TED Talks Daily - The creative power of your intuition | Bozoma Saint John

Episode Date: March 16, 2024

Great ideas are like electricity -- they snap into sharp focus and sprint from place to place. What's the best way to capture them? Bozoma Saint John, Chief Marketing Officer at Netflix, makes a compelling case to move away from an overreliance on data when making big decisions -- and calls on us all to tap into the power of our intuition and become creative trailblazers.

TED Audio Collective. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu. When businesses want to succeed, they often rely on data. The numbers offer insight. They show what's performing well, what's not, and where. But when it comes to new ideas or trying something that's rather untested by data, what then? In her archive talk from Ted Monterey in 2021,

marketing executive Bozema St. John challenges us to trust our intuition, not mountains of data. After the break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do. And with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests.

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and Sonia Sinek from Creative Destruction Lab as they ask bold questions like, why is Canada lagging in AI adoption and how to catch up? Don't get left behind. Listen to Disruptors, the innovation era, and stay ahead of the game in this fast-changing world. Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. So I am here to recruit you to the liberation movement. So you're probably wondering, well, what are we being liberated from? We are being liberated from the endless weight of data.

It keeps us bound so that we can't move into the future because we're so busy being tied to the past. So how do we get free? The freedom comes from our intuition, you know, that you can't really quite quantify. Sometimes you can't even really describe it. That intuition, that's the thing. Now, I'm fortunate to have had a career in marketing where data and intuition and creative

ideas are sort of intertwined. But at the beginning of my career, I had a boss who told me that the data was going to be extraordinarily important to the success of my ideas, right? Anchor the idea in the data. You can predict whether or not it's going to work, and then you can see if it actually did work, and vice versa. Well, I mean, look, I took that advice. I baked a lot of my ideas right there in the data. I was inspired sometimes, right? I'd see a pattern of something moving, and I'd say, ooh, look, look, look, I can follow that. Maybe it'll work.

But the challenge was that my ideas stopped right there. They didn't really take flight. Because you know the ideas are based off of electricity. You know, ideas like come sharp. They sprint here and they go here and they move there. They're nonlinear. I kind of feel like they're like daydreams. You know, intuition gets you there.

It feels like something that is just on the horizon. You know, and then sometimes it comes into sharp focus. You wake up and you remember exactly what it was. That's what ideas feel like. And your intuition is actually what helps you get there. It takes it from something that is so practical to something that is magical. Now, I'm also very, very, very grateful for a boss I had early on who affirmed my intuition. I worked for Spike Lee at his advertising agency. This was in the early 2000s. And at the time, Pepsi had commissioned him

to create a commercial for a campaign that they were trying to run on the main brand. Spike asked, you know, everybody in the office to come up with some thoughts on what the talent could be that would star in the commercial. And at the time, I was an assistant account executive. There were people who were much more senior than I, who knew exactly what they were doing, who had come up with a bunch of great ideas. They went to the data. You know,

they went to the billboard charts to look at who was at the top. They went to album sales to see who was selling, you know, who the public really loved. They looked at lists that experts had put together. Who's at the top? Who's really going to win? Who has longevity? Well, I didn't really understand any of that data. I could look at it, but I didn't really trust myself to interpret it. So I went to the thing I did know,

which was MTV. There had been a made-for-TV movie called Carmen, the hip-hopera, on MTV. I loved it. It starred Beyonce. Now, I thought it was magical because, I mean, who the hell puts hip-hop and opera together?

It's fascinating. So I put my vote on Beyonce. Now, of course, today, everybody would be like, well, of course, that makes so much sense. Why wouldn't you bet on her? Yeah, she's a winner. But at the time, the data would tell us differently. You know, there are not a lot of solo artists that come out of girl groups and are successful.

In my opinion, there is only one. Diana Ross. Yeah, the one. Beyonce is another. So at the time, nobody was betting on her. But I'm so grateful that Spike affirmed my intuition and also followed his. And I would say today that we're pretty successful. Now, 20 years later, I still use my intuition daily. I'm the chief marketing officer at Netflix. You'd probably say that, well, maybe the stakes weren't as high when I was an assistant account executive, so I could use my intuition, and who cared?

And maybe today that's different. It's not. Every day I'm charged with looking at campaigns that are 15 seconds long, 30 seconds long, 60 seconds long, 90 seconds long, that will encourage you to watch something that's much longer every day. And so I have to use my intuition to understand whether or not something is going to make you cry immediately, is it going to make you laugh immediately, is it going to scare you, is it going to inspire you? And I feel like if I feel that, then perhaps you do too. Now, I'm not the only one. There are other people who do this.

One is 100 years ago, over 100 years ago, Henry Ford. He's attributed with saying that if he had asked people at the time when he was inventing the Model T, if they wanted something like that, they would have said they wanted faster horses instead of this new invention. I think that's pretty powerful. Or you can look at today, a more recent example,

Ed Bastian and the team at Delta, you know, based on intuition, I believe, decided that after the restrictions of leaving that middle seat open so that those who were flying would feel safer, right, with some distance in between them, that after those restrictions were lifted, they still kept that middle seat open. Now, I'm sure they were losing millions of dollars every day

with that decision. But the intuition was right. Do you feel safer? Do I feel safer? What would make us feel safer? I think that's the right thing. Now, look, we can all look at 2020 and 2021 and understand that,

oof, we can't really predict what happens. We don't really know. But what we do know, what are the things that make us feel good, the things that scare us, the things that make us feel more connected to each other? You know, today is a gift. That's why they call it the present.

I didn't make that up, but it's so corny and I love it. But my addition to it is the question, why would we give the present back? Oh, your intuition is a gift. So we have to use it. So then let's talk about you. You have your intuition. And we'll use some science in here, too.

Okay? We're not totally against data. That if you are a set up of molecules, okay? Every one of us have a unique pattern, a unique set. How remarkable is that? No two of us are the same. So one molecule changes and we have a whole other being. Now, if you consider that we take ourselves as a whole, let's pretend we're one big molecule. The matter over there is life and the experiences, the services, the communities that we serve. And we enter that matter, it changes. You step out of the matter, it changes.

So of course you're powerful. So why wouldn't your intuition, your own thing that you have, be powerful? I think about that all the time. And perhaps you don't want to take the big, big swing just yet. You know, you can take the little steps. You can practice. I've practiced for a long time. I want to encourage you to practice too.

So maybe you don't want to, you know, bet on Beyonce. Or maybe you don't want to create the Model T. Maybe you don't want to make the call about the middle seat. So let's take it to something that may be a little bit easier, a little closer to home.

Let's pretend you're curating a dinner party. You're going to be safe about it. We have six people over. And you're considering all the data around who likes what, right? There's some people who, you know, maybe somebody's a pescatarian. Another person doesn't eat dairy. Another hates spicy food. Somebody only likes their food really, really hot with heat. And you have to consider all of this. Put it all together.

Think about what to make. I think you'd come up with a really bland fish dish. Something terrible. But if you used yourself as the curator, as the one with intuition, think about, yes, all the data. Put in all the data. You know, pescatarian, the spices, as the one with intuition, think about, yes, all the data, put in all the data, you know, pescatarian, the spices, all of that. I think you'd probably come up with something that you wanted to eat too, you know, taking all that into consideration. It might be a catfish stew,

something really delicious, something memorable. Now, there's probably going to be one person in there who hates it. Guaranteed. There's always one. But that's okay. Everybody else will remember that moment, will remember that experience. And it'll be something exciting. So consider that. As I think about data and how we want to live and change our world, I'm reminded that sometimes data is the pill that we take to calm our insecurity about what we intuitively know. So I'm advocating that we decrease the dosage of our data and that we increase the

implementation of our intuition. You'll feel great. You really will. When you're able to prove to yourself that the power of your intuition is actually accurate. Thank you so much. Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family? Today, TED now has games designed to keep your mind sharp while having fun. Visit TED.com slash games to explore the joy and wonder of TED Games.