I try to purposefully get to a sixty or eighty percent answer on something and stop and just say, I'm going to walk away from this, and I'm going to ask my brain the question, what's one hundred percent answer, and not expect my brand to give me an answer in the moment, but just know that it's somewhere in there, so that when I'm in a moment where I'm beginning to disappear again, the subconscious is doing the work that the subconscious does.
Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by the world's most successful people to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha. I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my workday. Before we get into today's interview, I wanted to firstly do a shout out to all the kind people that
have been leaving reviews for How I Work. I read every single one of them and they're just ringing such a big smile to my face. It's so nice to get feedback from listeners, So thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone that's done that and if you're enjoying how I work and you maybe haven't left a review, then maybe today's the day where you might do that. You might leave a star rating, which is awesome and thank you to the several hundred people that have done that.
Or maybe you might write a few words, so thank you if that is you. And one other thing before we get on with today's show is that you might have heard that I have recently launched a second podcast, which is called How to Date with my best girlfriend Monique. The show is all about helping us get better at dating, which is exactly what we're both doing, both being about
a year out of our respective marriages. So if you're interested in learning about how to become a better day and maybe consuming more on my podcast, then search for How to Date wherever you get your podcasts from, and I will also link to that in the show notes. All right, let's get on to today's guest. Who is Scott d Anthony. This is the second time I've had Scott on the show. I had him on oh maybe a year and a half ago, and I've known Scott for a few years. Our firms do a lot of
work together. And if you haven't come across Scott before. Scott is a global authority on innovation and also the former managing partner of inosit, which is a global innovation and strategy consulting firm co founded by Clayton Christiansen, the late Harvard Business School professor and the grandfather and really creative, disruptive innovation. I want to say so. Scott has written several best selling books, Got a new One out at the Moment, Eat, Sleep, Innovate, and he also writes regularly
for Harvard Business Review. Scott has been awarded the Thinker's fifty Innovation Award, which recognizes the world's leading thinkers on innovation and really Scott is one of the smartest people that I have the honor of knowing. So we talk about all sorts of things in this chat, and in particular how Scott's routines and habits and ways of running
meetings and workshops have dramatically changed thanks to COVID. So this interview is full of really practical strategies around how Scott has restructured the way he works some of his new routines, and also how he's now thinking about client engagements and meetings and workshops and things like that. So on that note, let's head to Scott to hear about how he works. Scott, Welcome back to the show, Amantha.
It's a pleasure to be here as always.
So I wanted to reach out to you again and have you back on the show because now as we're recording, we're in September. I almost had a mental blank. Then I'm like, what month are we actually in? But no, I believe it's September, mid September. So where gosh six months or something like that into COVID and everything that goes with that. And I know for you that life looks very different because you were often on a plane
most weeks. So I want you to start by taking us through where are you based and how has your work life changed in the last six months.
Well, I'm based in Singapore and I have been in Singapore since March seventeenth on this leg. I've been lived in Singapore of course for more than ten years. But the six months now that I've been in one place is I believe, the longest stretch I've been in one
place in my life. So my work life has changed a lot, because you know, my work life used to involve getting on planes and going to places, and I have not been getting on planes and going to places, and that has lots of knock on effects about how I spend my time in the day, the hours, when I do things, how I do things. We're a consulting company, and impacts how we work with clients, how we get clients, how we serve clients, lots of areas that we could dive deeper into.
Wow, isn't that amazing? This is the longest period of time that you've been in the one place. That's quite crazy. I think I could probably claim that same thing too, probably in the last decade. This is the longest stretch of time I've been in Melbourne at home. So I want to know what are some of the things that you've changed, And maybe if we look at this on a daily basis, because I know that when travel is a part of work, like not many days really look
the same. But now that every day looks the same in your home office, I imagine, what does a typical structure for your day look like at the moment?
Yeah, so the typical structure for me, and there are some days that are different because in Singapore at the moment, inside the country, things are actually reasonably open and there are opportunities to and I'm sorry for listeners who are in different parts of the world, but there are opportunities to go out and meet people in controlled ways and all that. But there is some degree of variety, so
I just say that as a caveat. But a typical day involves getting up a little bit later than I did before, and I'll talk more about that in a bit. It involves either having a morning of deep work where I've got a task that I need to get through and I'll avoid email until I do that task, or doing a catch up where my brain will be tired and i just want shallow work just to feed it a little bit in the morning.
Then usually in the middle part of the day there's.
A few meetings that tie to things that are being done on this time zone, and then there's a break between about six and eight to spend time with the family and have dinner. And then from eight until it's done, there are calls that are on the European and US time zone, and those will go anywhere from most nights ten or eleven, some nights two or three. And that's been one of the things that's been a big shift for me in that I didn't used to do calls
that late. But one of the pandemic opportunities is I could be anywhere in the world with a push of a button. So I've kind of expanded my view of where I can serve clients from Asia to anywhere. And you know, of course it's tiring to do something between two and four in the morning, but it's easier than dealing with twelve hours of time zone changes. So this has had a lot to knock on effects about how I think about things and all that. But that's what a quasi typical.
Day looks like.
I feel exhausted hearing that you're doing meetings at one or two in the morning. I'm quite lakish in my behavior. I'll sort of naturally wake up at about somewhere between five thirty and six thirty. And I remember the last time we spoke a couple of weeks ago, I think you'd had a two am meeting and then a seven am meeting or something crazy like that. So to start with, how are you even functioning at that time of night
and has that actually changed? Essentially, like the chronotype that you're running on in terms of your normal sleep wake cycle.
Yeah, it definitely has.
You know, there's traces back to the experience I had when I came back to Singapore in the middle of March. So you know, we were supposed to have a big face to face meeting in North America with one of our big clients, and then that meeting went from face to face to virtual and you know, everything was happening.
So I just flew back to Singapore. But I decided the first week I was in Singapore, when I was isolated for fourteen days, that I was going to roughly keep myself on the US time zone so that when we did the virtual meeting, I would just be in tune with the meeting. So that was kind of weird, But then I realized it actually wasn't that hard. You know, if you're stuck in a place and you're trying to adjust to different time zones, and at least for me, I'm able to adjust my sleep cycle a little bit,
I could do that. And I said, okay, you know, as long as we're in the situation, I should essentially mentally put myself on the time zone of the Maldives, which was, you know, a nice, nice place to imagine, which is, you.
Know, a few hours earlier than Singapore.
So you know, it just means that I'm starting my day mentally a little later and ending it mentally a little later. And you know, as long as I found that I get enough sleep in between the two, I'm okay. And I don't usually have things that go until two and then start at seven. Those are anomalous days. I tried very hard if I've got a quirky meeting after midnight to just have the morning be clear, and sometimes that doesn't work and you have to deal with it.
But I never do that more than one day, so.
I don't do that back to back days.
If I've got a week where I've got a couple things that are post midnight, the mornings are as clear as they possibly can be.
And as part of that too.
I blocked off all all Monday mornings and all Friday afternoons. And so this is just times when I'm just not going to take other meetings.
And what strategies are you using for I guess that's sleep shifting to effectively be in a different time zone to the one that you're living in, where the daylight is generally the thing that gets us into local times, So how are you doing that?
Yeah, you know, I mean, I'm thankful for whatever genetics have enabled this to be mostly possible, But you know, it's mostly making sure that I manage the calendar. Is at least for me, the thing that wakes me up as much as anything else is the stress of what's coming in front of me. So you know, it's one of these weird things. And I'm sure you have similar experiences.
It's like if you have an early morning meeting and you know that you need every minute of sleep, you still wake up before an alarm because you're anxious about.
The early morning meeting.
And to me, a large part of it is just making sure that my brain is cleared when I know that I'm going to have a weird no, so I don't have that stress leading to me getting up early. I also always give space, and I know I need space between my last work activity and bed. It's just it's an hour an hour between the last thing that I do and when I'm able to go to sleep,
so I just prepare for that. And I have started doing meditation and deep breathing, which is something I did not do before the middle of the pandemic, so it is something that I found helps as well.
And then you know, just managing.
Food and stuff like that as well, and of course all of this. You know, we've got four kids here in Singapore, and we have clear division of responsibilities, and there are mornings where I get the kids and my wife gets to sleep, and there are mornings where my wife gets up and I get to sleep, and you know,
we're very transparent and open about those discussions. You know, the weekends have generally been the times where I've been getting up earlier because I tend not to have late calls then, and just making sure that we balance and manage it that as best we can.
I want to dig into deep and shallow work. You mentioned that as part of your routine, and I remember when we spoke last a lot of your deep work rituals took place when you're on a plane and therefore disconnected from all things digitally distracting and also in cafes and sort of other such places. So how does your deep work ritual work now? And I guess how are you?
Trigging is not quite the word, but it is kind of tricking your brain into going, okay, this is deep work time, because I found for myself I completely had to change my habits and triggers around that, because I too would do a lot of my deep work in cafes and on planes, which is now no longer an option at all in Melbourne where I'm based.
No, absolutely, And you know, so the planes have certainly been out for me. The cafes are conceivable but challenging, you know, because you're then either very with Singapore regulation, you're either very slowly nursing a drink, or you're sitting around with a mask on, which just makes you conscious and it's just a little bit harder for your brain. Done one and focus, I've found, so for me it
really has been three things. Number one has been being even more ruthless about scheduling the time, making sure that I use some of the things Amantha that you've taught me about making sure that you put formal time on the calendar for things, and then making sure that that is time that you hold sacracent.
So that's number one.
Number two, to trick my brain, I do change space, just I do it within the place in which we live. And you know, I again am fortunate that there's enough different places that I can work. You know, we've got a nice porch that if the weather is good, can be a good place to get stuff done. And the kids are in school. Schools are open here, so there are good quiet periods of time where I can actually do that.
Where sometimes you know, it's at weird hours.
You know, it could be quite late at night where you get that moment where you've got ninety minutes just to crank through things in between calls.
So it's making sure.
It's not all done with the in the home office where I sit most of the time, but it's in different spaces in the house. And number three, I've used music a lot as the way just to get my brain into flow.
You know.
There's just certain mixes that I have or playlists on Spotify that just tell my brain this is when you're going to actually engage in a task. And I found for me, at least, I get much more in flow when I have background music. And I'm very thankful for the AirPod pros from Apple. They're just to me just phenomenal noise blockers, so you really can just immerse yourself in sound and just disappear in what you're working on. So those are the things.
That I've done.
That's great. What are your go to playlists then for your deep work?
Oh, it's a mix of different things, you know, and sometimes it's just following threads, you know. So I like music a lot. They are all things that I've created. If I'm trying to do deep work. This is not when I listen to my favorite band, which is a Pearl Jam is good for other things, but it is not good for deep work. But usually I will have
some album that I've just recently. Recently, I purchased a new album from Phoebe Bridgers and Bright Eyes, and there's just a tonality in both of those albums that's just good for me when I'm working. And then I'll go from those albums and sometimes go to Spotify radio off the songs.
Actually do buy albums, by the way, I just you know, I.
Feel like in the creative space, I write things and I hope people buy some of the things that I do. So I always feel like for artists, if I am listening to the music, I owe it to them to buy the albums as well, you know. So I buy a couple dozen albums a year, and it just changes depending on mood. But it tends to be things that are a little bit discordant sonically, but not things that are too loud, if that makes sense. So something where I can kind of feel the noise but it's not
disruptive to my brain. I've actually never thought about that before, but that's at least the way that I think about it.
Yeah, that's very interesting. I remember, like a couple of years back now, I had Matt Mullenwig on the show, the co founder of Automatic, and he had a strategy where he would to get into flow. He would listen to the same song on repeat. Do you ever do that or is it always circling like straight through the album.
I never listened to the same song and repeat. And generally, if I'm trying to lose myself, it is some collection on random, because if I listen to something in order, like if I listened to the Phoebe Bridges album in order, my brain is starting to track into and it knows what's coming, and I get kind of pulled too much into the music on random for whatever reason, our brain kind of loses it.
You know, you hear it, you hear it, but.
It's not something that you're tracking and figuring out it doesn't really make sense because you would think if you're listening to something where you know what's coming next, it's a way to not have to process things, and when you get surprised by a song, then you have to stop and think about it for a second. But at least for me, it just helps me disappear.
Yeah, it's interesting listening to you talk about it almost makes me want to experiment with music again. I've tried different strategies around music and working rituals, and I did try the same song on repeat. I remember when I was going through a massive Hamilton stage quite a while ago.
Now I would have a particular song on repeat from Hamilton, which I found I found quite good because you just sort of get into the zone and it does become background music quite quickly when it is the same song. But yeah, it's almost caterintuitive what you're saying about the random music. But I'm feeling all inspired to try music again.
When I work now, I want to look at shallow work because you said something interesting where some mornings you'll feel the need to feed your brain with shallow work. And for me that just kind of struck something in me because in my own possibly quite rigid rule book. It's like, hang on shallow work in the morning. The only time I would do that is if I've got a keynote in the morning, and I know I can't get into flow before the keynote because I'll just be disrupted.
So tell me about how you know when you're going to do shallow work in the morning. And I'm just curious to understand more about that.
Yeah, and you know, some of this is just again just given the reality of the way that twenty twenty has worked. You know, my chronotype, according to the test that I took about reinventing your work day, is a middle bird. So I am neither a lark nor a night owl. But the thing I find for me is where I am at my best really is circumstance contingent. So there are some days where I've not worked that late. I've woken up after a good sleep and I can hop out of bed and I could go and write
a chapter of the book. And there are other days where it's been more fragmented, it's been later. I've had a chopping morning where there's just no way I could do it. I just I'm not going to be really deep functional until later in the afternoon or early in the evening, and I have a reasonably good sense of myself to just have a feeling as to what type of day it is, and if it's a day like that, then I'll flip around and say, Okay, this is a great day to do stupid stuff and just answer the
emails that need to get answered. And I know I'm beating them whatever skinner light dopamine hit when I do it, and I know I'm not really making progress with anything material, but it's just.
A way to kind of warm up.
And there are other days where that is the exact last thing that I will do, where I will say, Okay, I really do have it in my brain to do it, and I need that focus first thing in the morning, and I won't even look at email.
So to me, it's very circumstanced contingent.
And I do have something that I adopted as a ritual a couple of years ago that is held, which is, I do not look at email first thing in the morning under any circumstance. So I wake up and I do other things, and I might look at what's app to see who's texted me, and I'll read some sports news, and I'll look at other things, and it is only until I've had my first sip of coffee that i will allow myself to look at email.
And some days it's not even that. If I really have a deep work task, I won't even peek because you know you know this.
I mean, you tell other people this, You tell yourself, Oh, I can just look and not engage. But your brain just starts worrying once you see these emails and you're like, oh, here all this super stuff that I need to deal. Not that my colleagues asked me to do super stuff, but you know, you know the point.
Yeah, absolutely, given the amount of time that you were spending traveling and now that's completely been removed from your life. And I say this because obviously plane travel is so good for work in many ways, and particularly when that's become quite habitual and almost this Pavlovian response I find
when I'm on a plane, I'm completely focused. There's so much ineffective and unusable time when you are traveling a little lot, like you know, moving from an uber to the airport, going through security, waiting in lines, and all those sorts of things like I feel like you must have a lot of time now that you didn't have previously, And I want to know if Astley ah, like, how conscious of you are that, and are you also conscious of deliberately using that time in other ways?
I am definitely conscious of it. But there's a bite that relates to new habits during the pandemic. We moved right before the pandemic end of February to a place that's about a two minute walk to the Botanic Gardens in Singapore, and I think this is true. I think one hundred percent of the days since the pandemic started after I got out of my quarantine, I've spent at least thirty minutes in the garden, and many days more than that going on long walks or going for runs,
sometimes doing work concurrently with it. Sometimes I will go and do some of the shallow work email while walking through the gardens. Sometimes I will purposely not do anything but just let my subconscious work on things as I'm walking and listening to music. Sometimes I don't want to work on anything. I just want to walk or run or listen to music or whatever. But that's kind of been the equivalent, you know, if it's thirty to ninety
minutes a day. That's kind of the equivalent of waiting in lines for planes that or dealing with it those moments where you just have time when you can't really do something.
It's kind of the same thing for me.
Yes, I'm conscious, but I also have consciously put in something else that is a routine and ritual that does not involve me sitting in a place staring at a screen. And again, I'm very thankful to be in Singapore, which has allowed that consistently. You know, even when it went for the tightest controls that it did in April and May,
individual exercise was something that was always allowed. So you know, they were restricted in terms of being with other people, and they were restricted in terms of parts of the garden you could go to to enable safe distancing, but the garden was always open. And that's one of the things that I've done just to you know, partially keep myself from going too crazy during these times and also to give myself space because you know, I have found for me.
You know, sometimes it's when you're waiting in a line.
To go through security that your brain's so engaged and then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, it's like ah, a connection is made. And that is one of the big things that I miss about travel. It's just the change in stimuli is something that's always very helped for me when I'm working on anything and just you see something and you make a connection you hadn't.
Thought to make.
And I was working on an idea that this idea for something related to leadership, and I remember the moment where I had something that clicked together and I began to see what it could be. You know, I had been working, I stopped working. I went out to the garden. I was listening to music. It was raining a little bit. I was reading the Harvard Business Review. It was way
too much stimuli. But I was just walking past this hill and like, ah ah ah, the answer are these four things And it just it hit me in that moment.
And why then, who knows.
But it's just finding ways to continue to make sure that you get the just diversity and stimulized so that you could let your subconscious process, to me, is just a really important thing.
Yeah, because I do want to ask a bit more about almost how you can take full advantage of those walks or maybe other rituals that you have to think
more creatively. Like I remember a couple of months ago, I had professors got Son and sh on the show from Rice University, and he's done a bit of research around how you can use rituals to boost creativity, which almost sounds counterintuitive, And so he described something that he did every day sounds similar to what you're doing, where every morning he'll go for a half hour walk and he'll deliberately walk the same path so that his mind can kind of be focusing on other things, but also
in the same breath, he said, well, even though you're walking the same path, there's going to be different sorts of stimuli that you see on your walk. Different people will be walking, different dogs will be out, and so forth. So I want to know, how do you almost think about priming yourself and these experiences, whether that be walking around the botanical gardens or something else, to optimize for creativity and those sparks of insights.
Well, to me, there's two things.
Number One, the gardens here are not tiny, but not that big, So there's no no inch that I have not gone through, So there's a little bit even if it's not the same route it's not new, you know, so I'm not discovering new things, etc. Although you know, you always do see little things like the flower you haven't seen before or whatever, So that there is a routineness to it that allows your subconscious to work on
other things. And I do find that valuable. Is there other times where you just you want to discover, you want to lose yourself in a new place, and that's a different thing, So I certainly would echo that experience.
The other thing for me is that I try to purposefully when I wanted to flex this muscle, I try to purposefully get to a sixty or eighty percent answer on something and stop and just say, I'm going to walk away from this, and I'm going to ask my brain the question what's the one hundred percent answer, and not expect my brain to give me an answer in the moment, but just know that it's somewhere in there, so that when I'm in a moment where I'm beginning
to disappear again, the subconscious is doing the work that the subconscious does.
You know, just a practical example.
You know, I've got a session I'm running for a European bank next week, and I started working on the presentation materials about ten days ago, and I wasn't trying to finish it.
Ten days ago.
I was trying to get a couple pieces done, and a couple pieces very purposefully open, because I didn't know what I wanted to say in those pieces, and I just left them there, and I just left them messy, and I asked my brain the question, how do you make this last messy? And then you know when exactly it comes You never know for sure, but it's in
there somewhere. So that that's the thing that I have tried to do, and I've learned from this current moment that at least for me, that's effective to give yourself a sixty percent answer in a question and let your subconscious do its work.
You know.
Sometimes it's the garden, sometimes it's the shower. Sometimes it's in the middle of trying to adjudicate a fight between the kids, whatever, just it comes to.
But you can't fully fully appreciate or predict.
I like that that's sixty percent rule. I can definitely relate. Makes me more conscious of actually deliberately doing that now. I remember when you were last on the show, we spoke about how you'd gone about removing the majority of recurring meetings from your diary, and you earlier in this chat you mentioned that you've got no meetings. Was it Monday morning and Friday afternoon?
Correct?
Yeah, So what's happening now around meetings? What have you found has happened in your own working life now that we're not traveling? Like, are you in more meetings now? Are they longer, are they shorter? What does that look like for you at the moment.
Yeah, So this this year has been a weird year for all of us. You know, I think I've been busier this year than any year that I can remember. I just have had the good fortune of having interesting client work taking place across multiple geographies, while also doing all the normal stuff and a book coming out in a month and all the things related to that.
So you know, it's been a very busy year, a good busy year.
So I would say if I were to compare the number of meetings now to previous years, I would say they're up by a pretty material amount. And I would say in terms of timing of meetings, I don't really see a big difference. You know, I've got some meetings that are short. You know, I've had a twenty one minute catch up with somebody earlier today. I've got some meetings that are longer. I've got a two hour session with the cloud at the end of the day to day.
Very rarely has there been kind of the equivalent of the all day meeting. You know, I think, like many people, I have found that you get much past three three and a half hours on any topic in a virtual world.
It's just really hard to make that work.
And the thing that I have tried to do personally is I just don't function well if I've got three hours blocked straight through of video meetings. So I have number one tried to make sure that I do have gaps in my schedule, and number two made sure that I don't do everything as a video meeting. There's somebody that I've got a standing meeting with, my colleague Patrick, who who you've met, Amantha.
We meet every week. We know what we look like.
We don't need to see each other, you know, we always do that as a phone call, and we both appreciate that.
You know, it's a weird thing. We have flipped this year the world.
To having this almost obligation to have a video meeting, and not everything needs to be done on a screen. I think many times being able to really listen, I think it's done better by a voice than by a video.
Yeah, and look, there's research to back that up. I know some research I came across suggests that we're actually better at reading people's emotions over the phone as opposed to video, which seems completely the wrong way around. But yeah, that's what's come out so in terms of making meetings effective, because I feel like that's interesting that you're doing a
lot of meetings that make sense. But I think that for people that are having good meetings, they are thinking about meetings differently because face to face strategies don't necessarily translate into the online world. And I want to know how, like, what are some of the different things that you've been trying in meetings to make them more engaging, more useful, and more productive.
Ultimately, this is something that obviously we have thought a lot about in our consulting work, because the way that we did consulting pre pandemic was very hands on, very side by side, very collaborative, and of course you have to think about how do you achieve the same sort of impact and have the same feel of collaboration in
a world that just has constraints on it. So the couple of things that I've seen in a client setting that have worked a lot is number one, the use smart use of interactive tools, whether it's polling or other technologies. You know, we in early March, my Collie g Asher Debong with an outside developer, hack together, a pretty simple engagement tool that we have found to be amazingly effective to guide group discussions. So using tools to encourage discussion
is one thing. And then the second thing, if you're on a platform that enables it, finding ways to break groups into the smaller groups using Zoom, breakoutrooms or whatever also as a way to make discussions much more engaging.
And I have found if you use these two things, well, if you use pulling and engagement technologies and you use breakout rooms, you can actually in some cases have more engaging, have better virtual meetings than you'd have physical ones, particularly because there is a democratization factor when everybody's box on Zoom is the same size. And I remember this experience I had with the Singaporean company a few months ago
that just really struck me. It was a company that is one hundred percent owned by Tamasik, which is one of the sovereign wealth funds here, and we were helping them think through their twenty thirty strategy. And we had on this session we had their top leadership team, we had their board of directors, we had some of their investors, we had some outside government people, and then we had about a dozen up and coming leaders in the organization.
And I can tell you had we done this base to face, there would have been a VIP table that had all the important people at the front of the room, all the younger people would be at the edge of the room, and they would have said not a word. But in a virtual setting using some of these engagement tools, everybody is the same size and basically in the same space, so we had wide participation. It was easy for me
to bring in different voices. We had people go toe to toe against the chairman of the company in a respectful way, of course, but just a really vivid, really democratic discussion that was very unusual for my experience in Singapore. So again I think done in the right sort of way, there are some dividends that you can get from a digital dislocation that can lead to higher engagement, more inclusion, et cetera. Of course, it can be a lot worse too.
I mean, you've got to actively manage it and create space for emotions and all that. But I have seen that there are some are some pandemic premiums.
That really stuck with me when we spoke a few weeks ago and we were talking about the future of work, and one of the benefits is that no one considered the head of the table when you're running a Zoom meeting or a Zoom workshop. And it's fine. It's not something I'd actually consciously thought about, but now I think about it a lot when I'm engaged in online experiences. I want to know, what else are you thinking about, whether that be for meetings or even workshops that you're
running with clients. How are you thinking about the openings and closings differently, or are there any other strategies that you've been experimenting with that you've found to be particularly effective.
Yeah, a few different things.
So one, the ability to have kind of the side conversations. It's a lot easier in a digital world than to do it face to face, you know, so that you are a discussion we have tonight is with one of
our clients. We have a Microsoft Team's chat with all the NSA people on it, so that we can just make real time calibrations, or someone can say, hey, this person, I can see they really want to get into the discussion, or we haven't heard from this person, or this person's got something good to say about it because I've already talked with them, blah blah blah blah blah, which is just.
Really hard to do face to face.
So you know, having whether it's Slash or Microsoft Teams or Zoom or whatever or WhatsApp chat, having the ability to essentially parallel path things I think helps a lot. The other thing that we certainly have done, and I think many people have done this is just have ground rules up front. You know, camera's on, not off, and if you need to go away and turn the camera off for a few minutes, that's totally fine, and put yourself on mute and turn the camera off if you
need to do it. But otherwise we want people to be present and this is I use the chat window for this.
And blah blah blah blah.
So having ground rules I think is important. And then there's a group that I'm part of that was sharing tips and tricks, and they mentioned something that I'd not thought of before, but just small ways to do digital engagement.
You know, so opening a meeting.
By saying, Okay, where's everybody calling in from? Or what did everybody have for their last meal or whatever, and just have them to type into the chat window, or even have something where you ask people to handwrite a word and hold the word up to their screen, so you know, how are you feeling right now, and people write it up and hold it up, just as a very small way to get in game aagement and to
make things a little bit more human. And then the final thing that I would say is, you know, particularly for internal meetings, I mean, of course we've got the business at hand, but you know, in today's world where depending on the country you're in, there are at least two and sometimes three crises going on. You know, there's the global health crisis, there's an economic crisis in many countries in the US, there's a social justice crisis, so you know, there's a lot of stuff going on.
Just giving space for people to be humans and.
Just say how are you doing and saying no more than that and not to try to fix, but just to try to listen. Create the equivalent of a holding container for emotions. I found that's an incredibly important thing to do. I wish I did even more of it, because you know, you're just so used to getting into the business at hand, but I think we all just need to give that space for humanity right now more than ever.
That's so true. And I really like that idea of writing a word down on a shade of paper. I
haven't come across that before, and that's really cool. I'm definitely going to be stealing that, you know, with meetings, and something I've been thinking about a lot is just the role of synchronous versus asynchronous communication, particularly in the remote world, and I want to know how you think about it, like when or what are the right types of purposes or reasons to have a meeting and do synchronous communication versus not because I think and what I
observe in a lot of the organizations we work with is that there are a lot of meetings going on that would best be served in an asynchronous way. I want to know what your thoughts are about this and how you think about applying that with the meetings that you're setting and attending.
Yeah, it's a great point, and I wish I had a great answer to it, because I certainly have the same feeling that you do where sometimes you end a meeting and you say, well, that could have been an email, and that that should have been an email or should have been a one on one conversation versus a ten person conversation with eight people listening.
And I have not seen a great framework for this out there.
You know, you could imagine there's something around are you really trying to actively collectively problem solve something versus in part information versus gather data from people? And I suspect there's something about is it one way or two way? Is it single party or is at multi party? That you could make some kind of two by two from it and solve it. But I know it's true, you know,
I just I had a reinforcing moment. I was doing a webinar for a European company and we were talking about, you know, what are some challenges some you know, internal innovation problems worth solving and they say, you know, one of our challenges is we can't get people to turn on the video when they're in meetings. And because of that it's hard to have, you know, good video based meetings.
And we talked about a little bit and the real problem was they had people who were showing up to meetings that were not present in the meeting at all. They didn't want to turn on the video because that would show that they were just doing other work.
They said, well why are they coming to that?
You know, there's obviously a much bigger issue there, you know, and I do think dB Bank, who as you know, it's a big vocal case study in the forthcoming book Sleep Innovate, which the publisher would be mad if I didn't.
Mention during this discussion. So there you go, I got it in.
So but dbs Bank, I think has done a really good job of thinking about what are the rules and rituals that you have to put around meetings and how do you think about making sure there are clear purposes for every meeting that you have, that you have clear reasons why everyone's there every meeting. You have to come to the meeting with three S one R, three suggestions, one recommendation. The meetings have to have a meeting owner. They have to have a joyful observer that's making sure
the meeting owner does their job. That's the Mojo program. The Mojo is rated for five things, the degree to which they are data driven, they take action, they keep time, and a couple other things. There's an app where everybody rates these things. At the end there's a leaderboard that's provided so the meeting owner knows how they're doing.
So just very thoughtful ways to.
Think about are we using our collective time as effectively and as efficiently as we can? And I think there is so much more that can be done here, and we just know that so much time is wasted on things, and I wish I had a better answer for knowing exactly what those things are.
But that's at least a couple of stream of consciousness thoughts.
Oh that's great, Scott, And you've done your publisher, Harvard Business Review Press proud by introducing the book. Although I was just about to ask you a question about your new book, Eat Sleep, Innovate, which comes out on October twenty. Is that I got the date right.
You have it exactly right. It's the same date. We'll see which one sells more. But Matthew McConaughey has a book called Green Lights coming out on the same day.
I have failed in my effort to get us to do joint promotion for our two books. But we will see whose book does better.
Oh, yes, I remember you're talking about that. Well, I won't be buying Matthew's book, if that's any consolation. But I haven't got my hands on an early copy of your book yet, Scott, I'll assume it's in the mail. In all seriousness, though, how does one launch a book in a pandemic? How are you thinking about that?
Yeah?
Again, you look for what is the silver lining? Which is another book I wrote that was a decade ago. But you look for the silver lining and things. And the great thing about right now is again, I could be anywhere, you know. So I'm going to be in Japan tonight. I'm going to be in India this afternoon. I'm going to be in Thailand later this afternoon. I'm in Australia now, you know.
So it's just my.
Point of view has been say yes to everything. And I've got some promotional things that are being done in the US, in Europe, in Australia, in Japan, whatever, all around the globe. So that is one thing that is a bit of a silver lining, and everybody's in the same situation, so they recognize and understand it. So that's one thing. The second thing is trying to figure out the connection points between the ideas in the book and the circumstances that we're in right now, which is not very hard.
You know. The book, as.
You know, it's about essentially how do you create a culture of innovation? And in the book we say that innovators follow five behaviors and you need to find ways to make those everyday habits, which means you've got to overcome the inertia that stops them from being everyday habits. We have tools and techniques for how to do that, and you can make the argument very clearly that this is a moment where we need innovation more than ever.
We need to innovate not to the new normal, not to the new abnormal, those are depressing, but to the new better. And if we're going to innovate to the new better, we have to figure out ways to be more curious, and to be more collaborative, and to be
more adept and ambiguity. And today's time creates challenges for following those behaviors, but creates opportunities as well, So seeking to find ways to connect the content in the book with where people are right now is I think another thing that will be important, and you know, we'll see
how it all goes. And of course, we have the book available in every format that might exist, so you know, of course, but people might not be going to bookstores, but you know that the world is still shipping, so you can still get physical books, and there are digital ones and audio ones and all that last thing i'd say. We are also planning to introduce, along with our publisher, kind of do it yourself kit that augments the book. You know, so of course there.
Are people who will buy the book, read the book, and use the ideas in the book.
There might be some people who want some consulting help to call us, But there's people in between that want a little bit more help but don't want to full on consulting engagement.
So we're working with Harvard.
To create a kind of do it with help sort of kit to enable people inside organizations to use all the ideas in the book, which I've not done for anything that I've written before. So I'm very excited about that as an additional offering that we hope will help people.
That sounds really cool. I love the idea of that, and I want to know in the book because I think it's like, it's a very practical book with practical strategies. Is there a favorite strategy which is probably asking you to pick your favorite child, but is there one in particular that you particularly love and would like to share?
Yeah, I mean, this one's very easy, because this really is the heart of the book chapters three and four. So let me just give you the brief arc of the book. Chapter one is definition, so culture of innovation, one in which the behaviors that drive innovation success come naturally or.
Five of them.
Chapter two then identifies what is the biggest blocker to having this happen inside organizations, and we make the case that it essentially is what we call the shadow strategy, which is the way in which you do the day to day work inside organization. We're institutionalized inertia crowds out the ability to do something different.
So we say this is what it is, this is what stops.
And then three and four goes into the tool we suggest using, which is essentially something that's adapted from the habit change literature. We brand it a bean. A bean is a behavior enabler, artifact and nudge BAM. The behavior enabler essentially activates what Daniel Konnaman would call system two. It's the logical rational steps to do different things. It's a checklist, it's a coach, it's a ritual. It's an app that helps you do the hard work of behavior change.
The artifacts and nudges are the indirect things like the pictures that push you in a direction, gamification principles and so on, so you do different things with not even thinking about it. Gets Daniel cottoman system one. And in the book we have one hundred and one beans and we have companion website where people can download them and use them that try to overcome the inertia encourage innovative behaviors.
Things like the DBS Mojo, meeting owner, joyful observer being, things like the Adobe Kickbox, things like the Tata Dare to Try a prize, all things that people in the innovation field would know the individual examples reasonably well. But the idea of bringing it together with a simple three step process to create a bean, which is not hard.
You identify the behavior you want to encourage. You identify the behavior you're doing instead of that behavior, and then you come up with the behavior enabler artifact and nudge to overcome the compensating behavior and encourage the desired behavior. I've seen people create beans in five minutes that are pretty good and actually work. So that's the tool that is my favorite in the book by far. It's simple, but it works.
That's awesome. I love the sound of that. Super practical and easy to use. Now, the final thing I wanted to ask you about is, and I know you're not a clairvoyant, but I know that you think about these things a lot, is just what do you think the future like? The next twelve months in your life as a consultant who has clients all around the world is going to look like like where will you be working from? When will you be traveling again? Are we going to
just move most things into the virtual world? What are you expecting the next twelve months will be?
Like?
A nice, nice, simple question to end the discussion.
You know, as you say, I'm not a clairvoyant and all that, but I'll give you a few of my perspectives, so you know, you just feel that the world desires to move on, And yes, we have to deal with health related issues, and different spaces and countries are going to move at different paces, but you know, the world wants to move on. The world is experimenting with different tracking and tracing and testing methodologies. We have vaccines that
people are working on. Exactly how these things will come together. I don't know human beings want to be together, but we want to have people move and not be stationary. We want people to be able to gather, and I just cannot imagine that we can't figure out some way, even if we can't figure out the vaccine, to.
Have a lot more of that than we have now.
Speaking in the middle of September, So I'm expecting that you're going to just see more stuff that looks like normal stuff in the months ahead. That said, I think we have proven through the last six months that you can do a lot of things remotely and can do
a lot of things digitally. So I don't think in any circumstance, even if a vaccine that completely eradicates COVID nineteen arrives tomorrow and has spread magically throughout the world in a minute, I don't think we're going to go back to the way things were I think we are going to have a different way in which we do work now we think about it at in a sight, if we were starting from scratch, we would have a
very different infrastructure. We would invest less in physical offices, we would invest more in coworking spaces, best more and having people all come together for short bursts of time versus having people episodically come into an office and sometimes run into people. You just think really differently about the geographic construct. I think people will have a much higher bar to go to face to face meetings. I think there'll be many more virtual things. So that's something that
I think you'll see in the medium term. And I think, and again, I am a half full sort of person. I'm an optimist by nature. I think you're going to see just this huge wave of innovation energy that gets it essentially what I call second order silver lining opportunities. So first order silver lining opportunities. March and April the world said we need more ppe, we need more ventilators, we need to have more specific things, toilet paper has to be produced faster, whatever.
But we have a whole set of very.
Obvious things where if you're in those spaces, the pandemic is actually good for you, But then you get the knock on effects where people say, Okay, in the longer term, consumers are probably going to care more about immunity and they're probably going to care more about wellness. What new forms of opportunities open up. You're going to have more places that are working in hybrid fashion, some people physical, some people virtual. What are the new tools that can
enable that to work effectively? And how do you create community across that? And people haven't figured this out yet, but people are working on it, and I think you're going to see some really amazing innovations that enable that to happen in a better sort of way. And then the final thing that I would say is, I would say, coming out of all of this, you have had a lot of miraculous things that have happened. In March and April. The world didn't stop moving, commerce didn't stop. Things didn't
stop shipping, logistics didn't stop. People in many places were still educated, some places not, but many places still were. And I think we will pause and reflect about the power of innovation, the power of working in dispersed ways, the power of global commerce to do some truly amazing things, and we'll say what do we need to do to make sure that the next time something like this happened and we handle it better then we handled it in
the March through June period. So I think there'll be a big moment of reflection in the world as well. So again, who knows, But those are some of the things that I see. I certainly see myself being on planes.
I mean, I've got touch would but I've got a trip plant next month to go to the United States to see some family and do some work that you know, these things aren't easy to do, and you have to in Singapore be prepared for two weeks of quarantine on the other side, but you know, they again the world lurches towards normalcy. So that's at least a few of my thoughts on the topic.
Wow, amazing, And I can't believe you are going to be on a plane potentially next month. That blows my mind. Now, my very final question for you, Scott is if people want to connect with you, read more of your work, and importantly buy a copy of Eat, Sleep, innovate, what are the best ways to do all of that.
So, of course we've got a companion website eat sleepinnovay dot com.
So go to the website.
It tells you more about the book and how to get copies of the book, et cetera. And then I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter, and I use LinkedIn more than Twitter, but LinkedIn is the best place to find me. And of course the company in asit www dot inters dot com has all the great research in writing that my colleagues are doing in addition to my work, So those would be my suggestions.
Awesome. I will link to all of that in the show notes. Scott, I've loved our chat. I always learned something new, if not many new things whenever we talk. So thank you so much for your time.
Oh, no problem, Mantha.
And the best part will be twelve months from now we can see how horrifically wrong I was about some of the predictions about the next twelve months.
We will see that's all right, Thanks Scott. That is it for today's show. If you liked it and know someone else that you think might benefit from it, why not share this episode with them? And as I mentioned at the beginning, if you're enjoying how I work, why not leave a review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this from So there's it for today and I will see you next time.