The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 189: Jennifer Mueller - Why Leaders Should Embrace Creative Change

Episode Date: February 6, 2017

    Episode 189: Jennifer Mueller - Why Leaders Should Embrace Creative Change Subscribe on iTunes  or Stitcher Radio The Learning Leader Show "If you're calculating risk, then it's not creative." In This Episode, You Will Learn: Common themes of leaders who sustain excellence: Mindset to learn Curiosity is the most important Thinking like an inventor... Curious by asking "What does this mean?" Why is their pressure to perform immediately? It's a followers mindset -- Anchor to the competitors and play the rat race game This does not allow you to break away from the competition If you want to change the status quo, you cannot think this way There are no shortcuts... Why write the book? Studied how people generated ideas Was cynical at first, but what Jen learned is that leaders don't know how to manage for innovation Why do ideas get rejected? "If you're calculating risk, then it's not creative." How to give yourself a better shot for the idea to get traction? Give a feedback pitch and not a selling pitch... Ask for feedback and advice Her famous study -- "The Bias Against Creativity" Overcoming the bias against creative leadership Backlash against the people who generate the idea -- It's not good Might be promoting people on out of date measures Mis-reading skill set "Creative Leaders have to ask questions and be curious" "Stop generating ideas, start making impact" Have a change circle... Talk about how you can push your idea through "Creative leaders must ask questions... And be curious." Continue Learning: Follow Jen on Twitter: @JennSMueller Read: Creative Change Connect with me on LinkedIn Join our Facebook Group: The Learning Leader Community To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12 You may also like these episodes: Episode 078: Kat Cole – From Hooters Waitress To President of Cinnabon Episode 071: Nate Boyer - Green Beret, Texas Football, The NFL Episode 179: How To Sustain Excellence - The Best Answers From 178 Questions Episode 107: Simon Sinek – Leadership: It Starts With Why Did you enjoy the podcast? If you enjoyed hearing Jennifer Mueller on the show, please don't hesitate to send me a note on Twitter or email me. Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell The Learning Leader Show is supported by FreshBooks: FreshBooks is offering a 30 day, unrestricted free trial to my listeners. To claim it, just go to FreshBooks.com/Learning and enter LEARNING LEADER in the "How Did You Hear About Us?" section.

Now, as I say this, many of your listeners may go, I don't want them to own my idea. It's my idea. I feel very proud of my idea. It's my unique identity. It's who I am. And I'll say to you, I understand. But the real way it works is any time a decision maker says yes to something, a little bit of them believes that they've owned it. That they also recognize the potential.

And you know what? They're right. They're right. Because without those gatekeepers saying, yes, you're dead in the water. Anyways. Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders. Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk. Pump for our new sponsor this year, it's Fresh Books. The working world has changed. With the growth of the internet, there's never been more opportunities for the self-employed. Meet this end, FreshBooks is excited to announce the launch of an all-new version of their cloud accounting software. It's been redesigned from the ground up and custom built for exactly the way you work.

Get ready for the simplest way to be more productive, organized, and most importantly, get paid quickly. The all-new Fresh Books is not only easy to use, it's also packed full of powerful features. Like, create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds. Set up online payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster and see when your client has seen your invoice and put an end to the guessing games. FreshBooks is offering a 30-day unrestricted free trial to my listeners. To claim it, just go to freshbooks.com slash learning and enter Learning Leader in the How Did You Hear About Us section. Hey and welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here.

absolutely thrilled with my featured leader tonight. It's Dr. Jennifer Mueller. She published an academic paper titled The Bias Against Creativity, which immediately went viral. More recently, she wrote a book titled Creative Change, Why We Resist It, How We Can Embrace It. A Few of the topics that Jen and I discussed on this really thought-provoking conversation. How do you stand a better chance of getting your new idea traction at work? Then how can we overcome the bias against creative leadership, follow up why, why we should stop generating ideas and start making an impact through our actions. Ladies and gentlemen, you're going to love this one with Dr. Jennifer Mueller. Jen, thank you so much for being here on the Learning Leaders Show. I've been really looking

forward to this. Welcome. Hi, Ryan. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I mentioned you in the conversation we were having prior to recording that I am a big fan of people, of studying people like you who have studied others, really get deep into from a social psychologist perspective, and I'm a big fan of the work that you do. Curious from your perspective, when you've done research written a lot, when you find people who sustain excellence, what are some of the common themes they all seem to share? Yeah. What I'm finding in my work, the big, big theme that's coming out, aside from the whole

creativity piece, is the mindset piece. And what I found was there's this mindset that I see people using a lot. And it's a mindset you may have seen in the popular press. Like there's one best solution. There's, it's all about how to do things and how to implement stuff and know the answers and get stuff done quick. And quick answers and quick solutions. And I think that mindset is very efficient and people use it to make decisions. The problem that I've seen though with the way, the thinking like this is it shuts down.

people's curiosity. I see it in the classroom. I see it amongst the leaders. I see it in many, many contexts. And so while it helps people make decisions quickly and maybe navigate their world very quickly, you know which movie you want, it's the best one with the best metrics, you know, which idea you want. It has the best ROI. It shuts down the conversation. So what I'm seeing leaders doing that are able to sustain, find solutions that actually produce long-term value, is this almost like thinking like an inventor. It's unleashing their curiosity to say, you know, I'm not looking for the best in exactly how to do it and to know the answers.

I'm curious about kind of what does this mean? Well, what about that? Huh, that's interesting. And following those impulses to learn more. And I think that it's cultivating that curiosity like an inventor would and thinking like an inventor about the metrics as opposed to assuming that the goal is to make the decision quick, fast, be decisive, and know the answers, which I think sounds great in practice and might actually make people perceive you know the answers. But in reality, doesn't really generate

the sustainability that I think leaders who do well have. Thought-provoking answer. I really like it. Specifically when it comes to people that are leaders in business. And I've gone through this personally. And so I want to get your ideas on the advice you would give to these specific people. So I'm going to lay it out for you. In so many leadership roles, there is a lot of pressure from above is a vague term, but I think people get what I mean. There's just a lot of pressure for results, and they need it now or they need it yesterday. And so it seems to be a lot of, and this is common throughout many or businesses all throughout the world, is that because of this pressure and the desire for people to perform right now,

that we don't spend nearly enough time in the quadrant that I would call not urgent, but important, which is basically time to think, time to read, time to watch TED Talks, time to generate ideas, be creative, you might say. And so what advice do you give to leaders in business and organizations that seem to always have to answer to the latest, you know, desire of whether it's a shareholder or whatever it may be to say, hey, we have to perform right now. Well, there's two ways to think about it. The first way is what I'm starting to realize in my own work is that we have to perform now

and have results is very much a follower mindset. What that means is to perform now and to do what works, you have to do what you know, you have what you have a lot of information about. Well, what do you have a lot of information about what your competitors are doing? So what I often see companies do is they start to anchor on and perform to the level of, if not slightly higher than their competitors. And they turn to this rat race. It's almost like you're on a little treadmill, right?

You're the hamster and the little ball going forward. And it kind of keeps you following this herd and following this path. And the problem with that, I want results now, is it's, is not something that will allow you to disrupt your organization to go in a new direction that could be, could could break away from the competition. So, and I think that that realization has not really sunk in. I think people believe that if you disrupt, you can also know, and you can also, you know, get quick results. And what we're finding is that's absolutely 100% not true. It's one of the reasons why they use the term disruption,

because it creates all kinds of havoc and you've got to figure stuff out and all sites of problems emerge. So I think that ultimately, the focus, I think, on getting results quick is not a focus on innovation and creativity. It is a focus on status quo kind of leadership, follower mindset, doing what your competitors are doing. And if you do want to break the status quo. There's no, this is the problem that I faced writing this book. There's no one solution. There's no one thing. There's no power pose. There's no, and there are people who will tell you there are, you know, start with why. And I read this and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is inspirational and beautifully written. Simon's the next book. But it's, it's not going to take you down this other path,

which is about exploring and having room to fail and room to find something. new. And when you see companies that do this, like Elon Musk's company, Elon Musk is a really thoughtful guy. And when you hear him talk, he's not going to be definitive about this is the future and I'm a great listener. And he's going to tell you the complexity of the issues that he faces and how he's kind of thinking in this multi-dimensional way. And that's the kind of leadership that I think if you cultivate in yourself, maybe short term, you've got to kind of speak the, I can get performance, you know, quick and get these results. But the reality is in your mind you understand that that's actually not going to help you promote

yourself and promote the company. There's this other skill set out there that leads to more sustainability. And it's really around making creative change and a lot of stuff I've talked about in the book. So, Jen, I mentioned to you that I got emails from people all over the world and they work companies that are feeling the pressure that you just described, if you had to give them a, you know, a one-minute piece of advice, what would you tell them? I would tell you to give your supervisors my book. No, I'm serious.

Now, it sounds self-serving. So if you go on Amazon, I think one of the number one reviews is there are no shortcuts, no easy solutions. That's the first review. It's a five-star review. and people are liking it. And it's almost like you have to educate them. Because I think a lot of leaders, they want the fantasy of the quick innovation that works.

And boom, they're at the top. We all want that fantasy. I want that fantasy. And I think that the popular press has responded to provide these stories that sound like that. You know what I mean? And people will read them and they sound inspiring. but the truth is it's it's actually harming a lot of people because it it doesn't talk about the other side, which is how difficult things are and how sometimes you can say something

and it doesn't come out right or isn't perceived right and it can harm your career and all the pressures that come from wanting both quick results and also long-term sustainable change that is new and innovative and disruptive. And I think part of what's going to happen, I hope will happen, is just an education to leaders, to managers about what this really looks like, what they're really looking for that. If they really want disruption, and maybe they don't, maybe they just want quick results and to follow the herd, but if they really do want to rise above as an institution, then cultivating this other kind of way of thinking about leadership is key. But they can't do it without knowing what it looks like.

some of the most self-assured best leaders I've ever come across. They are unbelievably curious, but they also have a bit of patience about them. And I think that seems to be what you're describing to me, is that if you want to just follow the herd and try to just barely outpace the competition, you just stay on that line of non-innovation. And you could probably have a decent little career doing that. It might not be that fun, but you could have a decent career doing it.

But if you add in elements of curiosity and patience, there's big opportunities for you. But it's not going to necessarily happen overnight. And the book we're referencing, by the way, is called Creative Change. Why we resist it, how we can embrace it. Why did you write this book, Jen? Why did I write this book? Oh, there's so many reasons. I think one of the reasons is because, you know, I'm an academic, which your readers might go,

Oh, no, that sounds boring. And yeah. But I'm an academic that is fascinated with stories. And the stories I was hearing leaders talk about was about making change and figuring out how to disrupt the dialogue. And the stories I was hearing and the research I was reading from my own field was about how to generate more and more and more and more ideas. And I thought to myself, there's a disconnect here. And I started to study how people recognize creative opportunity, see value in the new. And what I realized was that this mindset is key to whether or not people will see value in the new, such that when you're in this how best mindset, this treadmill mindset, this black or white, this I want results now mindset.

In the laboratory, we've shown that people who are in that mindset associate words like creativity with words like vomit. And they see creative ideas and they go, that's not creative. And the other side of it that I'm learning is in that treadmill mindset, when you're in that mindset, you'll dress up. really incremental stuff as innovative. And that's how you kind of convince yourself that you're actually innovating. And so it's self-perpetuating in so many ways. And it's very hard to get off that treadmill. And once I realized that leaders are really struggling.

And initially I had a very cynical view. I thought, oh, leaders just want to cover their butts. They want to have metrics so that they can make themselves look good. And creative ideas don't necessarily have these metrics. And this is all about self-preservation and impression. management. And when I started to talk to leaders and go more deeply into the problem, what I found was that many leaders simply don't know how to manage for innovation. They just don't know. There's not been a dialogue about what creativity looks like in the course of making change as opposed to just

regular change, like cutting costs, improving your efficiency. That's not creativity. That's operating within an existing way of thinking or how your competitors are doing business. That's operating with an existing way of thinking. Creativity is doing something that may seem opposite the old way. So it's going to feel weird and strange and odd. You know, thinking differently and outside the box doesn't feel good. It can feel really bad. And acknowledging that can help prepare people for that so that when they encounter it, they don't immediately do the knee jerk. Oh, vomit. Ew. Get away from me. Which is what they're doing. Instead, they can say, okay, I don't feel comfortable. isn't that interesting?

I wonder why. And it's getting people from the ick to the curiosity that I hope the book will at least open up the possibility for. Could you share a story of a positive interaction you had of a leader, whether they're in a business or not? And you mentioned Elon Musk, and obviously some of his ideas that some would have probably thought when he came up with him were crazy

are now just mainstream going to Mars, driving electric cars. Is there another example or a story of somebody that you could share that does this really well? Well, the story I was most impressed by was a physician by the name of Tom Fogarty. And Tom Fogarty is a, I don't know, if you've ever known anybody who's had a heart attack, that person's life was probably saved because of Tom Fogarty's invention. What he did was he invented this balloon catheter. So what that means is what they used to do if you had a clot in your body, and this was in the 50s, is if you had a blood clot, you were either going to die or they would cut off a limb. That's where your options were.

Because the way they would treat a blood clot is they would open up the vein and try to remove the clot that way or they would cut off the limb. So basically death or you don't have a limb. And he thought there has to be a better way. And he invented this way to go through the actual vein itself or artery with a little, almost like a wire with a little balloon attached at the end of it. And he would blow and inflate the balloon and pull it back out and get the clot out. And no fatalities. No fatalities. And what was amazing about this invention is after he invented it, he couldn't get it published until he worked with his advisor who opened some doors for him.

And after it was published, remember, the status quo at the time was death or no limb. So after it was published, you'd think everybody would want to use this technology. Guess what? Nobody did. The physicians ignored it until a smart lawyer sued a hospital for not using this practice that would have guaranteed the patient had lived, at least according to the results. And now it is the standard of care today. Now, Tom Fogarty now has an incubation.

that he runs, the Fogarty Institute of Innovation, where he finds medical device companies, promising medical device companies, and brings them in and starts to coach them and to build them. And I asked him, how do you make these choices? And what was interesting about asking him this is he really had to think it through. It wasn't something that he had a formula for, you know. He didn't have a checklist that he kind of had memorized. What it was was he said, look, you know, I'm here. here to encourage people. I don't want to teach people. I don't want people to think like me

because innovation, I don't like this word incubator because you don't know if any of these inventions are going to work. All you know is that there's a process. And that process is one that I know if the innovator follows that process and they're learning and they're curious and they're improving and they're moving and they're interacting with the end user, especially the patient who he views as the hero and all of this because they're the person who's really risking a lot, then that's the kind of person that can make it work. And sometimes you can't make it work. The materials aren't yet available. The market isn't yet there. The regulations aren't yet ready. So and these are reasons that things fail that are not about the innovator, not being on

the ground listening and making the product work. So his way of thinking about it is he doesn't care if you come from Stanford. He doesn't care if you've had an incubator before and you've been successful. He cares if you want to solve that problem. If you're curious, if you're down with the patient, asking the questions and really have a passion and a problem that you want to solve. Those are the kinds of things that he looks for when he brings various companies into his fold. And when I say, you know, don't you want to make money? He's like, yeah, you know, I'm here to make money. But the other thing he said was when I focus on that, I tend to get really anxious because I don't have metrics. I don't have all this stuff. And then I have to take a deep breath and I have to kind of settle myself down

and say, I can't know. I can't know. I might risk everything. It's true. And he says it happens every day. And so far, he's been making a lot of money. So let's dive a little deeper into some of your work in the book. Is that cool? Yeah. Let's start with why do ideas get rejected? Well, I think one of the major reasons is because people have believed that creative ideas, you are just like any other kind of idea and any other.

expert can recognize one. And in some ways, it'll be clear to the experts when a creative idea is really great. And that assumption has created a lot of problems. It's created a lot of problems in the scientific domains. So the most novel papers are getting rejected at an alarming rate. One study showed that I think it was 13 of the most breakthrough papers. I want to say, I might be misquoting this because they don't have the data in front of me. I think it was, sorry, 14 of the most breakthrough papers. 12 of them were desk rejected. What that means is they were rejected without being peer reviewed, without having a thorough

vetting. These were the breakthrough papers, the most impactful papers in the field in the course of a decade. And they were desk rejected. And so what this suggests is that, you know, these experts are really struggling in ways that we haven't acknowledged when it comes to evaluating really new ideas. And so I think that we haven't been talking about that. We haven't been having that dialogue. We've been having the dialogue about the hero, the innovator who has the idea and it's great and it works.

And so I think I've given these people this false expectation that you can know and the metrics will tell you if an idea that's creative is ultimately going to be received well. And so what I wanted to do was write a book to tell the other side of the story. The side of the story, which is all this uncertainty that creativity brings can create, you know, real problems because, A, leaders don't recognize great opportunity. In some ways, they can recognize opportunity that keeps them closer to doing what they've always been doing because you can only calculate risk for something you know a lot about. If you're calculating risk for something, it's not really creative is another way to say it. And I think that this belief that, oh, you can calculate risk and risk is meaningful is in some ways what you're battling against.

And so in any case, what I wanted to write about is people don't want to talk about how uncomfortable creativity makes them feel. They don't want to talk about how it feels bad, actually, for those who are attempting to put their money on the line to bet on something where there's no. data. And I wanted to give people who were trying to push ideas forward or recognize opportunity some possibility of seeing the hope to see, to see that I think that this mindset we've been using pretty much makes people frame everything negatively, so overly negatively. And as opposed to having a more skeptical kind of love, you know, a little more balanced approach to see it as, okay, yeah, there are a lot of problems here, but we hope for this and then open up the possibility for their curiosity to kind of continue and iterate.

So I'm thinking of the person who works at a company and they are curious type, they're creative. If they're listening to the show, they probably are. I find that listeners are quite intelligent. And so they probably are the type that do have thoughts and ideas to make positive change wherever they currently are. how can we what advice can we give to that specific person that will give them a better chance of creating traction with their creative idea what's what are like i love jenn i love the thought of someone being able to finish listening to this this conversation we're having and implement a few things that could better that could you know change their life for lack of a better

term in a good way. And so what are a few things that they could implement right now that could potentially do that for them? There are many. In Chapter 5 in the book, I talk about this idea pitching framework. And it's important that any time you encounter a creative idea or something you think would be creative or seen as creative to your boss. And how you know that is, you know what your boss or the person with decision-making authority, you want to know their worldview, kind of what they know, what the paradigms are, what the comparison is they're immediately going to use when they look at the thing you're trying to pitch. And knowing that is a huge benefit because it tells you kind of the kind of metrics that they expect, how good they want

this idea to be, what they want it to look like. And what I say about creative ideas is, you know, you don't want to make the mistake. There's two mistakes you can make with pitching a creative idea. And the first is the biggest one. And I see it all the time. Perhaps the biggest example of that is Ken Robertson, who has this number one TED talk on why schools kill creativity. And in this TED talk, and it's a lovely talk, and he's very funny and very charming. And he says, you know, he talks about how schools don't have creative curriculums and they don't involve dance and the arts. And then he goes on to say, no school does this. No school does this. Isn't the a shame they should do it. Now put yourself in the position of a decision maker and an administrator

in a school and you hear the message, no school does this. You should do it. Does that in your mind instigate an immediate need to change? No. Why? Well, because you mentioned it at the beginning of the conversation. Nobody's doing it. And there's nobody's doing it. You're fine. You're safe. If nobody's doing it, there must be something they know. Right. And this is called the status quo bias. It's this, even if something exists, people will want to do it more than something new. The fact that it's existed for a long time, they'll want to do it even more. The fact that lots of people have done it for a long time means you basically have lost your audience. They're going to want to do the thing that other people have done for a long time. People want to follow the crowd. It feels safe when they

follow the crowd. And if you're pitching a creative idea, you need to be aware that you don't want to evoke that feeling that the alternative is much more safe than your idea. So this means that most selling strategies, the full-on, unilateral, let me tell you how awesome my idea is, I don't typically see these working because they evoke the status quo bias, if not directly, the person sitting in that audience has all these different objections in their head because the status quo idea in their head is, it looks great. You know what I mean? And so, so this framework that I talk about gets at attacking the problems sideways as opposed to head-on. Anytime you have a creative idea, you try to attack it head-on, status quo always will beat you. It will always be better

than your new idea, no matter what. So instead of attacking it head-on, attack it sideways. One way to attack it sideways, for example, is instead of giving a selling pitch, you can give what call a feedback pitch. Now, the goal of a selling pitch and a feedback pitch is exactly the same. You want the other person to walk away saying yes to your idea. But the way you go about a selling pitch and a feedback pitch is very different. The first, there are two goals with a feedback pitch. The first goal is to walk up to someone probably in a formal situation, it's best. But when they have some time and they're not stressed out and when you can actually have a conversation. And ask them, hey, here's my idea.

What do you think? And in my experience, it's been important to ask this open-ended question because you want to get a sense of what their comparison is. What are they comparing your idea to? Because you might not know. You know, one decision maker that vetted Star Wars compared it to 2001 a space Odyssey and, you know, said, oh, Star Wars isn't angsty and that's what's sold to audiences. People want the psychological, you know, angst. and they want a thinking movie for a sci-fi movie.

And nowadays we might think, why did that happen? Why did they even, those two movies are so different? But at the time, it would have made sense because 2001 was one of the most successful sci-fi movies of the day. So it would have made sense to compare Star Wars to that particular movie. So you want to know what their comparison point is. So you can get a sense of what they're thinking. The problem is you need to solve.

And once they, once they, you get that feedback from them, the, the person, you know, the, the, the, the person who sells an idea will say, okay, let me try to overcome your objections one by one. That's absolutely 100% not what you want to do. The second step to a feedback pitch is after you say, what do you think, is you ask for their advice. How would you overcome that? Huh, that's interesting. What would you do to make the idea better? And the reason why you've now shifted from feedback to advice is because you want to start a collaboration with this person, because you want to start a collaboration with this person, because you want that person in their mind to start owning a piece of your idea. Now, as I say this, many of your listeners may go, I don't want them to own my idea.

It's my idea. I feel very proud of my idea. It's my unique identity. It's who I am. And I'll say to you, I understand. But the real way it works is any time a decision maker says yes to something, a little bit of them believes that they've owned it. that they also recognize the potential. And you know what?

They're right. They're right. Because without those gatekeepers saying, yes, you're dead in the water anyways. So they have to actually own the idea too in some way for them to want to take the risk to then say yes and put money behind it. And I think once inventors kind of understand that, that just because somebody else feels ownership over your idea, it doesn't diminish its importance and its value. And when you really think about it in organizations, there's so many players that have to take part in any kind of creative endeavor. Nobody knows who's responsible anyways, really. But anyhow, so you ask for their advice, you start collaborating with them on it.

And, you know, it's key when you're doing this to try to make sure that you maintain the integrity of what you believe that makes the idea new. Because sometimes decision makers will want you to make ideas look very similar to what has already been happening. And, you know, that's a very difficult dance. there. And afterwards, after you have that conversation, you then go back to the drawing board, you make a couple of tweaks to the idea, you send the person this idea, and you say, look, thanks so much for your feedback and advice. And I implemented it. And I think the idea is better, assuming, of course, you believe that. And then you ask them, you know, would you give this idea a shot? And now what you have going for you is psychologically, the idea isn't so foreign and weird. It's not

getting them out of left field and they also feel a little ownership for it. The likelihood they're going to say yes to it has now increased. Reminds me of a couple things. Robert Green's 48 Laws of Power. He talks about this, about the fact that people, even some of the best leaders have egos. And this plays into that a little bit as well as Ryan Holiday does too. An ego is the enemy. And that's what's interesting to me is that I think you find a way to tap into it. You ask for their advice instead of telling them you're asking them, which is flattering because you're asking them for their advice, right? And then in addition to that, once they feel like it's become at least some sort of their idea, then that plays into from, this is not a Jedi mind track. This is just

basic psychology, I guess you could call it, where if it becomes part of their own idea, they're more apt to like their own ideas than someone else's ideas. And then they feel a bit of ownership. And then they're rooting for you and they're with you. And I think that, That makes a big difference as opposed to the people who just try to sell, sell, sell, sell. It's to be more thoughtful about your approach to getting your idea done. Yeah, I think having, I had an article that was really, really popular and it really feels good when something goes viral. And, you know, it does. And it can, but the process of doing it is egoless, you know, the process, like when you, when you're trying to be.

creative, if you have an ego about it, first off, your ego will be torn apart. Because somebody will tell you how stupid you are and how you're wrong and now it's never going to work and you should never have been in this field in the first place and who are you eventually somewhere around the road. And so you kind of have to take your ego out of it and kind of rely on your friends and your collaborators and work together and get that support and try to make it a collaboration to push it through as opposed to. And then when you do that, you might not get credit, it's true, or you might get credit depending upon how things work. But the point, if you think of it in terms of solving a real problem, then maybe that also can feel like the reward too.

The paper you're referencing was titled The Bias Against Creativity, which went viral, downloaded over 65,000 times, receiving more than 100 media mention is pretty cool. And then the Atlantic called it, described it a famous study. How did your life change after that came out? Well, just to give you, I think when people say 65,000, that's not very many because, you know, TED Talks have 45 million. But what was amazing about that was this was an academic paper with stats. This was written in dry, really not interesting language. So what's the basic, the typical published paper in this setting? What's the typical one downloaded?

Oh, if you had a really great paper, maybe 500. Okay. You know, maybe 500 downloads would be a really, really good show. So 65,000 was in some ways and counting, by the way, it was a movement. Something was something that was really resonating with people. And so my life, you know, what's interesting about that is your life doesn't really change because I think a lot of, a lot of the focus is about, you know, you want a lot of papers. You know, this is I'm talking now as an academic. You want, you want like, if you have 50 papers, it's almost better than one breakthrough.

But it did change because I started to realize that, you know, there are many ways to have any career. You know, in the academic world, one thing you do is you can sit down and you can write lots of papers and if people read them or not, it doesn't matter if they get published in the journals. Another way to see it is, you know, you write a paper and it really resonates with people. And then I decided to write a book. And that's not something academics are encouraged to do or that they typically do. but something that I think you're going to see more and more of is academics recognize that's the way to make impacts and to connect with people.

So that's how my life changed. So I was reading through it and I stopped and highlighted chapter 7, overcome the bias against creative leadership. And you discuss, and I'll ask you to go a little bit deeper here and share for the people who haven't read it yet. The CEOs of Procter & Gamble, how it shifted from Bob McDonnell to Agie Laughley. and A. G. Lafley, I think it's, well, both of them are known, but I think A.G. Laffley, more well known based on his work and some call him a visionary and books that he's written. Could you share the story when it comes to Chapter 7 overcoming the bias against creative leadership? Yeah. And so we had discovered, this was in 2011, before the bias against creativity paper, and this paper also did quite well, but we had discovered something that was very counterintuitive. Because people have been talking about creativity being so great and no one really been talking about the downsides, I was really surprised when I collected some data and I found a negative correlation between leaders rating their subordinates as creative and whether or not they had leadership potential. And I found it in three different organizations.

And I thought, whoa, this isn't supposed to happen. What's going on here? So we then brought it into the laboratory and then we published the paper. And what we found was when you're labeled as creative, when someone says, this is, as a creative person, you don't really have a backlash necessarily against that. It's when you generate the idea versus somebody who just generates a practical idea. It's just this act of generating the idea that evokes this belief that, you know, maybe you're not focused, you're not thinking about the implementation concerns. You can't execute. You're not organized.

You're, you know, a dreamer or naive. And all of these are part of what people think about creative individuals, the negative side of what people think about creative individuals. And so when you're not yet a leader and you're first starting out and you pitch a creative idea, there actually is a cost to your leadership. And I argue that this is actually not so good because you want people who are creative in leadership roles. And is it possible that we might be, you know, promoting people based on an out-of-date stereotype of leadership that doesn't include creativity as it should. And, you know, there's some examples of leaders being hailed as visionaries, and perhaps they

actually are. But there are many instances when these visionaries, interestingly, they're in a position to do creative things and they don't. And so the question, and they're asked to do creative things and they're expected to do creative things and they don't. And so the question could be that maybe, you know, the skill set around disrupting people's thinking and taking organizations in new direction. directions is something that we're, at least when somebody does not yet have leadership potential,

is we're misreading. We're misreading that skill set. It's possible. So in the book, I say, look, you know, we have a stereotype of leadership and the person who I think embodies that beautifully is Donald Trump. The stereotype of leadership is tyrannical, masculine, strong, knows the answer is competent and tall. You know, and this, knowing the answer, and being certain about the world, the stereotype, it turns out it doesn't work very well when you actually need creativity because the truth is, like I mentioned, if experts in the field don't know the value of a creative idea and they have to use their best guess and be open to the possibilities, leaders can't know either. So there's this question of, you know, maybe part of, well, the problem

is the stereotype of leadership we've been using is the stuff we use in history books. and what we've seen plays well in the media like Donald Trump and, you know, Wolf of Wall Street and these, you know, leaders who know the answers and are hardcore and steely-eyed. And the reality is that creative leaders have to ask questions and be curious and not know the answers and, you know, and open up the possibility to find the answers. And so the book really talks about changing the stereotype of leadership. And this is why, you know, one of the things that could happen with this book is the people who are currently in leadership positions might not necessarily, you know, feel comfortable with that. And that's why, you know, if you aren't in a leadership position and you aspire to be in one, you know, providing your leader with a book like this and saying, this is some really interesting ideas and talking about it, could be one segue where if you're naturally creative and that's something you enjoy and that you do, you can help shape, recast those actions as you're actually trying. trying to lead the group in a new direction. So that was the goal of the chapter.

There was so much there. So when you talk about this, I just really thought provoking. So when you think about the stereotype of a leader, and maybe it's because I'm just so deep into this podcast and the people I talk to, that is not my stereotype of good or great leadership. Do you think that's, am I just head in the sand or just focused? on different people, but when I think of the tyrannical person who doesn't read, who has all the answers, who doesn't ask questions, who isn't curious, I mean, I don't, I view them as,

I don't know the word I would even use, but certainly leader isn't one of them. Do you think that's changing or am I just off here? I don't know. I was just thinking that is not how I stereotype great leadership. I do think it is changing. I do think it's changing. I think, however, you know, we're seeing. that that kind of leadership still plays well.

Do you know what I'm saying? You mean to get elected to president or just in general? Well, to rise through the ranks. Okay. Okay. Do you see what I'm saying? So I think what happens is people use that stereotype to rise to the ranks because for some reason, confidence, and this is something that I have a beef with, this whole focus on confidence.

In some ways, when I see students that lack confidence, I think that person to me has the most leadership potential because that person to me is, you know, realistic with them or is at least trying to have the dialogue with themselves about how much confidence should I really show. Do you know what I mean? What's appropriate? To me, that's somebody who's ultimately going to get to a position and really care about solving problems as opposed to just managing other people's impressions of them. So I like to cultivate those people.

But I think a lot of executives think, okay, you just have to have confidence. Do you have confidence? Then I'm going to choose you as a leader. And I think that kind of thinking can get you into trouble. Yeah, interesting. I think I know I'm picturing people in my mind right now that they are confident based upon their willingness to ask questions and their willingness to gain knowledge. And that, to me, that type of confidence is really attractive in a leader to me, someone I want to study.

If they are confident enough and secure enough in themselves to maybe ask a stupid question or a question that others would be fearful of asking for fear of being seen as not intelligent, those are the ones. So I think that I think we're talking about the same type of people where they're willing to put it out there. The insecure leaders who have fake, macho, tough guy confidence are certainly the ones who I would steer clear of. I think you're right. And in the book, I talk about how to recognize people who can ask those questions. And I agree with you that it's just a different kind of confidence. But it's not a confidence around knowing the answer. Exactly. So I guess people have to disentangle knowing the answer from confidence and decide that you can not know the answer and also be confident. And be secure enough in yourself to change your mind. I think a lot about Adam Grant, know he put a blurb on your book. I'm not sure. Do you guys, do you guys work? Have you worked together? Yeah, we worked a word together. I thought so. Yeah, I noticed that. So I figured you had. And he, I think he said it best and others have said it as well that there, that you have a willingness and security in your,

your beliefs that you can change your mind. And you're open enough to, if something, if you view the data or some of the work put out by someone like you, Jen, you could potentially be open to changing what you formally believe. Like for me, one example, maybe not a good one, but I'll share it anyway. When I was in a leadership role in hiring sales professionals, when I was really new, I'd gotten advice from certain people that said, you know, make sure you hire really educated people for your sales team. Make sure they, you know, if they have an MBA even better.

And so I would, if someone didn't have a college degree, I wouldn't even interview them. And this was just a gigantic mistake. And I learned that probably about a year later when a friend of mine said, listen, I know this person does not have a college degree, but I guarantee you, they will crush it for you. And they're really thoughtful. They're unbelievably smart. For just for family reasons and other things, they didn't go to college or they didn't finish

college. And I hired, I took the advice of my friend. I hired him and they just blew me away. And it just opened my mind. It changed my mind completely on my thought process on how to hire that you have to go deeper. You can't just cross somebody off a list. just because they don't have this one piece of paper that I personally got.

And it was a real, a poor way of viewing it in my leadership that I needed to make mistakes in order to learn directly from somebody and then see the success. And since then, I've continued to follow that rule or lack of a rule. And it's been really beneficial for me. And I think, I think you just had to have to open this to change my mind. You know, I love that example for so many reasons. And I love how you said it. What you just described is a creative change.

It's going from one way of thinking about something, you know, people I hire have to have college degrees to a second way that may be opposite the first, which is, no, they actually don't. And I'm sure when you first got that feedback, it didn't feel so good, you know, that you could hire people without them. It didn't feel like, oh, revelation, my life is changed now, you know, and you marched off into the sunset. It probably wasn't like that.

It probably was a little soul searching, felt a little. bad. Maybe you felt like you had egg on your face. I don't know what. But then when you actually tried it, you found that it opened up all kinds of other possibilities. And you got there by listening to other people, by searching for your own mistakes and being kind of open to them and curious. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. Somebody who's not curious doesn't care about those things. And I think this, when we talk about changing your mind, I think that's such a wonderful way to talk about this because that's what creative change is. So change is changing your behavior, but not changing your mind. So you can just, you know, you just don't have the motivation.

You know, I can't lose weight because I know I need to. I just need to do it. That's the habit problem and that you need to overcome. Creative change is changing your mind before you can change your behavior. And what I learned is an educator and, you know, just through my life is where is it that we learn to change our minds. You know, in school, we certainly don't learn that. In school, we learn pretty much to learn how the professor wants us to learn, right, to get a good grade. But there's not a systematic way the professor helps us learn to change our minds.

And I think when, you know, institutions talk about thinking differently, this is the skill they really should be teaching how to change their minds and be aware of this skill. Because I think this is skill like you learned is something that has profound impact on people's ability to compete and learn and flourish and grow. So, Jen, this has been so good. I want to, I think, end the conversation, at least this first conversation we're having. I fully expect us to have more talking about Chapter 8 where it's to stop generating ideas and start making impact. And I'd love to leave our listeners here with this part for you to go a little bit deeper when it comes to the point of

when you shift from idea to making impact. Can you share more? Yes. So I, this was a comment that I made in part because there's so much dialogue about generating ideas. Every creativity book I think, I think I'm right to say, every creativity book I've ever seen has the same advice to generate more and more and more and more and more and more. And I, because experts have so much uncertainty and we know that when you have more choices, you get overload. What I was seeing on the side of decision makers is that this advice was recipe for disaster for getting your ideas chosen. And that instead, part of what needs to happen is idea generation matters and it's important and all of that work is wonderful. It's not to diss that work. It's to say that, you know,

learning how to make creative change is just as important. as generating the idea in the first place because an idea you generate that you don't try to gain influence for is an idea in the file drawer that doesn't make impact. And so what I describe is a one-to-one ratio of the amount of time you spend generating ideas to the amount of time you spend making creative change. And so this chapter was really important for people to read. And maybe it should have gone first in the book. I'm not sure. But what it says is all the principles that I lay out in the book, they're hard to learn. It's not easy to make creative change. This is in some ways a new kind of leadership skill.

So one of the things that you might want to do is right when you have an idea you're in a group is to sit down and to talk about how can you start making creative change out of the gate? Because the time to make creative change is as soon as you start to have ideas themselves. Because part of it is getting your group to say yes to a new thing. That's creative change. The next part is once you say yes to that new thing and you're going to push it forward to start reaching out to other parts of the organization to see who's open, who isn't, what are the people thinking about this, talking to your regulatory guys, your manufacturing guys,

and getting all the information that you can up front so that you can start incorporating it into your design. Like all of that's really not something people do. And what I hear is their ideas are wasted effort because they get killed. They spend all this time and effort generating the stuff in their teams and they feel really good. and then they present it to stuff and they use regular selling techniques and they end up, you know, very disappointed, disillusioned and leaving their jobs. So it's, so the goal of the final chapter was to wrap it all together and to say, I know I gave you a delusioned solutions. I know it's complicated. I wanted to give you a simple story.

I'm sorry. Someone else might come along someday and say, here you go, do this and all your problems will be solved. It's not me. But what I wanted to do was give people something that if they followed it, it could work. It could really, really work. And one of the pieces of advice I give, which I think is great, is to have what I call a change circle where you sit with a group of people from different parts of the organization. If you're an entrepreneur, sit with people from different companies and talk about how you can push your idea through, how you can use strategies in the book,

and maybe strategies you've heard from other folks to push your idea through. And what I find is a lot of times people will say, ah, you know, so-and-so is just bias against creativity. I can't get a push through, but then the group starts brainstorming for them and saying, no, no, no, you know what, your pitch is awful. You know, you're evoking the status quo bias or, you know, you're not making them feel the failure. You can't just say, you know, you've got to do this. It's a good thing to do, you know, bad things will happen if you don't. You literally have to give them an example that makes them feel.

Why aren't you doing that? And that's what I see happens in these groups. And all of a sudden, people are brainstorming ways to pitch ideas and people to talk. talk to about ideas and feedback pitches. And ideas are starting to get through. So that's what I hope this final chapter would do, would solidify that I'm not saying, don't start, don't generate any more ideas. I'm saying do both. Yeah. There comes a point in time where you got to make it happen. We got to go out and do it. Do the work. Jen, thank you so much for being here again. This really good work that you're putting out in the world. I appreciate

you diving deeper with me here on the Learning Leader Show. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Online, you can go to Jennifer S. Mueller, M-U-E-L-L-E-L-E-R dot com, which is my website. I have stories of people who have written me about how they've tried to use the techniques in the book successfully, unsuccessfully, what they would tweak, what they think I missed, what's the big thing that works for them, and you should expect to see those stories coming along. You can also sign up to get more of those stories. And follow me on Twitter at Jen S. Mueller. Awesome.

Thanks again, Jen. Look forward to us continuing our dialogue as we both progress. This is great. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks a lot. All right. All right. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over,

but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to Learning Leadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO, world-class athlete or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on the Learning Leader Show. Pump for our new sponsor this year, it's Fresh Books. The working world has changed.

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