Debunking Myths About Your Brain From A Harvard Scientist | Tessa Forshaw

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So there's this like kind of ridiculous myth out there that humans are either rightrained or leftrained. I'm based at Harvard University. I'm a cognitive scientist there and I study um how adults learn, create, innovate, uh work, things like that. The idea is that if you are rightrained, you are more creative and if you are leftrained, you are more analytical. And in cognitive science, we call this phenomenon hemispheric dominance. So one hemisphere of the brain is more dominant than the other. But there's absolutely

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no scientific grounding for being only creative or only analytical. You can continuously learn more intelligence. Like intelligence isn't fixed. And that's proven to be really predictive of student success in schools is if they believe that intelligence is malleable. So if you have a CEO who says to you, "Everything else to date has been terrible." That unfortunately is likely to create a threat response. So all of a sudden you have a team of people who you've just yelled at to come up with

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more innovative ideas. They can't. Their brain has been hijacked by the fear sensor. Being metacognitive, not only about your thinking, but about your emotions, is essential. Do you think that the ability to be creative is some kind of muscle that we can train and develop? >> Um, I think that >> this episode is brought to you by Wick Studio. >> Here at the agency podcast, we're building a community and we would love for you guys to be a part of it. So, we would love to hear from you. What are

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you enjoying the most? What would you like to see more of? And what do you think might be missing? Drop a comment. Make sure you subscribe. And now on with the show. >> Tessa Forshore, welcome to the Agency podcast. >> Thanks for having me. >> I know you're staying here in Australia for about a month. >> Yes. >> And you tend to come back annually. Uh and right now you're where exactly and and spending your time doing what exactly? >> Yeah. Um so I'm based in Cambridge,

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Massachusetts. So just across the river from Boston, but if I claimed I was from Boston, I would get in trouble from Bostononians. So, I will say Cambridge. Um, and I'm based at Harvard University. I'm a cognitive scientist there and I study um how adults learn, create, innovate, uh, work, things like that. >> I'm super excited for today's episode. This is a topic that we've been looking for someone to deep dive with us. And I think cognitive science is something that I barely understand. And I

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understand that is almost like deeply ingrained into kind of everything that we do in society, families, workplaces. I think this is a topic that a lot more people need to be, I guess, adept at and I'm excited to deep dive and unpack this today. Something to open up with here is that we're told this narrative or this story that creativity is some kind of lightning bolt that's reserved for the special few. Why is that a myth in your eyes? And why are people so uncomfortable when you face them with

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that truth? >> Yeah. So it it's it is really a myth like it's kind of fascinating I think how we have created this idealized vision of what uh creative or innovator looks like in society. Um in particular I think that has a lot to do with your movies and television shows. We've got Silicon Valley, the TV show, or that the book about Steve Jobs, that famous Walter Isaacson one with the cover, you know, and um and stories of, you know, Thomas Edison and Einstein and all of these sort of lone geniuses who had

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really unique special talents and they went off by themselves and they came up with this light bulb moment creative thing and then poof, the world is, you know, history. It was their oyster and it was magic. Um, but actually underneath that, that's not really how any of those stories happened. In fact, one of my my favorite examples of this is, have you ever heard the term mcking around? >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Of course. >> So, mcking around is also one of my favorite terms and favorite things to

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do. >> Would you say it's an Australianism or is it global? >> So, I think it's a little bit more common in Australia than other places. I think just because we like a a good term like that. Um but where it comes from is actually um from Thomas Edison had a group of muckers. So the muckers as he called them were people who were helping come up with all of the different fibers that they were using to come up with the right threadings for the light bulbs and testing things and creating things. And

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there were heaps of muckets. >> Wait, that was a thing? >> Yeah, >> I didn't know this. And and so I think we forget that like the the collective the the group creativity is actually so important that we have this awesome term that we use in everyday life about it mcking around and yet for some reason we always attribute it just to the the individual. >> I did not know that. So the mythology behind that phrase is actually something that's deep and inherently entrepreneurial.

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>> Yeah. >> What what exactly would a mucker do? Was that someone who was uh job was to try to conduct electricity through >> anything and everything? I think the way you can think about it is like the maker of today. Like you know the I'm going in the studio and I'm just going to like throw this together and prototype something and see if it works or like let's try this 10 different ways. So with the light bulb in particular the so the story goes is um they were having a

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lot of trouble with particularly the right fiber for the thread in the light bulb if you can imagine what I'm talking about. Um, and so the muckers would, you know, rapidly iterate and try hundreds of different fibers, um, again and again and again and again and again, and they would go out into the world and, you know, get dirty in a park and find a new fiber and and try them. >> I'm just trying to imagine a bunch of dudes in top hats saying, "I'm mocking around, you know, like right

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>> like in an old movie." When you think about the concept around, you know, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos and these people that are seen as like, I guess a a common modern term might be they're the goats, right? There are these people that are seen as >> people that live in their zonogenius that just happen to get backtoback hits that compound and build these massive businesses. when you think about how we revere people in that position, what are we not seeing that is something that

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might be a pattern behind the scenes that you've identified in your research? >> So, I think one aspect of it is, as I mentioned, the muckers, it's the collaborators that they're they're working with. Um, you know, in some cases there's a very prominent second collaborator. In others, it's the entire teams and infrastructures that they've built around them. Um, one of the second things I think is that there the rapidness of the iteration. Um, it, you know, we have again as part of this

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mythology this sort of idea that like it's like you've gone for a walk and then there's lightning in the sky and then there's the idea, but actually so many of the things that we use today come out of thousands and thousands of iterations and of hundreds and hundreds of ideas that don't work. Like if you look at um I think it's Google Graveyard, the website is a website dedicated to like every Google prototype ever that didn't work. And there's all of these things that you know

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>> I didn't know. So I can go to google graveyard.com and see all their failures. >> Yeah. And so that's kind of I think an important thing to remember is that we see the polished story and like who doesn't love a story, right? Like I love a hero's story as well. It's cool. It's uplifting. It's inspiring. But I think the consequence of it is that we have internalized this myth and that's it means that I think people aren't thinking that they can be

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creative or they can be entrepreneurial when the cognitive science tells us that actually anybody can do it. >> So when someone's listening to this now and they're thinking to themselves, I'm more logically minded. Would you say that idea or that story that they're telling themselves isn't in actuality false? >> So yes, which is kind of might sound controversial. So let me brace yourselves. >> Yeah, let me explain. So there's this like kind of ridiculous myth out there

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that humans are either rightrained or leftrained. And the idea is that um if you are rightrained, you are more creative and if you are leftrained, you are more analytical. And in cognitive science, we call this phenomenon hemispheric dominance. And there is >> hemispheric dominance. >> Yeah. So one hemisphere of the brain is more dominant than the other. But there's absolutely no scientific grounding for like personalitybased hemispheric dominance. So there is no science. In fact, there's lots of

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there's lots of studies of re the most recent and the biggest was out of the University of Utah that looked at, you know, thousands of MRIs and other sort EEGs and other sorts of tests and they saw absolutely no relationship between like logical thinking in one side of the brain or creative thinking in one side of the brain and no individual human showed um dominance if they were what I neurotypical. They didn't have something that was an an abnormality. Um, so everyday people, there is just no such

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thing as being rightrained or leftrained or being only creative or only analytical. And I I think when you think about that, that might to some people I've had the reaction of like, but I'm rightrained. That's my identity. How is that not true? And so I want to challenge you to think about something that you think is really creative. So for me something I think really creative is choreography like dance choreography. I love the ballet and I always sit there at the end in complete awe of the of the

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choreography. But the truth is that that choreographer isn't just very creative. They're also very analytical. Right? Even though this is a very creative task, they have to think about spatial awareness and how things move, you know, through the um uh through the stage and the space. They have to think about um how that you break down units of times into beats and into segments. Uh they have to think about uh staging and blocking and height and weight and all sorts of things that we don't

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necessarily think about pace time. Um and they're all very analytical concepts. So even in the most creative acts or the most analytical acts in the world, you actually need a lot of the other to to achieve them. I I feel somewhat embarrassed right now. I'm just thinking to myself from a graphic designer's perspective, as much as we constantly get labeled as creative types, when you're designing a logo, for example, you're not only applying the cool creative component, however, you're

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doing the science of the color, >> negative space, positioning, placement, balance, using mathematical golden ratio equations to make things in alignment that feel good to the unconscious mind. There's a lot of logical analytical skills that I've experienced in creative design, creative campaigns, you know, whether you're designing a font or a logo. >> This sounds like it applies to, in your opinion, maybe almost everything that's creative. >> Yeah. And almost everything that's

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analytical, too. So, a lot of people um when you say something analytical, they'll say like an engineer. And uh one of my favorite examples of this is in Apollo 13. uh they needed a CO2 oxygen scrubber uh while they were up in space made from only the things that were on the on the spaceship or else they were all going to die. >> Oh yeah, I know this story, but I'd love to hear your take on it cuz this is wild what they were able to do. >> Right. So they put a bunch of engineers

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in a room with only on the ground with only the things that were available in the spaceship and or space capsule I should say and they made them come up with different prototypes for oxygen scrubbers, zoot scrubbers and test them and see which ones worked and they ultimately as evidenced by the fact that they got back to the ground you know found one that worked. But that process of you know rapidly iterating of thinking about novel uses for different materials that were in front of them of novel combinations that's all very

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creative and if those humans weren't wholebrained and both you know very creative and very analytical we wouldn't have got uh got those people back on the ground. Now I think to myself if I'm in a situation over a conversation and we've all experienced this where the individual in front of us is finding it difficult to grasp a creative concept or vice versa someone who's flamboyant, charismatic, tons of energy can find it difficult to add structure to something. >> Where does that come from? People

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>> to me in my experience of reality seem like they're maybe born with some nuance or some proclivity to some type of behavior. How do you look at this from a scientific perspective and and what's your lens on that? >> Yeah, so I definitely think that it's true every human is different and we have different personalities and different things that come to us easily and and not um but one of the biggest things that plays a role in maybe why that person is struggling with grabbing

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a grasping a creative concept is because they're much more practiced in a different cognitive thought process. So you know that idea of nature versus nurture they've essentially been like more trained and have done more uses of their mind on a convergent thinking process say which is a process that is very considered like narrowing down focusing selecting ideas categorizing things analyzing things. So convergent thinking and if that is their sort of default that process the way our brain

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tends to work is uh we we automize and we routinize things so that we minimize the amount of metabolic energy that we use. So the brain is um uses about 20% of the body's energy even though it's only about 2% of the body's weight which is kind of wild. >> I never thought of that. >> And so its goal is to like use less energy. So it automizes and routinizes things. So that's why we have like heruristics and biases and all of those sorts of things are are the body working

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towards >> what are those things? I've never heard those words before. >> Um sure. So heristic is uh tends to be like a pattern of thinking. Um and a bias is is uh essentially when a heristic kind of goes wrong. So, an example might be if you're standing at the supermarket and you see two um two milk choices. In fact, this just happened to me the other day. So, I live in America and I've come back to Australia, you know, frequently, but not so frequently. And I was standing in the

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supermarket and I was looking at the tea and I was like, Jesus, I don't know any of these brands. like I was and I was just so overwhelmed by the like the abundance and the choice and I didn't know what to pick. But when I stand in that same aisle but in America, I know immediately what tea to pick. And that that process is is a heristic. Um and so that is me that's reputation bias. Me going, "Oh, I know that one. It's good. I'm going to pick it up and go and use it." So, me being a dad, seeing Huggies

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commercials when I was a kid, >> now I'm a father. I go to the supermarket, I see 12 baby brands. I'm just going to pick Huggies cuz I've >> had some story in my head about what that brand means. >> Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. >> So, that's And that's not a >> it's not a bad thing. Like, it's actually it's if you think about it from both from a saving brain energy perspective, it's a great thing. Um, from a evolutionary perspective, going

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with things that you recognized when we were, you know, wandering um, nomadic nomadic humans wandering the world, going with something you recognized on the ground to eat because you know what that plant is and you know what it is and everything. Like that's probably a really good choice, right? You're not going to like end up eating the poison mushroom. So the that sort of fast recognition bias is um is really helpful. But sometimes in creativity, what we're talking about, those kinds of

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um biases and heristics can really sort of hold us hold us back. >> If you want to grow your agency, you need more than just a website builder. You need Rick Studio, the all-in-one platform that's built to help you scale. Design smarter in a hyperflexible, responsive editor, cherrypicking whatever clients need from pre-built UI elements and templates. Deliver robust backends with built-in e-commerce solutions for every industry, letting self-maintaining infrastructure just run itself. Stop reinventing the wheel with

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nurture, I think about childhood when we're raised. And you know, my experience thinking about my children and thinking about when I was in kindergarten, when the teacher would ask, you know, who in the class is creative, pretty much every kid would probably put their hand up because they're like, I finger paint, I create stuff, um, I do things in Minecraft, what have you. U, but in your Stanford classrooms, almost nobody inherently thinks they're a natural creative. If we're looking at the science of that,

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is is this by conditioning that we feel this way? What exactly is taking place? >> Yeah, it's a it's really something when you stand in classrooms at places like Stanford and Harvard in design schools and innovation centers where students have opted in to be in those spaces like they're opting in to be in a creative space at an elite institution and then at the beginning of class you say, "Hey, hands up if you think you're creative." And you know, very few of them um can

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vary 10% maybe 20% put their hands up. And yet to your exact point in my my own daughter who she's five in her kindergarten classroom just in October when I did a visit I asked this question and it was like both hands are in the air like from all these kids like it wasn't one hand. It was like >> super creative. Did you see what I mean this morning? >> Bursting to tell you. Um so that's a shift and it's a shift that I've seen in boardrooms as well like working with you

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know companies like um Airbnb or Coca-Cola or McDonald's or the World Bank or like any of these organizations I see that happen too and in these classrooms at universities and so a key reason for that is that uh when we go through that sort of um sixth grade so what is like 11 12 that sort of transition ition um into that like preubescent pre-adolescent cognitive changes. We start to care a lot more about what other people think about us and through that process we start to and there's good cognitive reasons for

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this. We take less risks. We become more susceptible to embarrassment. We become more susceptible to wanting to stay within the social norms and being accepted. And so we take less risks. That means often that we are less creative and that's something that most people go through. Um and it's really it's really sad like that one of my colleagues has studied this extensively and you can really see in the data the amount of kids who selfidentify as creative who will just jump in hands-on

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and make something you know like it's it's a rapid decline from that sort of 8-year-old through to that sort of 18year-old. And it's it's very sad. I think it has to do with those very natural cognitive processes that I sort of mentioned which I think it it's not and I say that they're natural because I don't want people to think oh I should get rid of it like I should get rid of my desire to be part of a social group. No, you shouldn't. Like that desire means that you still have friends and

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family. That desire kept you part of the tribe when we were nomadic. That desire helps you read social situations and understand appropriateness. And sometimes it's really helpful. But in innovation it's just like it's not so helpful. But so in in that process I think the cognition is one aspect. But I also think in society we signal so much conformity. Right. If you think about it school uniform >> conformity. >> Exactly. If you don't wear your hair up with the right color hair tie like we're

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talking about a hair tie you're going to get a detention. Conformity. Right. when you think about um subject choices in schools, like these are the choices that you have and they're the only choices, right? And even if there's 10, like that's still only 10 very structured choices and in younger years, no choice. Um so again, conformity. When we think about um uh what a lot of classrooms look like, they look like rows of the same desk and the same furniture sitting in front of a whiteboard. conformity.

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When we think about um Australia and the emerging workplace, we look for people who, you know, contribute to the company values. Would they be a good fit or a good addition to our organization? We really constantly we think about kids. I we've both got kids. There are a lot of times where I want to be like just do what I say. Oh my gosh. >> Right. >> Hourly. >> Yeah. Conformity. Yeah. >> Right. So, we accidentally, I think, really teach and reinforce kids that >> I caught myself the other day when I was

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trying to rush my children. Um, I have a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old. >> That's exactly the same as me. >> Yeah. And, uh, we were trying to get everything ready for the car and both my son and my daughter were, I want to get in the car myself. And my brain was just like, get in the car. We don't have time. And I had to remind myself that for them to develop confidence and the ability to want to tackle problems, I would just stand there for five minutes while they figure out how to crawl

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through the door up into the seat and put their seat belt on. How much of social conditioning comes from our childhood and how does this show up in our adult adulthood in ways that we might not expect? >> Yeah, I mean it's a great question and by God I wish I had the fullon answer that I would be very happy. Um I think that the um you have overt social conditioning so big things that can happen to you but these also these smaller routines and practices in your everyday life and they actually play a

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really big outsized impact on who we become as adults. So, the fact that you noticed that with your kids, like, hang on, the gift I can give them right now is space to practice independence, and even though it's driving me crazy, I'm going to like step back and let it happen. That as a routine is is go going to be incredibly impactful. That's not a trip to Hawaii, you know, that's not a um really fancy, I don't know, private school soccer lesson camp. that's not, you know, that's literally a tiny little

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thing that you're doing consistently, a small routine, and those have really um big impacts on who we become. I think in creativity, those routines also are the thing that starts to to shift um for for kids, like you know, am I allowed to have different ideas? Am I allowed to try stuff by myself? Am I allowed to not conform? Am I allowed to? If they can't do it with us, who can like as parents, who can they start to do that with? >> Do you think that creative and the ability to be creative is some kind of

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in your words cognitive muscle that we can retain and train and develop? >> Yeah. So, I I really do and fortunately for me, the scientific literature is is in agreement with that. Um, so I think about uh creativity. I mean it includes a lot of things but three cognitive processes that I think are really helpful for folks to understand. Um so the first one is about the ability to come up with wild ideas, the ability to think broadly, expansively, novelty. Um I think that this is often considered

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like the hero of creativity. But so we call that divergent thinking. So you're diverging from something. You're going expansive. The second process is actually what we talked about before as being analytical, which is convergent thinking. So that's the ability to go, oh, we've come up with 35,000 ideas. How do we cluster them? How do we test them? What should we look at? Um, how do I make sense of them or organize them? So convergent thinking is an essential process, too. And the third is executive

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function. And I think that's often the sort of unsung hero of of creativity. Um that's the ability to set timelines to follow through on tasks to um you know to actually execute on what your idea is and what you're planning to do. So the way to think about that um is to imagine if you will aerodynamics. So in aerodynamics we have um we have this idea of an airplane that needs to get in the air and they do that through lift right the way an airplane is designed lift. So divergent thinking is lift in

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this example. It gets you up into the sky. It gets you off the ground and and you're high up there and you're soaring. And then to come back to the ground to land the airplane, you need convergent thinking, right? And as you converge, you start to become more concrete close to the ground. You can see that a tree is a tree and a house is a house and it becomes sharper and more focused. So you converge. But if you only have, you know, convergent and divergent or lift and gravity in this situation, you're

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going up into the sky and you're coming down, but you're not going anywhere, right? So, you need thrust, which is what I would say is executive function. The thing that pushes you forward, makes you execute, makes you move forward. Um and then in this analogy what we were talking about earlier around the mythology of creativity that some people um are you know think they're rightrained or leftrained that there are we're so it's socialized out of us that is all something that I term innovation

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hesitation and I think it yeah it's like a I think a real thing that exists in the world and so um that is in this analogy drag and just like in aerody dynamics. Once we identified that, you know, the fluid medium we live in in the world was air and we could therefore figure out how to use it and manipulate it and work with it. I think we also need to acknowledge and realize that the world we live in is has innovation hesitation and we can, you know, now use these other levers to start to figure out how do we negotiate,

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you know, through it? How do we manipulate it? How do we overcome it? How do we use it? >> When someone thinks to themselves, okay, I understand what you're saying here, and they're trying to get a gauge on how much hesitation they might have in themselves. What are some things that people can implement to try to identify how much delay there might be? >> Yeah. So I think I mean some really common ways that I see innovation hesitation show up are um so firstly if you find yourself saying something like

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oh I I won't say that idea I'll wait for someone creative to do it or like I'm a I'm an analytical person not a not a creative person or um if in your organization you're hearing the leader or the team around you say things like well this isn't how we do it here that's not how this is done or that seems too risky. Those are all signs of of innovation hesitation. I think another sign in the Australian context is with the productivity commission. Something that I'm struggling with is if you read

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their main report, it talks all about, you know, how the outcome of us being productive is just magically going to be innovation. But it doesn't actually talk about the fact that we get innovation by having human beings innovate. And for human beings to innovate, they need to be creative. And I think that idea that it's just like a consequence and not an empowered thing that every Australian needs and should be able to do is another form of innovation hesitation. >> If you were to encourage people to be

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more innovative in their life, what are some things that people can use as a concept or an anchor to better understand how they could introduce innovation into their business, into their livelihood, >> whether it be personal or professional? what are some of those tools and things we should be considering? So a really simple way to start with this is sometime this is kind of silly but has been is very effective in um in the research is uh is to know if the next thing you're about to do is something

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where you need creative ideas or so like concrete example would be um you're at work and you look on your calendar and in two hours you have a meeting that's like a brainstorming meeting about how we're going to use AI in the procurement function. which is where you work in this organization. And so a really concrete way to show up better and be more innovative in that brainstorm would be beforehand to practice some divergent thinking exercises so that your brain is literally primed. We talked about you go

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for the um the sort of the thing that uh is stronger that you know well. If you've just done it, it's fresher. You know it better and you're more likely to use it. So um some great divergent thinking exercises include uh looking at the glass in front of us and saying well what are all the alternative uses of the glass and just coming up with okay that glass so it's a glass it can hold water could also be a vase could hold flowers if I turn it upside down I could cut scon with it right you know like the

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country women's association um uh if I ground it down I could probably make glue with it right like the glass could be all sorts of things that practice can really change an individual on the individual level how creative you're going to be in the following activity. >> So when you're looking at a problem or an idea, you're not looking at it at face value. You're trying to think about what are all the potential alternatives and at least wearing that hat for the sake of play, for the sake of novelty or

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or identifying things that you could uh utilize to innovate. >> Yeah. and and sometimes doing it on something that doesn't matter before you get to the thing that does matter. So like in the in this case of like the glass another way um in the case of something that does matter um I think a a really important here thing here is to recognize that you need to go for volume when you're coming up with ideas um and that the volume sort of serves a few purpose. So the literature says that it

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takes about 12 individual idea 12 ideas per individual to push into anything that would be considered novel in like a normal distribution of ideas. >> So if you're thinking about the last brainstorm you had in or most people have at work like there's no way that the five people in the room each came up with 12 different ideas, right? So, you're not getting anywhere near what we actually need um to to start being able to come up with ideas that are different. And the the science behind

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that is that when I say uh when you say a term or someone says something, so like again, let's use glass, in this case, glass, your brain reaches into its archival memory and brings forward everything you know about glass and all of the associations that you have about a thing that is a glass. So when you come up with the brainstorm, the first few things that you come up with are going to be things that are generally kind of obvious because they were easy retrieval. They were things that were

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already attached to the word glass in your working memory or in your archival memory to your working memory. What you need is to push through that initial batch of stuff to get to the stuff that you're only getting to because you're being inspired by novel ideas associated with the novel idea. So if we then say glue because that was one of the ideas. Now I've got everything that I had attached to glass and everything that I have attached to glue in my mind. >> You're reaching back and pulling

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different items and then combining them together. >> Yes. And that is how idea generation works. And so the more the more thing the more novel things that you can be or they call it um semantic distance. So the further away different concepts are in your brain >> and then you bring together the more likely the novel the novelty of the idea. >> We often do this in brand strategy workshops where people get a little too fixated on their industry. Let's take a financial adviser who wants to come up

00:34:24 - 00:35:09

with a cool innovative brand. >> Mh. >> But they spend most their time in their space. So they're in that financial advisor bubble and they look around at their competitors and they go, "Well, we're all kind of doing the same thing. If I do anything else that's outside the box, that's kind of scary." We tend to look outward like what's another lateral industry or even completely opposite industry that we could look at to get an understanding of how we might be able to

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take ingredients from something else and add it to this. >> How can someone practice that in theory if they're ideulating a way to innovate a product or a service? Are there techniques or hacks you can use to try to combine different ways of thinking? >> Yeah, for sure. So one way is to just have several people involved in the brainstorm from different departments. So when I worked at IDO it would often be considered uh like you know an honor for someone to say to you will you come

00:35:16 - 00:36:13

join my brainstorm and people would pull from all the different teams everywhere across the organization not just the team working on the project. And the reason that they're doing that is because that what is associated for me with the word glass is also different to what is associated for you with the word glass and different for the next person and the next person. >> And so when we then bring forward all of our associations that are obvious to us, some of those will be nonobvious to

00:35:44 - 00:36:42

other people and will then cause them to queue forward a different set of ideas. So increasing the diversity of types of backgrounds and thinking or departments in your brainstorm is one really easy way to do this. >> We had a guest on the podcast about a year ago uh Chris Doe and he said that people have baggage attached to words. >> So yeah, if I were to say to you, "Oh, I hate marketing." And then the person across from me works in marketing and they think to themselves, "I love

00:36:14 - 00:37:10

marketing." They both have different baggage >> Yeah. >> attached. And just by reaching into different departments, collabing people together with a common mission, they can mish mash or muckarounds their ideas to figure out a new way of innovating. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Now, question around innovation. It does sound like what you were talking about before. If our brain takes 20% of our body's energy and it only makes up 2% of our body, it does sound like maybe a lot

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of cognitive power goes into exercises like this. >> Yes. Is this why our brain shortcircuits into memory rather than thinking about new concepts? What exactly is happening in the brain? >> Absolutely. So coming back to that idea of like heruristics and bias, it's if if I serves us well most of the time to look at a glass and be like, oh, it holds water, right? like that shortcut, that heristic is helpful or like I I've been hearing this a lot lately with AI and organizations, you know, this idea that

00:37:16 - 00:38:18

everyone is having the same brainstorm and they're coming up with the same ideas and nothing sort of new is happening. And that makes sense because they're all defaulting to some of these heristics. availability bias the the thing that you saw the most recently in that you know HBR article that everyone else also saw like that is the the thing that you're looking at anchoring bias that which is the tendency to anchor to the first thing that you heard and try to draw that through design fixation is

00:37:47 - 00:38:44

the tendency to have an idea and then like fixate on it and try to morph everything else into the idea that you already had because you already sunk energy and load into that idea here and there's more than 50 very strongly researched cognitive biases but about 200 that are accepted. So there's 200 ways that our brains work against us being super creative and innovative. And so part of the thing that people need to realize is that it's okay that it's tricky. It's okay that that doesn't feel

00:38:16 - 00:39:19

um helpful. It's okay that you need chocolate at the beginning and end of your brainstorm. like you are kind of fighting against like just like you know going to the gym and building muscle. Like it it's not it it's not going to be the easiest thing in the world that you do that day if you actually want to build the muscle, right? Like you're going to have to have resistance and new new weight and conditioning and all of those things. And creativity too requires effort. My colleague often says it's not hard

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but it's hard work. >> Okay. Okay. Now, with the human brain, how is our brain working against us most of the time? Are there common things that you could point out that would help us understand what they might be? >> Confirmation bias is a a really common one. Um, so that is that you we have a preference to notice things that confirm our idea. So if you're going to say a user interview, do a user interview and you have a perspective on what the best new feature should be for the product that you're

00:39:20 - 00:40:34

developing, you are more likely to notice, wait, and ask questions about things that relate to that. That is your brain working how it's supposed to work. Um, another really good example of um of this is the bandwagon effect. I I loved when I say that I always get a vision of like a bandwagon. Um but but if you when everybody else is jumping onto an idea onto the bandwagon and it looks like fun and exciting and hype, you're also tend to be more likely to join the thing that looks like it has like social

00:39:58 - 00:41:09

acceptance, community, and desiraability. >> Um and so that is again your brain working how it's supposed to. But in the case of creativity and innovation, both of those things aren't helpful. Status quo bias is I think another really important one. Um, as humans, we have a natural tendency to preference the status quo over everything else >> and the status quo being everything was as it was yesterday. >> Yes. So what we see a lot of again in the example of AI right now is people

00:40:32 - 00:41:30

instead of thinking what entirely blowing it up and being like what could this be they will say how will we improve X process that we already have with AI. So that is an example of status quo bias. We're improving the process that we already have. So it's kind of exactly the same as it already was but AI is doing it. >> So you're focusing on optimization of what exists versus creating an alternative. Exactly. And even letting yourself imagine an alternative. >> And so that is a again if you think

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about that from a evolutionary perspective, if you are again a wandering nomadic tribe and you know that the place that you're in has water and food sources and you know community and really good sight lines and not leave. >> Yeah. Why leave that? That's a really good choice. So your brain is screaming at you stay here. >> We need this energy. >> Why why risk it? >> Exactly. So that again useful not in innovation. >> How would you separate the concept of creativity and innovation?

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>> I love that question. >> They seem so interconnected. I imagine you see them differently. >> I see them as really interconnected. So when I say talk about creativity, I'm typically talking about creative problem solving of which I think the product is or the goal is usually innovation. Um I think about it as really related to design thinking, human- centered design, all of those in my mind would be creative problem solving methods. And then creativity to me is an act that we

00:42:11 - 00:43:07

use in creative problem solving. Okay? But it's an act that you can it's a cognitive act that you can use in other endeavors too. >> Do you have an example of of how we might be able to see them together but see them separately? >> Yeah, sure. So I think um of so often we think when we say creativity people will think about artists for an example. So in that example somebody who is painting a novel um painting where they're coming up with something and they're creating

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it. That would be to me be creative. they're being divergent. They're, you know, they're coming up with a concept. They're putting it together. But if they're just painting a bowl of fruit that's right in front of them to be exactly as it is, I would say that's artistic but not necessarily creative. On the flip side, in innovation, if um somebody is uh has got a new concept that they've seen somewhere else and they're replicating it, you know, perfectly to build a business behind it

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and it may well be successful. I would call that being entrepreneurial. But if they are finding you know using the divergent thinking and creative thinking to come up with something novel to solve a problem in a new way to see something in a new way um that would then in my mind start to become innovative. >> I had someone explain it a while ago and they were telling me that let's take ice as a concept and that how did we as humans used to get ice? We had to go up a mountain, find a frozen lake,

00:43:38 - 00:44:37

>> cut a giant cube out, drag it down the mountain with donkeys, >> chop it up, and hand it out. >> At a certain point, people felt that that was a lot of energy and resources to make that happen. Then they started to create um their own refrigerated systems, if you will. Uh and then they would ship it from the factory to your front door. Then they realized, how do we innovate again? Well, let's put that giant refrigerator in a small model and put that in someone's house. When you

00:44:08 - 00:45:20

think of innovation, is is it always a quantum leap or can it be incremental? >> I think most innovation is incremental. Um, I also think so. We mentioned just before the show, I was in Neom in Saudi Arabia not that long ago, about a year. And um something that really struck me there was so the vision of Neon is this like grand like moonshot vision of you know a vertical city that's a line that's hundreds of kilometers long. >> Oh, I've seen the architecture for this. So Nom is that line that they're cutting

00:44:44 - 00:45:51

through the desert. >> Okay. And you've been there on the ground. Yes. Um and I mean there's no building there yet, but I have been to the site. Um and it's also a couple of other initiatives in this region that is called Neon that's about the size of Belgium. So it turns out that where the line is in particular is in one of the windiest places on Earth >> and they're putting a wall right in front of it. >> Yeah. That's like 500 m high. And so to get a massive concrete slab 500 m high

00:45:17 - 00:46:18

in the windiest place on earth, that's like that's going to take some some innovation, right? before we even get to like the building and you can get anywhere in 15 minutes and it's and it's totally carbon neutral and the transport knows you immediately and the mirror out every front door is a mirror and it can detect you know all sorts of health issues based on your appearance using big data like like the vision is unbelievable but before we even get to any of that right we've got this issue

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of we need to get a concrete slab in the windiest place on earth 500 >> we've got an issue with wind Yeah. >> And what really blew my mind is they have stood up an entire department in NEOM, like an entire like government agency essentially. It's called a sector entire government agency that's focused on these incremental innovations. So okay, to lift that, we need a different jacking system that uses different kinds of hydraulics. We need a different mold to be able to create that mold. We need

00:46:19 - 00:47:20

a because of the weight of the slabs, we need a 40 mm roundsized rebar. Now we need to come up with an innovative way to bend 40 mm rebar like and there are all of these little incremental innovations that are now already in uses in countries around the world that are not the line, you know, they're not the the thing's not even I don't even know if there's any building there yet, right? And yet there from that effort there are still innovations that exist all around the world. And so I think

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it's important to remember that not everything has to be as big and as grand as the line. It doesn't all have to be this sort of moonshot or um you know in Elon Musk's case Mars shot. Uh sometimes it's okay to sort of bring it in a bit. And in our um in innovation is the the book that I wrote, we talk a lot about um it can be a jump shot or a roof shot or a moonshot. Like you can bring in where your the impact that you're trying to have. It doesn't all have to be as impactful and huge as going to Mars.

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>> It does feel like we're in a moment in time in society where it feels like if you're not reaching for the moon, you're not doing a good job. When you're trying to implement incremental innovation into a business, are there some pillars or some frameworks or just some common tropes that can help people identify how they should consistently apply innovation? >> Yeah. So often um when people think about bringing innovation into a business, they think about these creative problem solving processes that

00:47:58 - 00:48:54

I mentioned. So design thinking is a is a pretty famous one. human- centered design, agile, like all of these sorts of methods. Um, and as I was teaching creativity, innovation with my co-teer, who's also my co-author, something we would often get asked is, "Oh, what about this process or what about this process or what about this process?" And so eventually we decided to go and analyze all of the different processes we could find. And there were about 80 sort of really good ones, meaning like a

00:48:26 - 00:49:39

company was putting it out there and it was their IP and they were sort of fully behind it or it was an academic paper or it was um an institution um like a um a government agency or a nonprofit that was focused on interaction design improvement or you know those kind of organizations. So we analyzed the 80 of these and what we realized as we were sort of going through that process was that actually the exact steps and the names of the steps and the exact phases and the order was all kind of noise. But

00:49:02 - 00:50:10

instead what they were all trying to do was have people enact certain mindsets. So they were all of them were saying hey like to um to be innovative you need to like go out into the real world and interact with people and see real problems and stuff that's going on and they were saying hey you need to have a mindset of being generative and coming up with lots of ideas >> is this to different people like your hat is to go do that whereas this other person's hat is to do this >> sometimes but I so I think in the case

00:49:36 - 00:50:36

of these processes the way that they were sort of presenting them to the world was or has typically been you have to do this specific sequence of steps in this very specific order and at the end of it you'll get a unicorn if you do it perfectly but it never works like that and as a result we get all these you know articles in in um in newspapers in industry magazines that will have headlines like design thinking is dead and then you read it and you're like well yeah of course that didn't work

00:50:06 - 00:51:13

right you just followed somebody else's journey that they wrote down step by step in a completely different context with completely different skills on a completely different problem. Like what did you expect? So we sort of decided to think about what are all of the mindsets mindset meaning uh the cognitive frameworks by which you see the world. And I I can talk a little bit more about mindsets in a tick, but we decided to look at all of those and then I sort of identify them and and name them and came

00:50:40 - 00:51:36

up with a perspective that was essentially along the lines of these 80 processes which worked for people somewhere once clearly well enough that they decided to like monetize them have value in them. And what they're all trying to tell you is that these are the essential mindsets that you need to be familiar with to start getting good at innovation in your organization. >> I I might pull from something I'm familiar with. Uh there's a book by Edward Dabono called Six Hat. Thank you.

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>> I love that book. >> Oh, you've read the book. Fantastic. >> In the book, he talks about six different colored hats. And you might know these better than me when it comes to the literature, but from memory, one of the hats is the black hat, which is basically be negative. So if you're looking at a problem, what are the risks, the dangers, the things that could go wrong? And he teaches, okay, now take that hat off and put on your emotional hat. What are the feelings?

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What are your hunches? What are your instincts? And then you think from that perspective or that lens. Then you might take the red hat off and put the yellow hat on, which is optimism. Let's be optimistic. Let's think best case scenario, what have you. Another hat I can reme remember is the white hat, which is the what are the facts, the data, the insights. >> When when you think about swapping hats and changing your lens when you're looking at a problem, what does that allow someone to gain when they're

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trying to build a business? >> So, I think Dono um didn't know that he was talking about mindsets, but I am just going to go with that. I think he was talking about mindsets. >> Take us down the rabbit hole. Let's go. So as I mentioned mindset cognitive framework by which you see the world. So the best way I think you can sort of internalize this is if you and um if in in America I know it's here now too like that big store Costco. >> Yes. Love Costco. >> Yeah. So my husband and I have really

00:52:33 - 00:53:33

different opinions about Costco. And as a result when we enter the store we have really different mindsets. So my mindset with Costco is like, I need to get out of here in 18 and a half minutes. I'm gonna go as fast as I can. I know exactly what I want. I don't want to spend a second in here longer. So that mindset, which I know has a stupid name because mindsets can really be anything. Um, that mindset though shapes what I pay attention to in the store. I don't pay attention to things that aren't

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relevant to my goal. It chooses what I perceive, what I notice. It chooses what it informs what decisions I make. And so my entire experience of Costco is completely and utterly shaped by my mindset. And my outcome is shaped by my mindset. For my husband, his ideal Costco mindset is very much a like I'm going to spend all afternoon here and try every sample. And occasionally he'll walk out with like a 2 L bottle of, you know, Bombay Sapphire gin cuz it was 30 bucks. that was not on the list and that's fine

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but it's a different mindset. It's it's shaping his experience of the store really really differently. >> Okay. >> So it's interesting I think to recognize this because most people think memory is a or how we perceive something is objective like a objective video recording that's fact. But if you and I watch the same event and we have different mindsets while we watch that event, we might actually recall an in entirely different narrative of what happened which is quite something. So

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mindsets are very very powerful. In fact at Stanford there's been amazing research done on the role of mindsets in uh weight loss and in chronic disease management. And in some instances they've found that uh mindset interventions are more effective than drug-based interventions for weight loss and can be as effective as um some drug based interventions for chronic disease management. >> What do you mean? So having people engage in a intervention that is designed to shape shape and change their

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mindset about the thing that they're doing about their weight loss experience can result in more weight lost at the end of the trial than if they were given this other drug or special manage diet. >> Okay. So if the mindset is going into it, h I have to go to the gym, a different mindset with the same Costco experience is I get to >> Yeah. Or it could be um the mindset could be uh you know each small choice that I make throughout the day matters. >> Compounding the little moments.

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>> Yeah. >> Like you can have a mindset about just about anything. Like you can come up with any crazy name you like. You can have a mindset about a mindset. >> You can there's a whole book Carol Dwick right called mindset that's on growth mindset um which is the mindset of that you can continuously learn more intelligence like intelligence isn't fixed. >> Okay. >> So um and that's proven to be really predictive of student success in schools is if they believe that intelligence is

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malleable. If you think about that if you're a kid in a school and you think you were just born as intelligent you are and there's nothing you can do about it. That's really going to give you a completely different experience. It's going to change how you interact with school. It's going to change how you study. It's going to change who you talk to, what friends you have, how you behave. Whereas, if you go into school thinking that everybody can be smart and everything can be learned and I can do

00:56:12 - 00:57:16

hard things, I just have to keep practicing because intelligence is malleable. That's going to totally change how you experience school, right? >> So, mas are so powerful. So coming back to innovation, I think um businesses, you know, coming up with a couple of mindsets. The six we have in the book are just six funny named ones. Like you don't have to use them, but coming up with six that or a set that make sense for your organization and then making sure that when you are doing stuff as a team, you

00:56:43 - 00:57:48

all have the same mindset at the moments you need to. So in the case of Costco, if I go to Costco with my husband and we have different mindsets, that results in us arguing, right? We disagree, we want different things, we notice different things, we have perceive different things, and as a result, it's a bit of a cluster. Whereas if we both align on, okay, Tess, today is a weekend day. The kids are, you know, at soccer and so we have two hours and we're going to do Costco mine way. and I like, okay, we're

00:57:16 - 00:58:17

it's a two-hour waste Costco day mindset. The experience that we have together will be much more in sync and we're priming each other to to synchronize. We had an a meeting probably about a year and a half ago here at Rival, our agency, and one of the things I noticed was our team would put so much energy into something that they would be perfectionists about it. We got to make the best logo for the clients. It's going to be perfect. And whenever we try to do something ourselves as our own initiative, the

00:57:46 - 00:58:39

team would overengineer everything. And we had to create a mindset which is called mud mapping it. So just get out a napkin, get out a crayon and just like test it before we try to build the whole thing. And we're able to kind of throw this language around now. And if someone's fixated on something being perfect, we just say, "Hey, just mudmap it and we'll figure it out later." And then they know what that means. when you're communicating about these concepts, you talk about in your book the

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importance of wandering like with the Costco analogy um do you mind sharing with us what you mean about conceptually wandering and and how that can be beneficial? divergent thinking, that process that we've talked about that, you know, it's often seen as the hero um for good reason, you know, um is uses a part of the your brain that's called the default mode network. And that part of your brain is responsible for daydreaming or minding. >> The default mode network. Okay. Is this

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something you've coined or is this a common thing? >> That's a a neuroscientist's neurologist kind of term. >> And what exactly is the default mode network? So it's a a So in your brain you have um you know the different regions of your brain that have different responsibilities based on things like um auditory processing, visual processing, um uh movement, um emotional regulation, fear sensing, um breathing, like all of those heart rate, all of those things are controlled by

00:59:18 - 01:00:15

different regions in your brain. And then sort of on top of the regions, you have networks which are um I think a way I'm going to go with this. I think a way to imagine it could be kind of like highway networks between regions in you know in Sydney. So if the brain is Sydney and you know you have this part is the east and this part is the you know northern beaches and this part is the Shire and this part is the CBD you then have highways that kind of get you know help coordinate between the regions

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and make them accessible. And it's through those sort of interconnections that um different some sometimes different more complex things can happen. So the default mode network is such a system. Uh so it sort of sits above the regions of your brain um and is more about uh how um information and different things are kind of connected. So, it has a lot to do with, as I said, in um in in daydreaming or mind wandering when you have ever noticed those moments like you're sitting on the train, you know, you phone's died and

01:00:26 - 01:01:23

you just kind of looking out the window and you start like thinking about all of the different things that this could be related to. And then that makes you think about, you know, that thing that you had yesterday for dinner. And then that makes you think about the talk that you saw and then how this is related to that. Like so that kind of process what you're doing is traveling. It's one of the only ways that you can kind of travel some of these um these neural networks between the different ideas and

01:00:55 - 01:01:52

and thoughts and things that you have start you have um in your archival memory. And it's how you can by traveling different routes, you bring different things into the working memory that you're sort of using and thinking and actively doing. And so you then can go and get more like more bits of information and connect them and make sense of them. >> So you're not fully daydreaming, but you're I don't know coagulating data together from things you're looking at, things

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you're feeling, things you're defragging from your day. >> Yeah. It's like a connection of all points meeting. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> And so that is a really important um network that we see kind of tends to be activated when you're engaging in divergent thinking. >> So when you're engaging in creativity, you really tend to be >> and and how is that important for us when we're trying to innovate and we're trying to incrementally improve

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ourselves and our companies? >> Yeah. So what we want to do is do things um as an organization that uh foster the default mode network being active. So things that don't foster us you know engaging in divergent thinking and the default mode network are things like immense threat. Um so if you are at a company that um has a you know you have a CEO who says to you I need you to come up with the most innovative idea about how we can use AI tomorrow everything else to date has been terrible the unfor even

01:02:29 - 01:03:34

though that co may feel that and that might be true that unfortunately is likely to create a threat response in the person their amigdula almond shaped part of their brain is likely to trigger and start to be like, "Oh, I sense fear. I sense threat." Even if they wanted it to or not, like that happens to all of us. In fact, that is is what's happening to your little kid when they have a tantrum is their amigdala is hijacking. Um, so it's going to start to sort of sense and then unfortunately when your

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um amigdula starts to hijack your your cognitive systems, the default mode network doesn't get the attention that it needs to operate. So all of a sudden you have a team of people who you've just yelled at to come up with more innovative ideas and they can't >> because their brain has been hijacked by the fear sensor. And so these are some like there's some real cognitive kind of principles at play that are really important for um people who are leading innovation teams to recognize because if

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they if they don't it's like saying to your soil, I'm really mad that you didn't grow carrots, you were too dehydrated and then like you know watering them for two hours straight, the soil's going to be soggy and the carrots aren't going to grow. Like you can kind of shoot yourself in the foot if that makes sense. That that really makes sense because if you add a time constraint to something and you're sparking their amydala to fe feel fearful of okay if I don't solve this

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problem you know what what does that mean for me then they're putting energy into that as a resource versus actually solving a problem. How can founders or leaders better position themselves to not create that environment for their team? >> Yeah, I mean I think about that uh as a parent. How can I not do that to my child? Um and I think unfortunately it's unfortunately it's the same. So, one of those things is being really recog recognizing the power differential and the impact of um the impact of what you

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potentially could say um on a person and therefore the timing of which you say it. >> What do you mean by power differential? >> So, in the case of what I was just saying like a parent to a child or a CEO, there's a power dynamic. >> Yeah, there's a power dynamic. >> Okay. And so if you say like what we, you know, I need this, the ideas have been terrible and I need a brand new one by Tuesday, like you're not going to ignite the cognitive processes in that person that you need.

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>> That still may need to be said, but maybe don't say it before you need the idea. Maybe say it once you have it. >> Okay? >> Right? So I'm not saying like don't give feedback. I'm not saying don't have hard conversations. What I am saying is be aware that like often those things can trigger the amygdala and that can mean that it our brain then prioritizes dealing with our threat response over dealing with our divergent thinking and and the you know utilization of some of

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these other systems. >> I was talking to I don't know if you know who this individual is Dan Martell yesterday. um he runs multiple SAS companies and is quite successful in his own right. And him and I were having this conversation around team dynamics >> and he was saying to me, hey, it's really important to let your team win and to have an objective and a goal or like a significant positive outcome. He said simultaneously there needs to be stakes and those stakes need to be

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planted out in the future to create time and space for the team to play. And what he was saying to me was that by having a negative reinforcement and a positive reinforcement set out in the future, it kind of prolongs or delays maybe the negative implications if a team doesn't hit a goal. It's like oh by this date in the distant future um we need to have solved this problem >> rather than not triggering the immediate amydala then and there. when you think about positive reinforcement and

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negative reinforcement for a team dynamic, how are both of them useful in your in your own perspective? >> Yeah, I think one of the most in creativity uh one of the most helpful things that you can do is a little bit less than positive or negative reinforcement and that is just making space for them to practice. So if you want a team that is more innovative then they need to practice the different processes of innovation. They need to practice being divergent. They need to practice being convergent. They need to

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practice different mindsets. They need to I like I think you could from I suppose what I'm trying to say is like it's a little bit more first order for me. Like if it's not about are they incentivized in the future positively or negatively. It's actually about do they have the skills and the recency and the time on like tools to be able to execute on the thing that you're asking um and is are those processes being enabled in the organization that you're in um from a like literal cognitive perspective or

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are they being shut down? >> Yeah. So you need to give your team time to solve a problem like what are some of the parameters that you would set for a goal for example. >> Yeah. So I will I often will think about breaking creative problem solving down into moves I call them. Um so they are things that are repeatable, definable, actionable and sharable. Um so for example doing interviews would be a move because um it's definable. Like I'm doing I'm doing three interviews.

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There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. I have a you know an interview guide. Like the whole thing's defined. It's actionable. I go and I actually execute on it. Um, it's uh repeatable in the sense that I can do it again if I want to later. Like it's not a one-off time special sort of thing situation. And it's sharable in the sense that like I have a transcript and insights that I could share with people so they can see the thing that I did. When we break things down into moves, they be the s

01:08:52 - 01:10:00

the kind of approximate cognitive size of that means that um there our cognitive load can kind of hold the amount that we can hold in our working memory. We can hold the whole experience. It also means that they're small enough that we achieve them quite quickly. when every time you achieve a sort of defined unit of a task like that, your brain releases dopamine which makes you happy which also makes you much more likely to do the thing again. So I think one thing that um leaders can really do is instead of

01:09:25 - 01:10:20

giving the lofty big 10-year innovation goal only like sure that's important too but is to say okay so like right now let's go out and let's figure out what people think about this. We're going to start with this thing. What are the different ways that we can do that? Okay, we could do some interviews. Great. Let's go do interviews. And so these sort of small incremental moves help us sort of hack our again hack our brain system to start getting more dopamine releases to get more rewards,

01:09:54 - 01:10:45

which means we're more likely to do more moves. We're more likely to do more moves. Using the gym analogy again, it's just like that, right? Like if you go to the gym once a week, you're much more likely to go to the gym twice a week. You're much more likely to go to the gym three times a week. The biggest predictor I've seen in the sides of how many times it's like how many times you're going to go to the gym is how many times you go to the gym, right? Like >> yeah, it's like that uh quote success

01:10:19 - 01:11:18

begets success. You know, once you get one win, you can stack it and continue to win. >> Now, I want to talk about obsession in the work environment. >> Uh and the current obsession for me seems to be pointed at efficiency. Right now, every business I talk to, every client for the most part is about, hey, how do we maximize profit? How do we maximize efficiency? How do we maximize things being automated? In a world where we're obsessed with efficiency, it feels like innovation requires time and

01:10:48 - 01:12:12

perhaps experimentation, especially when time is money. Uh, how do you think society got here? And is this a dangerous place for companies to live? I mean I think so because you know in economics my understanding is you know efficiency and productivity are often presented sort of like a fraction equation and efficiency I think the an principle here is efficiency is the denominator right so you can like you can only go as far as you can go which is zero right like you can't go littleer than that

01:11:29 - 01:12:23

>> yeah Um whereas productivity could be endless. You can have 10 million over 0.000000001. >> Right. >> Right. So the exponential opportunity can balloon out far greater than it can go south of zero. >> Yeah. >> Which is nil. >> Yes. And that's that's it. Like there's a point where something can't be more efficient, >> but mathematically there isn't really a point in which something can't be more productive. >> Okay. And so it is really fascinating to

01:11:57 - 01:13:01

me and I but I think it comes back to status quo bias is my honest response. I think um it comes back to this idea of like well we have a process for this and so let's just like optimize that and let's keep making it smaller and more efficient and you know and and innovate and innovate and innovate and instead of like what is the brand new thing we could do? What is the unbounded version of this look like? what is the problem we're really trying to solve and what are all of the multitude of ways that we

01:12:29 - 01:13:27

could you know effectively do that that have nothing to do with the way we're already solving it. >> Okay. >> Um and also the other thing that ties into that I think a lot uh is sunk cost fallacy. So again another one of these biases and heruristics and that's our natural tendency to um wanting to sink more time and effort and energy into something that we've sunk a lot of time and effort and energy into. So if we as a company already implemented an SAP module and we sunk a lot of time and

01:12:58 - 01:13:58

effort and energy into this module, our goal is going to be to like make the module work to, you know, put add AI plugins and thises and that's and processes and change human training and all of these things to make it work rather than to be like, hang on, does this even effectively solve the problem that we have? What is that? What are all the ways that we could do that? Should we maybe pursue one of the 500 other things that we have here versus the one thing that we've sunk a cost into?

01:13:28 - 01:14:29

>> Right. This reminds me of um like a really old video of Steve Jobs where he was talking about his frustration with developing a team that was launching a very early days Mac. He was saying in the video that he felt that hiring managers wasn't a good idea for Apple at the time because he felt that when he hired these managers with massive CVs, they would come into Apple and all they would do is try and manage stuff. And he was saying, I need people to do things. So then he felt by hiring someone who

01:13:59 - 01:15:14

was >> I guess on paper terrible but in actuality in the company super great at like solving problems and iterating and testing stuff a mucker he was like that's so much more valuable to our company than trying to bring these titles in. >> When you think about entrepreneurs and how they pieced their teams together what should they fixate on if it's not job titles? I'm going to steal from um uh Tim Brown at IDO. He had a sort of famous diagram that he would draw about T-shaped people. So the idea is that you

01:14:36 - 01:15:43

have people who have both a lot of breadth that's like the top of the tea, but they also have depth in something >> and his in something was kind of like doesn't really matter what the depth is too much. Um, but you want to have a depth in something. And I think that's shown up to be really true in my own work. Um, in the in in the teams that I've worked on where we've won, you know, Fortune um, Fast Company design awards or core 77 design awards, there's been like marine biologists on the team

01:15:10 - 01:16:08

who also like have some design experience, right? There's been cognitive scientists. There's been improvis like like professional do musical improvisation of Steven Sonheim musical like experts, right? Like >> they have really random >> deep things that they're great at. Yeah. >> But they have a wide vernacular of other skills. >> Yes. >> And so I think what the deep tea kind of shows and again this is um this is Tim Brown's not mine. Um but what it sort of

01:15:39 - 01:16:36

seems to show is this idea that a person can develop deep expertise. They have like the tenacity and the they have a growth mindset and they have >> their mind can hold death. >> Yeah. And they have a a practice at it and they want to do it. So you're looking for someone who's like found a you know they're a squirrel. They've found the nut and they've like gone the whole way with the thread like like too far. They've nerded out too far. but that they have the ability to bring all

01:16:07 - 01:17:06

of that depth back up to the tea line and sort of apply, you know, analogies or insights, >> okay? Like morph it and go down another rabbit hole with it >> with the person next to them who's completely got a different thing. So, yeah, that's sort of the the premise. And that's built on this notion in cognitive science, we call it edge effect. >> Edge effect. Okay. And it's when you get two really different disciplines together and you find these like if you imagine a vin diagram that like little

01:16:36 - 01:17:26

bit of overlap on the edges where they have something that overlaps that is like where creative design magic happens in the world. >> I've seen this in our team when we interview people we tend to look for an obsession. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> That they're like totally nerded out on. Yeah. And then it gives us confidence that if we hire them, they could probably apply that level of depth to like the thing that they need to learn. >> Exactly. Okay. >> Yeah. So I you've got it. You didn't ask

01:17:02 - 01:18:02

me. >> How does that tend to rub off on a team, do you think? Like what what type of friction or energy or opportunity does that tend to create from your experience? >> Sometimes it can create so much creative fiction friction. And I think that's another thing that is um really important for leaders to take away from this conversation is that friction in the in the context of creative problem solving is a brilliant thing. It can be hard. Remember, it's not hard, it's hard

01:17:31 - 01:18:39

work. It can be hard work to sit through friction. It can be really uncomfortable to be like in such vehement disagreement with someone else on your team. Um and that is but that is going to happen if you bring together people from all of those different disciplines and you really want to start thinking differently and more um connections in people's brain to bring forward more novel ideas and and you just like that's just going to be a natural byproduct. One thing about creative friction that I

01:18:04 - 01:19:04

think is really important um is to know that a key way through it according to the literature that I've seen is to make things or is to prototype to make things very concrete. So you you said was it mudded out? >> Mud mapping. >> Mud mapping. Yeah. So that to me is an example of that like prototype it. So instead of if you have a lot of creative friction in a team, instead of all of us sitting here talking and having this conversation and we're all going nowhere and we disagree and we're holding the

01:18:36 - 01:19:40

disagreement and the angst of the disagreement, a strategy that can be really helpful is go away quickly build what you mean. Quickly mud map it quickly. You know, if you're trying to tell a story, write a story board of the experience that you think that's creating. like disperse them into prototyping. Through that effort, often what people realize is that you were talking about a four-sided shape. I was talking about a photo shape. They were talking about a four-sided shape, but for you it's a square. For me, it's

01:19:07 - 01:20:13

a rectangle. For them, it's a rhombus. So, we're actually not talking about the same thing. And that is usually what is happening in really creative sort of um disagreement. And so by making things concrete for each other, we can start to um see their see their ideas uh come to life. They're going to help us make sense of what the thing is that's being put concretely in front of us. It's going to trigger different things forward in our into our archival memory into working memory. We're going to have

01:19:40 - 01:20:47

opinions and perspectives. And we also start to make the conversation about an object a real concrete, you know, thing. rather than about people and people's ideas. >> So, you're trying to get out of a fuzzy idea in someone's mind and into something that we can all kind of mentally grab. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And then when that moment happens, that's when teams rally together and then get to work. >> It's it tends to be a really effective way to make the kind of downside of of

01:20:14 - 01:21:19

um very diverse teams, which can be creative conflict. it tends to be a way to move through that much more productively and effectively. >> Um, and often when you move through it more productively and effectively, you're getting closer and faster to this edge effect. >> If you're leading your team and you're looking to inspire constant creative flow and innovation and and helping them or facilitate them thinking in a much broader sense, how can you facilitate this? How could you foster

01:20:47 - 01:22:01

that kind of energy in a team? >> Yeah. So, I think one of my favorite um components of innovation that is often uh overlooked and not really really quite honestly not really talked about at all uh is the cognitive practice of metacognition. So, yeah, meta like above self-referential. So, kind of you know think that and then cognition being how we think, feel and act. So metacognition then is sort of like the thinking about how we think, feel, and act. >> So you're talking about more

01:21:24 - 01:22:40

self-awareness. >> Yeah, that's definitely a component of metacognition. So a great example of it um in a study that I did uh last year, gosh, time flies. Um uh last year uh I was looking at uh consultants who work in innovation organizations and uh and looking at what their sort of practices were about how they innovate and in particular um something I noticed was that they were often very metacognitive in the flow of their work. So an example of that was this particular study. Uh this one uh participant was uh in doing

01:22:01 - 01:23:09

interviews uh with ex sort of experts in a company in the um like climate energy engineering sector and she's a you know really schmancy organizational leader very senior well-versed but noticed that during the interviews where she was gathering user data she was getting really distracted by all the acronyms and so at the end of each interview she found that she was like had written down acronyms and what they mean but had actually lost like what was the user telling them about their work in this

01:22:36 - 01:23:36

space and what did that mean for their innovation journal. So after the first two interviews she decided to take a break and sort of notice what was going on. Uh she identified that hey I'm getting really distracted. I'm focusing on the interviews on the acronyms in the interviews and I'm losing what I need. And so she decided to change her strategy. And so for all the interviews after that she uh every time she heard an acronym she wrote it down and underlined it but then kept moved on and she got what she needed and

01:23:06 - 01:24:00

then at the end of the day she would come back she would chat to the client and say these are all the different acronyms I heard. Can you tell me what these were so I can make sense of this? And that would also be part of her sort of reviewing the notes and the insights as she did that. And so that simple act right there of like, hang on, I'm getting really distracted by all of these acronyms and I'm not getting what I want out of this task. Let me pause for a moment and think about it. Okay.

01:23:33 - 01:24:45

And now what's a new strategy that I could come up with to use moving forward and adjust? That is metacognition. >> Okay. So hyper self-awareness, uh, great problem solving skills and the ability to pivot is is what I'm reading here. Yeah, I think in her case it was great problem solving skills and the ability to pivot. Um, but you can metacog being metacognitive is is more the act of the of making the space to think about her own thinking in which that um problem solving and self-awareness and pivoting happens.

01:24:09 - 01:25:05

>> Okay. So rather than being ignorant to the problem, you're aware that a problem exists and you're aware that it needs to be resolved. >> Yes. So, another example would be uh for folks who are listening to this um if you wanted to be metacognitive for a moment, a way that you could do that is to think about how you're listening to the podcast. So, are you letting your mind wander and making connections between different topics or things you've heard before? Are you um sitting

01:24:37 - 01:25:30

down and taking notes and listening to this like it's a lecture? Are you getting really distracted and answered a call from your kids in the middle of it and whatever else? None of those is inherently wrong, but what's your goal for listening to the podcast? And if you once you know what that is, now check if the strategy that you've been using while you've been listening to this matches how you would meet that goal. >> Oh, I see. So if you've arrived somewhere to learn something and then

01:25:03 - 01:25:54

you get caught up in the emotion of the event that's taking place and you forget the original reason you're there, you're not meta cognitive. >> Noticing that you have arrived there, you got caught up in it, >> it's, you know, it's not working for you and that now you need to pick a different strategy. That is being metacognitive. >> Oh, I get it. It's like clicked in my head. Yeah. Okay. So then if we're thinking about an entrepreneur and they're

01:25:29 - 01:26:28

>> solving a problem in their business, if they're feeling that they've plateaued for a significant period of time, >> is that then a sign that they're not being metacognitive enough? >> It it certainly can be. Um I think that uh slowing down, plateauing, getting the same doing, you know, that old saying like I'm doing the same thing and getting doing the same thing and expecting a different result. that person is not being metacognitive would be my my general guidance and I think

01:25:58 - 01:27:09

for you know that's common for a few things it's a very simple thing to do um to be metacognitive but it does require a few things the first is time so you can't actually be cognitive as in doing the thinking about you know whatever it is you're actually doing and the feeling about the the thing and then metacognitive the thinking about the thinking of the thing you're executing. You can't do them at the same time. And so you often need to do something that is cognitive and then make space for

01:26:33 - 01:27:45

being metacognitive. So in my classroom, what this means, the way that I teach this in creative problem solving is I'll have students um uh we'll we'll start with an activity that about a problem that they're solving. So it might be um I want you to come you know the problem is um pollution in Harvard Square. We to come up with all of the different ways that you could solve pollution in Harvard Square and then once they've done that we'll stop and we'll say okay did that brainstorm help you get closer

01:27:09 - 01:28:03

to your goal of the solution how or you know what's going on. And some of them eventually will sort of think about it and they'll like, well, we came up with lots of ideas, but we still don't know if that's the solution. And so coming up with just the ideas maybe won't like help us come up with like testing this in the world or finding out if it's meeting a human's need or understanding if that's really the problem. Okay, great. What strategy would you want to use to answer that question now? And so

01:27:37 - 01:28:41

helping them really practice this process of you've just done a thing. Did that thing help you meet your goal? Like did it further your understanding? Have you met your goal? Did it not? Like would you do it again? Should you do it differently? What do you need to do? What is your goal now? What questions do you have? What have you got to do now? So this practice of of really interrogating your own thinking and um you know your own mindsets and your own moves and your own choices and actions

01:28:08 - 01:29:09

and helping them helping to use them. um intentionally instead of sort of just blindly following what you're supposed to do next. >> Okay. And if we think about a team dynamic, how can we train teams to become >> uh more aware of their own thoughts through metacognition >> without feeling like they're in a therapy session? >> Yeah, that's yes. So, I mean, I would say metacognition can um you certainly need to be metacognitive about your emotions, but probably not so much so that you are

01:28:39 - 01:29:41

like in a Freudian situation. So, um, I would say with a team, we see metacognition accidentally at work a lot. So, if you've ever been in like a a retro or like a retrospective at the end of a project or a stage gate or a splashdown or what are some other awesome names that people use? >> Yeah, we use the debrief. So, whenever we finish finish a project with a branding client, we tend to sit down and go, okay, what were the mistakes? What were the lessons? What can we take away from this? It's not just like project

01:29:10 - 01:30:10

done. We we try to sit and absorb the moment and identify learnings. >> Um is that what you're talking about? >> Yeah, sort of. So all of those types of meetings that often happen at the end, they are often have elements of them that are naturally metacognitive. You're reflecting on what you did, on what choices you made. Sometimes someone will be like, I did it, you know, thinking about how um they showed up in a certain maybe if it's the end of a client workshop. Yeah, I noticed I was really

01:29:40 - 01:30:46

low energy today. I think next time we do this, I've got to do XY Z. Those kinds of comments are all metacognitive. But the problem that we have a lot is that we save the being metacognitive at work and in innovation um projects in organizations a lot until the end of the project. And we don't do it like in the middle of the project where the decisions that we make or the things that we learn through our metacognitive reflection can influence the thing that we do next and the thing that we do next and the thing

01:30:13 - 01:31:28

that we do next. And so for organizations, it's about, you know, making space like you would for a a debrief or a retro and making it smaller and putting them sort of more frequently throughout uh um a team, a project cycle. And um and in the the research on um metacognition, what we've seen is that creative problem solving teams who experience metacognitive interventions tend to come up with twice as many novel ideas as the teams that don't. And they also those ideas tend to be evaluated as

01:30:51 - 01:31:52

three times more creative by the divergent uses test or alternative uses test which is a long-standing framework for measuring um novelty. And on top of that when their final projects are evaluated by outside experts they are evaluated as being more creative than the group who isn't metacognitive. when you think about metacognition and how most entrepreneurs are tending to look at AI, >> what are the things that people are really missing from your perspective? >> Yeah. So, I mean, one big thing about

01:31:21 - 01:32:39

metacognition and AI is if you are encouraging your teams to use AI, you really which like go for it. And I say I all the time, but you need to teach them to be metacognitive over the output of the products. So just like they're going to be metacognitive over their own thinking, feelings, actions, so to too should they be metacognitive over the use of of a tool. So for example, oh interesting. That's uh the um results that that gave me. I wonder if this anchored overly on so let's use

01:32:00 - 01:33:12

a concrete example. If you give if you give chat GPT six transcripts from a user interview, it's very likely that it's going to use the first one as an anchor and then put all of the remaining two through five, two through six in conversation with number one. Humans do that too. That's where actually Chad GBT learned how to do that. It's called anchoring bias. Um, and so you need to then get that output and say, "Oh, I wonder if this is anchored. I wonder if this is being influenced by

01:32:36 - 01:33:52

the context of the conversation we were having in the other window. I wonder if and you need to interrogate its thinking as you would your own." So being metacognitive, I think, is becoming an increasingly important skill for us to be able to actively use these sorts of tools if we're using them to augment our thinking and and you know, cognitive tasks. Um but in terms of how should we be using them over uh innovating with AI, I think that this is a really important um perspective to come back to the

01:33:14 - 01:34:04

awareness of cognitive biases. So metacognition is one of the best antidotes that we have to cognitive biases because if you remember we've talked about how cognitive biases are really important. They're not actually things we want to get rid of. Even though like you might say like, "Oh, I don't want to have confirmation bias." Actually, when you're driving on your way to work and you know you see a a house on the street corner and your confirmation bias says you, that's the

01:33:39 - 01:34:46

one that you turn at like it's really helpful. You don't want to completely get rid of this. What you want is to be metacognitive about it. Was that helpful to me? Did a bias show up here that I didn't mean? So metaccognition is a great answer to to how do we deal with and mitigate and address bias in innovation and in innovation with AI. I think this is really important because what I'm noticing a lot of in um in classrooms and a lot of my students send me memes. It's like become a thing and I

01:34:13 - 01:35:21

have got some of the most hilarious I if you have show notes I can totally send you these like hilarious AI memes over the over the last few months and what the central theme of a lot of these memes has been is this idea that like we're um we're all like everybody is supposed to be innovating about AI and everyone is only coming up with like an agent or a chatbot or a prompt. like they're the three outcomes really when it comes down to it. And so how do we push beyond that? Well, to push beyond

01:34:47 - 01:35:44

that, you actually have to work through a lot of cognitive biases. You have, you know, we've talked about recency effect. You know, the thing that you most recently read or the open AI pitch you were in last week is influencing you. You have anchoring. The first idea that comes out, folks are going to anchor to it. We have status quo bias. So I think in terms of when it we're thinking about how do we use innovation in our organizations or how do we create new companies that use AI being really aware

01:35:15 - 01:36:16

of how biases are influencing our thinking is is essential. >> When a person feels overwhelmed by how many moving pieces there are in the world regarding AI and how businesses need to move, shift, and operate, what are the first metacognitive questions that they should be asking themselves? Yeah, that's it's I mean I feel that right now too, right? >> It's overwhelming. It's like there's so much >> happening and it just feels like the day-to-day brain power that's required is

01:35:46 - 01:37:02

increasing. >> Yeah, I think that is really really fair. So I think one um one thing that's really important that we haven't talked about yet is understanding that you can be metacognitive over your emotions. So that means noticing how and when your emotions appear and and um and how they influence what you're doing. >> Okay. So in the case of the state of the world right now uh I think a lot of people are in experiencing uncertainty and experiencing ambiguity and unfortunately actually in innovation

01:36:24 - 01:37:36

those are two things that you know you need and will be there a lot all the time for a good innovation to happen but they're not pleasant like I don't I teach classes on navigating ambiguity and I hate ambiguity like sometimes not all times Sometimes I love it but sometimes I hate it. And um the reason is again really biological. We have a sense of ambiguity. Humans have a tendency to seek certainty. Um again if you think about that in the times of um our evolutionary history, if I am camping or living somewhere and there's

01:36:59 - 01:37:58

a rustling in the bush behind me, like I probably want to know if that's a bear or not. Like ambiguity in this situation is not great. Figuring out if that's a bear is really really helpful. In the case though of today, like that's still true. If I'm camping in Yeusede National Park and there's rustling in the bush, even though we're not, you know, thousands of years ago, I still want to know if that's a bear or not. And that feels like a reasonable thing to reach for certainty and clarity and not be

01:37:29 - 01:38:41

spend all night in this ambiguous state of like, is there a bear next to my tent? Right? Because the result could be like you get hurt, but in innovation, unless you're doing it at like Burning Man, the likelihood that there is a bear rustling next to you is pretty low. >> Yeah. >> And so sometimes we misplace our um we misplace the our fear and um and this is this phenomenon known as sort of amydala hijack. And it's essentially when um so that ama that almond shaped part of your brain that I

01:38:05 - 01:38:56

mentioned um is very small but has a very very powerful effect on the brain and it sort of it's the way that I would describe it is it starts like a fire alarm in a building. You know if a fire alarm goes off here you can't sit through it and keep working. >> It's so distracting >> right? >> Yeah. >> Everything kind of stops what it's doing and starts paying attention to the fire alarm. It's kind of exactly what the amigdula does is it starts setting off a

01:38:31 - 01:39:26

fire alarm in your body. Now, if you imagine the fire alarm is on, but it's on really softly, but you can hear it and you know what that nose means and it's there. So, it's kind of anting you up, but you're not fully like diverted to it, but you kind of keep getting sort of distracted to it. Well, that's what happens when the amydala is like on low. And when we're in these situations, highly ambiguous situations, often our amigdula is on this state of low. And so our actions

01:38:58 - 01:40:16

are being driven by the amygdala and what we need to reach to certainty to start slow it turning it off and slowing it down instead of by what is good for the innovation. And so that is a place where being metacognitive is really helpful. Am I acting from a place of uncertainty, of fear, of emotion? Did that event that just happened, I noticed in my body that I heard the fire alarm and I got I started to get really sort of worked up and my heart rate increased. Did that influence how I perceived what I heard

01:39:37 - 01:40:45

next or what I chose to do? Like that kind of thinking is um is really important and I think in this current moment being metacognitive not only about your thinking but about your emotions is essential. >> Okay. Now, if we look at the zeitgeist with this fire alarm in the back of our head, >> yes, >> we keep asking ourselves whether AI is going to take our jobs. >> Yes. >> Should we actually be asking whether or not AI is going to take away our ability to think? >> Yeah. I mean, it's terrifying, isn't it?

01:40:12 - 01:41:24

The um some of the studies, there was a study out of MIT recently on cognitive atrophy. um which is this idea that your cognition sort of atrophies just like a muscle would atrophy if you didn't use it. So if you you know if you um are on bed rest your often your calf muscles atrophy the muscles disappear um and that is what this very small sample paper was sort of showing and so I think it's quite you know it's definitely alarming um we have been through periods of technology atrophying cognitive skills

01:40:47 - 01:41:53

before GPS is a really good example of that like navigational skills cognit cognitive processes of spatial awareness navigation like have atrophy with the use of navigational tools and so it's not always a bad thing. Um I think it's about making a deliberate and informed choice and we're at a point as a society where we've got to make that choice on a pretty big scale. It's really bigger than GPS around like what are we willing to outsource and afloat and what are we not. >> I've had this experience. I remember

01:41:19 - 01:42:15

being a kid on my push bike knowing all the nuances of the streets in my entire suburb and the adjacent suburbs. Whereas now I've lived in this part of Sydney for 3 years. >> And if I'm going outside of like a couple streets, I'm like, I got to put the GPS on. >> Yeah. >> Just because I've turned that part of my brain off. And you're saying that essentially it atrophies if you stop using it. It's like use it or lose it. >> Yeah. If you think about AI, obviously

01:41:48 - 01:42:53

there is a pressure and an overwhelm right now, whether you're studying or you're building a business or you're trying to make content to kind of go, well, I could climb those staircases in my own mind, which is going to require a ton of energy or I could just outsource it to this prompt engine and it'll just tell me what to do. Do you see an inherent risk of I guess avoiding the delay gratification by using this tool because it's super convenient? >> For sure. I do. I think um

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we need to be metacognitive over our AI use like in so far as why am I using this tool? What am I hoping it will help me achieve? What can I do with it that I can't do by myself? you know, am I comfortable with the fact that I might lose my editing skills? So, for me personally, I'm pretty comfortable with the fact that like I've lost a lot of my really good grammatical editing skills. I was a mad grammatical editor all through like undergrad. My friends used to give me papers. I largely got that

01:42:55 - 01:43:57

from my dad um who was was you know I remember one Christmas he gave me my Christmas list back and with a dictionary and was like Tessa there are spelling errors and grammatical errors in this. I'm not sending this to Santa until you figured it out. >> How old were you at the time? >> I was like nine. I learned pretty fast. >> Your dad sounds awesome. He's like his dictionary kid. >> He is amazing. And so he um you know was not he pro so I'm sorry Cam I probably he's probably mad

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at me for what I'm about to say but I have now chosen that I'm kind of comfortable using Grammarly and Hammingway and other AI tools like that and atrophying that skill. >> But you made a conscious decision to do that versus not being aware of it. >> I'm not comfortable atrophying reasoning for example. I don't want to lose my ability to be able to engage in complex reasoning. I don't want to lose my ability to think divergently or to think divergently or to plan and execute

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because I tell my AI my calendar and it tells me everything I should do that day. Now I that doesn't mean that those choices are right for everybody, but I I do worry that people the convenience of it means that sometimes we're not making a choice. We're making a choice by not making a choice. Does that make sense? >> It totally makes sense. I I'm thinking that as as we're looking at it now, we had a guest recently, Marissa Cos, who had this funny analogy about AI. She said,

01:44:31 - 01:45:30

"It's in this infancy stage. It's still kind of clunky and awkward and not fully integrated into our lives." And she reminisces it to being like the floppy disc era of storage. And if we think to ourselves now how ridiculous it was to put things on floppy discs and save them in a drawer for example, >> it's perfectly sized container with a little lock if I remember. >> Yeah. And then uh everyone would just leave the keys in it like so there's no point. Um but now it's it's like uh

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we've kind of seen technology atrophy where where you know from iPhone 4 to iPhone 14 hasn't changed a lot. It's been very incremental. Whereas from floppy disc to iPhone, it was quite a lot of leaps. >> When you think about >> how the brain is going to need to adapt in the future generations to this technology, how do you see this converging with society? >> I love that analogy. I think one thing about the analogy that I would shift though is that like the heart potential for arm of the floppy disc

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was low. I sort of think of this more like I don't know a toddler on a rampage is more like what AI is than a floppy disc. Like the potential >> it does kind of feel like we're giving a loaded AK-47 to a toddler and saying hey that way. >> I completely agree. I think that's my concern is not like I'm so pro technology and innovation and I'm even quite pro AI like bluntly and AI is also so much more than just you know LLMs and I think like the pace of it just means that like we're not

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being as intentional about it as we probably should be. Um whereas like with the movement in that period of floppy disc I mean to floppy disc to colored floppy disc. Thank you to patent floppy disc. I definitely had a Minnie Mouse floppy disc once. >> Okay. I didn't know that was a thing. >> Yeah. To USB stick. Yeah. And then like to I don't know whatever came after. Where did we go? >> Like a hard drive. >> Yeah. Yeah. A portable hard drive like in that >> and then the cloud.

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>> And now it's all on our phone. Totally. That is a a great example. But there wasn't a toddler with an AK-47 like two decades. Yeah. >> Right. Whereas it feels that >> the velocity >> by which AI is moving >> is outpacing humans ability to adopt. >> Yeah. >> And the terrifying thing for me is that it's in the hands >> of people are quite clearly incentivized financially. >> Yeah. I I completely agree. I think it is quite terrifying and from a a a

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cognitive perspective I think it means we have to make choices about you know what are skills that are inherently human and I think there are some that we just know like humans are inherently going to be better at and like creative thinking is one of those um but also there are some things that AI it's like a can do but should it do sort of situation Like something that constantly blows my mind and one of my colleagues at Harvard Graduate School of Education has a book coming out about this um soon

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is so we use AI a lot at the moment to try and replace teachers even though we know that one of the top three predictors of a student's success is strong relationships with teachers. >> Really? >> Yes. >> So the information exchange is not as important as the relationship? No, and that's not just now. This has also been proven hundreds of years ago. Like Vagotssky uh a Russian um academic, you know, his work focused on what these sort of um developmental relationships and this

01:48:30 - 01:49:24

notion of a zone of proximal development that through a relationship with another human who's more experienced um a child can slowly learn to do things that are more complex than what they could do by themselves. and then that zone slowly closes. So, I'm sure you've seen this with your own kids, the idea that like you might be with your three-year-old and they're trying to do a puzzle. And so, the first few times that you're doing the puzzle with them, you're going to be engaging with them.

01:48:57 - 01:49:50

Hey, yeah, this is really cool. Let's do this puzzle together. Okay. Oh, that piece there. I wonder if that one would work. Let's pick it up together. You're going to pick it up together. You're going to try it in. You're going to try twisting it. Twisting a few times. It doesn't work. you you know you're going to model like hm maybe we should try spin it another way. Oh yeah look at that. Wow do you want to try one now? And now all of a sudden that kid can start to do something that they couldn't

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do without you before but now they can do by themselves. A huge part of how come that gap closes is relational is the human the you know the process of learning that happens between two human beings. So outsourcing learning to teachers, I'm like, why are you doing that? Whereas I'm like, have you ever seen inside a school administration? There are so many great uses for AI in school administration buildings, in in you know, government, in content creation, in um assessment, in all of these components

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that isn't actually the act of the teacher. And yet for whatever reason that's the thing at the moment that we have like decided we're trying to automate. >> Is there something beyond the exchange that is somewhat meta-spiritual that that science has touched on from your experience? >> Yeah. So one um uh body of neuroscience research points to a concept that's called neurosynchronicity like synchronized swimming but for you know your brain. >> Yeah. So um it's actually you know quite

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likely that you and me right now we have neural synchronicities. That means that your um brain waves and patterns and mine are synchronized to each other. >> Yes. >> And that >> we're in deeper and deeper rapport. You have a more >> nuanced understanding >> or we do of each other the longer we talk. >> Exactly. Um couple that with some of the research that we also know about you know human interaction. So when you engage with humans, uh, parents, teachers, partners,

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customers, stakeholders, all of those things through human interactions, you open up the possibility to experience empathy. And empathy is actually one of the most effective ways to change your mental model. So if you have, you know, a set routinized way of thinking about something, it's kind of hard to change it. And some there's some really interesting research that suggests that empathy is actually a very efficient way having experiencing empathy for another person with them for over uh way that

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they see the world is one of the most effective ways to actually change quite a set mental model. >> So the there are special cognitive things that happen when you engage with other humans. If we're thinking about creativity and the act of introducing something that the world has never seen, do you believe that AI can enhance and optimize creativity or do you feel that it potentially dilutes it? >> So, there was a study out of a university in Paris, a design school that um I heard at a a conference uh

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called Cumulus, which is like a design education conference in Europe. It's amazing for anyone who loves design education. And um at this particular study, they had a a class of design students who were um instructed to come up with a what's called design fiction. So it's like the idea of using design principles and tools to create like a provocation or fictional story about the future. And um half the class used had to use AI and half the class didn't. And what they saw was really quite fascinating. The

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class that the folks that didn't have to use AI though still recorded it if they did or not. The students who used AI looked like a normal distribution in the sense of like most people were like a mean level of creative like their final product was like a normal mean predictable kind of level of creative. Um there were some people that were sort of a little bit less and a little bit more but not many folks on the tails. They also sort of noticed that there tended to be a couple of set patterns or like frames or ways

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that the projects tended to look if they were produced by um an LLM from the beginning. So, what I mean by that is they weren't like um it wasn't like they were all the same, but they had a similar underlying sort of flavor to them or structure to them. So, um one structure was like, you know, dystopian with like uh you know, but it might get good kind of vibe to it. And there were a couple that sort of, you know, had that sort of structure, different structures. the other group were doing um uh with

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their projects they uh could could use AI or not. What they noticed was that this group um mostly didn't use AI at the very beginning and if they did use it, it was kind of like once they decided sort of what they wanted to do and where they wanted to go, but also a lot of the group didn't use it. And what they found was that the the their projects were um much much more creative and incredible and provocative and they were positioning questions like a mirror back at society. Not just like making a

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state like a here's the dystopian future but it could get you know it could become utopian. Woohoo. Theirs was like much more you looked at it and you asked questions of yourself like it was evoking emotion and and reflecting society or they were abysmal. >> Okay. They were either brilliant or crap. >> Yeah. And there was some in the middle. >> Okay. >> So what's >> but they were more on the tails whereas the bell curve is predominantly where AI sat. >> Yeah. And so what's really fascinating

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about that is like AI lifts the bottom up. So like >> Oh, >> if you don't get the abysmal, right? like as much. I mean, they may have I don't have the data set in front of me, but like there it lifts it up so folks aren't as like >> um with a with using AI from the beginning, they can get to a much more reasonable average response quickly. So, there's not as like bad like not strong thinking good student work kind of in it. But they also they got way beyond what was

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ever even conceived as possible by the AI um by the projects that used AI when it was just the humans too or the humans plus AI but at the end of the work and so that sort of makes a lot of sense to me because when you think about how AI works you know it's a pred it's not all AI gen AI works it is a predictive model we're still talking about massive data sets and then like predicting patterns that we assume are the responses that are desired based on average like on an average of what a

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response would look like to that thing. >> And so of course it's going to give us a really good middle level thing and that's great but it's not going to get us that highend creative. So all of that is to say that changed how I used it use it in my class. I use AI a lot in my class with my students. Um, we use it to practice things that they might not be good at by themselves, like practice interview questions and practice techniques with uh artificial humans, so that when they go out into the world,

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they feel a bit more confident and ready. Um, we use it as a way to um, uh, if they have an idea, sometimes they'll craft uh, a prompt that says like, "Create me a visual of this idea." they can, you know, then start to use like visual artifacts as a way to continue their brainstorming or to show a user. They'll use it to quickly mock up a, you know, a prototype of something to get feedback on. It's it's enhancing how far they get in the class. It makes them better um in terms of the final products

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uh in terms of like how far they go and the fidelity and how quickly they get there. But I certainly wouldn't use it to do the work. >> One last question for you is this whole show is about me, a guy who started an agency on the backbone of I just take massive action and attack a problem. You seem like someone who's innately obsessed with, you know, how humans behave and how we can optimize our lives and think about things more creatively. And I love your notion around, you know, we're not left or rightrain. We're

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actually just whole and there's a way to integrate both sides. When you think about yourself, what does taking agency in life mean to you? >> Yeah, I think for me um it it means like finding whatever answers you're after. Um, so you know that might be like what will happen if I do this or what will happen what you know I don't want to know what will happen if I don't so I'm gonna build a business for me um the answers that I you know inherently look for are um to questions like um h how do

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humans create why do we create how do we learn um what do we need from each other what is it about the nature of relationship ships that makes learning um about how to be a great problem solver at work more effective you know things like that so agency a huge part of I think for me agency is about you know you can ask all the questions in the world but like sometimes you just have to like start answering them and so that's that's why I left uh my you know I spent a decade in um in consulting and

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in um design consultancies like as in human centered design consultancies not your kind of design consult ies and um and I just kept asking all these questions and eventually yeah I just had to bite the bullet and go answer them. >> You're doing amazing. I know you're going to be on television uh over the coming weeks and your book is doing fantastically well. Um so we'll make sure that we attach links so that people can connect with your material and all the things you mentioned. We'll make

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those actionable as well so people can click on those and get them for themselves. um how can people reach out to you or get in touch if they want to collaborate with you in some way? >> Yeah, for sure. So, LinkedIn is the easiest place for me. I think um if you're interested in sort of some of more of the sciency side of the stuff that I've said uh you can also have a look at um the our lab at Harvard is called the next level lab and if you just Google that it's the result that um

02:00:07 - 02:01:05

comes up and we have a substack and um that's a fun place to to do it and then also if you're interested more in sort of the innovation and the book side um www.inovationish.com innovationish.com. Both with the dash and without the dash. >> Okay. >> Park both. Love it. >> Yeah, >> we'll put all those links in the descriptors for anyone listening. Um it's been a real pleasure. It's been a ton of fun diving into some of these more esoteric questions together with

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the science that you've used to back all this up. And uh if you're ever back here in Sydney, we'd love to connect. >> Yeah, that would be fun. Thank you so much for having me.

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