Jonah Sachs || Unsafe Thinking

we have Jonah Sachs on the podcast. Jonah is an author, speaker, storyteller, designer, and entrepreneur. He's the author of Winning the Story Wars, Why those who tell and live the best stories will rule the Future, and most recently, Unsafe Thinking. How to be nimble and bold when you need it most. Thanks for chatting with me today, Jonah. Yeah, thanks, Scott, it's great to be here. Cool. We got some mutual interest, don't we. Yeah, definitely. Your last book, Wired to Create

was a big inspiration for me in writing this book. So, oh well, I didn't know that. Yeah, that's great. I've bodored to hear that. Yeah, it's a great book that you wrote. And you know, a lot of like I said, a lot of mutual topics that we're interested in. So the thing with that is it's always difficult to be like, where do I start, you know, when you have like so many topics that are interesting, but I'll start with It's in the Tyler book Safe Thinking, right, So what

is the safe thinking cycle? So the safe thinking cycle is this idea that we get into this place with a changing world in which we get a certain amount of threat awareness no matter what we do. If we're being unsuccessful in our work, we start to get nervous that there's you know, threats to our well being. But even if we reach high levels of success, you know, what we were doing yesterday probably isn't going to be

working tomorrow. So how do we respond to that? Threat awareness is the beginning of the safe thinking cycle, And of course we're programmed by evolution and biology to respond to threat awareness with you know a certain amount of anxiety, fear, and back on the savannah of the African planes, for our earliest ancestors, we would greet that fear by narrowing our thinking and we would you know, our vision would get very acute, but our peripheral processing would slow down

so that we could run or fight now. The more that we think in stereotypical ways when creativity is needed, of course, the more threat awareness we're going to find. So we get nervous, we start to think we got to change, but then our change kind of neurons start to shut down and we start to think, we just got to do something quickly. We got to do what worked last time. We got to do what someone else

is doing that's working. You know, we face a novel challenge with stereotypical thinking as we're programmed to do, and so we you know, we greet change with I'll do what work for somebody else. I'll do it worked last time. I'll do what works what I can do quickly and get it over with. And that doesn't allow us to actually open up and find the novel creative solutions that we need, leading to more threat awareness, because we're still sinking deeper and deeper into the problem that we originally

faced because we don't have new creative thinking. And so that cycle can just keep going and going. We keep making that safest, most obvious choice, and the pressure keeps rising and we're not breaking out. And that is a big thing I'm exploring in the book is how do you actually break out of that cycle as a pressure gets more and more because you're not changing. Yeah, that's great. And do you go in and consult for companies and

help them break out? Like do you show up You're like, I'm going to help you all break out today, you know, like, do you inspire them? I bet you do, right. Yeah. So I started my career seventeen eighteen years ago doing social change communications on the internet, so you know, earliest viral videos, social change viral videos. I was doing for

environmental groups and for human rights groups. And I found that while creating a great piece of media could sort of change an organization, really the work of helping to tell a better story was really about looking at you know, what are we doing, what are we stuck in? And why aren't we making the social change that we want to make? How do we actually start to change ourselves

in our organization? So I started drifting further further away from just doing communications into you know, how to open up the creativity of an organization. So, yeah, I'm doing a lot of that work. Now. You know, this is a bit of a tangent, but you're just having me thinking, you know, there's some people that like social change, that phrase has that almost like insertain circles, you know, in the political sphere, has become like a negative phrase. What's

up with that? Like, what do you think is going on in the cultural trends of because there's a huge like cultural we're going on. People even like say, you know, there was a time when saying cultural change was like a wonderful, beautiful, you know thing, and then if you

don't want to get into that, that's fine. Yeah. No, I mean I think we live in I think we live in a pretty cynical time where you know, yeah, that's a good point if you if you if you came on my show and you're like, hi, my name is Joana, I'm a social justice warrior, I'd be like, okay, yeah, No, I mean it's I think that we live in a time where sort of every term becomes contested, right, and every intention gets questioned and can be turned against us.

I think the idea of social change really though, is about people who are trying to devote their careers and their time to bringing their values out into the world, and that's kind of the heart of democracy. So I would say, you know, hopefully that never goes out of style for people to be out in the public square fighting for what they believe in, whether it's what I believe in or something else. I think we need to

keep that going, so I'm not backing away from it. Yeah, so what role does intuition play in this creative process I'm trying to link? You know, you do talk about intuition, but also how it can lead to bias thinking. You know,

it's not always bad as noways good? Right, yeah, yeah, So I started looking into actually started by looking into counterintuition because I was thinking, so much creativity comes from ideas that on the surface seemed you know, crazy, just kind of against the grain and make no sense from an intuitive perspective. But oftentimes what's intuitive can be just sort of conventional wisdom disguised inside of our own brains, like oh no, no one would ever get into a

stranger's car and use it as a taxi. That's not safe. That's you know, Well, it turns out it's the most intuitive way now of traveling. But it takes someone seeing that. You don't just dismiss every idea that runs counter to

the way we currently do things. To bring an idea like that forth, So I started looking into you all the flaws of intuition, and certainly, you know, as Daniel Conneman says and many others, there's this you know, fast processing that instantly, you know, looks at patterns and dismisses ideas and puts things in boxes. And that could be very dangerous. Right. It helps us process the world, but also can lead to racial bias, gender bias, or just as general creative bias that keeps us locked in that

sort of safe thinking. But like so many other things that's discovered in this book, you can't live without intuition too, and you can't be creative without intuition. So it's not I wanted to write a chapter about how bad intuition was, but you know, wound up running three chapters, one all about the amazing subconscious processing power of intuition. Right, to be creative, you need to spot patterns that others aren't seeing. And our conscious mind, only you know, takes in a

small percentage of what we perceive. But our subconscious mind is constantly processing and pattern matching two. And then every once in a while it'll shoot a aha moment up to the surface and we get this rush often through our body of feeling in our body. Wow, that's a great idea. We can't just dismiss those things and say we're gonna rely totally on data here. We're not gonna listen to his intuition. We're not going to listen to John because he doesn't have any way to justify it

just coming from his intuition. We actually should put intuition at the front of our consideration when we're looking at new ideas, but we also do need to analyze it and see is this true intuition, is this this true pattern matching, or is this conventional wisdom or bias disguised as intuition. I spoke to Robin Hogarth, who's one of the main most foremost researchers on intuition, and he basically told me that, you know, intuition are brilliant ideas that

need to be deeply interrogated, in questioned. And I thought that that was, you know, probably about the right way to look at it. They're not always brilliant ideas though, right right right, My intuition sucks. Yeah, yes, of course. So I did research on Silicon Valley investors, who are people who are paid millions of dollars, essentially for their brilliant intuition, and researchers who have talked to them find that they rely more intuition than they do on analysis.

But their intuition is constantly steering them away from investments in female entrepreneurs who tend to actually outperform the market or their male counterparts. They get like a thirty fourth of the amount of investment because the intuition says, this woman doesn't look like someone we invested in before, This doesn't match the pattern. But the pattern is all wrong.

And so even in these places where intuition is vaunted, and you know, these are the best intuitions in the world, they can easily get polluted and opportunities missed because of bias. That's really interesting. Are you aware of all the controversies surrounding the IAT. You know, some of these in the field trying to measure and pus it biases, and you know, criticisms of those measures as and then questions about what is it really measuring? Is it measuring are we consciously

racist or biased? Or we just you know, we've soaked up the cultural norms at the subconscious level, and you know, and there's no such thing as like, can your unconscious be sexist? You're just sexist if you're if you act sexist, right or no? Can you what do you think? It's an interesting question, though, isn't it. Yeah, it is an interesting question. I guess. No, your subconscious doesn't have a

free will. I guess if that's the question, And like, that doesn't really impact you can't be responsible for your subconscious in a way, although I saw some interesting research from people who have been trying to educate their intuition. Essentially, like if you put up on your screen, some Harvard researchers that were putting up on their screen savers kind of counter stereotypical images, just like when they looked at their screen, they would see a you know, someone who

doesn't belong in that role by stereotype. And by being confronted with images that are counter stereotypical every day, for hours every day, apparently that help to educate their underlying biases. So I think if you can expose yourself to things that counter your biases, you can re educate your intuition. And so in those ways, we can be responsible for our subconscious thinking. If we keep ourselves in bubbles and constantly locked away. You have to take responsibility when our

subconscience become more and more biased. So I actually, you know, know that so much research is based on it, but I hadn't been aware of new controversies maybe around it. There's kind of a lot of conversations now about there is are these measures reliable? Are these measures valid? Were they predicting? You know a lot of them don't necessarily predict explicit racism or explicit you know. Yeah, So then the question is like, if you're not explicitly doing it,

like are you racist? You know? Are your thoughts bad in themselves? Can you be a bad person if you just have bad thoughts in your life but you do wonderful things? Isn't that an interesting question? I think it's an interesting question. We can't impact our automatic thinking in a sense with new experiences, and so that's maybe the place where we can cut some control. Yeah, so that's

a good point. And you know, I've always been interested with I really like the dual process model of cognition, you know, and the Seamer Epstein's that's my favorite to out of all the thousand dual process models that exist in the field. The thing that's interesting about that, and also Keith Stanovich's dual process theory is that you can separate out evolutionarily driven intuitions from like our learned intuitions throughout our own lifespan. And that's interesting to think that

we have all sorts of different we have intuitions. We're being pulled in so many ways we don't even know consciously realize. Yeah, we pulled by these evolution drives, are also pulled by the things that, like our parents said to us when we were younger, you know that we don't want to be we don't want to be pulled by that anymore. So it's interesting, like how do you separate all these things? But the point you're making, which is excellent, you know, really is the more conscious we

can become of all this, the better. Right. Yeah. I spoke to Philip Tetlock, who's an expert on experts, and you know, he was talking about how wrong experts often are and how they're worse than dark throwing monkeys that you know, at predicting the future. But when I asked him to kind of wrap up everything we were talking about and you know, what do you do about this? He just said the most valuable thing you can do

is think about how you're thinking. Whatever kind of metacognition you can put on your own thought processes, is time really well spent? And I thought that was a really nice wrap up. That we can't break free of all of our flawed thinking and of all of our human flaws. But if we do think about and observe the way that we think and spend time watching ourselves think, we get smarter. That. I really like that advice. Yeah, that's why meditation is so popular these days, you know, as

one technique to do that. Yeah, So how can you challenge and change yourself when you need it most. It's not a easy question, is it. It's definitely not a one size, fit's all solution on that one, But I looked at it a couple different ways. Essentially, I think there are many many ways that we can have strength with our thinking. You know, some people are very have learned to rely on their intuition, for instance. Other people

have learned to rely on analysis. Some people are really invested in expert thinking, while other people are more sort of dilettants and like to explore broadly. Some people spend huge amount of time outside their comfort zone and never really focus enough on, you know, deliberate practice what they're really need to get good at. And what I push in the book is this idea that kind of whole brain thinking and whole brain behavior is really what's powerful.

So if there are things that you've left behind and say I'm just not good at X, Y and Z, and you spend all your time chewing away on the things that you're really good at, the time spent outside of your area of expertise, outside of your comfort zone, with people that you don't like to associate with or don't agree with in uncomfortable situations, that time is the highest growth potential time, And so finding how to use

those parts of yourself. In the book looks at many of those different pieces, so some parts will resonate with some readers more than others, I think, But how do you dip your toes into your weaknesses and focus on what you're not good at? That is the most direct way of starting to break those habits and ruts and patterns. This idea of deliberate practice, by the way, which may be familiar with, is you know, the best musicians in the world don't practice longer than other positions and they

don't do different exercises. But what they do do is they stay on the parts of the music that they are the worst at and they really pick away at that until they get good at it, while other people tend to really enjoy doing what they're best at, and

that seems to be what pulls them apart. And so that's one of the things I really look at is sort of how do you create those uncomfortable situations and enjoy getting outside of your routines and patterns, which is hard because the human brain is definitely programmed to enjoy

being in pattern and routine. And then the other thing, you know, I relied and spoke with Teresa Mobula at Harvard, who I know, you know, and she really talks about the context of creativity being very important too, that it's not just about you being creative, it's about you know, where are you, Are you around the right kinds of people, are you in the right processes? What's the environment? And how do you change that environment to unlock your own creativity?

Because I think there is this feeling of like it's a innate talent and skill and something we need to draw forth, but in fact, sometimes changing our collaborators, Our situation helps it birth burst out of us. Now, the word creativity doesn't appear in your book title whatsoever, But this is fundamentally a book about creativity and organizations and entrepreneurs. Anyone you know who wants to be creative? Would these some of these principles not apply? You always said there's

no one size fits all. Are there situations where some of these principles like wouldn't apply if you have to like meet a deadline tomorrow and your client doesn't really doesn't want you to be creative? Yeah, definitely. I mean so, I guess there's two things, you know. I think Adam Grant spoke about it really well in Originals where he talks about that portfolio of risk. I think he calls it, you know, this idea that we can't be on that creative edge at all times. It's totally exhausting and it's

not appropriate. And nobody really wants to be around the guy who wants to break everything all the time. So so, in some ways, the title, you know, with the exploding light bulb on the cover, is maybe a little bit misleading in that I'm not saying that you need to be this of like you know, provocateur at all times. So we do need to think about when we want to push risk. But I think we all know in our lives that there are times where like I need to get out of this pattern, I need to change this,

and then we fail to do it. This is a book about really when to do that and how to do it. And then you know John Cleese, who's a favorite of mine from Money Python. He talks about the opening. He's wonderful, he's hilarious and brilliant, and he talks about the open enclosed mode, which I know you wrote about something quite similar about this idea that there are times in the creative process where we need to go wide and really get out and just get as many ideas

and unusual collaborations and break expectations. And then there are times where we just need to buckle down and focus and we don't need to be questioning again and don't need to be like opening up Pandora's box at all times. And to really know where you are in the creative process and to stay in creative flow, you need to sort of be able to map and say, you know, now is time to push ourselves to the edge. It's time for intrinsic motivation. Is time for play, and now

it's time for execution. It's time to focus on extrinsic motivation. It's time to dive deeply and execute. And then we're going to commit to this idea and then we'll test it and go back to the creative mode again if we need to. So understanding where you are and this is not just creativity for creativity's sake, I think it's helpful.

One thing about like old style books about creativity that I don't like, you know, earlier generation is profiling these creative geniuses and being like, look at this amazing creative genius and how did they do it? In a way that sort of takes away from the reality of what we have to do every day, this iconoclass. So this is I know that sort of the part of a

new generation of creative books. I creativity books. I think that trying to make it more accessible to everyday people and not just look at Steve Jobs and how he did what he did. So are you referring to like Frank Baron's books or what are some old school ones you're referring to? Well, how old are we talking? Well?

You know, there's like a you know, I think maybe ten years back, but yeah, this is sort of like a lot of portraits of creativity, portraits of great artists, and you know there's some amazing books like that as well, but that sort of use these case studies that feel inaccessible, I guess in a sense. And I know that I try to use a bunch of case studies that it's

kind of everyday people who've done extraordinary things. And so yeah, so there are these different phases of the creative process, and I want I want to turn that idea, and I think it's really important to keep that in mind. And then you talk about the collaboration. So when there's the part of the creative process where you need to collaborate with others, what's the effect of working collaborating with people who only share your values. I love working with

people who only share my values. It's very fun, no, I know. I mean I started a creative agency based on values, and I had all kinds of litmus tests about who I wanted to have in the company. And you know that's the same as like Google, you know, hiring for culture. We see it. It's accepted as this sort of are you going to fit in, are you going to make are you going to add to the ease and comfort of this organization so that we can

get our work done effectively. And the problem with that is, you know that creates, it reinforces by us thinking it makes everybody feel good on the team, but they're spending more time making each other feel good and happy and not challenging each other. You know, these experiments to find that he hand picked teams of experts who share experience and perspectives underperform on creativity tasks. You know, random groups

of beginners. Because these random groups are beginners just see the world totally differently, and so new and novel ideas can come forth. But there's something kind of even deeper, I think, which is that when we enforce strict moral codes, it's okay to talk about this, it's not okay to talk about that. This is in bounds, this is out of bounds. We just shut down so many different avenues for exploration. So I profile a pastor in the book who was trying to fight crime in his neighborhood and

stop violence in his neighborhood. And it was when he was working with the at risk youth, he wasn't getting anywhere. But when he was working with the kids, when he stepped out and started hanging out with the kids who were actually committing the crimes that you know, the murderer

on his block, all these ideas started bursting forth. And he was part of the Boston miracle that saw you know, a sixty six percent drop and in Boston in murders because he actually started looking for creative solutions with the enemy.

And so I just think that organizations that are trying to get too comfortable and too safe by having people who don't rock the boat at all, create huge problems, and that we all need to sort of stop thinking that we'll be polluted by hanging out with people who don't share our values and start believing we don't need to change their minds, they don't need to change ours. To both get more creative just by being exposed to each other. So we should rellaborate with our enemies, I think.

So I think we can. It's uncomfortable, but we can, and and I've found there's a it's really hard to do that online actually, So there's some interesting experiments that just show that people just get further entrenched in their thinking when exposed to other people's to counter thinking online, but face to face, we are much more likely to learn when we encounter another human being and can't reconcile. Oh this p it's pleasant and nice and we're having

a good conversation. That allows us to open up to new ideas in a way that watching, you know, ranting on a message board does not at all. It just that further entrenches us in our thinking. Cool. So we talked about collaboration and I want to talk about motivation a little bit. How do you stay motivated? Are there any tips you know that you talk about in your book how to stay motivated when changing habits is so hard? That seems to be kind of the default state is

not wanting to change your habits. Yeah, So, you know, the thing that I kind of found to the most interesting about motivation is we think a lot about the content of what we're doing. Is this thing inherently motivating? Do I want to do this thing? Does this align with my deepest life purpose? And if yes, we'll be motivated, and if no, we won't be motivated. So we need to keep looking for that thing that turns us on. But creativity is a grind A lot of times, building

anything new and special doesn't always feel good. And even if we are aligned to our deepest life purpose, does that mean that we're going to stay energized and often know through all the failure and setbacks. And yet people do things all the time that are not inherently motivating at all, Like they play video games and they grind away for hours and hours with complete focus without sort of stepping back and asking why it has nothing to do with their life's purpose, but they're so motivated to

beat it. And so that has to do with you know, in many ways, what you know flow theory tells us, which is kind of what I based. You know, a lot of people talk about I base some of my thinking on is that if you have that right mix of challenge and skill, and the challenge is just beyond your skill level, that brings forth a ton of motivation, and that brings forth excitement and play. And that's why video games are just inherently so addictive and fun. They

just keep us just beyond our skill level. So instead of stepping back and asking all the time, do I want to do this? Does this align with what I'm most meant to do. Once we've committed to something, the most important thing to step back and say, how are my skills right now match to this challenge? And do I need to sort of tune up my skills or bring in other people to add to that motivation so we can get up to that level we need to be or do I need to tune down the challenge

or tune up the challenge? And working at that level of more, how do I get into sort of creative flow by being well matched for the challenge I'm facing is more important in some ways than questioning the content of what we're doing all the time. So, you know, I give kind of a lot of tips for how to question whether you or your team are in a state of flow when you're trying to be creative, and how to add in or subtract some of that challenge

so that you get to that right place. And so it's a little bit of a twist I think on the usual, you know, declare your purpose statement and then maniacally follow it, which I think is a little misguided. Times. Yeah, I feel your brother, but think that in the field, there's this debate, another debate between what is the difference or similarities between flow and the wert practice, because they seem to be almost opposite things, or are they not?

You know, Angel Ducker talks about this debate in her book Grit. You know is like, you know, when you're in the full state, you're not deliberately consciously trying to push beyond your comfort zone. You're kind of in the flow. That's the whole, that's the word flow. Yeah, all right, Now you're asking me to definitely weigh in with some of the true experts in the field and the degrees.

So I will do so very cautiously. But I respect the way that I the way that I understand it is that we engage in deliberate Deliberate practice doesn't necessarily put us in flow. In fact, it can be horribly difficult. We aren't experiencing flow at that time, but we do deliberate practice so that we can return to flow when we are performing our creative work. So I'm trying to get something done. I hit a wall. I feel that motivation flagging. It's no fun anymore. I want to put

it aside, and I don't know why. And I realize, actually I don't know how to do this thing, or I don't have the resources that I need to do this thing. So I'm just grinding and bang in my head against it. What happens if I step back and yes, it's going to slow down the project, it's going to slow down my performance. I step back and I go and learn that thing. I work on that thing. That's where the deliberate practice comes in. Now I'm a little bit better at it. Now I come back at it,

and oh I can do it. You know, video games the same way, right Like, I'm trying to beat this boss and I can't. I need to go back and get the right tools. And that may be not as fun, but I go get the right weapon. Now I come back and I fight. It's a sort of similar practice with building something, which is, you know, step away, learn, come back, return to flow easier so than done. But that's that's how i'd see them together. I don't see us getting into flow in deliberate practice. But the truth,

the researchers mean no more than I do. Well, thank you. I appreciate your perspective. You know, they're both creally important. We can agree on that. Yeah, So why can anxiety be a fuel for creativity? You know, we've talked about why anxiety sucks. Right, But like so when I was looking at this safe thinking cycle, I thought, okay, so threat awareness leads anxiety, which leads to stereotypical thinking, how do we avoid feeling anxiety? How do we get out

of that? And in the research that I looked at, it was like, you can't actually avoid feeling anxiety. And the more that you try to steel yourself against feeling anxiety, the more anxiety you're likely to feel. Right Like, when you push against a natural response, you're going to feel that response even more deeply. So instead of thinking how do I stay away from and guard against feelings of anxiety, is how do I reframe a feeling of anxiety? What do I do when I'm told, uh oh, this doesn't

feel good, this feels frightening? How do I respond to that? And so a lot of the research I looked at said, you know, we have that opportunity to reframe to if we tell ourselves I've never done anything creative without feeling anxiety, Anxiety may be a sign that I am pushing to that edge of the known. Anxiety may be a sign that I'm taking a risk, and risk is an inherent

part of building something new. We can actually say I'm want to move towards that anxious experience, not a way, it's not really a threat to my well being and my safety. It's just a sign that I'm pushing into the unknown. And that kind of self talk, while sounding very simple, was pretty common to the you know, fifty to sixty entrepreneurs that I talked to, who all said, yeah, I know an idea is not going to be good

if I feel comfortable the whole time through. And so yeah, starting to think about when I feel anxious tell myself that that is fuel or a sign that creativity is emerging can have a profound impact. Although of course it takes practice. It's not you know, a single in a day you're suddenly moving towards anxiety. But it's an important piece of the puzzle. Oh my gosh, does it take practice. I deliberately practice that one every day of my life.

How do you do it? You know, through meditation, through changing my automatic pattern. A lot of what you're talking about, brother, I don't know. I don't keep calling you brother, but you know I'm in that mood, I guess right now. But you know, a lot of what you're talking about today. You know, it's yeah, you do. You gotta keep practicing it. You can so easily revert back to the default, right, it's so easy too. To think anxious is easy totally.

And I think, I mean you probably know this from meditation, that being kind and gentle with ourselves when we do fall back into our patterns, just like in meditation, if you start thinking, you don't berate yourself, you you know, pull yourself gently back to to focus. I think that's pretty critical as well, that we need to sort of understand that the default state is automatic thinking and and patterned behavior, and except that we're going to be doing

that probably for the rest of our lives. But if we can bring those patterns just a little bit, we can open up new possibilities. And investing the time and thinking into doing that is really well worth it. Greed very much agreed. So let's talk about identity. Then we talked about values. What's difference between values and identity, first of all, because you do talk about identity separately as well. Yeah,

so I've got really interested in this. Some of the research that said, you know, if you say I plan to vote, I'm going to vote in this election versus I am going to be a voter in this next election. When you say I'm going to be a voter, I am a voter. We then take on that identity and the action that goes with it becomes so much more important that we're much more likely to actually do it.

Just getting someone to say I plan to be a voter will vastly increase the likelihood that they will vote in the next election of versus I plan to vote. Because taking a commitment to take an action that doesn't tie to who we think we are is really different than an action that we do because of course someone like me would do this. We're always doing things to match our actions to who we think we are. It's kind of a primal force within us, so we take on.

If we start to take on that identity of I am an unsafe thinker, then suddenly unsafe ideas become attractive as opposed to just frightening. And so it's a little bit different than value is. To say you know, I care about X, Y and Z puts us a little bit of a remove, you know. But if you say you know, I'm someone who fights for X, Y and Z, that tends to give us a a little bit more

of that boost of motivation to actually do it. And so at the end of the book, I really talk about my own journey of asking in the context of the context of my company, and a point I got to in my career, you know, what would an unsafe thinker do in this case, And that actually pushed me to sell my company and to move on from the only job I ever really had because I realized that was at the end of my creative journey with it.

So it had a profound impact on me. But I also think that just so many of the role models that we have right now are outdated, and we are building our identity as leaders and as collaborators and as creative people around sort of somewhat outmoded role models. So to see ourselves, for instance, to be a leader does not necessarily mean to be an expert, and many, you know, studies have shown that people would rather follow a humble

leader than a self aggrandizing leader. And yet we get into that leadership role and we start having to project you know, expertise and power when really that doesn't necessarily feel comfortable to ourselves and our followers don't really want that from us. Either. So can we change some of those roles models and change that identity to live up to something that's more relevant today, is you know what I'm looking at? Yeah? Do you mind telling you a

little more of your personal story? You only you know, you just teased the listeners what was the only job you ever had? You know? Like, are you comfortable talking about that? Yeah? Definitely not the easiest story in many ways to tell, because it involves some failure that I wrestled with for quite some time, which is that when I was twenty three, I started an agency, like I said, to create social change, which I know is a contested term now, but you know, how dare you to follow

my values? You know, I was kind of into heavily into helping save the environment and human rights and workers' rights, and so we were making these early internet films that were getting people to take action on some of these issues, and we had some huge early successes. We're getting twenty thirty million people watching our things, way before YouTube ever existed, you know, leading to actions on the ground and protests and campaigns to congress, and the company really kind of

went well. Things were good, and so we grew to about twenty five people, and people started asking how do you do what you do and how does it work? And I started giving talks and that's when I discovered storytelling was really at the heart of what we were doing. It's like, oh, this is not just about cool technology or cool graphics or sounds or humor. This is about like these core stories that we're telling. And I got approached to write a book about storytelling, which I was,

you know, a beginner at in a way. I didn't know the theory and the history of storytelling or of advertising. So I dove in wrote a book about storytelling, and suddenly I was like an expert in the field. Right. I was traveling around the world giving talks on stages, telling everyone how to do it, and that was bringing in all these clients and they were expecting us to follow this pattern that I was now associated with, and

so the company turned. I had to start turning the company from something that was just sort of it's called free range, you know, it's kind of free ranging, kind of crazy creativity, this thing that was more structured, and we had more and more clients. We grew to forty people, and we had a we had a whole system that

people were expecting from us, and I started. I stopped being that beginner who was so in love with storytelling, who was trying to learn as much as possible, and I started to become more of that disciplinarian who was like, this is how we do it, and I'd go up on stage, this is how we do, this is how we do It's sorry, sorry, I just hopefully I had sung during those times. It might help. I'll look for other other buzz terms you can jump in. So I, uh, yeah.

So the company started to lose this creativity, and I started to lose my creativity as we grew. And it wasn't really obvious in the bottom line. It wasn't obvious in our growth, but I could feel that sense of we are losing that edge of play and fun and cutting edge creativity. And I'll tell you that trying to do anything on the internet marketing that's not cutting edge

is you know, completely irrelevant, you know. Two weeks later and so I could really sense that the company was going to be kind of falling down on its face shortly if we didn't do something different, and if I didn't start letting go of that ego attachment to expertise and if I didn't become an explorer again, and so, you know, figuring out how to do that was really the foundation of writing this book. And you know, I kept running the company through the research for this book.

But as I got done with the research, I realized that the grind of trying to move something from where I knew I needed to move it to somewhere else. I had changed the creative process in the company, I had changed the creative process in myself. Things were working much better. But I felt like now I'm at the end of this journey and took a step that I never thought I could. I thought I would literally die as the CEO of this company, that that was my

goal was to you know, just the dial. But no, yeah, I thought that I would, you know, do it till I was seventy five, and then I would you know, that would be maybe I'd never retire and I keep doing this thing that I loved. And it took me, you know, changing my identity in a way to make that change and to free myself up to do something different. And in some ways that's a it's a bit an unknown. I'm launching a book. I'm speaking about it, and I

don't know where it's going to lead. So for the first time ever, it's important to know when to grit, and it's important to know when to quit. Is that? Do I summarize everything you just said? Pretty much? Yeah, sentence can edit all the rest own. I just say that. No, I'm not going to edit out. That was wonderful. Thank you for sharing that and being vulnerable with our audience. So I always appreciate it when I guess do that.

So I'll just I want to end with a question, how can you build an organization that embraces what you call intelligent risk? Yeah, so the end of the book I really talked on in the last couple of chapters about that. As leaders, what do we do to not just say, hey, I want more creativity from my company, because we're all doing that as leaders, you know, berating our people saying, you know, more creativity please, I'm not

always getting it, and so what do you do? I looked at a couple of things that I think are particularly effective. One of them is, ironically to me, that unsafe organizations are organizations actually that have a high level of inherence safety in them. So if you have this sort of free wheeling wild West environment where everyone's competing and fighting with each other to be the most creative, people are going to stop taking risks. But once you

make people feel inherently safe. I talked to Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors, the coach of the Golden State Warriors, and he said his first work when he came to the Warriors was to make everyone in the locker room, even though despite all the pressure to win, feel that they were inherently valued as human beings. And that's partly because he was an amazing three point shooter

and one of the best ever. He never want to yeah, very clutch, So he said that, you know, he was always afraid he was going to miss the shot and that he didn't really belong in the NBA, so he

would always secretly not take the big shot. And then you know that time in the finals when Jordan would have the flu they dished to him and finally he put it up, you know, during the shot won the series, and he realized that he needed to get past that feeling that he was always in the bubble of being pushed off the team in order to take any risks, and he vowed when he became a coach that he would never have any players feeling that they were on

the edge of being tossed out of the organization, that everyone, for as long as they are on the Warriors, would feel needed and important and loved, and that turned the team around hugely. Now, obviously he's got a lot of talent on our team, but he was able to unlock it, I think by making a very safe culture for experimentation

and risk. And that's what we need to do in our organization is if we want people to butt heads and disagree and fight it out and all that, we need to first establish that everyone is valued and safe in that organization and not have that kind of chaos where we're only rewarding people who create the results, where we're rewarding people for taking intelligent risks, where we're outwardly rewarding people for breaking rules that no longer make sense

and telling those stories of how they broke those rules. We should be minimizing the number of rules in an organization I found, so that anything that people are holding people back but are unnecessary, trusting our people more in

a sense. And finally, we need to kind of be putting teams together in which very divergent views are expressed and a lot One of the most interesting things I found in my research is this concept of shared information bias, which is a group gets together and they're most likely going to sit around and talk about what they all already know. What's the point of getting together. The point of getting together is to talk about the things that only a couple people know and everyone needs to know

and so. But that doesn't happen because we actually forget that outlying information the minute we get together and start discussing the stuff we already share in knowledge. And usually the people who are a lower status in the group are going to hold that outside information because the boss has always been talking about the same thing. Everyone knows what the boss thinks, but few people know what the people on the edges think. So what we need to

do is leaders need to speak last. We need to make sure everybody writes down what their unique contribution is before getting into a meeting, and then making sure everyone gets to speak before we end a meeting. So some research shows that meetings actually need to run a lot longer than they do, which I know a lot of people don't want to hear, but to make sure that we're drawing that information from the edges to get that creative output and break through is really important, you know.

So when we bring these diverse teams together, it's not enough to just bring diverse teams together, but to make sure those diverse ideas are being pulled forth. And that means the leader can't dominate the conversation. So yeah, a number of things. Organizations can't just say we want to be more creative, but really start building around a creative culture. There's a really surprising, fascinating study that I saw about

how discussing political correctness made teams more creative. I don't know if this is, you know, completely very counterintuitive, but apparently because if you discuss political correctness first, it doesn't actually shut down the boundaries of what people are willing to talk about. It makes everyone feel safe enough that like, Okay, I'm diverse people when they get together feel like, okay, I'm safe in this group. We've discussed what feels comfortable.

Now we can then go knowing we care about each other, we can go out and take more risks by being vulnerable upfront about our biases and our expectations. So I thought that kind of thing is interesting that I have a cheat. Yes, but what if you have people on the team that like are anti putical correctness, Like, aren't you making them feel uncomfortable? Well, first of all, I didn't run the study. Okay, I can't. You know, it's a you know it was it. Can you please everyone?

You know? It's like is that realistic? Yeah? But I you know, I talk a little bit about generally putting some distance in a sense, the idea is to find a way to put some distance between disagreeing with ideas and just disagreeing with each other as people. So this is maybe one way to do it is to set some set some kind of conversation about political correctness is one way to do it. It's a show we're all value.

There's many other ways to do it, but and I talk about gamifying descent, for instance, how do you actually make a structure and a game out of disagreement so that it feels safe to like go as hard as you can at each other's ideas without devalue each other. So yeah, there's there's a lot of ways to do that as well. But yeah, basically, like, how can I tell you that your idea sucks? Without telling you that you suck is you know, figure out the best way

to do that, and you're in good shape. That seems like a different issue than in the correctness issue though, that that seems like a really I mean, that is what the point you just made there, that's excellent point, you know. And we want to have diversity. We want people to feel comfortable to disagree with each other, you know, and not have to feel like everything they say is correct.

So well, I'm trying to answer the questions that I want to answer, and not answer the questions you're giving me. I don't really I don't know the answer you're You're probably right. It's a good ulication that you could turn somebody off by enforcing some norms of political correctness or even discussing it. That is definitely true. So I think it's more of an interesting as a signpost of an idea than maybe some of an activity to do every

day in your organization. Sounds good. Well, thanks for writing this book and for chatting with me today. Yeah, thank you. It's been a great conversation. Thanks for listening to the Psychology podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react, in some way to something you heard. I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Also, please add a rating and review of the Psychology Podcast

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