Episode 19: Josh Ruff & Marcus Hollinger
Driving Creativity and Innovation with Ideascience with Josh Ruff & Marcus Hollinger
Episode S3E19: Show Notes
Creativity is not an exact science and ideas often strike when we least expect them. But what if we could curate an environment ideal for sparking creativity and innovation? Today we are joined by Josh Ruff and Marcus Hollinger from Stoked to discuss their incredible new workshop, Ideascience. Tuning in, you’ll hear all about how music inspired their Ideascience creation, why they create a space for checking in with their team at the beginning of every meeting, how task switching overcomes cognitive fixation, and how meditation has improved ideas in brainstorms. They then go on to tell us about what Ideascience actually entails before walking us through the process of the workshop. Our guests even delve into some neuroscience facts and how they relate to creativity and innovation. Finally, we explore the importance of being goofy and allowing yourself to play in any creative process. You don’t want to miss this one so press play now!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Introducing today’s guests, Josh Ruff and Marcus Hollinger.
• They tell us about the product that they are launching, Ideascience.
• The inspiration for this incredible program and the goal of Ideascience.
• How music is linked to Ideascience and the importance of ‘getting real’ with your partners.
• Why they like to ‘protect’ the first 15 minutes of every meeting to check in with everyone.
• How our guests continue to make downtime to have space for creativity a priority.
• Testing the theory that task switching overcomes cognitive fixation.
• Our guests explain their art walk section of these studies.
• How meditation improved the quality and quantity of ideas in brainstorms.
• They tell us about the Ideascience Council.
• What Ideascience actually is and what the launch experience will entail.
• How theta brainwave activity contributes to creativity and how that’s part of Ideascience.
• They walk us through the steps of the Ideascience workshop.
• The importance of the sequence of events of the workshop.
• How their nine-by-nine method intersects with Ideascience.
• Going from concept to habit and the rewards that motivate people.
• The importance of play in creativity to lighten the load of hard work.
Quotes:
“I need unplanned space for some spontaneous connections to happen.” — Josh Ruff [0:12:53]
“Ideascience is a three-hour workshop. – It takes creative phenomena from music, pairs it with neuroscience, and delivers practical tools for leaders to solve ambiguous business problems and business challenges.” — Marcus Hollinger [0:26:44]
“In order for there to be impact, we have to identify a way that we can build a habit, a way that we can practice a behavior that helps shift the way that I approach problem solving, or creative problem solving in my work.” — Josh Ruff [0:37:18]
“If you didn't feel a little unsure or a little apprehensive before you shared the thing, then you waited too long.” — Marcus Hollinger [0:45:29]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
EPISODE 19 [TRANSCRIPT]
[0:00:02] JR: “You can access theta brainwave activity without 105-degree fever. We guide them through a series of guided meditations, visualization, and a sound bath. This allows us over the course of about 10 or 15 minutes, we can get into this space that is right at the cusp of theta, where our analytical filter is suspended. Oftentimes, we say, you know, let's brainstorm without judgment. Really, it's less about judging others. We judge ourselves, the ideas we throw on the table. So getting into this headspace, we're able to do a little bit of wrestling with our inner critic.”
[0:01:13] JU: All right. I am excited for this conversation today. Welcome to another episode of The Paint & Pipette Podcast. I am delighted to introduce a couple of my very best friends and very dearest collaborators, Mr. Josh Ruff and Mr. Marcus Hollinger. Josh, Marcus, thanks for joining us today.
[0:01:36] MH: Absolutely.
[0:01:36] JR: Thank you, Jeremy, so much.
[0:01:39] JU: I already know, we're going to go over. So folks, if you're watching or listening, just block more time, because it's not possible for this conversation to only take an hour. I'm just kidding. We'll try to keep it tight. But if it goes long, maybe we'll split it up into two episodes. I don't know. Okay. Wo we are here today to talk about a new product y'all are launching, dropping. Give us a 30-seconds, what's the product why is today special, and then we're going to do a little time travel, go back in time.
[0:02:05] JR: Yes. Today's 12/1. Today's the day that Ideascience drops, it is a three-hour ideation experience brought to the world by Stoked, the organization Marcus and I worked for. Here's what it does, it takes creative phenomena from music, explains it's with neuroscience, it introduces practical tools we can use to unlock our own creative breakthroughs. We're excited to bring to the world today.
[0:02:34] JU: Okay. So three parts, all of which are near and dear to my heart. You know that. When we are talking just before hitting go time, we joked that tangents is my middle name. I'm going to try to avoid tangents as much as possible. But let's just start with why. We say, 12/1 is here. Let's go back in time, when did you realize there was an unmet need? Where were you? What was the context that led you down the path that ended with where we begin today?
[0:03:04] JR: Okay. Sobering reality for our facilitator friends out there. When we ask a room of leaders when's the last time they experienced a fresh idea, something that's worth pursuing and exploring, or at least writing down. When we ask them to reflect on their last fresh idea, it is often spontaneous, a walk with a friend, some quiet time between meetings, some space in nature. The one common thing is that it usually is not in a brainstorm meeting.
[0:03:41] JU: Wait, wait. You mean that the conference room isn't the soil where creative flourishing takes place? I'm shocked.
[0:03:49] JR: Yes.
[0:03:50] MH: Not at all.
[0:03:51] JR: In the nature, we're in the business of leading workshops to spark inspiration. When we shift into go time, we often call it flare mode, where we're generating lots of ideas, huge variety of ideas. What we keep sensing no matter how much provisioning we do, we sense this element of like, "Oh, now it's time for ideas. Here's a couple that I can think of." But when we ask people to rate their best ideas, it always comes from these mysterious places of spontaneity, and we wanted to do some reverse engineering to name how can we make those spontaneous combustion moments of great ideas a little more normal, and predictable, and maybe facilitated.
[0:04:36] JU: Okay. So let's talk about y'all, before we get to facilitation, and before we get to unleashing others, which of course, we're all passionate about doing. Let's talk about your process as creators here, and it may be a little recursive, but this isn't Excel. We can't have circular references. It's okay. Finance joke for all my finance people out there. Let's dive into your creative process. So you realize or you have this moment that many folks have serendipitous, unplanned delight. What do you do – specifically, they aren't referencing the workshop. They're referencing this brand. They're referencing the brainstorm. What happens next in your own process? What do you do with that insight, and what are your next two or three steps in taking action on what you've learned?
[0:05:24] JR: You got this one, Marcus.
[0:05:26] MH: Yes. I think it's funny and developing as we kind of drank the Kool-Aid or practiced what we're trying to get others to practice. I think it's dipping into our sources of inspiration. I think that's where music comes in, right, where that's something that we both are actively engaging in when we're not actively working. Sometimes it's happening at the same time. So it kind of naturally happens, where music just kind of became a surface as this reference point for how to approach this problem. In following that, it becomes kind of like, "Oh, artists and musicians are constantly having the same problem. Artists and musicians are faced with – they're creating for a living, they're publicly creating for a living. And who, other than them to kind of study to see how are you able to do this not only consistently, but at a high level?" I think the first next step was pursuing that curiosity, and starting to wonder, and then search for the stories that we just knew existed.
[0:06:37] JU: Okay. Let's dive into that topic for a second. You talk about pursuing that curiosity? What is pursuing that curiosity look like practically for you in this history, in this historical biographical sketch? What did it look like to dive into that curiosity?
[0:06:53] JR: Okay. There's a quote Marcus turned me on to from André 3000, which is, pay attention to what you pay attention to, or notice what you notice. We would just pause and assess what is calling for our attention. For both of us, it happened to be the same podcasts that dissect the story of how great moments in music came to life. Then, it's the same stories that help unearth. Wait a minute, that magic moment wasn't just magic, there was some sort of activity that sparked that moment. Being real with each other, debriefing what are we currently drawn to and why gave us the space to just say, "There's something here that's worth weaving into the problem that we're currently solving."
So it really started with us noticing what we noticed, and it's, hey, we both listen to Tetragrammaton, and this is our Rick Rubin year. And hearing the way he pulls these moments, moments of breakthrough from popular artists helped us explore how to make this toolkit more accessible for the folks that we work with on a regular basis.
[0:08:08] JU: I want to dive into a phrase you use there, you said, "Get real." Why do you specify that as an important element of this? Why does that make the transcript of the history for you? Why is that important?
[0:08:21] JR: It is pausing and having some down-to-earth conversation with one another. What allows that to happen is just having a safe space to check in personally, and ask what is actually driving or fueling your motivation. Those moments help us actually identify, is this a noble novel problem to solve? Are people experiencing a pain by not resolving this problem? And by having real human-to-human touch points to connect and share, what are you drawn to right now helps us be real with each other and label it. It's so easy for some of those moments to just be fleeting, or to say, "Oh, that's just what I do in my downtime." But really, it is something that sparks in fuels our next creative step, and often is unexpected.
[0:09:18] JU: I see Marcus wants to get in there.
[0:09:19] JR: Yes.
[0:09:20] MH: Yes, because I think it brings back the André 3000 quote. What a lot of people may not know, André is half of the highest selling hip hop act of all time. That just happened this year, OutKast. They just created their album, just crafted highest selling hip hop album all time. Well, from that album to this year, 17 years past, where André had not put out any studio offerings. Between that time, he taught himself how to play the flute. So his most recent album to break his 17-year hiatus was a chart-topping, record-breaking album that featured no rap. It was just him playing the flute.
What he said gave him the capacity to break that silence was the, pay attention to what you're paying attention to, and go after it. So for Andre, he couldn't help paying attention to instrumental music, jazz, and that's what got him out of his rut, and allowed him to produce record-breaking work. When I think about the getting real moment, it was, "Hey, we both actually pay attention to music that fuels our work. Let's pay attention to that. Let's take that seriously." Sometimes if it's not the thing that on the surface seems like it actively contributes to our work, we have a tendency to downplay it. But for us, it was like, "No, let's get real about our exploration of music, and see if there's something there." It may not be, but we won't know if we don't get real and look into it. That is significant history of the project because that's where the breakthrough came.
[0:10:59] JU: Before we get to the breakthrough, which I know everybody's like, "Wait, wait, let's go to the breakthrough." But what are the environmental factors that contribute to your ability to or the permission you feel, or maybe not, and why it stayed. We just talked about these distinctions between work, not work between pleasure, play. How did you think about – are these conversations, sidebar conversations, off-hours conversations, is this really work? What contributes to either of those dynamics?
[0:11:27] JR: Yes. This is woven into a literal protocol that we are working into our working meetings, is protecting the first 15 minutes of each meeting to check in. We'll change the prompts, and we'll shake it up. We can relieve the stress of getting to our meeting agenda by having that protected space. The reason we continue to protect that space is because we can see the ROI on the beautiful stuff that comes out of an unplanned 15 minutes, shaping the future. A direct example that came from this is Marcus, and I teasing out some really fascinating studies in neuroscience, and how it's unlocking – or there's a fresh interest in the world of people wanting to understand the science behind what's happening behind the scenes. However, still a pretty steep-on ramp to get it and understand it.
But by opening up that space, I think it was a week later, I participated in a silent retreat, a space to just choose to be in silence for three days at a monastery. There was work to be done on that seed that we planted together. By having that protected space I know how I operate. I need unplanned space for some spontaneous connections to happen. That's where we took this link of musical phenomena that exists and the science of what's happening to drive breakthrough and marrying them together to get to something accessible, and something that teams can apply really quickly. This recipe of protecting space to check in helps plant seeds we can put together on our downtime.
[0:13:23] JU: Yes. Tell me a little bit more about this downtime. When's the next downtime scheduled? I mean, to me, one of the best ways to see whether it's a priority – I actually, I just made a note to myself the other day, because someone asked me, "What are good creative practices for cultivating creative well-being?" The first thing I found myself saying was, make time for it. I could immediately see the audience eyes roll. And because I'm somewhat sarcastic and confrontational, I just said, "Well, okay. Before you roll your eyes, look at your calendar. You got time for sleep, right? You got time for food, right? You got time for exercise. If you're really enlightened, you got time for exercise. Show me the time you've blocked to cultivate your creative, whatever, however you define it. What's the time?"
[0:14:10] MH: Yes, I love that.
[0:14:11] JU: And people go, "Oh, wait. Give me a minute." The point is, it's one thing like, we can admire these tactics all we want, but if we aren't actually creating space. So all that say, I heard something there about silent retreat, which is an imminently eye rollable tactics. I was like, "Of course, he went on a silent retreat." But to me, the proof of that is, tell me about how you think about creating space moving forward in your life. Again, maybe even separate from Ideascience, but just, I like to dive into some of the practices of creators as well. How do you think about continuing to make space a priority for yourself? Either one of you. Love to hear from both of you.
[0:14:52] MH: Yes. Tuesday, December 12, there is a design-a-day prompt that has gone out from Stoked, and we are actively – it's on the calendar, it's booked, and it's blocked. And Josh and I are currently leading a cohort of other creators for nine business days. Today is business day three, to come up with nine ideas before committing to one on a challenge. Josh and I are both for nine days straight, coming up with nine ideas on how to spend that day, December 12, of nourishing our creativity, and taking off. So that's like one super practical, like, we're actively in the middle of that, and there's some good stuff coming up.
[0:15:42] JR: I feel like we got to give a shout out to Anna Love. Anna is the CEO and co-founder of Stoked. She has helped really set the tone that enables us to take moments like this out. What she's done is said, "Hey." Six months ago, she picked December 12 as the date that together as a Stoked team, we're going to block a day off. And the only role we have to play is be intentional about designing a day of downtime. Having that permission, but also getting some momentum of ideas together as a team helps us be intentional and actually feel free to do it without the obligation of checking what's going on behind the scenes.
[0:16:26] MH: Anna as a leader, she believes so much in this concept that there's even allocated funds. There's this investment that's been issued or allotted for us to actually pursue this day. Shout out to Anna as a leader who puts the money where her mouth is as they say.
[0:16:47] JU: Yes, that's great. Shout out Anna. I love hearing about – I was actually thinking more in terms of personal practice. You went to an organizational answer, which I think is great, because it shows there are things that we can do as leaders to create – when you think about a high leverage, high ROI activity. A lot of times, we think individually, but then we think about where's my sphere of influence? What's the span of control I have? For every unit of effort that I exert towards that span of control, I have the levered kind of impact, right?
For Anna, it's one thing for Anna to do something for her own creativity. But for Anna to carve out a day for a team of 30, 40, whatever the number of people is, that has an exponential impact. A lot of times when anytime folks are asking me, "How can our organization…" I always say, "Manage down not up." You hear about some tactic, whether it's, say it's, these guys say we got to make space. The wrong thing to do is say, "Man, I wish my CEO gave us space." The right thing to do is say, "Who rolls up to me and what space can I create for them?" Start with where you are, what you have, the span of control, and scope, and resources, and people who you're responsible for, and you think about cultivating that environment for them.
So, okay, let's go back in the history kind of timeline, so to speak. You talked about before the breakthrough, there's this sense of folks recognize that the ideas that are really delightful aren't coming in the kind of plan settings, that you guys have the time to get real together as a collaborative pair to think about the impact that music has on your own personal and creative practice. Josh goes off on his silent retreat. What happens next?
[0:18:33] JR: Okay. Next step is, how do we test this immediately? There's a morsel here, how do we test it immediately?
[0:18:40] JU: What is it? What is it when you say – like, again, not it being Ideascience.
[0:18:44] JR: Yes.
[0:18:44] JU: But at this point in the journey, what is it? We say, how do we – I mean, granted, there's a great principle here, which is test things early. What is the thing you're trying to test at this point?
[0:18:54] JR: Yes. It is a connection between the talking heads and the way that we abandon expertise, increase neuroplasticity, and explore something that would otherwise be a mental rut. We were both kind of jaw-dropped to hear the story of how Naive Melody, which is actually titled, This Must Be the Place. It's the number two most popular track in the entire collection of songs written in performed by the Talking Heads. The way that they wrote that song was by switching instruments. And by switching instruments, David Byrne, normally, upfront singing, holding a guitar is now behind the synthesizer. He does not play keys, but he poked around and uncovered the riff that many of us know and love now.
It was tying that really interesting story that hooked Marcus and I to a behavior that's backed and valid. We're constantly working with right brainers and left brainers, even though that's been debunked. That terminology has been debunked. I think we all get it.
[0:20:02] JU: Noted.
[0:20:04] JR: What we learn is, how can we play with the really fun stories from the Talking Heads, and route our action in something that's valid and credible. We found a connection to a study from Columbia University that proved that switching roles in switching tasks allows us to overcome cognitive fixation. Or get to an idea that's unrelated to the previous idea that we came up with. So that was the first morsel, the connection we were excited to test. It was within a week, we had a gig on the books with a client, a paying client. We found a really natural spot to weave that story, and that connection into our next design sprint activity. That moment actually happened to get the most feedback at the end of our design program with the team. They identified that as the most relatable component that they want to take back with them as they explore making impact and taking these tools back to their team. It was quickly figuring out where can we apply this, and then picking something that was on the books happening –
[0:21:12] JU: Let's dive into that moment. What would you try? Talking Head swap instruments. you see from Colombia that the task-switching overcomes cognitive fixation. While we got a workshop, how do we get people to switch tasks in a practical way? What do you do? And then. I also want to get to feedback, because none of this works if you don't have mechanisms for learning whether it works.
[0:21:33] JR: Yes. We had everyone scramble teams, and intentionally be in ideation groups with someone who's in a department that is really disconnected from the problem that you're working on. We also gave them one minute to share the context of the challenge that they're setting out to solve, so that they're on a team with folks that don't have the context and cannot be labeled as experts solving this challenge. By bringing really unrelated, but fresh ideas to the table, it helped a lot of the folks who are working on this every single day break free from the very obvious ideas that come first and get into some noble territory.
[0:22:16] JU: Then, how did you actually learn that later? What's the actual mechanism, the way that you learned, "Whoa, this works. People liked it"?
[0:22:24] JR: You want to talk about the art walk, Marcus?
[0:22:27] MH: Yes. One of the things that human data, if you will, there were moments where participants who would self-identify as numbers people, or more analytic, or more decision-oriented, would come up and say, "Hey, this is how I self-identify, but this exercise actually showed me that I can be creative." It's seems like, "Yes, boom. Love that. Thank you." The art walk experience that Josh is describing as we exploded out the ingestion, like there's multiple different versions of this happen. I'm not grabbing the one you're reaching for.
We gave participants an opportunity to look at prototypes that were built from the ideation sessions that came from this. We're able to walk other participants who did not participate in the design, they were able to look at these prototypes, and silently react, and then join the process of co-design after getting a chance to kind of get a little bit of context. So the responses and sort of the value of the way that the portfolio of prototypes advanced after those moments of switching expertise was clearly different. They were able to get to more exploratory and creative territory by way of mixing things up like that.
[0:23:50] JU: Okay. So you have this experience with the Talking Heads. There's a school of thought, which says, "Great, let's optimize." Let's rerun the Talking Heads a bit, my impression, and we'll get – now, people are like, "For crying out loud, what is Ideascience?" So we'll get there, but how do you go from saying, "This worked" to "Maybe there's something more than the talking heads series of exercises"? Walk us through the development sequence from, you got that feedback after the art walk. What do you do as creators, as designers of learning – as revelatory learning experiences next?
[0:24:23] JR: We've had a lot of experiments cooking, and we assessed what experiments are yielding the best results. One example being, incorporating meditation prior to divergent thinking. That by itself is a, maybe counterintuitive tool for brainstorming, but we were seeing really great impact in the quality and quantity of ideas coming after meditation. What we were able to – after seeing the success of Naive Melody, and noticing what we noticed. We were hearing stories from our current media outlets or immediate intake of, "Oh, that creative phenomenon is the same thing that happened when we experienced meditation prior to brainstorming or divergent thinking." So seeing the connection or the recipe providing value, we were able to then identify and make connections where we see experiments were running, and tie them explicitly to some sort of creative phenomena in the music industry.
[0:25:31] JU: What's the next experiment in your journey?
[0:25:34] JR: Yes. Right now, we're in refinement mode. Today's launch day, but the way that we've been able to get to this launch is by assembling what we affectionately call the Ideascience Council. This is a place where we take the earliest inkling of what we think might be worth exploring, and run a session with them to test that moment. We have enjoyed falling on our faces, and learning really quickly what we thought was a hit, and was not a hit. But by getting to that, we've been able to use this cohort to keep testing the next version. Right now, one of those that feels really great is this nine by nine challenge that Mark has shared, where we've learned what's really missing is some social accountability, to practice generating nine ideas to get to something great. In order to build that habit, we need to build some camaraderie with a group to practice this together. That experiment is alive and well right now.
[0:26:37] JU: So tell us now, so we're here, today's launch day. What are you launching today with Ideascience?
[0:26:44] MH: So Ideascience is a three-hour workshop, practically. We won't bury the lead there. It takes a creative phenomena from music, pairs it with neuroscience, and delivers practical tools for leaders to solve ambiguous business problems, business challenges.
[0:27:03] JU: What does it mean that it's being launched? Where do folks experience it? How do they – okay, what now? Then, where do I go? What do I do? Tell me more.
[0:27:15] JR: Yes.
[0:27:16] MH: Josh, you want to take that one?
[0:27:18] JR: Yes. What you do is go to stokedproject.com/ideascience. We are telling the story of this today on our socials as well. You'll be able to get a glimpse of the first tool, the tool called Willie Nelson. What's the story, what's the protocol, and how does that tool come to life. To just get a taste. And there's an opportunity to connect with us, to plan and price an experience for your team right from the site.
[MESSAGE]
[0:27:52] JU: How many ideas have you tested today? How about your team or organization? Ideaflow is a set of tools that help you test more ideas faster. I've worked with both high-growth startups and global organizations and success comes when you test more ideas faster. Want to learn how better Idea Flow can help your organization? Check out my website, jeremyutley.design, or reach out to me at jutley@jeremyutley.design. I'd love to talk with you.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:28:25] JU: Now, you've wet my appetite with Willie. Tell me the Willie story. Let's dive in to Willie.
[0:28:31] JR: Free Willy you might say.
[0:28:33] MH: Yes, Free Willu is creative phenomena, right? [Inaudible 0:28:36] Yes, Willie Nelson wrote three of his best songs with 105-degree fever. That fever, the research behind that, and what he was able to do is that in that febrile state of 105-degree fever, theta brainwave activity is running in his mind, and he's able to access a more lucid thought process to go after and capture more creative flow. So the juices are flowing. He's writing his songs.
[0:29:11] JU: Don't tell me people lick doorknobs or something to get fever. Don't tell me he did that. I'm out. I'm out. Take my name off the list.
[0:29:19] MH: Josh, tell him [inaudible 0:29:20] next?
[0:29:20] JR: Yes. Okay. You can access theta brainwave activity without 105-degree fever. We guide them through a series of guided meditations, visualization, and a sound bath. This allows us over the course of about 10 or 15 minutes, we can get into this space that is right at the cusp of theta, where our analytical filter is suspended. Oftentimes, we say, you know, let's brainstorm without judgment. Really, it's less about judging others. We judge ourselves, the ideas we throw on the table. So getting into this headspace, we're able to do a little bit of wrestling with our inner critic, turning the volume down a little bit without judgment, and releasing some of the analysis we do on our own ideas, and access these infinite possibilities just like Willie.
What comes next after going through this experience is just an exercise where we write about what we notice, what we were surprised by, and what bubbled up.
[0:30:30] JU: In the sound bath, you mean?
[0:30:32] JR: Yes, in the sound bath. It takes just identifying what is the problem I care about today that I'm setting out to tackle, setting an intention, and then allowing yourself to be surprised by how – sometimes your subconscious wants to come in and say, "Hey, don't forget to think about this connection over here." And by accessing this space, we're able to free ourselves from the judgment that so often prevents us from getting into or beyond the obvious ideas, or the ideas we think our boss wants to hear or our leaders want to hear.
[0:31:08] JU: So you set the stage with the Willie story, you create the environment with a sound bath, and kind of a theta triggering, but non-harmful kind of – non-viral treatment. And then, you have folks kind of do some free writing of things that they experience. What happens next?
[0:31:29] MH: Yes. To anchor it a little bit, what they're holding, once they are submerged in theta is a tightly crafted business challenge, that they're working on something fresh off the top of their desk that they're going after every day. So as they surface back up from theta, and look at the new material that they've been able to create, what we've seen is leaders and participants are becoming more and more surprised by the ideas that, 'Wow, I didn't know I could –" they're looking at their work and saying, "I didn't know I could come up with that. I didn't know that that was in me." That feels wildly more exploratory and more inspiring than where I've previously been on this challenge.
From there comes part two, and part two of the experience is pet sounds. The recipe continues. We look at creative phenomena from –the next artists is or the next group rather is the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson, and how he was able to – his mind was blown when he heard Rubber Soul by the Beatles. And he thought to himself, "If I do anything in life, I want to make an album as good as that one." He committed to a creative practice to channel the Beatles for his album.
From there, we give a tool, we explain some of the science. Neuroplasticity is what's working there. We give a tool similar to what we did with Willie. We advanced this, we help our participants, our leaders advance this creative portfolio that they're building, following that similar flow. Here's creative inspiration, here's the science behind that phenomenon, and here's a tool. We move them through continuing to build on their ideas, and move closer to action that they can take on their challenge.
[0:33:30] JR: Yes. What makes this next tool that's showcased after the Beach Boys bit is really enhanced because of coming out of the sound bath experience. There's something that – there's a term that – the caveat here is this term is going to sound like an eye roller. It is dopaminergic tone is set, where often your dopamine when it is triggered is sent to all areas at once. But by following a meditation protocol, it actually triggers the release of dopamine that increases your access to memory.
So when you're moving into this next mode of introvert brainstorming tools, following our Brian Wilson bit, you're able to make those connections based on divergent exploratory memories in your past much easier, having just gone through that protocol. So the experience sounds kind of wacky, but it's been amazing to see how this tool on its own performs against this tool after going through the Willie Nelson bits, opening up that headspace.
[0:34:39] JU: What you're saying is that sequence of events matters.
[0:34:42] MH: Yes, absolutely.
[0:34:43] JU: Kind of psychological cognitive place in which we find ourselves has a non-trivial impact on the effect of the next tools. I think a lot of times folks, they'll interact with something in isolation and go, "It doesn't work." It's like opening ChatGPT, and typing in like nonsense, and be like yes, "Ah. Wasn't that interesting?" Well, you're not really working it. You got to work the process for the process to work. How did you decide on this particular sequence of activities? And how many other things did you try? What kind of stuff didn't work? Because it's interesting to hear what does work? It makes me think of what's all the stuff that you go, "Oh, let's not do that again."
[0:35:21] MH: Yes. The way that some experimentation has happened around and it's how we deliver it. We've delivered it in four parts, one hour each. That has really crystallized how much the sequence of events matter. If you've got one hour, and you just get that first step, we found that sometimes it's harder when we come back for that second step, for folks to get back into that mindset. Or rather, we've taken the two modules and put them in one hour. And then we realized, like, "Oh, okay. One and two connect." But then, two weeks later or a week later, we come back, and we do two and four, and the jump from part two to part three, it doesn't really translate to keep the momentum going through part four. So all that to say, we've tested with timing and sequencing, and that's really solidified for us that keeping them together matters. An hour and a half is a huge difference. It's a world apart from an hour versus what you can accomplish an hour and a half in three hours.
[0:36:30] JU: Of course, like the music historian in me kind of can't help but think, you want to get somebody to Sergeant Pepper. You don't want somebody to get to smile. You know what? I'm looping for decades on an unattainable goal. What would you say? You've got the nine by nine. I don't know exactly where these streams intersect. But how does a nine-by-nine experiment interface with Ideascience, and what is their connection point? Are they mutually reinforcing? Are they separate? Are they – tell me more.
[0:37:00] JR: Yes. What we know to be true is that breakthrough can't just happen in a three-hour session. It doesn't happen in just a three-hour session. We can give access and exposure to new methods that may feel counterintuitive or new. But in order for there to be impacts, as we talked about earlier, we have to identify a way that we can build a habit, a way that we can practice a behavior that helps shift the way that I approach problem solving, or creative problem solving in my work.
After going through this experience, we close it out with a bit from Kendrick Lamar. This started as legend that Marcus turned me on to and then we learned from Derek Ali, which is the producer that worked with Kendrick Lamar on the creation of To Pimp a Butterfly. Kendrick Lamar, obviously being the only rapper to win a Grammy and a Pulitzer Prize for this body of work. The phenomena that happened here is, he recorded 80 tracks before selecting the 15 that would go on to make To Pimp a Butterfly. What he's showing us here is the importance of creating quantity to get to quality. When we think of recording 80 tracks, these are not just demos or iPhone demos, these are full tracks created, imagined, and engineered in a studio before he cuts so much a way to make greatness in this album.
What we're identifying is how can we take and leverage that inspiration, and inspire the teams we're working with to focus on building habits that help us create 80 tracks in our own life. Eighty tracks can't happen in a three-hour session. The reason we do nine ideas a day for nine days is to get to 81 ideas in working toward this idea. We're building our own 80 tracks, plus one bonus to get into the habit of building up this behavior. Where it really pays off is when a cohort experiences this together, when they're holding each other accountable to say, "Hey, did you get your nine done today?" And sharing what they learned along the way.
An example of this, oftentimes, it's the eighth or the ninth idea that is the idea that the folks that are practicing this habit, find the fresh new perspective and bringing that to life. That's where habit formation really comes to play.
[0:39:39] JU: How do you create, I think that a lot of folks will resonate with that as a tactic of, I love that nine by nine. That's like saying, "I love 30 pushups, but if I don't have a 30-push-up habit." I heard you mentioned the idea of community, talk about whether it's community, accountability otherwise, how do you go from concept to habit in this case?
[0:40:01] MH: Yes, we create space. The first thing is, well, right now, we've got folks in a WhatsApp chat. We send videos and track our own progress. It's been so fun, I think, to lead by example. I mean, at this point, Josh and I are not facilitators, we're participants ourselves in saying, "Hey, we've got this real challenge, and we're also putting ourselves on the line to meet this daily deadline, to then produce and grow in our own habit of ideation. Some other fun thing is rewards. At the end of the nine days, there's a reward that folks can unlock for keeping up.
Obviously, there's a reward of having built your own practice. But when it's social like that, you want to have something that you can share. We've actually switched out rewards, and we're learning what's a small thing or on top of building your own practice. That keeps it fun, it makes you motivated.
[0:41:00] JU: Okay. What kind of rewards are actually motivating people?
[0:41:04] MH: Well, we experimented, and we're experimenting right now with coffee. I've got a coffee roaster here.
[0:41:12] JU: Yes, there it is.
[0:41:14] MH: Right here in Atlanta.
[0:41:15] JU: Can I put my mug up there so that folks can see?
[0:41:18] MH: There you go. I got Mugsy there, skateboarding. In this group, it's so fun because we were able to tell people, "Hey, if you get to the end of the nine days, and you track with us, we'll send you a freshly roasted bag of coffee from Atlanta with love. It's working, right? I don't necessarily think so much about the coffee, but it's the fun of it, it's the reward, sort of at the carrot, at the end of the steak, combined with the social element. And also seeing other people's ideas like, we're screenshotting the ideas that we're coming up with, we're dropping them in the bucket, we're talking about, "Hey, day two, I struggled." Here's what I did to get to nine. I called some friends, and I asked them to think about this challenge to jog some ideas for me. Those are some of the rewards that we're holding out, but we're also experimenting with what community looks like.
Okay. Let me share the ideas I'm coming up with. Let me be honest about the struggles that – let me talk about how I'm overcoming the struggles. The one we're in right now feels like the most rewarding.
[0:42:26] JR: This reminds me of an early failure we experienced in bringing this to life and testing it. We had taken the content we'd been developing and we tested with a neuroscientist. We said, "Hey, we want to pressure test the way we're drawing these connections." Invite you to share, like, what does this make you think of. At the end of our test with this neuroscientist, she shared, "This sounds really cool. This is like maybe too cool. You got like the science, and you got the music connection, and counterintuitive tools. Maybe to cool that this would turn some people off." That was a really sobering moment for Marcus and I, that stuck with us.
[0:43:08] JU: Wow. How do you respond to [inaudible 0:43:10] for school? What do you do?
[0:43:12] JR: Yes. What we identified was missing was ratcheting up the elements of play. What we keep learning over and over is that by creating a space for play, and Dr. Bolado shares that play is the single human behavior in which uncertainty is sought. So in embracing uncertain environments, aka, innovation pursuits, play is a behavior that allows us to do this boldly and in a way that feels safe. We figured out how can we infuse play in each moment, and we learned that goofy is kind of in our DNA. By bringing [inaudible 0:43:54] of goofy at each moment, it actually brought a really awesome sticking power to some of these habit tools. We tried introducing like a beautiful notebook with a nine-for-nine challenge, and people didn't use it. People didn't stick to the practice. By being goofy, and sending video updates, and lightening the load, it actually made it way more accessible for teams to play along, individuals to play along, and have fun along the way.
[0:44:25] JU: What's the last goofy thing each of you did? Marcus, you go first.
[0:44:30] MH: Yes. So I was at the coffee shop, and I have a family. So I have to end my day at 5pm, no questions asked. It was getting to be crunch time. I was struggling with logging my ideas, and fulfilling that commitment to the rest of the crew. I go and I crouch down on the floor, buy the coffee that is in the roastery, and I say, "Hey, here's what I did today. Here are my nine ideas." I grab a bag of coffee. I'm like, "Oh, this one tastes like black tea and blackberries, so inspiring. Don't you want one?" And just kind of drop it in there. It's just like this thing. It left me feeling like, "Ah, that was so goofy" or I didn't think enough about that.
[0:45:17] JU: In a good way, right?
[0:45:18] MH: Well, in a good way, because what we're finding is that, that is the feeling that we're looking for. There's an innovation quote, and Josh, you can kind of help me out with this. That says, "If you didn't feel a little unsure or a little apprehensive before you share the thing, then you waited too long." So that moment of me – this is so small, it's really small scale. I'm just sending a video to inspire the cohort.
[0:45:46] JU: I love it.
[0:45:46] MH: But that feeling is ultimately what we're chasing. It's like, I got it out there before I felt super good about it. Now, I can keep trying the next thing. So yes, it was a good feeling. That's ultimately what we're after.
[0:45:56] JU: John, what about your goofiness? What do you got?
[0:45:59] JR: Yes. Marcus, to what you're sharing, we heard that quote from one of the innovation leaders at 3M, who we work with. He said, "If you aren't slightly embarrassed to introduce this idea, or test this idea, then you've waited too long to test it." So we always have a little bit of a slightly embarrassed meter that we're measuring. For me, today, I feel slightly embarrassed about a video that we're putting out in the world. This is my pretending to be in a Wes Anderson movie, mono tone shot describing part one of Ideascience. I feel slightly embarrassed to put it in the world into be goofy. But really, it is the encouragement of Marcus to kind of keep pushing me along and my team to react and give input that helps me build enough confidence to say, "Yes, we can put that, we can put that out in the world."
[0:46:55] JU: Yes. You can always delete it if you need to. It's fine. It's fine.
[0:46:59] JR: Your turn, Jeremy,
[0:47:00] JU: Last goofy thing I did?
[0:47:03] JR: Yep.
[0:47:03] JU: I mean, oh my goodness, every day of my life. Last goofy thing I did, I was pushing a thought partner to create a loom, and she was intimidated by it. So I pulled up a loom and I literally recorded one of me vocalizing the script I was giving to her, and then sent her the loom of the script for the loom she should make. Basically, just saying like, "Stop thinking about it." I like what you said, Marcus, I wrote that, don't think too much. I think that we get in our way a lot. And maybe like, I wonder if a good proxy for the last goofy thing we did is the last thing we didn't let ourselves think too much about. If you think too much, you're going to talk yourself out of any amount of goofy, right? But it's like, what would you do if you weren't going to talk yourself out of it? A lot of times that stuff can feel goofy, but then you realize, oh, it gets you a long way towards where you want to go, and a lot farther than overthinking it is going to get you, right?
[0:48:04] MH: Yes.
[0:48:06] JU: All right, Josh, Marcus, where can folks follow up to find out more if they want to immerse and/or see Josh's Wes Anderson monotone cameo debut?
[0:48:18] JR: Okay. First, you can follow Stoked on LinkedIn, S-T-O-K-E-D. You can find us at stokedproject.com You're going to see that Wes Anderson goofy video that just went live 53 minutes ago as we launched the podcast with you. You can follow us @stokedproject on Instagram. Remind us that we have some flowers to give you, some imaginary flowers to give you at the end of the session that we can't forget.
[0:48:49] JU: Imaginary flowers. That's beautiful. That's great.
[0:48:52] JR: Anything you'd add to that?
[0:48:53] MH: As we pass our flowers, keeping with the music theme. Kanye West has done a lot in music, and he's got this song, where he is writing to Jay- Z sort of the forerunner for his career. He says, "If you admire someone, you should go ahead and tell them because people never get the flowers while they can still smell them." So Jeremy, so much of your work, Josh has been saying that Ideascience is a bit of fan nonfiction to some of the work that you've done. So we just want to give you your flowers and saying that a lot of your work has led to the breakthroughs, and the inspiration, and sort of the blueprint for how we've approached it. So thank you for giving the space and putting the things that you put into the world as well.
[0:49:39] JU: No, it's fun. It's a joy and a privilege to get to work with such great people and to get to learn together. For me, it's a gift to get to learn together. I learned from you guys every time we get together. So I'm hugely indebted to you both as well. It's a reciprocal flower sharing at the very least. And also, Marcus, you guys, you roast a great cup of coffee.
[0:49:56] MH: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
[0:50:00] JU: All right, folks. Thanks for tuning in today. Thanks to Marcus and Josh for dropping some Ideascience in our laps. Go check it out today and make the most of your holiday break, and until next time. We'll see you soon.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:50:14] JU: By day, I'm a professor, but I absolutely love moonlighting as a front-row student next to you during these interviews. One of my favorite things is taking the gems from these episodes, and turning them into practical tips and lessons for you and your team. If you want to share the lessons you picked up from this episode with your organization, feel free to reach out. I'd be thrilled to do a keynote on the secrets that I've gleaned from creative masters, or put together a hands-on workshop to supercharge your next off-site adventure. Hit me up at jutley@jeremyutley.design for more information.
[END]
Puzzled by underwhelming results despite your expertise? Discover the surprising insights from a groundbreaking study that can help you tackle challenges and achieve better outcomes.