Jeff & Staney DeGraff — The Art of Change (DeGraff Trilogy Finale) - The Innovation Show

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
this really became the cornerstonefor a lot of the things that we're now

(00:05):
doing with really large corporationsin the age of artificial intelligence
where, you know, where expertiseis compressed and the real key is
thinking through complexity andhow do I manage in this environment
that's disaggregating very quickly.
So that's become a tonefor that, how to do that.
But it really came out of thisexperience of how come these really

(00:27):
brilliant people who give their bloodand treasure their life for the cause,
why are they having trouble with this?
if you wanna punish somebody, don'tpunish them for doing the wrong thing.
The worst thing is to punish them whenthey think they've done the right thing.
And that just cut to the very coreof what it's like to be an innovator.
'cause that's what happenstime and time again.

(00:48):
When y
When y
you start doing something reallyinnovative, no one will notice.
He said, after that they'll tellyou that, you're doing it wrong.
He said, after that, they'llcall you unprofessional.
He said, in the end, they'lltake credit for your work.
Before we start into the finale ofthe trilogy with the DeGraffs, I want
to thank our sponsor Kyndryl, whoruns and reimagines the technology

(01:11):
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With a unique blend of AI poweredconsulting, built on unmatched managed
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(01:32):
Don't forget, if you sign up to theInnovation Show Substack, you can
win a copy of the creative mindset.
But let's get stuck into this book.
The Art of Change.
Change efforts rarely fail because ofpoor strategy or execution, but because
leaders are using the wrong mindset,they treat change as a project to be
managed with fixed goals, linear plans,and measurable outcomes when change is

(01:55):
actually a dynamic paradoxical processthat resists that logic entirely.
Our guests argue that organizationsare structurally designed to
resist change because they existto eliminate variance and deviance.
Change makers.
Therefore collide with the systemby definition and often get

(02:16):
pushed out even when they succeed.
It is a pleasure to welcome back forthe finale of our DeGraff trilogy,
the authors of the Art of Change.
Today's book and the others are therebehind me, Jeff and Staney DeGraff
. You're very welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having us back.
Thank you.
It's great to have you guys backI thought we'd start a little bit

(02:40):
different because we've come tothe finale of our trilogy and.
I have the distinct gift here, andI mean a gift from the universe of
reading the books in sequence, kindof like as you'd written them, except
this compressed week after week.
So I've seen how the books have,have compounded on the knowledge that

(03:04):
you've collected during the years.
I've seen little bits of sprinklesof earlier books appear again.
But Jeff, I thought I'd come to you.
first about this, because this book isa little bit different and it reflects
the learning you've had and the amount ofclients you've worked with in the meantime
since you started your very first book.
Yeah, so the whole idea of this wasthe books were written as a trilogy.

(03:27):
And this book was written that reallycame out of a bunch of discussions
with sort of two groups of people.
Number one, when I got together withthese great thought leaders that I
kind of came up under CK PrahaladKarl Weick and Bob Quinn and Kim
Cameron, and all these brilliantguys, we never talked about successes.

(03:48):
We talked about our failures,and we talked about them
as learning opportunities.
What did we learn?
And these were the kind of projects thatpeople read about, the United Nations
or the military or , apple or Google orwhatever companies are reading about.
second thing was we wereworking on a project at the
very highest level the military.

(04:10):
And not just the US military,but militaries around the world.
And what occurred to us was these are someof the brightest, most committed people.
We love these people, but when it came to.
Highly ambiguous situations, paradoxicalsituations, their ability to adapt,
their ability to think in verydifferent ways was highly constrained.

(04:35):
And it's because they'dbeen trained differently.
And we noticed that, giving them all theselenses, et cetera, wasn't really landing.
What really landed talking about myown failures of saying, okay, here's
what happened when I went to thisbiotech and it completely failed, and
we figured some stuff out eventually.

(04:55):
And then it became thisvery famous company.
So the book is about that.
The book is kind of being vulnerable andalmost like a parable and saying, and at
the end of this, the moral of the storyis this is how you think about this.
So it really connects the idea of change.
To the idea of adaptabilityto the idea of learning.

(05:18):
These are learning opportunities.
And this really became the cornerstonefor a lot of the things that we're now
doing with really large corporationsin the age of artificial intelligence
where, you know, where expertiseis compressed and the real key is
thinking through complexity andhow do I manage in this environment
that's disaggregating very quickly.

(05:40):
So that's become a tonefor that, how to do that.
But it really came out of this experienceof how come these really brilliant people
who give their blood and treasure theirlife for their, for the cause, how,
why are they having trouble with this?
I just wanna remind our audience, I havea copy 'cause you're probably wondering
why is there's four books up there.
I have a copy of theChange Mindset up there.

(06:03):
For those of you who sign up to oursubstack as Well, I've already picked
a winner for part one and part two.
This is part three.
So there's one more chance, one morebite at the cherry before we finish.
But this book is The Art of Change,and at the heart of the book is
two core things to understand.
One is paradox and the otheris, the word mindset itself.
I thought we'd get themoutta the way first.

(06:24):
Your definitions of what they mean becausethey're core to understanding this book.
paradox is I think relativelyeasy, meaning that two ideas
that seem to be antithetical andthey appear at the same time.
Remember, F. Scott Fitzgerald, theguy wrote the great Gatsby, said
The definition of genius is beingable to hold two oppositional ideas
in your mind at the same time.
That's what a paradox is.

(06:45):
And I would expand the concept of aparadox a little bit to say incongruities,
high degrees of ambiguity, right?
Things that are nonsensical whenyou first encounter them, right?
And then the idea of mindset is whateverwe're calling cognition and inquiry.
your mind makes inquiry, yourcognition, if you're neurobiologist,

(07:09):
you know, your neocortex, right?
Whatever your list, whateveryour listeners believe about
mind, how it makes inquiry.
And, the whole idea of this is it makesit, we're taught patterns and patterns
are really important because the worldwould be very complicated they, or
nominal if we didn't think of patterns.
But the notion is some ofthose patterns become so rigid.

(07:29):
When we're seeing something,we're not, uh, we simply try and
destroy it with that pattern.
And so there's a whole part to thisthat I think is another word, which
is meaning making or sensemaking.
There's a key idea here, youknow, what are we looking at?
What does it mean?
And I know Staney has a lot of experience.
This, she was a graduate student

(07:50):
I didn't realize that.
Yeah.
'cause Karl Weick is thesensemaking guy really, isn't he?
He brought it to prominence.
Staney's nodding away there.
I was thinking about this, Staney.
You know, I, I wrote an articlerecently and I called it being
punished for doing the Right Thing.
And my wife actually said to me, it wasthat about me because I was, I just, for

(08:12):
those who may not have called part one andpart two, Jeff and Staney are married and
they're in separate places at the momentbecause Jeff is in the university and
Staney's in the office, runs the office.
But the point of this articleis very relevant for this book
and, in particularly the openingabout this guy, Luis, because.
I was writing about those innovatorsand often so many innovators go

(08:35):
out on a limb, they're deviant,they go against the paradigm of the
organization, they go against therules and they have a breakthrough
and then they're punished for that.
And I cannot find for the life ofme where I heard this, but I believe
it was some, and I may have justimagined this, I thought it was
somebody, like Nietzsche, who said,if you wanna punish somebody, don't

(08:58):
punish them for doing the wrong thing.
The worst thing is to punish them whenthey think they've done the right thing.
And that just cut to the very coreof what it's like to be an innovator.
'cause that's what happenstime and time again.
When y
And I thought we'd open andmaybe close the entire day
today with the story of Luis.
'cause it comes full circleat the end of the book.

(09:18):
I have a sign in my office thatsaid organizations love innovation
but hate their innovators.
And, it really came from aconversation when I was a very
young man with Jonah Salk.
Probably the greatest, one of thegreatest scientists of the 20th century.
He really let me knowwhat was gonna happen.

(09:39):
And he famously said to me, youstart doing something really
innovative, no one will notice.
He said, after that they'll tellyou that, you're doing it wrong.
He said, after that, they'llcall you unprofessional.
He said, in the end, they'lltake credit for your work.
Right?
No truer words have ever been said, That'sbeen Staney in my experience throughout

(10:02):
our career, and this is importantfor people to know, if you're on the
path to be a real innovator, and I'mtalking about writing about innovation.
Remember, we've been in halfthe Fortune 500 companies.
I mean, we're kind of the, I dunnowhere, you know, whether, whether we're
the Indiana Joneses or the, or the,or the forest Gumps of this field.
But the notions we're practitionerswe're academics, right?

(10:23):
So we write about things, but thatwe also build a lot of things.
And this is, these are the table stakes.
So the book starts with the story of Luis,and we got brought in to look at how to
accelerate the transfers from radicalnew technologies into the military.
And, Luis was the guy who did it.
And what happened was, theycompletely sat on the project, as you.

(10:44):
would've expect, the bureaucracytook over, nothing happened.
And this was only about two monthsbefore COVID hit COVID hits.
And, you remember all theworld governments sort of
completely, fumbled the ball.
They don't know what to do.
There are these two or three differentmodels, none of 'em are very good.
around, April, the United Statesgovernment decides to create something

(11:07):
called operational warp speed.
is now we're gonna put somereal muscle behind this.
And.
this thing that Luis worked on,which became called Rapid X, was
actually co-opted to, uh, to, so toexpedite the process of the vaccine.
So not so much to develop the vaccine, buthow to get billions of vials and billions

(11:28):
of needles and cold chain storage.
And how do we get this into peopleso that we're, we, , we survive this.
And, , he did just a brilliant job anda very unassuming man behind the scenes.
Lots of stuff, bringing theright people in, all the stuff.
We've talked on previous ones.
And then when it was over had victory,you know, a hundred, remember the

(11:49):
object was a hundred million vaccinesand a hundred, and we did it.
Yay us.
You know, Louis certainly wasone of the key people for this.
It came time for him to bepromoted and they passed him over.
Right, and, and we've seen this,Staney and I have seen this time
and time and time again, right?
So the notion was, that's why I wantedto start the book is to say even getting

(12:12):
it right doesn't mean you'll succeed.
what happened was that then otherpeople started taking credits and they
posted and things and say, well, I wasthe leader of this and or whatever.
I created this and we were like, we werethere when Luis was getting it off the
ground, and we knew the people who werearound him and who work with him and

(12:37):
no, these other people who claim thecredit,were, were nowhere to be found!
It's just ridiculous.
Even a couple of very popularbooks that had been on the New
York Times bestseller list.
You know, we were there.
what they're reporting is a reportingof reporting, and they're incorrect.
This is really important to note.
These are very established writers whowould swear that these are correct.

(13:01):
They didn't talk to the right people.
Right?
The whole idea of Luis and this.
Particular part of the military,which became the background.
And again, Staney and I werepart of all this in a, in a
only in the supply chain way.
And only because we had developed thisfor technology, we did, we did not
develop this for the COVID vaccine.

(13:21):
it's a perfect example ofhow great technologies also
get co-opted great processes.
And remember we talked aboutthis in a previous one.
Innovations and changes donot move from the inside out.
They move from the outside in.
And what happens is the fartheryou move to the center, the
more ideas become co-opted.
Right?
And I'm not saying this is a bad thing,you know, watch the movie Oppenheimer.

(13:46):
It's a perfect example.
Robert Oppenheimer is not quite a,Nobel prize winning quality thinker,
but he knows all the people andhe's a key leader in these ideas.
He brings, brings everybody together.
He's really smart.
But the part of the movie whichpeople get really upset is
when they take his clearances.
I'm not sure if I was in that boat,I wouldn't have taken his clearances

(14:08):
because the people who invent thingsor build things at some point have
to hand off to the people who aregonna run them or manage them.
The problem in the first chapter ofthe book we talk about, Luis, isn't
that it should have been handed off.
It's that they basically said, weinvented this when all they really
needed to do was tip their cap to Luis.

(14:30):
I've seen that time and time it'shappened, me and I think that's the thing.
It's happened most change makers whenthey've had a success and I talked about
it in a previous episode, one of thehard things I found, my ego found hard.
And it depends on theorganization you you're in.
And if they tip the hat towards you,that's a key thing just to be the

(14:52):
recognition that you went through so manydifficulties to get this over the line.
And in some cases, the very peoplewho are the biggest blockers are up.
Doing the keynote, doing thepresentation saying, this is what I
and my team did, and you're going,you, you, you were the biggest blocker.
There's no way around that though.

(15:13):
What I want your, listeners tounderstand, these are table stakes.
This if, you know, if you're gonnabe an innovator, a real innovator,
not innovation theater, none ofthis, you know, I mean, you're
a builder, you're a builder.
a real innovator, expect this.
And if you wanna be loved, get a dog.
Right?
I mean.
it's really that simple.
You innovate because it's in your soul.

(15:34):
It's, it's, you're, you'reinternally motivated to do it.
It's so difficult though, I haveto say to you, I struggled so hard
in the early days, particularly'cause it was early in my career.
And you wanted some wins and youwanted some recognition so you
could move up in the organization.
This line in particular, I pulled aline that I think will cut deep, sorry
about this, for open up any wounds forthose people listening, perhaps you're

(15:58):
a change maker, driven by profounddissatisfaction with the status quo.
You come across as negative, but inreality, you harbor a very positive
belief that things can be better.
You have good ideas on how totransform your organization, but
you have trouble selling them andeven bigger challenges trying to
get them implemented effectively.

(16:19):
I think that in a nutshell is such acommon issue for so many change makers.
And as you say, instead ofbeing considered a gainsayer,
you're considered a naysayer.
Or you pipe up in a meeting and youcan visibly see people going, oh,
not him again, not the black hat guy.
Once again, that's another problem.

(16:40):
Let's call that out.
I know we haven't even gotinto the book yet, but.
These are things that you justsee crop up time and time again,
and it can make the change makerfeel ostracized, bullied, gaslit.
Yeah, I wanna add to that, people,I'm one of the original people here
at the University of Michigan thatcreated this Center for Positive

(17:00):
Organizational Scholarship,which is a very important thing.
But one of the real early thingsthat I wanted to make very clear
was positive, doesn't mean happy.
It means a sense of destiny.
It means a sense of positivethat I can get to some place
that no one's gotten before.
It's not the same as happy,happy, happy, happy, right?
If you want to, the differencebetween happiness and meaning,

(17:21):
happiness and impact, what we'reworking for is meaningfulness in life.
My opinion and what we'reworking for is impact.
Did we make a difference being here?
Right.
So, so I think what you're talking aboutis I think great change makers, like great
innovators, have a deep sense of destiny.
there's a, a really interestingthing I observed, and it's probably

(17:43):
'cause you quote so many of thesepeople, but actually you knew all
these people like, , Bob Quinn.
And, , Kim Cameron and Mintzberg.
We had Henry Mintzberg on the show, bythe way, he's still thriving up in Canada,
talking about this idea of deliberateversus emergent strategy, et cetera.
But I, I think this part that you callout, because you saw it firsthand, both

(18:04):
of you saw it as scholars, as academics.
You saw what had happened inside thefield, and you said, traditionally,
change management has often been treatedas an offshoot of project management.
Leaders establish fixed targetsand employ streamline processes
to reach those objectives.
However, true mastery of changerequires a different approach.

(18:24):
One that prioritizes time as a criticalfactor given the inherently ambiguous
and ever evolving nature of crises.
I thought we'd speak to that becausethat was a key point for me to
share to our audience that theymay have missed that because that.
That means that, you know, it's like thePlanck principle that science doesn't

(18:45):
advance because somebody has a great idea.
It advances one funeral at a time, andthe old, old way of doing things is
kind of died out and people realizethis is the new way and therefore we
get into that new paradigm as a result.
I don't wanna get too esoteric here,but most of management theory is

(19:05):
based on the concept of structureand, change and innovation is based
on the concept of time or process,what we call process philosophy.
That there are states in which we'rein, right, it's like a child developing.
So we think in terms of cycles,we think in terms of states.
current state, you know, desired state,version one, version two, version three.

(19:29):
Think about thin versions and thickversions that innovators talk about.
So there's this real strong component oftime, uh, that, that underlies everything.
And that's the kind of the key that ledto this whole idea of the paradox mindset,
the paradox, mind cycle, you know?
One of the things that Staneyand I both do, and I do this with
students, and at the beginning ofclasses at Michigan, particularly

(19:50):
the MBAs, it drives 'em bananas.
'cause this is, they wannahave the right answers.
And the first slide I show themis the age of answers is over.
You know, we have artificial intelligence,you know, it's like GPS or Bluetooth.
If you want an answer, pressa button and you'll get it.
The issues, you can't, what you can't dois you can't mobilize or manifest that
idea into the world by pressing a button.

(20:12):
So the first thing we dois we start with a story.
So, for example, I would show a story of.
Young people and young peopleare hooking up more than anybody.
You gotta talk to youngpeople the way they do.
They're hooking up morethe story, new story.
They're hooking up morethan any other generation.
And then somewhere along the lines,somebody to just make this weird
comment about, on the story about, it'sthe loneliest generation we've ever

(20:34):
seen, including widows and widowers.
So we've never seen this in our studies.
you start out by saying,okay, we watch the video.
Where's the paradox?
And so they startfinding paradoxes, right?
So they're thinking in real time.
They're stirring in real time.
They're making it up as they go along.
Then the second questionis, me what it means.

(20:55):
Now, this is really important because halfthe time people solve the wrong problem.
That's difference betweenproject management and change in
innovation, the problem is it fixed.
If X marks the spot in the ageof artificial intelligence,
press a button and you'll get it.
mathematics, right?
It's not morality, it's mathematics.
So to me, the hardest part, and thiscomes back to Staney's, an expert

(21:17):
on this, is what does this mean?
And you're not allowed to answer it.
You're not allowed to say it means this.
What you have to do is come up with awhole list of things that this could mean.
So you're basically thinkingaround the problem and I'm
forcing you into plasticity.
I'm forcing you tobe, , an adaptive thinker.
we'd say, okay, what are theguiding principles then that

(21:38):
we can derive from this?
What can we learn from this?
Which is much more like philosophy,but it's not philosophy in a rigid
way where I start with a model.
It's, we're gonna make a model.
We're gonna make a model thatmight work or might not work.
It's a work in progress.
See that time element again,it's a work in progress.
And then the next part, which isright outta Karl Weick's playbook.

(21:59):
What are the small experiments?
How are we gonna hedge.
How are we gonna run a bunch of smallexperiments, not looking for confirming
feedback, but disconfirming feedback,looking for where we're wrong right now.
This is a, there's an implicithumility into this of saying,
assuming that, I don't know,some things that I need to know.

(22:21):
And and a lot of this stuff came fromour work with biotechs and, you know,
radical, kind of new technologies.
The kind of thing you'd maybesee come on our DARPA or you
know, in Europe, DIANA right?
The notion is if you are really in thatmood, there aren't any clear answers.
And the key step to all ofit is what does this mean?

(22:42):
Which is a learning step.
and we see this a lot of, theprojects that we've worked with,
the most difficult part is to getpeople to understand that everything.
Everything can change.
It's not just one thingor two things or whatever.
So when you're a changemaker, you make a plan, right?

(23:05):
The plan itself can change, right?
I mean, the goal of the plan might change.
We might not wanna do A, you wannaactually wanna do B. The time
itself much, everything must change.
And I think lot of people just kindof think you can make a plan from
A to B, and then you can just kindof figure out a way to get there.

(23:27):
And that way might change,but it isn't just that.
I mean, destination might change.
I think readers of this book, thereseems to be, I'm getting feedback
from a lot of different people.
There seems to be kind of the moregeneral readership and then the people
who are really, really insightful of this.
I'm getting a lot of emails from them.
What this book is saying is thatthe paradox is not part of change.

(23:50):
It is the change.
The central thesis of the bookis that what change basically
is about is not resolving theparadoxes, but diving into them.
And the, the notion is a lot ofwhat we, we do for change goes
all the way around these paradoxesand we never get change from them.
Right?

(24:11):
And it, and it doesn't mean thatthese paradoxes are gonna be resolved.
This is the process piece.
The notion is these paradoxesoccur, they occur in antiquity,
they'll occur in the future.
They're just common paradoxes.
But you have to work through, , thoseparadoxes which are unresolved to come
up with experiments that at least moveyou forward on trying to make the change.

(24:32):
that positive change thatyou're trying to make happen.
Let's bring it to life witha, there's multiple episodes.
Episodes in the book of experiencing this,but one that many people might relate
to, which is a married couple, Aaronand Olive, and an all too familiar tale.
I'm gonna let Staney take that.
Go ahead, olive.
Go ahead, olive.

(24:54):
that, one, is a, actually, it's, it'sum, it's more of the easier ones that
is, you can actually kind of solve that.
Right?
mean, you know, two people have twodifferent goals and then so, and because
they have two different views of how to.
You know, in this case, finances, right?

(25:15):
Staney, can I add a bit of contextjust to give the background here?
So Olive and Aaron.
Aaron, I think is the more, he comes froma background where finances are tight, so
everything needs to clear the debt, don'tborrow too much, et cetera, while Olive
comes from a more wealthy background.
And I may have them the wrong way around,but olive's like more, let's invest,

(25:38):
let's put it in high risk investments.
'cause there's bigger return from that.
So that's the setup because I thinkthat's an important thing just to call
out that it's that and also we talkedabout this before, the embracing of the
difference is where the beauty comes from.
And we talked about this with theinnovation code, that there, there's
beauty in that diversity thatneurodiversity if you harness it

(25:59):
like you're gonna tell us about here.
Yeah, so in that example, you're right.
So, , Aaron's is a lot more conservativein terms of what you do with the money.
And Olive, knows that in order foryou to make money, you actually
have to invest more, right?
And I think it's just kindof shows there are ways.
In the middle on how to do thingsthat can combine both interests and

(26:23):
so forth, because both thing is true.
, the point of the story iskind of two parts to it.
Number one, not about compromise.
The first part of the story iswe're constantly rebalancing
our portfolio life constantly.
What worked for you?
Imagine if you got everything youwanted the day you graduated from
high school, you'd be disaster.
Right?
So we're constantly rebalancing ourlives and these dynamics change that,

(26:45):
and they're changed often from not justpersonal aspirations, but from outside.
There's a recession, there's awar, something happens to, right?
So on and so forth.
But the second part of this wasthat it wasn't just rebalancing,
it was finding hybrids.
It was finding things that metboth criteria so that got the
benefit of both pieces, not just,and so it's not a compromise.

(27:06):
It's trying to findsomething that's beneficial.
Right.
I think the key part of the thingthat we're talking about is that the
change changes with the change, right?
Which is part of what we talkedabout originally with Luis.
The whole use of this technologythat where this process we developed
changed because something changed.
You know, and there's a tonof examples historically.

(27:27):
You know, think about, uh, AlexanderFleming, what he's trying to do at Oxford,
and he's, he's trying to solve certaintypes of things and a, a mold of falls
on his Petri dish while he's on vacation.
The next thing you realizeis it's killing, bacteria.
And we have, penicillin.
And so now it's going ina different direction.
And this is very common.

(27:48):
And so again, the difference inproject management would we say, well,
no, we're trying to accomplish thisand there's gotta be a part to this
where somebody goes, wait a minute.
There's something else going on hereand I need to be adaptive at that point.
And course correct.
There's something that's maybemore valuable outta this.
And of course we could give hundredsof examples of this, but to, to

(28:09):
Staney's point, this happens atboth the level of just individuals.
And it happens at higher levels.
We try and minimize conflict, butchange is created by conflict.
, If you really wanna see an organizationthat's not it's not gonna change,
not gonna invent anything, whatyou really wanna look for is
a lot of alignment and apathy.

(28:29):
Everyone's happy.
Right?
And I give an example in the book ofcoming to a one, one of the largest
organizations in the world, andgoing in the elevator and listening
to Led Zeppelin, Muzak, and seeingjw pa, you know, Turner paintings
on the wall and everyone was niceand it was great and whatever.
And you just, and you know,then you become the black hat

(28:51):
guy of going, you brought me inhere to make innovation happen.
You guys are way too compl.
You know, you're way too, calm.
is way too aligned and apatheticfor anything to grow here.
You know, and you really have towork what are the issues here?
And you have to pull them out.
And then finally, it's like functionalversus dysfunctional families.

(29:14):
families never have the argument.
And then there's divorce, right?
And dysfunctional families are havingthe argument in a dysfunctional way.
And then there's divorce , everybodywho's ever been married for a long time
knows there's going to be a dust up,There's gonna be some chippiness, right?
Whatever you wanna call it, inwhatever part of the world you're at.
But within boundaries within that,we're trying to do the same thing.

(29:36):
We're trying to get ahead.
So those, I think that becomesreally kind of the key to this is,
are we, do we have enough generativeenergy to get to the next place?
It's such an important thing.
Jeff, I was thinking before when I wasreading the book, the first book, the
Innovation Code, and by the way, it's notthe first book of what you've written.

(29:57):
It's the first of the trilogy.
I just want to tell ouraudience that there are other
books that we didn't cover.
But I was thinking about my son.
So my son had this horrific teacher.
She was terrible his first teacher andshe had this rule, the Irish, we speak
Gaelic we're taught Gaelic Gaeilgeit's called Irish language here, and
white spots is spotai bana right?

(30:19):
And she say, she would say, you'renot allowed to have any spotai bana.
So when they were coloring in,they weren't allowed to leave white
spots and she must have given outto them or scared them in some way.
Fast forward to, I'm coloring with him.
He is only, you know, he's four orfive and he's done, you color mine
for me, he was scared to color in,in case he left the white spots.

(30:41):
Right?
So I was thinking aboutthis like, firstly.
That teacher, I was angry with her,but apart from that, I was thinking
about, well, sometimes , you startthe lens or the paradigm for that
person, even in childhood likethat, that don't make mistakes.
Or like you said in anothertime when inevitably you have an

(31:02):
argument at home with your partneror your wife or whoever I had.
Anytime I do, I say to the boys,my two sons, I say, you know, it's
normal to fight, otherwise youjust hold it up and then something
worse happens down the line.
And I want them to know thatconflict is important because
you disagree on something.
And I'll tell them aboutthe point of disagreement.

(31:22):
And then last part on this, I sometimesbrought into organizations, I run a
program called Communicate to Innovate.
And I am, I'm talking to this team andI'm brought in specifically because people
won't call out the elephant in the room.
In the room, but they'll talk abouteach other behind their backs, right?

(31:44):
And not purposefully.
I le my fly is down for the first hour.
I'm, my zipper's down, I'm flying low.
No one says it to me.
And then, and now passes.
And a guy kind of says,we're having a coffee break.
And he says, Hey man, I dunnoif this is part of your gig
here, man, your fly is down.

(32:05):
And then I was like, why didnone of you say it to me?
They're like, oh, we weren't sure.
We didn't wanna upset you.
And I was like, going,that's the point here.
You should have told me straight away.
But I wanted to then bring it to the book.
Because leaning into that, and ifyou don't lean into it and also
if you don't have the culture thatallows for it, you miss things.
And a great example you give in the book.

(32:27):
And I learned about this onlyrecently looking at Nokia.
I know you're the Nokia scholar.
Was Timo Partenen a guy whoteaches up in Adelphi University?
I mentioned him before.
He told me that Nokia had thismusic service where you could
actually get free music for Nokia.
And the whole idea, it was like,think about it, 20 years before
Spotify, they had Spotify.

(32:49):
You downloaded the music, you hadunlimited music amounts to download, but
nobody saw that this actually could be adifferent service that they could sell.
Instead, they used it to do whatthey always do to sell more phones.
And it came to mind when I read about yourwork with the car manufacturer, when they
had this beautiful concept , sitting rightin front of them of mobility and because

(33:14):
of the deliberate strategy, 'cause they'reaiming for that strategy, they missed
the emergent right under their nose.
Maybe you'll share this one.
Well, I don't wanna say what the carmanufacturer is, I'm still on good
terms with them, but I used to bepart of, running the board meetings
and I'd fly to Europe to do it.
Right.
And um board meeting we were looking at.

(33:37):
Growth and profitability.
And they, they amazing engineers.
I just cannot say enough good.
I mean, really amazing people.
And, um, they ran a project inLondon and they ran a project in,
in Germany the projects had to dowith ride sharing and they were
extremely successful and profitable.

(33:58):
And so the question came up about,well, why aren't we thinking
about transportation this way?
then the issue became, well thatwill cut into sales, of this stuff.
And I have a million of thesearound this kind of industry.
I mean, if you think about wherethe electronic vehicle came
from, it did not come from wheremost people think it came from.

(34:18):
The electronic vehicle, youlook it up, the EV one came
from General Motors, right?
19, uh, I think 89 90 early.
Right.
There's a ton of these where,you know, and they're famous.
You know, Kodak got to digital, imagingfirst, and Blockbuster got to streaming.
I know that 'cause I worked.
on Hulu, which, you know,got there first, right?
For, for a, for a, afriends, a General Electric.

(34:41):
So there's a ton of these wheresomebody gets it, but because
it doesn't fit their model.
And the most prominent examplehere in the United States is Sears.
And people tell theSears stories all wrong.
Remember, think aboutthis for just a minute.
If your listeners are willingto do this, think about how
the digital economy started.
You know, so Sears, uh, youknow, Sears had all state.

(35:05):
Which began buKyndryling.
It had Coldwell Banker,you know, uh, real estate.
It had, uh, hit everything.
It created the digital economy.
People forget this andyou should look it up.
I wrote an article on BigThink around this, right?
No Ink Magazine.
I wrote, freak think But thepoint is, um, they had all the
pieces and it's the wrong story.
People get it wrong.

(35:25):
Sears missed.
They didn't miss anything.
The problem was they tried to fitit all into their store, right?
And that's the problem that this book isreally trying to address, is saying, a lot
of times this is not an issue of workingharder or doing something new or better.
It's an issue of lookingat this differently.
Remember, this car companyhad done this already.

(35:48):
The only issue was they, didn'trecognize that they had discovered
the future it really cost them.
There's so many cases ofthat, Jeff though, right?
And I I was thinking about the, thecharacter you call out in there, I'm
sure he is anonymized, but you call itthe guy who was leading that project and
he could see there was something in it.

(36:10):
But going back to a Luis type character,he presents that in his career suicide.
You know, one of somebody told merecently that CIO, chief Innovation
Officer actually stands for careeris over as soon as you take the job.
And, and that's not funny becauseactually it is the case in so
many, , organizations, particularlyif you choose the future.

(36:32):
And I was me, I met, I was tellingyou before I met with two, , of the
innovation community here in Ireland.
Hello, Karen and Anne-Marie.
I'll say hello to them because I, I told'em specifically to listen to this series,
but we were talking about two things.
One was what you said that, and youtalk about this in the book and , the
science and the neuroscience behindthis, that if you learn something

(36:52):
and you don't immediately apply it,just like any habit, it will fade.
'cause it's habit change.
And I think that's what's really nicethat you do in the book and why you
structure the book the way you do.
It actually should be read much slowerthan I read it because I read it
for the purpose of this interview.
But if you read it and you put itinto practice, it's kind of like,

(37:14):
you know, I give you a great example.
Physio.
You go to the physio, the physiogoes, you need to do this rehab.
And you don't do it that dayor the next day you forget it
and you're like looking up.
Now you have YouTube luckily, but you, itfades and you don't ever do it properly.
And we see this so many times withchange theater that you call out in
the book, that you have a big event,you're brought in the change, the

(37:37):
speaker's brought in, you, me, whoeveris brought in as the keynote speaker.
You can spot it a mile away.
There's a big event.
There's loads of energy for like aday or two, and then it fades and
everybody goes back to business as usual.
And what I like about you doing thebook is you encourage people to get it
straight to practice, do something smallexperiments, like you said, et cetera.

(37:59):
I think we, we should probablycall that out because it's a
core part of the whole concept.
I just brought in the other day to, twogovernments are trying to make a deal.
I'll leave it at that.
this is a pretty high stakes kindof conversation and the first
question I asked was when theystart trying to put together these

(38:19):
groups that are gonna innovateacross boundaries, borders, right?
Was who's actually built something here,who's got a lot of experience with this?
the challenge was there were people whohad a lot of experience, but they were
the junior people and there were a lotof senior people who were administrators.

(38:40):
Administrators are fine.
We need administrators.
But my point to the administrators was,you don't have this experience, you have
to be, a guardian, a enabler, helperthose people, stop telling them what to
do because you don't know what to do.
I see this universitiesdo this all the time.
Where the person gets appointedto be that person is not the

(39:02):
innovator and they're not always proinnovation, which is very frustrating.
I know when I get into these bigorganizations, I would say at least half
the time, the person who's most threatenedby me is the chief Innovation officer,
even though I'm there to help them.
If I am, you know, I'mnot, I don't want your job.
I don't, you know, I'm just hereto help you get this right side up.

(39:22):
the reason for that is of the, andagain, I'm not saying this is everywhere,
but what I find is that often becomesa position like somebody who couldn't
make it as the chief operating officer.
Right?
It's often the also ran position, butit's also often a. Bureaucratic position.
My opinion often under them are the realinnovators, the people who are builders.

(39:45):
I'll give you a great example.
The, when I look at themilitary, the most amazing people
I've met are tech sergeants.
They have to be, a ton of stuff theygotta figure out in real time, and they're
stunningly good all across the globe.
All these different cultures, theyhave great tech sergeants, right?
The issue is a lot of times the peopleabove them have those same kind of

(40:08):
dirt under the fingernails experiences.
Remember, innovation and changeis not something you can do on a
blackboard or on a PowerPoint slide.
You have to have gone through it.
That's why this book is about stories.
That's why this book is aboutparables and most of the stories
in this book are about my failures.
couldn't do this, and they don't all win.
I love the story in the book whereI talk about one of the largest

(40:31):
organizations I got brought into.
And I knew exactly what was wrongand I knew exactly how to fix it.
And I was a jerk, right?
Even though I knew what was wrong andI knew how to fix it, and I was brought
in by the , top dog, you know, my viewof this was, you guys aren't getting it.
You're the slow group here.
So the learning doesn'talways be, and then we won.

(40:53):
So the learning that one was, you know,it's very clear as I'm walking out
the door, , I probably needed to be adifferent kind of person here, So it's
not always, , that kind of abstract.
Yeah.
You know, on, on that, that ideaof you have, you have skin, you
have dirt under your fingernails.
A great story.
You, you probably know him, Gary Klein.

(41:14):
I had him on the showrecently, so you're nodding.
So Gary told me this brilliant storyabout Napoleon, where there was a
part of France Toulon that was, theenemy had taken Toulon and Toulon,
had this core, it had resources.
It was important, but.
Napoleon worked as a,an artillery sergeant.

(41:34):
So he had skin, he had dirt under hisfingernails, and the, his commanding
sergeant was attacking the, attacking theport to head on with cannons, et cetera.
And Napoleon's staring over and he isgoing way all the attacking the port.
All you have to do is take out that smalllittle tower over there that's on a hill
because they won't have any supplies.

(41:54):
And uh, you know, it's like that thingof the, the caveman with the round.
Somebody has a wheel and they, they'repushing along the square wheels.
It's like, we're too busy.
They're like, going shutup with your crazy ideas.
'cause he was a junior saruh, junior, um, officer.
And eventually his boss gets fired.
He takes out the, the hilland they capture Toulon.

(42:16):
Again, core battle.
But that thing you said, I just,I'd love to double click on
that where you have knowledge.
And your superior blocks you, or inmany cases, gets rid of you from the
organization because they see you as athreat because you know more than they do.
A hundred percent happened to meand it's why I'm here doing the show

(42:39):
in the organization where I startedthis innovation show where I worked
for the national broadcaster, Iessentially got fired by my boss.
Now the organization's tried to saveme, but I was like, I'm outta here.
But it was because time andtime again, and I You don't
mean this, I didn't mean this.
I would say stuff in a meeting whereI was asked my opinion and my boss
is gonna going like this, you know,head in her hand, kind like going, I

(43:02):
should have been the one who said that.
And I'm sure Staney's noddingthere, you too have seen this.
'cause you've worked with so manydifferent organizations across
the world, time and time again,and you see the moment as well and
you glance over and you go, uh oh.
I saw what happened there.
Even though there was no words shared.

(43:23):
I think it's all about the cultureand what you you project, right?
Within the boundaries and what'snot, and what's cultivated.
And, actually this is why I, I told Jeff,just don't go to faculty meeting anymore.
Just don't, it's, it's not useful.
just makes you angry becauseit just creates bad energy

(43:45):
but it, but again, I mean, this is allabout if the leaders of the organization
make it clear they appreciate, youknow, opinions and they appreciate great
ideas, as long as, you know, people arerespectful, I think it would be different.
And it's difficult to do that.
But, difficult as a leaderto be mindful of this, right?

(44:07):
Because you saying your boss's boss,should have seen, be able to seen it.
But he has so many other responsibilities,even if he made it known that.
know, he wants great ideas.
It doesn't always happen.
He can't see what everybody does.
So part of, I think what's alsodifficult is a leader, you have to see,

(44:30):
you have to be able to spot talent.
And I think that's hard,I think that's the key.
It's the people you are notlooking for, you are not
looking for a particular thing.
To me, it's like you, if you find theright people, I think that's the key.
When we go home to, Indonesia,to Staney's house where she was

(44:52):
raised, I'd like to look throughher elementary school reviews.
I hope there's no white spots there.
No white spots in our coloring.
Staney's really smart.
And the good news is ofthe class, all this in very
competitive environment, right?
All this stuff, but in everyreview, she's disruptive, right?
And I just think that, to me, I love thatpart because if she wasn't disruptive,

(45:16):
it would be she wouldn't do this.
So what I find is that people who'vekind of ascended to the part where
they're kind of very successfulinnovators, they have long history of
being reviewed as not, not disruptive ina negative way, but disruptive, right?
And then people willuse that word with it.
So I wanna go back to your son, right?
If your son would've had adifferent response to his teacher,

(45:39):
he would've been delved, hewould've been deemed, , disruptive.
Now, here's the point.
The point is, what happens with innovationis those people have been disruptive and
if had gone through the failure cycle alot, fired, been marginalized, whatever,
when it comes time to, to go throughthe failure cycle, remember that's one
of the things you, you know, we try toavoid failure, but there in innovation

(46:02):
and change, there's no avoiding failure.
You have to go through the failure cycle.
We're more comfortable, we're morecomfortable calling us dummy, or we got
it wrong, or whatever you wanna call us.
We're comfortable.
'cause we've had, we've taken a,we've taken our beating, right?
Whatever you wanna call it.
it's, the people who have hadeffortless superiority that
they, they, they completely fail.

(46:24):
And one of the things I wanna say aboutthe way we're raising our kids these
days, uh, I'm very worried about it.
I think there's two kinds of parenting.
There's the, the don't dothat, don't do that parent.
And then there's like,my dad hurt, didn't it?
Don't rub any, get on me a dumb ass.
Right.
The notion is you, the only timeyou say don't do that is if junior's
gonna play on the freeway or he issomething that's really dangerous.

(46:46):
Right.
But most of the time you have tolet people go through, not major
failures, but minor failures.
Right.
The, and I, one of the things I'mvery thankful for is my mentors
were very much take a whack at it.
And they weren't all nice.
say this to your listeners.
They loved me in the way thatmaybe a coach would love you.

(47:09):
I can, you can run faster,you can jump higher.
You're stronger than that.
I think I, I'd expect more out of youthan that, but, so that doesn't, it
doesn't mean that they didn't loveme, it just means that were very
much, you have to figure this out.
You're gonna have a lot of fun stayingup all night the next two nights,
sorting this thing out, junior.

(47:30):
So I think there's something about that.
And one of the things that Stan'sreally been great, she kinda has
this entourage of the end of atrium.
She's had all of these kind of, I'mgonna call 'em disciples or whatever.
They, she's attracted a lot ofyoung, particularly young women
who just thinks they wanna be her.
But one of the things she letsthem do is go through the failure

(47:50):
cycle, not in a negative way.
She'll say, here's a project, I'llsee you next week about the project.
And then, you know, and they'reall looking for, is it all great?
And it's like, a lot of it'sgood, but there's some things here
that we need to, you know, andyou didn't swim out far enough.
You didn't try enough here.
I think again, it's about knowing what thestakes are and where the boundaries right?

(48:11):
there has to be a hardboundary on something.
So for example, youcan't go to the freeway.
That's whatever it is, buteverything else is totally fine.
And I think we've mentioned this beforetoo, is that actually, innovation and
creativity actually works really wellwhen there's very clear boundaries.

(48:32):
And I think, as educator, forexample, like your, your son's
teacher, it's like what matters?
I mean, does no white spot, doesthat actually matter in life, right?
I mean, to me, of coursenot, but obviously for her it
is, but it's all like that.
I just, I would just remembering,actually when Jeff was talking, you

(48:52):
know, children and I think because Icome from the philosophy that actually
children really need to find timeto play, and that's how they learn.
And you can't really structure all theirdays, that they have to be at school
for eight hours and then they have andthey have that, and they have that, and

(49:12):
they have that all the way until theygo to bed I don't think that's healthy
because I think everybody needs to haveunstructured time in which they can do
something out of their curiosity that can,can do something for them that invokes
some feelings to them and that may letthem make me meanings in something.

(49:35):
So with actually the fellowsthat I work with, I don't give
them a lot of directions interms of how to do something.
I give them a job that is,your job is to do this.
So the final goal isI want this organized.
I don't actually carehow you organize them.
You just need to tell me.
And if I don't agree with that,I will tell you, but I need you

(49:58):
to come to me first and tell mehow you're gonna organize it.
I'm not gonna tell you how.
And some people don't like thatapproach, obviously, right?
Because . i can't show them how todo something because they have to
go out and try to kind of figureout how to do it themselves.
And that's hard.

(50:19):
But unless you do that, you'renot gonna be able to grow.
I have a good example of this.
The first innovatrium we built, we builtacross the street from the business
school here, and we basically gavekeys to the coolest people We knew
professors and said, well, all you'regonna do is bring your young people here.
We're not, we're not so interestednew old guys, young people.

(50:40):
And everything that happenshere has to be, , about change,
creativity, or innovation.
And we want big things.
We're not gonna workon little dinky things.
We're gonna work on big things.
And a lot of the student groupsgot formed there and it became
very, we became the hotspot.
Well, what happens is, you know,over time the university watches
this for 10 years and it's not justthis university, they all do this.

(51:02):
they'll appoint, they'll build abig center somewhere and they'll
appoint a person, have a nice bighat or something of the person
and it'll be all very organized.
But the stuff that, that the sortof, the more radical stuff stops
happening and it stops happeningbecause you're now don't do that.
in the first group it was, this isyour play space, it's your tree fort.

(51:26):
You figure out what's gonna happen here.
There's a few rules, you know,here's the legal rules and here's a
couple of, you know, socially accept,you know, it's only a handful of
things you're not allowed to do.
Right.
But the notion was organizations loveto do is they build these things.
So I was just recently part of thisbig think tanky thing about workplace

(51:47):
design, and we're going through allthe great things and workplace design,
and I asked all these architects.
Are you designing placesfor people to hide?
And they said, what?
And I said, places for people to hide.
And they said, what do youmean places people hide?
I said, in change, innovation doesn'tstart where everyone can see it.
You have to hide.
right now they're hiding inthe coffee shop or the pub.

(52:08):
They're hiding right now.
And they're already, they're alreadytalking trash and they're figuring out
what the next, you know, the, the nextrevolution will be broadcast or whatever.
And I said, you know, in theseorganizations have, have you placed this
And then this one guy caught up who'san architect, this is blowing my mind.
And I said, why?
And he said, we co we, we had abuilding like that called a TS.

(52:31):
what does it stand for?
He said, across the street.
I'm like, yeah, there you go.
Right at s is across the street.
You called the building a TS It'swhere, so this again, I wanna make
sure that everybody's clear about this.
So it, this is a paradox.
This is what I'm talking about.
So for in order for anorganization to really innovate.
It has to move innovation outsideor change it has to move it outside

(52:52):
the organization where it can gettraction, where it can get to where,
work out all the things that, youknow, off Broadway didn't clip the,
you know, things didn't work out tobring it back into the organization.
Some people are more attracted tothat kind of environment, right.
So, for example, some students grouprelief flourish in which the way

(53:14):
we do things, some people are not.
You just kind of know that whatapproach brings what result.
And you can't expect that you have the 12,that programs are a lot of rules to end
up having breakthrough products somewherebecause it just doesn't happen that way.
You need to lot more space.

(53:36):
You need a lot more play.
And this is what I think we talkedabout that I talked about before too.
I feel like the education systemwhich have really actually constrained
that of letting the kids findthings and you know, it, it, it
just constraints them more and more.
And it's, it's also very muchthis whole concept that it's

(53:58):
all rational, which it's not.
We talk about this in the, one ofthe, maybe at some point we should
talk about what the seven paradoxesare, but one of the paradox is
this, we use facts to change minds,but facts don't change minds.
My favorite example historicallycomes from Abraham Lincoln.
I mean, we had all the, the stuff in theUnited States, and this little woman in
Connecticut, Harriet Beecher Sto, wrotethis book called Uncle Tom's Cabin,

(54:19):
is a story, it's very melodramatic.
It's not even really wellwritten, but the notion is it took
something that was abstract orfact-based and it made it a motive.
it made it something thatpeople could relate to.
People have children, people have , apiety for their neighbors and for,
you know, and, you know, there arehigher order things that we have in
life that we believe about ourselves.

(54:41):
And the book basicallycalled them to task.
Right?
It wasn't using facts.
And remember Lincoln said, you're thelittle lady that started all this problem.
Right?
It wasn't facts thatthat changed the laws.
was, it was somebody who understoodthat facts don't change minds.
And they told a story about this.
And the part of these kind ofspaces where people do this is they

(55:03):
start making their own stories.
They're not your stories, they'retheir stories about how they
created this thing in there andhow this student group did that.
And that's when you know it's workingbecause now the stories perpetuate.
So, and that's just how, incidentally,this is how organizations become dynastic.
This is how organizations, youknow, generation after generation

(55:25):
understand what that is.
I know when I first got to the Universityof Michigan, I said something which I
was really called to, to, to heal on.
I said, Michigan is the only school inthe world, in the top 10, in all 19 areas.
We're not number one in anything.
We're number five at everything.
And so it's not true.
And they started lookinginto it and it was true.
Then you started seeing it on t-shirts.

(55:46):
It's hilarious, right?
You start and what's happening isthat becomes part of the mythology.
The story becomes part of themythology of, you know, big blue.
What does it mean to be at a big public?
And I see this as small schools now.
They do a great job with this.
Little, little schools do this,so you don't have to be big.
But the notion is it's those, it'sthat, it's that paradox makes something

(56:09):
clear often is using somethingthat doesn't make things clear.
Again, that's building culture.
And that takes a long time thattakes a lot of, you know, different
artifacts and, and actually youhave to be deliberate about it.
in,
this is, goes back a bit about yourstory Aidan and about, you know,
the leadership of that organization.
If they can somehow instillthat culture, what you want.

(56:33):
It's hard.
It takes forever.
That's part of why you're doing,I think, Aidan, what you're doing,
if I can, if I may be bold enough,you've applied what you did as an
athlete other aspects of your life.
I did it too.
Because those experience weretransferable skills and you kept

(56:53):
then building on transferable skills.
You had the ability to do this.
Every athlete and I was all,everything wrestler, And even
with that, you're gonna get beat.
You get beat.
And I tell this to people all the time,I don't remember any of the victories.
I go home and people, you know,your picture's on the wall or
whatever at your high school,and they remember the victories.
I don't, I don't remember 'em, Iremember every loss I've ever had.

(57:14):
I remember why I lost, I dunno ifthis makes sense to you, but it's
that learning from losing, right?
That's a failure cycle thatgets you to the next place.
I think that there's a great curse inearly success, like if you're, if you're
successful too early without the struggleof the success, you learn the wrong, you

(57:36):
don't learn anything actually, and you,you actually don't learn the discipline
of what it takes to actually be long-termsuccessful because that, that's the
transferable skill, is the disciplineto keep showing up the perseverance
that you talk about in the book.
There's so many places thatmy mind has gone, by the way,
because of the conversation.
We will get to the seven Paradoxesis one that one that Staney kind

(57:58):
of identified there is the idea,we talked about it before, that you
need some type of boundary in orderto succeed and a a beautiful story
I just wanted to share with this.
I dunno where I heard it again.
'cause I hear some great knowledge.
Somebody was saying tome that, you know, when.
A young, and they said, particularlya young woman, when a, when a girl

(58:19):
is with their mother in the swimmingpool, it's kind of like in life the,
it's like a swimming pool and you arethe side where they hang on the side
and then they'll go out and they'llswim out into the, out into the
middle to the deep end a little bit.
And then if something happensthere, they'll come back to you.
But if they're with you too long,they'll kind of rebel against you

(58:40):
and they're kinda going, I hate you.
And they go back to the center again.
And I actually was thinking because ofwhat you said about the across the street
story, that in a way what an organizationis creating is the bell curve.
It's the edges.
It has to have a place.
where the edges exist in order tothen bring it back to the middle.
And like you said, Jeff, there.

(59:01):
About the story, you'reletting them create a story.
And in a way, what the innovatordoes, this is just kind of coming to
me at the moment, is you're givingthem the ingredients and the plot
for the story, but let them own it.
And that's the difficulty of,again, of giving over the credit.
Because when you've done that, you've won.
But as, and I often talk about this,the concept of a catalyst is beautiful

(59:26):
for this because a catalyst, like amatch actually gets burnt up in the
transaction and is, you can't see it.
And I was like, that's theproblem of being a catalyst.
You're not, you're no longer visibleat the end, but the fire has taken off
or the wildfires taken off and thatthey're, and therein is a huge difficulty.
So there's many, manyparadoxes in the book.

(59:48):
We'll, let's talk to them at a high level.
Share the seven and then we'lllet people read the book.
'cause you really do need to readthe book, add in the stories that
you share from your own career.
Actually then apply it to yourselfand go, well, this is where this
has played out for me, et cetera.
And you do, you start to seethat, you start to apply it.
And in there is the learning.

(01:00:09):
So maybe at a high level,we'll share all seven.
Okay, so I'm cribbing here from my notes.
Right?
So the, the first, the first one isseek to change others, but can only
change ourselves, which is the classic.
And I start with a story about a girlI dated in college named Katie when
I was training for his wrestling.

(01:00:31):
And she was a chain smoker, right?
And, , the whole, the rest of thestory is why she dumped me and,
why she eventually quit smoking.
And what I learned from it, I thinka more modern example would be like
Mother Teresa, know, would takepeople in and say, change herself.
And then we'll start changingthe widows of Mumbai, right?
That sort of thing.
You can only change you and youcan model that for other people.

(01:00:53):
The second one is we aspire totranscend our own limits, but must do
so from within a, a. I tell studentssomething that makes 'em crazy.
They'll come in and talk to meabout what they wanna do, and I'll
say, I'm not interested in that.
And they get really upset.
I said, I'm deeply interestedin what you're designed to do
what you're designed to do isdifferent than what you want to do.

(01:01:14):
What are your gifts?
What are, and it's like, it's freeing.
It's not limiting.
It's saying, how do I usewhat I have to do this?
My favorite example, one,our heroes is Beethoven.
mean, imagine writing theninth when you're deaf.
I don't know about you, butthat's such a mic dropping thing.
I mean, it's like, out, out ofall the things you like, you
know, it's like Michelangelodoing Michael when he's blind.

(01:01:36):
it's just that kind of a thingand then Beethoven kind of
figured out, this is what I got.
This is, you know, this is what, don'tget me wrong, you can get better.
But I think people spend too muchtime on trying to be good at things
that they're not naturally good at.
I think I, again, this is maybe myview of the world, what, whatever you
believe about how you got your giftsbiological or God or whatever you

(01:01:57):
believe about 'em, um, have gifts.
And I think you have tobe aware of your voice.
You have to be aware of, amI morning creative people and
afternoon creative people aroundpeople alone listening to me?
Right?
Once you start figuring out theinstrument, I think all of a
sudden you understand that thiscan be used to make great changes,

(01:02:19):
but it cannot be transcended.
Right.
And I think today wetry too much to do that.
I think that's, uh,that's stuff in nonsense.
Uh, we already talked about, weuse facts to change minds, but
minds aren't changed by facts.
If you don't believe that, just geton your social media account try and
explain to somebody why their positionon something doesn't make sense.

(01:02:39):
And it doesn't have tobe politics or religion.
It can be GMOs or anything else.
And you know, I give some examples inthe books of really good people who,
um, and of course with social media, wenever encounter the loyal opposition.
Anybody disagrees with us,you know, on a dark night.
On a dark road, they go away.
The Spanish Inquisitioncouldn't have thought of this.

(01:03:00):
I mean, it's that sort of a thing.
Uh, we set goals for change, butthe goals change with change.
is, we already talked about this,you know, this is the problem.
is the difference.
Project management and changemanagement, project management
is not change management.
And if you've had Henry Mintzbergon watch the Mintzberg thing, right?
Strategic thinking versus strategy.
Strategic planning.

(01:03:21):
Mintzberg got there in front ofme, ti my hat to Henry, right?
Great guy.
I we're all standing on the shouldersof giants and he certainly is one.
I I, I'm a huge fan.
You should know I'm a huge fan of Mitz per
we try to minimize conflict,but change is created by it.
This isn't, this is the center of Sandyand I our work for 30 some years we have

(01:03:43):
to be, this is where society has failed.
We have destructive conflict.
We're trying to win things asopposed to constructive conflict.
Imagine.
So I got to give the TED Talk.
When the Affordable Care Act wasrolled out, it was supposed to
be originally at the White House.
It ended up being at,um, at Lincoln Center.
What?
Excuse me.
Kennedy Center.
The Kennedy Center.
But what was interestingwas there were two groups.

(01:04:05):
There were the people wantedgovernment regulation and the
people wanted free markets.
My big thing was imagine if thesetwo which had spent, they'd spent
a half a trillion dollars lobbying.
Imagine if we could have takenthis energy to build something new.
So we brought together the heads ofinnovation to Apple and Google and some
other, you know, some other places.
And we talked about things and Ithink what really stunned the doctors

(01:04:27):
and what stunned the politicianswas to say, we're innovators change
makers, and whether you're involvedor not, we're gonna do this.
And you're just gonna be asideshow, you're gonna be road
pizza if you're not careful here.
Right?
We know we, you know, we're coming andwe're, and we're not doctors and we know
that, and we, we need doctors and weneed people in the government to do this.

(01:04:47):
if you guys aren't willing to engagein the conflict in a constructive way.
Then we'll show you how to do it.
Right.
And the, the good news that there's stillbad news about that, the healthcare issue
still of, of, you know, an albatross.
But certainly when you seealternative, uh, forms of what's
happening around the world, uh,place, particularly places like India,

(01:05:09):
stunningly, the progress is amazing.
we attempt to avoid failure,all learning, all learning is,
uh, is connected to failure.
And of course, the most famous personfor this is just go back to Edison,
Edison, the 10,000 attempts or shots ongoal And eventually gets the light bulb.
And, you know, and in anybodywho's ever built anything will

(01:05:30):
tell you writing is the same way.
I was talking about AI theother day, and, uh, I think Stan
and I were talking about this.
You know, you know, you write something,you go to ai, it's still iterative.
still have to go through version, youknow, on version 12, it's ready to go.
And it's AI's not writing for you.

(01:05:50):
You're writing, but you're tryingto get disconfirming feedback
and you're moving it forward.
You're moving it forward tillit's something that makes sense.
And then finally, we endeavor to alignchange, but change driven by deviance.
And I wanna come back to somethingJohn Kotter writes about.
uh, I'm not on the same page asJohn on a lot of stuff, but I'm

(01:06:12):
really on the same page on this forthis part, at the end it has to be
unified, but not at the beginning.
So think of it like a funnel, right?
And the problem with conventional,uh, tools for change in innovation
stage gating, systems, portfoliomanagement, kp I go down the list,

(01:06:32):
all starting at the AF positionas the output of this, the inputs.
The inputs are culture and competenciesand communities and leadership and what's
going on in the world and emerging.
That's the input, that's thestuff you put in the machine.
Only at the end you align.
And so the biggest problem is when yousee people like venture capitalists trying

(01:06:54):
to align things at the front end of this,'cause they're trying to mitigate risk.
doesn't work that way.
And I come back to the beginning ofthe book, the COVID vaccine, you know,
500 shots on goal actually startedwith 600, but they eliminated a hundred
just for, 'cause they were crazy.
169, phase two, nine provisional therapiestook a, you took a 10 year process, did it

(01:07:15):
in six months, So the notion is, yes, youalign, but at the end, at the beginning.
Right?
So the paradox is you don't wanna have,you know, you don't wanna have things
that are, you know, that are crazy.
But in order to get what youneed, you gotta get crazy.
Those are the seven.
Love it.
And it could have been 70, but those werethe seven we thought were the biggest.

(01:07:38):
Uh, one of the things I think is soimportant, and just to reiterate it
in a slightly different way, PaulNunes, I dunno if you know Paul.
He, he, yeah, you're nodding.
Paul, great guy.
He's not far from me.
He is in Boston.
I met him there justbefore Christmas, but he.
He said to me that like at the start orat the point of the lifecycle, at the
point of creative destruction on theS-curve that we talked about in part

(01:08:01):
one, that you want deviance there, youwant disagreement, but when you're in
execution mode, you want alignment.
And I thought that was interesting becausemany innovators actually thrive when
it's deviance time, but they forget thatit'll always get to the alignment time.
And they get bored in that timeand they want to leave or they,
it's not the same organization.

(01:08:22):
That's fine.
I think the big thing, and we talkedabout this in the first video.
Which is the key learning is thehandoff is the critical part.
You need the handoff.
So going back to the very firstone, the greens or the crepe
people are going to be attractedto risk, to variance, to ambiguity.
The middling positions, thesage and the athlete, right?

(01:08:45):
Those positions are antithetical.
They'll take much longer thanyou think they're going to take.
There's natural tense tension betweengetting the right people on board and
selling to the right people and makingsure the project is on track and making
money, which is what VCs want or privateequity wants or your company wants.
If you've got an incubator,that's the long part and
that's where most changes die.

(01:09:07):
innovations die 'cause it takes too long.
You're in the desert.
Yeah.
If it really was that easy,it would've been done through
standard operating procedure.
This is where the, all the big talk ends.
Oh, your big talker.
Now, can we get through this desert here?
You know, what do they call bottomof more called it the bottom
of the bathtub or death valley.
Right.
You know, we, us old timers, we all,we have names for all this crap.

(01:09:29):
And then the AF position is yougotta get scale, which is what
you're saying at the AF position.
It's like, okay, we've agreed tothis, now we're gonna, now we gotta
get processed and a lot of complexityand we gotta spend a lot of money.
We gotta push our chips inthe middle of the table.
So the key is that even though theseare antithetical how we hand off as

(01:09:49):
human beings, and the problem withmost change in innovation processes.
is they don't take this into account.
What they say is, thisis the way to do it.
Here are the eight steps.
Here are, and that's not how it works.
And it's not just change in processes.
I mean, we we're talking about, forexample, even in teams, these interactions
in teams, you know, throughoutthe life of the projects, right?

(01:10:11):
I mean, who the leader is orwho you listen to is different
from stage to stage to stage.
So like you said, I think that allthe greens in the beginning, you
know, they, they come out all theradical ideas, which is pretty great.
And then they get bored, right?
And all the way until the end.
But this is the thing, even during thatlast part, the greens still need to be

(01:10:34):
there because they are the weather thing.
And the organization needs to understandthat is the green's job wait a minute,
there's a disconfirming feedback.
This may not work anymore,or, our approach was wrong.
And if there isn't that person, you gonnacreate something that it's not useful.

(01:10:58):
Conflict.
We need constructive conflict, and atthe heart of this diverse worldviews,
and those come from experiencethat you have different views and
just, I hope this is making sense.
We come right back to the firstprinciples at the beginning of
this, Hey, let's go back to Luis.
Let's finish with Luis.
Luis had the kind of commandingofficer that would've made sense.

(01:11:23):
Luis's commanding officer would'vesaid, Luis is really good at
this particular type of job.
The openings are these kinds of jobs,and he would've looked for an alternative
for Luis to keep Luis in the military,to keep him warm, and maybe to give
him some additional projects that hecould have worked on that he probably
would've been very happy with, right?

(01:11:44):
Instead, they lost all of thisexperience and knowledge of
developing a COVID vaccine.
I think the militaryis a little different.
They have a very.
Strong and rigid, career path andyou know, what they need to do.
I think , in the industry, we havea lot more freedom as a supervisor,

(01:12:05):
as a manager to kind, , createnew positions of things like that.
I want everybody to rememberthat everybody doesn't
want the same thing, right?
If you're in the forward position,if you're a create, you want freedom.
know it's a big thing for me.
Think about who builds.
You know who builds ashop across the street?
That's crazy, right?

(01:12:25):
if you are the opposite.
If you are, , an engineer, youwant more responsibility, right?
You seek responsibility, advancement.
If you are, an athlete, you seekgoal attainment money, Whatever.
And if you are a sage,what you seek is harmony.

(01:12:46):
wanna work in a place that's harmonious,and these are all important parts of
innovation and change and worthwhileand good, they're different.
you mentioned Geoffrey Moore there,we have a series with Geoffrey
Moore coming down the line as well.
At least eight partscovering his books as well.
The more of Moore.
Series.
So, uh, we're gonna get throughall the, all the legends.

(01:13:10):
One thing I just thought we'd put inthere before we finish, really just to
fly through it, a bit of homework forour audience, which is the paradoxical
mindset cycle, the four steps, andmaybe you'll just say, this is how
you do it and because you do this inthe book where each chapter gives.
So you start off by giving the paradoxes,then you take us through it, you give

(01:13:31):
us an example, and then you go, okay,it's over to you now using this cycle.
Yeah, I'm, I'll tell you a real story thatwill make this clear to your listeners.
I love trees and Staney and Ilive in a, we live on the river
and we're, it's like hobbiton.
We're there are trees everywhere.
We live around trees and, we livein Michigan, which gets snow.

(01:13:53):
we had about three weekendsin a row of heavy snow.
So the worst kind of snow islike in the spring where it's
more wet and outta nowhere.
A whole bunch of trees came down.
And we live on a dirt road, so you canimagine you gotta get everything out.
So we found a group of, young people,enterprising young people chainsaws and
they were gonna take stuff down, youknow, pay 'em cash and it's all good.

(01:14:18):
So were taking everything downand it worked really well.
But there was one tree that wasleaning over our conservatory, right?
And it's a place that Danny andI really enjoy being out there.
And, um, I said, can, can, you know, uh,the guy said, you want me to cut it down?
This tree's gonna fall down.
Well, if I had been thinking about it, Iwould've said, no, can, can you shimmy up

(01:14:40):
the tree and get out the snow out of it?
And you know, would I letthe guy cut the tree down?
And the minute he did it, Ijust had this horrible feeling.
I don't know if you've ever had thishappen where, you know, and then what you
do is you mire, you know, you ruminate.
Why'd I let this happen?
This is not, I, I, I madea really bad snap decision.

(01:15:01):
what I started thinkingabout was the paradox.
What was the paradox?
Paradox.
I love trees.
And then I let this guy cut a tree down.
The paradox is I'm a thoughtfulperson, but I wasn't thoughtful.
The para, the paradox was, I'm having,I have to check the software here.
Something didn't go right.
Well then I had to look at the meaning.
Why did I let this happen?

(01:15:22):
Well, I think, you know, was it'cause I was panicked about this?
Was it because I'm,now I've deferred this?
Was I having a bad day?
Was I tired?
May I, you know, and yougo through all the kind of.
Things that you do.
of the reason I think it was,is I didn't give myself enough
time to think this through.
I didn't give myself five minutesto just step back and say, Hmm,

(01:15:43):
we're just cutting down trees.
'cause you know, one's up across the road.
And those were easy decisions to make.
And it didn't occur to me thatthis felt in a different category.
Right.
So then the next part was, wellwhat's the guiding principle?
The guiding principle is you havesomething that seems like a snap
decision, be present of mine to giveyourself five minutes and maybe call

(01:16:03):
Stan and say, what should I do here?
Doesn't mean I, doesn't mean I alwaysdo what she says, but mostly I do.
Um, it means I'm, you know,I'm beginning to think about,
and then I'd run an experiment.
So to your listener, what Iwould say, and then what happened
was , we had a situation witha car that kind of broke down.
We had opport, you know, people takeadvantage of you when that happens.

(01:16:24):
And we kind of thought through, Ikind of got to think through minutes.
What are some alternatives towhat these experts are telling me?
We had a very positive experience.
So here's what I'd askyour listeners to do.
I'd like you to think about a decisionthat you made recently that you actually
don't know why you made it, right.
I have no idea.
This came outta nowhere.
This is not like me.

(01:16:45):
You said something at aparty that was hurtful, just
something that just didn't fit.
Then I don't want you to thinkabout, you know, that's the paradox.
Then I want you to thinkabout what does this mean?
Why did I do that?
Which we all do, butdon't get on one thing.
Get the object is to fan out 15things of why I might have done that.

(01:17:07):
then you sort of work it like uh, youknow, like you're workshopping it.
You're workshopping it.
You maybe talk to a confidantor think about, go for a long
constitutional, think about that.
know why you do that?
She laughs 'cause I go onConstitutionals every day long.
Why am I doing this?
then instead of, this is what BenjaminFranklin did, he was great at this.

(01:17:29):
Then make a simple rule.
A simple rule.
What the learning, given allthis, what's the learning?
, It on a laminate.
I do that all the time.
You know, get a tattoo.
I don't know.
Just remember it.
And then the next time that you'rein that, the, and then to test it.
Run an experiment.

(01:17:49):
Is this true that Iwould do this or try it?
And what you're gonna find is in thefirst iteration, It's not quite right.
never.
The first pancake is nevera good pancake, right?
Um, second one's a little,someone's considerably better.
And the third one's a good pancake.
So you don't have to go througheKyndryless loops of this, but
that's what I would ask people to do,and I'd start with yourself in the

(01:18:12):
paradoxes about why did I do this?
I love it.
I love it.
The first attempt is learning.
That's a nice, acronym forFail First attempt is learning.
I loved our series.
I have a little quote that I just wantedto share before I come to you guys to ask
you where people can find you, et cetera.

(01:18:33):
Also, maybe you call out your finalmessage to the audience because it'll be
a while before we connect again, becausebefore you write , your next book as well.
I really enjoyed this one.
I really enjoyed this episode becausewe put everything together as well.
There's a part from the book Ihad so many little quotes and I've
been sharing them on LinkedIn, asyou probably saw, but I love this?
one.
You said, "transformation beginswithin by first changing ourselves

(01:18:58):
as individuals and leaders.
We unlock the potential to transformour teams and our organizations.
Through your personal growth, youcan inspire thriving organizational
culture, elevate competencies,and foster a vibrant community.
As visionary leaders, you embodythe culture, practices and
competencies you aspire to see.

(01:19:19):
In essence, you lead by exampleguiding those around you to embrace
and champion change." I love that.
That's my mic drop from me.
Maybe I'll come to you, Staney.
Ladies first, what's yourfinal message to our audience?
It's messy.
Innovation and change andcreativity is really, really messy.

(01:19:39):
you have to have a stout heart, right?
And a will.
need to know what you're getting into.
You can get pushed back.
But you know, that's, that's how it is.
And if you want to be a real changemaker, you can have to accept all of that.
So surround yourself with communityand people who can support that.

(01:20:00):
as you said, it's table,stakes to do that, right?
So, Jeff, your final, firstly,before you give your final word,
where's the best place to find you?
jeffdegraf.com and there's aton of free stuff on there.
So my school of thought and allthat's there, and I'm one of the
original LinkedIn influencers.
So if you look me up on LinkedIn, youcan find me and I post a lot of articles

(01:20:21):
and stuff that I write for, you know,uh, you don't have to look at all the
publications, you'll find them if Iput 'em on LinkedIn, would say the
last thing is about 40 years ago, Icoined a term called Creative Izing.
In fact, I trademarked it, right?
I coined the term, meaning just addcreativity to everyday normal things.

(01:20:42):
Let's take this down a thousand, right?
The object is, what you're reallytrying to do is get momentum.
You're trying to get movement, you'retrying to become more fluid at something.
So rather than making this grand,let's make this intimate, right?
So whether it's, doing something creativein the way you drive to work or the way

(01:21:03):
in which you, , have a coffee conversationwith a friend, and what's gonna happen
is that's gonna build a muscle memory.
It's gonna build momentum.
And the object of that is once youstart living in that mode where
you're able to affect some agencywithin yourself and some agency around
you,, that's when everything, that'swhen everything starts to change.

(01:21:28):
It all starts with you creativizing.
and by the way, you can get started.
Just sign up to our substack.
I have a copy of this Bad Boy upfor grabs as well, but this was
the book we're covering today.
The art have changed their latest intheir tome of work of the DeGraffs.
It's been an absolute pleasure having youon the show, authors of the Innovation

(01:21:49):
code, the creative mindset, and thefinale in our trilogy, the Art of Change.
Jeff and Staney, DeGraff, thank you for joining us.
Thank you so much, Aiden.
We've really enjoyed this.
Yeah.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Double mic drop.
I.
Thanks once again to our sponsor,Kyndryl, who runs and reimagines the
technology systems that drive advantagefor the world's leading businesses.

(01:22:12):
With a unique blend of AI poweredconsulting, built on unmatched managed
service capability, Kyndryl helps leadersharness the power of technology for
smarter decisions, faster innovation,and a lasting competitive edge.
You can find out more aboutKyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute.
KYNDRYL Kyndryl.com.
Don't forget, you can win a copyof this book, the Creative Mindset.

(01:22:33):
Just sign up to our substack.
Just watch out for posts and I'llask you to respond and you will be
in the hat to win a copy of that.
And the book we covered today wasThe Art of Change, the finale in the
tri trilogy of the DeGraff series.
Thanks for joining us.

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Jeff & Staney DeGraff — The Art of Change (DeGraff Trilogy Finale)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Jeff & Staney DeGraff — The Art of Change (DeGraff Trilogy Finale)