59: Unlocking the Pathway from Imagination to Implementation

have Tina Selig on the show. Tina is a Professor of the Practice and the Department of Management Science and Engineering, faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and a member at the Hasso Platner Institute of Design at Stanford School of Engineering. Her latest books are What I Wish I Knew When I was twenty, Ingenius, A Crash Course in Creativity, and Insight Out. Thanks Tina for being on the show. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much. Oh.

I love that title. That's why I repeated it. You came over with that title before you saw the movie Inside Out right. You know, it's really funny. They came at at about the same time, so I thought that's pretty interesting. We're both thinking the same way, but this sort of taking a different spin on it. Insight out, yeah,

side out. Yeah, it's not all about emotions, right, It's about lots of different cognitive process and emotions and motivations and everything that helps us increase our imagination, creativity, innovation. In fact, maybe that would be a good place to start. Is helping me to untangle all these different words. So you know, what is the difference between imagination, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurism? Right? In fact, that's absolutely the core of

that book. Inside Out. It's about trying to understand the process of going from the seeds of inspiration all the way through implementation. And I realized that there was actually a big problem that a lot of people have, and that is that they don't have a clear vocabulary for these terms. And so I decided to put a stake in the ground and come up with a set of terms and relationships and they're pretty simple and hopefully really easy to remember as well. So imagination is envisioning things

that don't exist. I mean, we do this all day long, right, I envision what I'm going to have for lunch. Okay. It allows us to function in the world. Is being able to imagine what's going to happen in the future. Creativity is applying your imagination to solve a problem. So for example, I'm hungry, I open my refrigerator and I use my ability to envision things that don't exist to

make us myself a sandwich. Innovation pushes further because that is applying my creativity to come up with a unique solution. So creative ideas are new to me or to you, but they're not new to the world. Innovative ideas are breakthrough ideas that are near the world, and then entrepreneurship that is essentially applying the innovation and scaling it and bringing it to the world. Cool. Yeah, it's a little

bit different than you know. In the scientific literature, they say over and over and over again, creativity is novelty and usefulness. Right, But let me just say something. It's actually the same. It's novel, but it's novel to you and it's useful and then it solves a problem. So I think it's actually not inconsistent. But what I really did try to do is create a framework that allowed us to show the relationship between all these stages as opposed to just having a bunch of definitions that are

completely standalone. Yeah, totally. This is what the field needs. Well the world that means is a better differentiation of this stuff. You know, like Dean Simonton's model. He argued that we should apply the same criteria we apply to the patents, like whether or not we accept patents, and that's novel, usefulness and surprise like that. For something to be creative, it has to be surprising to others. But you're saying that not necessarily at the creativity stage, as

long as it's to yourself personally, and that's good enough. Well, I think this is you brought up a very very interesting point here. People conflate the words creative and innovative, and I think it's incredibly useful to differentiate the two and basically say creative ideas those are sort of everyday creativity is solving problems in your everyday life, and innovation

is something that's new to the world. So what you're saying is that the patent office is looking at things that are surprising because those are things that are actually truly innovative that they will They're not going to patent something that's creative, They're going to patent something that's innovative. Yeah, that's exactly right. Good. Good. So let's go through each of these kinds of things, and you know, let's not

give it all away. People should read your book, but let's go through and talk a little bit about some of these specific things that are tied to each of these constructs we just talked about. So let's start with imagination. You talk in your book about the role of engagement. I love that, and you talk about how sort of passion, what a lot of ways engagement precedes vision or imagination.

Is that right? Well? What I realized that each of these stages there are attitudes and actions that are required, and I distilled it down to one representative attitude and one representative action. And in the imagination stage, it requires engaging with the world and then envisioning what might be different. People often think of doing it the other way around. They think, I'm going to envision what I want to do in the world, and then I'll engage in making

it happen. But actually, in real life, if you talk to real innovators, it starts the other way around. It starts with engagement. And one of the most important insights I had was the idea that before something is your passion, it's something you likely know nothing about, and therefore it all starts with engagement. Engagement is the master key that

opens up all of these doors. An example I give in the book, and it's a very moundane example, but it's something that hopefully everyone can relate to, is that you could be a waiter at a restaurant and every day you could just with blinders on, serve everybody their coffee. Or you could really be engaged and really paying attention, and with that acute observation, you're going to start seeing things. You're going to see opportunities that are right in front

of you. You can become an expert on customer service by exploring what days you get bigger tips than others. You could become an expert on culinary trends by looking at what types of things people are ordering and what they're not. You can look at the demographics of people at different times of the day in the restaurant. Each of these can open up the door to really interesting possibilities.

You could become a world expert in customer service, open up your own restaurant, become a consultant, write a book, make a movie all that starting with just being a waiter at a restaurant. Yeah, and you talk a lot about the interconnectingness of curiosity and engagement, right, you bet

it all starts with curiosity. And one of those things that is so sad that curiosity gets beaten out of people just going through the world, you know, asking questions that start with why you know, just like a two year old, really opens up your mind to all sorts of possibility. You have some like great quotes about curiosity in there and in your book, and you talk a lot about the importance of questioning everything. I'm really interesting.

This is toggling between being curious and exploring but also like trying things out, like you call it experimenting in your book. And you use a word in your book that I haven't come across before preto type, not prototype, but preto type. Maybe you could talk a little about what that is. Yeah. So this term was coined by a colleague of mine, Alberto Savoya, who's quite brilliant. He

has had a lot of entrepreneur experience. One he's been involved with starting companies that have been extraordinarily successful as well as those that have failed very dramatically. And he decided that he really needed to explore what was the difference between the two and realize that you can make something that's really fabulous and works really well, but it's not the right thing. The market doesn't want it, And

so he came up with the idea of prototypes. The idea is that a prototype tests whether you're doing the right thing before you test and do a prototype to see if it actually will work. So an example that he might give would be, let's say McDonald's wanted to sell max spaghetti. Well, they could go have their test kitchens, put together tons of recipes and have all sorts of

people tasted and ask if they buy it. But the simplest thing they could do is just put it on the menu in a few stores and see if people actually buy it. And so they would quickly see whether the concept would even work. That's called the false door or the facade approach to preto typing. There are lots of other tools and ways that you can do quick and dirty experiments to see if your idea has any legs. I like that, and you talk about how we can each decide the stage in which we will play out

our lives. So when we talked about prototyping or experimenting. We're not just blindly experimenting. I mean that's tied. What we choose to experiment with does in a large degree under our control and associated with our identity and our passions. Is that right? Is that? Yeah? This is really important. I've always been fascinated by the question of at what point in your life do you decide? You know, does every individual decide what stage they're going to play out

their life? Because it's the same skills that are required if you're going to be the president of your PTA or the president of the United States, right, I mean, leadership is leadership, and they're really similar skills used in

different venues, different environments. So the question is who decides that they're going to act in their local community theater or who's going to decide I want to go to Broadway And a lot of it has to do with how we identify our role in the universe, and it's something that we get to choose, and I think it's something that should be an active process where people actually think about it and decide what stage in the world

they want to play out their life. I love that, you know, I'm really a big fan of like the humanistic approaches from like the fifties and sixties and seventies, and getting in touch with your identity in a very deep way that's not influenced by external environment and everything. Do you think today like workers, because you do a lot of work in business contexts, so you know so much about that. Do you see a lot of workers

kind of losing their identity in their workplace. One of the things that I tell people all the time is that when you get a job, you are not getting that job, you're getting the keys to the building. But it's really really true, and people make a mistake of thinking that the job they have is just the things

that have been assigned to them. And I notice with the people who work for me or with me, that there are those people who define themselves very clearly by the job they've been given, and other by the possibilities that exist. And the people who define themselves by the possibilities that exist in that environment are the ones who keep growing and being given more responsibilities, the ones who

get promoted. And so it's really important when you go into any new environment to imagine where it could take you. I tell a story the book about my current job at Stanford. As you mentioned, I run the Technology Ventures program.

Many hats as well, though I do, but it's really interesting when I first I've been there at Stanford now sixteen years, and when I first was looking for a job and I printed out the job description for the job I ended up taking, I initially crumbled it up and put in the garbage because it was much too junior. You know, I had a PhD, I lot a work experience. This was a very junior job, sort of an junior administrator.

But the day after I took it out of the garbage and I flattened it out, and I said, you know, there's something in here. So I decided to apply, even though it didn't seem like it was exactly right level for me. But I met all these people. I had eleven interviews, and I met all the people who were related to this organization, and I said, Wow, there's something in here. I want to work with these people on

this problem of teaching entrepreneurship to engineers. And I took the job, and within one year I became the executive director.

The next year I became the director, and several years later they made me a real professor, And the fact is this never would have happened had I not taken that job and basically put my foot in the door, you know, and seeing the possibilities, and I really encourage other people to do the same, to think of the possibilities as opposed to the limitations of the role they're in.

Love that, I mean, that's very much tied to all these other kinds of constructs that we study in psychologic inspiration and all and kind of all these things which really have to do kind of transcending your present possibilities right in a way, absolutely, And you know, we create our future every single day, right. I mean I remember growing up and father used to always say, I don't know if you remember this expression that was used all the time, was you know, today's the first day of

the rest of your life. And you know, I don't know if you remember that. I used to used to be people said all the time, today is the first day of the rest of your life, and that you have to remember that that you know, imagine you're starting today, what are the possibilities in front of you? And a lot of people just get anchored by their past as opposed to really drawn towards the future. Yeah, I love that.

My colleague Martin Selgen and here at Penn talks about being called into the future a lot, you know, and how great creative geniuses kind of report that they feel like they're being called into the future in some way. Yeah, I love that. And you talk about hauling in your book, so you do talk about and a purpose and these things kind of being different than just taking a job just for these external reasons. Well, you know, it's interesting in can I just can I go down on that

anything you want to talk about? Okay, great, So you know I talk about this extensively in my book What I Wish I knew when I was twenty about the fact that people often draw a then diagram of you know, your career, your passions, and your interests. I think it's not a then diagram where there are three sort of overlapping circles. I think it's actually more like a bullseye.

And so you have an outer circle your passions, the next one in is your skills, and the next one in is the market, and so things that are in the outside. Your goal is to get something in the middle of the bill's eye. That's the bulls eye. That is the market your skills and your passions. But a lot of people get confused. They think, well, I'm passionate and interested, there's no market for that for what I'm doing. And you go, well, great, that's a wonderful hobby. It's

great to have hobbies. And there are other people who live in the world where they put aside their passions and they focus on their skills in the market. Well, that's just a job. So but you really want to figure out the place where the three of them intersect, where it's something you're really excited about, you're really good at, and there's actually a market for it, and that's you know,

that's really your callity. I like that. So you talk about something called reframing and why that's important for creativity. Can you talk a little bit more about what we bring back how people can actually reframe themselves. You're right, framing and reframing is one of the most powerful skills that you can have in your life. We so often look at the world through a very specific frame and don't see the possibilities outside. I'll give you an example.

Every single problem you solve when you ask the question, the answer is actually baked into the question. For example, I could say, we're going to plan a birthday party for you, and we're going to brainstorm about a birthday party. But if we change one word in that prompt to planning a birthday celebration, all of a sudden, we've opened up the frame of possibilities. And let's say instead of that question we asked what's the best way to mark your birthday? We've opened it up even further, and we

don't often question the questions we ask. One of my favorite quotes on this subject comes from Albert Einstein, who said, if I had a daunting problem to solve, and I have one hour to solve it, and my life ended upon the solution, I'd spend the first fifty five minutes framing the problem, because once I determine the right question to ask, the answer would become obvious. And this is true in all aspects of our life. I mean, think about it. I'm looking at my window here, looking at

the bay bridge. You know, someone could say, hey, Tina, will you go redesign a new bridge? We need a new bridge to go across the bay. Well, you could run off and do that, or you could come back and say, why do you need a bridge in the first place. You know, if my goal is to get to the other side of the bay, how many ways are there to do that? You know, there's so many other ways to get across, and so you could also say, well,

why do you need to get across? So each of these questions opens up the frame and gives you lots of other really interesting ways to look at the problems you're solving. Great, and you can also reframe your own existence, right Like if you used to think yourself is just a total loser, for instance, you know kind of and then in every situation that there's kind of failure, you say, oh, it's because I'm a loser. You can also reframe your

You can do cognitive reframing, right you bet. In fact, I think that's one of the most critical things you can do. You know, I do this myself, and I'm hesitating because it's somewhat personal. Is that, you know, I get fearful of things. I'm afraid of things like getting sick when I'm traveling, and I try to then reframe it, figure out, Okay, how do I look at this more as an adventure as opposed to something that's scary. You know,

that would be sort of an example. But if you to any person, any person, you know there are things that hold them back, and you're absolutely right. You can use the framing and reframing tool to even look at your own life from very different perspectives. In tact, you can say, you know, you were talking about someone says they're a loser. Well maybe they go, you know what, I'm going to be someone who's overcome great obstacles. I want my story, but one of the what's the story

I want to tell? And in fact, in my book inside Out there exercizes at the end of every chapter and it starts out of the book where you're asked to write a letter to yourself and then you keep revisiting the letter throughout the book at various stages. And with the new tools that you get, have new ways of framing the way you see yourself and how you want to engage with the world. Yeah, I found that

really helpful. And you talked about you have also little tiny things that you could anyone could just do to like warn to write, or brush your teeth with your non dominant hand, you know, And it's cool, there's like, you know, there's a lot of this research coming out showing that any new and unusual experience can really increase your cognitive flexibility, like buttering your toast in a different way, or I like to moon walk on the way to work or something like that. Do you do you? I

bet you get lots of interesting looks. I get interesting looks no matter what I do. I don't know why. I think your point is a good one. Getting out of your comfort zone doing things that you haven't done before. You know, it could be as simple as, you know, brushing your teeth when your non dominant hand, or taking

a new route to work. These might seem mundane, but the fact is if it forces you to pay attention and to be very mindful, and it awakens your brain every single day, yep, absolutely awakens and as you say, retrains right. Yep. So what can managers do to motivate their employees? Yeah, there are tons of things that people

can do in a work setting. I spend a lot of time in my book in Genius talking about this, talking about habitat and the levers that people have in organizations to unlock the creativity of the people they work with. The rules there rewards, they're incentives, they're the team dynamics, there's physical space. All of these things have a very dramatic effect on how we behave You know, when you walk into any setting, you just look into the room. You look in and you know what type of behavior

is expected there. Right when you go into an auditorium and take your seat, you know what you're expected to do. You're supposed to sit there quietly. When you walk into a playground, you know what you're supposed to do there. So the physical space in an office is a great messaging and it really is your responsibility as a manager to create a space that communicates the type of behavior you want people to have. Yeah, and you've worked with a lot of so you've seen this stuff and it's

not just theory. You know, you've gone and you've consulted with companies, right, Yes, And it's fascinating to me to see how different different companies are in terms of the types of environments that they create. One is, of course, the physical space, but the rules, the rewards, the incentives. What happens if someone is a big idea and it doesn't work. You know, if you're in an environment where if you have a big idea and you try it

and doesn't work and you get punished. Everybody else sees that and they go, WHOA, I'm not going to try anything new. I'm just going to you know, I'm just going to color within the lines. I'm not going to go outside because I don't want that to happen to me. But if you see that people have big ideas and it didn't work out and they are celebrated for trying something bold, then you're more willing to do it yourself

as well. Absolutely. Yeah. So why aren't things like that, you know, why are there structures and managers and things that really don't support creativity? Well, I think a lot of people don't think about it that way. They are more worried about protecting themselves from failure than looking at the upside of trying something new. And the thing that I've found, and I'm going to guess that you agree with me on this, is that most people are hungry

for opportunities to be created. It is something that is so part of who we are. It's fascinating me. I do teach at the Design Institute, the Stanford d School, and the space, the physical space there is quite interesting and inviting, and it's very clear that this is a place where creativity is welcome. And people come into the space and they go, oh, my gosh, I would love to take a class here. Haven't met a professor, they haven't taken a class, they haven't looked looked at the

courses that are offered. They just walk into the space and they say, wow, this feels so comfortable. But you know what, it feels like a kindergarten classroom. It feels very very much like a place that you're going to be invited to do things that are very creative. So you talk a lot about how you do think creativity is a skill that we can all learn. It's obviously

not a skill. I mean, your book is about multiple skills, and you think any of these things we can learn mostly probably by applying them in their own life on a daily basis, like building it up as a habit. Right. It's such a fascinating question is that nobody asks can you teach math? Nobody asks can you teach history, No one asks can you teach science. No one even asks if you can teach music, And yet people always ask can you teach creativity or can you teach innovation or

can you teach entrepreneurship? And I truly believe it's because we haven't had a clear framework and clear set of definitions. And that's what I've been trying to address, is trying to put together a clear framework that we can all share, we can all learn, we can master, and we can teach to others. Certainly done that. Yeah, so you worked

with some of the some businesses, best and brightest. Do you feel comfortable giving me some examples of some people you think are the most imagined people that you've had the opportunity to work with and what made them so imagining. The thing that is fascinating to me is that the people who are the most imaginative I work with are the students at Stanford. They are so hungry to learn these skills and really bring their best work to these classes.

In addition, I've been working with a very unusual group of people recently who has totally blown my socks up. I've been working not with corporate executives, but with prisoners at sam Quentin State Prison. I'm working on with a program called the Last Mile that teaches entrepreneurship to a

select group of men who are in the prison. And these are guys, many of them who've been in prison for over twenty years, and the goal is to teach them entrepreneurial skills so that when they do get out, they're prepared to essentially, you know, take care of themselves, because it's going to be very difficult for them to find a job with someone else. And I have never worked with a group of people who are more hungry

to learn, more dedicated and inspiring. In fact, I worked on a project this last quarter with my students where the students did a project on redesigning the experience of going from prison to freedom. And this was one of the most meaningful projects they have ever worked on. They essentially took the things we learned in our class on creativity and they went up to San Quentin and taught

it themselves. They taught it to the men, and they got a chance to meet with other all to people in the ecosystem, you know, the men who are in prison, people who have been released, parole officers, mentors in the Last Mile program, and they came up with really remark warkly interesting insights on how to redesign that experience. So what they had to do is they had to spend a bunch of time framing the problem they were going

to solve. Remember we started this discussion about reframing. They spent a bunch of time framing the problem that they really wanted to solve. For some of them, that was finding a job. For others, it was how do you integrate into society when you've been gone so long you know everything has changed in twenty years, or how to connect with your family again when you've been gone. And then they have to generate at least one hundred solutions.

Now why one hundred solutions? They've leave one hundred? Yes, I know first they think it's a typo, but I say no, because the first solutions are going to be incremental. Those are going to be the creative solutions, not the innovative ones, not the ones that are really breakthrough. And then once they come up with solutions, they have to do the preto types. Remember we talked about the quick examples.

They had to do prototypes to test their concepts, and then they had to share them in a compelling story. And I spend a lot of time in the class teaching storytelling skills, because once you have a great idea, you're not going to get other people to become excited about it unless you can tell a really compelling story that really brings it to life. And they make videos,

they make sure videos they capture their ideas. So I have to tell you know that this was meaningful not just for the students, but of course also for the men and zan Quentin of course. Yeah, so what a great exam practical example of how imagination can help people of all different varieties in the life's circumstances. That's wonderful. So right, So that was a great example of how in your book to talk about how making things happen,

it begins by imagining what you hope to accomplish. You also mentioning really interesting about how looking at something briefly doesn't mean you're really seeing it. Can you just explain a little what it means to really see something? Right, So that goes back to the beginning to engagement. We so often go through life with blinders on and we're

not really paying attention. Paying attention is a very very active process, and by paying attention to everything in our midst you open up the possibility of seeing problems that need to get solved, solutions that are right in front of you, and it's the great way to start and also to end the invention cycle. You get to the end,

and the end leads you back to the beginning. You know, once you've inspired other people, you have to now pay attention to how your ideas have reached the world, and that observation leads you to more insights, more ideas, and certainly more Entrepreneurship Easier said than done right, Well, it takes practice, you know, just like anything else right. I mean, playing the piano is easier said than done right. You know,

building a rocket is easier said than done. That. This is not easy stuff, but you know what, it's so worth it because entrepreneurship is enormous power in our community. It allows us to identify problems, to leverage limited resources, and to make things happen. And with these skills, the world becomes a place that is opportunity rich, full of possibilities, and people who learn these skills have the confidence to solve the problems in their everyday life and the big

problems at face the world. Oh thanks for inspiring me and everyone listening to this. I encourage people to for sure buy your book and buy all your books, but particularly Insight Out, which is relevant to what you're just talking about, because you do give a lot more tips and strategies for enhancing this important aspect of humanity. So thank you for all the great work you do, Tina, and for being on the show. Thank you so much for including me, it was my pleasure. Thanks for listening

to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought for booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or hear past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com. Don't