Conference season is upon us. And while I won’t be seeing y’all at SXSW (I opted to trade the “Silicon Hills” of Austin for the “Silicon Slopes” of Utah), I wanted to share a powerful personal strategy I discovered last year. I dusted off my notes from to unearth this gem written on the heels of a deeply inspiring conference experience. Enjoy!

(Originally published “Talk To Strangers” on March 21, 2022)

It’s so easy to get into a well-worn groove. We talk to our people, and we play it cool with everybody else. Not only in our daily life, but even when immersing ourselves in environments where such well-worn norms don’t serve our best interest.

I knew I wanted something different for my first time at Southby, so I made a simple rule: talk to strangers.

In the elevator. In food lines. At meals. After talks. In between speakers. Etc. Etc. And then I enforced it. And I told people about it. I was that guy.

And guess what? I learned a lot! I wouldn’t have learned about freewriting (sorry for accosting you at lunch, Markus!), or about Bob Metcalfe’s new paper (let alone remembered how he invented the Ethernet!), or about the pernicious scripts of high-potential students, or about the importance of calling creative acts what they are, if it wasn’t for this rule.

Every single one of these stories was developed because I put myself out there as much as possible. If you’re like me, talking to strangers doesn’t come naturally (for the record, I let Daniel Radcliffe (aka Harry Potter!) alone in the elevator — I figured he gets enough of the bad kind of talking to strangers that a pass on the rule was in order), because it can feel like an inconvenience. Luckily, there’s research that indicates that, not only does talking with strangers improve our own experience of an environment; it improves theirs, as well! In a controlled experiment, “both the people who started the conversation and the people they talked with reported having a significantly better experience than those who did not” (per this fantastic article in The Atlantic).

The experience was so fantastic, actually, that it’s shifted my approach to the week ahead. Three times per year, we host executives and professionals from around the world for our world-class design thinking program at Stanford. The whole “talk to strangers” mindset has given me an entirely different outlook on engaging with the folks who are showing up.

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