Episode 23: Teresa Amabile and Diego Rodriguez
The Progress Principle with Teresa Amabile and Diego Rodriguez
Episode 23: Show Notes
Have you ever wondered how traditional leaders can be motivated to support creativity in the workplace? What is the secret to fostering creativity and driving innovation? Today, on the podcast, we welcome Teresa Amabile to help us explore the crucial role that managers play in shaping the inner work lives of their employees through the lens of her book, The Progress Principle. Teresa Amabile is a distinguished scholar and researcher in organizational behavior. She is renowned for her groundbreaking work on creativity, motivation, and the work environment. Joining as a co-host is Diego Rodriguez, a board member at LendingTree, whose expertise extends to pioneering tough tech, fintech, and shaping the future of transportation. In our conversation, we unpack her interest in ‘garden variety’ creativity, why reward incentives are not good motivation tools, and what kills creativity. Discover the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, typical progress inhibitors, and how failure can lead to innovative breakthroughs. We discuss the power of small wins, what extrinsic motivators are necessary, the role of AI in creativity, why the meaningfulness of work is essential for productivity, and much more. Join us as we uncover Teresa’s progressive unifying theory of design thinking and how it applies to the culture of creativity for organizations. Tune in now!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Her shift in focus from studying exceptional individuals to ordinary people's creativity.
• Learn about the impact of social environments on creativity.
• How companies, like IDEO and Hewlett Packard, foster a culture of creativity.
• Teresa unpacks The Progress Principle concept and how it applies to organizations.
• Discover the value of “intrinsic motivation” and the steps to creating it.
• Effective strategies leaders can leverage to overcome a company crisis.
• Hear how a major failure can lead to an innovative breakthrough.
• Potential of AI to gain deeper insights into motivation and creativity.
• Ways traditional leaders can be intrinsically motivated to drive creativity.
• Explore the concept of AI augmenting human intelligence and creativity.
• Our guests share advice and their final takeaways for listeners.
Quotes:
“I discovered over a series of few years using well-controlled lab experiments, with both children and adults, artistic creativity, verbal creativity, and other forms of creativity that yes, there are many ways to kill creativity.” — Teresa Amabile [0:06:59]
“I would say, [The Progress Principle] is a unifying theory for leading and managing creative organizations.” — Diego Rodriguez [0:11:18]
“Help with the work. When the work gets really difficult and complicated, maybe people just need access to information that you as the manager can give them access to.” — Teresa Amabile [0:17:36]
“You can’t create a good incentive scheme that relies on extrinsic motivation.” — Diego Rodriguez [0:23:04]
“People will feel great when they make progress, even if their progress seems small, incremental, or even trivial to us as outside observers. It can be enormously motivating and satisfying for people.” — Teresa Amabile [0:36:59]
“I think that we need to really start to see AI as a potential collaborator, not an infallible one. No human collaborator is infallible and we certainly shouldn’t expect that of these machines.” — Teresa Amabile [0:51:27]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Harvard Business School
‘Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, and a World of Surprises’
Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You
EPISODE 23 [TRANSCRIPT]
“JU: If you’re wondering why we’re spending so much time on motivation and what’s getting in the way and what kills creativity, it’s because, if you know those things, for example, in this case, which I love that there be dragons is great, what happens when a project blows up? And if you can remove the sense of punishment, the sense of shame, the sense of retribution, right? If you can remove that, you’re creating an environment that is more conducive to creativity.”
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:57.1] JU: All right, welcome everyone to another episode of The Paint and Pipette Podcast. I am joined in the co-interviewer slot today by, none other than, Diego Rodriguez. Diego, welcome.
[0:01:10.0] DR: Hey, thanks Jeremy, it’s great to be here.
[0:01:12.5] JU: I am so excited to talk with you and to get to learn together alongside you, we got a pretty amazing guest today, don’t we?
[0:01:18.5] DR: Indeed, we do.
[0:01:21.0] JU: I am thrilled to welcome to the stage, Dr. Teresa Amabile from Harvard Business School, who I know is not only one of my heroes but one of your heroes, Diego. So, thank you Teresa for joining us today.
[0:01:33.8] TA: I’m really happy to be here with both of you.
[0:01:35.8] JU: Yeah, this is going to be a fun conversation. I know we want to dive right in because folks have lots of questions and I’m not just talking about me and Diego. So, maybe I could get started with a simple question, Dr. Amabile, just to kick things off.
[0:01:48.5] TA: Oh, you're going to call me Teresa, aren’t you? Please call me Teresa.
[0:01:52.7] JU: Okay, I will. I’d rather you say it, than me. Okay, that’s fine. So, nearly 50 years ago, which is incredible, you’ve been studying this craft of creativity for nearly 50 years and you took a contrarian view. You said that ordinary people can be creative. I would love to hear why you took that view, what led you to believe it, and what are some of the ways in which you learned that.
[0:02:15.7] TA: Yeah, I was a graduate student at Stanford at the time in the psychology department, and we’re just really fascinated with human creativity. So, I went into the journals and to see what research has been done on it. There wasn’t a lot of research on creativity in the literature at the time but what there was, was focused almost exclusively on creative geniuses. You know, who were the great minds and human history?
It was usually who are the great men in human history, who are the geniuses, what are they like and how are they different from all the rest of us? Research was actually pretty interesting, and some of it was being done contemporaneously, a lot of it was happening at Berkeley at the time, and it was looking at people who had distinguished themselves as being at the very top of their professions or had appeared in you know, biographical dictionaries of great composers, of great artists, great scientists, and so on.
And the contemporaneous studies were doing, you know, very careful assessments of personality and backgrounds, demographic characteristics of these geniuses. It was very interesting. It found that there are some ways in which people at the top of their fields seem to be different in personality and backgrounds from the rest of us but it seemed to me to be missing most of the creativity that happens in the world.
That’s the stuff that you and your students are doing at the d.school, right? And the stuff that Diego and the people that he’s worked with over the years have been doing and designing great products, designing new strategies, designing new processes. All of that stuff is unlikely to end up in biographies of the greatest of the great, unlikely to win Nobel Prizes, and yet, it comprises most of the progress that’s made in human history, I would argue.
So, I wanted to look at what might be called ‘garden variety creativity,’ you know? What is it that the 99.9% that the rest of us do, what is it that facilitates our being able to do our most creative work, and what is it that inhibits our ability to do our most creative work? So, there was my starting point, it was very helpful that I was in the social psychology program at Stanford, which focused not on personality differences, but on social environment and how it can impact people in their behavior.
[0:04:47.7] JU: And did you see an intersection there, we’d call it the ‘garden variety of creativity.’ What did you learn about environments and I don't know if the garden is an active metaphor here but I’d love to hear.
[0:04:56.9] TA: I was intrigued by some research being done by Mark Lepper at the time, who was like a young assistant professor, he’s now an Americas professor at Stanford. He had been looking at what he called intrinsic motivation in kids and how it might be destroyed by external rewards and I’ve had this really intriguing – I don't know if you are aware of this but in the 1950s and 1960s, even into the 70s, in psychology, behaviorism was king.
And that was you know, looking at the effect of rewards and punishments on everything from rats to pigeons, to children, to adult humans, and this research by Mark and his doctoral students was finding that rewards had a downside, a big downside potentially, and that is when children were working for promised reward, they showed less interest afterwards in doing an activity that they had previously loved.
Their intrinsic motivation was undermined by that small tweak in their social environment. Something they enjoyed doing already when they were asked to do it, in order to get a reward, later on, they weren’t necessarily interested in doing it. Phenomenally interesting. So, I had conversations with Mark about whether the actual work that they did under reward might be different.
And he said, “I don't know, we haven’t found any differences in the kinds of activities we’ve been using but we haven’t really looked closely for them.” He said, “What kind of performance differences do you think there might be?” And I said, “Creativity.” My guess is that when people are focused on getting a reward for what they’re doing, they might not engage in it as deeply. Therefore, there might not be as creative.
Sounds interesting? I don't know what you’ll find, why don’t you test it? So, that was the beginning of this research and I discovered over a series of few years using well-controlled lab experiments, with both children and adults, artistic creativity, verbal creativity, and other forms of creativity that yes, there are many ways to kill creativity.
[0:07:16.3] JU: Okay.
[0:07:17.5] TA: By making tweaks in the social environment.
[0:07:20.5] JU: Okay, this is amazing. I want to bring Diego in here because some folks who are listening to this might be going, “Okay, wait, why is she at the Harvard Business School, right?” You’re talking about social psychology, you’re talking about creativity among children and yet, what I know, one of the people I admire most in business is right here, Diego Rodriguez.
And Diego told me personally, that your work, he considers it to be, what did you say? “The unifying theory of design thinking.” Which is just an incredible title. So, Diego, I’d love to invite you to talk for a second. How did you come across Teresa’s work and then, how did you start to appreciate the significance in your context, which for folks who don’t know, I mean, you led a good chunk of the design firm IDEO for a long time?
You led into its product and design organization, right? If anybody can speak to the unifying theory of design thinking, it’s you. Why was it that Teresa’s work resonated so much with you?
[0:08:17.1] DR: So, I’m in my early 50s now and I would say, I spent the last few years trying to figure out why I had such a great time in my 20s, which would have been in the 90s, working as a design engineer and most of that was spent at IDEO. Some was at the original Hewlett Packard, which was also an amazing culture, and when I think about those days, the thing that stands out to me is that there was a person working in the office named Dennis Boyle.
He goes by Denny, Dennis Boyle, and he had this aphorism, which went something like, “Never attend a meeting without a prototype.” It’s a really simple phrase but it’s quite profound and that phrase really informed that experience I had as someone trying to do their best work every day in my 20s, and the reason for that was, we really lived it at IDEO. Everything in the culture and in the environment and in the organization, especially things I wasn’t seeing because you know, I was just a frontline employee.
I wasn’t making budget decisions or anything else but when I look back on it, everything was set up to help me be able to express myself as fast and clearly, and kind of fully as I could each day, and the same went for all my teammates. So, we had this culture where all you did really, was brainstorm with people in an informal way, take your ideas, and try and get them into some kind of form where you could communicate them to other people.
That could have been in metal, or wood, paper, foam core acted out as a skit. Later on, you know, after I went to HPS, I could make spreadsheets to illustrate my ideas but it was all about this idea of, “Don’t talk about stuff, make it tangible.” What I found, and this is the link to Teresa’s amazing research and work is that as I progressed in my career, and I started to be responsible not for creating the design.
But creating the culture and the organization and kind of the machine to help other people do their best work, I figured out that if I just focused on getting rid of barriers to people expressing themselves and be able to do it without a lot of friction or hassles or other things, then they were happy and I seem to be doing a good job as a manager. In the times when I didn’t do that, I got feedback that I wasn’t doing a good job.
So then, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take a class from Teresa at Harvard Business School. I wish I had, it probably would have accelerated my career in multiple dimensions but when I found out about this concept she had researched and articulated, called The Progress Principle, it all came together for me because she was basically articulating principles that I knew intuitively through this kind of school of Hard Knox at IDEO and HP.
But that, I hadn’t been able to articulate so that I could put them into practice on a routine basis and of course, help other people do it. So, to me, that’s the thing that unifies, I don't know if this is just design thinking. I would say, this is a unifying theory for leading and managing creative organizations.
[0:11:23.6] JU: Okay. So, these are big words. Let’s start with something very small, which is progress principle. So, Teresa, Diego just referenced something, which hasn’t come up yet. Tell us what’s The Progress Principle and then, Diego, just so you know, the next question is, how did that manifest, specifically, in some of your managerial duties? But first, Teresa, tell us what is it and why is it important.
[0:11:45.1] TA: I’m going to answer that question by first of all, confronting something that Diego just said. He said that he learned in the school of hard knocks at IDEO and Hewlett Packard. I’m here to tell you, those were not hard knocks because those organizations, I studied both of them, Hewlett Packard indirectly but IDEO very directly over many years, they were wonderful at opening their doors and letting me do research there.
Those cultures are fantastic at supporting progress and creativity and I’ll talk about the link between those in just a minute.
[0:12:19.8] DR: But they’re soft knocks, you’re saying they’re soft knocks, just let the record reflect, those are not –
[0:12:24.4] TA: Soft knocks.
[0:12:25.6] DR: Point well taken.
[0:12:24.3] TA: The school of soft knocks at HP and IDEO for sure. Yeah. The fact is that most organizations are not like that, even organizations that say they’re focused on innovation and they support creativity, they don’t. They don’t know how to do it well, even though you know, in my view, what I’ve discovered is not rocket science but it takes attention and in that sense, it can be hard to do what it takes.
The attention of leaders and managers up and down the line in an organization, all the way down to the project team leaders, and in fact, colleagues on project teams need to know about how to create an environment that supports creativity. So, I went from this research on showing how to kill creativity, and after a while, I got a little depressed looking at it. “Okay, I’ve learned how to kill creativity. This can’t be all there is. Can’t I do something on the positive side of how to stimulate creativity?”
[0:13:25.1] JU: Before you get there, I think, inverting our thinking is very useful. So just very quickly, will you rattle off, how do you kill creativity? Just like, if you had a 30-second lecture on, “Here’s how to kill creativity” because I want you to go to the positive but just so we’re all clear, how do you kill it?
[0:13:39.0] TA: Focus on how ideas are going to be evaluated, especially focus on harsh evaluation of ideas, okay? So, evaluation is number one, reward, recognition, misuse of incentives is another, and that’s an extension of the early research I did in the experiments at Stanford. Surveillance, being watched in every move they make in their work. Competition, competition among peers can be extremely destructive for creativity.
And simply, having an environment where you’re focusing, on what we call the extrinsic motivators of evaluation and reward and competition, deadline pressure, all of these external motivators, which managers use a lot can undermine creativity, and by the way, classroom teachers tend to use them a lot. That can undermine –
[0:14:32.0] JU: Woah-woah, hey, hey, let’s not throw stones, okay? Let’s not throw stones. So, you got tired of just studying how to kill it. Now that we know how to kill it, what do you do next? And I’m assuming you’re headed towards The Progress Principle here.
[0:14:44.1] TA: Yeah, I am. I didn’t have great ideas on how to stimulate creativity in labs settings. It turned out that it really was much easier to undermine creativity but I thought, there are people doing really creative work out there in the world. I’ve seen it. So, I’m going to go out and just study it in the wild and that is how I began the research that eventually led to The Progress Principle.
So, I started studying R&D scientists in various organizations, people who were trying to create the new products in those organizations and asked them to tell me stories about incidents of high-level creativity from their work experience, their recent work experience, and incidents of low creativity, meaning, they needed to come up with a new and useful solution to a problem or a new and useful product or process or something like that and it just didn’t happen, and just talk about it.
And in doing that, in analyzing those interviews, I discovered that there is a set of stimulants to creativity that show up repeatedly in the work environment in these stories of high-level creativity and they tended to be reflected in the opposite in the stories of low creativity. So, I then developed a survey to assess these stimulants and obstacles to creativity more directly. I did a lot of research with that survey instrument, which I call keys.
Discovered through some very carefully controlled research in a real organization, project teams that while they were working on their project experience these high creativity environments and I’ll tell you what mark those high creativity environments, produce work at the end that was rated by experts in their organization as more creative than the people who, while they were working, rate and assessed their work environments as being low on these creativity stimulants and higher on the creative obstacles.
So, the stimulants are again, this is not going to sound like earth-shattering news but clear goals in the work, meaningful goals in the work that has people having a sense of why they’re doing what they’re doing and why it matters, why it makes a difference for something important. People having freedom or autonomy in how they carry out the work to meet those goals. So yeah, the goals can be set and they should be set.
They should be clear, in terms of what are we trying to work toward here, people need to be able to use their own minds, use their own creative skills in deciding how to get there. Sufficient resources, important. Sufficient time, important. Although, not too much time, sufficient time, and actually, not too many resources, sufficient resources, we can talk about that later. Help with the work.
When the work gets really difficult and complicated, maybe people just need access to information that you as the manager can give them access to, if only you know that they need it. There might be some help that you can provide as a manager that you don’t know unless you stay in touch with people and you find out what’s standing in the way of them being able to do their work.
And atmosphere, not of harsh evaluation of ideas but openness to new ideas. Openness to new ideas, a constant idea flow, not that every idea is going to be accepted but that every idea will be respected enough to be heard and I see Diego nodding his head. I mean, that’s one of the things that was so great at IDEO, you could say anything in a brainstorm, right? The nuttiest ideas would not be left out of the room.
I mean, people might laugh but they wouldn’t laugh you out of the room. You know, people try to build on ideas, even if they were seemingly nuts, and because some of those end up turning into really breakthrough ideas, and being able to learn from mistakes, learn from problems. My HPS colleague, Amy Edmondson, has been writing so brilliantly and doing research brilliantly over the past many years on psychological safety.
And that is an environment where people feel that, “Hey, you know, mistakes happen. We try to avoid making stupid mistakes but mistakes are inevitable, and failures are inevitable when you're doing complex creative work. If you don’t fail, that means, you’re not doing it right because you got to fail sometimes if you're really trying to do something truly novel.” And the important thing is to say, “Okay, we recognize that something didn’t work here, what can we learn from it?”
“What failure value can we extract from this and how can we move forward into the future?” So, those are – I’ve been kind of contrasting the stimulants and the obstacles together and there are other things that are more focused on the individual’s emotional state and we can talk about those in a minute but those are the basic catalysts or stimulants to creativity and we found that when people have a work environment like that, they’re more likely to make progress in their work and when they make progress in their work, they’re more likely to have great work days.
And that means, more positive emotions, more positive perceptions of themselves, their team, their organization, what they’re doing, and higher levels of intrinsic motivation, which in turn, leads them to be more creative, which is more progress, which in turn, it can lead to a positive spiral of greater – what we call, inner work-life, that’s those psychological states and greater creativity and productivity in the future. That’s The Progress Principle.
[0:20:39.7] JU: I want to put a pin in this word, “intrinsic motivation” because I hope we come back here. I just want to pause and say, Diego, that’s a Rorschach blot so to speak. See, Teresa just gave us so much. I trust your instincts as a tuning fork. What’s resonating with you and what you saw successful either at IDEO or HP or Intuit and the organizations you were trying to build?
[0:21:00.7] DR: Well, I’ll tell a quick kind of before and after story. I worked a job after business school, that wasn’t IDEO. I was kind of low personnel, you know, in the hierarchy and I was doing so much data crunching and the policy in this organization was that the further up you went in the hierarchy, the bigger the computer you got, the bigger the screen, everything, right? This is a time in history where screens were really expensive and I had a tiny screen.
And I went to my boss and I said, “Hey, I think I could work faster and do better work if I could see more of my spreadsheet.” And she said, “You know, I get it but I can’t get you a bigger screen, it would violate the rules.” You know, enter Teresa’s point, my inner work life kind of wilted at that moment and I contrast that to the way that a place like IDEO worked, which is, “You mean, we can’t get that prototype built this week?”
“Let’s take that into mind, let’s figure out how to do that with you know, better process or better equipment or whatever, so that next time, we don’t run into that roadblock.” In a creative environment, I think you typically see that the kind of lower you are in the hierarchy, which is a weird word, but the more you’re doing the key work of the organization, the better the tools are that you have and so, I think about Progress Principle as a leader in the following way.
It’s just incredibly liberating. Full stop. If you think of that list that Teresa went through of all the blocks to creativity, let’s go back to we’re in a satellite and we’re watching 31-year-old Diego struggling with a spreadsheet on a small screen and you would react to it and say as a manager, and say, “Well, his annual survey just came through and it looks like he’s not as happy as he could be. So, what are the – all the levers we can pull?”
“Well, is his pay competitive? Are annual performance review process working well?” Blah-blah-blah, all these things down the road, and actually all the things you're focusing on have to do with extrinsic motivation, and they also are really difficult to do well. You might even argue that you can’t create a good incentive scheme that relies on extrinsic motivation.
The thing that’s so liberating to me about The Progress Principle is that when you look at all the data that Teresa and her team have gathered over the years, it all comes down to, “Are we, as leaders, helping people feel and make true tangible progress on a daily basis?” So, all of a sudden, as someone, you know, deciding about big budgets or policies, like, do we need to have a more rigorous performance evaluation each year or not?
You start to make different decisions. I would say, “Well, why don’t we just focus on the stuff that makes people feel better about their daily work, up to and including, maybe we need to dial down the performance review process, so people can just spend more time doing what they do.” I just can’t overstate, when you pair that up with this idea of bring a prototype to the room as Dennis Boyle said.
And then have the psychological safety that everybody could critique the prototype and it’s not just the wild and crazy ideas, it’s also, the high candor comments that that just looks like it’s going to break in five years when it’s in a customer’s hand. We should solve that today and then you critique the person about their performance in private or they just get it because they’re in the room listening to everybody.
It’s such a great way to lead and manage an organization because it’s simple, it’s effective, and it works with this positive spiral that we just spoke about.
[0:24:23.9] JU: You mentioned this kind of intrinsic, the challenge there. So, I’m going to go back to the bookmark here. So, Teresa, I know, a lot of your work is concerned with this learning that or this insight that folks are most creative when they’re intrinsically motivated when they have strong levels of intrinsic motivations. It feels like that makes sense when it comes to our hobbies when it comes to the stuff that we do outside of work.
Have you seen successful mechanisms, policies, practices, et cetera, that cultivate intrinsic motivation in the workplace? Because I think a lot of leaders, all they’ve got in their tool kit is a bunch of extrinsic, whether it’s the – like Diego mentioned, the bigger screen or whatever, right? How do leaders actually incorporate your insights around intrinsic motivation into their actual day-to-day management?
[0:25:12.1] TA: Well, it’s not easy in the sense that I don’t think it comes naturally to managers, at least, those who grew up in the US corporate culture. Let me tell you what intrinsic motivation is. It’s a motivation to do something primarily because you find it interesting, enjoyable, satisfying, personally challenging in some way. So, the activity itself, somehow, draws you to it. You enjoy or at least, get a lot of satisfaction out of engaging in the activity.
That doesn’t mean that it necessarily feels fun all the time. It can feel really hard if you find yourself wanting to keep at it, really wanting to struggle with it, to get through it, to find something new, see what you can make here, that’s intrinsic motivation. You know, I was fortunate enough to spend a day, many years ago, interviewing the novelist, John Irving, about his upbringing and his orientation toward his work, and how he works and how he gets his ideas, how he develops those creative ideas.
He told me that – I don't know well-known this is but he has dyslexia. He had it very severely as a child and even as an adult, he struggled with dyslexia and he joked at one point and said, “I can almost write faster than I can read.” Because he does still have some issues with dyslexia. When I’m working on a novel, I will work for often, 12 hours a day, which it’s way more than most novelists will work when they’re working.
He has to keep at it in part because of the dyslexia but in part, because these characters have captured him and he’s trying to find out what their story is and get it out and he considers himself not a creative genius. He considers himself a crafts person and that term is something I heard all the time at IDEO. Like, it was just in the air, people talked about their craft, about working at their craft and enjoying it.
I asked Irving how he could work so hard, he told me that he actually breaks out in sweat sometimes, not because it’s hot when he’s working, it’s just from the effort of how difficult it is. He said the unspoken factor is love. “The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.” And he said, “I can’t imagine doing anything else. You know, yeah, it’s really hard. But I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
So, that’s strong intrinsic motivation. Now, we don’t expect people when they go to work every day to necessarily feel that way. Like, you know, wake up two hours early, I can’t wait to get there but we have seen organizations and again, I’m going to go back to IDEO place where I’ve been privileged to do a lot of research, where people really enjoy working. They enjoy their work and a way a manager can support that is really to kind of get out of the way.
Get out of the way with hovering, you know, you could think of it as micro-management, surveillance, with the constant emphasis on performance reviews, and instead, to view themselves as supports. So, view themselves as resources to people to give them time, to give them materials, whether it’s foam core or big screens for their computers or whatever, to give them information that they need.
To give them a sense of camaraderie, giving them opportunities to interact with each other informally, and have fun together to take as much of the pressure out of the environment as possible. Of course, there’s always some but to diminish that as much as possible. To show people respect and recognition of their individual contributions and talk to them about how important their work is for whether it’s the client that the company is working for.
The ultimate consumer, who is going to be using this thing that you’re trying to make the patient who is going to benefit from this drug that you’re trying to develop, giving people encouragement when the work gets really hard. Showing confidence in them and just, as I said, getting out of the way, not overusing these extrinsic motivators. That’s really all it is.
[0:29:48.4] DR: I love that idea of getting out of the way and I don’t want to give the impression that kind of progress, principle-centric, cultures are all about grand gestures from leadership like, “Look at the big machine tool we just bought for you.” Or, “You’re all getting big monitors.” You know, in my 20s, I found out that we – I think we had a new controller or CFO at IDEO, they figured out that the petty cash box we had at the front desk, which also contains stamps was a bureaucratic nightmare to keep track of and that’s their job, right?
They’re kind of, right at the decimal point people is their job, as I like to call them, and so they got rid of the free stamps at the front desk. A sign of a psychologically safe organization, I went to David Kelly as the CEO, or maybe, I only went to his office. I think I saw him in the hallway and I said, “Hey David, not having stamps is actually a real bummer.” And he, being a good, curious leader, said, “Why is that? How could that possibly be a problem.”
“We work so hard and I’m not always good about paying my electricity bill. So, when I pull an all-nighter and then realize my bill is late, it’s so…” And this is before you can pay bills online. “It’s so great to be able to go downstairs and just pay my bill from a free stamp at the front desk and then I go back and work.” And so, of course, he saw, “Well, that’s a progress inhibitor.”
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:31:07.1] JU: How much time and effort does it take to test an idea? When I ask individuals in an organization this question, they typically overestimate both the time, effort, and expense required. Tests need to be quick, fast, and cheap. You need lots of tests. So, when I work with organizations, I help them take ideas out of the “waiting for testing pile” and move them into the “tested pile.” That’s where lessons are learned and impact is created.
Do you want to make impact for your organization’s good ideas? Let’s talk, check out jeremyutley.design or write me at jutley@jeremyutley.design. Let’s test some ideas together.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:31:51.2] DR: So, free stamps are a bargain but when he got it changed, you wouldn’t – everybody was talking about in the culture. This is a place where our founder cares that we have free stamps. I just bring that up because I think you can get this impression in a psychologically safe place where leaders really are focused on The Progress Principle that every day is going to be a happy day, and of course, that’s far from the truth.
I think because things are so focused on progress and tangibility in these environments, you’re probably going to even have even more awareness that there are really bad days when there’s huge setbacks and so my question for you Teresa in terms of helping people be better managers this way and leaders or just helping people realize there is a different way to lead in those situations, what are some of the common principles or approaches that you saw effective leaders taking in these environments when they were dealing with bad news or reverse salient.
Something just not just went wrong but we’re talking, “Oh my gosh, we need to scrap the program if we don’t get this fixed.”
[0:32:55.2] TA: Yeah, in the research that we did for The Progress Principle, we studied seven different companies and we had about four project teams within each company where we followed them through the entire course of an innovation project that they were working at each of those teams, and the projects varied from three months to nine months. We literally asked the people on those project teams to submit an electronic diary to us every Monday through Friday during the entire course of the project.
We worked like mad to get them to actually do this, it was only like a five-minute thing that showed up in their email in the afternoon and we asked them to fill it out before the end of the day but we had an amazing 75% response rate. So, we ended up with nearly 12,000 of these individual daily diary reports and when we analyzed them, we discovered that there was one company out of these seven, these knowledge workers, these people doing the most complex innovative work in their companies were consistently supported in making progress.
And they can consistently had positive inner work lives, so strong intrinsic motivation, positive emotions on balance, and positive perceptions of the organization and their colleagues and what they were doing yet, they had a lot of setbacks. They had more progress events than setback events. You’re doing innovation, you’re going to have setbacks, you just said it Diego, but what we saw in this organization is exemplified by one incident that was reported in a diary.
There was a guy who said, “I was really bummed because there was some kind of mistake in the trail that we just ran.” They were trying to develop a new process by which their company’s main product could be manufactured. It had the potential to save essentially half the cost of producing their main products and this trial went horribly wrong. Horribly wrong, and it was almost like a “are we going to have to scrap this project?” wrong.
And he said, “I talked to the project team leader in the hallway about this and the VP of R&D was walking by and we pulled him in.” So, this is an important thing, they had on the spot, “Let’s not wait until the performance review at the end of the month to talk about what went wrong. We’re going to talk about what went wrong right now.” And nobody is going to try to hide if this thing failed.
They were in the hallway talking, the rest of the team came out of wherever they were and huddled together and he said the message they got from these leaders, the project team leader and the VP of R&D was, “It’s all right. As long as you know what you did, as long as we can retrace the steps of what was done in this trial, we can figure out what went wrong and see what we can learn from that.”
That was a turning point in their project, they ended up with a huge breakthrough and it did – it revolutionized actually their industry, not just the way their company manufactured this product but it eventually revolutionized the entire industry and it started with an enormous failure. That is the kind of thing that we saw happening, that’s what supports intrinsic motivation. It’s not, “Okay, we’re never going to make mistakes.”
“We’re never going to have failures. We’re going to have fun at work every day.” That was a pretty miserable day for that guy and in his daily diary, he reported very negative emotions but what you got to do is make sure that you're constantly moving forward in some way. One of our biggest discoveries was what we call the power of small wins and that is at The Progress Principle operates.
People will feel great when they make progress, even if their progress seems small, incremental, or even trivial to us as outside observers. It can be enormously motivating and satisfying for people to see that they are at least getting somewhere even if it’s just by small steps.
[0:37:18.4] DR: And what I’m hearing and what you’re saying too and I think this is really critical if you are trying to lead this way is that a massive failure can actually be a big win. It can be a small win but there’s this idea that the only good prototype you can make or experiment is one that works but the converse is actually true. The bigger the blowout, the more information you get back about where the edge is or there’d be dragons.
And that’s really what you’re trying to get to when you are leading in one of these creative environments. When people know that you’ve got their back and they’re not going to fall over the edge, where they might fall a little bit but you’re going to be there to pull them up or build a better net, that’s golden. That’s all you want to know about your employer and your workplace and your team.
[0:37:59.9] JU: Yeah, that’s beautiful. I can’t emphasize it, you know, what you are reminding me of is you’re both talking is I don’t know if you’ve heard Connoman’s kind of notion of driving forces and restraining forces, right? And there’s for folks who aren’t familiar, the basic idea is behaviors of function of the equilibrium between driving forces or reasons to do a thing in restraining forces or things that prevent the thing being done.
And Connoman’s language I love is it’s profoundly – it turned out to be profoundly counterintuitive that removing a restraining force is a better way of accomplishing a behavior than adding a driving force. If you are wondering why we’re spending so much time on motivation and what’s getting in the way and what kills creativity is because if you know those things, for example, in this case, which I love that there’d be dragons is great.
What happens when a project blows up? And if you can remove the sense of punishment, the sense of shame, the sense of retribution, right? If you can remove that, you are creating an environment that is more conducive to creativity. So, I love this idea of – that we’ve been getting on, which is all around restraining forces. I got to say one thing that I’m kind of nerding out on and we don’t necessarily have to shift this topic.
I know we want to eventually but Teresa, I’m just thinking about you’ve got 12,000 daily dairy entries, that is like the most amazing fodder for context window for generative AI to have a field day with. I don’t know if you still have all those records but what are you going to do with that information now? It’s like not to question the research or anything, you could probably identify trends that no human being was capable of recognizing, right?
And to me, this age that we’re in now with generative AI and the possibilities for creativity and even creativity research are just almost mind-blowing.
[0:39:45.7] TA: Absolutely. You know, we collected those data in the late 1990s, even, I mean, some of these companies, email was like a new thing for them, and just getting them this daily diary by email was a big deal sometimes. I was stupid enough at the time to think that we’d be able and a lot of the daily diary form was quantitative. You know, rate on a seven-point scale, rate these emotions as you experience them today.
Rate these perceptions of your work environment today, a lot of that, and then we had the open-ended, briefly described one event that occurred today that stands out in your mind. That was where we found the really juicy stuff like I just told you about but those quantitative data, I thought we’d be able to use those to identify wonderful trends and I thought we’d be able to somehow identify patterns in these qualitative data with some kind of machine something rather.
Well, it wasn’t exist yet at the time, there was nothing. So, we had human coders starting with me, I’m going through and looking for patterns again and again and we developed what we called a coding scheme and had a team of trained research assistants reading these 12,000 diary entries and we ourselves, of course, the research team, we read them many times ourselves to discern patterns. Yeah, I guess we could go back now and use some of those tools, right?
[0:41:13.1] JU: You’d have a field day. You’d have a field day. Before we go all the way to Gen AI, there is an amazing question from our collaborator with the d.school, Scott Sanchez, who is a great product design leader in his own right, an incredible talent. I thought he had a really great question, he said, “The environments where creativity can flourish look and feel very different than the environments in which many of our traditional leaders have been successful.”
His question is, “Can you motivate these traditional leaders who might even consider themselves business geniuses intrinsically as well? Is there a way to motivate leaders intrinsically to support creative environments?” If that sparks anything for you to review.
[0:41:51.7] TA: Yeah, it does. As I said before, it is a lot easier to kill intrinsic motivation and creativity than it is to build it up. I believe everybody has a spark of intrinsic motivation still within them even if they’ve been beaten down by the corporate America rat race over a period of decades. I think that probably the best approach is for people to think about when they were most excited about their own work and really get in touch with that.
And we’ve got some exercises in our book, The Progress Principle, encouraging people to do that kind of helping them to use some techniques to see for themselves when they were most intrinsically motivated in their work when they were most excited about it, and then to think about how they can establish that kind of environment for the people that they lead more often. By the way, I don’t want anyone to get the impression that extrinsic motivators have no place.
Everyone needs, deserves to be equitably and generously compensated for their work. To me, that’s the baseline given and you are not going to be able to intrinsically motivate people or support their intrinsic motivation and their progress very well if they’re worried about paying their bills, if they’re worried about feeding their children, right? So, that’s step one. There has to be a baseline level of taking care of the extrinsic for people.
But beyond that, it’s so much more important to allow people to engage in work that they find interesting where they’re able to use their creative skills, where they have the autonomy to do that than to try to keep them going by adding on more and more incentives and bonus schemes and that sort of thing and we would be so much better off if more leaders could do that introspection to think about what they have experienced when they’ve been most excited in work and what were you saying, Diego?
[0:43:54.3] DR: No, I think there is this element of the golden rule with this method, which is just imagine that you’re in the shoes of the person you’re trying to help. How would you want to be approached and treated by someone in a position of power, right? Who has a bigger budget or has a budget that they can use to help you or not help you? Something I’m curious about that you sparked for me when you’re just talking, I had this image of you literally going through the 12,000 data points, which must have been an incredible experience.
But then we start to think about artificial intelligence in the creative process and of course, there’s a lot of attention now on literally asking the AI to be generative for you but there’s also this idea of artificial intelligence as a copilot. It’s something that augments the human intelligence and the things that we do really well like ask questions. I’m curious because when you look inside of different innovation typologies or manifestos, like Toyota production system.
There’s this idea of go to the problem, see it for yourself, and the great American designers, Ray and Charles Eames, had this principle of never delegate understanding and I’ve always found those to be very powerful because for two reasons really is one is that for someone like you Teresa, how great is it for you to be able to see the data or hear the anecdote and process it and giving your own unique life experience and bring your creativity to bear.
And then second, sometimes the data doesn’t tell the whole story, right? And there’s something else going on. You know, for me right now, you know United has created a new boarding system for their planes, which gets us all in the plane faster but as a person who hasn’t been able to get my bag up in the overhead in my past few flights, it’s not working for me. I feel horrible boarding that flight now even though it’s faster.
So, there’s something qualitative that can be missed and I have a feeling that those executives maybe aren’t going to the problem. They’re delegating their understanding of the experience to somebody else. So, in this world where we may have artificial intelligence and agents doing a lot of this creative work for us, how should we think about that? Master of creativity, how should we think about using this for the good of humanity?
[0:46:05.7] TA: You know, I think that’s one of the most important questions that we creativity researchers and creativity practitioners need to think about. I do believe that there is always going to be a place for the human experience in high-level creativity because of this maybe intangible factor that you were just describing Diego, of being steeped in the phenomenon yourself and yourself trying to understand and get intuitions about what’s really going on.
My coauthor of The Progress Principle and I, who did read those 12,000 diaries more than once, were able to do this by talking to each other as we were reading this and playing around with ideas and of course, using the coding that have been done by all of these research assistants but going beyond that, going beyond that and that’s how we discovered one of the most interesting pieces of The Progress Principle, which I don’t think would have come out, out of even really sophisticated machine learning analysis of those 12,000 stories.
And that is that The Progress Principle doesn’t operate unless people feel they’re doing meaningful work because we didn’t find many instances of this but when we did, when we saw them, they were powerful instances. So, there were a few examples of people saying, “I got a lot done today. I got a huge amount done today but I have no idea why I was doing it. It seems stupid and pointless to me.”
Inner work life was not boosted those days and we saw no subsequent boost in creativity, which we did when people make progress and had powerfully strong inner work life. We did see a boost in creativity that day and even in subsequent days in those instances where people were making progress at work, they didn’t find meaningful, wow, and because AI now and I don’t know, maybe always is going to somehow work out frequency would have missed that.
There were just a few instances and my coauthor Steve Kramer, who’s also my husband, and I had a few big arguments where he said, “I think there’s something here in this meaninglessness of work.” And it was just a handful out of these 12,000 diaries and I said, “Well, what can we do with that? I mean, that really?” But then as we looked at the patterns and literal what preceded this and what followed it in these people’s lives and their work lives, it was undeniable, and it fit with other research that people were doing in meaningfulness of work.
[0:49:00.9] JU: Well, I would just say I realize there’s danger in anthropomorphizing technology. I feel with my limited view, it’s more helpful to think of AI as a collaborator in this case, and to me, Teresa, one of the things that you just sussed out was you were in a dynamic conversation with your partner, another intelligence if you will, I think treating AI as another intelligence is actually a part of the key to unlocking the potential.
You know, some of the research I’ve done this last year shows clearly most people don’t do that. Most people treat AI like a search query, which is I post a question, I get an answer and usually, I run with it on my own but there is not a dynamic conversation and I love your example of Steve saying, “I just feel like there’s something there.” And in that polling and that back and forth, that is possible within LLM.
The problem with the collaboration between humans and AI right now is actually humans. Humans aren’t thinking of interacting with AI like another intelligence. What we found in some of these teams that exemplify kind of disproportionate output is they had a fundamentally different relationship with the AI and so to me, that’s the shift that we have to make is treat it like another intelligence.
Set it, for example, if you’re going to sit down at the dinner table with Steve and talk about it for 30 minutes, make a decision, “I’m going to have a conversation with Claude or ChatGPT or Copilot, I’m indifferent, I’m not voting.” Decide to have a conversation for 30 minutes because I think where a lot of people are orienting and where a lot of the mistakes are being made is they think my job is to pose a question and then get a response.
And all they do is evaluate response and see if it is good or bad, and if it’s good, then they say, “AI is good.” And if it’s bad, then they say, “AI is bad.” But that’s not what Steve did. Steve said, “Hang on a second, I feel like there’s something else here.” When is the last time you as a human being said that to AI? “Hang on a sec, I feel like there’s something here.” That’s actually the kind of dynamic that we need to shift to.
But it requires behavior change on our parts and the truth is technology has been programming us. As long as we have been programming technology, technology has been programming us, and now, we have a very kind of particular set of expectations around our interactions with technology that LLMs could totally up-ended if only we’d realize it.
[0:51:21.2] TA: We need to reprogram ourselves, don’t you think? Really, I agree with you, I think that we need to really start to see AI as a potential collaborator, not an infallible one. No human collaborator is infallible and we certainly shouldn’t expect that of these machines at this point but to me, that’s another super interesting empirical research question. How can we help humans become more comfortable with collaboration with AI?
And how can we help them learn how to do it better? Are they going to be suspicious of it? Are they going to feel nervous that they might somehow be replaced by it? I know we don’t know enough about how people react psychologically to being confronted with AI.
[0:52:10.8] JU: Yeah, right now fear is kind of the prevalence and I mean, if you look at the research, what I feel that kind of the way I phrase it is I want to move people from fear to familiar to fluent to fun and you got to get people up with having fun and I’ve kind of deployed some you know, low rez prototypes of my own with the goal in mind of increasing conversational fluency, right? But that is not empirical research.
I agree with you a hundred percent, Teresa, that empirical research is needed. Diego, what are you thinking?
[0:52:40.2] DR: I’m just thinking about a great movie that came out 37 years ago. There is an artificial intelligence that always talks back to the human and that of course is R2D2 talking with Luke Skywalker but I think that’s what we’re getting toward hopefully, right? When he is flying that X-wing fighter through the trench or the Death Star, his copilot is that little droid and the droid isn’t just taking orders from him. It’s kind of telling him what to do in a lot of cases.
[0:53:04.5] JU: A fascinating thing that anybody can do right now, I call it turn the tables on AI. Our default orientation is I ask questions, you give answers. A really simple thing you could do with AI is say, “Ask me some questions.” So, for example, I’m trying to – I mean, I did this with a beloved family member the other day that was talking about a really, really big decision. Frankly, it’s way over my head.
I cannot help with this decision. I mean, I can be a sounding board, I can be loving, etcetera but I said, “Hey, what if we talk with ChatGPT about it?” And this family member said, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what to say.” I said, “That’s fine. Let’s tell ChatGPT.” And what we did is we said, “Hey, we’re thinking about this topic that’s way over my head and it’s way over their head too, would you ask us four or five questions that you better understand the position we’re in before you offer recommendations?”
It was fascinating, this is a person you know, who is aging and who is thinking about you know, areas of life related to aging what I watched within about 15 minutes this person said, “Well, I’ve never thought about this like this before.” And I said, “Oh, AI?” And they said, “No, the major life decision I’m thinking about.” By shifting why is it given that I’m the one with all the good questions and AI has either genius, you know, read-my-mind style answers or, “It’s terrible and I shouldn’t have trusted it anyway.”
If you turn the tables, what you find is it’s actually capable asking some pretty insightful questions, and then using my responses, the feedback I get is an order of magnitude better outcome.
[0:54:31.7] TA: It’s brilliant, I love it. I love this. I think one of the techniques that we could study, you know, is this something that will get humans to think more expansively about how they can work with AI. I love it.
[0:54:45.3] JU: I know we’re getting close to time but I just got to ask you, Teresa, you met Marvin Minsky 40 years ago and he’s pretty prescient about AI. I’d love it if you just gave folks a little bit of a teaser and you shared with me and Diego a research paper you wrote, which I think is also quite prescient. I really enjoyed it, back five years ago about AI. Can you talk for a minute about some of the things you started wondering then and if you’re thinking has evolved at all on the subject?
[0:55:12.5] TA: My thinking has evolved so much. This was a creativity conference at the Center for Creative Leadership in 1982 and I was asked to go there as a speaker. I was a young assistant professor and was you know, trying about my early experiments on creativity and Marvin Minsky was there. He was a keynote speaker, you know, he’s the AI pioneer. He just died I guess about seven or eight years ago and his talk was brilliant.
And brash and funny, interesting, and at one point he said that he believed that within the next 50 years – well, a hundred years he said but possibly even 50, autonomous AI would be able to produce literature at the level of Shakespeare and I thought, “Okay, hyperbole.” He’s giving a keynote speech here and I tested that reaction with him later. I said, “Well, you didn’t really mean that, right?”
And he said, “I was really quite serious. I do believe that from what I’ve seen.” He said, “Of course, there’s going to have to be advances in electrical engineering and advances in computer science and advances in understanding the human mind but I believe that this is going to be possible.” And I privately thought, “Oh, this is sad. You know, I wonder if he is aging prematurely.” You know, it’s that, “The poor man, you know?”
[0:56:33.8] JU: Not so good, not so good, he’s losing it.
[0:56:35.5] TA: So skeptical, you know? And I had this notion, “Only humans can be creative.” Well, let’s face it, humans have never been capable of producing poems at the level of Shakespeare, are we really going to expect the machines to do it? I now believe that it will happen, I do. I don’t know when it’s going to happen but it’s going to happen.
[0:56:56.8] DR: You can’t spell iambic without AI.
[0:56:59.1] JU: Did you just ask AI for a dad joke in this context?
[0:57:03.0] DR: Yes. I put out the ship in my head and also Star Wars was actually 47 years ago, not 37, I’ve been informed.
[0:57:09.5] JU: Oh, that’s so good.
[0:57:09.4] DR: There you go.
[0:57:10.1] JU: That’s so good. I feel like we’re just getting warmed up. Now, it’s like we’re firing on all cylinders, we could go another hour easily. Maybe we’ll try to get a part two, we’ll see what folks ask us about. Is there anything that you’d want to express or communicate or ask Diego before we wrap and then I’ll let you close Teresa, with anything that you’d like to leave folks with?
[0:57:28.4] DR: I’ve had the pleasure of reading through the comments that have been coming in from people watching this and I would just say read Teresa’s work, articles, the books, it’s all in there and there is not a book that I’ve recommended more in a business context to people than The Progress Principle. So, if you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and go get it. It’s awesome.
[0:57:51.7] TA: Wow, thank you so much, Diego. If I’m going to leave people with one thought, I guess I’d say don’t lose sight of your intrinsic motivation ever. Keep focusing on progress, whatever you’re doing that’s important to you even if it is hard and you’re having a lot of setbacks, don’t forget to think about the steps forward that you’re making. Write them down and diary them if you need to but keep track of it and that in itself can help you stay motivated in what you’re doing.
And for the elderly in the crowd, Jeremy, if your older relative might be interested in knowing that I have a new book coming out later this year on retirement called, Retiring: Creating a Life that Works for You, and we have an interesting creativity finding there. We found that to the extent that people were able to be creative in their last job in the last few years before they retired, they are more satisfied in their retirement life.
That creativity at work is a significant predictor of life satisfaction after retirement. Creativity and activities outside of work did not correlate with life satisfaction after retirement. So, I think there’s something there about people feeling like, “Hey, I can put a bow on this career that I’ve loved because I’m going out on a high point.”
[0:59:17.4] JU: Wow, that’s powerful.
[0:59:18.7] TA: So, think about that, think about that, managers, give creative work even to your older employees as they’re heading toward retirement. You’re going to benefit and they are going to benefit.
[0:59:29.4] JU: Yeah, that’s huge. You know, I love getting hyper-practical, and maybe one thing I might suggest to folks if you want to take Teresa’s kind of idea here seriously, a running record, just take five minutes at the end of each day and monitor, “Where did I feel the best intrinsic motivation? Where was I really lit up today? Was I lit up today and if so, where?” Because I find for myself as I read, as I’ve been researching it, it’s hard to do kind of abstractly across all my life.
That’s almost too much of a time scale but to say, “Today was there a moment and what was that moment?” I think is great and then if I want to kind of close the loop with AI, here is something amazing. I just talked to a researcher at Stanford who is doing this, which is super cool, you can start a new chat with again, a bot of your choice, but you can do the daily diary entry there, you can just do it via voice even.
It doesn’t have to be written, it will keep a running transcript and then you can start to query. You can ask the model itself to identify patterns in your submissions over time, which is pretty cool and they are using that to actually help people understand patterns of their thinking over the course of this learning experience but if you keep it all in the same chat, you basically got this running and the context window just keep increasing, right?
So, the model is able to process all of that context every time you ask it a new question, which is pretty cool. It’s like a meta copilot so to speak back to the R2D2 reference.
[1:00:54.1] TA: That’s fascinating.
[1:00:55.5] JU: Yeah, it’s super cool. Anyway, folks, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for all the comments. Sorry, we couldn’t get to all the comments on LinkedIn. We will post this video, this video will be available on LinkedIn immediately, and then we’ll post it to the podcast platform shortly as well. Until next time, we hope everybody has a great afternoon. Thank you so much.
[1:01:12.4] TA: Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[1:01:13.6] 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 offsite adventure. Hit me up at jutley@jeremyutley.design for more information.
[END]
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.