Ideaflow: Achieving Breakthrough Creativity and Ideas with Jeremy Utley
Jeremy Utley - Stanford University Professor and Author
Jeremy Utley is a world-leading expert on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. He’s an adjunct professor at Stanford University, a General Partner at Freespin Capital, and the co-author of Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters, which landed him on the Thinkers50 Top Ten Innovation Leaders watch list in 2023.
His award-winning teaching has touched more than a million students of innovation over the last 14+ years. A dynamic and engaging speaker, Jeremy translates his research into the history of invention and discovery into transformative learning experiences.
Jeremy Utley’s current research concerns the impact of generative AI on problem solving and innovation inside large organizations. As the Founder Stanford’s Masters of Creativity series (former Director of Executive Education), he considers himself to be a “front row student in the world’s coolest classroom,” and shines a spotlight on the ways every single one of us can emulate creative masters and grow in our own journey of becoming.
Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters
In this searching examination of the personal and interpersonal practices (rather than events) that fuel breakthrough thinking, Jeremy Utley shares insights from his bestselling book, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters (co-written with Perry Klebahn). Having taught the subject of innovation for the last 14+ years at Stanford, he has seen the topic become over-hyped, yet remain an under-nourished capability. This is true not only on the personal level, but also on the team and organizational levels. This conversation explores what Ideaflow is, and how we create organisations and teams where it’s possible.
Learn more about Jeremy Utley and find his new book here:
Connect with Jeremy Utley on LinkedIn here.
Get your copy of Jeremy’s book Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters here.
Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Sally Clarke: Welcome to We Are Human Leaders. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do. You're creative. We all are. And the capacity for innovative and creative ideas has never been more important in our work lives and beyond. Our first idea is often not our best. And yet many of us get stuck in the good enough rut rather than pursuing something magical.
[00:00:32] Sally Clarke: So what does it take to be truly innovative? How can we nurture fertile ground for game changing ideas? An environment where ideas flow. I'm Sally Clark, and today, Alexa Sana and I are speaking with Jeremy Utley. Jeremy is a world leading expert on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He's an adjunct professor at Stanford University, a general partner at Freespin Capital, and the co author of Idea Flow, The Only Business Metric That Matters.
[00:00:59] Sally Clarke: His award winning teaching has touched more than a million students of innovation, and his current research concerns the impact of generative AI. On problem solving and creativity. Jeremy is a natural born communicator, and this conversation will open your eyes on ideas, creativity, and the impact of integrating AI at work, including practical tips on how to harness AI to improve you and your team's idea flow.
[00:01:24] Sally Clarke: Let's delve in.
[00:01:28] Alexis Zahner: Welcome to We are Human Leaders. Jeremy, it's a pleasure to have you here with us today. And we'd love to start our conversation by getting to know you a little bit more first and the journey that's brought you to the important work that you're doing today.
[00:01:41] Jeremy Utley: My pleasure. I'm delighted to be here and I'm eager to see where the conversation takes us.
[00:01:45] Alexis Zahner: Agreed. So tell us a little bit about you, Jeremy. How did you come to do this work and publish your new book on IdeaFlow?
[00:01:53] Jeremy Utley: How I came into the work was totally accidentally. My life was derailed by the design school at Stanford about over 15 years ago. I was actually working at a startup in India doing my MBA stuff.
[00:02:08] Jeremy Utley: I'm a recovering MBA. So I love a good spreadsheet, love a good pivot table. And while I was working for this startup in India, my life was like, say pleasantly derailed by the practice of design thinking, a human centered approach to solving problems. The company in India was founded on that premise and with that ability, and they had hired for that.
[00:02:30] Jeremy Utley: And somehow I got through the hiring practices, despite my ignorance. But they trained me and they taught me and it gave me a passion to learn more and to grow my own ability. And I feel like I've been a front row student of this amazing practice since then for the last, you know, nearly 20 years now.
[00:02:47] Alexis Zahner: And can you tell us, Jeremy, for someone who's never heard of this concept of design thinking before, can you give us a quick insight into what exactly that means?
[00:02:55] Jeremy Utley: Design thinking, very simply, it's a language for interdisciplinary collaboration. So you've got folks coming from different backgrounds. How do you make sure to maximize the respective perspectives and expertise of a diverse group?
[00:03:11] Jeremy Utley: Design thinking offers one such way. It really puts the human being whose life you're trying to improve at the center of your creativity and innovation efforts. And then puts all other expertise. in service of that human being. So it's a process by which we align not just on the solution that we want to implement, but even more importantly, we seek to align on the human problem that we hope to be solved.
[00:03:39] Jeremy Utley: And once we gain alignment on the problem that we've discovered, then we can bring our respective expertise to bear and design thinking affords us a little bit of language and vocabulary. For knowing how to leverage that expertise.
[00:03:53] Sally Clarke: Can you give us a couple of examples of the kind of language that you might see in terms of really getting clear on the problem that we're trying to solve?
[00:04:01] Jeremy Utley: A really simple example is, are we diverging or are we converging? So I would say the majority of the time in our day to day lives, we converge and we're eliminating variability, we're eliminating options, we're making decisions, et cetera. So for most of us, it's pretty comfortable. We're pretty familiar.
[00:04:20] Jeremy Utley: With some of the rules of the game, the challenge is recognizing that diverging, generating options, embracing variation is also critical to the innovation process and the creative process. And yet we're much less practiced at that. And because of practice, because of our education, because of our organizational incentives and structures and norms, we're much more comfortable converging.
[00:04:44] Jeremy Utley: And we tend to default towards. A convergent mode of thinking, which isn't always helpful. And so one way, one very simple kind of language we'll use is just, are we focusing or are we flaring? Are we converging? Are we diverging? And that helps me know who I should be when I show up. If I'm converging, simple example, I'm going to be more critical.
[00:05:02] Jeremy Utley: I'm going to be more judgmental and that's great. That's fine. I'm saying, what do I think of this idea? What are the flaws? What are the mistakes? If I'm diverging from trying to generate possibilities, I'm not going to say, what do I think of this idea? I'm going to say, what does this idea make me think of?
[00:05:16] Jeremy Utley: Are there other things that come to mind, right? And it's just a totally different mindset. So that's an example. Another great example is, are we working on the problem right now or the solution? And again, there's kind of a default bias because we prize problem solving so much. We almost always put a premium on solution finding.
[00:05:34] Jeremy Utley: And yet, oftentimes, focusing on the problem, I think John Dewey, who's an American educational philosopher, he said, a problem well put is half solved. And a lot of times what we find is when you frame the problem properly, the solution almost handles itself. And so much of the innovation actually in the design thinking approach writ large is legitimizing the problem as a meaningful output of a design effort.
[00:05:59] Jeremy Utley: That the articulation of the problem to be solved is a non trivial and meaningful kind of stepping stone towards innovation.
[00:06:07] Sally Clarke: I love that, Jeremy, because I think that really creates a kind of comfort around the inevitable kind of discomfort that can come up when we're not in solution mode yet. So we're kind of actually holding space for this kind of exploratory sort of phase where we can really clarify what's going on rather than sort of simply getting into the, no, I want to get past this discomfort.
[00:06:26] Sally Clarke: I want the solution. I want this wrapped up and in the past so we can move on. So thank you so much for unpacking what that looks like. That was such a great practical example. And I think this really segues nicely into my next question, which is really, what is IdeaFlow?
[00:06:40] Jeremy Utley: Besides the name of award winning groundbreaking new book by professors from Stanford, the premise of IdeaFlow is simple.
[00:06:47] Jeremy Utley: One of the things that we've been amazed to discover is some great research. I mean, there are no new ideas and even this stuff, even, I mean, certainly design thinking we inherited. We did, we stand on the shoulders of giants of. Not just David Kelly, who's our direct founder, but also a lineage of product design in Stanford and a lineage of anthropology and building to think.
[00:07:08] Jeremy Utley: And I mean, lots of kind of sedimentary layers, so to speak, or in the kind of family tree. So we stand on the shoulders of giants. And one of the things that's really been astounding to us is to see from our perspective at Stanford and having the privilege of getting to teach in different contexts, different countries, whether it's New Zealand or Amsterdam or Israel or Russia or Malaysia or Japan or all over the world, We start to see what resonates with people and one of the surprising things that resonates when you're kind of, you can almost think about us as we're workshopping lots of material and there's lots of different on ramps into this kind of methodology and mindset.
[00:07:42] Jeremy Utley: One of the things that we found again and again and again that just floored people is some research that our brilliant colleague, Bob Sutton, who's in the School of Engineering, MS& E. Our brilliant colleague, Bob Sutton, did some research on the question of how many ideas do you need to have to have a good idea?
[00:07:58] Jeremy Utley: You know, Linus Pauling once said, to have a good idea, you need a lot of ideas. Okay. That's clever for a Nobel laureate to say, but what's a lot, how many is a lot? And what Bob and his PhD student, Andy Hargenon did is they started studying innovation in firms. And what they found was. Okay. So. what we end up calling the idea ratio in the book.
[00:08:16] Jeremy Utley: It's about 2000 ideas to have a commercially successful idea. That number floors people. It doesn't matter if you're in Japan. Or in Johannesburg or in Joplin, Kansas, you know, people go 2000, how do I have 2000? I've never had 2000 ideas in my whole life, you know, it's like what? And so idea flow. And so we realized, I mean, there's lots of ways in again to this question of innovation, the question of creativity we realized.
[00:08:45] Jeremy Utley: And there's some great research by a legend, Dr. Dean Keith Simonson, who he's conducted longitudinal research across, you know, three areas. History, function, or industry, and geography. So across time, across function, and across geography, the single greatest variable that dictates the quality of one's outcomes or one's ideas is actually the quantity of one's outcomes or the quantity of one's ideas.
[00:09:15] Jeremy Utley: So if you want to write a great scientific paper, write lots. If you want to make a great piece of art, make lots, right? And on and on and on that could extend to, you want to make a great reimbursement process in your company, make lots. You want to make a great annual performance review or hiring process, make lots, right?
[00:09:35] Jeremy Utley: Quantity is actually one of the biggest variables that's in your control. And quantity, as it's been said, has a quality all its own. And so for us, that became the, because it resonated with people and because we heard it was just shocking to people, the question quickly, if you want to innovate, it's not how do I have a good idea?
[00:09:52] Jeremy Utley: It's how do I have more ideas? And when you realize that the challenge is fundamentally one of quantity and volume and variability of thinking, then you go, okay, let's teach people how to generate a volume of ideas and test a volume of ideas. And that. Is what we call idea flow is basically the number of novel solutions that you can generate and test any problem that you're trying to solve in your organization and your team or your life in a given period of time.
[00:10:17] Jeremy Utley: And the more solutions, the better solutions. We know that to be sure.
[00:10:21] Alexis Zahner: I love that, Jeremy. And I'm so glad that you mentioned Bob Sutton, Sally and I had caught up with Huggy Rao earlier this year as well to speak about their recent book called The Friction Project. And to that, yeah, it's a great book. And I'd love to dive into this sort of the environmental conditions, if you will, around what creates an innovative culture or a place where idea flow can really occur and sort of going to the work of even Huggy and Bob is what are some of the elements that need to be present for these ideas to flow is friction a part of it, you mentioned this convergent and divergent thinking, what do we need to have in, in the mix?
[00:10:56] Alexis Zahner: What's a good sort of ingredient list to create an idea flow?
[00:11:01] Jeremy Utley: Well, it's a great question and there's a lot, and there's too much friction and there's not enough friction. I mean, to use Bob and Huggy's thing of, you know, good friction, bad friction. There's not enough good friction and there is far too much bad friction, I would say, just to use their framework, but we can break it down in a few areas.
[00:11:17] Jeremy Utley: One is, do we see innovation as a strategic imperative? So at the highest level, it does a CEO and the senior leadership team agree, we need to be doing new things. I If not, it almost doesn't matter what else you do. You're toast. So that's, you know, if you think about kind of environmental factors, leadership alignment around the strategic imperative of innovation is critical.
[00:11:39] Jeremy Utley: Okay. So given that now you've got leadership alignment, what do you need? Well, what kinds of things are being measured? Are you measuring failure rate and which way are you measuring failure rate? One way to think about it is what is the maximum allowable failure? And in some parts of the organization, that's a good question.
[00:11:58] Jeremy Utley: But if you know, as we do, the innovation is a function of volume and most of the things that you try aren't going to work. Then if you aren't failing, what does it tell you? You probably aren't really trying. And so there's other parts of the business where you actually need a minimum failure threshold, right?
[00:12:12] Jeremy Utley: It's not how much can you fail beyond which you're fired. It's how little must you fail underneath which you're fired. I don't mean to use that as like you're fired. That sounds bad, but where are the consequences? Where are the consequences? Is there a consequence for a lack of failure or for too much failure?
[00:12:28] Jeremy Utley: And the biases are we punish any failure rather than no, no, no, no, there are certain parts of the business that if we aren't failing and we aren't learning, then we aren't innovating period. So, you know, and Amy Edmondson, obviously their new book, clearly intelligent failure, but even more, you know, fundamentally psychological safety.
[00:12:44] Jeremy Utley: Talking about another element that's got to be present. Is it okay to be stupid? And I use that word somewhat deliberately and somewhat provocatively, but one of the most interesting questions a leader can ask themself is when's the last time somebody shared a bad idea with me? It's a very searching question from a psychological safety perspective, because in my own experience, I find that most leaders fall into one of two buckets.
[00:13:10] Jeremy Utley: One bucket you could say the enlightened bucket is. Or, or the enlightened, but I know I have work to do is they'll, a leader will say, you know what? You will not share bad ideas with me that much. That's something I need to work on. You know, thanks for pointing that out. I know I need to get better about being approachable and safe, right?
[00:13:28] Jeremy Utley: That's great. My friend, you have work to do more power to you, right? There's another kind of leader that says, when I ask, how many bad ideas do people share with you? They say, Oh, tons. People are always sharing bad ideas with me. In which case, most of the time I say, you're a jerk. I wasn't asking you whether you thought they were bad ideas.
[00:13:46] Jeremy Utley: I was asking you whether they thought, whether they thought they were bad ideas. And what you want to do is cultivate an environment, not where, you know, you're judging, but rather people are willing to come forward and say, Hey, this might sound crazy, but, and they'll give it a try. Right? So that's a really searching and important question.
[00:14:04] Jeremy Utley: How often are people sharing bad ideas? And then do I require it? You know, Astro Teller, he's a head of Google X. I had him on my podcast a while back. He's someone who's done a fabulous job of cultivating an environment for risk taking and experimentation. And he speaks at length about how he always says, give me five, you know, anytime a team comes with solution to a problem or an idea, he wants five, not just one.
[00:14:26] Jeremy Utley: He wants options. And you think about that is it's imposing optionality on problem solving, right? And it's acknowledging the tendency of a team is supposed problem solution in the same breath rather than problem and options. And what I asked Astro was what happens when you say, give me five, he said, Oh, most of the time teams try to game the system, you know, and they say that, you know, here's our favorite idea.
[00:14:49] Jeremy Utley: And then here's four dummy ideas. But he said, half the time, one of the dummy ideas is better than their favorite idea. Right. And by requiring volume requiring options. You end up generating delight and possibility that you wouldn't have if you were only coming up with your one right idea. And then two other things I want to say, one, when you ask, what are the ingredients that are necessary?
[00:15:11] Jeremy Utley: I said, good friction. I've talked a little bit about, you know, the bad friction that may present in terms of psychological safety, lacking, et cetera. Good friction to me, like a canonical example of good friction is the brain trust at Pixar. If you look at what Ed Catmull did so masterfully there, and Bob and Huggy have certainly studied this.
[00:15:30] Jeremy Utley: Lots of people have studied it. I had the privilege of having Ed on my show last year, and he told me at length about the mechanism of the brain trust. And if you think about it, it's a critique mechanism. It's actually a mechanism for giving critical feedback. And Ed and his whole team are very, very thoughtful about.
[00:15:47] Jeremy Utley: What is the regularity and the rhythm, ritual, if you will, around giving hard hitting constructive feedback? And what are the parameters that have to be in place in order to do that? But to think that just because I say we should suspend criticism, to think that that means there's no such thing as critique, would be naive.
[00:16:05] Jeremy Utley: And organizations tend to fall on one side or the other. It's all critical and they're judging everything. They're evaluating everything or everything's a snowflake and every idea is a good idea. And I don't, the truth is messier than that. The truth is eliminate the bad friction of bullying and lack of psychological safety, but then actually increase the good friction.
[00:16:26] Jeremy Utley: We want super refinement. We want critical constructive feedback and It's a little bit of both. The last thing I was going to say is what's lacking from an organizational perspective is it definitely comes down to individuals in the sense that organizations are a collection of individuals. And it's one thing to address the kind of structures and mechanisms and things like that.
[00:16:49] Jeremy Utley: Fundamentally, if I will not allow myself to have a bad idea, it doesn't matter what we've done as a team to create an environment. My own kind of cognitive bias becomes part of the problem. And so I would say the last element is enlightened humans who recognize how pernicious some cognitive bias is and are proactive about addressing that bias through kind of, you know, practice and attention and effort to short circuit the biases that hold them back.
[00:17:21] Jeremy Utley: I can talk a lot more about that, but that's fundamentally comes down to people too.
[00:17:24] Sally Clarke: And I would actually love you to talk a lot more about that, Jerry, particularly because I think it's such an important one for the individual leaders who are listening right now to understand because This component of self leadership.
[00:17:34] Sally Clarke: And I think bringing a lens, this continual bringing a lens to the biases that we have, the ways of thinking that are just ingrained in us. And like, I'm in my mid forties. I'm astonished how I'm like, so I've so much further to go in terms of really unpacking it. It's such an interesting process. The more curiosity I bring, the more I see.
[00:17:52] Sally Clarke: You know, that there is the lenses through which I'm looking at things. So I'm wondering if you could tell, you know, share with us a couple of the perhaps attributes that lead individual leaders might need to have or ways that they can sort of work on that self leadership component of their leadership in order to create an environment for idea flow.
[00:18:09] Jeremy Utley: So I'll answer the question by way of a story, by way of a study. I'm a nerd. You, when you have a professor on the show, you're going to get nerdy responses. I'll, I'll, I'm happy. Yeah. It's, it's okay. Talking nerdy to me as they say. So you think about the muscles that we tend to cherish and treasure and reward and strengthen.
[00:18:29] Jeremy Utley: I remember I was at Stanford business school. Actually this weekend is my 15 year reunion. So I was at Stanford business school 15 years ago. And we had an entire course on critical analytical thinking, a full semester of critical analytical thinking. This deeply important, right? And we want to train the next generation of leaders.
[00:18:47] Jeremy Utley: We got to train them to be critical. You know, I agree. When Dr. Charles Lim, who's a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, when Dr. Charles Lim starts studying creative flow, he had access to technology a lot of us don't anecdotally. He could use fMRI scanners to actually look at what's happening in the brain when an improviser, a jazz musician, for example, enters into creative flow.
[00:19:11] Jeremy Utley: What happens in the brain when a freestyle hip hop artist starts free flowing, right? How does their brain change? Where's the blood flow go, et cetera, et cetera. So what he did is he actually had, you know, jazz musicians with a truncated keyboard go into an fMRI scanner, you have them play known sheet music.
[00:19:30] Jeremy Utley: And then at some point he would spark them to, okay, now, you know, with a microphone now improvise, and then they'd start improvising and he's doing comparative studies of the blood flow. in the brain. What Dr. Lim found is pretty telling. It's not actually, maybe at least to me, it's less interesting what turned on.
[00:19:49] Jeremy Utley: It's actually fascinating to see what turned off. What turned off when musicians entered creative flow was the area of the brain that's responsible for criticism, for critical analytical thinking.
[00:20:02] Sally Clarke: Wow.
[00:20:03] Jeremy Utley: They stopped judging. And it's pretty interesting when you think about that because your question, I think Sally was the personal practices.
[00:20:12] Jeremy Utley: I think we often reward ourselves and reward others for finding flaws, for criticizing. And that becomes kind of a, We get the candy, we get the dopamine hit whenever, when we're the sleuth who discover something, when do we practice not judging? When do we reward not judging? When would do we reward wondering?
[00:20:33] Jeremy Utley: I feel it's a muscle that's, it's almost unflexed. I didn't have a single class on non judgmental thinking, on non critical thinking, you know, not even one session, let alone a semester. So all that to say, I think. One thing that enlightened leaders do is they say, Hey, I'm actually going to work to flex this muscle.
[00:20:50] Jeremy Utley: I'm going to generate it. You know, in the book, we call it doing an idea quota, generate a bunch of ideas, any problem, 10 ideas, kids break a window in the house. What are 10 ways we could deal with this? I'm writing an email. What are 10 subject lines to the email? Just pushing oneself to not judge, write down a bad idea.
[00:21:09] Jeremy Utley: You go, what about idea? I go, don't worry. No one's ever watching. No one's ever going to, you can throw it away immediately. But just finding opportunities to flex that decision, not to judge. When someone brings me an idea, instead of saying what I think of it, I met, just use it as a jumping off point. What, where does it make me go?
[00:21:29] Jeremy Utley: I don't think in terms of criticizing this at all. And I only think of where could it take me. What does it take me? And finding environments, starting brainstorming session by saying, here's not the right answer. Somebody improve this. It's a different posture, but I find that leaders who practice that create a different kind of environment in their team.
[00:21:49] Alexis Zahner: Jeremy, I love this so much as someone who went through business school myself. It's funny to think that my friends who went through, you know, the creative arts school or the music school. I always felt as an individual, that level of creativity and dare I say it, like open mindedness and freedom of their craft was just not something that was inherent to me personally, or to the way that we acted in the business school.
[00:22:13] Alexis Zahner: And what I'm appreciating with what I'm hearing you say is that this is more of a trait or a practice that we can cultivate in ourselves when we actually allow ourselves to, and. It sounds to me almost like this judgment element is kind of the antithesis of the creative process, at least in its infancy, when it might be silly ideas, or it might be improvisation of music or whatever it may be coming up.
[00:22:38] Alexis Zahner: And I love this idea that for all of us, just Noticing that that might be our tendency and choosing to challenge ourselves or quieten that part of our brain and just allow these things to flow is something we can actually cultivate because that personally does not feel very innate to me as someone who's always been in the realm of, I guess, intellect and less of that, just allowing things to come up and be and flow through us like that.
[00:23:02] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, we manage what we measure oftentimes. And you've probably been taught to measure certain attributes and certain reactions. And so then you end up kind of optimizing for those. I think to me, one of the fascinating things that you can do, here's a very simple exercise that will, because I totally, totally agree with you, Alexis, that it's a wrong bifurcation.
[00:23:24] Jeremy Utley: It's a false dichotomy just to divide the world between creative people and non creative people. It's a totally false dichotomy. And, but the question becomes like, how do I define creative? And the way that I think about it, I mean, there's a lot of ways that you can, I have technical and non technical, but just treasure definitions.
[00:23:42] Jeremy Utley: But one way to think about it is just the feeling of where'd that come from? You know, it's very simple. That to me is a creative moment. I didn't know that that was in there. I didn't know. I thought of that. I, whoa, that's kind of cool, you know, and it's useful. I call that kind of an epiphany or breakthrough moment.
[00:23:59] Jeremy Utley: And for me, one of the most useful things that an individual could do is say, Three steps. One, when's the last time you thought, Oh, where'd that come from? Where'd that idea come from to diagram that, sorry, I've got balloons flowing there. Diagram that moment. What happened before it, what happened after it, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:24:20] Jeremy Utley: And then three operationalize that. So for example, I was with a group of leaders in Japan recently. And I asked them, diagram your last epiphany, diagram your last breakthrough, you know, so first you got to kind of think about, when's the last time I felt like, Oh, that's it kind of a moment. Right. And this woman, you know, described the situation and she started diagramming it and I said, okay, so what preceded the breakthrough?
[00:24:47] Jeremy Utley: And she described that she was talking to this stranger on the train. She's riding the train into work and she's talking and all of a sudden the idea came. And then I asked what to me is a very obvious next question, which is, so do you do that now? And she said, do I do what? And I said, talk to strangers on the train.
[00:25:07] Jeremy Utley: And she said, what? Oh, right. And the moment you start to wonder why, what, Oh, that's why, right. We should say you can wield it. It's one thing that, you know, for most people, a breakthrough is more like a break in, you know, it catches them off guard. Like, where does that come from? I like to think one could perpetrate a breakthrough.
[00:25:26] Jeremy Utley: If I might use a turn of phrase, you can actually commit a breakthrough. And part of committing a breakthrough. And to me, that's where it's so different. Alexis from like the conventional art school kind of paradigm is recognizing where you yourself have broken through and then trying to wield that just like your art friends wield the paintbrush.
[00:25:46] Jeremy Utley: Now I talk to strangers on the train because I know that's how I court the muse and on and on, and maybe it doesn't work, but at least it makes you a cause in the matter, it gives you agency. To seek to discover what's my paintbrush? What's my palette? What's my medium? You know, my media may not be pottery.
[00:26:05] Jeremy Utley: Okay, no problem. But am I seeking that feeling of, Oh, where'd that come from? You know, insofar as we're channeling the divine or something, however you want to think about it. The artist I think is a little bit more in touch with their medium. Many of us, because we aren't working in the arts, we feel like we don't have a medium or that we don't have a, or tools or a process and something simple like diagramming an epiphany.
[00:26:28] Jeremy Utley: Just starts to give people some language for, or even appreciate almost prospectively, or, you know, looking forward, that is a moment where I need creativity. I didn't realize it, but I need it here. And I hadn't called it creativity before. And so all of us, so I find that. The tools that I can draw upon are exceptionally narrow when I don't call it creativity.
[00:26:50] Jeremy Utley: When I call it creativity, all of a sudden, the tools that I can draw on become much broader.
[00:26:55] Sally Clarke: So many things there. Yeah. I can imagine it also gives rise for people, like, to help really enforce this idea that, you know, we have this idea that long hours and hours at the desk in front of the computer is the way to extract more from our brains, when in fact it's often those long hours Random moments on the train or when I'm going for a midday run or when we're having a surf or doing something completely different.
[00:27:16] Sally Clarke: When we've done that preparatory work of, you know, reading whatever we want to do or starting the article and I think like fertilizing the garden in a particular way, but then also allowing ourselves to come out of that environment and be somewhere else so that we can have that moment of perspective shift or whatever it is, that magic dust that comes in and brings it all together.
[00:27:34] Sally Clarke: I think that's such an important insight too.
[00:27:36] Jeremy Utley: I mean, to me you're getting Sally at my favorite chapter in the book, which is the 10th chapter, which to me, the reason I like that, you know, if I had my own druthers, that's how the book would open. I'm less for like the framework than I am for the magic and the mystery.
[00:27:51] Jeremy Utley: And I realized perhaps the framework is necessary to prepare folks to appreciate the mystery. I happen to believe that a lot of the stuff that geniuses do looks dumb to smart people. And when you become aware that that's not dumb, that's genius. You know, when Einstein stuck on a physics equation, he picks up the violin, you know, and you come into his office and you go, dude, what are you doing with the violin?
[00:28:13] Jeremy Utley: You slacker. Or do you say you bow in reverence to genius at work? Right? One of my favorite examples of this is Amos Tursky and Danny Kahneman, who together, you know, reinvented. Economic theory, as we know it, literally rewrote the laws of economic theory. And they did so through a series of wildly inventive experiments, which as kind of rising stars at Hebrew university there in Jerusalem, they were fortunate to construct.
[00:28:38] Jeremy Utley: And in so doing, they really undid a lot of our understanding of psychology and economics. Once Tersky was asked, how did you all do it? How'd you have so many great ideas? And what Tersky said was, he said, the secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed. You waste years when you can't waste hours, you know, and it's amazing right to really appreciate.
[00:29:07] Jeremy Utley: And I think for a lot of people, they wasting time feels guilty. Do you see it as a way of working differently? You know, and I think to me, when you become familiar with these stories, it starts to give it a little permission, permission to work differently. That some folks lack, you know, because you're not told in business school to go take a nap.
[00:29:27] Jeremy Utley: Nap is like, I just cursed at you as far as any MBA program is concerned. What are you talking about? And yet like the cognitive science is totally clear. Napping is highly valuable for synthesizing new information, but where's even the time to nap, let alone the lesson on napping, right? It doesn't happen because it seems dumb.
[00:29:44] Jeremy Utley: Frank Lloyd Wright napped twice a day. He did all right. Twice a day, you know, Thomas Edison napping in his thing. He called it his thinking chair. Interesting. It's not as napping chair. It's just thinking chair. But that's the point. It's he has the right frame on it. I think Edison's closer than we've ever been, which is, it's not about not working.
[00:30:04] Jeremy Utley: It's about working differently. And when you give folks that language, and I think it frees, I mean, I was interviewing Kevin Kelly on my, I've got an AI focused podcast because AI is kind of my latest obsession. And I was talking with Kevin cause he's radically experimental. He's founder of wired magazine.
[00:30:20] Jeremy Utley: He's an incredible photographer, Technologist, optimist, importantly in his own mind, and Kevin said something that I loved. He said, I try to do something useless every day. And I thought that's such a beautiful statement because there's so much written and at least emphasized implicitly, if not explicitly about usefulness.
[00:30:43] Jeremy Utley: There's not even a footnote on uselessness. I feel like, you know, And yet a lot of times it's the useless moments, the throwaway moments that end up being the breakthroughs. And so all that say an activity like diagramming a recent breakthrough oftentimes makes people go, Oh, maybe I should take naps. You know, it was, I thought it was the exception.
[00:31:02] Jeremy Utley: What if it's the rule? Right.
[00:31:05] Alexis Zahner: I love that, Jeremy. And for me personally, It's a reflection of my nervous system state in those moments because what I'm sort of just reminded to do right now is firstly put a notebook next to my shower, because that's always seems to be the calm part at the end of my day when I start thinking about things and thinking, Oh, wow, I really should have said that or done that or did this differently.
[00:31:25] Alexis Zahner: And two other moments where I think that comes up for me is when I'm working out or exercising. You know, I feel like when our brains. Our body's active and our brain's taking a rest, we're actually able to start generating some of those ideas and the meditation mat for me is a big one as well. As much as I'm supposed to be allowing thoughts to come and go, it tends to be when thoughts actually get their opportunity to free flow.
[00:31:46] Alexis Zahner: So, It seems to me to be a bone, a moment of considering the state our nervous system is in when we're trying to generate some of those ideas. So I love that. I heard you mentioned AI as part of this equation as well. And I'd love to dive into that. I know that you recently published a paper around AI and idea generation.
[00:32:06] Alexis Zahner: Can we unpack this a little bit? And can you give us a bit of an idea of how AI should and can fit, especially in this team problem solving element? I guess your paper was around how many ideas were generated, what kind of ideas were good, bad, this sort of language. How do you see AI playing a role in ideation in the future and how can we be most effectively using this?
[00:32:31] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, it's really interesting and fun and weird, which is kind of the sweet spot for me. It's like the weirder it is, the better it is. And we thought actually we were undertaking a study to see How much more creative and more generative teams that are amplified by AI can be the question of my mind was, are they two times more?
[00:32:51] Jeremy Utley: Are they five times more? Are they 10 times more? And as we started reviewing the data, we go, Whoa, like there's actually a moment where you look at the data. I haven't done a ton of research, but the little research I've done. There's an interesting moment where you look at the data and you're thinking, Oh, no, no, no, no.
[00:33:07] Jeremy Utley: And then you go, Oh, yeah. And we had that kind of a moment with this data. It's like at first you go, something's off. Oh, right. And we had that because what we found was. It's not a multiple, it's a fraction. Teams that use AI actually aren't necessarily better off. You know, even theoretically, just take Ideaflow as a very rough metric.
[00:33:31] Jeremy Utley: Granted, it's incomplete and imperfect. Teams that use AI should, you know, empirically, theoretically, generate far more ideas than teams, and there's even papers written on it. There's a great paper, Garota, and, It's all kind of wrote a paper called ideas or dimes a dozen, where they kind of calculated the economic costs of tokens and ideas and found that LLMs are much better, you know, just even from a perspective of what's the cost, the economic, cognitive and otherwise.
[00:33:57] Jeremy Utley: And yet what we found is we studied real teams in situ, they aren't coming up with more ideas and they aren't coming up with better ideas. They aren't coming up with worse, which sounds good until you realize that to get to better, you have to get to worse and they are coming up with better either. And so for us, just getting all the way to your question, Alexis, I would say the best way to use AI is to treat it like a team member, like a collaborator.
[00:34:22] Jeremy Utley: Not like an answer giver. And I think the teams that approached AI, like it was an Oracle, as we say in the paper, underperformed, and they kind of checked their brains at the door. That's how it would appear, you know, from the outside teams that outperformed. And there were some that outperformed with AI.
[00:34:39] Jeremy Utley: What they did was they treated AI more like a conversation partner, an iterative back and forth. That's where part of our fix it methodology comes from. We have this. It's got a five step process we call F I X I T, fix it, you know, his website, how to fix it dot AI. But, and the basic premise of how to fix it is, you need a focus, I, uh, F, focus problem, I, ID'd individually first, X, provide sufficient context, I, iterate interactively, sorry, interact iteratively, and then T, team based incubation and experimentation and next steps.
[00:35:12] Jeremy Utley: And that seems to just kind of bring, for lack of a better word, unsophisticated question to AI, get a very unsophisticated answer. The problem is they don't really know that actually. If they knew that it was an unsophisticated answer, they wouldn't settle for it. But the truth is they bring like a half baked answer to AI and it seems kind of great.
[00:35:33] Jeremy Utley: They kind of go, I mean, that was like five minutes. Like you guys want to go get coffee and they just kind of quit. And it's fascinating because we didn't have the kind of problem owners grade the solutions until after the session was over. So you don't know when you're in the middle of a brainstorm, you don't know what an A idea is or a B or a C.
[00:35:53] Jeremy Utley: And what we found is AI assistance. There's this underlying cognitive device. We've talked a little bit about it. We've kind of skirted it in our earlier conversation. It's known as the Einstein effect or cognitive fixation, or Herbert Simon called it satisficing. It's basically the human instinct to settle for good enough.
[00:36:10] Jeremy Utley: That's well established across, you know, decades of cognitive science research. And what we found is with AI, you can get to good enough faster. That doesn't mean you get to great. And so in a sense, the availability of AI, unless a team was aware of the bias, perhaps It just amplified the underlying human cognitive bias rather than mitigate it.
[00:36:33] Jeremy Utley: Although it, well, it certainly can. It ended up oftentimes just amplifying the underlying human bias, which is to say the problem with human and AI collaboration is the humans.
[00:36:43] Sally Clarke: This is so fascinating, Jeremy, and I think particularly, I love that you highlighted how you can sort of see it as another team member in the same way that, so AI brings aside an idea, let's stretch that.
[00:36:55] Sally Clarke: Let's unpack that. Let's see what we can do with it. Where can we take that rather than because, and often I find AI also coughs up a lot of like satisfying jargon. And sort of pleasingly put together sentences. So it feels very structured and very sort of contained in a way that humans don't. So we just sort of go, well, that must be the answer.
[00:37:11] Sally Clarke: Cause it sounds like an answer.
[00:37:13] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. And it's, it's like, it's a lot better thought out than I was going to give it in the last minute. Right.
[00:37:17] Alexis Zahner: It's not messy and that's not, yeah,
[00:37:19] Jeremy Utley: you're exactly right. But it doesn't mean that actually is better. And when you really dig in, you go, there's kind of nothing here.
[00:37:24] Jeremy Utley: It's like, well formatted, nothing. That's not to say that you can't get something amazing, but it requires iteration requires interaction. Yeah. And the challenge is how do we become AI conversationalists? How do we become fluent in this new language of innovation? That's, I'll tell you all, I'm very disappointed right now because I just wrote what I think is an amazing paper on this topic and the publication, I won't name them, so I'm not, you know, throwing them under the bus, but a very distinguished publication.
[00:37:51] Jeremy Utley: I've been working with their editorial team on Speaking the new language of innovation, and they just wrote and said, actually, we're not going to run the piece after all. And I'm totally devastated because it's so I think needed. I mean, I could just publish it on my blog. I'd love to get wider. The people that are following me already, like they already know this stuff.
[00:38:09] Jeremy Utley: What I want is to get wider distribution with folks who go, wait, there's a language to learn here. And yeah, there is. Absolutely. Do you remember back in the day when voicemail came out, we had like the tech people coming around, helping us get started with voicemail and the same thing with email, no new technology.
[00:38:25] Jeremy Utley: And we aren't baked knowing how to use it. And AI even more so is the kind of technology that lends itself to, to familiarity, to practice, to confidence. Right now, people are afraid whenever the topic of AI comes up, there's no familiarity, there's fear. And what I want to do is move people from fear through familiarity all the way to fun where they're, You know, the leading AI users I'm talking to, they mentioned they're giggling regularly.
[00:38:53] Jeremy Utley: I think it's possible for AI to regularly make you giggle. And if you aren't giggling regularly yet, then you're not pushing hard enough. You're not exploring broadly enough.
[00:39:02] Sally Clarke: I love that. And I think that rings so true for any language that you learn when you get, when you are, you know, sort of given the space to be able to grow and learn, make mistakes, and then get to a point of fluency where you can really have fun with it.
[00:39:12] Sally Clarke: It's a really great space to be in. I'm curious, just sort of a practical perspective, so for leaders who are listening now who perhaps don't have a huge amount of sort of AI use in their team at this stage. Would training be a good place? Like, how would you see that sort of how they're starting to bring that on new team member as it were into their team?
[00:39:31] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, every single person on the team needs to be playing, needs to be experimenting. I was actually an expert AI panel at this fintech conference a couple of weeks ago. You know, it's a bunch of just, I'm by far the least distinguished person on the panel. I'm a nobody. There's somebody's there.
[00:39:47] Jeremy Utley: And then there's me, because I think they basically just need like a, a So, and I actually wrote a blog about this recently, which we could link to if you want. I mean, I'll tell you the story, but basically the moderator says to this very distinguished like world leader in AI, okay, Hey, you just gave a 90 minute global state of the art on generative AI.
[00:40:09] Jeremy Utley: Give us the two minute takeaway for those of us who weren't able to attend that lecture. And he kind of convincingly said, I can do it in three words. I don't need two minutes, three words. He said, recess is over. Last year was all about, you know, playing around or whatever. Now it's time to get down to business.
[00:40:25] Jeremy Utley: It's time to get serious next. And then the moderator went to the next panelist. What do you think of that? He said, absolutely. I agree. It's going to be hard work, you know, scowl, scowl, scowl, deep voice, deep voice, deep voice. And then the moderator got to me and said, so professor Utley, any thoughts? And I said, I love that statement recess is over because I profoundly disagree with it.
[00:40:48] Jeremy Utley: I think it's such a good statement. And I feel the exact opposite. I feel like recess hasn't begun and that's part of the problem. And you know, there's like this stunned kind of silence. I didn't know, I'm never the contrarian, but all of a sudden I'm like the contrarian. I was like, I go, well, and there's like silence in the room and the moderator is kind of like, do you want to clarify that?
[00:41:09] Jeremy Utley: And I just said, there's like a thousand people sitting there. I said, okay, raise your hand. If your company's had an AI recess, no hand goes up. I said, what I mean by that is your company has given you time to play with this technology without any expectation of what you're going to do with it, raise your hand, no hands went up.
[00:41:26] Jeremy Utley: And then I just turned to him. I said, respectfully, I would submit to you that the problem is nobody's playing. You're saying recess is over. It hasn't even begun. And so to your question, Sally, I would say, absolutely. The first thing is give folks the freedom and permission to play. I mean, The kinds of gains were 40 percent quality improvements, 25 percent time reduction, 12%, you know, quantity.
[00:41:52] Jeremy Utley: It's like the kinds of gains we're talking about here are we're talking, you've got to go back to steam to get that kind of improvement in labor. Okay. It's like, it's been a while. So, which is to say it behooves you organizationally and individually to discover what's your kind of 40 percent leverage opportunity.
[00:42:11] Jeremy Utley: Okay. If you don't have enough time to find basically half of your time back, please write me and let me know. You know, if you go, actually, I'm not able to really, I think everybody stands to benefit from seriously considering what does that mean? 40 percent improvement in quality? What work do I not want a 40 percent improvement in quality?
[00:42:30] Jeremy Utley: You know, this Harvard BCG study came out 25 percent improvement in quantity of tasks done. In what part of my life do I not want 25 percent more done, right? And on and on and on. And I think if folks, if organizations and leaders especially will take that imperative seriously. And my belief is folks can't imagine applications if they don't have baseline familiarity.
[00:42:51] Jeremy Utley: You know, I built like this kind of AI drill coach. My girls are knocking at the door right now. Hi girls. We can cut this out, obviously. Hi. Not right now. I need 10 minutes. Okay. And then I'll come out and say, hi, 10 minutes. I want to be with you too. I'll see you in 10 minutes. Hey, thanks. So cute. Why? We want to be with you.
[00:43:11] Jeremy Utley: That's the four year old. She always does like whenever she's like irritated, she does this thing where she kind of lifts her. She's like, why? So fun. Okay. I was saying I've built with a couple of friends and partners. I built basically an AI drill coach. that gives daily drills to help folks learn how to converse with AI.
[00:43:32] Jeremy Utley: It's very simple. I mean, for example, here's one of the early drills hit regenerate. When you're in Chad, GPT, and you ask a question, you should hit regenerate at least three times, because every time you regenerate a response, it's a non deterministic model. You get a new answer. Why in the world would you just take the first answer, right?
[00:43:48] Jeremy Utley: That's a drill, you know, so, which is to say, it's not honor us next question. You tell AI before you answer, please ask me three questions. These are very simple, but profoundly valuable interaction modes. And so every day, what we're seeing is if folks who use this coach just in 10 days, they'll go 10 X in their ability to leverage these tools well.
[00:44:11] Jeremy Utley: And that to me is, it's ultimately about human behavior change. We've been given this amazing new tool and we have, it doesn't come with an instruction manual. We have no idea how to use it. The only way you get better is if you actually put in the repetitions.
[00:44:26] Alexis Zahner: Jeremy, I'm hearing sort of two things here.
[00:44:28] Alexis Zahner: Firstly, I just want to hilariously throw back to the Google days. Not so long ago, where we had the button, I'm feeling lucky, when you could hit that in the search query, it kind of reminds me a little bit of that, where we take a little bit of risk, the questions we're asking, and the second part of that is this idea that we're often not in the possibility thinking mode at all.
[00:44:50] Alexis Zahner: We're just looking at, as you said, the solutions. And I love using chat GPT as one example to write questions that are like, what if, what if I did this, or what if this was an outcome? And I think often it's even in the way we're framing the questions we're asking. That is. Pigeonholing us into the kinds of solutions that this technology is going to give us.
[00:45:11] Alexis Zahner: And I love this idea of just playing with the tech, asking it weird questions, asking it all the what if questions that we might feel are too stupid to bring up in a room of human beings in that case, and just seeing where it takes us.
[00:45:22] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. The one I agree by the way, Alexis, definitely. The one caution I would offer is I think some people don't feel permission to play and they don't feel like what if is like who has time for what if I can imagine some of my clients or partners.
[00:45:38] Jeremy Utley: It's like what must be nice to just like have what if time. And what I would say is maybe a different way is maybe to accomplish the same objective. Another early coach drill. That we've encoded into this software, you can say, okay, forget work. What's a personal decision that matters to you that you'd ordinarily ask a human being for advice about.
[00:46:01] Jeremy Utley: Should we grow our family? Should I take this job? Should we move? Should I put my mother in law in assisted living? Think real questions. Should we buy this property? Right? Whatever it is, I go to chat GPT. Hey, chat GPT four, by the way, friends, don't let friends use GPT 3. 5. Okay. So, you must be paying like absolutely unequivocally, you must be paying for a frontier model, like no questions asked.
[00:46:27] Jeremy Utley: I am personally prepared to refund someone their money if they find no use for it. And I get no benefit from saying that, by the way, I'm not a shareholder or anything. Go to chat GPT and say, Hey, you know, I'm thinking about, I have a loved one who I had this conversation with. I'm thinking about assisted living, trying to figure out when the right time to move into assisted living is.
[00:46:46] Jeremy Utley: Would you ask me three or four questions? Before you give me advice on how to think about that. Sure. Jeremy, have there been any changes to your mobility recently? You know, and then I had my friend, you know, who's really in this situation, you know, my spouse had a fall, but she's good otherwise. And I still try to golf a couple of times a week.
[00:47:05] Jeremy Utley: Great. Tell me about your relationship with your caregivers. Well, the youth group comes by and we make them, you know, dessert, but that's not really caregiving. And our son comes up from time to time, but He's just likes being with us. He's not really a caregiver and, you know, and we have this question. And then, so I just said, Hey, based on the information that's been provided, what advice would you have about how to think about the question of assisted living?
[00:47:27] Jeremy Utley: And I handed my phone to my friend and I just said, you know, what do you think? He said, I never thought about like this before. I said, wow. Yeah. Technology is kind of cool. He said, no, not the technology. I never thought about assisted living like this before. I said, wow. And the point is to me, the difference I would say, Alexis, between the what if game, which I agree is a good thing.
[00:47:45] Jeremy Utley: I feel the what if game has a tendency towards people trivializing the technology and I love it. I mean, the thought partnership is wonderful and beautiful. I think for people to really take it seriously, what I've seen is something that matters to you in a matter of minutes. It's this new collaborator, this new intelligence.
[00:48:07] Jeremy Utley: is offering perspectives that you've never considered before. Something that's deeply important. If folks will really take that just one exercise seriously, like granted, they're probably listening to this podcast for free. It's well worth the price of admission. Okay. If they'll take that one exercise seriously, they're going to say, I have been underestimating this technology and it's really just a function of learning to speak a different language, you know, and not like in the sense that you need to learn how to speak French and there's like a, you know, this enormous vocabulary or something.
[00:48:38] Jeremy Utley: It's just. You need to treat it like it's a behavior change and it deserves attention. That's the point. It's something deserving of attention and something that will reward intention, importantly.
[00:48:50] Alexis Zahner: Wow. Jeremy, thank you for that. That was a really powerful sort of reframe in how we look at using and integrating that technology in our day to day.
[00:48:57] Alexis Zahner: I really appreciate that. It's never occurred to me, honestly, to use the technology for that sort of personal purpose or question. So certainly that's something I'm going to experiment with. Now, Jeremy, we could really, yeah, we have to, and Sally and I could speak with you all day. There's more questions coming up than there are answers in my head right now.
[00:49:17] Alexis Zahner: I'll ask just one final if that's okay. And that is, you know, for leaders listening to our conversation right now, and They're realizing that it's critical for them to maybe up level this level of innovation in their team. What would you suggest is a very first step for them to take?
[00:49:33] Jeremy Utley: I'm taking your question seriously.
[00:49:35] Jeremy Utley: I've never given this answer before, but this is what's coming in my mind right now. I mean, I have lots of canned answers. You could just like Google, what would Jeremy say, you probably get something, but here's what I would do. I'd block 30 minutes, one day per week for the next three weeks, three weeks from now, it would be, the block would say, review data from.
[00:49:55] Jeremy Utley: experiment. Two weeks from now, the block would say, run experiment. One week from now, the block will say, come up with ideas to problem. And today I give myself a week to think of a problem that I want to generate ideas for next week, that I want to experiment on the following week, that I, whose data I would like to review the following week.
[00:50:20] Jeremy Utley: They could have a team do that. They could do it themselves. The reality is most folks calendar is their boss. If you do not block time to think about this later, my friend, it doesn't matter how eloquent I am, it doesn't matter how lovely your hosts are, let's talk real, you're never going to think about this again.
[00:50:41] Jeremy Utley: Block three 30 minute slots. 90 minutes have the potential to transform your business, have the potential to transform your life, period. It's only if you exert intention and attention in this direction. And to me, you have what you need. It's just a matter of creating the space to do what you know you need to do.
[00:51:01] Sally Clarke: Very wise words. Thank you so much, Jeremy. It's been an absolute delight to have you with us today on We Are Human Leaders. Thanks for being here.
[00:51:07] Jeremy Utley: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
[00:51:15] Sally Clarke: Thanks so much for being a part of this conversation with us at We Are Human Leaders. I hope it's sparked lots of ideas about ideas and innovation for you too. You can learn more about Jeremy's incredible work at The links in the show notes and learn more about working together with us at human leaders at www.
[00:51:33] Sally Clarke: wearehumanleaders. com. See you next time.