27
  sorting this thing out, junior.
• 47:30
  So I think there's something about that.
• 47:32
  And one of the things that Stan's really been great, she kinda has
• 47:34
  this entourage of the end of atrium.
• 47:37
  She's had all of these kind of, I'm gonna call 'em disciples or whatever.
• 47:41
  They, she's attracted a lot of young, particularly young women
• 47:44
  who just thinks they wanna be her.
• 47:47
  But one of the things she lets them do is go through the failure
• 47:50
  cycle, not in a negative way.
• 47:52
  She'll say, here's a project, I'll see you next week about the project.
• 47:56
  And then, you know, and they're all looking for, is it all great?
• 47:58
  And it's like, a lot of it's good, but there's some things here
• 48:01
  that we need to, you know, and you didn't swim out far enough.
• 48:04
  You didn't try enough here.
• 48:05
  I think again, it's about knowing what the stakes are and where the boundaries right?
• 48:11
  there has to be a hard boundary on something.
• 48:13
  So for example, you can't go to the freeway.
• 48:16
  That's whatever it is, but everything else is totally fine.
• 48:22
  And I think we've mentioned this before too, is that actually, innovation and
• 48:27
  creativity actually works really well when there's very clear boundaries.
• 48:32
  And I think, as educator, for example, like your, your son's
• 48:35
  teacher, it's like what matters?
• 48:39
  I mean, does no white spot, does that actually matter in life, right?
• 48:43
  I mean, to me, of course not, but obviously for her it
• 48:47
  is, but it's all like that.
• 48:49
  I just, I would just remembering, actually when Jeff was talking, you
• 48:52
  know, children and I think because I come from the philosophy that actually
• 48:57
  children really need to find time to play, and that's how they learn.
• 49:03
  And you can't really structure all their days, that they have to be at school
• 49:07
  for eight hours and then they have and they have that, and they have that, and
• 49:12
  they have that all the way until they go to bed I don't think that's healthy
• 49:16
  because I think everybody needs to have unstructured time in which they can do
• 49:24
  something out of their curiosity that can, can do something for them that invokes
• 49:30
  some feelings to them and that may let them make me meanings in something.
• 49:35
  So with actually the fellows that I work with, I don't give
• 49:38
  them a lot of directions in terms of how to do something.
• 49:42
  I give them a job that is, your job is to do this.
• 49:46
  So the final goal is I want this organized.
• 49:50
  I don't actually care how you organize them.
• 49:52
  You just need to tell me.
• 49:54
  And if I don't agree with that, I will tell you, but I need you
• 49:58
  to come to me first and tell me how you're gonna organize it.
• 50:02
  I'm not gonna tell you how.
• 50:05
  And some people don't like that approach, obviously, right?
• 50:08
  Because . i can't show them how to do something because they have to
• 50:13
  go out and try to kind of figure out how to do it themselves.
• 50:17
  And that's hard.
• 50:19
  But unless you do that, you're not gonna be able to grow.
• 50:23
  I have a good example of this.
• 50:24
  The first innovatrium we built, we built across the street from the business
• 50:27
  school here, and we basically gave keys to the coolest people We knew
• 50:32
  professors and said, well, all you're gonna do is bring your young people here.
• 50:36
  We're not, we're not so interested new old guys, young people.
• 50:40
  And everything that happens here has to be, , about change,
• 50:43
  creativity, or innovation.
• 50:45
  And we want big things.
• 50:46
  We're not gonna work on little dinky things.
• 50:48
  We're gonna work on big things.
• 50:49
  And a lot of the student groups got formed there and it became
• 50:52
  very, we became the hotspot.
• 50:54
  Well, what happens is, you know, over time the university watches
• 50:57
  this for 10 years and it's not just this university, they all do this.
• 51:02
  they'll appoint, they'll build a big center somewhere and they'll
• 51:04
  appoint a person, have a nice big hat or something of the person
• 51:09
  and it'll be all very organized.
• 51:11
  But the stuff that, that the sort of, the more radical stuff stops
• 51:15
  happening and it stops happening because you're now don't do that.
• 51:22
  in the first group it was, this is your play space, it's your tree fort.
• 51:26
  You figure out what's gonna happen here.
• 51:28
  There's a few rules, you know, here's the legal rules and here's a
• 51:31
  couple of, you know, socially accept, you know, it's only a handful of
• 51:35
  things you're not allowed to do.
• 51:37
  Right.
• 51:38
  But the notion was organizations love to do is they build these things.
• 51:43
  So I was just recently part of this big think tanky thing about workplace
• 51:47
  design, and we're going through all the great things and workplace design,
• 51:50
  and I asked all these architects.
• 51:52
  Are you designing places for people to hide?
• 51:56
  And they said, what?
• 51:56
  And I said, places for people to hide.
• 51:59
  And they said, what do you mean places people hide?
• 52:01
  I said, in change, innovation doesn't start where everyone can see it.
• 52:04
  You have to hide.
• 52:06
  right now they're hiding in the coffee shop or the pub.
• 52:08
  They're hiding right now.
• 52:09
  And they're already, they're already talking trash and they're figuring out
• 52:13
  what the next, you know, the, the next revolution will be broadcast or whatever.
• 52:17
  And I said, you know, in these organizations have, have you placed this
• 52:22
  And then this one guy caught up who's an architect, this is blowing my mind.
• 52:26
  And I said, why?
• 52:26
  And he said, we co we, we had a building like that called a TS.
• 52:31
  what does it stand for?
• 52:31
  He said, across the street.
• 52:33
  I'm like, yeah, there you go.
• 52:34
  Right at s is across the street.
• 52:36
  You called the building a TS It's where, so this again, I wanna make
• 52:41
  sure that everybody's clear about this.
• 52:42
  So it, this is a paradox.
• 52:43
  This is what I'm talking about.
• 52:45
  So for in order for an organization to really innovate.
• 52:48
  It has to move innovation outside or change it has to move it outside
• 52:52
  the organization where it can get traction, where it can get to where,
• 52:56
  work out all the things that, you know, off Broadway didn't clip the,
• 53:00
  you know, things didn't work out to bring it back into the organization.
• 53:05
  Some people are more attracted to that kind of environment, right.
• 53:09
  So, for example, some students group relief flourish in which the way
• 53:14
  we do things, some people are not.
• 53:16
  You just kind of know that what approach brings what result.
• 53:20
  And you can't expect that you have the 12, that programs are a lot of rules to end
• 53:28
  up having breakthrough products somewhere because it just doesn't happen that way.
• 53:34
  You need to lot more space.
• 53:36
  You need a lot more play.
• 53:38
  And this is what I think we talked about that I talked about before too.
• 53:41
  I feel like the education system which have really actually constrained
• 53:45
  that of letting the kids find things and you know, it, it, it
• 53:52
  just constraints them more and more.
• 53:54
  And it's, it's also very much this whole concept that it's
• 53:58
  all rational, which it's not.
• 53:59
  We talk about this in the, one of the, maybe at some point we should
• 54:02
  talk about what the seven paradoxes are, but one of the paradox is
• 54:05
  this, we use facts to change minds, but facts don't change minds.
• 54:08
  My favorite example historically comes from Abraham Lincoln.
• 54:12
  I mean, we had all the, the stuff in the United States, and this little woman in
• 54:15
  Connecticut, Harriet Beecher Sto, wrote this book called Uncle Tom's Cabin,
• 54:19
  is a story, it's very melodramatic.
• 54:21
  It's not even really well written, but the notion is it took
• 54:24
  something that was abstract or fact-based and it made it a motive.
• 54:28
  it made it something that people could relate to.
• 54:30
  People have children, people have , a piety for their neighbors and for,
• 54:35
  you know, and, you know, there are higher order things that we have in
• 54:38
  life that we believe about ourselves.
• 54:41
  And the book basically called them to task.
• 54:43
  Right?
• 54:43
  It wasn't using facts.
• 54:45
  And remember Lincoln said, you're the little lady that started all this problem.
• 54:48
  Right?
• 54:49
  It wasn't facts that that changed the laws.
• 54:54
  was, it was somebody who understood that facts don't change minds.
• 54:58
  And they told a story about this.
• 55:00
  And the part of these kind of spaces where people do this is they
• 55:03
  start making their own stories.
• 55:05
  They're not your stories, they're their stories about how they
• 55:09
  created this thing in there and how this student group did that.
• 55:13
  And that's when you know it's working because now the stories perpetuate.
• 55:16
  So, and that's just how, incidentally, this is how organizations become dynastic.
• 55:20
  This is how organizations, you know, generation after generation
• 55:25
  understand what that is.
• 55:27
  I know when I first got to the University of Michigan, I said something which I
• 55:30
  was really called to, to, to heal on.
• 55:33
  I said, Michigan is the only school in the world, in the top 10, in all 19 areas.
• 55:37
  We're not number one in anything.
• 55:38
  We're number five at everything.
• 55:40
  And so it's not true.
• 55:42
  And they started looking into it and it was true.
• 55:44
  Then you started seeing it on t-shirts.
• 55:46
  It's hilarious, right?
• 55:47
  You start and what's happening is that becomes part of the mythology.
• 55:51
  The story becomes part of the mythology of, you know, big blue.
• 55:55
  What does it mean to be at a big public?
• 55:57
  And I see this as small schools now.
• 55:59
  They do a great job with this.
• 56:00
  Little, little schools do this, so you don't have to be big.
• 56:03
  But the notion is it's those, it's that, it's that paradox makes something
• 56:09
  clear often is using something that doesn't make things clear.
• 56:13
  Again, that's building culture.
• 56:15
  And that takes a long time that takes a lot of, you know, different
• 56:19
  artifacts and, and actually you have to be deliberate about it.
• 56:23
  in,
• 56:23
  this is, goes back a bit about your story Aidan and about, you know,
• 56:27
  the leadership of that organization.
• 56:29
  If they can somehow instill that culture, what you want.
• 56:33
  It's hard.
• 56:34
  It takes forever.
• 56:36
  That's part of why you're doing, I think, Aidan, what you're doing,
• 56:38
  if I can, if I may be bold enough, you've applied what you did as an
• 56:43
  athlete other aspects of your life.
• 56:47
  I did it too.
• 56:49
  Because those experience were transferable skills and you kept
• 56:53
  then building on transferable skills.
• 56:55
  You had the ability to do this.
• 56:56
  Every athlete and I was all, everything wrestler, And even
• 57:00
  with that, you're gonna get beat.
• 57:02
  You get beat.
• 57:03
  And I tell this to people all the time, I don't remember any of the victories.
• 57:06
  I go home and people, you know, your picture's on the wall or
• 57:09
  whatever at your high school, and they remember the victories.
• 57:11
  I don't, I don't remember 'em, I remember every loss I've ever had.
• 57:14
  I remember why I lost, I dunno if this makes sense to you, but it's
• 57:18
  that learning from losing, right?
• 57:21
  That's a failure cycle that gets you to the next place.
• 57:25
  I think that there's a great curse in early success, like if you're, if you're
• 57:30
  successful too early without the struggle of the success, you learn the wrong, you
• 57:36
  don't learn anything actually, and you, you actually don't learn the discipline
• 57:40
  of what it takes to actually be long-term successful because that, that's the
• 57:45
  transferable skill, is the discipline to keep showing up the perseverance
• 57:48
  that you talk about in the book.
• 57:49
  There's so many places that my mind has gone, by the way,
• 57:52
  because of the conversation.
• 57:54
  We will get to the seven Paradoxes is one that one that Staney kind
• 57:58
  of identified there is the idea, we talked about it before, that you
• 58:02
  need some type of boundary in order to succeed and a a beautiful story
• 58:06
  I just wanted to share with this.
• 58:08
  I dunno where I heard it again.
• 58:10
  'cause I hear some great knowledge.
• 58:12
  Somebody was saying to me that, you know, when.
• 58:15
  A young, and they said, particularly a young woman, when a, when a girl
• 58:19
  is with their mother in the swimming pool, it's kind of like in life the,
• 58:24
  it's like a swimming pool and you are the side where they hang on the side
• 58:30
  and then they'll go out and they'll swim out into the, out into the
• 58:33
  middle to the deep end a little bit.
• 58:34
  And then if something happens there, they'll come back to you.
• 58:37
  But if they're with you too long, they'll kind of rebel against you
• 58:40
  and they're kinda going, I hate you.
• 58:42
  And they go back to the center again.
• 58:44
  And I actually was thinking because of what you said about the across the street
• 58:47
  story, that in a way what an organization is creating is the bell curve.
• 58:52
  It's the edges.
• 58:53
  It has to have a place.
• 58:55
  where the edges exist in order to then bring it back to the middle.
• 58:59
  And like you said, Jeff, there.
• 59:01
  About the story, you're letting them create a story.
• 59:05
  And in a way, what the innovator does, this is just kind of coming to
• 59:09
  me at the moment, is you're giving them the ingredients and the plot
• 59:13
  for the story, but let them own it.
• 59:16
  And that's the difficulty of, again, of giving over the credit.
• 59:19
  Because when you've done that, you've won.
• 59:21
  But as, and I often talk about this, the concept of a catalyst is beautiful
• 59:26
  for this because a catalyst, like a match actually gets burnt up in the
• 59:31
  transaction and is, you can't see it.
• 59:34
  And I was like, that's the problem of being a catalyst.
• 59:36
  You're not, you're no longer visible at the end, but the fire has taken off
• 59:40
  or the wildfires taken off and that they're, and therein is a huge difficulty.
• 59:45
  So there's many, many paradoxes in the book.
• 59:48
  We'll, let's talk to them at a high level.
• 59:50
  Share the seven and then we'll let people read the book.
• 59:53
  'cause you really do need to read the book, add in the stories that
• 59:57
  you share from your own career.
• 1:00:00
  Actually then apply it to yourself and go, well, this is where this
• 1:00:03
  has played out for me, et cetera.
• 1:00:05
  And you do, you start to see that, you start to apply it.
• 1:00:08
  And in there is the learning.
• 1:00:09
  So maybe at a high level, we'll share all seven.
• 1:00:12
  Okay, so I'm cribbing here from my notes.
• 1:00:15
  Right?
• 1:00:16
  So the, the first, the first one is seek to change others, but can only
• 1:00:21
  change ourselves, which is the classic.
• 1:00:24
  And I start with a story about a girl I dated in college named Katie when
• 1:00:29
  I was training for his wrestling.
• 1:00:31
  And she was a chain smoker, right?
• 1:00:33
  And, , the whole, the rest of the story is why she dumped me and,
• 1:00:37
  why she eventually quit smoking.
• 1:00:39
  And what I learned from it, I think a more modern example would be like
• 1:00:42
  Mother Teresa, know, would take people in and say, change herself.
• 1:00:46
  And then we'll start changing the widows of Mumbai, right?
• 1:00:49
  That sort of thing.
• 1:00:50
  You can only change you and you can model that for other people.
• 1:00:53
  The second one is we aspire to transcend our own limits, but must do
• 1:00:59
  so from within a, a. I tell students something that makes 'em crazy.
• 1:01:02
  They'll come in and talk to me about what they wanna do, and I'll
• 1:01:05
  say, I'm not interested in that.
• 1:01:06
  And they get really upset.
• 1:01:08
  I said, I'm deeply interested in what you're designed to do
• 1:01:11
  what you're designed to do is different than what you want to do.
• 1:01:14
  What are your gifts?
• 1:01:15
  What are, and it's like, it's freeing.
• 1:01:17
  It's not limiting.
• 1:01:18
  It's saying, how do I use what I have to do this?
• 1:01:21
  My favorite example, one, our heroes is Beethoven.
• 1:01:24
  mean, imagine writing the ninth when you're deaf.
• 1:01:27
  I don't know about you, but that's such a mic dropping thing.
• 1:01:30
  I mean, it's like, out, out of all the things you like, you
• 1:01:32
  know, it's like Michelangelo doing Michael when he's blind.
• 1:01:36
  it's just that kind of a thing and then Beethoven kind of
• 1:01:41
  figured out, this is what I got.
• 1:01:42
  This is, you know, this is what, don't get me wrong, you can get better.
• 1:01:46
  But I think people spend too much time on trying to be good at things
• 1:01:48
  that they're not naturally good at.
• 1:01:50
  I think I, again, this is maybe my view of the world, what, whatever you
• 1:01:54
  believe about how you got your gifts biological or God or whatever you
• 1:01:57
  believe about 'em, um, have gifts.
• 1:02:00
  And I think you have to be aware of your voice.
• 1:02:03
  You have to be aware of, am I morning creative people and
• 1:02:05
  afternoon creative people around people alone listening to me?
• 1:02:09
  Right?
• 1:02:09
  Once you start figuring out the instrument, I think all of a
• 1:02:14
  sudden you understand that this can be used to make great changes,
• 1:02:19
  but it cannot be transcended.
• 1:02:21
  Right.
• 1:02:21
  And I think today we try too much to do that.
• 1:02:24
  I think that's, uh, that's stuff in nonsense.
• 1:02:27
  Uh, we already talked about, we use facts to change minds, but
• 1:02:30
  minds aren't changed by facts.
• 1:02:32
  If you don't believe that, just get on your social media account try and
• 1:02:36
  explain to somebody why their position on something doesn't make sense.
• 1:02:39
  And it doesn't have to be politics or religion.
• 1:02:41
  It can be GMOs or anything else.
• 1:02:43
  And you know, I give some examples in the books of really good people who,
• 1:02:48
  um, and of course with social media, we never encounter the loyal opposition.
• 1:02:53
  Anybody disagrees with us, you know, on a dark night.
• 1:02:55
  On a dark road, they go away.
• 1:02:57
  The Spanish Inquisition couldn't have thought of this.
• 1:03:00
  I mean, it's that sort of a thing.
• 1:03:02
  Uh, we set goals for change, but the goals change with change.
• 1:03:06
  is, we already talked about this, you know, this is the problem.
• 1:03:10
  is the difference.
• 1:03:10
  Project management and change management, project management
• 1:03:13
  is not change management.
• 1:03:14
  And if you've had Henry Mintzberg on watch the Mintzberg thing, right?
• 1:03:17
  Strategic thinking versus strategy.
• 1:03:19
  Strategic planning.
• 1:03:21
  Mintzberg got there in front of me, ti my hat to Henry, right?
• 1:03:24
  Great guy.
• 1:03:25
  I we're all standing on the shoulders of giants and he certainly is one.
• 1:03:29
  I I, I'm a huge fan.
• 1:03:31
  You should know I'm a huge fan of Mitz per
• 1:03:34
  we try to minimize conflict, but change is created by it.
• 1:03:37
  This isn't, this is the center of Sandy and I our work for 30 some years we have
• 1:03:43
  to be, this is where society has failed.
• 1:03:46
  We have destructive conflict.
• 1:03:47
  We're trying to win things as opposed to constructive conflict.
• 1:03:50
  Imagine.
• 1:03:51
  So I got to give the TED Talk.
• 1:03:52
  When the Affordable Care Act was rolled out, it was supposed to
• 1:03:55
  be originally at the White House.
• 1:03:56
  It ended up being at, um, at Lincoln Center.
• 1:03:59
  What?
• 1:03:59
  Excuse me.
• 1:04:00
  Kennedy Center.
• 1:04:00
  The Kennedy Center.
• 1:04:02
  But what was interesting was there were two groups.
• 1:04:05
  There were the people wanted government regulation and the
• 1:04:07
  people wanted free markets.
• 1:04:09
  My big thing was imagine if these two which had spent, they'd spent
• 1:04:13
  a half a trillion dollars lobbying.
• 1:04:15
  Imagine if we could have taken this energy to build something new.
• 1:04:18
  So we brought together the heads of innovation to Apple and Google and some
• 1:04:21
  other, you know, some other places.
• 1:04:23
  And we talked about things and I think what really stunned the doctors
• 1:04:27
  and what stunned the politicians was to say, we're innovators change
• 1:04:30
  makers, and whether you're involved or not, we're gonna do this.
• 1:04:34
  And you're just gonna be a sideshow, you're gonna be road
• 1:04:36
  pizza if you're not careful here.
• 1:04:38
  Right?
• 1:04:39
  We know we, you know, we're coming and we're, and we're not doctors and we know
• 1:04:43
  that, and we, we need doctors and we need people in the government to do this.
• 1:04:47
  if you guys aren't willing to engage in the conflict in a constructive way.
• 1:04:52
  Then we'll show you how to do it.
• 1:04:54
  Right.
• 1:04:54
  And the, the good news that there's still bad news about that, the healthcare issue
• 1:04:58
  still of, of, you know, an albatross.
• 1:05:01
  But certainly when you see alternative, uh, forms of what's
• 1:05:04
  happening around the world, uh, place, particularly places like India,
• 1:05:09
  stunningly, the progress is amazing.
• 1:05:11
  we attempt to avoid failure, all learning, all learning is,
• 1:05:16
  uh, is connected to failure.
• 1:05:18
  And of course, the most famous person for this is just go back to Edison,
• 1:05:22
  Edison, the 10,000 attempts or shots on goal And eventually gets the light bulb.
• 1:05:27
  And, you know, and in anybody who's ever built anything will
• 1:05:30
  tell you writing is the same way.
• 1:05:33
  I was talking about AI the other day, and, uh, I think Stan
• 1:05:36
  and I were talking about this.
• 1:05:37
  You know, you know, you write something, you go to ai, it's still iterative.
• 1:05:42
  still have to go through version, you know, on version 12, it's ready to go.
• 1:05:48
  And it's AI's not writing for you.
• 1:05:50
  You're writing, but you're trying to get disconfirming feedback
• 1:05:53
  and you're moving it forward.
• 1:05:54
  You're moving it forward till it's something that makes sense.
• 1:05:56
  And then finally, we endeavor to align change, but change driven by deviance.
• 1:06:04
  And I wanna come back to something John Kotter writes about.
• 1:06:09
  uh, I'm not on the same page as John on a lot of stuff, but I'm
• 1:06:12
  really on the same page on this for this part, at the end it has to be
• 1:06:16
  unified, but not at the beginning.
• 1:06:19
  So think of it like a funnel, right?
• 1:06:22
  And the problem with conventional, uh, tools for change in innovation
• 1:06:27
  stage gating, systems, portfolio management, kp I go down the list,
• 1:06:32
  all starting at the AF position as the output of this, the inputs.
• 1:06:38
  The inputs are culture and competencies and communities and leadership and what's
• 1:06:42
  going on in the world and emerging.
• 1:06:43
  That's the input, that's the stuff you put in the machine.
• 1:06:47
  Only at the end you align.
• 1:06:49
  And so the biggest problem is when you see people like venture capitalists trying
• 1:06:54
  to align things at the front end of this, 'cause they're trying to mitigate risk.
• 1:06:57
  doesn't work that way.
• 1:06:59
  And I come back to the beginning of the book, the COVID vaccine, you know,
• 1:07:02
  500 shots on goal actually started with 600, but they eliminated a hundred
• 1:07:07
  just for, 'cause they were crazy.
• 1:07:09
  169, phase two, nine provisional therapies took a, you took a 10 year process, did it
• 1:07:15
  in six months, So the notion is, yes, you align, but at the end, at the beginning.
• 1:07:23
  Right?
• 1:07:23
  So the paradox is you don't wanna have, you know, you don't wanna have things
• 1:07:27
  that are, you know, that are crazy.
• 1:07:29
  But in order to get what you need, you gotta get crazy.
• 1:07:32
  Those are the seven.
• 1:07:34
  Love it.
• 1:07:35
  And it could have been 70, but those were the seven we thought were the biggest.
• 1:07:38
  Uh, one of the things I think is so important, and just to reiterate it
• 1:07:42
  in a slightly different way, Paul Nunes, I dunno if you know Paul.
• 1:07:45
  He, he, yeah, you're nodding.
• 1:07:46
  Paul, great guy.
• 1:07:48
  He's not far from me.
• 1:07:49
  He is in Boston.
• 1:07:50
  I met him there just before Christmas, but he.
• 1:07:53
  He said to me that like at the start or at the point of the lifecycle, at the
• 1:07:57
  point of creative destruction on the S-curve that we talked about in part
• 1:08:01
  one, that you want deviance there, you want disagreement, but when you're in
• 1:08:06
  execution mode, you want alignment.
• 1:08:09
  And I thought that was interesting because many innovators actually thrive when
• 1:08:13
  it's deviance time, but they forget that it'll always get to the alignment time.
• 1:08:18
  And they get bored in that time and they want to leave or they,
• 1:08:21
  it's not the same organization.
• 1:08:22
  That's fine.
• 1:08:23
  I think the big thing, and we talked about this in the first video.
• 1:08:27
  Which is the key learning is the handoff is the critical part.
• 1:08:30
  You need the handoff.
• 1:08:31
  So going back to the very first one, the greens or the crepe
• 1:08:36
  people are going to be attracted to risk, to variance, to ambiguity.
• 1:08:41
  The middling positions, the sage and the athlete, right?
• 1:08:45
  Those positions are antithetical.
• 1:08:47
  They'll take much longer than you think they're going to take.
• 1:08:50
  There's natural tense tension between getting the right people on board and
• 1:08:54
  selling to the right people and making sure the project is on track and making
• 1:08:58
  money, which is what VCs want or private equity wants or your company wants.
• 1:09:02
  If you've got an incubator, that's the long part and
• 1:09:04
  that's where most changes die.
• 1:09:07
  innovations die 'cause it takes too long.
• 1:09:10
  You're in the desert.
• 1:09:11
  Yeah.
• 1:09:11
  If it really was that easy, it would've been done through
• 1:09:13
  standard operating procedure.
• 1:09:15
  This is where the, all the big talk ends.
• 1:09:17
  Oh, your big talker.
• 1:09:18
  Now, can we get through this desert here?
• 1:09:20
  You know, what do they call bottom of more called it the bottom
• 1:09:22
  of the bathtub or death valley.
• 1:09:24
  Right.
• 1:09:24
  You know, we, us old timers, we all, we have names for all this crap.
• 1:09:29
  And then the AF position is you gotta get scale, which is what
• 1:09:32
  you're saying at the AF position.
• 1:09:34
  It's like, okay, we've agreed to this, now we're gonna, now we gotta
• 1:09:39
  get processed and a lot of complexity and we gotta spend a lot of money.
• 1:09:42
  We gotta push our chips in the middle of the table.
• 1:09:44
  So the key is that even though these are antithetical how we hand off as
• 1:09:49
  human beings, and the problem with most change in innovation processes.
• 1:09:53
  is they don't take this into account.
• 1:09:56
  What they say is, this is the way to do it.
• 1:09:57
  Here are the eight steps.
• 1:09:58
  Here are, and that's not how it works.
• 1:10:01
  And it's not just change in processes.
• 1:10:03
  I mean, we we're talking about, for example, even in teams, these interactions
• 1:10:07
  in teams, you know, throughout the life of the projects, right?
• 1:10:11
  I mean, who the leader is or who you listen to is different
• 1:10:15
  from stage to stage to stage.
• 1:10:17
  So like you said, I think that all the greens in the beginning, you
• 1:10:21
  know, they, they come out all the radical ideas, which is pretty great.
• 1:10:25
  And then they get bored, right?
• 1:10:26
  And all the way until the end.
• 1:10:28
  But this is the thing, even during that last part, the greens still need to be
• 1:10:34
  there because they are the weather thing.
• 1:10:37
  And the organization needs to understand that is the green's job wait a minute,
• 1:10:44
  there's a disconfirming feedback.
• 1:10:46
  This may not work anymore, or, our approach was wrong.
• 1:10:51
  And if there isn't that person, you gonna create something that it's not useful.
• 1:10:58
  Conflict.
• 1:10:58
  We need constructive conflict, and at the heart of this diverse worldviews,
• 1:11:04
  and those come from experience that you have different views and
• 1:11:09
  just, I hope this is making sense.
• 1:11:10
  We come right back to the first principles at the beginning of
• 1:11:12
  this, Hey, let's go back to Luis.
• 1:11:15
  Let's finish with Luis.
• 1:11:17
  Luis had the kind of commanding officer that would've made sense.
• 1:11:23
  Luis's commanding officer would've said, Luis is really good at
• 1:11:27
  this particular type of job.
• 1:11:29
  The openings are these kinds of jobs, and he would've looked for an alternative
• 1:11:34
  for Luis to keep Luis in the military, to keep him warm, and maybe to give
• 1:11:38
  him some additional projects that he could have worked on that he probably
• 1:11:41
  would've been very happy with, right?
• 1:11:44
  Instead, they lost all of this experience and knowledge of
• 1:11:48
  developing a COVID vaccine.
• 1:11:51
  I think the military is a little different.
• 1:11:53
  They have a very.
• 1:11:53
  Strong and rigid, career path and you know, what they need to do.
• 1:12:00
  I think , in the industry, we have a lot more freedom as a supervisor,
• 1:12:05
  as a manager to kind, , create new positions of things like that.
• 1:12:09
  I want everybody to remember that everybody doesn't
• 1:12:12
  want the same thing, right?
• 1:12:15
  If you're in the forward position, if you're a create, you want freedom.
• 1:12:19
  know it's a big thing for me.
• 1:12:20
  Think about who builds.
• 1:12:21
  You know who builds a shop across the street?
• 1:12:23
  That's crazy, right?
• 1:12:25
  if you are the opposite.
• 1:12:27
  If you are, , an engineer, you want more responsibility, right?
• 1:12:31
  You seek responsibility, advancement.
• 1:12:34
  If you are, an athlete, you seek goal attainment money, Whatever.
• 1:12:41
  And if you are a sage, what you seek is harmony.
• 1:12:46
  wanna work in a place that's harmonious, and these are all important parts of
• 1:12:50
  innovation and change and worthwhile and good, they're different.
• 1:12:55
  you mentioned Geoffrey Moore there, we have a series with Geoffrey
• 1:12:58
  Moore coming down the line as well.
• 1:13:00
  At least eight parts covering his books as well.
• 1:13:02
  The more of Moore.
• 1:13:03
  Series.
• 1:13:06
  So, uh, we're gonna get through all the, all the legends.
• 1:13:10
  One thing I just thought we'd put in there before we finish, really just to
• 1:13:14
  fly through it, a bit of homework for our audience, which is the paradoxical
• 1:13:18
  mindset cycle, the four steps, and maybe you'll just say, this is how
• 1:13:22
  you do it and because you do this in the book where each chapter gives.
• 1:13:27
  So you start off by giving the paradoxes, then you take us through it, you give
• 1:13:31
  us an example, and then you go, okay, it's over to you now using this cycle.
• 1:13:36
  Yeah, I'm, I'll tell you a real story that will make this clear to your listeners.
• 1:13:41
  I love trees and Staney and I live in a, we live on the river
• 1:13:45
  and we're, it's like hobbiton.
• 1:13:46
  We're there are trees everywhere.
• 1:13:49
  We live around trees and, we live in Michigan, which gets snow.
• 1:13:53
  we had about three weekends in a row of heavy snow.
• 1:13:56
  So the worst kind of snow is like in the spring where it's
• 1:13:59
  more wet and outta nowhere.
• 1:14:01
  A whole bunch of trees came down.
• 1:14:04
  And we live on a dirt road, so you can imagine you gotta get everything out.
• 1:14:07
  So we found a group of, young people, enterprising young people chainsaws and
• 1:14:13
  they were gonna take stuff down, you know, pay 'em cash and it's all good.
• 1:14:18
  So were taking everything down and it worked really well.
• 1:14:21
  But there was one tree that was leaning over our conservatory, right?
• 1:14:26
  And it's a place that Danny and I really enjoy being out there.
• 1:14:29
  And, um, I said, can, can, you know, uh, the guy said, you want me to cut it down?
• 1:14:33
  This tree's gonna fall down.
• 1:14:36
  Well, if I had been thinking about it, I would've said, no, can, can you shimmy up
• 1:14:40
  the tree and get out the snow out of it?
• 1:14:41
  And you know, would I let the guy cut the tree down?
• 1:14:44
  And the minute he did it, I just had this horrible feeling.
• 1:14:48
  I don't know if you've ever had this happen where, you know, and then what you
• 1:14:51
  do is you mire, you know, you ruminate.
• 1:14:55
  Why'd I let this happen?
• 1:14:56
  This is not, I, I, I made a really bad snap decision.
• 1:15:01
  what I started thinking about was the paradox.
• 1:15:03
  What was the paradox?
• 1:15:03
  Paradox.
• 1:15:04
  I love trees.
• 1:15:05
  And then I let this guy cut a tree down.
• 1:15:07
  The paradox is I'm a thoughtful person, but I wasn't thoughtful.
• 1:15:10
  The para, the paradox was, I'm having, I have to check the software here.
• 1:15:16
  Something didn't go right.
• 1:15:18
  Well then I had to look at the meaning.
• 1:15:20
  Why did I let this happen?
• 1:15:22
  Well, I think, you know, was it 'cause I was panicked about this?
• 1:15:25
  Was it because I'm, now I've deferred this?
• 1:15:28
  Was I having a bad day?
• 1:15:30
  Was I tired?
• 1:15:30
  May I, you know, and you go through all the kind of.
• 1:15:33
  Things that you do.
• 1:15:35
  of the reason I think it was, is I didn't give myself enough
• 1:15:37
  time to think this through.
• 1:15:38
  I didn't give myself five minutes to just step back and say, Hmm,
• 1:15:43
  we're just cutting down trees.
• 1:15:44
  'cause you know, one's up across the road.
• 1:15:46
  And those were easy decisions to make.
• 1:15:48
  And it didn't occur to me that this felt in a different category.
• 1:15:52
  Right.
• 1:15:52
  So then the next part was, well what's the guiding principle?
• 1:15:56
  The guiding principle is you have something that seems like a snap
• 1:16:00
  decision, be present of mine to give yourself five minutes and maybe call
• 1:16:03
  Stan and say, what should I do here?
• 1:16:07
  Doesn't mean I, doesn't mean I always do what she says, but mostly I do.
• 1:16:11
  Um, it means I'm, you know, I'm beginning to think about,
• 1:16:14
  and then I'd run an experiment.
• 1:16:15
  So to your listener, what I would say, and then what happened
• 1:16:18
  was , we had a situation with a car that kind of broke down.
• 1:16:21
  We had opport, you know, people take advantage of you when that happens.
• 1:16:24
  And we kind of thought through, I kind of got to think through minutes.
• 1:16:28
  What are some alternatives to what these experts are telling me?
• 1:16:31
  We had a very positive experience.
• 1:16:32
  So here's what I'd ask your listeners to do.
• 1:16:35
  I'd like you to think about a decision that you made recently that you actually
• 1:16:39
  don't know why you made it, right.
• 1:16:42
  I have no idea.
• 1:16:43
  This came outta nowhere.
• 1:16:43
  This is not like me.
• 1:16:45
  You said something at a party that was hurtful, just
• 1:16:48
  something that just didn't fit.
• 1:16:51
  Then I don't want you to think about, you know, that's the paradox.
• 1:16:55
  Then I want you to think about what does this mean?
• 1:16:57
  Why did I do that?
• 1:16:59
  Which we all do, but don't get on one thing.
• 1:17:02
  Get the object is to fan out 15 things of why I might have done that.
• 1:17:07
  then you sort of work it like uh, you know, like you're workshopping it.
• 1:17:10
  You're workshopping it.
• 1:17:12
  You maybe talk to a confidant or think about, go for a long
• 1:17:15
  constitutional, think about that.
• 1:17:17
  know why you do that?
• 1:17:18
  She laughs 'cause I go on Constitutionals every day long.
• 1:17:21
  Why am I doing this?
• 1:17:24
  then instead of, this is what Benjamin Franklin did, he was great at this.
• 1:17:29
  Then make a simple rule.
• 1:17:31
  A simple rule.
• 1:17:32
  What the learning, given all this, what's the learning?
• 1:17:36
  , It on a laminate.
• 1:17:37
  I do that all the time.
• 1:17:39
  You know, get a tattoo.
• 1:17:40
  I don't know.
• 1:17:41
  Just remember it.
• 1:17:43
  And then the next time that you're in that, the, and then to test it.
• 1:17:47
  Run an experiment.
• 1:17:49
  Is this true that I would do this or try it?
• 1:17:53
  And what you're gonna find is in the first iteration, It's not quite right.
• 1:17:57
  never.
• 1:17:57
  The first pancake is never a good pancake, right?
• 1:18:00
  Um, second one's a little, someone's considerably better.
• 1:18:04
  And the third one's a good pancake.
• 1:18:06
  So you don't have to go through eKyndryless loops of this, but
• 1:18:08
  that's what I would ask people to do, and I'd start with yourself in the
• 1:18:12
  paradoxes about why did I do this?
• 1:18:17
  I love it.
• 1:18:17
  I love it.
• 1:18:18
  The first attempt is learning.
• 1:18:20
  That's a nice, acronym for Fail First attempt is learning.
• 1:18:24
  I loved our series.
• 1:18:26
  I have a little quote that I just wanted to share before I come to you guys to ask
• 1:18:31
  you where people can find you, et cetera.
• 1:18:33
  Also, maybe you call out your final message to the audience because it'll be
• 1:18:37
  a while before we connect again, because before you write , your next book as well.
• 1:18:41
  I really enjoyed this one.
• 1:18:42
  I really enjoyed this episode because we put everything together as well.
• 1:18:46
  There's a part from the book I had so many little quotes and I've
• 1:18:49
  been sharing them on LinkedIn, as you probably saw, but I love this?
• 1:18:52
  one.
• 1:18:52
  You said, "transformation begins within by first changing ourselves
• 1:18:58
  as individuals and leaders.
• 1:19:00
  We unlock the potential to transform our teams and our organizations.
• 1:19:04
  Through your personal growth, you can inspire thriving organizational
• 1:19:08
  culture, elevate competencies, and foster a vibrant community.
• 1:19:13
  As visionary leaders, you embody the culture, practices and
• 1:19:16
  competencies you aspire to see.
• 1:19:19
  In essence, you lead by example guiding those around you to embrace
• 1:19:23
  and champion change." I love that.
• 1:19:26
  That's my mic drop from me.
• 1:19:29
  Maybe I'll come to you, Staney.
• 1:19:30
  Ladies first, what's your final message to our audience?
• 1:19:33
  It's messy.
• 1:19:35
  Innovation and change and creativity is really, really messy.
• 1:19:39
  you have to have a stout heart, right?
• 1:19:43
  And a will.
• 1:19:45
  need to know what you're getting into.
• 1:19:47
  You can get pushed back.
• 1:19:49
  But you know, that's, that's how it is.
• 1:19:51
  And if you want to be a real change maker, you can have to accept all of that.
• 1:19:55
  So surround yourself with community and people who can support that.
• 1:20:00
  as you said, it's table, stakes to do that, right?
• 1:20:03
  So, Jeff, your final, firstly, before you give your final word,
• 1:20:07
  where's the best place to find you?
• 1:20:08
  jeffdegraf.com and there's a ton of free stuff on there.
• 1:20:12
  So my school of thought and all that's there, and I'm one of the
• 1:20:15
  original LinkedIn influencers.
• 1:20:16
  So if you look me up on LinkedIn, you can find me and I post a lot of articles
• 1:20:21
  and stuff that I write for, you know, uh, you don't have to look at all the
• 1:20:25
  publications, you'll find them if I put 'em on LinkedIn, would say the
• 1:20:29
  last thing is about 40 years ago, I coined a term called Creative Izing.
• 1:20:33
  In fact, I trademarked it, right?
• 1:20:35
  I coined the term, meaning just add creativity to everyday normal things.
• 1:20:42
  Let's take this down a thousand, right?
• 1:20:45
  The object is, what you're really trying to do is get momentum.
• 1:20:49
  You're trying to get movement, you're trying to become more fluid at something.
• 1:20:52
  So rather than making this grand, let's make this intimate, right?
• 1:20:59
  So whether it's, doing something creative in the way you drive to work or the way
• 1:21:03
  in which you, , have a coffee conversation with a friend, and what's gonna happen
• 1:21:07
  is that's gonna build a muscle memory.
• 1:21:10
  It's gonna build momentum.
• 1:21:12
  And the object of that is once you start living in that mode where
• 1:21:17
  you're able to affect some agency within yourself and some agency around
• 1:21:23
  you,, that's when everything, that's when everything starts to change.
• 1:21:28
  It all starts with you creativizing.
• 1:21:31
  and by the way, you can get started.
• 1:21:32
  Just sign up to our substack.
• 1:21:34
  I have a copy of this Bad Boy up for grabs as well, but this was
• 1:21:38
  the book we're covering today.
• 1:21:39
  The art have changed their latest in their tome of work of the DeGraffs.
• 1:21:44
  It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, authors of the Innovation
• 1:21:49
  code, the creative mindset, and the finale in our trilogy, the Art of Change.
• 1:21:54
  Jeff and Staney, DeGraff , thank you for joining us.
• 1:21:57
  Thank you so much, Aiden.
• 1:21:58
  We've really enjoyed this.
• 1:21:59
  Yeah.
• 1:22:00
  Thank you.
• 1:22:01
  It's been a pleasure.
• 1:22:03
  Double mic drop.
• 1:22:04
  I.
• 1:22:04
  Thanks once again to our sponsor, Kyndryl, who runs and reimagines the
• 1:22:08
  technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses.
• 1:22:12
  With a unique blend of AI powered consulting, built on unmatched managed
• 1:22:16
  service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness the power of technology for
• 1:22:20
  smarter decisions, faster innovation, and a lasting competitive edge.
• 1:22:24
  You can find out more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute.
• 1:22:27
  KYNDRYL Kyndryl.com.
• 1:22:30
  Don't forget, you can win a copy of this book, the Creative Mindset.
• 1:22:33
  Just sign up to our substack.
• 1:22:35
  Just watch out for posts and I'll ask you to respond and you will be
• 1:22:39
  in the hat to win a copy of that.
• 1:22:42
  And the book we covered today was The Art of Change, the finale in the
• 1:22:45
  tri trilogy of the DeGraff series.
• 1:22:49
  Thanks for joining us.