Latest / The Innovation Show / Creativity Is a Skill: Jeff & Staney DeGraff on the C.R.E.A.T.E. Method (Clarify to Evaluate)

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Creativity Is a Skill: Jeff & Staney DeGraff on the C.R.E.A.T.E. Method (Clarify to Evaluate) · The Innovation Show

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  Before we kick on, let's thank our sponsor Kyndryl, who runs and reimagines the
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  And don't forget, you can win a copy of today's book.
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  thought on Substack, and you'll be in with a chance to win a copy of this book.
• 0:45
  Today's book is a practical no nonsense Guide to everyday creativity, not
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  the mythology genius type, but the incremental, observable, learnable
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  kind available to each one of us.
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  The central argument is that creativity is not a gift, but a skill and the
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  most transformative innovation happens in small compounding moves rather
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  than in lightning bolt moments.
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  The book is built around the acronym, C.R.E.A.T.E. six sequential skills,
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  clarify, replicate, elaborate, associate, translate, and Evaluate with each having
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  its own chapter, worked examples, personal stories, and practical worksheets.
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  , More of a workbook than a book, but it's full of beautiful stories and it's a
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  pleasure to welcome back for part two of the, DeGraff series, the authors of the
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  Creative Mindset, Jeff and Staney, DeGraff
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  Welcome back.
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  Thanks for having us, Aiden.
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  to be back.
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  great
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  to have you back.
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  And I thought we'd get straightaway stuck in, because the book
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  really demystifies creativity.
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  It doesn't come from this lone genius, et cetera.
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  Maybe we'll just demystify that and get stuck into the acronym thereafter.
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  the book has an interesting origin and it really sort of relates to, our careers.
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  I'm the last graduate student of a fellow named Rudolph Arnheim, and Arnheim is
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  the guy that gives us almost all these terms for creativity, visual thinking,
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  design thinking, all that kind of stuff.
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  And he starts writing in the 1920s.
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  And in fact, when he died, the New York Times has a two page obituary for him, and
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  I was very lucky to be a very young man.
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  And he, is the link to all this because the whole study of creativity
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  starts at the University of Berlin in about 1900, where a man named
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  Max Heimer Heimer has, these famous colleagues, Kurt Kafka, Wolfgang
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  Kohler, and they create this school of thought called Gestalt psychology.
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  It's basically perception and how your brain creates, new ideas.
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  Arnheim is the guy that sort of takes us forward into that, and I'm the
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  last of the, of his disciples, if you will, and some of the other ones
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  become very, very well known as well.
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  So, the origin of the book was to say that there are different levels of
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  creativity and that anybody can kind of do them, but it's like climbing a ladder.
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  Right to get to the higher forms of creativity.
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  And the whole idea was to make it really practical for the classes Stan
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  and I teach on creative thinking, what's called creativity at work.
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  How in fact you bring these in and when it started, you gotta remember
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  when I started teaching this class, it was crazy, that anybody in the
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  business school would teach this.
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  But of course now with design thinking and everything else,
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  every business school has one.
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  So, you know, 40 years down the line, oh, it's whatever.
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  But I could tell you when we started this, it was absolutely
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  considered, very much out of bound what you did at the business school.
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  I love those stories, man, because it just shows you what we forget that most
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  ideas started out being misunderstood and the people driving those ideas were
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  definitely misunderstood and sometimes ostracized as well or considered weird.
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  I think the whole idea here is to demystify this and build
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  it more like a curriculum.
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  it's quite literally a curriculum at the University of Michigan and it relates to
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  everything else because you can't have innovation if you don't have creativity.
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  So let's add a sharp edge to it if we can.
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  You can have all the ai, large language models in the world, which is the
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  field Staney and I both come from.
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  But the notion is, if you can't think creatively, then you're not gonna
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  have anything that's unique, that's really significantly better and new.
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  So the, it all started with, an very early book that I wrote, and I coined
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  a term in the late eighties, which I hit, which we had the presence
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  of mind to actually trademark.
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  I coined this term creative izing to creative eyes.
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  And what I meant by creative eyes was adding creativity to
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  ordinary, normal standard things.
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  So this is taking creativity from the realm of, I'm Isaac Newton,
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  or I'm Orson Wells, or whoever you're thinking about to, we all
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  do this, but we don't recognize it.
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  And so we start the book with just some basic things that people should do,
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  So one of my favorite ones, if I could just, get us started here with this,
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  is what time of day are you creative?
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  Some people, Staney's a nighthawk.
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  I'm a morning, I'm a morning person, right?
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  Real early morning person.
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  So why do I come into my sanctuary here at the University of Michigan
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  is if I'm here at my desk at six 30, no one's here for a while, right?
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  And because I need mental space, I'm doing my creative work at that
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  time, Staney, she'll stay up late.
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  That's when her creative work happens.
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  So it's just paying attention to simple things like what gives you
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  energy, what takes your energy?
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  What is this happening?
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  Who's around you?
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  Is music playing.
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  once you start doing that, you start to understand something that most
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  people don't understand at all.
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  It's not creativity on demand.
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  It's creativity when creativity demands it.
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  But everyone is different.
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  So it's like learning your instrument.
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  So step one, what is your instrument?
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  then before we get into any of this other stuff,
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  we talked last week about how innovation needs courage.
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  You need to actually be able to feel confident in yourself to actually try
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  something really different because people, like you said, could ostracize you.
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  Creativity is the same thing.
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  A lot of people have lost confidence, right?
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  In terms of, am I really creative?
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  So actually the book takes them through simple exercises to more to progressively
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  difficult ones and more complicated ones at the end because it's really
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  like, okay, so let's just, you know, start with take a walk, you know,
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  field trips, that's what we call it.
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  Or, you know, look at the things in the world and see are
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  there, things , that inspire you
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  I love how the book's laid out and I love how practically you make it and,
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  you know, you end the book on this idea of getting into a flow state.
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  I think for me, that is the piece most people miss about this.
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  Like, people will go to me and I'm sure you have the same thing
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  to go, how did you think of that?
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  Or how did you write that?
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  Or, where do you find the time?
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  And literally, you have to actually create the time you have to create,
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  but ideally, what works well for you.
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  And I wondered, do you find this as well, Jeff?
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  I know you go early into the office.
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  For me, it's the same.
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  , I need the studio I have here.
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  It has a atmosphere that I've created here, but also I have to graduate up
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  those brainwave states to get into a place where I'm actually going to write.
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  And also I'll think about what I'm gonna write for a few weeks before I write it.
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  And it's almost like putting the ingredients into marinate.
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  then they'll mix with my thoughts.
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  I'll come up with analogies and metaphors, et cetera, and then the
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  idea seems to pop out, but you've concocted the recipe for it to happen.
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  Yeah, I think everyone, I think that's exactly right.
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  Everyone is different.
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  And I, you know, I start out with these, um, I'm gonna read here a
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  little bit from the beginning of the book, but just so let me give you what
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  I think the preparation should be.
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  And it's not all of these catch, know, they don't, so one is notice when and how
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  you're creative, That's the fir Second, prepared at all time to capture ideas.
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  I'm, I carry notebooks around.
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  I drive my wife crazy.
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  I leave notes everywhere.
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  I'm a note guy, right?
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  nodding furiously for
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  Yeah,
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  just
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  I know I, I'm a mess that way.
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  There's notes everywhere, you know, pay attention to who
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  and what gives you energy.
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  I mean, I know this sounds very kind of new agey, but it's not.
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  I mean, the notion is when, when does it show up?
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  Um, consult the muses in your mind.
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  I'm very big on things rattle around in my mind.
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  I just had a Psychology Today article where I talked about, to me, when
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  some, when a soundtrack, I have soundtracks that show up in my mind.
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  And they're really not earworms.
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  They're just, somehow things show up.
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  And when they do, I pay attention to them.
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  Because a lot of times what I'm wiggling around in my brain is in those my big
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  one, look for signs, incongruities and most importantly anomalies.
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  Things that don't make sense are golden.
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  They're gold, They don't make sense for a reason.
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  And my big thing is, instead of saying that doesn't make sense,
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  you gotta dive into those things.
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  Challenge boundaries and authorities.
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  Creative people have a lot of self authorizing behavior.
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  meaning that people are gonna create a lot of rules.
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  Now, this is where it gets a little weird 'cause boundaries
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  actually create creativity, right?
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  So this is making sense.
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  So create, it's not out of the box stuff that, and in the research
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  says it's nonsense anyway.
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  The issue is constraints actually help.
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  But you have to challenge 'em.
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  You have to engage in them.
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  escape assumptions about how things should be.
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  This is a hard one for me.
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  You know, we all have that voice of judgment.
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  into things and being a professor, that's really hard.
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  I just got off of all of these.
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  These telecasts right before this one.
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  And there's a part of me that wants to get in and go, eh,
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  that's not a very good idea.
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  Whatever.
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  But you gotta escape that and go, okay, because here's why.
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  Here's what your listeners need to understand.
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  No matter how bad the idea is, you gotta say, that's a great idea.
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  Here's why.
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  if they actually start to implement it, they'll get disconfirming
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  feedback and they'll make adjustments.
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  This is like being a parent.
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  There's two kinds of parents on the aren't there on the playground.
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  There's the don't do it parent.
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  And then there's the hurt, didn't it?
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  Parent?
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  Now assuming that junior's not, you know, on playing on the freeway, hurt, didn't.
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  It is how we all learn.
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  That's how we become creative through the failure cycle, which people don't,
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  you know, they don't wanna acknowledge.
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  And finally, this is as important, and I really see this in you, Aidan,
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  in the way you talk about things, you have to have a sense of destiny.
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  So positivity doesn't mean happy.
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  Happy, happy, happy.
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  I don't know where people get this from.
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  Positivity means.
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  I'm going, I'm going here and really focusing on getting there.
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  So those are kind of the things that we start the book with is saying Before we
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  get into techniques, let's start with you.
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  What you need to be able to do that you can do.
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  You don't have to be genius.
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  You don't have to be smart, right?
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  You don't have to be perfectly good person, right?
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  Just be yourself, understand your instrument, and move forward.
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  There's a book you mentioned in the, in your book, it's by Paul
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  Torrance, 1993, and he talks about this idea of becoming a beyonder.
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  I really like this and I wanted to share with you, I dunno if you've heard about
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  this beautiful study where they had children playing in a playground and
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  when the playground had no fence, the children would center around the middle.
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  But when they put a fence around it, the children would go right
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  to the edges of the fence.
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  And me it was speaking to this idea of the boundary, also that when you have that,
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  like you said, when you have some type of constraint, it leads, gives you somewhere
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  to go as far as you can in that moment.
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  And I, I love this in the book that you talk about, that's the beauty.
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  It's not thinking big, it's thinking big by starting small.
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  And this idea of beyonder is key to that.
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  There's a lot of studies that actually have talked about, psychological
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  safety and safe spaces and everything.
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  But that's what it is though, when you have actually a guideline and you know
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  that you are safe in that environment, you become more creative and you tend
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  to try more things, and I think that's what it is with the fence, right?
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  , I have a colleague who's now retired who's very famous named Carl Weick.
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  Wonderful man.
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  And his whole thing was sense making, but his, and he's very famous for
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  this, but the other thing was small wins and here's what people don't get.
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  So when you think about like a venture capitalist and you think about a
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  round money, the beginning money, when you start seeding money, right?
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  To your listeners who don't know what that means, what a venture capitalist
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  is looking for is a huge return.
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  So they're not looking for things to be tightly wrapped.
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  They're looking for things that swim out farther.
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  And the issue is you give a lot of of companies or organizations a little
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  bit of money so that their small win is a small risk, but they're
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  trying something radical in it.
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  So you hedge.
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  So going big doesn't mean I'm trying to do something huge.
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  Going big means I'm trying something small that's significantly different.
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  Um, and, and you can see when you go to Picasso's museum in Barcelona or
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  wherever you're at in the world, you can see Picasso trying small things that
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  are quite radical and they're not very, they're not their works of progress.
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  We all do that.
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  So when you talked about writing, one of the things that I have to laugh
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  about is I talk into my phone when I go on a constitutional every day.
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  I go on a long walk, talk to my phone, I come back.
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  Throw it on my computer, make outlines, and I'll probably write
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  six or seven drafts of something.
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  And what I'm doing is it's not imperf perfecting it.
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  I'm working out my thinking, right?
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  I'm working out the creative act as I'm working it out.
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  And the mistake that I make, and I still make it at my age, which is embarrassing.
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  say, I've got time on the flight from here to Singapore.
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  a long flight.
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  And I'll write and I never can.
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  And anything that I do write is terrible, right?
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  And then I'll say, okay, when I get to Singapore, I'm gonna do these five
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  things and I'll go for a long walk.
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  And all of a sudden I realize I can write and I go back to my hotel room
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  for the next two hours I'm writing.
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  So even there's a bit of hypocrisy in this, in that, even though I know
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  better, I fall into this trap that everybody else falls into, which
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  is I'm gonna be creative there.
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  Even though at my advanced stage, I know I'm not.
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  I love it.
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  And you know with the Picasso thing I heard this great, the an acronym
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  FAIL: First attempt is learning.
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  You are pitting on a really key thing, and that is creativity and learning
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  are inextricably linked, and that's part of the reason for this book.
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  Was to say, if we are building a curriculum every, what the
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  iterative cycle is, what the failure cycle is, it's a learning cycle.
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  And what you're trying to do in a learning cycle is you're trying to
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  diversify your thoughts as far as you can.
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  That's why the, that's why, incidentally for your listeners, innovation doesn't
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  happen at the middle of the bell curve.
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  It almost never does.
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  It happens at the edges where you have a crisis or you're on a roll.
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  And the reason is risk and reward are reversed.
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  Think about it.
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  People change when they get a divorce, when they lose their health, when
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  they lose their job, whatever.
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  And the same is true for big companies.
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  You know, apple, the first trillion dollar company, basically is on the
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  verge of bankruptcy and when risk and reward are reversed, right?
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  So it's not the 80 20 rule, it's the 2080 rule.
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  It's easier to change 20% of an organization, 80% than
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  80% of an organization, 20%.
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  The innovation moves in.
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  Well, the same is true for people.
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  People have a tendency to be really creative at the edges of the bell
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  curve, and the reason is you have less to lose and more to gain.
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  So these experiments, really, again, coming back to how to think about
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  this, it's almost counter to the way we've trained our children.
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  These experiments eventually move back into things that are, productive.
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  But this book isn't really about being socially productive.
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  This book is about developing your instrument, about being more creative.
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  This could easily be a self-help book as it is an organizational book.
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  Before we move into the acronym create, there's one last thing I
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  wanted to ask you, and you work with Fortune 500 companies all over the
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  world, all over different industries.
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  This idea of.
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  Thinking big by starting small.
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  And you mentioned about this idea of seed money inside an organization.
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  One of the things you see often is that an innovation team is given unlimited
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  budget and straight away it drowns them.
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  And I, I heard this great idea, it was, , Sadhguru this Indian mystic,
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  and he had this idea of gold crushes, ants, that if you give a piece
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  of gold to an ants, you crush it.
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  Now, he was talking about if you give somebody a gift that they haven't
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  developed the muscles to carry yet.
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  Or if you give them a position too early, maybe it's nepotism, you
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  give them position and they haven't developed the requisite skills to
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  be able to carry that position that they actually flounder and fail.
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  But I thought about it the same way as if you give an
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  innovation team too much budget.
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  That they actually can fail quickly rather than giving them incremental budget.
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  And I wondered for the many people who listen to the show who are innovation
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  leaders, what is your advice and what's your experience of that?
• 17:31
  I think whenever you create an organizational hierarchy for
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  innovation, it always fails.
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  Here's a way to think about this.
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  Organizational leaders,
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  the farther away you are from headquarters, every expat knows this, the
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  more likely you're gonna see innovation.
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  Right.
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  And the reason is not because they're more ingenious, because
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  they're the way to solve the problem.
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  They don't have the resources to do it, so they have to find a new way.
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  So there's something about innovation that over resource doesn't help.
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  Now I can go into, talk about a lot of stuff we've worked on over these,
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  but I want you to think about this.
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  Great innovators they're never at the center of the circle.
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  They're always standing at the edge of the circle.
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  And there's a part to this.
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  I know I'm guilty of it in big time.
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  There's a part to this.
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  If you get too close to the center of the circle, everything
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  has a tendency to converge.
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  Everything has tendency to maintain.
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  And what you call innovation at scale is by definition,
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  because it's operationalized.
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  Incremental.
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  So the larger the innovation is.
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  that the more, because you have to build it, the more incremental it's gonna be.
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  So you have to proof the concept, so you have to swim way out.
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  I know that, IDEO says this, and anybody's built stuff for a long time will tell
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  you this, that you have to be at the edge of the circle, which means are
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  people don't think like you, they're probably not in your subject area.
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  you have to do is look at these cities like, I think like going to
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  Cambridge in the UK or Ann Arbor where, where Staney and I live.
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  Where are the great innovation ideas coming from?
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  Now they get built in the universities.
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  I'll give you that, the big companies.
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  But the great ideas are coming from the coffee shops, the pubs, and
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  where people are connecting in ways that they wouldn't normally connect.
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  And the experiments are starting, which have a high de, a high failure
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  rate, but there's very little loss.
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  So I am very much against.
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  These kind of huge corporate incubator systems I get brought in all the time.
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  I'm in one right now.
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  The billings, they a lot of money.
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  And don't get me wrong, we need big corporate centers to build,
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  the revolution doesn't start there.
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  So I was just on, let me just tell you this story just quickly.
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  So I was just asked by this group of architects, so I was just at
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  this, , panel discussion with all these architects and they're talking about
• 19:48
  all the stuff they're building and all these incredible new buildings.
• 19:51
  And I said, where have you built places for people to hide?
• 19:56
  And they said, what?
• 19:57
  And I said, where have you built places for people to hide?
• 20:01
  They said, people to hide.
• 20:02
  I'm like, yeah, innovators hide in plain sight.
• 20:05
  then one of the other panelists said, I built a building this place
• 20:10
  that I was at called ATS Right?
• 20:14
  And people said, because it sounded like he was building a big innovation
• 20:17
  center, the person was ATS stand for, he said, across the street.
• 20:21
  And I thought the first Innovatrium Staney and I built was across the street.
• 20:25
  The whole idea is you have to have places for innovators to work it out.
• 20:30
  I was even thinking in my office, right?
• 20:32
  So I'm, I'm the only person of this big office takes 10 people.
• 20:36
  I'm the only person here, and I sit in the corner with nobody.
• 20:41
  Nobody can see my screen.
• 20:42
  But there's nobody here.
• 20:43
  I, and I was actually talking about innovators about that,
• 20:46
  and they were all like, me too.
• 20:48
  And this idea of, you wanna find a kind of comfortable place, but we better get
• 20:52
  stuck into the acronym because I know you're under a bit of time pressure today.
• 20:57
  I thought the best way to set up the first one, which is clarify, which is getting
• 21:00
  the challenge, right, was this study that you mentioned where it asked business
• 21:04
  leaders and school superintendent.
• 21:06
  The simple question, what does creativity mean?
• 21:09
  And the startling difference in their answers of the superintendents.
• 21:14
  Now in schools, 48% believed that problem solving is the skill that
• 21:18
  best demonstrates creativity.
• 21:21
  the business leaders, it was actually identifying the problem articulation.
• 21:26
  I thought that was fascinating.
• 21:27
  'cause it just shows you, and we'll talk about this later on, different
• 21:31
  perspectives, how you even see what clarification is in the first place.
• 21:36
  I would tell you my class at Michigan, right?
• 21:38
  The one that started 40 years ago, you're not even allowed to start
• 21:42
  creative thinking until you identify the problem, which takes half the semester.
• 21:46
  You don't know what's wrong.
• 21:49
  have to go through many iterations to find the center of
• 21:51
  what's, what the challenge is.
• 21:52
  It's either a, you know, problem or an opportunity, right?
• 21:56
  So, step one is not just clarifying what the, what the endemic or real reason is.
• 22:02
  The other one is why you.
• 22:04
  Why are you working on this?
• 22:06
  And one of the things I tell people a lot, which I think is really
• 22:10
  important is, whenever you're working on a problem, you have to really
• 22:14
  ask yourself who owns the problem?
• 22:17
  nobody cares about your creative idea.
• 22:19
  I hate to tell listeners this, but they don't.
• 22:22
  they care about is you solving their problem.
• 22:24
  This comes back to the CEO of the executive issue that you're raising.
• 22:27
  So step one is how do you actually clarify what is at the center of the issue?
• 22:35
  Because most of the time I always, I always tell people the most important
• 22:39
  book of the 20th century, according to the New York Public Library, was Anna Corina.
• 22:44
  And of course, it starts with happy families are all
• 22:46
  happy for the same reason.
• 22:47
  And unhappy families are unhappy for multitude of reasons.
• 22:50
  And my big thing is whenever you've got a problem, there's a multitude
• 22:53
  of reasons that it's not working.
• 22:56
  gotta start with, okay, can I really handle here and what can I, how
• 23:00
  much of this can I really take on?
• 23:02
  What's my level of ambition?
• 23:03
  And I just wanna add in our programs, with corporation and also with the
• 23:07
  military, this is the one singular thing that is the most difficult.
• 23:12
  It's because in order to really deep dive into this problem.
• 23:17
  You are also faced with a lot of, ambiguity.
• 23:20
  You really don't know.
• 23:22
  You don't know what's actually is being solved, right?
• 23:26
  And a lot of people are uncomfortable with that.
• 23:29
  what you're really looking for at the beginning is disconfirming feedback.
• 23:32
  This is a hard thing for people to get.
• 23:34
  You're looking for where you're wrong , and so the creative
• 23:37
  process is highly iterative.
• 23:39
  You think all these big projects we've ever run, whatever,
• 23:42
  we started with a group that they're sure this is the problem.
• 23:46
  Six weeks in, they're sure it's not, it's a different thing.
• 23:49
  Well, that's part of it.
• 23:50
  You're learn, you're learning about what's really going on here every
• 23:54
  time you sort of take a step forward.
• 23:56
  So the, so it's a work in progress and people who are trained differently,
• 24:00
  and this is where they really confuse project management with being creative.
• 24:05
  You know, where they say, this is the part we're gonna have.
• 24:07
  It's like, well, is that what you found?
• 24:09
  I was just on a call right before this one where they have this very
• 24:13
  big, complicated technology thing and they had this assumption.
• 24:16
  They got on this call with the owner of this assumption, and probably
• 24:19
  halfway through the presentation, one of the key assumptions was wrong.
• 24:23
  It's like when you pull that out, a lot of things start to
• 24:25
  fall and people start to panic.
• 24:27
  I'm like, don't panic This is normal.
• 24:30
  This is a normal thing.
• 24:32
  Now you're going to have to build it up again.
• 24:35
  That what we think is the challenge is a little bit different
• 24:38
  than what we thought it was.
• 24:40
  And it's important, actually what Staney said there about the psychological safety.
• 24:44
  They don't want to be seen to be wrong in front of people wit witnesses.
• 24:49
  And that's one of the big problems, isn't it?
• 24:51
  And you're like kind of go, no, we encourage that 'cause you wanna fail
• 24:54
  early because it's less expensive,
• 24:56
  I like what you said though.
• 24:57
  That's something I think that that really great creative people do is there's a
• 25:03
  vulnerability that you have to show.
• 25:05
  To say, I don't know at this point what this actually is, but I'm brave enough
• 25:11
  to go figure it out, but I need everyone to know that I'm still figuring it out.
• 25:15
  in that chapter, you give tons of examples of how to do this way, finding
• 25:20
  techniques you call them, and very, very simple these way finding techniques.
• 25:25
  But let's, jump to the next one, the next in the acronym which
• 25:28
  is the R which is replicate.
• 25:31
  this chapter because I've a fascination with biomimicry, but
• 25:35
  also this idea of reapplying ideas.
• 25:37
  So I'll let you guys take this one away.
• 25:39
  I have a picture here of Buckminster Fuller.
• 25:41
  If your listeners don't know who that, Bucky Fuller was very
• 25:44
  influential in my early career.
• 25:46
  If you go to Disney World and you see the big ball at the beginning of
• 25:49
  Epcot, it's a spore, it's part of the geodesic dome thing that Fuller did.
• 25:54
  And if you go to the museum in, Singapore, the science museum with the
• 25:57
  hand, it's a, it's Bucky Fuller, right?
• 25:59
  The notion is, the beginning is just seeing with new eyes.
• 26:03
  That's all it is.
• 26:05
  And I like, one of the things I do in my class with artificial intelligence
• 26:08
  when it comes to making new friends.
• 26:10
  Is, I call them heroes of the Imagination.
• 26:12
  Two of my favorite books of all time were written by Dan Borston, who
• 26:16
  passed away, of course, was the Library of Congress who wrote these books?
• 26:19
  The discoverers, the creators, right?
• 26:21
  The amazing, think he's won the Pulitzer Prize like two or three times.
• 26:26
  But one of the things that I really like about, the heroes of the imagination
• 26:29
  is that you can use artificial intelligence to create personas.
• 26:32
  So my class does that.
• 26:34
  So I make them think around problems.
• 26:36
  So they have to consult people , because we know a lot about Emerson, or we
• 26:40
  know a lot about William Blake, right?
• 26:42
  So imagine you build a persona, right?
• 26:44
  Which a large language model can.
• 26:46
  So the notion is, in my class, you're required to consult
• 26:49
  these and I call these matches.
• 26:51
  So they're gonna give you matches.
• 26:52
  And it doesn't mean you, you pick everything, they're not
• 26:54
  doing your creative work.
• 26:56
  But the notion is you're getting a lot more texture.
• 26:59
  In your inputs, just like you would if you start talking to
• 27:02
  people outside of your field.
• 27:04
  So the beginning of replicate is simply what we sometimes
• 27:07
  call search and reapply, right?
• 27:09
  Go find it and go put it in your area.
• 27:13
  One of my favorite stories comes from Tom Kelly at ideo tells a story about
• 27:17
  he had this problem at the Mayo Clinic that with, patient satisfaction.
• 27:22
  So what he did was he had the doctors go live in the Ritz
• 27:24
  Carlton for a week, right?
• 27:26
  And they got a lot of ideas about what that was like and great service.
• 27:29
  And then the next week he had 'em live in their hospital bed.
• 27:32
  So they learned a few things and patient satisfaction went up.
• 27:37
  So these are the kinds of things that anybody can do.
• 27:39
  It doesn't take any time.
• 27:41
  It's your normal day.
• 27:42
  I mean, you get a pair of binoculars and go on a walk on Saturday
• 27:45
  morning and watch how birds fly.
• 27:47
  Watch how fish swim.
• 27:48
  You'll get a lot of ideas about how things are designed.
• 27:51
  Yeah, the other day my son was talking about owls.
• 27:55
  And about how their flat patterns and their wings are designed very
• 27:58
  differently than an eagle, like a raptor.
• 28:01
  Because, that's why they're so quiet when they des descend
• 28:04
  I I love that.
• 28:05
  My son's still looking for royalties for many of the ideas he gave me from my book.
• 28:11
  he was always giving me ideas for metaphors, et cetera.
• 28:14
  I love that idea that you mentioned about the Mayo Clinic getting outta
• 28:17
  the building, going and seeing places.
• 28:19
  An example I experienced firsthand is the Accenture Research and Innovation
• 28:23
  labs here in, in Dublin, in Ireland.
• 28:26
  And the team actually went a step further.
• 28:28
  So you were saying about the Mayo Clinic guys.
• 28:31
  Went to Ritz Carlton, saw how patients were treated, brought some
• 28:36
  of that mindset back and they were like anthropologists observing.
• 28:40
  in Accenture, they actually hired people from places like Ritz
• 28:43
  Carlton as the receptionist.
• 28:45
  So there's this beautiful welcome that's totally unlike a consultancy.
• 28:49
  So I thought that was a nice add-on to something there.
• 28:53
  But I love this chapter replicate and this whole idea steal like an artist, the whole
• 28:58
  idea of engage in bio mere, et cetera.
• 29:01
  But the next one then is elaborate.
• 29:03
  So this is multiplying ideas by adding new ones.
• 29:07
  And again, another term.
• 29:10
  I love how you pepper in all these terms, and I love how you knew many
• 29:13
  of these people as well, that you worked with them and studied with them.
• 29:17
  The idea of bisociative, this was coined by the controversial art
• 29:22
  novelist, Arthur Koestler in 1964.
• 29:26
  I really liked Arthur Koestler, although he was, uh, his views of the world.
• 29:30
  I didn't share, I'll leave it at that.
• 29:32
  Because he wrote Darkness at Noon and some other famous books.
• 29:35
  Very brilliant man.
• 29:36
  And, uh, the Salzberg Festival and all that stuff.
• 29:38
  So that, you know, that goes back to sort of my origins, these
• 29:41
  connections to Europe, right?
• 29:43
  But, um, the whole idea of elaborate was at a very superficial level,
• 29:47
  your brain is, functions on language.
• 29:51
  You know, you don't have to be wienstein and be a, you know, be a philosopher
• 29:54
  mind person to get this, but by moving words around in your brain, it's
• 29:58
  relatively easy to see new combinations.
• 30:00
  Now, of course, AI does this pretty doggone well, but there's kind of,
• 30:04
  there's some very simple things here.
• 30:06
  So let me tell you what the three things in the book are.
• 30:08
  The first one that's relatively easy is just random words.
• 30:11
  , And there, there's actually an old technique for divination called,
• 30:14
  biomancy And famously in, St. Augustine's confessions, he talks
• 30:19
  about how he has this conversion to Christianity because he opens up a
• 30:23
  book and points his finger at a word.
• 30:25
  And it's, the notion is anybody can do this with anything.
• 30:29
  It doesn't have to be divine.
• 30:30
  I wanna point that out.
• 30:31
  It just bissociates things.
• 30:33
  It takes something that you normally don't connect to something else.
• 30:36
  Incidentally, you can reverse that, which is called, , to
• 30:39
  disassociate things, right?
• 30:41
  There's a way to do that.
• 30:42
  It's called defamiliarization.
• 30:43
  There's a different way to do it., So your brain works both ways with language.
• 30:47
  So that's easy.
• 30:48
  Anybody can just take a book at any time.
• 30:49
  When you're stuck, open up the book and point your finger at a word and just
• 30:53
  do this like five times, and your brain will automatically, because your brain
• 30:56
  assimilates and accommodates, your brain will automatically make a connection.
• 31:00
  That's the way your brain functions, right?
• 31:02
  So you don't have to worry about the neural net.
• 31:04
  Just make sure you've had enough, you know, iced tea or whatever you're drink
• 31:07
  to make sure you're, you, you know, make sure that you're, that uh, the,
• 31:11
  the sugars in your brain are working.
• 31:13
  The, the second thing in there is, uh, something that actually comes
• 31:17
  to us from an advertising executive, , Alex Osborne, people forget.
• 31:21
  Alex Osborne an advertising executive, and he noticed that people who made
• 31:27
  great ad campaigns were able to use certain words that were active
• 31:31
  words, like substitute and combine.
• 31:34
  So he called it scamper.
• 31:36
  S-C-A-M-P-E-R, Scamper.
• 31:38
  And this, and, you know, and some of these people came outta these, uh, that
• 31:42
  he's talking about became Jay Walter Thompson and these big ad agencies.
• 31:47
  And so they ad agencies like the fifties and sixties use this stuff all the time.
• 31:52
  So if you watch, mad Men, you know the, you'll see this stuff in there.
• 31:57
  So what he's doing is he's taking words, not just random
• 32:00
  now with a little more oomph to.
• 32:03
  And then the final one comes from an English guy who lives in Italy,
• 32:06
  a very famous guy, which you call lateral thinking in Europe, right?
• 32:09
  A guy named Edward, Deb Bono.
• 32:10
  And he called these thinking hats, right?
• 32:13
  So he has these different kind of archetypal hats and saying, you know,
• 32:17
  can you look at the same problem, from these different points of view?
• 32:20
  But the reason they're all under elaborate is they're all just
• 32:24
  highly fluent fluency based terms.
• 32:29
  The four things we do know about creativity.
• 32:32
  It's number one fluency.
• 32:34
  If you have more ideas than , other people do, you're much more likely to
• 32:38
  come up with something too is which is what we talked about in replicate.
• 32:43
  If you go from one area and apply it to another one is freedom.
• 32:47
  The notion is you can have really bad ideas, but the notion is once
• 32:50
  you start to implement those ideas, you'll get disconfirming feedback.
• 32:54
  the final is flow, right?
• 32:55
  Which is, , Mihaly, right Csikszentmihalyi, right?
• 32:57
  The famous, know, the famous Hungarian, , cognitive scientists who talks about
• 33:02
  we, run in certain periods of time.
• 33:04
  So all of these concepts under elaborate, kind of fall into that brainstorming,
• 33:11
  moving pictures and words around in your brain, which is actually
• 33:15
  not very hard for your brain to do.
• 33:17
  This is not high level stuff.
• 33:18
  you mentioned the
• 33:19
  Bono there.
• 33:19
  I had all his books up there and he passed away a few years ago,
• 33:23
  so unfortunately before I had time to get him onto the show.
• 33:26
  But, one of the things I do now with ai, you mentioned this, was
• 33:30
  you can actually get it to do a six thinkings hat review of what you write
• 33:34
  or what you produce or your ideas.
• 33:36
  But also one of the ones I used that you, I was delighted to see you mention
• 33:40
  in the book was Think and Grow Rich.
• 33:42
  Napoleon Hill's work, this idea of a mastermind that Napoleon Hill wrote
• 33:46
  about, you, I get it to do that as well.
• 33:49
  So you actually can have people, different viewpoints from different
• 33:53
  people in society, different authors.
• 33:55
  , That's where my board of advisors on AI came from.
• 33:58
  I make 'em build a board of advisors and I make them do AI and go get a board
• 34:03
  of advisors, a mastermind alliance.
• 34:05
  Right?
• 34:05
  So, and I make them read this book by Robert Green Mastery.
• 34:08
  I make them all read it.
• 34:10
  I think that young people need to know how mastery is really developed.
• 34:14
  Uh, and this is back to the book, you know, the creative, the whole
• 34:18
  idea here, the creative mindset is that we're building capability.
• 34:23
  We're building, as you know, we, we now need to go to a,
• 34:26
  now it's a harder thing to do.
• 34:28
  So each time it gets a little more advanced.
• 34:31
  did it this way, but it could have been a pyramid.
• 34:34
  I love that.
• 34:35
  And you know, Green's work, he's really focusing on helping people
• 34:38
  today, I feel, find purpose, et cetera.
• 34:41
  We keep going 'cause we're gonna run outta time and not get through
• 34:44
  We can run a little long.
• 34:46
  We're fine.
• 34:47
  There's, there's one thing, defamiliarize I thought was just, , I paid attention
• 34:51
  to all these little terms and you know, I'll mention another quote by
• 34:56
  a, painter, which is Henri Matisse,
• 34:58
  He said there's nothing as difficult as a truly creative painter to paint a
• 35:03
  rose because first they have to forget all the roses they've ever seen before.
• 35:08
  And it made me think of defamiliarize because actually that's the problem.
• 35:12
  'cause we have this functional fixedness with everything.
• 35:16
  you're right on it.
• 35:17
  I think the hardest thing to do self-help across the board
• 35:22
  is get people outta your head.
• 35:24
  It's very hard to do.
• 35:27
  And to me that's the biggest thing is what do you actually think?
• 35:31
  Right?
• 35:31
  Can we get people out of our head?
• 35:34
  Can we get, you know, what , the Buddhist called beginner's mind?
• 35:37
  Can you get back to a beginner's mind Aristotle is a great term for this,
• 35:41
  the biologists use, but Aristotle uses this a very different way.
• 35:44
  It's called neoteny.
• 35:45
  It means to be childlike, not childish childlike.
• 35:49
  And so when we look at, you know, biology, there's this very specific
• 35:52
  thing that goes on with that.
• 35:53
  But what Aristotle's writing about also is, can you get back to that, what
• 35:58
  Staney was talking about, that, that, that child wonder, the ability to, to,
• 36:03
  you know, to, to, uh, free associate in some ways as an, as an adult.
• 36:09
  I'm gonna keep going 'cause you're, sparking lots of ideas.
• 36:11
  For me, one thing to just mention, the idea of the axolotl.
• 36:15
  the axolotl for me is actually a perfect metaphor for an organization
• 36:20
  needing to stay young because it's capable of actually forever staying
• 36:23
  young because of stem cells, et cetera.
• 36:26
  And this idea of an organization, Bezos Amazon letters to shareholders,
• 36:32
  and he talked about Amazon staying in day one and straight away it
• 36:35
  talks to the axolotl on this idea of constantly embracing your inner self,
• 36:41
  your inner youth, the whole time.
• 36:43
  But we, we better keep going onto associate because the steps come in
• 36:47
  a specific order for a reason, which is why the acceptance of discomfort
• 36:52
  and the readiness of the unexpected come first because they paved the way
• 36:55
  then for associate, which is next.
• 36:58
  Yeah.
• 36:58
  Associate is of something your brain does that we think only humans can do.
• 37:03
  So we used to think only humans were creative and then we realized
• 37:06
  that Chaldean crows and orangutans, everybody else's elephants are creative.
• 37:10
  Right?
• 37:10
  So, you know, we've come a long way in a hundred years.
• 37:14
  But one of the things that your brain is capable of doing, associative,
• 37:17
  is what's sometimes called, we call it adaptive reasoning in the book.
• 37:20
  The technical term is analog thinking.
• 37:22
  Right?
• 37:22
  You can say something is like something, and the fact that we can
• 37:26
  communicate that is quite interesting.
• 37:28
  And of course, marketing people love this.
• 37:30
  So somebody's trying to sell Sprite and jumps on a hot day into a cool pool, and
• 37:35
  we're supposed to make the connection that Sprite is refreshing, right?
• 37:38
  Which of which it is.
• 37:39
  But the whole idea of adaptive reasoning is something, is like something else.
• 37:43
  And why that's so important is because people have creative ideas.
• 37:47
  They usually try and glue them together.
• 37:49
  A bunch of things that don't really fit.
• 37:51
  And what metaphors and analogies do incredibly well
• 37:54
  is they bring things together.
• 37:56
  So one of the things I write about a lot are, I don't, I think that
• 37:59
  innovations are not in ecosystems, they're in solar systems.
• 38:03
  'cause it's easier to imagine a sun or binary stars trading planets.
• 38:07
  It's easier to imagine how things go together.
• 38:11
  They orbit.
• 38:13
  They have an organic way in which they fit.
• 38:16
  so the whole idea of, analog thinking or adaptive thinking here is saying,
• 38:21
  how are these parts like this?
• 38:24
  it moves on to what I call imaginary friends.
• 38:28
  And imaginary friends are people who have built, they're systems thinkers.
• 38:33
  They're people who have already thought about how systems go.
• 38:35
  So it's not just sort of abstract.
• 38:37
  How would they have put this together?
• 38:40
  You know, what would they have done about this?
• 38:42
  And we could go back to Picasso, et cetera.
• 38:44
  But when you start talking about, like Bezos, it's a great example of,
• 38:47
  you know, he wasn't cash positive for 15 years and he had a picture, , you
• 38:52
  know, I knew Steve Jobs, right?
• 38:53
  My relationship there when people say, did he really understand
• 38:57
  what he was building out?
• 38:58
  And the answer was yes, actually he did.
• 38:59
  Even when he was being kicked out the first time.
• 39:01
  Right?
• 39:02
  So the, so the issue is there's also people.
• 39:05
  Who have this idea of, you know, how all these things coordinate.
• 39:09
  And then the final one, of course is something called synetics, and
• 39:12
  it's really timely because this guy named William Gordon was brought in
• 39:17
  very early on to the space program.
• 39:19
  He was MIT, there were two of 'em.
• 39:20
  There was MIT guys.
• 39:22
  And basically what they did was they used analogical thinking to say, let's take
• 39:28
  the problem and deconstruct the problem.
• 39:30
  What's really wrong?
• 39:32
  Then they have all these, what are called excursions where we go off and think
• 39:35
  about all the kinds of things we could do.
• 39:37
  But then the most important thing is now we have to force fit our
• 39:41
  metaphorical ideas back into the idea.
• 39:44
  Now, this is the part that's really hard for people.
• 39:46
  It's really hard cognitively, because what you're doing is using
• 39:50
  metaphors in reverse, saying.
• 39:52
  So let me give you an example that's very famous.
• 39:54
  One is Ecoimagination, which we worked on.
• 39:56
  We are, we were part of that whole thing at General
• 39:59
  Electric, the $16 billion spend.
• 40:01
  And what they started with, which is something I didn't understand
• 40:04
  very well, was how, how do all these pieces go together?
• 40:08
  Like nascar?
• 40:09
  Now, I'm not a NASCAR guy, so I don't know, what was interesting
• 40:12
  is as we got all the pieces, there were things in NASCAR that
• 40:15
  we didn't have in Ecoimagination.
• 40:18
  we had to reverse and go, well, what would we have to build to be like that?
• 40:23
  And that's how things got built out.
• 40:26
  So in this stage, we're synchronizing, we're coordinating, and we're
• 40:31
  using our brain's ability to look at complex clusters and relate
• 40:38
  that to the creative activity that's at hand, which is not easy.
• 40:43
  a beautiful segue for the next of the acronym, which is translate because
• 40:48
  this metaphor or analogies give you ideas, then to be able to translate
• 40:53
  into a story that encompass everybody and bring everybody on the journey.
• 40:57
  I will say the big thing about this is all you have to do is look at a child, have
• 41:01
  a child try and tell you a story, have an awkward adult try and tell you a joke.
• 41:06
  And what you realize is telling a story is a very complex, cognitive activity
• 41:15
  because you, because there're characters.
• 41:16
  There's actions, there's plot, there's folk color, there's a lot
• 41:20
  of things that have to happen.
• 41:21
  So in this chapter we talk about the beginning of this is about storyboarding.
• 41:25
  What Walt Disney, da Vinci did it, do you take ideas?
• 41:29
  And of course, those people who are fluent in PowerPoint,
• 41:31
  you're already storyboarded.
• 41:33
  That's a storyboarding tool.
• 41:35
  So what you're doing with PowerPoint is you're trying to get the story right, and
• 41:38
  if you tell the story in a chronological way, you're probably not very interesting.
• 41:43
  So, you know, you have to around and the book tells you why people
• 41:47
  don't tell interesting stories.
• 41:49
  How, you know, sometimes you have to start with, you don't start with, let
• 41:52
  me start with telling you how I was trying to build this thing at Domino's.
• 41:56
  You start with, let me tell you, I met Steve Jobs, right?
• 41:59
  And then you work back.
• 42:00
  You gotta catch the reader, right?
• 42:02
  And you just, what you said, you have to bring everybody into the
• 42:04
  story, People wanna be part of story.
• 42:06
  Then the next part of this, I think, which is really interesting,
• 42:10
  but very, have to really be into this or what I call morphologies.
• 42:16
  Alright?
• 42:16
  And this actually starts with the Brothers Grim.
• 42:18
  I know this is weird.
• 42:19
  The people who write the fairytales and Vladimir prop, the famous Russian.
• 42:23
  But the notion is if you start thinking about like cases and case studies.
• 42:28
  I've had three student groups win the big McKinsey case study, national competition
• 42:32
  right here at the University of Michigan.
• 42:33
  And the, it's a simple way to do it.
• 42:35
  On one side, on the, on the Y axis you say players, and on the x axis you
• 42:41
  say actions that people could take.
• 42:43
  whenever you deconstruct what's called deconstruct or reconstruct, whenever
• 42:47
  you deconstruct to reconstruct, you see millions of possibilities.
• 42:50
  And where this really takes off is like the fashion industry where, you know, what
• 42:55
  if I took orange and I put it on this kind of purse, or they do this all the time.
• 42:59
  the notion is when you get into these kind of like you go to Milan
• 43:02
  and you see people do this, what they're really doing are morphologies.
• 43:06
  They have their own words for it, but it's really a morphological one.
• 43:09
  And then the final one, which of course business people do all the
• 43:12
  time now, and AI is very helpful for, this is scenario making.
• 43:17
  Which is now saying not just what could go right and what could go
• 43:20
  wrong, here's all the drivers, because there is no data on the future.
• 43:25
  The only thing we can really know is the things that we, we
• 43:28
  know are gonna drive the future.
• 43:29
  So, for example, you know, teaching at this large university, we
• 43:34
  know that Americans are having fewer and fewer babies or other
• 43:37
  parts of the world even worse.
• 43:39
  we're not gonna have as many college kids, That's something that we
• 43:42
  can actually know in a scenario.
• 43:44
  The challenges of scenario and the challenges of innovation and creativity
• 43:49
  is very simple, Aidan, and that is what's called event driven innovation.
• 43:53
  The things you didn't see, right?
• 43:55
  And those are always the ones that whenever you're creating, you have to swim
• 44:00
  out farther in order to anticipate those.
• 44:03
  This chapter is actually extremely hard to do because you have to have developed
• 44:10
  a lot of the other skills from the previous chapters to get to this point.
• 44:15
  But I think it's also the most impactful because story can really change your
• 44:20
  life, . When you wanna innovate or when you wanna change something, you
• 44:24
  need to know, and you need to have this vision in your mind about what
• 44:28
  that is in the story that you tell.
• 44:31
  It can come true though.
• 44:33
  If you do have it right
• 44:36
  it's not that it's hard to do.
• 44:38
  It's hard to do well.
• 44:40
  All you have to do is think about a novel who writes well.
• 44:43
  So the notion is everyone can do all of these, but what we're trying to
• 44:47
  do in the book to say, to be really good, I mean to be world class at this.
• 44:51
  So there's a difference between if you're doing it for yourself, that's great.
• 44:55
  The book will work great for you if you're trying to get better, the book
• 44:57
  work book will work great for you.
• 44:59
  But if you've got a team going back to your leaders and you are trying
• 45:02
  to build something that no one else has, imagine when you go to your pitch
• 45:07
  day, If you can tell a winning story, and we see this all the time, you
• 45:11
  know, dragons layer in the uk, right?
• 45:13
  Every that
• 45:13
  All right.
• 45:14
  if you can tell a winning story, right, you win.
• 45:18
  Right?
• 45:18
  That's that.
• 45:19
  Because that's a very complicated thing.
• 45:21
  And if we would've had more, if the book would've allowed us to
• 45:24
  go farther, which it didn't, I, we would've talked about things like
• 45:27
  meditation, which are higher order things, you know, dream theory there.
• 45:31
  So there's a lot of things your brain does.
• 45:34
  That's super creative.
• 45:36
  That doesn't fit in the book because these were things that you can develop.
• 45:40
  Right.
• 45:41
  Were the other things, I think that we, maybe you should to somebody in
• 45:44
  ashram or somebody who's in a cathedral somewhere or something that's,
• 45:48
  although I do wanna acknowledge that those are higher forms of creativity.
• 45:52
  you can see why this book is so valuable for you as a person, as well
• 45:56
  to shape your own life, to own your own story, to create your own story, to
• 46:00
  Yep.
• 46:00
  your skillset, and recombine them in new ways as well,
• 46:04
  which is why it's a great book.
• 46:05
  It's full of exercise, full of tools as well.
• 46:08
  And we have a copy for grabs.
• 46:09
  Don't forget if you're a member of our substack, we better finish
• 46:12
  before you gotta go, Jeff, on the final one, which is evaluate.
• 46:16
  I'm guilty of this.
• 46:17
  I'm an idea aholic.
• 46:18
  I probably should be in a 12 step program, right?
• 46:20
  I've a lot of, I've notebooks of notebooks of notebooks of ideas.
• 46:24
  So when people say, how do you write so many articles or whatever, just
• 46:27
  like you, I, well, it's not hard.
• 46:29
  In fact, I forget a lot of stuff.
• 46:30
  I have to go back and look at my work.
• 46:32
  But evaluate is basically saying, it's like being an editor of a film.
• 46:37
  How you evaluate will largely determine which ideas win.
• 46:41
  And so in the book, we give you four or five ways to evaluate ideas like
• 46:44
  force choice evaluation and matrix evaluation, the GE workout method, you
• 46:49
  know, which I think is very valuable.
• 46:52
  What's hard to do?
• 46:53
  Big payout, easy to do, small payouts, et cetera.
• 46:56
  So these are the kind of things you would see in, really in any engineering,
• 47:00
  , course or any business school.
• 47:02
  But why that's important.
• 47:04
  Is the people forget that this is the most important creative step you'll take how
• 47:11
  you evaluate will determine what you pick.
• 47:14
  And one of the things Staney and I have experienced over and over and
• 47:18
  over again we will be in these groups and someone will have a billion
• 47:23
  dollar idea and they'll leave it on the, they'll leave it on the wall.
• 47:28
  the notion is you're not, look, you're evaluating this for an incremental idea.
• 47:34
  and then, so the creative part is, let's evaluate it this way.
• 47:37
  And so we have a long track record of some really big ideas that became
• 47:41
  very valuable simply by saying, you're evaluating this the wrong way.
• 47:45
  And this goes back to what Staney said at the beginning.
• 47:48
  Evaluate our children the wrong way.
• 47:50
  We evaluate college people the wrong way.
• 47:52
  We're evaluating the wrong way.
• 47:54
  it's hard to not evaluate them that way.
• 47:57
  Right.
• 47:58
  I mean, it's hard to, to figure out this idea that could be great,
• 48:05
  but you don't know what to do with it because it takes a lot of time.
• 48:09
  But it's also the ambiguity.
• 48:11
  And again, we're always, reluctant to do that.
• 48:14
  And I think a lot of people have more trouble with that than others.
• 48:18
  And this is why I said also in the beginning that it's just like innovation,
• 48:21
  creativity takes a lot of courage.
• 48:23
  And that's the journey.
• 48:24
  The book, again, I wanna put the book in the right perspective.
• 48:28
  This is a book like learning how to speak another language, or
• 48:32
  learning how to master an area.
• 48:34
  It's a book about how you actually develop that skill.
• 48:38
  it takes you through the things that are easier to do harder to do.
• 48:42
  point of this is you're able to do all of this, but it really has to do with
• 48:46
  how much, what the level of ambition and what the reader's trying to do it.
• 48:50
  So at the University of Michigan, what I want these young people to be
• 48:53
  able to, so they wanna be to go on and be innovators in these businesses.
• 48:57
  That's why they're in my class, right?
• 48:59
  It's creativity at work, right?
• 49:01
  But if you are a person, if you're a person who's trying to write a novel,
• 49:04
  then this is the way you do that.
• 49:06
  If you're a person who's trying to start a business, you're a person who's stuck in
• 49:09
  their career and just wants to feel more creative and doing something, this is a
• 49:12
  book for you because it's gonna take you on that journey in a very practical way.
• 49:17
  And with each step, you're gonna develop more competency, more confidence as well.
• 49:22
  And that's kind of the idea of the book.
• 49:24
  And again, as I said, so valuable for you on a personal level.
• 49:27
  You reminded me of a quote there where you were talking about
• 49:29
  these ideas, these ugly babies.
• 49:32
  It's a quote by, what one of your favorites?
• 49:34
  Buckinster Fuller.
• 49:35
  There's nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's gonna be a butterfly.
• 49:38
  One of my favorite Bucky quotes.
• 49:40
  Maybe we'll share where people can find you.
• 49:43
  I know you do workshops, you do keynotes all over the world.
• 49:45
  Where's the best place?
• 49:47
  Oh well, JeffDeGraff.com is the easiest place for everything,
• 49:50
  including the business.
• 49:51
  It's JeffDeGraff.com I'm one of the original LinkedIn influencers,
• 49:55
  so you can find me on LinkedIn.
• 49:56
  I'm easy to find and I publish regularly.
• 49:59
  So you'll see the stuff I write for Big Think and for Inc. Magazine.
• 50:03
  All the other places I write for will all show up on LinkedIn.
• 50:05
  So JeffDeGraff.com and on LinkedIn and Aiden, I just
• 50:09
  wanna thank you for having us.
• 50:10
  This has been a delight.
• 50:11
  It's an absolute pleasure having you, and we're gonna be back for
• 50:14
  part three, the finale, the trilogy.
• 50:16
  So to cover that baby behind me there, same colors, I can see you like your
• 50:20
  colors because they, they bring into some of the concept we talk about in part one.
• 50:25
  We're gonna cover the Art of change in part three.
• 50:28
  Don't forget, you can win a copy of this.
• 50:29
  It's really a toolkit.
• 50:31
  It's not really a book, and it's a pleasure to have had you on the show.
• 50:34
  Stan and Jeff Degra, thank you for joining us.
• 50:37
  Well, thank you.
• 50:38
  Thanks again to our sponsor, Kyndryl, who underpin the IT infrastructure
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