Episode 8: Linda Hill
The Power of Team Dynamics in Innovation Leadership with Linda Hill
Episode 8: Show Notes
One of the most important aspects of leadership is having a vision for what you want to achieve. It’s the vision for a project that will guide your team and inspire them to perform at the top of their game. But how does that change when you need to lead innovation? And how do you navigate the unknowns inherent to pursuing true innovation? Joining us today to unpack this topic and explore key questions of innovation and leadership is Professor Linda Hill from Harvard Business. Professor Hill is the co-founder of Paradox Strategies, the co-author of the acclaimed book Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, and is regarded as one of the top experts on leadership. Tuning in you’ll hear her break down the paradoxes that lie at the heart of leading innovation and why building a sense of community can be such a powerful catalyst for fostering innovation. She explains how leading innovation requires embracing the unknown while being intimately familiar with the ‘why’ of your project, before describing how collaboration, experimentation, and the ability to learn are essential for building a sense of community. Professor Hill also sheds light on her personal practices as a researcher and practitioner of innovation, her process for selecting her co-authors, and why she places such a high value on having a novice perspective. For a deep dive into the intricacies of leadership, innovation, building a sense of community, and so much more, be sure to tune in to this fascinating conversation with Professor Linda Hill!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Insight into Professor Hill’s research on innovation for her book Collective Genius.
• Why leading innovation means not having a vision, but having a ‘why’.
• The emotional and intellectual challenges that accompany innovation.
• Creating a sense of community to help face the unknown of innovation.
• The details of a key Google project and what it teaches us about leading innovation.
• An overview of the paradoxes you have to manage as a leader of innovation.
• The distinction between planning forward and acting forward.
• How to organize for action and innovation.
• Insight into some of the dangers that expertise can pose to innovation.
• Lessons from Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi's unique culture of communication.
• How their company culture helped them prepare for, and navigate, the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Professor Hill’s personal practices as a researcher and practitioner of innovation.
• Unpacking why she always partners with a young person when working on a new book.
• The story of how she visited New Zealand with her young book partner to conduct research.
• Professor Hill’s approach to client work and why she has started focusing more on startups.
• The founding of Paradox Strategies and how Professor Hill is pushing herself to be a novice.
• Generative AI, having a growth mindset, and the value of different perspectives.
• Some insight into Professor Hill’s research for her upcoming book Scaling Genius.
Quotes:
“If you’re trying to innovate, you don’t really know where you’re going, you don’t have an answer, you don’t have a vision to share with anyone. Fundamentally, you’re trying to find that out.” — @Linda_A_Hill [0:04:35]
“What leading innovation is about is giving people a sense of purpose or a really interesting problem. The ‘why’ that they want to pursue as opposed to the ‘what’.” — @Linda_A_Hill [0:05:34]
“You have to have structure. But the structures you need to put in place need to be, in some ways, minimal structures required for us to collaborate, experiment, and learn together. We don’t need extra structures.” — @Linda_A_Hill [0:17:54]
“One of the rules of engagement of innovative companies is you always have to tell people what your evidence is and you could even say your evidence is your gut.” — @Linda_A_Hill [0:28:36]
“Whenever I’m starting a research project, I always have a young person on the project. I don’t know if they like being called a young person, but I always find someone who is in their early 20s to be co-authors of my book.” — @Linda_A_Hill [0:30:28]
“Collaboration [and] innovative thinking happens when you have collaboration amongst people who have diverse points of view, diverse ways of thinking.” — @Linda_A_Hill [0:31:10]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation
Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader
Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi
Lockheed Martin
Skunk Works®
Sanjay Poonen on LinkedIn
Cohesity
Avatarin
EPISODE 8 [TRANSCRIPT]
“LH: So, whenever I’m starting a research project, I always have a young person on the project. I don’t know if they like being called a young person but I always find someone who is in their early 20s to be coauthors of my book. So, our books, I should say, I shouldn’t say mine because they really are ours. So, the first ET was a woman named Emily Truelove, who joined me right after she graduated from college, a year or so after, and she helped with the writing of Collective Genius.”
[0:00:32.5] JU: You’re listening to Paint & Pipette. I’m your host, Jeremy Utley. I teach innovation and entrepreneurship at Stanford University. Thanks for joining me to explore the art and science of bringing new ideas to life. Let’s dive in.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:54.9] JU: All right, welcome to another episode, the Paint and Pipette podcast. I’m Jeremy Utley and I’m delighted to have you with me today. Thanks for joining, feel free to drop in the comments below where in the world you’re joining from. We are joined today by an illustrious guest, Professor Linda Hill from Harvard Business School. Linda, thank you for joining us.
[0:01:14.4] LH: It’s a privilege.
[0:01:15.5] JU: This is going to be so much fun. I have been looking forward to this. I think we started trying to schedule this back in May. You are a busy woman.
[0:01:22.5] LH: Yes, I am, but I think you are too. So, I’m sorry and I’m glad you were persistent because I’m glad to be here and hopeful to have many conversations going forward.
[0:01:30.7] JU: Likewise, likewise. It’s super fun. I want to try to, if I may be so ambitious, I want to try to have four mini-conversations today, okay? I want to talk about your past, which of course, I mean, you have a storied past but one of the things that a lot of folks want to talk about is Collective Genius. Obviously, it’s an amazing work, then I want to talk about your present research, and then as I often like to do, I’d like to get more into your personal, both research process and also your creative practices as well. So, is that okay with you? Does that work?
[0:02:01.1] LH: That works.
[0:02:02.0] JU: We’ll see if we can do it all.
[0:02:03.8] LH: You’re speaking to an anthropologist so I tend to tell stories but just cut me off and keep me moving.
[0:02:09.1] JU: No, I love it, I’ll never cut you off, it’s beautiful, I love stories, thank you. I thought we could get started with a very simple line from Collective Genius, and I thought you just unpack it. You say that the role of a leader of innovation is not the set of vision and motivate others to follow it, it’s to create a community that’s willing and able to generate new ideas.
Okay, so, I see four things there. It’s not about vision and motivation. which is fascinating. It’s about a community, that’s kind of the second thing and we can talk about each of these in turn. Then the third is the willingness and the fourth is the ability. So, let’s start with this idea that the role of a leader of innovation is not to set a vision and motivate others because that I think flies in the face of a lot of our conventional definitions of leadership. Tell us more about that.
[0:02:58.4] LH: So, I’m a protégé of John Cotter, who helped us all learn about the distinction between leadership and management, and for John, leadership was about vision, communicating that vision to others, and really inspiring them to one, fulfill that vision. So, when I went to do the search on what do exceptional leaders of innovation do, and we really looked at this connection between leadership and innovation because there wasn’t much research that did.
When I talked to leaders who did a really good job of that, who built companies that were able to innovate time and again, I found that they were all visionaries, some of them with big V visionaries but they wanted me to understand that that’s not what they were doing when they were leading innovation. They weren’t being a visionary. When they’re leading changed, they were being visionaries, but innovation, by definition as a number of them told me, “You don’t actually have a vision. You don’t know the answer.”
If you’re trying to do something that is breakthrough, you have no vision. You do have the “Why” you have the purpose, the problem you’re trying to solve. So, what you’re really, if you will, leading with is a problem that needs to be solved and then you need to create a sense of community because people really find innovation hard. Innovation is emotionally and intellectually challenging. So, you as a reader –
[0:04:11.2] JU: Okay, but hang on because you’re about to go to the problem, I know. I just want to bookmark. You mentioned that vision is needed to manage change but it’s not how leaders in innovation actually lead. So, I just want to bookmark that, that I’d love to come back to that comment in a second but so it’s not about vision because you say, they don’t know where they’re going necessarily. Can you talk more about that unknown of innovation?
[0:04:33.6] LH: Yeah. So, they don’t know if by definition, if you’re trying to innovate, you don’t really know where you’re going, you don’t have an answer, you don’t have a vision to share with anyone. Fundamentally, you’re trying to find that out, so that’s what that’s about. So, in fact, that it is not about followership, it’s actually about cooperation. So, when you have a vision, you know, we all want to know, tell us and we’ll follow you. Inspire us to move us in that direction.
But when you’re working on something that’s an innovation, you actually know the problem you were trying to solve. Of course, as you well know from your research and your work, it’s not easy to frame the problem but you have a sense of the problem and you have the sense of the “Why.” So, what we see these leaders really focus on is building that sense of community that will allow us to engage in what is a really difficult process and there are three parts to it. I’m going to break it down, the first is you have to be able to collaborate.
The second is you have to be able to experiment, and the third is you have to be able to learn, and you have to be able to do that usually with diverse others because you rarely get innovation without some diversity of thought. So, what innovation, leading innovation is about is giving people a sense of purpose or you know, a really interesting problem, the “Why” that they want to pursue as supposed to, if you will, the “What.”
[0:05:45.5] JU: You gave us the disclaimer at the top that you’re an anthropologist who loves to tell stories. Can you tell us a story about leading with the “Why” rather than the “What” or an example of a leader who led with “Not vision” but problem that had to be solved?
[0:05:58.7] LH: Okay. So, an example I would give that we actually did include in Collective Genius was at the time, we were studying one of the leaders who was considered to be an exceptional leader at Google. Unbelievable leader of Google. They had to figure out how to store the data for Gmail and YouTube.
[0:06:15.4] JU: Just a little bit of data, just a little bit of data, right?
[0:06:18.5] LH: Yeah, which is different from storing search data. So, they needed to solve this problem and they didn’t know the answer, they had thoughts about it. So, the person who was leading the organization, he was this SVP of technology. What he said is, “You know what? This is the problem we need to solve. I don’t know what the answer to this is.” Because this was all new when Gmail and some YouTube, so this was all new stuff.
And so he said, “What I need to do is create the environment at which people are going to be willing to tackle this problem, and able to tackle this problem.” Now what makes them willing is really helping them understand the “Why.” Why it’s important, there’s a lot we can say about that. But it’s the sense of shared purpose or why we want to solve this that goes back to what the purpose at the time of Google was, you know, why we’re very driven by we want to get people access to information.
But he needed to help them understand not only the purpose when you create the sense of community around it, they needed to understand, we can talk about it more in-depth if you want to later, have a certain set of values and a certain way, a sort of rules of engagement of how they were going to work that made them feel that they were a part of community, that they could trust, they could work in, and take the risks necessary to solve what was technically a very complicated problem.
So, what he did just to illustrate the will part of it, is he basically went out and told everybody, “This is our problem.” And then he told me he waited to see who would come into his office with ideas of solutions. So, people would walk in, tell him, “This is I think, you know, this is the problem, this is the “Why”, this is, we really need to get this done. Isn’t YouTube going to be marvelous? Gmail” et cetera, and then he said, they would talk to them and he said really, two or three sort of coalitions of thoughts began to emerge as he listened to people coming into his office. Two in particular.
So, he decided that, “You know what? These are both reasonable. I’m going to let each of you, new coalitions, organize yourself and you go at it. Figure out how to solve this problem.” And so, those two groups went at it, he didn’t know how long it would take, and it took them almost two years to actually come up with a solution and they needed – in fact, we could talk about the leadership that had to happen during this but again, they didn’t really have the answer.
As they learned, as they collaborated and experimented and learned, they began to get closer to solutions or quote “the answer.” Now at that point, there’s a whole other issue. He didn’t want – he said, “The most important thing is we can’t afford to lose the learning of either group. So, even if we pick one of the solutions, we got to make sure we don’t lose the learning of the other group.”
[0:08:44.0] JU: Right, right.
[0:08:44.9] LH: And the second thing is he doesn’t want one group to feel that it’s you know, they won and you’ve lost. So, there were all kinds of challenges but it wasn’t like he said, “I have the answer.” And they kept coming to him. The engineers kept saying, “Why don’t you just put together the group that you think has the most talent? You know you have ideas about this, just tell us those ideas.”
[0:09:01.1] JU: Wow.
[0:09:01.3] LH: He said, “Nope, that’s not the way innovation happens.” Not that he didn’t have thoughts, of course he did but he just said, “Nope, push it back to them, create the space, ask them the questions to make sure they’re asking the right questions as they’re doing their experiments and learning. Make sure they’re learning. Occasionally, bump these groups up against each other” because they’re competitive, you know?
[0:09:18.9] JU: Yeah, I like that.
[0:09:20.2] LH: Go and let them see a little bit about what’s happening and so that’s the process of give them the problem, not the answer, and he said, “Linda, I didn’t have the answer, I wasn’t playing games with them and we had a shortage of engineering talent.” So, I will tell you, that’s what I mean about, we know what the problem is, we know the "Why" and why it’s really important to solve this problem.
But now, let me help create the space instead of, “Yeah, I have the vision, these are the five or six people, you know, who know about this the most, have the most technical expertise, let me put them on it.” No, grab people’s talents and passions, sit back, listen, and then we get to sort of shape the environment they’re in. Does that make sense?
[0:09:54.8] JU: Yeah, I think, one question a lot of the leaders that I work with really grapple with is, where do these people come from? Extensively, the folks in the organization had day jobs, right? And now, we’re undertaking this new stream of experimentation, we’re bumping up against this kind of cooperative, competitive, other group. How are they resourcing for this exploration?
[0:10:16.8] LH: So, this was Bill’s point of view. So, the others might have different points of view at Google, and when I talk about a different – a particular company, I’m talking about the leader I specifically studied at that company. I don’t know all of Google, didn’t know all of Google but what he said to me is that what he worried about was he had a shortage of people who knew how to lead this way.
Most of his engineers wanted to say, “I have the answer, follow me.” But he said, fundamentally, when you actually did that with these talented, passionate people, they would follow you out to the parking lot and go work someplace else because they expected to have some autonomy and to be able to work at the cutting edge.
Now, at Google at the time, they had that 20% rule that we’ve heard about, 20% of your time would be spent on something else. In his group, what I was told is virtually no one used the 20% time to do something that wasn’t deeply related to a problem they needed to solve. So, a lot of people, what they did was, eventually, these groups, this was their full-time work but only after it became necessary for that to happen, if you will.
[0:11:14.6] JU: Yeah, it makes sense.
[0:11:16.3] LH: Yeah, and the last part I just want to say right now because I think it’s so important is that what all of these exceptional leaders of innovation told me, like Ed Catmull, who was at Pixar. He said, “Linda, innovation is a voluntary act. You cannot use your formal authority, you cannot tell people to innovate, you can only invite them, they have to volunteer to innovate.” And that’s why, this is – in creating this environment, where they want to volunteer, wait in here, what they’re thinking, and then figure out how to give them the resources and the space, resource, time and space.
What he said is most people in his group at most, they spent 5% of their time working on something that “wasn’t directly related to a problem that Google needed to solve.”
[0:12:00.2] JU: Okay. So, now I’d love to talk about this because this is kind of the perfect segue, the apparent Schizophrenia of a leader who is trying to do this, right? Because as you said, change requires that kind of visionary leadership and leading innovation requires that they aren’t leading with vision but they’re creating the context. How does a leader kind of oscillate between – because most people aren’t doing this all the time, right?
They’re going back and forth, they’re almost appearing to contradict themselves. How do they manage these seeming bipolarism of the task of leading innovation, while also driving the kind of steady-state business?
[0:12:39.0] LH: So, one little things I want to say and I’m really going to answer your question is we ended up writing two books at the same time.
[0:12:45.7] JU: Speaking of bipolar, speaking of schizophrenia.
[0:12:47.8] LH: Speaking of schizophrenia, which means that both books were late but as we begin to discover what these exceptional leaders of innovation were doing, I began to think we can’t talk about leadership as being tied, so closely tied to vision because there is this other kind of leadership you need to do. So, we actually ended up talking about, in a book called, Being the Boss, the three imperatives of leadership, managing yourself, managing your network, and managing your team.
Don’t want to go into those with you right now but what I want to say in terms of the managing yourself and the schizophrenia, as you know in Collective Genius, we talk about six paradoxes, six tensions that you as a leader have to manage. So, always, there are these tensions, they’re always tradeoffs. So, the one you’re describing here in part, there are a lot of pieces to it but what we see is that leaders who are more versatile and know when in fact they need to be quite top-down.
Because when you are leading innovation, I want to be clear, there are times when you need to be top-down. As one leader put it, “Brute force.” Other times, and most of the time, it’s more bottom-up once you put in place this environment. So, it’s not that vision doesn’t matter. As I said, all the people that we’ve studied have been visionaries.
Now, we studied organizations that were built from, if the ground up innovative and leaders, actually who are building organizations and we studied organizations that have to be transformed to become more innovative, where that leading change piece is so central. So, you know at Google at the time, we were looking to leading change was about what you had to do to scale up, to scale the business as quickly as you possibly could.
So, I think that there are really six tensions. You know, that one is about unleashing the talent and passions and the organizations, as you know we call those slices of genius, you have diverse slices of genius in your organization and that is an individual’s talents and passions, how do you unleash it to get the new, and then on the other side, you have to get the useful if it’s going to be innovation.
So, you have to leverage and harness all those diverse slices of talent. So, when you’re working and even when you’re thinking about present and future, one of the things that Bill was always doing is we’re trying to solve this problem that you know, is in the future. It’s in the present but you know, YouTube hasn’t actually been really launched until we get this done and there’s urgency. So, one of the things that he had to worry about in terms of, you know, how you deal with resources. Another tension is patience versus urgency.
[0:15:01.4] JU: Yeah.
[0:15:01.3] LH: On the one hand, he needed to be patient, which today is urgent, usually because innovation doesn’t happen quickly. As I said, it took these very talented people almost two years to come up with the solution. On the other hand, you know, you’ve got to be urgent because Google needs – they paid a lot of money for YouTube and it needs to be up and running.
So, the way I think they think about present and future is you know, “What am I patient about, what am I urgent about?” And that’s why he was always looking ahead and thinking this is where being a visionary can be helpful. Where is the market going? Where are our customers going? And you know, I know we got to need to be preparing for that. So, what are the problems that we need to be solving?
How do we prioritize that we’re working on them in the right order so, we’re likely to actually have an answer by the time we really need it? So, that’s – I think, the way they dealt with the present and the future if you will.
[0:15:50.0] JU: Yeah, it reminds me of one of the things that you say in your book that it’s not about planning your way forward but acting your way forward.
[0:15:55.7] LH: Yes.
[0:15:57.0] JU: And you also mentioned it’s about actually organizing, leading for innovation is about organizing for innovation. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. The distinction between planning forward versus acting forward and how you organize for action.
[0:16:10.2] LH: So, one of the things that I didn’t know this and Jeremy, this is what comes from really studying people who are good at what they do, this was not an insight I had. So, I began to do this work about 20-some years ago, and one of the first companies, and as you know, one of my coauthors was kind of the chief technology officer of Pixar. They had different titles.
So, I studied when we first began to do our work on exceptional leaders of innovation, I found myself looking at Pixar. An unbelievably, you know, innovative company being led by people who are extremely talented. So, the one I got to know really well was Ed Catmull. So, Ed, if you look at it, the reason I’m answering it this way is they always did work in the way that we’re now saying people need to do work if you want to be innovative.
So, they always experimented and iterated, they always did that. So, I saw this company that was growing up that had to experiment and iterate and that’s the acting your way forward. So, what the whole process of how they made movies and how they led was actually, I guess, cutting edge leadership that we are now seeing people trying to help people understand and do.
[0:17:13.5] JU: Can you drill down one level there? We actually had Ed on the show recently. So, we talked to them a little bit about it but I would love to hear your observations, especially as an outside observer. I understand how they acted. How did they organize for that action? When you talk about organizing for innovation, what is the structure, rhythms, mechanisms, enabling and supporting, creating accountability for the action to discover?
[0:17:37.8] LH: The other paradox, we started – I’m just going to – So, top-down, bottom-up, top-down, the other one, we’ve talked about this patience, urgency. The third one is, I’m actually doing it a little bit backwards, is improvisation versus structure.
[0:17:50.6] JU: Okay.
[0:17:51.8] LH: So, how do you structure? So, you understand that yes, you have to have structure but the structures you need to put in place need to be in some ways, minimal structures required for us to collaborate, experiment, and learn together. We don’t need extra structures. So, what you see in these organizations, even when they get big or bigger is trying to keep structure down to a minimum and say, “Do we need this structure to help us collaborate, to experiment, and learn? And if we do, then we need to put it in place.”
So, for instance, these organizations are very clear about decision-making rights. People don’t need to guess about who is going to make the decision. You know who is going to make the decision but having laid down that, you know that framework, then you need to look at, “What do you need to improvise about?” That’s the third paradox that needs to be managed.
Now, there’s a separate question and that’s in the next book, so I don’t know if you want me to talk about that now in terms of structure, about building ambidextrous organizations, and what those structures look like to allow you to do this. That’s my present research more than what’s in Collected Genius. So, the first thing, what we need to understand about these organizations is they don’t have some people who innovate and some people who execute.
They don’t think that way. They adopt a very democratic mindset about everybody in the organization always needs to be an innovative problem solver, everybody. So, we’re trying to build the culture and capabilities that allow us all to do it. So, one of the things they do because they want everybody to do it is everyone is supposed to be figuring out what they should be doing and what they could be doing for the customer or whoever their stakeholder is.
So, no matter if you’re a janitor in a hospital, what should you be doing, what could you be doing to reduce infectious disease rates in the hospital? Everybody.
[0:19:33.0] JU: So, just in that example, how do you incentivize or reward that kind of – I think some would say, do your job, right? Your job isn’t to innovate, your job is to make sure the room is sanitary or whatever, right? So, how do you not incentivize and reward that?
[0:19:46.5] LH: No, that’s wrong.
[0:19:47.9] JU: No, I’m setting you up here, right?
[0:19:49.3] LH: Yeah.
[0:19:49.5] JU: But like, how do you enable that kind of broadminded, customer-centric thinking from the frontlines of the organization all the way through the C suite?
[0:19:58.3] LH: So, one of the things you do is you’re very transparent about what your purpose is and who you serve. This is who we are, this is what we do, and why we do it, and everybody needs to understand how they fit into that, what their impact can be. So, part of the answer to how do you incentivize is you set up a culture that supports people collaborating and experimenting, and learning together, in terms of their values, et cetera.
So, it’s not that everybody has the exact right pay system. I do see many, many more companies, even large, you know, established ones, moving to the OKR model as opposed to KPIs because in fact, OKRs are about setting ambitious goals if you will that in fact, you may not meet. So, in terms of the incentives, I do see that but the other thing I see happening at Proctor & Gamble, for one period of time, this was when they were leading change and trying to figure out how to be more – how they could really speed up their innovation, that’s the way I’m going to put it, accelerate innovation.
One of the things that the head of R&D and innovation did is go to the business unit heads and said, “How should we manage it for you? And we have so many businesses, they’re all different. You tell us where you are in the S curve and then you tell us how you want to be measured with regard to innovation.”
[0:21:07.1] JU: We can help keep you accountable but we’re helping you stay accountable to your own defined goals, right? Yeah, that’s good.
[0:21:14.8] LH: You’re going to tell the board, this is what, you know, when you come back next year, this is what they’re going to see. Now, that was through a period of change that they did that, right? Then I think once they understood and had some sense of what made sense, they began to structure or if you will, standardize more of how they thought about some of those metrics.
[0:21:32.4] JU: Yeah.
[0:21:33.7] LH: But I do think it’s about leaders understanding that when you need to lead today, you’re always going to be on your formal authority. You need to know the local and you don’t know those conditions even if you are a very hands-on leader. So, you need to figure out how to do more, co-creation, collaborative approach, even with figuring out how to set appropriate metrics.
[0:21:51.4] JU: Yeah. No, I love that. You just kind of made an allusion to the next book and I see Tomas just mentioned in the chat that he wants to hear more about the ambidextrous stuff, which I love. I’m a big fan of Charles O’Riley and Michael Tushman.
[0:22:02.5] LH: Yes.
[0:22:04.0] JU: Folks who are doing that but before we get there, the one last question I’m dying to ask you is, I’ve heard you speak a little bit about the danger of expertise.
[0:22:12.5] LH: Yes.
[0:22:13.2] JU: In innovation and I think, I’d love to hear you just give folks a little bit of an appreciation for – because most organizations value expertise, right? What is the danger that expertise poses in the context of innovation?
[0:22:25.7] LH: So, one other leaders I had the privilege of studying was the CEO at the time of Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi. We spent many, many mornings, talking about how they were working their way through COVID, the pandemic crisis. First off, I’m going to put this in context, he told everyone in the hospital since these are new circumstances and you know how many experts, if you know anything about world healthcare systems work, you have. He said, “We understand that everything we’re doing is a working hypothesis.”
“We’ve never been here before. This is a working hypothesis. So, the only way we’re going to know if our decisions are right is if, in fact, we basically make the decision and figure out what happens. What the impact of that decision is. So, the key to our being successful is being able to learn as quickly as possible, the impact of our decisions, and then once we know the impact, if necessary, then be able to pivot” be agile, as we talk about it.
So, one of the things he really worried about is because the doctors who were there had seen, and the nurses, had seen everything. Ebola, everything, right? These were very global physicians, so they had expertise. He said, “You know what? Since this virus is not operating the way we think most viruses are, we need to have someone with the beginner’s eye on this team, on the team that is working with us who will ask us the so-called stupid question because those stupid questions usually get the first assumptions.”
So, if you can imagine, in a hospital that had to respond to something like COVID-19, they put on novices. Now, his role was to make sure that those novices would feel comfortable speaking up and more importantly, be heard.
[0:23:56.4] JU: I mean, you’re getting right out of this. How do you ensure that the experts who possess so much, I mean, my favorite example by the way, just to give you one for your, you know, example kit, Skunkworks, Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks, whenever it is, Overholser had the kind of the Russian equation that determined the design parameters for the – what became the stealth bomber.
When he presented it to the group, they called it the hopeless diamond because it couldn’t fly, and what they said was, one of the senior aeronautical engineers said, “Overholser should be burned at the stake. I got slide rules older than that kid. He didn’t know what he was talking about, right?” And so my question, with all that said, I think it’s a beautiful story of a novice having an innovation but the tendency of an expert is to dismiss any kind of non-conforming evidence. So, how – I’d love to hear in the context at Cleveland Clinic, how did they do that?
[0:24:47.2] LH: Yeah, these are physicians, right? These exceptional physicians, very, very good at what they do. So, the leader, in this instance, Dr. Suri is one of the pioneers in robotic surgery, cardiac surgery. He was the head of the hospital. So, when he was on these teams, he was the one who would throw his weight, if you will, behind whatever the novice was saying because he knew his formal authority mattered.
But before this all happened, he could not have put that novice, if you will, on the committee if they hadn’t already put in place a bit of culture where people knew they could get to him. So, one of the ways they found out that Cleveland Clinic, Abu Dhabi that something was happening is, I believe it was someone in the kitchen who had family in Wuhan told them, “There’s something strange happening in my home city.”
Now, most people, you know, in the kitchen, don’t think that they can get to the CEO of a hospital. So, there were processes in place where that could happen because they have a team of teams approaching the first place. So, when he first heard it, he thought, “Eh, I’m not too worried about it.” But then he realized, it was a freight train coming and I will tell you that he sees them as having been late in responding but they were testing people for COVID in January.
[0:25:55.9] JU: Wow, right away, wow.
[0:25:59.0] LH: It was all the way this culture of, “You know what? Speak up, don’t let us all die, tell us what you’re hearing, what are you seeing on WeChat. How can that make its way up?” So, first off, there was a culture here where people who were at the frontline could speak to people at, if you will, at the top, or had a way of getting there if you will.
[0:26:17.3] JU: You know, like, what are the actual, is it a Slack channel, is it a group, WeChat? Like, what is the actual mechanism to ensure that the kitchen worker can, you know, shine the bat signal?
[0:26:27.1] LH: It was actually a team of team’s approach. They have these huddles. So, they have these cross-functional huddles that happen at various levels in the organization, every day. So, people are updated about what happened yesterday and what are going to be the priorities today.
So, they have groups of like, 20, 15 people who huddle and they’re all done in a – and the cadence of them really matter because basically, you know maybe the people who are lower in the hierarchy huddle first to some extent, and the way this works. So, if anything needs to be escalated, the next huddle has those people in it and they’re hearing it and it works that way.
So, they already had this culture in place. I won’t try to say that if you just put somebody in a novice in and you haven’t been used to having some vehicles, and mind you and Abu Dhabi is a pretty hierarchical place as our hospitals. So, you put this into context but I think he just said was she’s asking a reasonable question. “How do we know this?” Because this one is you know, operating differently.
So, I remember when I talked to them in early March. He said, “There are at least seven or eight variants that we’re already seeing because they began to test for the variants very early on and they’re working differently, so some seem to be killing off the young people immediately. Others, not so much. Some people are more contagious, seemed to be more contagious than others.
So, they always had this, “What’s the problem, how do we get the information?” They also have won many awards as being a smart hospital. So, they relied very much on digital technology and data to inform their decisions as well, I will tell you.
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[0:27:58.5] JU: Research is clear that our first idea probably isn’t our best idea. That’s true for you, me, as well as your organization but that first idea is an essential step to better ideas. So, how do you improve your idea flow? That’s my passion and the work I do with organizations. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization implement better ideas, let’s talk. Check out my website, jeremyutley.design, or drop me a line at jutlee@jeremyutley.design. Let’s make ideas flow better.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:28:33.8] LH: What does the culture they had was one where one of the rules of engagement of innovative companies is you always have to tell people what your evidence is and you could even say your evidence is your gut. Tell us what your evidence is, don’t just state your opinion, second, anybody can question you. “Is your experience, you know, was the Ebola really relevant to this thing that’s operating rather differently as a virus?”
[0:28:55.3] JU: That’s beautiful. Okay. So, I want to now pivot a little bit to your personal practice and you gave me this word, novice, which I wasn’t going to bring up until a bit later but I know that you yourself, one of the reasons I was so excited by the way to interview you is because I know that not only are you a great researcher of innovation but you’re also a great practitioner of innovation.
I’d love for you to tell our audience a little bit about your two ETs and why you have, not just one but two ETs in your life, and perhaps if you don’t mind, you could incorporate a certain drawing of an octopus, I don't know, if you’re willing.
[0:29:32.2] LH: Yes, I’m going to move this direction. I don’t know, well, maybe I need to move it closer so you now grab it. So yes, I will tell you about my ETs. It’s somewhat accidental that they’re both ETs. I don’t know if you can see this is an octopus that was in fact given to me as a gift drawn by one of the ETs and given to me as a gift because what we want to understand about innovation as I said it’s about collaboration, experiment, and learning is that the octopus is an unbelievable learning organ.
As you know, it is one of the most intelligent animals in the world and how they learn with those tentacles, those limbs is what she thinks we need to be doing and know how to do and we have to help organizations learn how to do.
[0:30:10.6] JU: Why should we care what ET says and why do you care what ET says?
[0:30:14.4] LH: What ET says? So, as I have gotten older, I think I was always kind of this way but certainly as I’ve progressed in my career, I always know there’s so much I don’t know and I know that because as a professor, you know the students get younger. So, whenever I’m starting a research project, I always have a young person on the project. I don’t know if they like being called a young person but I always find someone who is in their early 20s to be coauthors of my book.
So, our books I should say, I shouldn’t say mine because they really are ours. So, the first ET was a woman named Emily Truelove, who joined me right after she graduated from college a year or so after and she helped with the writing of Collective Genius.
[0:30:52.4] JU: I see her name on the cover of the book. I mean, she got – it’s amazing, a 23-year-old gets writing credit, for a seminal work. Okay, so why? Why bring ET onto the team?
[0:31:04.0] LH: Because when we were collecting the data and when we were analyzing and writing about it, I needed to have her eyes. As we know, collaboration, innovative thinking happens when you have collaboration amongst people who have diverse points of view, diverse ways of thinking. She actually was an English major and a violinist, so when I hired her in the first place, people thought, “Well, this is weird, she’s not a business-type person.”
But anybody who can do the kind of work she did who could play the violin professionally means you are a driven and passionate individual and she didn’t end up playing professionally and she actually studied because she was thinking about that but she was also an English major and she on her own gave up her Fullbright because the Fullbright wasn’t going to create enough challenge for her.
So, I guess I go for the growth mindset. So, it’s not just any other person, it’s some young person who has a fair amount of courage and you know, some conviction and talent. So, we only met once though but we so connected and she was on her way to go over to Asia to do some work when I met her. The other one, Emily Tedards was my research associate rather similar kind of background.
She had done some work with the UN, very interested in sort of the politics and technology, we hit it off, Emily Tedards and she is now going to be the co-author of the book I’m working on right now and I have to tell you one of the things that they do and I’ve had many young people, a number of them have actually ended up working on Collective Genius and you see I acknowledge them in the front in the acknowledgments.
They worked on different pieces of it, but I remember once when I was working very hard to write what I think is the best chapter of the book, chapter two, I could not get that right. It was a mess and I remember Emily saying to me, “Well, let me take a shot at it” and I’m thinking, “Well, how can she take a shot at it and I’m the academic who knows all the theory, etcetera?” She took it and you know in a matter of a day or two, she gave it back to me in a structure that fundamentally is the one we ended up relying a whole lot on.
[0:32:54.4] JU: Wow.
[0:32:55.2] LH: To write that chapter up. So, they have all kinds of talent. I mean, the slices of genius idea that people have talents and passions and again, you know there’s editing, doesn’t get everything right, doesn’t know all the research but that’s not the point. She understood how to frame the problem and then we together could work through a collaborative way how to come to the solution but you have to encourage them.
I remember almost all of them has said to me when they start, I have a brilliant, brilliant RA working with me right now, Lydia, so I’m moving away from the ETs, they always start wondering, “Does Linda really want to know what I think?” and Lord me, I have too many opinions and I think they learn pretty quickly that she does, right?
[0:33:33.9] JU: How do you reinforce that you actually really want to know?
[0:33:36.8] LH: Well, I’ll ask them to do something and I don’t think I’m the best at clarity. I think if you work with me, you have to be pretty comfortable with ambiguity frankly to some extent and they are pretty proactive in managing their boss. So, if they overtime can’t figure something out and they all have their own structures they put in place and so it turns out I have a notebook, each have written about, “If you want to work with Linda effectively, you have to help her do these things.”
[0:33:59.3] JU: Wow, okay.
[0:34:00.6] LH: So, they pass it on to each other. I have never been able to see the notebook and what’s in it but I can guess. So now, they put in some other structures.
[0:34:07.9] JU: They don’t share the notebook with you?
[0:34:09.8] LH: No, they don’t. It’s something, a joke we have. My very first RA who is now a very senior executive in Australia, she came to see me recently, it was like a couple of weeks ago and we were laughing about how they trained me. So, I told her what I was doing and she’s like, “Oh, who did that? Who got you to finally do that?” and I said, “Don’t even ask” but I always say to them, “What do I need to do to help you do your best work?”
And then inevitably, they don’t do it right away. They’ll come back to me and say, “Well, what do I need to do Linda to help you do your best work?” So you know, then they make me reflect on that. So, I think that because they have different experience, they ask me hard questions. They often have answers to hard question and going back to the 20% rule, I always try to give them something else, say to them, “What’s something you really want to work on?”
“Let’s work on it because you know, I’ll probably learn something.” Now, I had one who was an incredible sailor and a marathon runner. She didn’t practice for the marathon, she just ran it. I mean, she was very sports-oriented, you know what I mean?
[0:35:08.9] JU: Wow.
[0:35:09.2] LH: She wanted to understand how you put together an America’s Cup Syndicate and at first I thought, “Is that going to be relevant to business?” That is quite something, to put together a syndicate, so we spent time in New Zealand and we spent time learning a whole lot of about the innovation of those boats. The only bad news about her is she arranged for us to actually get on one of those boats and sail for just a number of hours and I thought I would die and I thought I would kill her.
[0:35:32.0] JU: Sea sickness aside, I want to – she has this idea about America’s Cup syndicates and you actually went to New Zealand with her on a lark not knowing whether it was going to have bearing on the research or not or did you do any kind of pre-vetting like because I think for a lot of people if it’s not patently obvious how this is relevant, I mean, for someone of your eminence and stature, any executive in an organization goes, “I don’t have time for the potentially irrelevant.” How many support that?
[0:36:01.2] LH: Yeah. Well, first off, they know me well enough that they make the case for it. So, she began, she did some research and did some explaining to me and what it takes to put together a syndicate and how hard it is. As you know, the actual sailboats are at the cutting edge of design. So, she shared with me, she did her homework, and said, “You know this I think would be a really good example of what we’re trying to study.”
And she said, “So, can we do this? Does it make sense?” and as she – and I didn’t just get up and go but I think what I am saying that’s even more important is to make sure you understand what they are passionate about and why they’re passionate about it because one thing that I did learn is, one leader said to me, “If you don’t think someone has a slice of genius, let them go work elsewhere.”
If you don’t think they’re going to say something to you that you think is interesting for the organization, so an innovation is always something that’s new and useful, not just creative as you said, it’s relevant in some ways and so I think that what is her passion. I’ve already seen her do hard work, I’ve already seen you know, she’s produced things that are just been great and now, she’s telling me that she thinks there’s something that we could learn and this is her passion.
So, why can’t I respond to that? Now, if it was really irrelevant, you know I am not going to waste the school’s money and time and energy going to do something but as I looked at it, they really are small businesses and not so small in some ways. There’s a whole set of marketing issues, there is a whole lot of challenges putting those things together. So you know, as I thought I was stretching myself, I don’t know anything about it.
But boy, was it fascinating work and it also led us to do a little bit of work looking at sports in general and innovation because some of you may know in New Zealand, you have the All Blacks. Well, it turns out, I had no idea that the people who sailed these boats, many of them come, they’re rugby players and professional football players. So I cannot tell you how my network grew.
They thought it was hysterical that a Harvard Business School professor was at an All Blacks game, right? What we’re doing here and how do you work with that but again, you know I ended up realizing for some things we were doing, we begin to talk to coaches about how you really help very, very talented people express their genius, which is a question that I’ve always been interested in.
So, it actually – it had tentacles like if you will, the octopus, have led to other kinds of work that we’ve done.
[0:38:16.9] JU: I so admire that about you, Linda, how you embody some of these principles, and before we go to your next work, which ET2 is working on, let’s talk about other practices and specifically, I’d love to hear one of the things you mentioned to me when we spoke recently was how you shifted from working with – or I don’t know about shifted from but you’ve started focusing more on working with startups.
I think the audience would really appreciate your mindset towards what kinds of clients you work with, what kinds of ways in which you engage the outside world because that speaks to me about a certain kind of rigorous process and rigorous practice that you hold yourself to.
[0:38:54.0] LH: I would like to say it’s as rigorous as it could be but I’m fairly opportunistic but I do pay attention. I’m always scanning and sensing the world. So, part of the way that startups came about was probably about nine or ten years ago. I went to our then dean because I am the chair of the leadership initiative at Harvard Business School and I’m supposed to be providing insight on what we need to be helping people learn, if you will, if they are going to be effective leaders.
So, I went to the dean and said, “You know what? I need to learn about design.” There’s this sort of design thing happening and I think it’s going to be ever more important to business and the only way I know to do that is to become deeply associated with designers and I think the best way I can do it at scale is I’ve been invited to join the board of art center in Pasadena, which is a design school and I said, “I’m going to go do that.”
And I actually gave up, when I began to think about giving up, one of my public boards because you know, I’ll forge a big one to be able to be on a not-for-profit board of design. As a consequence of doing that, going to the art center, which does a lot of auto design, there are a lot of different game design, entertainment, and also Nike, on shoes but one of the things that happened was one of the designers, the designer and you may know, Eight Inc. asked me if I like to have little equity in his company and be able to work with him and so I could learn about how they actually work with clients.
So, Eight Inc., he actually designed, that company designed the Apple stores, the Tesla stores, the Burgeon Lounges, so I’m on there, right? I’m in there and I can see. So, I began to do this kind of work with designers and learning about that because of that network and I ended up working and because of Greg at Pixar, he said, “Let’s take Collective Genius and make it useful to the executives.”
So, we began to work on that and we both agreed we’re not so good at building businesses but fortunately, two of my former students came to me and said, “Professor Hill, you’d never figured out how to leverage yourself.” So, they are the managing partners of a firm we set up called Paradox Strategies. We also set up another firm related to that, another former student who said, “I’d like to use some of your IP.”
And I said, “Well, it belongs to Paradox Strategies” and Emily Truelove is also a part of that entity. What I said is, “Sure.” So, what we’re developing is a SaaS AI-driven dashboard in a way, a real-time dashboard for the utilities can use. At this point, we’re going to go broader after this but utilities because we need data to do the machine learning to help them figure out whether they’re making the right kind of progress they need to make to meet their goals, their sustainability goals.
So, we actually got named by Fast Company as one of the companies to watch this year, which is very exciting.
[0:41:24.2] JU: No way, that’s so cool. So wait, how does that idea form and how do you decide individually with all of the varying kind of competing interest or things competing for your time, how do you decide, “This is worth some of my bandwidth, this is worth some of my attention,” especially in the early days where it’s unclear whether there’s any value to be created there.
[0:41:44.1] LH: Who knows, right? Who knows as you all? So, first of all, I’m feeling what it’s like to being a startup. Now, at the same is I did this, I want to add one other piece, I did also joined the board of an Israeli high-tech foundry. So, a teammate. So, I’m seeing, I’m learning from teammate how you actually do this stuff, right? They're a venture firm, etcetera, in technology and so I get to see that.
And so that helps me think about what we’re doing with our other two companies, Paradox Strategies, and Innovation Force but Taran and Cheryl, the managing partners of Paradox Strategies, once my former students, they are serial entrepreneurs and serial entrepreneurs, both big and smaller companies so they know this stuff. So, we have different roles, and Kim Getgen, who is the head, the CEO of Innovation Force, I said she was in my class as well, she’s working very close with them.
So you know, one of them is on the board, I’m the cofounder, so working on the intellectual capital and doing the research to help with that, they’re aligned and Taran is sort of being the executive coach for the team as they’re trying to build this business skill because she’s done this stuff a lot. So there is expertise, I want to be clear, not just novices in this. If anything, I’m the novice in building a business.
[0:43:01.3] JU: That’s a point that can’t be overstated is, is there an arena that you play in where you, and I’m asking my audience and our listeners, is there an arena that you play in where you are the novice or you’re the expert in every arena because you know, this amazing professor, Linda Hill, who is an expert in so much is deliberately finding arenas where she’s the novice too.
And to me, that’s a point that can’t be overstated and it’s no one is going to force you to become a novice, no one. No one is going to force you to either incorporate a novice’s perspective. It’s a compliment, your own expertise, and no one is going to force you to become a novice. In fact, the world’s, the pull of the world is just for you to lean more into your own expertise. So to me, I think that’s an incredible point.
Speaking of your former students by the way, so one of the things I’ve done during the pandemic is I’ve got a group of CEOs, we call ourselves The JU:nto after Ben Franklin’s leathery prince club and we’ve got a group of CEOs who like to talk about issues related to exploration and innovation and things like that and there’s hospitality and let’s see, real estate, and restaurants and nonprofit and tech.
A number of very interesting leaders and I’m privileged to get to be a part of this group. I mean, one of the leaders in this group is Sanjay Poonen, who is a former student of yours. He is now the CEO of Cohesity and he had a great question, which I think is actually tied to not just the former student thread, which will be a very thin thread but more importantly you were saying you’re always seeing and sensing what’s happening in the market.
And this reminded me of Sanjay’s question, he said, “How do growth mindset CEOs need to operate today in a world of tech innovations like generative AI?”
[0:44:43.2] LH: Big question. I actually earlier today did a roundtable of so-called digital natives, the youngest generation that’s in the workforce, who grew up with technology and I say this because one of the things that we ended up talking a bit about was whether or not the senior executives are open to embracing the latest technologies. One of them of course, generative AI. So, what – they want to use it, they want to do it.
And some companies, and this is from another roundtable I did, you’re not allowed to use it because companies are trying to figure out what it means, etcetera. So, there is this push and pull between you know, these digital natives are saying, “Why aren’t we trying out the latest and the greatest?” and then if you are an executive in a company, how you’d manage the risks associated with beginning to try out the latest and the greatest, which is I went to a CEO session on generative AI and they talked a lot about those.
So, I would say that if you have that growth mindset, it’s important as you are figuring out what you are going to do is to be talking to the different constituencies that are within your organization because some are actually thinking of leaving you because they don’t see you wanting to play and frankly, part of the reason is one of them said is, “I don’t think that the leadership is explaining to us, being as transparent as they should be about what their concerns are.”
So, this is where having a dialogue, if you will, particularly with the ones who are sophisticated about technology and want to use it, having a dialogue with them to both learn why they want to use it and you to be able to educate them about some of the risk associated with using it because the other group that I have been spending time with and the people who are doing the basic research on generative AI.
And from what I’m understanding and I couldn’t repeat it and many people in this audience could because I don’t really understand it is you know completely understand why it hallucinates the way it does and that’s an important thing for us to understand before we start incorporating. It’s one of many things but one of the things that we’ve got to understand. So, they were sharing with me you know, the different theories about what’s really going on when it hallucinates so that you can understand since there’s always going to be a lack of data in some area that you’re trying to use it when it does and so, these three different groups look at generative AI differently, right?
So, if you have the growth mindset, you can talk to the ones who are using it in their daily lives already and wondering why they can’t use it at work and/or they have to use it in certain ways to the people who are doing the basic research and say, “You need to put a break on some of this because let me tell you what we don’t understand” and then the CEOs who have their different policies and practices are putting in place.
Fundamentally, what I see a lot of them doing is somewhat putting it on delay. They’re exploring it to try to figure it out but the part they also need to figure out is what to do about the ethical dilemmas associated with adding the power of generative. Already with AI, they haven’t figured that out but when you add the generative piece, that has a whole other set of complexities. So I would say if you have a growth mindset, make sure you’re not just talking to your friends.
You get different perspectives when you talk to different groups about it. Everybody sees possibility, so you want to know the art of the possible but everybody also sees some tremendous risks that might be associated with using it that any of which are not predictable because frankly, the people who really know the technology well know that they can’t predict. They can’t tell you.
So I think that generative AI, in particular, so much promise. A lot of other people, I’m not saying young, that’s maybe not the right term, using it when they can but they’re not and many companies aren’t letting them use it at work. I don’t know what your experience is and what your – for a couple of reasons.
[0:48:18.2] JU: Hugely thinking here about that.
[0:48:21.0] LH: So I think that if I were a CEO, I’d stay right in it. I’d be in all those conversations but make sure there’s diversity in who you’re speaking to about it.
[0:48:30.6] JU: If I may add something to the conversation here Linda, one of the simple things that I’ve been recommending, I’ve had the privilege of conducting a little bit of a research study with a colleague at Singularity University, concerning the question of, what are the implications of the availability of AI on collaboration and problem-solving in organizations, and we can talk about that.
It is actually super interesting and fun but what it’s done is it’s put me in the context of a bunch of organizations in conversations with leaders who are trying to figure out, “How does this impact our team’s ability to solve problems and how does it impact collaboration?” And one of the things I discovered, I kid you not, I was talking with a you know, multibillion-dollar multinational organization, a woman there leads all of their digital and innovation.
I said, “Well, how much time do you spend using ChatGPT a day?” expecting it to be in hours. She said, “I don’t use it all” and I was on the one hand kind of dumbstruck and surprised because to me it’s table stakes. It’s like saying we don’t use the Internet and on the other hand, I get it and what she said, she said, “I’m putting out a bunch of fires right now but I have an innovation project coming up and I intend to start experimenting that.”
And to me, it just showcased the tension that a lot of folks in organizations feel that I know it’s important so I’m going to wait. It’s too important to give a little bit of attention to so I give no attention to it and one of the simple things that I suggested because one of the findings from our research is not going to surprise you is people look to AI for the answer rather than to have a conversation and AI will give an answer but it will give an answer that kind of satisfies your tendency to satisfy, meaning it will give you a B-plus answer pretty easily.
And so, if you are just looking to AI as an oracle, you tend to get mediocre answers. If you’re prepared for a conversation, however, that’s a radically different – as one CEO said, “Oh, you mean the emphasis should be on the chat not the bot? We’ve been putting the emphasis on the bot, not the chat.” And I said, “Yeah, exactly.” But one thing I encourage this leadership group to do is think of an emotional question that you have in your life that you’d ask a trusted friend their advice about.
Go to AI and have a conversation about that, “How should I prepare to raise teenage daughters?” This is a question my wife and I have right now and the reason that that’s a fascinating prompt is not because you have to get the right answer but because one, I care enough to engage and two, I have requisite context and background to be able to respond and appreciate nuance and not expected perspective.
And what a lot of people are doing is taking some kind of arbitrary prompt and throwing it in there, they have no care, they have no context, and they have no expectation of a conversation, right? I have never thought of that this way but you can think the three Cs, care, context, and conversation. They have none of those and then they go, “Ah, it’s not really that interesting.” I say, “Okay. Well, what’s something you actually care about?” Try that, right?
And so anyway, all that to say I’ve seen this very simple way. I guess perhaps to answer Sanjay’s question a little bit is start playing yourself, start experimenting yourself. Another CEO in the group, a CEO of an NBA team said is looking for habits, generative AI habits, and I think someone with a growth mindset is probably someone who’s looking for excuses and ways to incorporate into their workflows that they aren’t expecting.
[0:51:54.0] LH: Yeah, so a couple of things. Everything you’ve said is very true. So, I will tell you going back to my ETs and actually LB, Lydia, I have another one, Karina Grazina, one of the things that – Karina’s very creative too, all of them are just crazy but Karina wrote me a thank you card using ChatGPT but she put in different things to see what the different thank you cards were.
So, I got this thank you card that had different kind of answers and then she later told me, you know, the prompts that she had given that created these different answers and so this was real. She was thanking me for something, so this is why you want to have young people in your lives, in your life. The other thing is that they actually, Lydia decided, I had asked her to do a task but she used ChatGPT to do it for me and she gave it to me and she didn’t tell me she used ChatGPT.
And I’m looking at the answer and thinking, “Well, this is a curious way to comment this but I don’t really understand why she would. Let me play with it, let me see.” So afterwards when we got on the phone after I read this, I said, “Well, you know what Lydia, this was such an unusual way to comment with this question. What led you to go down this path so I can make sure I am following your logic?” and she said, “Oh no, we wondered if you’d figure out it was ChatGPT.”
[0:53:03.1] JU: That’s great.
[0:53:03.9] LH: So, I just said, “Oh, that’s what it is?” So again, this is where if you don’t want to experiment, let them experiment on you. This is what they do to me, this is how my team plays. So I think that I agree with you, I think that you know at Art Center we had a whole session on there’s going to be new careers as a result of generative AI and one of them is I guess and you probably know this already, how to do the right prompts.
[0:53:03.9] JU: Of course.
[0:53:25.3] LH: That’s a whole art form, science and art.
[0:53:28.3] JU: Well, and again, I actually think it’s more about conversation engineering than thought engineering. You know, I had Kevin Kelly on the show recently, the founder of Wired and he’s got a really radical kind of daily art practice. He told me on average, I mean you can follow him on Twitter and see he’s always posting kind of AI-generated art. Well, he told me on average, he has 30 back and forths within AI to get to the right image, right?
So, the point is people see these images and go, “Oh, it must be a prompt genius.” Well, maybe that’s part of it but he’s also a conversationalist and he’s going back and forth. That’s really important and that’s something that people, again, emphasis on the chat, not the bot. I realized we’re right at the end of time, I’ve been hoping to give you the opportunity to share a little bit of your current research.
I know it’s called Scaling Genius and I know that you are concerned with this question of structures to support organizational ambidexterity. Is there anything you want to share with the audience even as a teaser?
[0:54:24.9] LH: Yeah, the question is, how do you scale innovation with speed? That’s what we’re looking at, so how do you do it with speed and structure is a piece of it and so one part of it I will tell you, it’s really what we talk about on the ABCs of great leadership. Architect, the first role of creating that environment and culture capabilities. B, bridger, you’re never going to have the tools and the talent you need inside.
All of it I should say you’re going to have to learn how to partner and bridge the – how do you learn how to collaborate, experiment, and learn with partners like vendors for instance. So, one of the groups we’ve been studying is the group that ran the Pfizer trials in 266 days.
[0:55:00.4] JU: Wow.
[0:55:01.1] LH: And it was partly because of the partnerships they’ve built with their vendors so they could collaborate, experiment, and learn together, and then the last role of the ABC is the catalyst role, where fundamentally, what you need to do is you are enmeshed in an ecosystem and when you start to get ready to do some breakthrough innovation, you discover that there are other parties in that ecosystem that you need to help be good at innovation.
So, an example would be when Mastercard works with one of their strategic clients and introduces them to a startup that can help them get better at cyber security because until they get better at cyber security, they’re always going to create a risk for Mastercard when they’re connected to them. So, the catalyst is when you figure out who in your ecosystem needs to be collaborating and experimenting, and learning together, and how do I facilitate that, and one of the most interesting one and I’ll end with this story is about a company called Avatarin.
I encourage you all to look it up. There are two engineers at ANA, working out, you know, if you will, out of the airport, they came up with an idea about how can we do teleportation without the mass. Now, to do this, they had to get to the CEO of ANA, Japanese company, to convince the CEO that they should be able to do this because they went to the quantum physicist, can’t move the human body, probably the whole for 50 years but can we remove all our five senses?
So, they’re building out a global infrastructure, they’ve worked with experts and others to build out an 800 company, if you will, ecosystem necessary ones we’re working on the tele-operational hand, ones that are working on how you smell from a distance, et cetera, and this is about the catalyst roll, where you fundamentally are the collaborative. You’re facilitating the collaborations across that ecosystem. To get done, you helping them be more innovative because you need what they’re going to produce.
So that you can do the innovation you want to do. So, we have to be architects, we have to be catalyst, and all of these roles is leading, going well beyond your formal authority. So, we didn’t get to talk about that network piece of those three imperatives but boy, is it an important part of being able to innovate and I have to talk, the ambidexterity, I mean, I can – part of what we’re looking at there, just to say and maybe we can talk another time is you know, there’s been this advice that you should always set up these ambidextrous structures, one that works on the future, one that works on the present.
The problem is, is we went to do some research on this. Most of them don’t work because what’s created in the future and the part that’s working on the future, the innovational lab, the corporate accelerator, whatever it is, it never gets integrated back into the present and launched. It doesn’t get scaled and so we’ve studied 10 different leaders who have actually done this in a way that it actually does get scaled and are beginning to identify what it takes to do that, and that’s bridger role and that catalyst role are very important in that.
[0:57:39.3] JU: Wow. You’ve given us the perfect teaser. Yeah, I think we’ll schedule another interview in a year once the book comes out and by the way, I don't know if you have other books working in parallel but I love that you couldn’t just launch one book on leadership. It’s just so on brand, and so this whole conversation.
So, thank you, you’re amazing, it’s been incredible to learn from you, and we can’t wait to learn more about what you learn in Scaling Genius. So, thank you for joining us, everybody who is here today, thank you for joining us as well, and until next time, be good.
[0:58:07.9] LH: Thank you.
[0:58:09.9] 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 glean from creative masters or put together a hands-on workshop to supercharge your next offsite adventure. Hit me up at jutley@jeremeyutley.design for more information.
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One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.