Afford Anything - The Routine Habits of Breakthrough Thinkers, with Jeremy Utley

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

#410: You face plenty of problems. But you have a scarcity of good solutions. Stanford Professor Jeremy Utley can help. He says that solving complex problems requires creativity. And creativity comes from deliberate practice. It’s not an innate talent. It’s a skill. And it’s useful in any occupation, from accounting to zookeeping. Jeremy speaks and writes on the history of invention, discovery, creativity, and innovation. He also leads Stanford d.school's work with professionals. Today he talks to us about how some of the greatest innovators produce new ideas. He tells us about their creative process. He describes how researchers and authors improve their skills. And he shares pointers to help you understand how to do the same. Timing of discussion points as per November 2022: 3:00: How to focus while staying open to creativity 6:23: Definition of creativity 14:02: Different cognitive biases faced 17:35: The idea quota 19:28: Where ideas come from: the Lego analogy  21:32: How Ben Franklin honed his creativity 28:36: Capturing inspiration 46:04: The importance of reviewing the problems in your life 50:24: The roles of creative collaboration and distributed reasoning 54:49: The argument for quantity over quality  56:07: The value of bad ideas For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode410 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything, just not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention, to any limited resource that you need to manage. And that opens up two questions. First, what matters most? And second, how do you align your priorities around that which matters most?

Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice. And that's what this podcast is here to explore and facilitate. My name is Paula Pant. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast, and the truth is that for every good idea, there are a thousand bad ones, and sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. That's a quote that comes from Mark Randolph, the co-founder of Netflix. And it is the theme of today's episode. No matter what type of work you're in, whether you are an entrepreneur, an executive,

the owner of a lawn care company, human resource, for a stroller manufacturer, whatever it is that you do, you stand out when you bring creativity to your practice, even if you are in a field that isn't traditionally thought of as a creative field. Creativity at its heart is the craft of problem solving. We narrowly ascribe the word creativity to painting and poetry, when in reality, creativity is foundational and practical in every discipline, because in every discipline we face problems, and we need to find solutions, and that is where creativity comes in. Today's guest is a professor at Stanford's School of Engineering and the director of executive education at Stanford's D-school.

where he teaches students and leads the D-School's work about how to tackle complex problems in more creative ways. He recently published a book called IdeaFlow. Its central thesis is that in order to come up with better ideas, we must come up with more ideas that quantity begets quality. To explain that concept, as well as dive into the mechanics of how we implement that, Here is Stanford professor Jeremy Ulley. Hi, Jeremy.

Hi, Paula. It's great to talk to you. Likewise. Yeah, thanks for having me today. Jeremy, given that attention is so limited, we have a limited, finite amount of attention that we can give. And there seem to be more demands on our attention in the digital era, in the era of the attention economy. Given that set of circumstances, how do we focus our attention? attention while simultaneously maintaining the openness, the expansiveness that is so often regarded

as synonymous with creativity. Yeah, that's a great question, Paula. This expansiveness is something that we can't learn enough about, I would say. It's something that we can study and that we can develop. Thanks to you and to your listeners, I've created a short e-book where you can learn to think like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. You can maybe link to it if you want, I posted it on the website, but this is a learned skill. And if you think about somebody like Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs as fundamentally different from you, then you're not going to have much luck in terms of developing this capacity. But you're exactly right. It's just a matter of attention. Of metaphor, I would say, my little sister played volleyball in high school. And I noticed

that whenever we went to the grocery store, my mom would ask, hey, Rachel, would you grab that jug of milk. She got the jug of milk from the refrigerator, but then what did she do on her way to the cart? She did curls. Why? Because she's in volleyball. She's in training mode. And to someone who's athletically minded, every jug of milk is a dumbbell, right? Right. It's an eight pound dumbbell. To someone who's attending to a muscle and development, they see opportunities. Opportunities abound. And I would say the creativity is no different. The challenge for most people is they don't even see that it is something that can be developed, that it is a muscle that can be flexed, and therefore it lies dormant.

But every bit as much as my little sister would grab a jug of milk and do a dumbbell curl, we can take some of the mundane tasks of life and turn them into curls, small creative challenges that allow us the chance to build that muscle. Because the reality is she's not in the game, right? we're in the grocery store. But she knows that curling a couple times is probably going to give her just a little bit edge in the game. And if we're waiting for our creativity to somehow manifest in the really big meeting,

but we're not doing curls in the grocery store, we shouldn't be surprised if we hit it into the net to continue the metaphor, right? We have to be practicing in the moment outside of the game if we want to perform in the game. And so there's a couple of things there. One, it is a capacity to be creative. Every single human being has that capacity, whether you're in the arts, whether you're in the sciences, whether you're in accounting and finance, whatever your profession happens to be, you have a creative capacity. And it can be developed. It can be grown just like your bicep can be grown. Your ability to, as you said, I love it. Think expansively can be developed. You know, my favorite definition, if I may, just before moving on, because there's probably a question about what is creativity? Right. My favorite definition, because we're throwing that word around like we all know what it means,

we've got a network of teachers at the D-school that we've worked with in our K-12 lab. And Laura McBain, my colleague, who's the head of the K-12 lab, she said that one of her colleagues in Ohio had posted on the whiteboard, what is creativity? And one of her seventh grade students put on a post-it note, creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of. And I think that's actually a fantastic definition because it gets at the heart of one of the greatest challenges we face. But it's so simple. And so for our purposes, for the purposes of this discussion, simply thinking of creativity, not as artistic expression, but doing more than the first thing that comes to mind is a

really, I think, a practical definition of creativity. And that leads perfectly to a question that I'm sure many listeners have. There are going to be some people who are listening to this, who are at this moment thinking, my job is very procedural. It's very methodical. It's procedural. I do data entry. I'm in spreadsheets all day. How can I bring creativity to my job, particularly for the people who are listening who are at the entry level, who may not be asked for ideas in meetings? Is there a space for them? Yeah. Well, I mean, certainly it's one way to get ahead is to go above and beyond. If you take as a given that your job is, quote, as you said, only data entry. No wonder there's nothing more there

for you, right? Any employer wants to see someone who's going above and beyond who's looking for creative, inventive solutions and who says, you know, I did what you asked, but then as I thought about it, it seemed like what's really important is this other thing. And I did that too. So if you're just trying to get by with the bare minimum, you're probably not listening to this podcast, first of all, Right. If you really want to over deliver, if you want to delight your boss, even if you're in an entry-level job, developing that creative muscle, I would say is the foundational skill you need to be thinking about.

And for me, I think one of the things that's really illuminating is to realize that problems that we face need solutions. And a solution starts as what? It starts as an idea, very simply. When I said the seventh grader in Ohio said that create a problem. is doing more than the first thing you think of, you could say creativity is coming up with more than one idea, again, very simply. But so then the question is, okay, the challenges that I face, I probably have one idea, push myself to have another. What's another way of doing this? What's another way of

thinking about this? It's a simple question we can ask ourselves that yields amazing results. I mean, I'll give an example of a very mundane task. Okay. I live in a west facing house in California. And so that means that the sun, as it's setting, beats on my front door, which for whatever reason, the sunset or the heat of the day always coincides with grocery delivery. So we get groceries delivered, you know, and it's ice cream and whatever else meat and, you know, deli meat, et cetera. And it's like all the alarm bells ring because the stuff's going to melt, you know, everybody all hands on deck and we're trying to get the groceries in. For me, that's just a task. And it's basically a question of, and I would distinguish between task and problem, right?

Task is something you know how to do, just execute. It's the manual. It's the entry level, whatever. But a problem maybe deserves more solutions than you're thinking of, right? And for me, the task orientation that I have towards groceries in my houses, how many, you know, paper bags can I get in my hands without them ripping? And how precariously can I balance them without them, you know, shattering across the floor. But one day I couldn't help with the, you know, five alarm or whatever it is, you know, the alarm bells. And my 10-year-old daughter takes over the grocery run. Well, she's not nearly as

strong as me. And she's not familiar with the task of bringing in groceries. So what did she do? She put a big blanket on the floor. She loaded all of the bags onto the floor. And then her told her sister she was going to give her a ride. And she pulled her sister and all the groceries through the house. And I happen to come in and I looked at this and her two-year-old sister is a little concerned, obviously. She has a very concerned look on her face. But my 10-year-old doesn't even know she's, you know, quote-unquote, doing it wrong because she's just approached the problem or the task fundamentally differently. And to me, I actually took a picture of it. It's a beautiful example of when we think we already know the answer, then we just proceed blindly without question.

If we just introduce, it's called an interrupt. Abraham Luchens identified this effect in the 1940s. It's called the Einstein effect. And I would affectionately call it the anti-Einstein effect because of its phonetic resemblance. So you can think about the anti-Einstein effect. What is it? It's the tendency to ignore other solutions. Researchers at Oxford and other places have proven, once we find a solution, not only do we stop looking for others,

were actually prevented from seeing better solutions. That's the Einstein effect. And so how do you overcome that? Well, you introduce what they call an interrupt. And an interrupt can be as simple as asking myself, is there another way of doing this? And, you know, unlike math, where there's only one right answer,

in almost all of the situations we face in our daily lives, and by the way, if you ask a physicist, they will tell you there's more than one right answer even to math problems, or some math problems, right? But most of the problems we face don't just have one solution. But because of the einstilling effect, which is a deeply rooted cognitive bias that we all hold, the moment we think of an answer, we eliminate the search. We cease the search. And again, seventh graders definition of creativity. Creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of.

And that's why that definition is so profound because it goes right at the heart of a deeply held limiting bias, which is the second we come up with the answer, we move on. And somebody wants to grow this creative muscle kind of gets in the habit of just asking themselves, is there a different way to do this? And a lot of times, I was talking to Astro Teller, the head of Google X the other day. And he was telling me, anytime a team at Google X brings him a solution, he tells him he wants five. And he says, a lot of people now they know, Astro always wants five solutions.

He says, they'll bring him dummy ideas. But he said, here's the thing's amazing, Jeremy. Oftentimes, a team's dummy idea is every bit as good as the idea they were going to tell me when they only had one idea. We fail to appreciate how many good ideas are out there, or to say it differently, we dramatically overestimate how good the first idea that came to our mind actually is. And so it's getting in the habit of questioning that, ultimately. It's a simple way. It's just doing the curls, the milk jug curls with problems we face on a day-to-day basis. The einstilling effect, am I pronouncing that correctly?

I think so. You and I can both, we'll kid ourselves into believing we know how to do it. Excellent. Well, the einstilling effect is one example of a cognitive bias that creates a limiting belief that limits our desire to become more creative and use creativity to solve all types of problems in our lives, not just at work, but as your example illustrated also at home. That's right. What are some other cognitive biases that we face?

We'll talk about the problems before we get into the solutions. What are some of the other cognitive biases that we face that serve as that gate? Yeah. One of my favorites, if one can have a favorite cognitive bias. I suppose you can. Yes. I think you can. If there's any doubt prior to this podcast, yes, I am a nerd.

One of my favorite cognitive biases is called the creative cliff illusion. And what that basically demonstrates is people have an expectation that they're creativity runs out over time. If you were to plot creativity over time, most people would think the line goes downward. And it's actually not true. It's not necessarily true, I should say. What researchers have determined is creativity actually doesn't degrade over time. And in fact, it can enhance. Twyla Tharp, the legendary choreographer, gives a great example of, she said in workshops with her students, she'll bring something like a stool into the workshop. say, what is this for? She tries to push the class to think of 60 uses or 100 uses. This is,

by the way, a foundational creativity test. It's called the alternative uses test. But she'll do it in class. She said it always follows the same trajectory. The first 10 responses are totally boring. They're straight up the middle. They're variations on. You sit on it. And then she said, typically responses 11 to 30 start to get interesting. It's a door stop. You know, and then when you get beyond 30 towards 60 or 100, she said all of a sudden it becomes a tool for taming lions. And it becomes really interesting stuff. And that's kind of a beautiful, simple illustration of the creative cliff illusion. And the emphasis there being illusion. It's not true that our creativity degrades over time. And in fact, if we give ourselves a challenge, our creativity can begin to

increase over time. But the most fascinating part of the creative cliff illusion paper comes, I think, in the third part of the study, which determined that someone's expectations of when their good ideas come have a profound effect on the overall quality of their ideas. Specifically, the more someone expected good ideas to come early in their thought process, the worse overall their ideas were. However, the more that someone believed that they would continue to have better ideas that their good ideas would come later, the higher quality all of this set of ideas they generated was, which is to say one of the greatest levers we have for affecting the quality of our ideas is expecting good ideas will continue to come.

And so with regard to allowing those good ideas to continue to come, is the solution for everyone who's listening when it comes to how they become more creative in their approach to problem solving, is it simply for them to brainstorm more ideas, or are there other methodical ways, actionable ways that the people listening to this can enhance and improve their creativity? Yeah, that's a great question. There are simple and there are significant enhancements that you can make. I would say I hesitate to start with these significant ones, only because the barrier of entry is much higher. And just like a chiropractor or a orthopedic surgeon can learn a lot by asking you to try to touch your toes, right? There are simple diagnostics that are profoundly valuable

because of their simplicity. So a simple example we give in the book is take out an important email that you've got to write and set a timer for two minutes. Try to generate as many subject lines to that email as possible. For most people, they think hard and come to, one subject line and move on. And what we'd say is that's a great opportunity for what we call an idea quota, which is a daily practice where instead of focusing on coming up with one good idea, you shift the goal. And this is another interrupt to interrupt the instilling effect. You shift the goal from the quality idea to a quantity of ideas. And you say, instead of one good idea, I'm going to come up with 10, probably mediocre ideas. But I'm going to get myself permission.

And what people discover when they do an idea quota is, wow, ideas eight, nine, and ten were actually way better than the first thing I thought of. And I would have gone with the first thing I thought of. Even doing two is better or doing three is better than nothing. So that's one thing is every day we recommend just like you play your piano scales every day, right? Nobody thinks book Carnegie Hall for me. I took a piano lesson, you know? Nobody thinks I took a swim lesson, drop me off in the ocean, right? And yet, for whatever reason, when it comes to innovation and creativity, people go, I did a workshop.

I'm good to go. It's like, it's insane. Like, show me your practice. If you aren't innovating, you aren't an innovator. And so, just like a pianist will do their scales, just like a swimmer will do their laps. A creative person is someone who's attending to that creative capacity on a regular basis. And the simplest way to do it is to force yourself to come up with ten. ideas for anything, any problem, could be personal, could be work, the subject line of an email,

how you're going to open a conversation, how you're going to close that sales call, oh, you're going to let that person go. You know, it can be any number of things where you're going on vacation, right? So that's a simple daily practice. And I would say, don't dismiss the simple daily thing. That's the first thing. But then beyond that, how you think about provoking your own imagination, it's systematic, right? there are a lot of different levers that you can pull.

Here's a TED talk that I saw that really blew my mind. This neuroscientist said, the brain doesn't create anything from scratch. So when you think of an idea, an idea isn't created from nothing, ex nihilo. An idea is created from component parts, things you already know. A very simple definition of the word idea is it's a connection. It's a connection between two things that I already know. Synthesis. So here's a simple example. What I want to do is tell you about how you can, for lack of a better word, you can gather Legos, right? You think about two things that you know,

kind of clicking together. So for example, a friend's trying to start a stroller company, and he wants to enter the San Francisco market. But you know what stinks about San Francisco? Big hills? Yeah. How you push a stroller up hills, right? And he's really struggling with, how is he going to break into the market? And then he remembered that when he was in high school, his dad got him a self-propelled lawnmower to help make lawnmowing easier. You and I and every listener on this call just had this collective hallucination called an idea. We just put these two Lego pieces together.

One piece is the hills of San Francisco and a stroller. The other piece is this notion of a self-propelled lawnmower. I didn't have to tell you, try to solve the problem. Although, by the way, if you do, you're much more likely to solve it. I just gave you those two Lego pieces. for most of us, they're almost like magnetic. They just click together, right? And that's what I mean when I say that the brain doesn't create anything from scratch. It's taking pieces and it's connecting them. When you realize that, then a lot of the creative life becomes effectively about gathering Legos.

Because if you know that ideas are made of component parts, then the bigger your bag of Legos, the more combinations you can make. So how do I gather Legos? That should be a question for anyone, I mean, to use a simple illustration, right? How do I get it? gather Legos, and there's a bunch of ways to do that. One of my favorite ways to do that is what the American inventor, statesman, author, discoverer, Benjamin Franklin did. If you think about Ben Franklin, he's actually a great example because of the breadth of his invention. He invented bifocals. He mapped the Gulf Stream. He came up with public libraries and fire departments and the Continental Congress for crying out loud. Lightning rods on and on and on, right?

you go, if you or I had made one of those things, we'd go, great, lifetime achievement award, I did bifocals, you know, not bad, right? What have you done with your life, right? But Ben Franklin has this incredible breadth. Well, why? And one of the things that he did for 30 years, if you want to get the routine habits of breakthrough thinkers, I'm interested in the, not the exceptional behavior, but the regular behavior.

And one of the regular behaviors that Ben Franklin employed is every week for 30 years, years he met with a group he called his Juntoe. It's a leather aprons club, an artisans club, where folks from different backgrounds, different trades, would gather together and they discuss mutually agreed upon topics. For example, have there been any discoveries and herbs that might benefit our businesses? Has anyone moved to Philadelphia recently of note to us? Has anyone's business failed? And what's the reason? Have there been any discoveries in the sciences? They would go through these questions and then they would just discuss. And this isn't, mind you, It's not his employees, right?

He's getting out of his business. And it's not just other printers. It's artisans of all kinds. And he did it every week for 30 years. And you go, well, of course he's credited with inventions that span the spectrum. Why? He's gathering Legos. He's gathering lots of disparate inputs because he knew what now neuroscience is kind of

catching up to figure out that your ideas are a function of your inputs. And what I would say is that with somebody who, wants to be creative. Certainly there's the output oriented thing, like come up with 10 ideas for it to solve a problem every day. That's table stakes and it's great curls, dumbbell curls, milk jug curls, right? If you want to take your craft to the next level, then you've got to start thinking about cultivating inputs. Who am I meeting with outside of my team, outside of my company, outside of my industry? And what is the basis of that meeting? You know, a podcast for you, I'm sure, is an incredible idea collider. You're colliding with all sorts of ideas and perspective

all the time. Someone I really admire Linda Hill. She's a professor at Harvard Business School. She's a fabulous author. She's written a bunch of books. One of the things that's amazed me about Linda Hill is she always invites a 20-year-old to join her writing team. So she's got a 20-year-old on her team helping write the book. And she said the reason is we actually, we were interviewing her for our book and we saw a little, you know, octopus illustration in the background. And we're going, why do you have this octopus? She said, oh, junior person on my team has asked me to consider an octopus as a metaphor for organizational life. And I'm trying to do that now. And so I leave it here. So does that make you think of anything? We start having this amazing conversation, right? But she has

been deliberate about if I want to keep pushing my craft and writing inventive, insightful research, I got to have a younger person on my team. It's a simple way she's incorporated that idea into her own But thinking about how do I regularly bring other perspectives into my life and work is a very valuable question to ask yourself. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in payments technology built to evolve with your business. Fifth Third Bank has the big bank muscle to handle payments for businesses of, any size. But they also have the fintech hustle that got them named one of America's most

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Because particularly in the era of the internet, in the era of podcasts and blogs and websites and articles and Twitter, particularly digital inputs are easier than ever. How do you curate? I personally am a big fan of analog and going old school. The simple thing, I think back in the day, Newton, Isaac Newton, is. day. They had what they call a commonplace book, but it was just kind of a scrapbook for miscellaneous information. And I think something like a commonplace book is a very important practice. You know, different people, I think Dan Pink calls his a spark file. I was speaking with an author John Acuff who keeps a notebook. He writes down, I said something over the course of our conversation.

He goes, ooh, that's good. He wrote down. He goes, that's idea number 434 this year. And I go 434. And then what's wild is Paula, two weeks later, or maybe a month later, I had him at a program at Stanford. He was talking about his creative practice. And he just pulled out the notebook. He goes, yeah, if you had 792 ideas this year. And someone was amazed. I go, that's 350 more than you had last month when we talked.

But I thought that was an awesome example. He said, people think I'm weird. I bring my notebook to my daughter's water polo games. I think Naval said the half-life of inspiration. is exceedingly short. So capture it while it's fresh. I keep a notebook in my back pocket at all times, a notebook that's this size.

You know, I mean, it's literally in my back pocket. And I just keep it there. And I write stuff down anytime something strikes me. And half the time, by the way, I have no idea what something means.

That's fine, right? It's actually not about perfectly understanding everything. My friend Henrik Vertland, he's a entrepreneur. He's from Amsterdam originally, living in New York. and he started a company called Bark Box, which is basically a monthly subscription to dog toys and dog treats. By the way, it's a billion dollar publicly traded company.

He said he sends himself emails. He uses actually an email client that I use as well. And he sends himself emails. And he said 50% of the time, I have no idea what an email even means. But he said I'd rather err on the side of capturing too much than going, oh, what was that idea that I had? Ann Lamott calls it. It's the worst feeling in the world. She keeps an index cart in her back pocket.

The author, Ann Lamott, whenever she goes and walks because she said, I never want to be caught without a capture device. And so to your point, the digital world is replete with possible inputs. The question is, what am I capturing? And how simply do I capture it? And a list of links, I mean, you know as well as I do, marking something is unread. It's basically dead. You're never going to go back to it, right?

listing a link, never going to revisit it again. So getting very specific about what is the line, what's the thing, what's the quote or the reference, and write that down. As I said, I definitely prefer analog for that. And why is that? That's what strikes me as you talk about these capture devices, these notebooks or index cards, and we're talking about a physical paper notebook or a physical index card. Why not use the notes app on your iPhone? Well, I use everything I can. It's like I have a friend who says you use all lanes of the highway. Yeah.

So I use everything in my disposal. I can't say it's perfect because there's about five or six different places I have to look if I'm trying to track something down. But it's really what's on hand at the moment and do I have something on it? I mean, I keep another one of these notebooks on my bedside table. And I have just to tell a funny personal anecdote because I've kind of preached the message of documentation and capturing ideas, I take it really seriously. I hate hypocrisy. I've got a lifelong vendetta against hypocrisy. And so, you know, for example, I have a juntoe. You know why? Because I talk about juntoes. And I have a simple rule. I'm not willing to talk about it if I don't also do it.

So everything that I talk about, I have to do or stop talking about it. It's either start doing it or stop talking about it. Very simply. B.F. Skinner, you invented behavioral psychology, Harvard psychologist, you know, 50 years ago, he would set an alarm at midnight and he had a clipboard by his bed. He would set an alarm at midnight and another alarm at 1 a.m. because he found waking himself up in the middle of the night and taking notes was so effective at triggering insights. Okay. So, I mean, I don't go that far. But I keep a notebook by my bed. And especially as you kind of start to go to the sleep state, your brain starts to relax the censorship mode. So the reason that we're so free associative at night is the sensor's not on. And Charles Lim is a, I think he's

at MIT's a neuroscientist who has conducted fMRI studies of improvisers and jazz musicians and hip hop artist. And what he's found is basically the way they're able to perform their craft is the part of their brain that self-regulates, they turn it off effectively. And so, which is to say it's really valuable to be in a state where that's turned off. That's a long-winded way of saying, I value that state. So what do I do? I put a notebook by my bed and I've made an agreement with myself. If an idea comes to mind while I'm going asleep, no matter how close I am to falling

asleep, I'll write it down. And the other night, I had this experience where I thought of a great idea and then I thought, I don't want to be a hypocrite. I have to read it. No, if I just think about it, I'll just think about it. I'll just like repeat it five times to myself. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

And I'll click my heels and I'll remember. And then I thought, you know what? I don't want to be that guy. So I kind of rouse myself. I, you know, prop myself up on an elbow and I write down the idea in the notebook. And I fall asleep and I waste maybe 10 minutes. And in the morning, the first thing I think of is my idea. And my second thing I think of is I can't believe I wasted 10 minutes.

I still remembered the idea. This is focus, you know. So because I had this great idea, right? So then I opened my notebook. Guess what? It was a totally different idea. When I woke up, I had a new idea. I believed it was the same idea.

And it was this amazing moment for me. It's like the value of sleep is what? I got two great ideas. The value of writing it down is I would have believed that I had remembered my first idea had I not actually written it down. Wow. All right. So what we're talking about right now is idea generation and capture. But what about validation and implementation?

That's really the other half of idea flow, right? if you think about flow rates, flow is determined not only by the volume, but also the throughput. And as we joke in the book, we're not after an idea pond. We want idea of flow. What really determines the flow rate a lot is how quickly and rapidly can you deploy experiments? Experimentation is the means by which you validate whether you've got a good idea. So you got a bunch of ideas. How do you know if any of them are any good?

You deploy clever, simple, scrappy experiments. That's the way to determine whether your idea is. or any good. And so can you give me an example of what such an experiment would look like, particularly as it pertains to generating ideas about some of the most common everyday mundane problems that people will doubtless be trying to solve. How can I make my commute suck less? Right. I'll just give an example that I've been kind of thinking about lately from my life. And you started with what bothers you, right? So commute bothers you. Okay, great. And it's a really good idea to start with something that bothers you. Bob McKim, one of the legendary professors in Stanford's

design program, he told students to keep what he calls a bug list, which is long before software development. It's not actually a bug list from a software development perspective. It's literally a list of things that bug you. Write it down. What bugs you? That's great fodder for renovation. What bugs you? If your commute bugs you, awesome. Relish it. That's the seed of great ideas, right? You know what bugs me? What's that? The cardboard boxes. that pile up at my house because of Amazon. Yep. Drives me crazy.

And so I find myself kind of stewing on this and being irritated about it. Well, I haven't figured out a way to have like a paper shredder incinerator. That's what I really want. But because of liability, I haven't been able to do that. And I like the kind of pyrotechnic skill. But I thought, hey, you know, it'd be cool as if there was just a truck that followed the Amazon truck around and basically offered a service of whenever somebody opens the door, they pick up their package and then you just hand them the cardboard.

Just do it right there, right? So that's an idea. Is it any good? I have no idea. To your question, how would I validate whether it's a good idea? Well, what I would probably do is I wouldn't rent a U-Haul or certainly not buy a truck, right, or ask people what they think because people will not tell you the truth, not because they're evil or ill intention, but because people can't envision a different world.

They have no way of knowing how they would feel about something. the best way to test, for example, the marketability of an idea is to test customer desirability, see if people will sign up for it. And so what I would do is I'd put door hangers on every door in my neighborhood, you know, box cleanup service, you know, text this phone number for more information. It can be very simple, right? But now, if you think about your conversion rate, you're always trying to measure conversion with a consumer-facing thing, right?

So you know your denominator. I know I put a hundred door hangers up on doors around my neighborhood. But how many text messages do I get? So then I've got an offer conversion, right? And then I really get into a text message conversation with them. How many people sign up for the service? And then how many people do I actually perform the service for? If you think about your funnel, I just painted a picture of what your conversion looks like at every stage of the funnel.

But I wouldn't say, wow, because you and I are talking, we're at a barbecue. And I go, you know what? I hate Paula. I hate those boxes. I was thinking about, you know, renting a truck and just picking them up, you know what you're going to say? that's awesome. Yeah, exactly. Let me know when you do that. What typically happens is I get a bunch of people telling me I've got an awesome idea and you know what I do? I go invest a lot of money without performing the very, very fundamental validation of, let me see how much it costs to acquire a customer. If people think is as good of an idea as everybody's telling me at the company barbecue, let me just go and do a quick test down my street and see whether I can get people signing up. So this makes sense for an entrepreneur who is trying to validate a consumer-facing commercial product. But how would a person validate an idea if it's an idea related to some type of efficiency at their office

or if it's an idea related to some type of improvement in their home life, something non-commercial? So if you say, how can I make my commute less painful? Then you come up with 10 ideas. One easy way to do it is try them. You know, maybe you say you're going to call your mom during the commute because you miss time with your mom. And then you just ask yourself a simple question. How do I feel about my commute? I mean, make a basis like apples to apples comparison, right? And you can determine what about the commute stinks, right? Is it that it feels like it's wasted time or is it that it feels like you get home and you're drained? Let's say I get home every day and I'm totally drained. Okay, I'm going to rate myself on the drainometer, you know, every day for the next two weeks. That's 10 days. And I'm going to try five different things two times. And I'm just going to rate myself and see objectively which one actually makes me less drained. Does, you know, stopping at the gym make me feel less drained or more?

Does calling my grandma make me feel less drained or more? These are really simple, but the most expensive thing is doing nothing. Like, what's the cost of calling your grandma? It's nothing. It's the opportunity cost of I could have been doing something different. But if you just take an experimental attitude, you can create data that will give you a better sense of what the answer is. And there it's just being honest with yourself. Which one did I enjoy the most?

Great. Do more of that. I'm thinking about this in terms of how it relates to your daughter bringing in the groceries. Yeah, the problem is I don't even realize I had a problem on my hands. And I think that's actually the challenge a lot of times is becoming aware. What I need is new ideas here. Because we take so much as given. The groceries are a hassle. The moment that I say, what if they weren't a hassle?

All of a sudden it opens up this entire universe of possibility. And so it's almost developing that reflex or that instinct. This doesn't have to be a hassle or this doesn't have to stink. How could I make it great? How could I make it the highlight of my day? And that brings us back to the first part of the conversation, which is applying creativity to problem solving. The foundation of that, the precursor to that, is identifying root problems in the first place.

That's right. For the people who might be thinking, all right, I recognize that I ought to question my assumptions, but I also recognize that so many assumptions are so entrenched that even with conscious effort, I still may overlook some big things. Are there any practices, any exercises, anything that they can do in order to shake things up? Yeah, that's cool. No, I love that. I think one of the big things is to start to appreciate when you have small breakthroughs,

because as long as a breakthrough has got to be this. catastrophic, monumental shift, then the threshold is enormous, right? If I ask you, when is your last breakthrough? What's your last breakthrough? Well, there was a problem that I was facing inside of my business, and I was venting about it to someone, and he offered an idea. I had heard that idea before, actually many times, and I dismissed it. But for some reason, when he said it, something about the way he said it, maybe the timing and the angle, it struck. And so I've thought about that ever since. And I've kind of, in my head, iterated on exactly how I would execute it. So I would say that was my latest breakthrough. Okay. So that's great. So to me, then the question is,

how do you operationalize that, right? What does it look like to say, if I were to kind of trace the trajectory of that breakthrough, venting was a really important part of getting to it, right? If you hadn't vented, maybe you never would have broken through. Maybe you wouldn't have had that suggestion. Maybe you wouldn't have been receptive. Maybe there's something not only about your venting that triggers something in a thought partner, but it also triggers something in you. It makes you receptive in a different way, right? So then maybe you feel bad about venting. I don't know. Maybe you feel guilty about it. But I would say that if you're thoughtful about, you know, diagramming your last breakthrough or breaking it down, you go, venting is actually a really important part of my process.

And becoming aware of that, maybe gives you permission to vent when you need to, right, as a tool. Breakthroughs for a lot of people are more like break-ins. They catch them off guard. Whoa, where did that come from? It's like a total surprise, right? Rather than being a deliberate strategy that they pursue,

like think about perpetrating a breakthrough. Wouldn't that be wonderful if you're the one committing the breakthrough? For some reason, breakthroughs are always happening to us. And it's because we have so little appreciation for how they happen for us. And these little, you know, I'll tell my own story just because it's silly example, how simple these things are.

I was driving the other day in the car. And I was doing errands. I had the car loaded up with all sorts of stuff. I needed to drop off and take somewhere. And for whatever reason, somehow, the 40 pound cooler ended up balanced like a jingo block of death in my passenger seat, right? Which means every time I turn right, the cooler slams into my shoulder. You know, every time, boom, you know, slam, slam.

And it's hurting. And I kind of try to figure out a way to wedge my elbow in. And I'm thinking, okay, I've got like 45 minutes to an hour in the car. Like, is this going to damage my rotator cuff? Like, I'm thinking about this. Like, what am I going to do? But I'm already on the highway. I don't want to stop.

So I'm just doing this. And then my brother calls. My brother's a construction worker in Texas. And he called. And we're talking for a couple minutes, just, you know, catching up on life. And he goes, hey, dude. why do you keep grunting? And I go, I'm sorry.

I've got this stupid cooler slamming into my arm. I said, I'm going to be like this until I get to where I was going. And he goes, have you tried buckling it in? In one minute, the problem that I was resigned to inflict rotator cuff injury was totally solved. And you know, I did? I buckled it in. And then I took a picture.

And I said, Zach, I just wrote a 90,000 word book on problem solving and the value of seeking other faith, but I'm still in need, you know, but I really believe it's an important part. Like documenting those moments and those breakthroughs is part of what retrains our cognitive wiring. You know, for me, I go, I wasn't even thinking about asking him for help. I wasn't even thinking about it as a problem to be solved. It's just something I got to deal with, right? There's that. But then there's also introducing these interrupts.

And it may not help in the kind of acute moment, but on a regular basis, what am I enduring right now? What am I putting up with right now? What's causing me pain and does it have to? And those are questions that if we revisit them from time to time, I think we start to realize, oh, I've never thought about this as a problem that could be solved or as an opportunity for a fresh perspective in my life. Many times as soon as we see them, you know, like John Dewey once said, a problem well put is half solved. And a lot of times it comes down to putting problems, actually articulating them.

And then the moment you do, you go, oh, I've never thought about asking for help for that. I've never thought about vinting or, you know, whatever the tactic might be. But it's bringing a little bit of that problem mindfulness. And a lot of times, you know, a great example. Like I just was in a business discussion earlier today where one of our collaborators on the other side of Zable, so to speak, had suggested this solution that was abhorrent to everybody else on the call, you know, and it'd been via email. And I'd seen some kind of snarky, you know, text replies and stuff over the weekend. And I just asked the question, well, what is that going to do for him? And nobody knew the answer to that question. So I actually

called the person and asked, hey, what is that going to do for you? And he had made kind of an aggressive, you can call it a revenue side demand, right, effectively. And he goes, oh, I just don't want to be out of pocket. It's like, oh, well, the problem that we need to solve as a team is how to keep you from being out of pocket on this deal. And that's all he was trying to do. He wasn't trying to be offensive or it's. And so just having a, having that instinct a little bit when a solution gets thrown out there,

a lot of times it's somebody's best guess. And the important thing to know is, well, what problem was that solving for them? And if you become aware of the problem that they're trying to solve, all of a sudden, then you go, well, how else could we? solve that problem. And the solution space opens up dramatically. And I see that in brainstorms. You know, people will, or I see it when, you know, in workshops at Stanford, we will, we'll get people through a problem definition phase. Almost always, some people can't define a problem. They just immediately go to solutions. We could do this. We can do this. We can do this. And I'll just stop and I'll say, okay, at home box pickup. Okay, what's the problem that would solve? It would keep me from having the 9 p.m. Wednesday night, frantic, you know, box folding event to every.

week. Oh, okay, so then how might we help Jeremy avoid the 9 p.m. rush to resolve the box situation. One solution is box pickup. There's probably a thousand other solutions. A lot of times it's not clear what problem they're solving and we're not even clear that we're trying to solve a problem. And if we would just be a little bit deliberate about establishing the problem we're trying to solve, all of a sudden, the solution that we're all obsessed with or that we're all kind of consumed with becomes one of many possibilities that we could entertain. What's interesting about what you've just said is that it, on the surface, sounds as though it flies in the face of other advice that you often hear in the business world. As employees,

people are often taught don't bring problems to your manager, bring solutions to your manager. It's assonine. Totally assonine. Now, anybody says, I don't want to hear problems. I want solutions. I would say you want to look for another job. A great manager loves problems. They're the seed of innovation. You bring me a hundred problems. We will be in business the next hundred years. You bring me a solution. Who knows if we'll be in business next year. And so I think getting that in people's minds, problems aren't bad. They're great. They're wonderful. And having an attitude of, no, bring me problems for sure. That's wonderful. Bring me more problems. My friend Claudia Akachka ran innovation at Procter & Gamble for a bunch of years. She called the innovation lab,

the company litter box. It's where people brought all the stinky stuff. It fueled an incredible career in innovation because people started bringing their really wicked problems to her. She didn't say, no, no, no, no, we're just about implementing solutions. She said, no, bring me your problems. Love them. Love your problems. She ended up building an incredibly robust, not just solution or new business, but a capability around creating new business. is at Procter & Gamble. So far, we've been talking entirely about creativity as an individual sport. Can you talk about creative collaboration and distributed reasoning?

How does that play a role? And particularly in the workplace, but also I suppose this could extend to families, to community organizations, volunteer groups, any two people collaborating on anything, two or more people collaborating on anything. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, brainstorming is probably one of the most overused and underutilized tools out there, meaning everybody's familiar with brainstorming, but it's almost like an inoculation because everybody's had the experience of a really painful, quote unquote, you know, if people are watching the video, they could see air quotes brainstorm. And I think that's a shame because there's incredible value and potential that can be generated in a group setting, right? we're colliding all of these perspectives together.

It's like everybody brings their bag of Legos. What can we build together, right? That's really cool. It's really interesting. Couple of ways to supercharge or turbocharge a group moment. One, give folks the opportunity to consider a prompt in advance. So rather than everybody comes in the room, nobody's got any idea what's going on and you just kind of, you know, blindside them with the prompt. give people an opportunity to consider and ask them to come with a few ideas in hand.

That's very helpful. Then, two, have some thoughtful moderation or facilitation of the group dynamic. And there's kind of ideation most people consider the most wild and out-of-the-box moment of the design process. It's the place we have the most rules. And rules are really helpful. And we don't have to go through all of them right now. But there are clear rules of engagement for a good brainstorm. But then where a lot of people make a mistake is they think idea generation is over at the end of the brainstorm.

And this is where the research is actually really interesting. The worst thing you could do at the end of a brainstorm is declare victory and select an idea and say, we're done. You severely limit the team's generation potential. What you should do instead is say these are some great starts, want everybody to keep. continue considering this question until our meeting tomorrow, next week, whatever it is, in which we will make some decisions and expect and let people know this. My expectation is the team leader here, as the facilitator, is that the best ideas that our team is going to generate have not been generated yet.

This was almost the preamble or the precursor. We're preparing. We're tilling the soil. Now go off and see what comes to mind with the raw. materials that this group has supplied you for yourself. Many times what we've observed is the best ideas come back and people go, you know what? I was thinking about what Paula said. You know, we hear people all the time.

I couldn't think of any ideas last night. And the next morning I woke up and I couldn't stop thinking of ideas, right? But playing with the timescale a little bit, right? It's playing with inputs and it's playing with the timescale. And people think that a great brainstorm is defined as ready, set, go, stop. Right? And it's like this short burst activity. And that doesn't have any regard for what's happening cognitively is a bunch of collisions

and a bunch of divergent perspectives coming together. And then allowing gestation, allowing time for the team to consider those inputs and allow them to take them in all sorts of unexpected directions. Because incubation is critical to the discovery process. And that time for gestation is essential. And then when you come back together, a lot of times, you get somewhere that none of the individual team members ever could have gotten had they not come together, but none of them were prepared to get by the end of that first meeting.

We are coming to the end of our time. If people could only pay attention to one thing from this conversation that we've had about idea flow and creativity, what is the one thing that they should walk away from this with? What should they pay attention to? I think the thing that's most unexpected for people who are new to the creative practice in the context of business is the greatest indicator or lever to get to good ideas is lots of ideas. If you want good, don't go for good. Go for lots. The variable that has the most impact on the quality of your ideas is the quantity of your ideas. There's a researcher named Dean Keith Simonton, Dr. Dean Keith Simonton, who recently won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Minsa Foundation.

Okay, this guy's smart as it gets. One of his significant contributions to the field is he did a longitudinal study across domains to the arts and sciences and invention and discovery. And what he found was the single greatest predictor of the success of any actor or thinker or artist or scientist was the volume of their work. And if you want to define the periods where they did their best work, look at the periods where they did their most work. But here's the thing. The periods where they did their most work in terms of volume of outputs is also the period where they did their worst work too.

So we make the mistake like everywhere I go in the world, people say, what do you do for a living? I say, I help people come up with ideas. I get the same response. You know what it is? What's that? How do you come up with good ideas? And I say, who said anything about good? I didn't say good.

But that quality orientation is so, we can't think of ideas without thinking good ideas. What's the value of a bad idea? It turns out they're profoundly valuable. The goal is not to eliminate bad. The goal is to increase the variation of your ideas such that you make good a possibility too. I just told you the quantity of your ideas is the most important thing. You go, okay, well, what's the distribution of those ideas over a curve of quality?

And I would say, like all natural phenomena, ideas are normally distributed. So it's like a bell curve. It's easy to picture for most listeners probably. Your ideas are going to fall under a bell curve. That means the vast majority of them are pretty ordinary. And then on the right-hand side of the distribution, you've got a small percentage that are totally genius ideas. On the left-hand side of the distribution, you got a small percentage that are totally goofy. And what most people think is, I love the genius stuff, and I'll tolerate the ordinary stuff.

I just want to lop off the ordinary side. And what they don't realize is when they lop off the goofy side of the distribution, they also chop off the genius side too. Because the genius is a function of goofy. Goofy is the price of genius. And allowing yourself to generate not just revolutionary ideas, but also totally insane ideas, totally silly ideas, totally illegal ideas.

In your daily idea quota, one idea must be illegal. One idea must be impossible, right? I didn't say back in the beginning of the conversation, come up with 10 good ideas every day. That's intimidating. But come up with 10 anything ideas? That's totally doable, right? But what are we doing? We're practicing the instinct to relax our quality filter and to shift to a quantity orientation.

There's a fascinating study that came out of a MIT economist named Pierre Azulay. And he studied a bunch of grant programs. And he found that there were two grant programs in particular that delivered pretty outstanding results regularly. One of the two had two times as many breakthrough outcomes and six times as many prizes awarded as the other. It also had 35% higher failure rate. So the question is, which grant program do you want to be a part of?

If you want a totally average, you know, passable outcome, go with the safe one. If you want to win a prize, if you want to really achieve something breakthrough in your field, you're going to have to also bear the potential of failure as well. That's the point about the variation being so critical. Volume is important and variation's important. And nobody's making you implement a bad idea. Nobody's making you do something stupid. But the point is by allowing yourself, I coach a Singaporean executive and IT executive,

and she told me, it's usually only. only after I allow myself to think of something illegal that my really good ideas come. And it's just recognizing that allowing your mind to go there, like the cost of writing down a bad idea is zero. It's a price of a post-it. It's nothing. But the benefit of allowing your mind to increase in variation that much, it's incalculable. So allow yourself to go there and orient on quantity and variation rather than quality, and you'll see your results transform. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they would like to hear more of your ideas? Our new book, Idea Flow, just came out on Penguin Portfolio. You can

pick it up anywhere you pick up books. We've also got a website to support the book called Ideaflow. Design. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, we've made a free resource available to listeners of this episode called How to Think Like Bezos and Jobs. It illuminates seven essential essential tactics and ways of thinking that Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs used to break through in their industries. And we'd love for you to check that out. It's a great resource. And then folks can find me on Twitter. I'm Jeremy Utley on LinkedIn, Jeremy Atlee, et cetera. And I look forward to hearing from listeners and staying in touch. Thank you, Jeremy. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Number one, beware the Einstein effect. If we want

better ideas, better solutions to our problems, we need to keep searching. We can't stop at the first option. Because if we stop, we might get so attached to our first idea that we refuse to see a downstream better idea. Researchers at Oxford and other places have proven, once we find a solution, not only do we stop looking for others, we're actually prevented from seeing better solutions. That's the instilling effect. The number of ideas we produce has a massive impact on the quality of ideas that we produce.

Quantity begets quality. And so stopping at the first option means that we might not find the optimal solution. And this applies no matter what your field is or what the stakes are. This could be the solution that saves your business, or it could be a better email subject line. The same practice applies. If you aren't innovating, you aren't an innovator. And so, just like a pianist will do their scales,

just like a swimmer will do their laps. A creative person is someone who's attending to that creative capacity on a regular basis. And the simplest way to do it is to force yourself to come up with 10 ideas for anything, any problem, could be personal, could be work. The subject client of an email. And so that's the first key takeaway. Beware the Einstein effect. Key takeaway number two. Know the difference between analysis and synthesis, and know that in order to do both well, you'll need exposure to a wide breadth of topics. It's tempting to think that depth within your area of expertise is what will lead to more and better ideas. But breath across fields can help you create interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary connections and observations.

When you borrow ideas from disparate worlds, neurology, biology, accounting, history, food science, sociology, textile manufacturing. I mean, this sounds like word soup, like I'm just naming disciplines and industries. But each of them have their own practices and each have debates, have discussions, have frameworks. When viewed through the lens of your own field, can help you see things in different ways. The brain doesn't create anything from scratch. So when you think of an idea, an idea isn't created from nothing, ex nihilo. An idea is created from component parts, things you already know. A very simple definition of the word idea is it's a connection.

It's a connection between two things that I already know. The brain doesn't create anything from scratch. It's taking pieces and it's connecting them. When you realize that, then a lot of the creative life becomes effectively about gathering Legos. Because if you know that ideas are made of component parts, then the bigger your bag of Legos, the more combinations you can make. To analyze something is to break it apart and to synthesize it is to put it back together. When you can take lessons from disparate fields and analyze them, break those lessons apart into their constituent components, and then put them back together, synthesize them with insights borrowed from a wide variety of fields. That's how you arrive at unique solutions, unique insights.

And so that is the second key takeaway. Widen your lens. Finally, key takeaway number three, breakthroughs can be life-changing, but we make the mistake of thinking that these breakthroughs are happenstance. There's all this mythology around some of history's greatest innovations happening by accident. but people would not have eureka moments if they weren't already thinking through the problem, generating hundreds or thousands of solutions that ended up being the throwaways.

And so we may be able to influence breakthroughs by being deliberate about how we approach problem solving. Breakthroughs for a lot of people are more like break-ins. They catch them off guard. Whoa, where did that come from? It's like a total surprise, right? Rather than being a deliberate strategy that they pursue, like think about perpetrating a breakthrough. Wouldn't that be wonderful if you're the one committing the breakthrough? And so that is the third and final takeaway from this conversation with Stanford professor Jeremy Utley.

Thank you so much for tuning in. If you haven't done so already, please leave us a review in whatever app you're using to listen to this show. I want to give a shout out to Soho Doc who recently left a review that said, quote, heard you on the white coat investor, which is a podcast that I was recently on, and loved your thought process. You verbalized that it's not just money that has value. It's our time, energy, focus, and concentration. There are a lot of podcasts in the finance or personal finance space, and so much of it is a repackaging of things we've already heard. that's disingenuous or ick and fake.

Your podcast is rigorous, thoughtful, well-researched. You have an amazing ability to really listen and then distill the key points for your listeners. Loved the podcasts about Inflation 101. That was the episode that we did that was a primer on inflation. We will link to that in the show notes for this episode if you want to be able to listen to it. Soho. dot goes on to say, love the podcasts about inflation 101, the one with Jen Cicero, and especially the one about happiness at work. Your explanation about imposter syndrome and how it affects

high achieving people was just amazing. I've it saved and forwarded to friends, colleagues, and other physicians and students that I educate and mentor. I also appreciate the honesty about your own experience when you were getting into the Columbia School Fellowship. Please continue to talk about your fellowship. Want to hear about the findings from your dissertation on cryptocurrency. My time is valuable and your podcast and the WCI White Coat Investor are the only ones I really listen to as a lifelong learner of this stuff. Keep on, keeping on. Thank you so much, Soho, Doc.

I appreciate that. I'm really honored that you took the time to leave such a thoughtful and thorough review. And absolutely, I will continue to talk. about this fellowship at Columbia, the business journalism fellowship that I am currently in, I may at some point even do a sort of a catch-up episode, a bonus episode where I just talk about what's going on right now. Because I feel like there are so many updates that I need to give that I just have not had the time to do. So I may at some point do a bonus episode where I just chat with you about everything from learning about how to read business and economic news more

critically, which is a big piece of what we've covered so far this academic year. And that has implications for the way that I now understand all of the economic news coming out around everything from mortgage rates to the jobs report. There's a lot to unpack. So at some point when I have a few hours at my disposal, sometime in the coming weeks, I'll be a lot. I think I'll record a bonus episode that's just, hey, y'all, let's catch up. Thank you so much, Soho, Doc, for that review. I also want to thank CC-12347, who left a review saying, Paula is a talented interviewer.

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