What is the secret to creativity? Jeremy Utley demystifies the art of ideas

Jeremy Utley leads some of the most popular courses on creativity and innovation at the d.school of Stanford University. I was delighted to see that he was making his teaching of such popular courses available to a wider audience and chased him for an interview. This is one of his first interviews to talk about his brand new book Ideaflow.

In it he discusses the way to have good ideas, and why most of us aren’t willing to do what is required. I loved this discussion. Buy Ideaflow here – and find out more about Jeremy and his co-author, Perry Klebahn, here.

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce Daisley (00:06)
This is Eat Sleep Worker I’m Bruce Daisley – its a podcast about workplace culture, psychology and life. One of the things I’ve been really intrigued by over the last few weeks is discussions about where the office sits in conversations about creativity. You know, a lot of us are sort of interested in the idea of where creativity lives or we might’ve heard buses say, we need to be back in the office so we can be creative. So when I saw a new book was coming out that talked about the process of, of creativity, I was really intrigued.

The book is called Idea Flow by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn.

And it really goes into the specifics of how ideas are created. Now what they do is they run a course at Stanford Business School, sort of an ideas related course that tries to show people how to systematize it. I found it really intriguing as you hear in the conversation, the preview copy of the book that got sent fell apart, it disintegrated because I’d spent so much time flicking between it and annotate it and ascribing it.

The thing that really struck me by it was that we often find ourselves thinking that creativity is this sort of nebulous, hard to reach, far off thing. And actually creativity is just a process. It’s a learned process. It really reminds me of a book that I think about all of the time. There’s a book by a former Madison Avenue madman that’s called

technique for producing ideas. And I’ve put a link to that in the show notes by James Webb Young. It’s about sort of, think, just glancing there on Kindle. It’s about sort of six pounds on Kindle or you could buy a paper copy for about the same amount. the thing about that technique is firstly, think, hang on, is there a technique for producing ideas? Then you read the book and you go, kind of buy this. But the fact that the third stage of the process is do nothing.

You think, well, hang on, it’s a three stage process. The third stage do nothing. I want my money back. And so the technique in that case is to number one, to do thorough research into the areas. Number two, to spot links between the elements that you’ve researched. And I think this is the critical thing. You know, the idea that you often hear Steve Jobs says, he says the reason why innovation and ideas feel fraudulent to the person who created them in hindsight is because

They’ve just been the connection of two previous ideas, sometimes called recombinant thought. We’ve combined two different ideas. And so as soon as you look at the creation of them, you think, well, this is so obvious. People are going to think I’m a fraud. The second stage of James Webb Young’s technique is to spot those things and connect those things. The third stage of his technique is to do nothing. And you think at the time you think, well, hang on, I’m not sure that will work. And it’s just so extraordinary. The reason why it has persisted in the book remains.

A bestseller to this day is because that technique works. This is similar. So idea flow. I’m going to chat to Jeremy Utley. Idea flow is similar in the sense that it tries to disabuse you of any of the mystique around creativity, especially for the moment we’re in right now. I think this is a really compelling investigation, not least because they say the number one thing that helps you produce good ideas is producing a lot of

bad ideas first and you might consider that to be a sort of silly thing to say, but they say effectively that you start and you, need to produce a lot of exploration investigation. And it’s often, I think they say in the book, it’s often when you think you’ve exhausted all the good ideas, that something will hit the whiteboard or the, place that you are brainstorming, something will hit that is the provocation, the surprising provocation.

that comes from a of mental exhaustion that is often the seed of good ideas. I’m not going to preempt it. I love the book and I love this conversation. So I’m going to speak now to the author of Idea Flow. This is Jeremy Utley.

Jeremy, how lovely to chat to you because actually I found the book so sort of deeply enlightening that as I told you, my book has disintegrated in the process of reading.

Jeremy Utley (04:29)
I feel that’s the greatest compliment someone can make is that they tear the book apart. That’s great.

Bruce Daisley (04:33)
So I’d love to kick us off if you could introduce who you are and what you do.

Jeremy Utley (04:38)
Yeah, absolutely. I’m Jeremy utley. For the last thirteen years I’ve been teaching at the Hasso Pladner Institute of Design at Stanford, teaching folks generally how to come up with ideas. I do that for both graduate students and for executives who’ve come to Stanford to learn what we’re teaching to the graduate students.

Bruce Daisley (04:56)
I get sent a bundle of books and the reason why I was really interested to chat to you is that the process of coming up with ideas is so shrouded in mystery and deliberately sort of a frustration that people try to present it as something complex or ethereal. And you’ve really just made it quite methodical and structured. so firstly, I’d love to know the origin story before we get into that.

process. I’d love to know the origin story of how you found yourself teaching one of the most popular courses about ideas and innovation and creativity at Stanford.

Jeremy Utley (05:34)
Well, the short answer is my life got derailed by the D school as a student. So I was in business school Stanford, two thousand seven, right as the D school was getting established. And now the D school is so well known that people come to Stanford many times because of the D school.

Bruce Daisley (05:51)
And we should explain then the D school for anyone who doesn’t know.

Jeremy Utley (05:55)
Yeah, absolutely. So the D School is an interdisciplinary hub for radical collaboration and innovation at Stanford. So it’s not a degree granting institution and it’s not an admitting institution, meaning you can’t apply to the D school formally. But if while you’re in business school, as I was, or if you were in law school or medical school or an engineer or computer science or any of the other fields, you can apply to take D school courses while you’re in your degree granting program.

So the D school kind of sits in the middle of campus as this hub for interdisciplinary collaboration because increasingly the problems we’re facing don’t fit neatly in any one disciplinary arena. It’s not like you’re facing a business challenge and go, well, this is clearly only a business problem. No, there’s ethical considerations and there’s legal ramifications and there’s policy and environmental factors, right? Well, do we have only business people thinking about all those things, or do we bring an environmental scientist and do we bring an ethicist and a lawyer, right?

And if we do, where’s the where’s space for those folks and those perspectives to come together? The D School is Stanford’s place for such kinds of collaboration to occur. So that’s the D School. I didn’t know, as I said, I came to Stanford site unseen without any knowledge of the D school, as it was in its infancy. And I was a management consultant. I was a financial analyst. I love a good spreadsheet, a DCF calculation or a net present value. I love doing those things.

And I was very much a straight A kind of individual, type A personality, but I did something kind of crazy with my summer. I decided to go work at a startup in India. And the summer between years of school, I went to India to New Delhi, just outside of New Delhi in a town called Noida. And I worked at a startup. And I happened to be sitting next to a guy who was a designer. And I didn’t know designer was really even a category of job or anything like that.

And I’d be working on my spreadsheets and he’d be going into the field, talking to users, talking to people in the rural areas, going and staying in the slums for days on end. And I kept exhibiting, as he would say, this curiosity about what he’s doing. What are you doing? Why are you doing that? And eventually he said to me, Jeremy, you you’re a D school guy. You gotta go to the D school. I said, What what is that? And he said, it’s this place at Stanford, you gotta go check it out. And when I came back from my second year of business school, I

Took all of my elective credits basically at the D School. I lived at the D school. And the D school just fundamentally changed my life. It changed my outlook on the world. It changed my definition of work. It changed my definition of meaning and purpose as it pertains to work. And so that’s what really set me on this new journey. And it’s been 13 years.

Bruce Daisley (08:34)
It’s the Hogwarts of business school, but come on, tell us what happens there then. You make it sound like a magical place. How would it force you to reappraise so much?

Jeremy Utley (08:44)
Well, you know, I think that’s an interesting word you use, Bruce, epiphany, because I don’t know if everyone believes they’re capable of epiphany. I would say for myself, I wasn’t ever even in pursuit of epiphany. And one of the things that D school gave me as a gift was it gave me my first breakthrough moment. And the the way I would describe an epiphany f just for myself and my own experience of it, and now seeking to cultivate epiphany moments in others for the last dozen years.

It’s when you have a moment where something comes to mind or something comes out that you say, I had no idea that was in there. I had no idea I was capable of that. That’s really special. And for me, I had I had been a very successful financial analyst working in an investment fund. I had been a very successful strategy consultant and management consultant, but I never had the sense that what I had

been doing was really special or that it came it was uniquely from me. And that really wasn’t until I came to the D school that I had this feeling of, I like that word you used, epiphany. Wow. I came up with that? That’s special. And it’s that’s an addictive feeling. When you start to realize, wow, I can contribute to an epiphany moment in the world. I can have an epiphany that’s capable of ushering in transformation in others’ lives. That’s a very, very

intoxicating experience.

Bruce Daisley (10:11)
And I love the fact then so moved were you by this journey that you went on that you’ve now become a teacher of it. And I guess it would be very easy as we’ve said at the outset for anyone who works in this realm of ideas to try to regard them as a capability of an elite view. It’d be very easy because that’s what happens all around us, right? We’re surrounded with people who attempt to mystify and

to create this magic aura around ideas. But your idea is, is actually very learnable and it’s very workmanlike. And before we go into it, I’d just love to know, are people surprised by how touchable this level of understanding is?

Jeremy Utley (10:57)
Well, there there there are there are misconceptions across the board. I mean, you know, people often come and say, I’m an ideas guy. And I don’t know if you would say that about yourself, you’re an ideas guy. I would respectfully say, No, you’re not. You’re an idea guy. And that is a very simple way of describing a profound cognitive bias, which is when we think of ideas, we think in terms of good. You know, anywhere I go in the world.

I tell people, and I introduce myself very deliberately when you ask me to introduce myself, whether it’s in Israel or Malaysia or Columbus, Ohio, when people say, What do you do? I say, I help people come up with ideas. I get the same response regardless. It could be Tokyo, it could be Moscow, it could be Bogota. How do you come up with a good idea? I say, Well, who said anything about good? Right?

But that gets at one of the core things, right? When we think of ideas, we think in terms of good and singular, a good idea. So for people, when they when they come to workshops, I mean, there’s already a little bit of a premise, maybe it’s learnable, or maybe they get sent and maybe they come skeptical, right, to a class. Or like me, someone told them they should look. But you know, for me, when I first came to the D school, I thought it was a circus. You know, I thought this is.

Irresponsible. Where’s the adult supervision? Right. And so there are all sorts of biases that we bring in. And people are consistently astounded. You know, one of the astounding things is I never realized that I don’t actually love ideas. I love having the right answer. And there’s a profound difference between an ideas person is comfortable with lots of possibility. An idea person wants the right answer, right?

And many of us say we’re ideas people because we like new gadgets, right? But liking the iPhone or liking Twitter doesn’t make you an ideas guy because it’s the right answer. The question is whether you’re comfortable with the ambiguity and unknown of generating lots and lots of possibility. And that’s the other big thing that surprises people is if you ask someone a simple question, you know, how many ideas do you need to have to have a good idea? Linus Pauling, the only individual in history to individually win the Nobel Prize twice.

And he almost won a third one, by the way. He was neck and neck with Watson and Crick in discovering the double helix structure of DNA. Someone asked him once, how do you come up with so many great ideas? And he said, it’s simple. To have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas. And if I ask you that question, define lots. How many ideas is lots?

Bruce Daisley (13:30)
Well, I think I know the answer to this, how many ideas you need for a good idea. And I have to say it’s anchored me a much, much, much higher number than I anticipated. And actually the takeaway I’ve had, you know, it made me, I read the book while I was on holiday and it made me think, my God, you’re not producing any way. Like these things you’re doing are close to randomness. You’re not producing enough ideas. So go on, let us see how many ideas you need to have a good idea.

Jeremy Utley (13:58)
I mean the short answer is Linus Pauling’s, you know, quote, to have a good idea, you need to have lots of ideas. The definition of lots is in the thousands, not in the hundreds. And for most people, if you say how many ideas do you need to have to have a good idea, most people say, about twenty. That’s kind of the average response I get. If I get if I come up with twenty ideas, one of them’s gonna be good. But they’re just they’re way off. It’s more like two thousand actually. And in some industries it’s different. In pharmaceuticals, it’s more like ten thousand.

You know, James Dyson made 5,000 versions of the bagless vacuum before it worked. 5,000. You know, and that was when he already knew kind of what he was trying to make, right? But the point is, it’s much, much larger than you expect. And then the question, Bruce, is if you have that realization, well, what do you do? How do you shift your orientation from trying to come up with a good idea to trying to generate lots of ideas? And

That shift in orientation is kind of at the heart of the book, shifting in orientation towards quantity rather than quality. And it affects how you interact with collaborators, and it affects how you interact with customers, it affects how you interact with the marketplace and experimentation. And that state of generating lots of ideas to ultimately get to the good ones is the state that we call idea flow.

Bruce Daisley (15:15)
It’s really interesting for me. There’s a few things that really struck me as I was going through. Firstly, hearing you talk about it now, but also reading it. I chatted to Biz Stone, who was like one of the founders of Twitter, but he also formerly a book designer. That’s how he started his career, designing the covers for books. And he said, the thing about design thinking is that there’s no single answer. And so as a result of that, when you’re book covers, there’s no right answer. And so it’s an iterative and creative process. And actually, eventually, because you create 20

I guess, conceptually create a thousand in your head and then you render 20 of them on the page. And then you narrow it down to what you love about them, but it’s a very different way of thinking.

And the way you describe creative ideas is actually far closer to that design thinking where we’re trying to evolve it by playing and sort of sorting the ideas. really struck me. And, and one thing that really articulated the difference in the way you were thinking was the marshmallow challenge.

And so I wonder if you could remind us of that, not to confuse with the marshmallow test, but the marshmallow challenge, what it teaches about business school teaching, typical business school teaching, and what it teaches us about kindergarten children. And I wonder if you could sort of talk through what we can learn from that, because it seems quite helpful for your overall approach.

Jeremy Utley (16:36)
Absolutely. I mean the the fundamental idea there, and I can’t take credit for the challenge. Tom Wujek, who’s a fellow at Autodesk, invented this challenge. And the basic premise is you get 20 sticks of dry spaghetti, you get a yard of tape, you get a yard of string, and you get a marshmallow. And your goal is you got 18 minutes to construct the tallest tower in the room. And if you got a room of a hundred people, you split them up into 25 tables of four. So there’s 25 different teams all competing for 18 minutes.

To build the tallest tower possible. And at the 18 minute mark, nobody can be touching the structure. And then we come around and we measure it. And what’s shocking to most people, to adults and to many is that at the 18 minute mark, most of the towers fall. And you hear, I mean, I’ve conducted this activity hundreds of times, you hear around the room this kind of collective groan, like, right? But the thing that’s fascinating is to simply ask a team, why did you groan? And

When you do, they almost always say the same thing. We thought it was gonna stand. And then the question is again, it’s Sesame Street simple. What gave you the conviction that it was gonna stand? And if you watch them, what you realize is they very carefully protected themselves from failure the entire time. There’s never a point in the entire 18 minutes that someone’s not touching the structure.

It’s only when we blow the whistle that everybody lets go. And kind of they all have this collective cross their fingers moment. Let’s hope it does what it hasn’t done for the last 18 minutes, which is stand on its own, right? And it’s this hilarious moment where nobody’s structure stands because they never tried to make it stand. And so Tom’s data is great, but he shows on average a typical structure across categories is something like 20 inches. But MBAs, their towers are about 10 inches on average.

If you want to see who’s really, really good besides structural engineers who thankfully are really good, it’s kindergartners. Their towers are mid-20s to low 30s on average. And you go, well, what’s different about MBAs on the low end? And as a recovering MBA, I can say that myself. And kindergartners on the high end, what’s different? And if you watch the way they work, basically it comes down to this. When do they start trying to allow the structure to stand on its own?

MBAs build a great many of them have been to the Eiffel Tower, right? They have a knowledge of what good architecture looks like. So you know what they do? They spend a lot of time talking and planning. Kindergartners don’t really have any preconceived notions. So they spend a lot of time making and building. And what kindergartners learn in two minutes, MBAs don’t learn until 18 minutes, which is the marshmallow is actually pretty heavy, way heavier than you think. Whereas for a kindergartner, they learn that at the two or three minute mark. That informs

All of their subsequent building efforts, this failure that they had. For MBAs, they’ve got plans written down. And the problem is none of their plans account for the marshmallow being heavy. And because they don’t let go of the tower until the end is like the final ta-da moment, the ta-da becomes a uh-oh, right? And some of our colleagues at Stanford actually conducted research that shows that and this the the notion that kindergartners are employing there are what what in the lean startup land they call building to think.

So rather than thinking in order to build or planning to build, they’re building in order to think. And in an emergent environment, you learn a lot more by doing than by planning. And doing is actually what gives you the data you need to inform a good plan. MBAs, though, who’ve been trained in kind of classic business planning methods, are particularly resistant. This is what the researchers at Stanford found. They’re particularly resistant to methods of learning by doing.

And it’s for that reason that they, of all the categories of participants in this activity, they categorically performed the worst. And it’s because they don’t want to do in order to learn. They want to plan in order to do. And there’s kind of a fundamental shift that has to take place. When you’re doing something new, the only way to learn whether it’s worth doing is to is to do it. We have a sign at the D school that says the only way to do it is to do it. I think it’s a John Gage quote. But

It’s it just flies in the face of so much of our conventional wisdom around planning.

Bruce Daisley (21:00)
It’s so intriguing and I guess the spirit of it, like it was really struck me that the quotation you give from Stanford’s Bob McKim.

Jeremy Utley (21:08)
He’s he’s one of the progenitors of the product design program.

Bruce Daisley (21:12)
Right. And when a student went to Stanford’s Bob McKim for feedback on an idea, he said, show me three ideas first. This is what we’ve hinted at throughout the early preamble here is that the secret of coming up with good ideas is coming up with lots of ideas. And often the curses, the cognitive error we make is because we’re searching for the right idea. We are far too restrictive with the filtering we apply and we kill

the abundance of ideas that are sitting before us.

Jeremy Utley (21:45)
So restriction, I just you you you just touched on something I think is so important. The restrictiveness, think in terms of variation for a second. We’ve talked about volume. The other piece here is variation. If you were to ask someone, or if if you were to ask me, hey, you just told me I need to come up with a lot of ideas. What’s the quality of those ideas going to be? I’d say, well, they’re normally distributed. If you think about plotting quality on a graph, what you would find just like that, what’s the height of a man in Australia?

It’s gonna be normally distributed, right? And you can kinda everybody knows what that bell curve looks like. Well, that’s a distribution of ideas, too, if you’re generating a bunch. And what does that mean? It means that the vast majority, the middle of the bell curve is they’re kind of average. Most of your ideas are pretty average, they’re pretty pedestrian. On the right hand side of the distribution, the the kind of high variation outcome, every once in a while you get a really genius idea. On the other hand of the distribution, every once in a while you get a really goofy idea.

And this is the nature of things. If you generate a volume, you get some goofy, a lot of ordinary, and some genius. And what most people want to do is they go, you know what, I love the genius stuff, and I’ll tolerate the ordinary stuff, but I just want to get rid of the goofy stuff. And so they try to chop off the left hand side of the distribution. And what they don’t realize is that the left hand side, the right hand side of the distribution, the genius stuff, is a function of the same permissions and restri restrictionlessness.

As the left-hand side was. And when they chop off the goofy stuff, they also eliminate the genius stuff. And part of getting to spectacular outcomes is actually allowing yourself to let go of the inhibitions. I defy you to try to write down a bad idea. It’s actually really hard to do, right? You grab a post-it, not that it’s hard to come up with a bad idea, potato chapstick. I just thought of that.

Get me, I mean, and by the I was just looking at my chapstick and I thought of the word potato, right? But it’s like, that’s a what does that even mean, right? But like a chapstick tube with potato in it? I don’t know. But try to write that down on a post-it and you find, well, why bother? It’s just a waste of a post-it. And we’re so inclined to go, no, no, no, I’ll just write down the good stuff when I come. You know, one of the things that we advocate in the book and in in our practice is we call it an idea quota, where every day,

Once a day, you just make the shift and you say, instead of trying to come up with the right answer, I’m gonna generate lots of possible answers. Just once a day on any problem, could be anything, not new product or new service related necessarily, just anything. And it’s just a flip. It’s called the idea quota. We were debriefing an idea quota with an organization the other day. We’re asking people how many ideas they came up with in their idea quota. And we’re hearing lots of numbers. And then one person said, three. And I said, Tony, the point of the idea quota is to come up with at least ten.

And he said, no, no, I did, but I meant I only had three good ones. And I and I go and I go, Tony, count the crazy ones. But it’s fascinating, right? I ask, how many ideas did you come up with? He only counted the good ones.

Bruce Daisley (24:48)
Because I chatted to like an award-winning creative director and I had a conversation with him and he said, look, the secret is adjacent to what you said, he said, the art isn’t coming up with ideas. The art is spotting which ones are the good ideas. So he said, the reason why in the ad industry, these creative pairs, because often they would spit, spit, spit, spit, spit, spit, spit ideas. But it’s when the person in the room with them goes, that’s the good one. Now you’ve hinted at something there. How do we go from this filtering process where

Okay. We’ve turned out a billion ideas, you know, what’s the plans for next quarter? What’s the plans for next year? We’ve come up with some crazy ones, some that seem like fever dreams, these incredible ideas. How do we then start going through this, this reduction to try and work out, you know, okay, we’re getting from something that’s Looney Tunes into something that feels like there could be something to it. What’s the next stage?

Jeremy Utley (25:44)
For us, it’s all about experimentation. The better way than choosing is to allow the market to choose for you or allow the data to choose for you. I think the simplest way to to illustrate experimentation is to watch how somebody like Jerry Seinfeld develops material. If you look at what he does, the vast majority of us see the 10 minute or the five or ten minute bit on David Letterman.

And we go, man, it’s like hit after hit after hit. And if you watch it, it’s 10 minutes of everything he says is funny. And that to us is the Jerry Seinfeld brand, right? Is every idea he’s ever had is good. That’s actually not true. The truth is, painstakingly, and you can watch this in documentaries like The Comedian or read his book, right? Painstakingly, he’s going to clubs every night of the week and he’s trying 10-minute bits.

Or 10 minute sets of which he gets three laughs. The hit rate among the 20 to 200 people who are in the room there is that Seinfeld guy is not actually that funny, right? By the way, it’s it’s limited in nature, right? It’s not like millions of people are watching him bomb. I mean, one of my favorite moments in the comedian, I know if you’ve seen it on Netflix.

Bruce Daisley (27:00)
I’ve it. I’ve seen it a couple of times.

Jeremy Utley (27:02)
But you know, this the woman Heckler on the side, she said, like, is this your first time?

By the way, this after he’s had the hit show, Seinfeld. And what Seinfeld says, he goes, you know, this is how comedians develop material. And as you can see, it’s quite painful. And there was it was such a poignant moment because the truth is, what is he doing? He’s experimenting. He’s putting out a bunch of stuff in a very contained environment and he’s learning what’s good. And by the way, he’s probably generated lots of other stuff that didn’t even make his set, but he’s not only selecting the stuff that he knows is going to kill.

He is allowing the market, in this case, a small room of people at a comedy club, to tell him what’s good. And he’s willing to put out a bunch of stuff that probably nobody’s gonna laugh at. He’s willing to endure an incredible amount of pain to find those couple of nuggets that are worth refining. And over the course of a year, at the end of the year, he wants to be on Letterman, right? And he’s got 10 minutes worth of material, but it takes a year of painstaking development and what I would call experimentation. It it’s the same with us. How do we learn which of our ideas are good?

The more you can get them out of your head or out of your notebook and into the world in some way, and get, you know, for Jerry Seinfeld, it’s a laugh. For others of us, it might be a click, or it might be an email open, or it might be a sign up, or it might be any number of things. But if we start getting real data, and it doesn’t have to be from millions or billions of people, it can be from a room of 20, like Seinfeld does. If we start getting real data that will let us know which of our ideas are actually worth moving forward.

Bruce Daisley (28:34)
What really struck me, because I love the example that you gave of one organization. You said to them, they said, look, we’re going to turn this prototype into ideas. And the first instinct from one of the guys is, okay, we need three customer service agents. We need to get recruiting for them. And you’re like, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not proving this idea. Proving this idea is you’re taking the calls.

Jeremy Utley (28:57)
No. Yeah, you gotta reduce the cost of an experiment. Yeah. If an like that word experiment, if it’s expensive to you, then you then it won’t be sufficient to the objective that we’re talking about. It’s gotta be cheap.

Bruce Daisley (29:09)
That stage is really powerful because it’s just a reminder to test one of these crazy loopy ideas might be much easier than you think. And there might be zero cost to it, but it’s a, it’s a mindset. a stage of thinking that I suspect a lot of the people who turn up at your course, this is a learning, a re-learning for them.

Jeremy Utley (29:29)
They don’t have that low resolution experimentation mindset. You know, so take this example. This is a guy he’s got 30 years, the example that you referenced from the book, he’s got 30 years experience in this company. He’s friends with the CEO. It’s a you know trucking company. and he’s got a great idea. He’s got this idea that, you know, anytime somebody on on a highway, anywhere in America, they can get real-time diagnostic support of anything that they wrestle with. And we say, Okay, well, Chad, make an experiment. What’s your experiment? He says, Well,

It’s going to cost me $30 million to be able to roll out support for all of these drivers everywhere. We go, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. That’s not an expert. The organization can’t afford many $30 million experiments. Okay. We said, take it down a level. That’s to fund it for a long time and for nationwide service. What could you do if you’re just going to do a limited beta? And what Chad said after he kind of worked on the numbers, he said, okay, you know what I need, I just need three customer service reps. We’re going to cover a limited geography and

we’re gonna offer this service twenty four hours a day, but just for a small number of people. And I said, Well, how much is that gonna cost? He said, That’s a couple hundred thousand dollars. I said, Chad, still too expensive. That’s crazy. That’s not an experiment. What could you do? Sorry to use the word crazy. I mean, it’s not an accusation, it’s a compliment. Crazy is a good thing, but that’s still too expensive, right? Can everybody because we were in a cohort of 10 other potential startups in this company, can everybody, can the organization afford to fund 10 $200,000 prototypes? No.

What do we need to do now? And when we dug into it with him, what we realized, just like you just said, he was planning on hiring people. He had never hired anyone for less than a year term. So these are three people who are gonna make 80K a year, but it’s only for a year. It’s a year-long pilot. So he’s basically requesting funding for a year of activity on an idea that’s one of many ideas, right? We go, no, no, no. Don’t do a year’s worth of work. Do like a week’s worth of work. What’s it gonna cost? They said, Well, I can’t hire a

customer service rep for a week and I said, Chad, do you have a phone? He said, Yeah. I said, Great. You’re the customer service rep. And what are calls you could take? He said, Well, I know, you know, 10 truck drivers. Okay, great. You give your number to 10 truck drivers and you tell them to FaceTime you. And he said, well, what if it’s the middle of the night? I said at Stanford we tell our students to answer calls in the middle of the night. He said, well I can’t do that. I got a family. And I said, okay, is there a resource that you can he said, actually we’ve got a

relationship with an outsourcing shop in India, they could cover me during the night. Said, okay, what’s that cost? for a couple of weeks coverage, maybe $10,000. Okay, now we’re talking about something, right? So whereas the the question is, is it a good idea to provide 24 hour support for diagnostic assistance? One way to answer it is to fund an entire program that’s nationwide that has enough availability

Assuming the answer that they’re assuming that people will use it, that they can service all of the demand. That’s a $30 million solution. The other end of the spectrum, and what we got Chad to was the $10,000 test is do the 10 people who get the phone quote unquote phone number of the diagnostic service make a call over the next two weeks? Because if you are sitting by your phone and nobody ever calls you, despite the fact that as far as they’re concerned, they have 24/7 diagnostic support.

It’s probably not worth rolling out the service across the entire nation and hiring a bunch of field service agents, right? But and that’s a really scrappy and cheap experiment. He could still do his job while he’s doing that, right? Because unless people call him, he doesn’t even have to be dedicated to it. He’s just got to establish that paradigm with a handful of drivers. But it’s a great example of the cheaper you make can make an experiment, the more experiments you can run. Yeah.

Bruce Daisley (33:14)
Absolutely. I was really struck by the, give another example, which is sort of very specific to people who know San Francisco, but someone, they opened a beer garden at the top of the Westfield shopping mall in San Francisco. Now, knowing the clientele who frequent Mission and Market fairly well, and having been in that Westfield lots of times, this seemed like a flight of lunacy, but your suggestion, so it didn’t surprise me when no one went there.

But your suggestion was before opening that, start fliering it and see, you know, on one day, see if anyone goes up to the top floor to go to this beer garden. And if they do give them a voucher and cause they’ve been valuable market support, you don’t even have to open the beer garden to know if there’s a demand for the beer garden.

Jeremy Utley (34:03)
Put an intern up there with a pitcher of beer, right? You can pour them a beer. That’s fine. But the point is, you don’t need to build out a super luxurious space to learn that nobody’s gonna come up there. There’s a really cheap and scrappy way to do it and get what we call high credibility data. And ultimately, there’s a big conversation about big data right now. We advocate small data. Do something small that’s high trustworthiness rather than doing something big. You can commission a survey. That’s what Westfield had done. They commissioned a survey.

thousand people. Eight hundred of them said they’d come. So that’s ba that’s convincing data, but the problem is it’s not believable data. And what you need is believable data. And if you just put a bunch of flyers on the first floor and just all you have to do is count how many times does that fourth floor button get hit. That’s the only thing we’re measuring. Or how many vouchers do you hand people who come up saying, Hey, I saw a a flyer for the beer garden downstairs, right? And if you’re not getting it the demand that you expect, you know you got a problem on your hands. But it’s small data.

We all gravitate towards these large data sets unnecessarily.

Bruce Daisley (35:04)
guess what you’re effectively doing and you know, this highly popular award-winning course at Stanford, you’ve turned into a book because it’s so transformational for people is what you’re effectively saying is that the idea that we stumble upon the immaculate creation, the ideas that are just this beautiful inception that turned into something perfect. It’s one of the most limiting factors. And actually we need to understand firstly, you need to

unshackle yourself from the self-imposed limits of the ideas you’re creating, then you have to start experimenting with them at the lowest possible investment to check whether these ideas are genuinely real. Is there anything further that you’d add in terms of explaining to people how they need to rethink these stages?

Jeremy Utley (35:53)
Actually, yes. The critical thing is, are you practicing? Are you building a muscle? I mean, if I ask you right now, Bruce, will you go run a four hundred meter dash around your block? You’d say, I’m I’ll probably pull a hammy. You know, I’ll probably I’m not in shape. I haven’t been training unless you’ve been training to run a four hundred meter dash, you’re gonna you’re gonna be I mean, I would vomit, right? Eva you know, it’s like that’s not you can’t just like start sprinting, right? And yet for innovation and creativity,

There is this notion of a sprint. Just do it. Just click into gear and go. Creative. open the floodgates. And I what I say is just like a physical sprint, if you haven’t been training, if you aren’t warm, if you haven’t stretched, you shouldn’t expect to win the race. Similarly, people who are invited to a sprint or to a workshop or a hackathon, if there’s no stretching as a part of their life, if there’s no practice as a part of their life,

Don’t ex don’t be surprised if you get lackluster results. You know, to use a really simple example, my sister was a volleyball player in high school, and she was really good, right? And we’d go to the grocery store, and my mom would say, Hey Rachel, would you grab a jug of milk from the from the refrigerator? And I’ll use this cup as a jug of milk. Rachel would grab the jug of milk from the from the refrigerator. You know what she did on the way to the cart? She’d do curls, right? Why?

Because to an athlete, every jug of milk is a dumbbell. Can you imagine if I said, Hey, Rachel, you know you want to practice volleyball? She said, No, we’re not on the court and my coach isn’t here and I’m not wearing. No, to somebody who wants to improve their athletic ability, the world is their oyster, so to speak. I’ve seen it myself. I’ve experienced it myself. Well, the same is true of creativity. If you want to grow your creative muscle, what are you doing? What are you doing today? And most people, if you ask them,

You know, Thomas Edison talked about the key to being an inventor is to cultivate your imagination. If you ask most people, how do you cultivate your imagination? they will give you a blank stare. How do you practically, what do you do? When you’re cultivating your imagination, what are you doing? When you’re working on your cardiovascular, you know you’re doing. You know, and and so there’s this weird asymmetry. We s we say we value it. And so it’s this overhyped capability, but it’s totally underdeveloped and undernourished and underattended. And nobody would go to a

one hour piano lesson and say, book Carnegie Hall for me. I’m ready to play. You know, nobody would go to a swim class and say, drop me off in the middle of the ocean, right? But somebody takes a one hour innovation workshop and they’re updating their LinkedIn profile and they’re saying they’ve got it’s like, you’re ready to get dropped off in the pool? Like show me your scales. Show me your laps. What are you doing? Right? If you aren’t innovative, you’re not an innovator. I don’t care what your LinkedIn says. And so to me, there’s this idea of

Practice? Am I attending to the muscle and the capability on a regular basis? If so, I’ll be prepared for the sprint.

Bruce Daisley (38:55)
The last thing I really wanted to take on was something really of the moment, really. The way you describe your connection with the D-Score originally and the way that you describe the process of it, it sounds very kinetic. It sounds very tactile. It sounds like energized, like you’re in this sweaty room. And the one thing that we’ve all become accustomed to in the last couple of years is that ideas or that the way that we work has become more distributed.

And so I’d love to know your perspective on how important being in the same room is for the sorting of ideas, the initiation of ideas, any stage in particular actually of the process and whether there’s any awareness that we need to have about the importance of place. We’ve heard some organizations talk about creating their own experiential labs. Do you see any substance in that? I’d love to know your take on this.

Jeremy Utley (39:52)
Work does pose challenges to weaker links. So the research is in strong ties are strengthened by distance collaboration because we’re executing on a known task with known responsibilities and known roles to achieve a known outcome, et cetera, et cetera. And strong ties can endure and even be strengthened in those times. And we’ve seen that with the data. The relationships that suffer are what are known as weaker ties or bridge connections inside of relations inside of organizations.

And the the sad thing is those are actually the relationships where new ideas are often formed. And also where new ideas are scaled across an organization. The truth is to for any innovation inside of an organization to work, you have to have nodes of influence. And your connection to those influencers is probably lower than ever if you aren’t attentive to it. So if you look at if you map out innovation over time, you’ve got generally speaking, ideation, incubation, and scaling, very roughly speaking.

Incubation is a function of bonded, tight relationships. Both ideation and scaling are a function of bridge or weak relationships. And those are the relationships that have eroded in the pandemic era. Now, the inter and there’s interesting research from Stanford, from Charles O’Reilly, and a colleague of ours named Michael Arena, who is formerly the CHRO of GM, who’s now got his own company, and many others have studied this. The thing that I will say though, and the caveat is

There’s an unprecedented opportunity to cultivate a different kind of relationship as well, those weaker relationships. One of my favorite innovators of all time is Benjamin Franklin. Ben Franklin had some of the most profoundly broad experimentation in the history of invention. He invented bifocals, swim paddles, the lightning rod. He mapped the Gulf Stream for the first time. He invented libraries, fire department, the Continental Congress, right? You look at his the breadth of his impact, it’s profound.

And you wonder why. Well, one of the things Ben Franklin did is every week for 30 years, he met with his junto, a like-minded group of artisans who connected with a series of questions that they asked themselves every week. Has someone new moved to Philadelphia that we should know? And why? Has anyone’s business fallen into disrepute? And why? Are there any new discoveries in the sciences that have bearing on our fields? And what are they? Right? They would go through these questions for 30 years.

And to me, I look at something like that and I go, one, no wonder why Ben Franklin had such a broad range of innovation. And two, there’s nothing stopping me from doing something like that too today. It’s actually easier than ever before to convene a group of people from outside of my industry and outside my organization for deliberate, thoughtful connection. And what that takes is it takes it’s got to be on my radar. And one of the chapters of the book, we talk about perspectives and leveraging different perspectives.

In fueling your idea flow. And for me, putting that notion of a portfolio of perspectives on one’s radar and giving someone a little bit of language around how do I assess what the portfolio perspectives I bring to bear is and what are the levers that I can pull to amplify my portfolio of perspectives. To me, the the remote environment in which we find ourselves does not have to be a limiting factor. It can actually be an amplifying factor.

if you are attentive to it and if you wield the technology that we’ve got as a lever to increase the breadth and span of your collaboration.

Bruce Daisley (43:28)
Just to dive in a little bit more, if you were going to speak instinctively, do you think sometimes, and not all the time, and harnessing the fact that it can bring a far broader range of perspectives to the room, do you think sometimes when it comes to sorting ideas, these times that we should be together, or actually you think this is actually a limiting restriction, it may be a generational framing?

Jeremy Utley (43:55)
I think we I think we have to. I think we have to be together. There what the research suggests is the best outcomes happen when we modulate between being alone and being together. And being alone and being together. And the the fallacy is to think this moment of the brainstorm, right? It’s like a very very useful construct, but it’s also damaging in that it’s almost like an inoculation. Everybody’s been a part of a brainstorm, so everybody knows what it means and therefore everybody is a poor participant, right? And one of the bad things about a brainstorm is it’s

viewed as a moment in time episode where we all get together, we come up with all the ideas and then we leave and we don’t ever talk or think about it again. And what I would suggest and what we the model that we advocate in the book is a little bit more nuanced where you give folks individual time to consider a prompt prior to meeting, which honor honors introverts, which honors the processing time and marination time required.

Then you gather together and have people share and build on one another’s ideas, but you deliberately do not select at that point. And what I like to do at that point, rather, and that’s typically a brainstorm ends, you select, you move on, make decisions and move on. And what I suggest is there’s some really fascinating research called the creative cliff illusion, is one of the papers that we lean on for this. But there’s some fascinating research that suggests that creativity does not degrade with time.

the that’s why they call it the illusion. There’s an illusion that the number of our ideas falls off a cliff. It goes down precipitously. The truth is actually that it’s the opposite. Your creativity goes up over time. Your expectations have a big role to play there. But generally speaking, creativity can increase. And what I tell people at the end of a session like that is I don’t think we’ve come up with our best ideas yet. I actually think that if we all leave here and consider to continue to noodle on the topic that we’ve been discussing,

The very best ideas that collectively we can come up with are yet to occur to us. And so we’re going to schedule a meeting for a week from now where we’re all going to share the better ideas that we thought of that were inspired by this conversation. And in that meeting, we’ll make some decisions. And so you see that modulation between individual and collective, and individual and collective, it empirically generates a much better outcome.

Bruce Daisley (46:07)
That’s such a valuable model to understand, to understand that, that ideas, Cliff, because it would naturally be your perspective. yeah, we’ve got all the good ones down, you know, that good ones fallacy. And now we did like the slightly silly ones that are on the, on the periphery. And I guess what you’re doing there is you’re just harvesting this, the very accessible ideas. And actually you’re not pushing into that uncomfortable thought where you’re having to imagine.

something a bit more out of the ordinary. It’s such a valuable model because as soon as you know that you think, okay, actually this is something that can help me have confidence that there’s more good stuff to come.

Jeremy Utley (46:47)
Yeah, we had a workshop recently on the East Coast and one of the one of the epiphanies on the team was our best idea was always the last post that they got written. And that really astounded the team. Cause every session they thought they had come in with the best material. And what they realized as they looked back is they this came out of a reflection activity. They realized all of our best ideas came at the very end of whatever the session was together.

Bruce Daisley (47:12)
That’s so powerful. Wow. I’ve loved this conversation today. Firstly, because when you feel that someone who’s had this incredibly popular course commits it down to paper, it’s like this democratic act of allowing other people who maybe don’t have access to that elite resource that’s required or that access. It’s so democratic to actually see some of these put down. And also the fact that it’s so, I think it’s so humbly demystifying to say that, you know,

There’s no secret to any of these, but any of you can learn these. If you’re willing to exercise this muscle, you are going to have access to this stuff. It’s you can see I literally tore through the book because the book is in pieces in front of me, but so brilliant. And I loved it. Thank you so much.

Jeremy Utley (48:01)
Yeah, one thing I wanted to mention is because of this conversation, we actually put a free resource on our website if folks want to check it out. We wrote a short ebook called How to Think Like Bezos and Jobs, where we lay out seven key mindsets that Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs sh shared in common that we discovered in our research for the book. A lot of this stuff didn’t make it into the actual manuscript itself. So we made it available as a free ebook for folks who’ve listened to this conversation. If they want to check it out, just go to ideaflow.design and they can grab that there.

Bruce Daisley (48:30)
I love it. Well, that is the top link in the show notes below. So anyone who’s interested in that can go and grab that before they download the book. So grateful for the chat today. A wonderful discussion. I’m personally so intrigued because the, the attribute of creativity is going to be more important than ever before to all of us. And so someone who gives you faith that even if you don’t think you’re creative, you’ve got it within you. think he’s just an important contribution to this whole discussion. Thank you.

Jeremy Utley (49:00)
so much. Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for having me today.

Bruce Daisley (49:07)
Thank you to Jeremy. Fantastic to hear someone, I think, sort of strip away the mystery about how creativity is formed. And I think the heartening thing about that is that for many of us, we might be empowered and think actually, creativity is something that is possible for all of us. At the very least, I think it helps us reimagine specifically our relationship with creativity. Thanks for listening. If you are interested in this or anything to do with the podcast,

Please do follow the newsletter, you’ll see a link to that in the show notes. And I always welcome people getting in touch either by replying to the newsletter or on LinkedIn. I’ve been Bruce Taisley. Thank you for listening. See you next